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Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

> With the exception of octopi, primates, birds and cetaceans, animals that do extremely intelligent actions turn out to be automatons.

[a lot of citations needed]

Yes, some invertebrates have been found to execute fairly rigidly preprogrammed behavior patterns, and some reptiles as well, IIRC. But others seem to be capable of much more adaptive behaviors. And mammals? Exactly what evidence do we have that cats and dogs and horses and elephants are just mindless automata? To make such a claim certainly requires extraordinary evidence.

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Cats really aren't that intelligent in all cases, unfortunately. They are very picky eaters because of instincts about food poisoning, and if something scares them once in the presence of a food they might just associate them and refuse to eat that food ever again.

I think dogs are a bit smarter, but my aunt's dog checks behind the TV every single time there's an animal on screen.

Humans think dogs are not conscious because they don't recognize themselves in a mirror, and if the roles were reversed dogs would probably conclude the same about us since we don't even recognize our own pee.

As humans we tend to hold other animals only to our own standards, even if we often wouldn't score that well by theirs.

I used to love eating meatball sandwiches as a kid. Ate them once while I had the flu, threw up, still can't eat them without gagging today years later. That doesn't particularly say much about my intelligence. Humans have phobias too.

Will you refuse to eat unless someone guards you during dinner in an otherwise empty house? Attack your roommate cat because you saw a strange cat out the window and now think your roommate is that cat?

>Will you refuse to eat unless someone guards you during dinner in an otherwise empty house?

No, but I will close the bathroom door when I shit, even in an empty house. I imagine that's almost the same instinct.

Ants, bees?

> But others seem to be capable of much more adaptive behaviors.

Examples? I'm really interested for finding at least one example of complex intelligent behavior of insects (that is actually studied and not just conjecture).

I’m not an expert, but my guess at an example would be bees.

Complex communication via dances about food sources. Learned attacks against murder hornets to defend the hive.

Probably what I would look at first.

Bees and jumping spiders are both acknowledged to be relatively intelligent.

I find conversations like this difficult. I don’t think anyone here will change your mind. If your position is that intelligence must rival a humans to be worthy of “being intelligent”, you are free to do so.

I think the bar is much lower, and intelligence is simply a measure of ability to learn. And from that perspective, a simple automaton does not learn. But insects DO learn.

http://www.womanaroundtown.com/contributed/the-worlds-smarte...

"Visual signals of individual identity in the wasp Polistes fuscatus" (Tibbetts, 2002) establishes recognition of individual nestmates by facial markings.

Now it's your turn. You've made a lot of assertions here, and substantiated none of them. Would you like to do so, or are you instead comfortable being regarded as no more closely abreast of the current state of the field than Fabre was when he published on spider wasps, a century and a half ago?

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