Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020)
statnews.com
statnews.com
When I finally got back inside and upstairs, I went and looked out the living room window, which looked out the same direction as the back alley. The crow had flown back around and was at the 8th floor looking in the window, from the other side of the pigeon netting we had on our balcony. On the inside of the pigeon netting, was another crow, desperately trying to figure out how it could escape. Not really sure how it had got itself through the pigeon netting in the first place.
I went out and sliced a hole through the netting and the trapped crow quickly joined its mate outside, who finally stopped screaming bloody murder. To this day it still amazes me that the crow's mate, knew which apartment I lived in and spotted me downstairs.
Maybe it was just me, but for months I could have sworn there were crows out sounding the alarm whenever I left my apartment.
Bears are another animal that seem to recognize individuals and take offences personally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/science/26crow.html
There’s a delicate balance to be struck if you live in a neighborhood with a large crow population and also like to pet neighborhood cats — and like most of life, bribes go a long way to lubricate the peace.
You need to be able to recognise the individual and put yourself in their shoes and imagine what would annoy the target and then execute your plan.
Reminds me of a short story I wrote which is a transcription of a vivid dream I had: http://www.tlalexander.com/spooks/
Not consciously! But they sounded crow-like to me. Like they could be onomatopeias for words that crows could theoretically speak/croak to each other.
Assuming you mean it's difficult to tell the difference, as opposed to just in this case:
Telling them apart is fairly straightforward! Crows are smaller, have a flatter tail, and typically flap quite a bit during flight. Ravens, by comparison, are much larger in size, have a diamond-shaped tail that moves quite a bit during flight, and typically glide during flight.
Love the whole family of corvids :D as well as your story!
I would like to point out that your description of how straightforward it is to tell them apart very humorously belies how it is not at all straightforward because all of your proposed evaluations are implicitly relative to something not seen.
> Crows are smaller, have a flatter tail, and typically... Ravens, by comparison...
If you see one bird, is that bird smaller or larger? Is its tail more flat or less? Smaller than what? Flatter than what? Flappier than what? Without seeing both, a lay individual can't easily evaluate "by comparison".
Additionally the raven's beak is is longer than it's head is wide (in profile). A crow's beak from the same view is approximately the same length as it's head.
This one sounds pretty good. Thanks (finally)! From a cursory search on the subject, it seems like one might need to be relatively close to be able to tell?
That's assuming Ravens are present in your area. One of the first things the guide books teach is to differentiate based on range. E.g. a candidate crow/Raven in Iowa is most likely a crow, since Ravens' range doesn't include the great plains.
Let me finish by plugging birding as a relaxing pastime that doesn't require much investment (just a $25 guide book for your area), and can really enhance any time spent out doors.
one recent quote i heard on the bus: "ravens are near humans, crows are in the country"
Above holds true in Western US and Eastern Canada at least.
On the other hand, as long as there is enough light, you can always tell them apart because the hooded crows have a lot of grey so long as they are fully grown (young hooded crows are darker than adults)
The problem is, they are rarely sitting next to each other so I can tell which one is larger.
3 Ways
1) if you can get a good look at the tail, think croW = wider/more or less even at the bottom, raVen = V like at the bottom (or diamond as a whole) but it's just a mnemonic and makes more sense if you see this http://naturemappingfoundation.org/natmap/images/drawings/ra...
2) Their calls are very distinct, hear one then hear the other and you won't confuse them at all but that requires having heard both and knowing which is which and I won't even bother to try to explain, you can find a million videos/etc. demonstrating if you really care.
3) Beak, ravens have a slightly curved tip usually and crows... don't but it's hard to see this because of the color, so again, depends on what you can observe
No, I don't know which. Heck, I don't even know what distinguishes a pinion from other feathers on the wing.
I'm just saying - keep an eye out for witches ;)
"Just as [the arrow] had spent its force, just as its ambition had been dimmed by destiny and it was preparing to faint, to turn over, to pour back into the bosom of its mother earth, a portent happened. A gore-crow came flapping wearily before the approaching night. It came, it did not waver, it took the arrow. It flew away, heavy and hoisting, with the arrow in its beak."> The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
However, the first result on Google, excerpted for my benefit, was this:
> Gore crows are a form of Dead Hand, involving any number of normal crows killed by a Necromancer, then imbued with a spirit from Death. This may be one spirit shared among the entire flock, or simply a single crow with a single spirit. The more crows share a spirit, the more quickly the corpses erode.[0]
And we wonder why people believe crazy shit!
