You are so right!
about everything!
I messed up!
Once you put foot on this road
there is no turning back
Now I don’t know whether to take my medicine
or not
who will die
so that my ego might live?
Time for me to weigh in here. Hmmmm… Let me start by saying that MM should be applauded rather then admonished for his empathy with other living creatures. That is a noble endeavor and it deserves our respect. I don’t see what was gained by criticizing his choice to move to a more compassionate lifestyle. That is not one I choose at the moment, but I certainly understand why someone would choose to not eat animals.
Nah, your assessment that eating plants is no more humane then eating animals is flawed. You forget that plants have no nervous system with which to feel pain and suffering. The chicken that you ate for dinner last night probably went through more anguish and suffering then you would go through in several life times. Factory farming creates more suffering then any other industry, person, group, or thing on this planet. It makes Hitler and Stalin look like pussies. I don’t mind when people eat animals. I eat animals. But we should have respect and reverence for the life forms that gave up their lives to keep us in this realm, and yes that even includes plants. It is a sacrifice that should be honored. It used to be. Not any more. Most tribal cultures performed rituals in honor of the living animals that they raised before killing them. Then every single part of the animal got used for something, so none of its life would go to waste. That can hardly be compared to eating a chicken that gets shoved in a small wire cage with 15 other chickens, and has its beak seared off with a hot iron so it doesnt pluck the feathers of its fellow chickens and bruise the meat, and then throwing the majority of the animal’s carcass in a landfill.
Eating living things is a necessary part of life. Life has a cycle. By eating other life you are recycling it. But because it is alive you should be respectful. One of the ways to show that respect for life is to eat plants instead of animals. Plants are much less attached to their corporeal existence then animals. Yes, they do exhibit certain physiological reactions. But those reactions do not mean that they experience suffering in the same way as we do. Plants exist to make life possible in these four dimensions on this planet. Without them, there would be no animals or intelligent life on this planet. As such, we should respect plants as well by not senselessly inflicting damage to them or destroying them. But eating them in a respectful manner is perfectly fine. Animals on the other hand do have nervous systems, are conscious, have feelings, and rational thought. They are higher life forms then plants. A lot more energy goes into the life of an animal then that of a plant. Animals cannot get their energy from the sun, so they must eat plants in order to survive. The amount of energy put into the raising of one animal for livestock can produce ten times as much food in plant form. This is a known fact. So sustainability is yet another reason to eat plants rather then animals. But again, if the animals are treated respectfully and killed humanely then there is nothing wrong with the occasional eating of an animal.
Now finally to the elephant. Personally I think that was a wonderful video, and I don’t think training the elephant to do that made it any less magnificent. Nor am I convinced that the trainer did that through the elephant. The elephant is not a robot. You can’t program it to draw an elephant and a flower. But you CAN teach it to. Most human painters were taught to paint by somebody. So what? They are still the ones doing the painting.
[quote=“dreamscaper”]
Time for me to weigh in here. Hmmmm… Let me start by saying that MM should be applauded rather then admonished for his empathy with other living creatures. That is a noble endeavor and it deserves our respect. I don’t see what was gained by criticizing his choice to move to a more compassionate lifestyle. That is not one I choose at the moment, but I certainly understand why someone would choose to not eat animals. ]/quote]
Very kosher!
Though you are not yet with me in body
you are in spirit
Agreeing on the elephant
is icing on the cake.
What nonsense, you deduce an ‘incredible phenomenon’ from watching a trained elephant show off the dexterity of it’s trunk…and because art buyers buy this shit means what exactly? Since when have art buyers been the standard bearers of what is art, they just as gullable as the schmuks that fly to thailand to watch this farce, there’s no difference between this and dancing bears in the circus…vulgar.
My dear…
who ever you are
they are not only buying art
they are paying for a change in human consciousness
a clear and timely and necessary message from Nature
Beasts are not beasts after all
they are fellow animals
who like flowers
just like us =D>
I think you are playing fast and loose with language here. That we perceive an elephant and a flower when we look at what the elephant draws is not the same as the elephant drawing an elephant and a flower. The latter is a projection that we generally make onto people, and in the case of people it is largely correct (and we have oodles of corroberating evidence, such as the complex things we innovate). When we see a person draw, we infer that they know what they are drawing, because, for them as for ourselves, a two dimensional drawing is a representation of a three dimensional thing in the world.
However, there is no such evidence for the same faculty in animals. This elephant was coached to mimic a two-dimensional line drawing, not to look at an elephant and produce from the three dimensional animal a two dimensional representation. For the elephant, it is much more reasonable to believe that it has no understanding of what it is drawing, and is simply acting as it has been coached to act.
