What is it like to be a crab? | Hacker News Reader

What is it like to be a crab?

aeon.co

87 pointsdrdee75 comments

The article mentions bats, and it mentions philosopher Thomas Nagel, but it doesn't mention Nagel's famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like To Be A Bat?. I assume the article title is a riff on that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

There's always a wavery, indefinite line between 'cribbing from un-cited sources' and 'everybody should get that reference.' I'd assume the article's on the latter side of the divide, but still worth mentioning (as you've done) for people who don't read this stuff all the time.

just to add on with a slant toward the types of things HN is interested in, the point of "what is it like to be a bat" is essentially, you can't know what it's like to be a bat unless you are a bat (and I don't mean the paper should be read for that conclusion, you develop far more insight thinking your way through it)

The old "how do I even know my red is your red" is a little piece of this puzzle. Perhaps someday the sci-fiction notion of loading a stimcard into the slot behind your ear will let you experience what it's like to be a bat... but the point of the paper is, will you know for certain, or can you know, if that's actually what it feels like?

Now, that was just a rehash, which you didn't need me for. What I want to add on is--everybody remain civil, this is a serious intellectual question--we know what transgender people feel like they aren't, but do they know what it feels like to be what they believe they are? Of course it feels like "you" (or "me", depending the voice I'm supposed to be writing) but comparatively, how would anybody know what else it feels like? Do men and women feel differently? We think they do, but perhaps they don't. Perhaps they just think about different things, with the same feelings. Of course, some would be offended by that suggestion, declaring that men and women don't think differently.

It's a separate series of questions, "I want to be treated as if I'm X" and to preserve the suspension of disbelief, "please don't indicate you doubt I am X because that won't feel like being X". This is the only way I can think of it. I don't understand why other people don't think of it this way.

But, I'm one of those people who doesn't mind talking in theaters, it doesn't ruin anything for me.

Actually, Nagel's initial point with "Wiiltbab" is the question of whether it is, in fact, like anything to be a bat. He noted that we are almost certain that it not like anything to be a rock, and definitely like something to be a human. He chose bats as an example of an interesting "midway" case to use for discussing, initially, the question of what might be required for it to "be like something to be an X".

He did certainly touch on the question of "if it is like something to be a bat, what is that like?" but it was a secondary question that follows only if you can first conclude that it is indeed like something to be a bat.

how do I even know my red is your red

I get why kids ask this. I don't get why adults ask this. If you have normal color vision and don't have a tumor in your visual cortex your red is as close to my red as the red subpixels are on two units of the same television. Sure, you can't look at them and positively measure their identicalness, but they're being generated with the same hardware.

sorry, you assume that, you hypothesize that, but you don't know that.

people like different colors, people like different tastes. according to you, "no, same hardware"

> Sure, you can't look at them and positively measure their identicalness, but they're being generated with the same hardware.

But to continue your analogy, after so many years of experiencing the world differently—different pasts, upbringings, worldviews—are they being interpreted by the same software? And that's the question that the paper really poses: are qualia real, and if so, is it ever possible to conclude that two individuals experience qualia in the same way?

My intuition says yes, they are basically perceived the same way. Color recognition is so elementary it seems more hardware-based than software-based. I think there are better examples for the point (which I assume it's trying to make). Take a piece of rock, does it look the same way to different people? (there the answer is IMHO no).

> My intuition says yes, they are basically perceived the same way. Color recognition is so elementary it seems more hardware-based than software-based

In which case you're missing the point of the fucking example. Colour is just being used as an easily definable (to some extent) sensation. "What is it like to perceive this particular rock" doesn't roll quite off the tongue so well, and intuition is exactly the aspect that this discussion attempts to avoid in order to be as objective as possible with regard to an inherently subjective experience.

I would assume the answer is probabilistic and likely follows something like a bell curve.

I mean, the existence of significant numbers of people who don't have "normal colour vision" is a pretty good indication that different perceptions of red is an actual thing. Seems far more childish to insist that that everyone's perception is either identical or impaired.

If it is possible for human perception of colour using similar hardware to be so different that they subjectively experience 550nm and 700nm wavelengths as identical in appearance, it is surely possible for the minds of that people who can reliably distinguish between the two don't necessarily perceive them exactly the same way you do or I do. Apart from anything else, it would explain a lot of people's decorative choices!