Good for them, the more conscious creatures we share the universe with, the better. Well, the planet, anyway. While we're nominally in charge. If we can avoid screwing everything up too badly.
Actually, hell, can the ravens take over? We seem to be bodging things up just a bit.
Don’t worry human chauvinism will find a “practical” reason to break that down to too.
https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
[oregon] I accidentally created an army of crow body guards. Am I liable if my murder attempts murder? UPDATE: The crows saved a life
https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/lobhtj/oregon_...
I also read a comment online somewhere (maybe here?) recently where someone talked about a crow they met years ago while in college at the local Taco Bell who would exchange nickels for tacos. I believe they said that crow would even croak "TACO" when it presented the nickel.
Now I wish I would have bookmarked that one.
[UPDATE] I tracked down the Taco Bell story:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/572ajt/whats_the...
This comment is 5 years old so I think I read a copypasta version of this. Or maybe author reposted it somewhere more recently. Anyway, great story.
Unfortunately, our neighbors got angry because the crows would wait for feeding times and sit on the power lines and ... crap on their cars. And the squirrels grab the peanuts and hide them and once I was coming back from a walk and the neighbor walked up to me and said "hold out your hand" and then dropped a peanut shell in my hand. Really frustrating, because it's not like there are a lot of them. Usually they fly away with them and leave them elsewhere.
Two stories related to this:
1. I was talking with a neighbor for a good while. We were talking and heard a sound like metal dropping near me. I said "did you hear that, too?" ... I looked around and there was a bottle cap a few feet away and a crow above it on the power line. They were impatient and wanted their peanuts.
2. I was walking a few blocks away from my house and an empty peanut shell dropped right in front of me. Looked up and a crow on the power line.
Right now a couple of crows are building a next. One of them looks much bigger than normal and seems to fly slowly. Crowlets incoming??
Heck, not long ago you'd find a lot of humans saying this about other humans.
Another point is, other animals do dumb things - like videos of ducks walking over drains and the ducklings fall down the drain, or creature stuck in plastic sheet until it dies. Or creature does nothing while humans approach, kill, and eat it. It's hard to see examples like that and think "deep intelligence".
Emotions, yes - a lot of fear, pain, excitement, skittishness, visible in a lot of animal behviours. But examples of planning ahead, cooperation, tool using, they're so rare they make headlines like this article when observed.
This line of argument doesn't make much sense given that pigs are very intelligent and you'd probably say "pigs roll in the mud, what reason do they have for deep intelligence and thoughts"
> other animals do dumb things - like videos of ducks walking over drains and the ducklings fall down the drain, or creature stuck in plastic sheet until it dies. Or creature does nothing while humans approach, kill, and eat it. It's hard to see examples like that and think "deep intelligence".
I could say the same about most humans
> But examples of planning ahead, cooperation, tool using, they're so rare they make headlines like this article when observed.
This is true, but the way you go about making a case for it ain't it.
And no, it doesn't help to say "given pigs are intelligent, then pigs are intelligent".
> "I could say the same about most humans"
Go on then, say that most humans are stupid therefore "humans are not intelligent". That will be a very productive line of reasoning.
This is a logical fallacy which requires "deep thoughts" to evolve the same way we did. As mentioned, pigs are considered to be intelligent and yet you didn't choose to address pigs but instead chose cows.
> And no, it doesn't help to say "given pigs are intelligent, then pigs are intelligent".
It doesn't help to say that. That's true. It's a good thing no one said that though.
> Go on then, say that most humans are stupid therefore "humans are not intelligent". That will be a very productive line of reasoning.
It's about as productive a line of reasoning as you cherrypicking cows.
If you're going to start with a conclusion, "animals can be intelligent because pigs are intelligent, QED" where does that get you?
Why, exactly, are "pigs considered intelligent"?