A dog can easily be taught to bark three times in response to the question “how many fingers am I holding up?” as I hold up three fingers. But we are attributing too much to the dog to say that the dog knows that I am holding up three fingers. In order to that, the dog would need an abstract concept of numbers, and to understand the idea of a question, the referent of ‘fingers’, and the idiom ‘holding up’. The simpler answer is the dog understands that, after a given cue, if it barks like it did last time, it will get a treat.
I agree with Wonderer that the most interesting of the elephant paintings are the abstract paintings, but I think it’s important to recognize that what we say when we make that distinction is ‘abstract for us’; for the elephant, none of these paintings carries more meaning than the next.
Source? I checked Google Scholar, but no luck.
Let’s see if he answers you Carleas, he sidestepped both oh mine. 
That has also been my view for the past 67 years. That drawing brought me up short. It may be that I am jumping to conclusions. An old dog like me does not change spots easily. but I can tell you now I am hit hard - right were it hurts. I will try to show why as we proceed.
This is were we part company. I agree that the elephant attended art classes. I have no idea of how they got it draw. Probably tasty snacks every time it headed in the right direction. But get it to draw they finally did. One can encourage any child to draw - but very few produce art like that elephant did.
My brother has been an art director most of his life , let me repost his assessment again in case you missed it.:
The amazing thing about the elephant’s art, is that she drew it from an abstract single line starting from the trunk to the hind foot, inclined for perspective of it’s elevation from the ground. Then repeated that incline again for the forefoot on the same side, The flower was incredible. Two daubs of paint, red on the tip and yellow on the body of the brush and she fan painted the flower head floating in space with a ‘hot’ center … the whole image is a romantic ballet … a dancing elephant. Divine inspiration? Perhaps, but one thing for certain, she painted like a pro … no different than Picasso. Express the line … fill in the details.
There is no way on this good earth that every line, every position every stroke could be made robotically. The end result would have to be mishappen. In any case the same elephant draws elephants a little differently every time. That is her bag. Others do flowers only. All realistically amazing. One even does geometrics - completely at odds with Nature, except for crystal structures. (Click on the side panels of the Utube link to see them all}
That example is far too simplistic. And dogs are infinitely more intelligent than that anyway. Witness a sheep dog working a flock.
An aeroplane can make abstract art by spilling paint on the ground. That area of art is not relevant here. It is the realism that makes the relationship between man and animal so potent
If I remember it was an Indian researcher. Tagore? Not the poet. It was done via recording chemical reactions with some kind of sensors. I lost my 60’s library when I left South Africa. Sorry.
Sorry that i over-looked you Lit. I normally do not do that when I open a thread. If I have not yet answered all your points please feel free.
Maybe this link will help you see things a little better. 
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4696315n
A car crash can bring about a change in human consciousness, is a car crash an incredible phenomenon?
But MM, all you’re arguing for is good fine motor control and good training. That doesn’t make it art. You say that it “could [not] be made robotically”, but that’s exactly how it’s being made. This robot can do the elephant one better, and actually draw from what it sees rather than from what it’s been trained to draw:
What’s significant about human art is the artistic expression, the meaning that people put into art. When I draw an elephant, poorly formed as it may be it is a bad drawing of an elephant. When an elephant draws an elephant, the elephant arranges a bunch of lines that resemble an elephant; we make the picture an elephant by interpreting it, it wasn’t intended as a picture of an elephant.
Of course the elephants drawings are a little different each time, it’s trunk is clearly a little unsteady as it aims the brush. And of course some elephants create pictures that are “completely at odds with Nature”: paintings don’t occur in nature. And of course you perceive the pictures as “realistically amazing”: like anyone who’s ever seen a picture in the clouds or the virgin mary on a slice of toast, your brain is doing what brains do and looking for useful patterns in the world. But that is an act of humans projecting meaning onto pictures that don’t have meaning other than punishment and reward for the elephant.
Along the same line, elephants and humans and dogs are all social animals. Their interactions are bound to resemble ours. Why can’t we get along if an elephant and a dog can? Because elephants and dogs don’t run global economies, don’t have millennia of recorded history, don’t pass down culture and tribal hatred. Neither elephants nor dogs worry much about global warming or Cartesian duality, and they don’t do these things for the same reason. Again, the news clip is another example of humans projecting human intricacies onto what is vaguely similar. Humans, elephants, and dogs bond, they search for families, and they are by and large faithful to their mates. But those instincts don’t by any means raise these animals to the level of human consciousness.