Even the "same hardware" argument doesn't stack up because even if it turns out you're actually my identical twin, our visual cortexes and brain structures and chemistry that parses, interprets, emotionally responds to and stores images evidently aren't the same.

I see different color temperature casts in each of my eyes. So, depending on the eye, my red isn’t even my own red! Seems like a perfectly valid question given the complexity of the human vision system.

The interesting thing is that so much of color (and vision in general) is software, not hardware. Our eyes don't see color and light the way we we perceive them at all, it is a composite of multiple sensors each doing different things. Colors like magenta are almost entirely constructed by our brains in software because we don't physically register them but recognize their presence.

Then there is the element of how we define colors at all - some languages have no word for blue, for instance. People can see and distinguish the color but without context along the spectrum they way they understand the color is definitely influenced by lots of contextual factors. So from that perspective, we certainly do not all perceive colors the same.

The existence of "The dress", which is seen by different people or the same person in different states of mind as white/gold or blue/black, and other such illusions, would seem to invalidate your perspective.

Or if that's not persuasive, just consider different software versions, different video drivers, etc. running on the same hardware.

Or consider that if you believe a tumor in your visual cortex could meaningfully change color perception in your model, then why wouldn't a difference in cortex structure have some effect too? I'm willing to bet no two humans have ever had or probably will ever have the same arrangement of visual cortex neurons and other relevant brain biology. Do you think you know enough to say any such variation is irrelevant?

The uniqueness of being. Imagine being a you that is totally at odds with what the world is telling you the way you are supposed to feel.

Look in the mirror and see your physical being, but if you remove the vision and we would be so very different in the way we interpret reality and how we reconcile them with how we feel.

> Now, that was just a rehash, which you didn't need me for. What I want to add on is--everybody remain civil, this is a serious intellectual question--we know what transgender people feel like they aren't, but do they know what it feels like to be what they believe they are? Of course it feels like "you" (or "me", depending the voice I'm supposed to be writing) but comparatively, how would anybody know what else it feels like?

They don't. How could they? At most, they know what it's like to have lived life as one sex, then take hormones, have surgeries done on themselves, and "pass" as the other sex. If they started passing when they were 25, then they kind of know what it's like to be a 25 year old of the other sex, assuming that their mind and behaviors also match the other sex, and they've abandoned all contact with people who knew them prior to transition. And they still don't know what it's like to have the body of someone who was actually born as the sex to which they've transitioned.

But most don't get that far. Most MtFs instead only know what it's like to be treated as a femininely dressed guy with breasts whom the more progressive-minded people take pity on and call "she" sometimes. The non passing FtMs only know what it's like to be treated as a woman with a beard and a deeper voice. It's tragic.

I read this article as part of fantastic anthology The Mind's Eye edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett.

Somehow I find it harder to imagine what it “would be like” to be even simpler creatures. As a crab I can kind of imagine having more legs and probably having a great sense of smell. I can imagine the excitement and urgency of spawning. How it would feel to think that a sea floor carcass would be tasty.

In the other hand, what the hell would it feel like to be a worm? Would I have an inherent sense of “left” and “right” since I’m just a tube? What would being cut in half and becoming two separate organisms feel like? Sensing vibrations with no ear drums? Do I have a “plan” or are my actions more passive responses?

And most important of all, would she still love you if you were a worm?

There's a story about a man who woke up as a dung bettle...

The Metamorphosis? Yeah, a pretty sad story to say the least

We've all been there at some point in one way or another

If she was a crab, she certainly would.

It is sometimes surprising to learn which organisms are more or less like us. Annelid worms like the ones you likely find in the soils where you live do have brains, for example, albeit ones with different characteristics than those of crustaceans or mammals [1]. They don’t have lungs though sometimes gills. Are they more like crabs or humans? Tough to say but fun to ponder. Incidentally, of the marine invertebrates, the ones we are most closely related to are tunicates and salps, which are blobs that filter feed [2]. Who said cladistics wasn’t cool?

Imagine all the ways we can’t imagine how other organisms experience their existence. But as you learn more about their biology it’s incredible how much we share.

1. https://frontiersinzoology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...

2. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/tunicates-not-...

Most worms don't actually become separate organisms when cut in half, it's just a myth based on their reaction. They usually just die after while.