And, note that I'm not saying animals are dumb as rock, there clearly is some level of intelligence involved in navigating the world, finding food, finding mates, avoiding predators, and a level of difference between say hamsters and elephants. What I'm contesting is something like "approximately all animals must have the same capacity of thought as humans because humans are animals", or the original statement more like "we shouldn't be surprised if tests show animals do have because we should have been assuming that all along even without evidence".
> "It doesn't help to say that. That's true. It's a good thing no one said that though."
fine, then I don't disagree with your statement that "pigs are considered intelligent" in the sense that "people consider pigs intelligent" but I disagree that they are intelligent in the same way that humans are, and the reason I disagree is that they haven't been proven to be such. Occam's razor, if they haven't been shown to have human-level capacity for (invention, language, music, mirror neurons, communicating abstract information, symbolic manipulation, arithmetic, planning, teamwork), then we shouldn't assume they have it unless necessary.
It's in response to this
> cows eat grass, what reason do they have for deep intelligence and thoughts
Where does that get us? It gets us thinking about how does that line make any sense.
> Why, exactly, are "pigs considered intelligent"?
There's plenty of research on pig cognition and it's not like you'd take my word for any of it so why not google it for yourself?
Here, I'll even start you off with one: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c
> What I'm contesting is something like "approximately all animals must have the same capacity of thought as humans because humans are animals", or the original statement more like "we shouldn't be surprised if tests show animals do have because we should have been assuming that all along even without evidence".
Your objection was to someone else saying
> It continues to surprise me that humans are surprised at other animals having deep intelligence and emotions and thoughts.
This is not the same as
> approximately all animals must have the same capacity of thought as humans because humans are animals
That is you moving the goalposts.
> I disagree that they are intelligent in the same way that humans are
> if they haven't been shown to have human-level capacity for (invention, language, music, mirror neurons, communicating abstract information, symbolic manipulation, arithmetic, planning, teamwork), then we shouldn't assume they have it unless necessary.
Again, no one claimed that so you stating that you disagree is fine but who are you disagreeing with? I still don't understand why you feel the need to declare this.
Nations bent on conquest and colonialism had been using those arguments to justify their actions for centuries. Not to animals but to other humans as well.
While it's mostly illegal to do so to humans now, it's still socially acceptable to do the same to animals.
We still don't know how human intelligence developed or the evolutionary pressures underlying our intelligence. Using that as an argument to summarily dismiss animal intelligence is a strawman at best, as is your other points - you could easily find humans which are literally dumb as a rock, does that have any bearing on the intelligence we're capable of as a species?
I'm not denying that people never treat other people as inferior because they don't speak English. I'm saying the reason people treat hamsters as inferior isn't "because hamsters don't speak English", and that saying that is as uninterestingly dismissive as saying "it's because hamsters don't wear makeup".
> "Using that as an argument to summarily dismiss animal intelligence is a strawman at best, as is your other points"
No it isn't. If cows have no reason to think thoughts to survive, do not compete with tricksy, planning, vicious cow-enemies on evolutionary timescale, display no visible deep thinking behaviour, cannot visibly communicate deep thoughts to other cows, to say "but they must have them because reasons" is not good logic. Me asking "why star a-priori with 'they must have them?'" is not a strawman or a summary dismissal.
> "you could easily find humans which are literally dumb as a rock, does that have any bearing on the intelligence we're capable of as a species?"
Your position is that "Some humans are stupid so cows are smart?" Really? Where's the cow Einstein, the hamster Beethoven, the Kangaroo Gandhi, where's the wolf whose face launched a thousand ships, or the beaver who added hydroelectric lighting to their damn? The intelligence humans are capable of as a species has taken over the world, it's bloody obvious, you can't miss it for looking - tool use, machine building, theorem proving, organising on a large scale, on a timescale which outlasts one lifetime while adapting to changing environments on a scale of hours to months not hundreds of lifetimes.
The presence of dumb humans doesn't undo that. The absence of all that surely does call into question the intelligence bears are capable of as a species.
> Where's the cow Einstein
The cow does not speak English
> the hamster Beethoven
The hamster does not compose in music notation
> the Kangaroo Gandhi
The kangaroo does not speak English
I don't really know how you fail to comprehend this -- people have been proven to underestimate or look down upon other people who don't share the same language or looks. Whether it be barbarians, people with different skin color, or generally of different cultures.