When I was in my teens
I thought rock and roll
out-shone Beethoven
and the tales of Hemingway
made Shakespeare stodgy
I also thought all animals
were nice
but dumb
My sense of appreciation
and awareness of their profundity
on all three
have made a 180
When I was in my teens
I thought
that a haiku about music
was a valid response
to a philosophical argument
Unfortunately, you haven’t justified your ‘180’. I’m glad you have remained open to changing your ming throughout your life, but I don’t think you’ve made a good case for changing our minds about the level of animal consciousness. What you’ve presented is a video of an elephant making deliberate lines on a canvas; you’ve interpreted that as a video of the elephant painting an artistic interpretation of an elephant holding a flower. I think I’ve made a good case that that is a projection of human mental states onto animal actions, and as that is something that occurs regularly (almost as regularly as humans project human mental states onto inanimate objects), it is by far the more reasonable explanation for the phenomenon.
If elephants have the sort of representational abilities you’re attributing to them, we should be able to get elephants to learn things from pictures (the location of food, for instance). Or, they should be able to draw novel representations, and not only the ones they’ve been trained to draw. We have no evidence that they are able to do either.
You could be talking about any seven year old at the drawing board.
Elephants have more than just a reptilian brain stem. That’s all any of us need for basic survival. A cortex helps us to analyze things. They have a cortex. Not as big as ours, but big enough to have an analytical and intuitive consciousness far above the limits you are trying to ascribe to them. They are not automated consciousnesses. That friendship with the tiny dog and the concern for its illness, the presentation of a flower; all show that they profess as much aesthetic appreciation and empathy with other species, if not more, than we do. They do not destroy other specie senselessly like we do. When an elephants sees a mouse, it does not trample on it. Dolphins have an even bigger brains than ours. Why? Who is to argue that they have might have a far better knowledge and understanding of the greater portion of this planet than we will ever attain?
Life is not just about collating data. It is about experiencing it. A King might not believe that a low-born peasant shares the same values. But that is because of bigotry and nurturing. Are we pseudo-intellectually bigoted about the intelligence of “low born” animals? How sure are you that we are not?
We never invented ourselves. Nature produced us. We all evolved out of the same first cell. Everything that was ever to be, had to be already imprinted in it. We are extensions of Natural consciousness, born of this earth, not aliens injected from some other dimension. We belong to the primate specie. Our base consciousness is natural. It is shared by all of Nature. Birds sing. We sing. Males battle for supremacy. Birds fall in love for life. Dogs mourn the death of human friends. Our specie developed a reflective ego. Why, only God knows. But it separated us from our natural base. Ever since then we have being trying to find our way back to God consciousness - through religion and science. That effort defines our survival dynamic. Animals and plants never got lost. They are God’s repository. And every now and then He sends us message through one of them, via the gift of a flower, to remind the prodigal gambler of our natural family and our shared family values.
These are projections and equivocations:
-Animal bonding, though we call it “friendship”, is distinct from human friendship. Humans, being more intelligent, have more complex relationships. Certainly some of the relationships of some humans are quite similar to animal ‘friendships’, but animals don’t confide in their friends, they don’t have false friends or friendly aquaintances. We mustn’t attribute them too much because they are social animals and form similar bonds of allegiance.
-“Concern for illness” attributes an understanding of illness that isn’t earned. After it’s established that animals form quasi-familial bonds with other animals, it isn’t surprising that they should also be drawn to their packmates. If the dog has simply been removed without being hurt, would the elephant have been any less vigilant?
-Again, we have no reason to believe that the shape the elephant creates is intended to represent a flower. It’s been trained to create a certain pattern on the canvas. It has been so trained because to us, that shape resembles a flower.
-“Aesthetic appreciation”? How has this been established? The elephant is led to the canvas and creates a shape it has been conditioned to create. Pavlovian stimulus and response is a more useful and better supported explanation than all that “aesthetic appreciation” entails.
-Birds ‘sing’ in that they create noises to attract mates that sound vaguely musical. Humans create music to express feelings; the feelings we express are often complex; the purpose is not always to attract a mate (indeed, our music is often designed to reject a mate, e.g. Whitney Houston).
-Love, again, is an overstatement. It is an appropriate metaphor, but the complexity of the emotional and rational aspects are do not equate. No bird has ever written a sonnet for his mate.
-Dogs miss their packmates. ‘Mourn’ entails an appreciation of the concept of death; loss entails more understanding of a situation than is necessary or deserved. A more accurate description is, “Dogs [dislike] the [absence] of their pack.”