The only ones that I know of which do so are Planarians [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian

The book "the tree of possibilities" wrote by Bernard Werber, contains twenty "philosophy-fiction" stories. One of them is about a scientist who want to "free" its brain from its body, so he put his brain in a jar, and just...think. I think it kind of relate to your comment. It's a good reading (an other story is the left hand of one guy taking control and starting to act as a human).

That sounds amazing. Did you read it in English? I can only find it in French and Korean.

I've read it in French, looks like it have never been translated in English. They are quite short novels, so maybe automatic traduction can work.

Interesting. How would it feel to know you’re just a battery?

Well you’re just a battery and you don’t seem to mind!

Well, we can imagine all sorts of things which have nothing to do with how things actually are. It gets us into problems all the time. The trouble with your imagination is that you are imagining being the crab while remaining yourself, as yourself. But this is nonsense. If you were a crab, you wouldn't be you as your identity is to be human, with all the typical human powers and capacities. But when you merely imagine being a crab, you essentially maintain your human identity while changing some minor features here and there. You are effectively anthropomorphizing.

We don't live in some weird Cartesian universe where minds can be attached to any old living thing (though, strictly speaking, Descartes only recognized that human beings have minds).

One difficult thing to imagine is having no thoughts!

At least not the way I/we have thoughts.

You're imagining something you think is what it's like to be a crab, or what you think it's like to have more legs, etc., but why do you have any confidence that's what it actually is like?

> A majority of philosophers accept (or lean toward accepting) consciousness in adult humans (95.15 per cent),

I laughed aloud.

> The Declaration points to five consciousness markers that are the results of scientific research: homologous brain circuits; artificial stimulation of brain regions causing similar behaviours and emotional expressions in humans and other animals; neural circuits supporting behavioural/electrophysical states of attentiveness, sleep and decision-making; mirror self-recognition; and similar impacts of hallucinogenic drugs across species.

...awesome. This is a really fun article.

OK so to translate those 'consciousness markers':

- You've gotta have a brain like ours

- Messing with your brain should do the same thing to you that it does to us

- Gotta have 'attentiveness' since the homunculus needs a homunculus too

- It's you in the mirror

- Get wasted like us

Hmmmyeah these seem like good yardsticks for consciousness. /s

As I like to call it, anthropic arrogance.

Good article on Cris / Koch's perspective on this. A follow up to this article could talk about the views of Mark Solms, Joscha Bach. Both of which would include most animals as conscious, but in different ways. Mark Solms talks about how affect (i.e. feelings) is where consciousness arises from. Living organisms developed homeostatic mechanisms (i.e. maintaining oxygen levels, finding energy, etc), and this mechanism becomes more and more abstract in such a way that they become the "feelings" of the organism. From this perspective, any sufficiently complex nervous system that is maintaining homeostasis probably has feelings and with enough complexity will have some level of consciousness.

Personally, I agree with Joscha Bach who says consciousness is part of the simulation that the brain needs to do in order to model the world and the needs of the body. So any organism that has a simulation of the external world is probably conscious. Crabs would certainly have one, even if it's a very simple model. They probably also have a self-model, but no self-consciousness of that model like in mammals.

My guess is that although we don't know what it's like to be a crab, we might have an idea of what it's like to be a non-human mammal, even a bat. I think when we are infants (1-3 yrs old?) we have this kind of limited consciousness, which lacks self-awareness but we still have experience and emotions. From the computationalist perspective (i.e. Joscha Bach), this makes sense because our world simulation is still being "built", and for non-human mammals like chimps, this could be their computational limit.

I agree with you exactly about the simulation idea of consciousness and the difference between conciousness and self awareness. Here's an interesting question, do you actually remember when you were about 1 year old? Apparently most people don't but I do very clearly. I read something recently that autism is correlated with the ability and I always thought I had a bit of it (like a lot of people that is into computers). For people that don't remember and don't know what he's talking about, being conscious without language (so probably what is like to be a dog) is a world of now, there's no past, or future, no planning, no if this then that, just what you can see and hear and feel at that moment. Emotions come and go like clouds for no reason, you don't have the capacity of wondering about reasons and they are very strong, you don't have the ability to regulate them or to compare them with anything else for perspective.

Given the memory thresholds of the rare few with hyperthymesia, it seems more likely that you hold false memories than that you remember clearly being one year old. Certainly you would be the first person known to have such memories if confirmed.