And you just reply with "it's OBVIOUS that animals don't possess the same level of intelligence, show me the cow Einstein". The GGGP's point is that studies on animal intelligence is only surprising with this attitude. I feel like you're just trying to appeal to common sense without actually addressing people's point. Don't forget who made the claim that '"As if they are inferior because they don't speak English" is a pretty cheap shot'.
I'll sign off here. You are free to presume that we're unreasonable idiots who don't even have a speck of your "common sense".
The disconnected lever fallacy is the idea that you can take the lever from a ship's bridge to your home, and then when you move the lever, expect your home to move like the ship moves. Without knowing about the engine. You're taking that idea even further - without ever seeing the ship move, and having no lever for moving it, assuming that there must be an engine but it's hidden by the lack of a lever. It's not the absence of lever which is so important, it's the absence of powered movement.
> "You are free to presume that we're unreasonable idiots who don't even have a speck of your "common sense"."
I'm not willing to assume that hamsters must, a-priori, be capable of the works of Beethoven because you think it's racist not to. English speaking humans are racist to Spanish speaking humans. That's /not the same/. You don't need to speak Spanish to observe that Mexico City is many orders of magnitude more than what hamsters can demonstrably do.
(I also take this the other way; seeing that animals show emotional behaviours and therefore have emotions. I don't think animals are rocks, it takes some intelligence to find food, mates, build nests. But that's not demonstrating high or human level intelligence because humans are capable of so much more. I think it equally bad that humans do/did surgery on human infants without anaesthesia arguing that they "don't feel pain" ( https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-fel... ) and ( https://www.google.com/search?q=open+heart+surgery+infant+no... ))
"[Researcher] Nieder kept varying the “rule,” with the birds told which color meant what — red = saw it, or blue = saw it — only after the flash. That required the crows, Glenn and Ozzy, to keep monitoring their brains; they had a second or two to figure out what they had seen and tell Nieder by choosing the corresponding target.
While the crows were solving these tasks, the researchers were tracking the activity of hundreds of their neurons. (Crows’ brains have 1.5 billion neurons, as many as some monkey species.)
"When the crows reported having seen a faint light, sensory neurons were active between the flash and the birds pecking the color that meant, yes, I saw that. If the crows did not perceive the very same faint stimulus, the nerve cells remained silent, and the bird pecked, no, I didn’t see anything. Ozzy and Glenn’s brain activity systematically changed depending on whether or not they had perceived the dim flash.
"During the delay, many neurons responded according to the crows’ impending report, rather than to the brightness of the light... The birds were aware of what they subjectively perceived, flash or no flash, correctly reporting what their sensory neurons recorded..."
"Then Allah sent a crow searching in the ground to show him how to hide the disgrace of his brother. He said, “O woe to me! Have I failed to be like this crow and hide the body of my brother?” And he became of the regretful." (5:31)... I don't actually understand what this means. Am I dumb or is this just badly written? Can someone explain? What is Nieder actually doing here, and how does it test whether the crows are introspecting? How are they "told" which color meant what?
If there was a faint light, and the red target appears, the birds were taught (how?) to peck it. If there was light and a blue target appears, don't peck it. If there was no light, and the blue target appears, peck it, and if the target is red, don't peck it.
So peck a red target = "I saw a light", peck a blue target = "I didn't see a light". If the opposite color target appears to what you need to peck, don't peck it.
Or: Target is red, did I see a light? If yes, peck it. Target is blue. Was there a light? If there wasn't, peck it.
I didn't continue reading the paper, but I guess the researchers concluded since they crows could answer the "Did I see a light?" question correctly most (i.e. statistically significant amount) of the times, it shows they can ponder the contents of their brains.
So, thanks for being the only sane comment.
This research has important consequences for our understanding of the evolution of higher intelligence. First, a cerebral cortex is not needed, and there are other anatomical means to achieve the same outcome. Second, either the evolution of consciousness is very ancient, tracing back to the last common ancestor of mammals and birds about 320 million years ago, or, equally intriguing, consciousness arose at least twice later on, independently in mammals and birds. Both options raise the likelihood, in my view, that higher intelligence on other planets may not necessarily be mammal or human-like, but could very well be birdlike.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/crows-are-...