In the human sense of the word, almost everything an elephant does is senseless. They aren’t great conservationists, they just don’t have the means to wipe out species. If there were a species of plant on which they fed, and they were confined to a small area, would they really ration to avoid wiping it out? Would they have fewer children to avoid overuse of resources? Elephants don’t consider these things, they don’t have a concept of extinction.
I am, and so are you. Dolphins might have seen more of the sea floor than humans, they might even have seen more of the earth than humans, but humans know more about the planet than dolphins do. Dolphin knowledge is rudimentary. They know how to herd fish and kill sharks, but they don’t know how to cure diseases, or even how to avoid being caught in nets. Their large brains do not give them the same problem solving ability that humans have, nor the same understanding of the world. They’re fascinating and, by non-human standards, very intelligent. But they are surpassed in brain power by almost every human over the age of ten.
Exactly. How many seven year olds have art on display in the Louvre? How many seven years olds have become famous poets? Seven year olds don’t have the same level of expression or representation that adult humans do, and so we don’t treat their ‘art’ the same way we treat adult art. And seven year olds are significantly more intellectually advanced than elephants!
Magnetman, I surely do suspect you of being the most full of shit person here, I shall have to watch where I tread…
We all have the free choice to base our standards on what we believe to be the Truth
Engineers see the world one way
artists see it another
I believe that mine view is based both upon analysis and intuition
I see yours as purely mechanical.
Newton is dead
The universe is not a clock
Matter is nothing but energy
and all energy is equally conscious
all consciousness is essentially loving
the mechanics are incidental
Mutual attraction is what love is all about
You have presented your art
I have presented mine.
The elephant has presented hers
Let the future decide which paintings to keep
“The universe is not a clock” is not equivalent to “any and all beliefs are justified”. By posting this topic in the Natural Science forum, you open yourself up to a scientific critique of your propositions, and the case that your conclusions are unscientific is strong. The idea that “all energy is equally conscious”, is at best to radically change the way those words are used. At worst, it’s simply false.
Prove me wrong
and don’t ask me to prove you right
My belief precedes yours
Until you do
it is only polite
to remain neutral
Look, for crying out loud, the damn elephants don’t draw from memory.
The trainer of the elephasnt gives signals on a sensitive spot beneath the ear, which signals when the elephant should move its trunk up, down, left, right, any direction, and whether or not to apply pressure to the brush.
It’s a slow proces which involves a lot of angling.
It’s a trick. they train the elephant to use its trunk like a paintbrush, but when it comes to the drawings, the trainer is the one who directs the brush.
these elephants do not draw pictures whatsoever.
The only thing they do for themselves is the abstract art, which sometimes is interesting.
Your claim is technically absurd.
There is no way in hell you can end up with a symmetrical drawing that way. The brush would have to inch jerkily along with endless stops and starts and pull backs. In the end it will be completely distorted, even unrecognizable.
Look at the video again. Once the awkwardness of trying to draw with one’s the nose and with the brush four feet away, as soon as the position and brush is set on the canvas, the lines are drawn with deliberate authority. On the long strokes you can see that the elephant knows exactly where it is going. There are also a few flourishes. The eye and the ear are perfectly placed and executed deftly. The two fan strokes that created the flower could not have been more masterful.
The end result looks the exact opposite of an angular robotic drawing. It is full of movement and grace. Even joy. The more logical conclusion has to be that elephant’s trunk is responding naturally to its own mental nerve impulses, and not translating the mahout’s instructions and then executing. That robotic process would be more jerkily hesitant.
I would not deny that the elephant would have to be trained to go from abstract scribbling to realism, just like any child would. But I cannot see in any way that it could be executed by two separate brains. I doubt two humans could end up with such symmetry…
I would suggest the the problem of acceptance is pathological. . Our heavily indoctrinated analytically trained brains just cannot imagine anything else than it being a fake. We have been told as children, over and over again, by authoritative teachers, that animals just cannot do that sort of thing. That instruction is as hard-wired into the educated psyche as any religious doctrine. If we denied that training , that would push us towards insanity.
An intelligent native who has never been left-brain indoctrinated in a school and still has balance between the two hemispheres of the brain, would have no trouble accepting what he saw. Our response of course is the he is too naive to be suspicious. We would not grant him any degree of basic wisdom. And so we would remain comfortable and move off to other things. Well, its hard to fool a native with an animal. With technology - yes.
IMO we are just going to have get used to the strange sensation of making heartfelt changes in the way we think and behave towards Nature. She is far more intelligent and sensitive than we can imagine at present. We are going to have to train our children to be more balanced. If I am right in this, and I believe I am, our one-side view of reality can only get worse if we keep crying fake and continue to abuse, pollute, poison and rape the living consciousness from which our own consciousness originated.