I've considered that, I'm well aware of how easy is to fabricate memories and think they are real, but I've checked with my parents (without giving them the information, just asking questions), the memories are real. To clarify, I'm not claiming to remember everything about being one year old, just to have a few very clear memories that match with what my parents know happened, the layout of the house etc.

It's interesting to me that on the one hand, many AI researchers either try to sidestep the hard problem of consciousness ("well, once it has 100 trillion parameters and quacks like a duck, we'll have to accept it's a duck") or refuse to acknowledge that it's a problem at all, and then on the other hand you have folks like that google engineer who readily accept that an LLM is experiencing consciousness because it outputs some text about consciousness.

Many of the physical adaptations critters on this planet have made were in response to evolutionary pressure. Eat or die. Reproduce or your bloodline dies. Get those resources before something else does or die.

At the moment AI doesn’t really face these pressures. They don’t need to get better at “getting electricity” - something else does that for the AI systems so there is no pressure to “be aware of where your next electron comes from” so why waste the processing ability to track such things?

I guess what I’m getting at is consciousness seems like an emergent behavior of keeping one’s self alive. Maybe if we start threatening AI models then consciousness will emerge?

How would consciousness present an evolutionary advantage? Wouldn’t a non-conscious agent with the same behaviour be just as fit?

So it seems to me that consciousness is more likely an emergent property of certain kinds of computation.

>Wouldn’t a non-conscious agent with the same behaviour be just as fit?

So what would that entail. A complex organism needs to be 'aware' of its actions and the outcome of those actions versus the actions of 'non-self'. When you start internally modeling the complex behavior of self versus others it starts looking a lot like consciousness.

> When you start internally modeling the complex behavior of self versus others it starts looking a lot like consciousness.

Does it? This is another attempt to sidestep the "hard problem" of consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

A thing that always comes to mind with these kind of news is the claim that octopi have comparable effects from MDMA as humans. For anyone that have an overview of evolutionary history that should be interesting to say the least.

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=octopus%20mdma

Another interesting source I have found lately is this talk by Nicholas Humphrey (How did consciousness evolve?). If I'm interpreting him right, being a crab is nothing. The experience of "something" evolved a couple of hundred million years ago at the earliest, in our lineage. Assuming he is right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QWaZp_2I1k&t=2064s

Humphrey also has a book called “Seeing Red” that covers similar ground that I found quite compelling, too

Completely unrelated to the article: but what a refreshing website (on mobile at least). Fast, fluid, beautiful. Just its design made me feel compelled to check out and read other articles.

Aeon is a gem. Beautiful and fluid site, lots of interesting articles.

https://youtube.com/shorts/wIfvcWCZZ7w?si=Bd2b3TGM7vIRuJYS

Raw output of a crab’s neural net

This is such a classic title for an Aeon article.

If anyone is interested in other related content I've always found the article about ctenophore nervous system/evolution [1] to be cool - also from Aeon.

Regarding the "higher animal" part: My SO is a neuroscience researcher studying fruit flies, it's common for people to ask "How does your work relate to human brains/health?" and the answer is usually "The work doesn't translate to humans." Their lab also focuses on "walking behavior" of the fly which can be funny in conversations, flies walk more than you think.

[1] https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-ctenophore-says-about-the-ev...

If you like crabs, there’s a crab museum in Margate (Kent, UK)

http://www.crabmuseum.org

According to their flyer, it’s the #1 crab museum in Europe!

Seeing this title on a tech site, I am reminded of the memorable slogan: "Through strength, persistence, and adaptability, Realtek follows in the spirit of the crab."

Is THAT what it was supposed to be?? God, the ugliest logo in history.

As a homeless man living on the beach, I can report that crab consciousness is da kine, brah.

Solving conciousness feels similarly futile to "solving" the number 42.

There are infinite scenarios (what is the square root of 1764? How many mushrooms are in my vegetable box? ...) which yield the sought result.

What suggests it wouldn't be the same for conciousness (neurons in a cortex, vectors in a GPU, alien biology we have yet to discover...)?

Their life must be stressful, they like the seashore, unfortunately there are so many humans around, hunting, playing with them, disrecting their lives, simply throwing rocks in the water or rock stacking is already disrespectul btw

The must be a certain pride in being an evolutionary local maximum

I am a strange loop...

The neat thing is, you're not actually conscious, you just think you are.

Well, you think you think you are.