Another is a transparent tube, with plate like stoppers in different locations. Each stopper can be pulled out with a string, causing the treats on top to drop to the next compartment. When they reach the bottom (3 different 'plates') the crow gets his food. That also seemed just too easy for them.
We're now looking for more elaborate games to play with them.
Despite all the obvious communication from them, and them being part of our daily life, they are still scared animals and will not get to a arm's length distance. Still, we get what they give, and love them for it. Beautiful entities they are.
If I said a fly wheel keeps spinning after being in contact with an outside force, you would never characterize it as "fly wheel acts of its own accord following demonstration".
And I wonder if the animals that we run these intelligence tests on know the humans are behind the tests. Maybe if crows achieve a culture with legends and stories, they'll have the a trickster god -- white coat, glasses man. For lab rats I guess white coat glasses man would take a more malicious aspect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NI...
we are "herd" enough that the benefits of learning from others overcomes the need to be smart enough to work it out yourself.
But individualistic enough that we won't follow the herd all the time (we might want to improve that given the success of religion and dictators).
But what I am trying to say is that intelligence is a necessary but not sufficbet condition. We also need ... politics ... for want of a better word.
Our brains seem to be wired as levels of co-operating systems coming to collective decisions - and that is a pretty good way to describe politics and society.
Human species is less a collection of organisms feeding and dying and more a distributed brain, trying to wake up.
Now that each node has a pocket sized way to communicate with each other node, I wonder what the conditions for consciousness really are?
<https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15192261W/A_Science_Fiction_...>
All sorts of biological / ecological factors would come into play like average lifespan, the size of life in relation to the size of the planet, resource scarcity, reproduction rates, mobility, avg. number of offspring, mutation rates, weather patterns, geography, etc.
Then you get into social and technological factors.
We have a sample size of 1, so it’s hard to extrapolate or understand where we are on the probability curve.
The best data point we might have for a self-inflicted civilization ending event would be looking at it from a smaller point view. How many times in history has one group attacked another such that both groups ceased to exist?
One positive sign is that even with all our destruction and violence, someone usually wins or backs down with the ability to continue on living.
Of course there are always long-tail events like mutually assured destruction, but I don’t know if 100 years is the correct timetable for ~100% certainty.
There was an interesting HN discussion about it a few weeks ago here with folks chiming in on the best ways to assess the odds of a long-tail event like MAD:
How would that work? It seems to me the only that matters is that the proper conditions for abiogenesis be maintained for whatever duration it requires. It shouldn't matter how far along the Universe or planet history this period occurs
Bird brains are much more neuron-dense than mammalian brains. They also lack the layered structure that permeates our cerebral cortex. I wonder if the different structure is what causes the funny head movement seen across bird species.
I could walk out on the porch and get within a foot or two of it without it flying away.
I hadn't been feeding them or anything.
I put out some water and ran the garden hose a bit and put out a bit of bread thinking that food or water was probably what it was looking for (it was during some very hot days in Seattle). It didn't really act all that interested in what I did though.
Curiously crows (abundant around here too) have displayed little interest in the peanuts on offer. OTOH there have been "wars" between the crows and jays, not sure what "issues" precipitated highly vocal confrontations. I assume it was territorial. Significantly there was never any evidence of killed or wounded black or blue participants.
Strikes me as sad and shameful that these corvid cousins know more about resolving differences than we humans ever seem to learn.
Makes me feel bad for using the insult "bird brain" in the past.
One morning they flew above us with a rotting sausage and dropped it right in front of my dog and waited for him to eat it. I had to pull it out of his mouth and when I looked up the ravens were all watching us.
I can’t say for sure, but it certainly felt like revenge.
I posted it to Reddit at the time and got a bunch of suggestions ranging from "it's dead" to "crows love to play tricks". I never got to the bottom of what was going on.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=galah+upside+down&t=ffab&iax=image...
I find myself wondering more and more if we are more similar than I give animals credit for.
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/ki6fnd/oregon_...
This in itself shows team work. They failed to get rid of the owl in time before the breeding season.
Next season they tried again. This time, together they stuffed the nest hole with so much stuff that the owl couldn't get in anymore. The owl would try to clear it but soon gave up as it was two working against one. With the owl permanently gone, they cleared the hole and seized it.
Isn't that stunning? This demonstrates memory as the previously failing tactic was not repeated. The idea of stuffing a nest surely isn't intuition or a skill learned from parents, it's a spontaneously formed idea for a highly specific problem.
They also have very complex social behavior where males exchange favors. Every bird knows of every other bird they commonly interact with whether they are owed or in debt. So that means they have a currency.
We should lose our arrogance and look at wildlife with new eyes and with new respect. And not just for wildlife superstars like crows or dolphins, do it across the board. Case in point, earthworms drag leaves into their underground lair and feed on them. When you give it the wrong type of leaf, it will reject it. When you give it the right type of leaf, yet wrongly oriented, it will turn it around. We're talking about a creature with a handful of neurons, figuratively speaking. It's one of the most stupid life forms and it can do that.
That said, ants friggen farm. Size does not determin intelligence. Nore does brain size.
https://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/meet-earths-oldest-farmers-...
> “For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” – Thomas Ligotti
Our brains represent a step change in the timeline of complexity in the universe, from subatomic things spontaneously coalescing into atoms, all the way up to Thomas the paranoid android.
Instead of being depressed that we will get hurt and die, let's be happy that we will be able to experience many interesting and wonderful things, many of which can be quite pleasant and meaningful.
"Impressiveness" is about the most subjective thing I can think of. It's literally about whether it impresses someone.
I've never heard of this Ligotti chap, but these quotes are not selling me on him.
Naturally, there are pessimists who do kill themselves, but nothing obliges them to kill themselves or live with the mark of the hypocrite on their brow. Voluntary death might seem a thoroughly negative course of action, but it is not as simple as that. Every negation is adulterated or stealthily launched by an affirmative spirit. An unequivocal “no” cannot be uttered or acted upon. Lucifer’s last words in heaven may have been “Non serviam,” but none has served the Almighty so dutifully, since His sideshow in the clouds would never draw any customers if it were not for the main attraction of the devil’s hell on earth. Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life’s rattle and hum. Without a “yes” in our hearts, nothing would be done. And to be done with our existence en masse would be the most ambitious affirmation of all.
Ligotti repels me because, whether he acknowledges it or not, his is a counsel of despair. He's gotten so wrapped up in his own inability to find an answer to the simple question "why are we here?" that he has totally omitted to consider he may have a responsibility, in regard to his own person, to make an answer to it. Through that omission, he's inadvertently - I think inadvertently - made the purpose of at least his public life to tell everyone else how bad it is he can't come up with one.
Perhaps I'd have felt the same about Lovecraft, in his day.
I will concede that existentialism of this sort is really the only honest philosophical alternative to pessimism. Ligotti dismisses it, but I can't remember why right at the moment.
Meanwhile, nobody argued that the writer should kill himself. What I said was that the things he does despise prevent the consummation of his expressed desire. Not acknowledging that is unsound.
But, as the kids say, "he probably can't hear himself over the sounds of his own talking".
The guy makes a living spouting this kind of depressing prose. So, he's good at it. I bet he might enjoy it, sometimes, too. Maybe the recognition, a little? So, perhaps he's a counter example to his own dour outlook.
Not to sound too cynical, but if he hates being known for his writing, why does he write and publish? Why have a website about his works?
That's very strange to me. I could understand hating being famous. But hating being known for the thing you're literally putting into the world so that people know about it?
In the case of being a writer, having some sort of PR output (like a website) is part of managing your brand or whatever I guess. Of course it isn't mandatory, but I bet people have done things they hated more for money.
> It is important to note that while all copyright-related content is presented with the permission of Thomas Ligotti, TLO was created upon the solitary actions of Jon Padgett and continues to exist independent of the direction or promotion of Thomas Ligotti.
I think it's normal for someone to feel the need to write and publish without wanting recognition. His publishing schedule is erratic and also dropped precipitously as he got well-known.
An asteroid impacting the Earth will surely make an impression on its surface. Therefore, there ARE innately impressive things in the universe.