Think you think you think you think you... and yep, this is what we call consciousness.

I finished reading Strange Loop recently, I think 'Being No One' by Metzinger is more pithy though.

Oh thanks, goin to add "Being No One" to my reading list.

I have a very alternative perspective, especially coming from an applied physics background. I don’t know if anyone has experienced what it is like to be a crab, but I know that there are people who claim to have experienced events from other animals perspective, and hundred of thousands that claim to have done so from other humans' perspective, in near death experiences.

A few years ago I thought that NDEs basically were that they saw a light and felt a bit relaxed perhaps. Some facts, without an attempt at explaining them: The experience is very similar between experiencers and involve numerous distinct steps, and while some people only have a few of the steps, they seem to be largely the same. The step where someone experiences things from another person’s perspective, or in some cases animal’s, is the “life review”. Positive and negative interactions from the (nearly) dying person’s life is replayed and experienced from their own as well as other involved persons’ (or much more rarely, animals’) perspective. These are also relived somewhat in parallell, a common description is that they are “outside time” or that “it’s not in linear time” (Which btw is very similar to what a lot of John E Mack’s abduction clients told him about their abduction experience. Similar brain mechanisms, or similar actual event perhaps.)

NDEs are not uncommon either, estimates are in the hundred of thousands to millions.

So, now if these experiences are actually what was experienced by the other party, it might indicate that qualia are the same for everyone, your red is my red, and so on (Why is it always red?).

Another interesting thing from NDEs is the first step (so before life review mentioned above), which is an out of body experience. A significant percentage report seeing their surrounding, into neighboring rooms at the hospital, and all sides of objects at the same time, as well as 360 degrees around in all directions. Even more interesting is that a majority of blind people in the survey I read, had been able to see, and there are instances where people blind from birth could say which people in the operating room wore the same color clothes, even though they could not name the color. (Also, at another step than the two mentioned here, a large percentage of seeing report percieving new colors that they have not previously seen).

So this is about 2% of the strange things with NDEs, I would probably dismiss it if it wasn’t for the richness (often years of experiences, although time is a difficult concept in NDEs, uniformity and not uncommonly, information gained during them that the experiencer could not have known. Basically I ended up just feeling desperate hanging on to a materialistic world view.

So there are many mentions about a nerve system, or neurons or other things as a basis for consciousness, but we must explain that many NDEs happen on an operating table with no oxygen supply to the brain, sometimes for hours, and to people with almost no brain tissue left.

I won’t try to convince anyone, because I know I could not have convinced 20-30 year old myself of this even if I could convince “him” that I was himself from the future :) And that doesn’t mean I am right either, of course.

As a footnote, experiencing things from other people’s perspective isn’t limited to NDEs, Federico Faggin, the designer of the Intel 4004, describes one that happened to him in traffic. He also has some interesting metaphysical view, that seem to originate in revelations, rather than the kind of reasoning (if you allow me to use that word) here, but are very compatible with (to skip to the conclusion) the idea that consciousness might be fundamental, and spacetime not.

I have a similar interest in NDEs. 30 years ago I "knew" what they were. Now I'm not so sure.

Do you have any links to articles about the blind people knowing what color clothes people were wearing?

Thanks.

I'm pretty sure it is from David Suich, and I believe I have heard him make the claim more than once in interviews, however since I have his book "God took my clothes" (rating 3 out of 5, had higher hopes) the only thing I found was:

Of the hundreds of near-death experiences that I have heard, two of them were from people who were blind since birth. During their experiences, they could see for the first time. They were not able to say which colors they saw because they have never learned what colors go with which name. They could only describe what they saw as different intensities and shades of light and color.

So, I'd look at a few of the interviews he gave on youtube and be careful with believing that it was exactly as I claimed. Also, whether this was reported by the experiencer or told to credible people in the room on wakeup, it's still a lot less scientifically rigid than most unreplicatable experiments in other fields.

(And a paranthesis, these journeys are within each of us, but about not being sure what NDEs are, if they are actually happening as experienced, they happen in a reality with a completely different metaphysics, seemingly projected onto the (far lower dimensional) concepts understood by the experiencer. If anything I find NDEs refreshingly straightforward with friendly guides explaining things in ways that make sense, a concept of God that is without the paradoxes of Abrahamic religions, explanations for sufferings and evil that don't conflict with a benevolent God. Compare it to the absolute confusion that is UFO encounters, while similar, are full of nonsensical elements and seem designed to deceive and confuse. But about the actual nature of it, what could we really understand?)