Contentness can be learned, though.
Or just use that brainpower and create medication that tricks the primitive parts of the brain into being happy. Profit!
Thankfully, nature already did that for us. It's THC and Alcohol.
I think that Blindsight and its author Peter Watts have a stronger claim :)
- Sincerely, this amazing universe that could contemplate itself using your brain, if you'd stop feeling so bad about yourself
This is not an assumption that science makes. However, we have never observed consciousness in anything that does not have a brain, and physically altering a brain can cause fundamental changes in consciousness. So, until there is evidence that consciousness is not tied directly to a brain, its the best working model we have. Suppositions to the contrary are interesting but meaningless without being supported by evidence.
how would you measure consciousness?
The Denial of Death was a life-changing read for me.
There are many people out there who seem to lack the ability to analyze the consequences of their behavior, or to admit that they were ever wrong. There are also people who seem to be very bad at understanding what are their motivations for doing certain things. Not being able to look back at your own behavior and your own mistakes makes it nearly impossible for these people to grow.
I won't get into the argument as to whether these differences in self-awareness are biological in origin or due to nurture. It's probably some of both. Either way, even though this metric is multidimensional and hard to quantify, some people are definitely less self-aware than others. Just like some people are less physically fit than others.
In any case, the vast majority of healthy humans are probably more self aware than the vast majority of healthy crows, no?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
It's hard not to notice that many people are... dumb, but content or happy. They don't second guess, they don't fret, they don't think much.
I really wish I could be like that.
I suppose it's possible to mistake low neuroticism for stupidity. And if you don't talk to dumb people (pick an IQ range below 100) very often you might not know their worries and concerns, especially if they're not overt about them as is fashionable for Lisa Simpson-esque individuals.
Still bad news on adjusting your base intelligence (apart from drastically down through damage), I don't know about adjusting self-awareness though I suspect it's a bit more mutable in good and bad ways (if only because related traits better understood are more mutable), but at least your desire to feel happier or more content more often is a possible state for you to achieve if you work at it. Some people will recommend therapy (surprised nobody has internet-diagnosed you with depression already), or meditation, or philosophy, or drugs (prescription or party), or whatever (I like the idea and research of gratitude journals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude_journal but don't keep one), I don't want to recommend anything, just point out that personality and outlook is more mutable than something like base intelligence, which is good news for your melancholy should you wish to attempt change.
Of course it's not the only thing, and can be greatly mediated by other factors. From the book Age of Em, citing that and other sources, "people today tend to be both happier and more productive when they have jobs, autonomy at work, health, beauty, money, marriage, religion, intelligence, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and non-neuroticism."
I brought up Lisa Simpson because there's this meme: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/lisa-simp... It's a popular take, but it's wrong.
Intelligence is a far-cry from self-awareness. I once knew someone who would regularly (daily, for years), in conversation, cut other people off like they weren't even there to completely change the subject to their own preference. I once called them out on it and tried to finish my original point to the rest of the table. They yelled at me and demanded an apology that I would dare cut them off like that, that I would dare try to finish my own point.
I have several similar stories, but the rest are far too specific for the open internet.
Some people just pay themselves no mind.
Unfortunately, a lot of people boost their worth by degrading others, so to give that credit to those that they look down on would cause them a certain degree of cognitive dissonance.
On the other hand, small scale situations similar to what's depicted in fun-fiction like Idiocracy or other things keep happening, and the idea that reality is stranger and crazier than fiction holds true. I've joked that the 2020s are going to be the dumbest decade, and will require the dumbest people. Holding up well so far. Furthermore, even if we acknowledge that humans are intelligent, period, there is still great variation within humans. There is variation on every trait we can measure, self-awareness should be no different, the presumption that no one is more or less self aware than any other person defies reason. Apart from that, just observing people's behavior in a casual way I think it obvious that people vary quite a bit when it comes to self-awareness, both in general every day lives (which I can notice varies in myself) or in specific focused tests. It doesn't get better when you switch from casual observation and conversation to more detailed study, psychology and psychotherapy are full of strange and fascinating data (and not just of fundamentally damaged brains) which I think a model that assumes equal capacities in self-awareness would be hard-pressed to explain.