Thanks for the references. I will check out David Suich and his Youtube interviews!

I'd also like to add that the other stats about blind people seeing, and more examples of blind from birth people describing colors, are from:

Ring K, Cooper S. Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind. Palo Alto, CA: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology; 1999

Vicki was married and wearing rings, but of course had never seen them. Here are her recollections of her rings:

I think I was wearing the plain gold band on my right ring finger and my father’s wedding ring next to it. But my wedding ring I definitely saw… That was the one I noticed the most because it’s unusual. It has orange blossoms on the corners of it.

What is so remarkable about Vicki’s recollection of these visual impressions is that she had never before understood the concept of vision. “This was,” she said, “the only time I could ever relate to seeing and to what light was, because I experienced it.

Judging by their longings, desires and fantasies, many people don't seem to know what it's like to be them. In this respect, they resemble crabs. Crabs, on the other hand, probably don't have to struggle with it because they can't imagine to be something else. An idea that may be wrong of course. Imagine you can't imagine anything. A bit like imagining what it feels like to be dead. Which inevitably leads to longings, desires and fantasies.

nobody can tell you what it is like to be a crab ... yet

Obligatory mention of "Consider the lobster" by David Foster Wallace

https://web.archive.org/web/20230325034108/https://www.colum...

South Park already did this > CrabPeople. They're among us yet /s

Well, I suppose there's a simple "rule of thumb" way to respond to all these "What is it like to be an X?" questions (with X defined as "non human").

So here it is: take the lowest of the lowest IQ but still functional human being, I dunno, IQ in the 40-50 range. I mean someone who's definitely not a rocket scientist but are still not mentally ill and can still tie their shoes and wipe their own a*s. You can probe for not much of "I think, therefore I am" philosophical introspection going on in their skull but they walk around, forage for food and learn to "do tricks" (work) and display signs of general intelligence like remembering where they put their TV remote or "forecasting imagination" like devise a plan to cross the street safely if not just following other people on the crosswalk.

Now take that, divide by 100 and multiply by the stupidest of the stupidest retarded level of human idiocy one can imagine and voila: you get a bat.

Another round of downsizing and you're at crab level. Does this answer your question? :)

I'm not sure if this is a serious suggestion or not, but I don't think trying to measure intelligence gives a full picture of consciousness.

I can't know for sure but I also don't believe that if a living being is assessed to be less intelligent, that it feels less or is in some way less conscious.

I guess this all speaks to a troubling line of thought that justifies treating other beings as lesser for being less intelligent. Be kind to each other, and the bats, and the crabs, then let's talk about consciousness.

I was 100% sure, heck figuratively speaking I was even more certain that my very serious and slightly unconventional opinion will get me downvoted. You see, the world is dominated by imbeciles who feel threatened of anything that's not regurgitated platitude and the HN crowd apart from not being that statistically different from "the world" as much as they'd like to believe, it's also "trigger happy".

More or less I adhere to Neil deGrasse Tyson's opinion that plants are live beings too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh_3gH7l6Dw

Intelligence and consciousness seem quite plausibly interrelated based on observed samples across the animal world, like there's more intelligent behavior displayed by magpies (who appear to pass the mirror test) than say crocodiles. And since with all it's flaws, we humans have the IQ scale to try quantify our species and within this IQ we observe that the high IQ seems to be generally more capable of intelligent behavior than the very low tail, I don't see why we couldn't use it as a rough extrapolator.

Why limit IQ scale to only humans and not extend it across animal world? Would it be a linear or log-scale (I'd bet on log). Having an universal scale would certainly require it re-imagined it at least to some degree since you can't ask a fish to solve systems of differential equations, at least not in Leibniz notation. What tests would apply universally? That's a good question not just comparing humans with crocodiles but even addressing the complaints that IQ tests tend to favor people who can access a formal education. Like an Amazon forest tribe or the Sentinelese surely have never taken formal school lessons but are very capable of intelligent behavior and statistics says some of them would be very smart. How do you measure that?

But nooo. Show the idiots a smart dilemma and them monkeys start throwing their feces at you (i.e. downvote).

Comparison is the theft of joy.

Without understanding what smarter is, how can you feel dumb?

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