This sentence.
I’ve read and heard it so many times now, that according to Bayesian statistics, I should correct my assumptions and assume that, in the end, we will find out that there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans.
A few candidate "unique to humans" characteristics:
- surgical replacement of defective organs. I wouldn't be surprised if some animals have processes for amputations - especially insects - but I'd be pretty surprised if there are any kidney transplants going on.
- written language systems for durable information passing, phonetic alphabet systems. As far as I know, a phonetic alphabet was invented only once among humans, which makes it a rarity even for us.
- haircuts. This one is super plausibly wrong, but I don't think that any animals do this, and its a good example of something that they could do but just don't.
Write about history no one currently alive has seen
Make music
Go to space
Theorize
Not sure about those.
Make music - I know that birds sing, and a quick Google search shows whales and seals seem to make "music" as well
Theorize - Depending on what you mean of course (but I agree with you about e.g. scientific hypotheses to be tested), but as an example apparently birds "theorize about the minds of others", again by Google search
Writing - Definitely a stretch here (and so I agree with you) but animals do leave chemical markings for others
You show me one outfit, I raise you an entire textile, clothing, and fashion industry allowing us to show our features in displays of status all the way to enabling us to walk in space.
Compose music
> Theorize - I always thought cats who look at a gap for a while before jumping are theorizing if/how to make the jump.
Laika does not approve of this message :)
A bit of an aside, but I'm a bit puzzeled by this statement. There are many phonetic alphabets invented through history of course. Are you saying they all have the same root or inspiration?
I think you're thinking "alphabet", which indeed, has been independently invented multiple times. The most widely used alphabet is the one derived from the Phoenician script. Other alphabets that were independently invented include the Brahmic scripts and the Hangul script.
However, the "phonetic alphabet" (also known as the NATO phonetic alphabet) was only invented once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet#
In contrast, alphabets have been invented multiple times completely independently without knowledge of the others.
There are many other writing systems but they tend to be pictorial or syllabic.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing/Types-of-writing-sy...
Over time, humans have demonstrated a vastly more impactful ability to manipulate our environment and ourselves than any other living organism we have encountered.
But the differences in scale are so vast that it opens massively different capabilities.
At some point, quantitative differences are so large they become qualitative differences.
Although both can hold matrices in memory and do math operations, the M3 Max can hold so much more and run math operations so fast that LLM inference becomes possible making it seem “intelligent” on a whole different level than an 8086 even though they are at some fundamental level very similar.
However they can sense electromagnetic fields and can sense whether a flower they're interested have pollen or not without looking at it with their eyes.
Elephants and whales can communicate over vast distances via sound. Bats can see without eyes. Salmons and pigeons can find the point they have born without even trying. A dog can smell history of a place, plus get much more information from a single smell.
Humans can do none of these things without tools.
Also, in electronics, there are accelerators which are much simpler in transistor count and architecture, but which can do much more than a more complex counterparts. GROQ inference cards and FPGAs come into my mind.
So neither capability, nor capacity in numbers is a valid measure for intelligence or capabilities in practice.
Just because a bee has less neurons than a chimp doesn't mean it can't have some kind of comparable intelligence when you compare the things they can accomplish.
Oh, also crows understand and exploit physical phenomena and can manipulate things with tools to get what they want.
Intelligent is not a synonym for “have amazing capabilities” but rather the ability to process and adapt to new information and transform their environment.
No other life form comes even close to humans in that regard. Our abilities (for better or worse) are godlike compared to other animals. There is a reason this epoch is called the “Anthropocene”.
I think the argument in this thread is more between people thinking animals have 'zero' ability, it is just instinct, or some other mechanism different than what is taking place in a human. And the group that is saying, animals are using the same mechanisms as a human, just humans are scaled up. Abilities between Humans and animals is a sliding scale.
They are wanting to argue that Humans have a singular ability that does NOT exist anywhere else, kind of a 'divine' argument. And animals are doing something different.
"comes even close" is indicating, it's a scale, might be a big scale, but it is the same scale.
"Just enough better" is doing a lot of work when that leads to space travel and computers and inventing reasons to feel bad about our phenomenally efficient expansion and predation, whilst members of other species prove extremely limited at acquiring human knowledge even when we're expressly trying to share it with them.
>However they can sense electromagnetic fields and can sense whether a flower they're interested have pollen or not without looking at it with their eyes.
Which, yes, like your other examples, is an impressive feat, but not an impressive feat of intelligence. Perceiving one or another part of the spectrum isn't intelligence. Neither is hardwired responses. In contrast:
>Oh, also crows understand and exploit physical phenomena and can manipulate things with tools to get what they want.
That would be a feat of intelligence. But you're lumping all impressive feats into "intelligence", regardless of what's responsible for them.
While bees thrive in their ecology by using intelligent behaviors like dancing, counting, navigating, remembering colors and scents, and making decisions using a process that resembles cost-benefit analysis, the sheer scale and complexity of human intelligence is unparalleled in teh animal kingdom. Our neocortex facilitates advanced cognitive functions, including our capacity for reflection, conceptual thought, and technological innovation generally puts humans at a higher level of cognitive complexity.
Far more interesting than the fact that animals “can” ape behavior is how they do - and how that differs from humans.
Check out the work of Richard Byrne [1]. Our best theories suggest that the way primates share behavior is through literal parsing and replication of sequences. A chimp is able to watch a fellow chimp complete a complex maneuver to open a nut, and can replicate that sequence. But the sequence can contain odd moves that obviously have no effect, and those moves too will be replicated. This signals a lack of understanding. Primates use an advanced copycat mechanism, which makes innovation very slow.
The way humans learn and transfer behavior is vastly different. We watch another complete a task and develop an explanation for how it works. Our reproduction isn’t us following a literal sequence, but using our understanding/mental model to solve the task. For example, if I watch a complex sequence to open a tricky nut, I’ll have developed a model for the physics of the nut, weak points, ways to get leverage, etc. I might memorize and repeat your sequence, but I might also get creative with my own method, knowingly or not.
And, of course, we can do this one-shot.
It’s the difference between a parrot mirroring words and a person retelling a story they heard.
We are super different than animals, and denying that fact will hide important secrets about knowledge and creativity.
[1] https://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/Readings/Byrne-99.pdf
So for instance I think it's pretty well known that monkeys in Bali have taught themselves how to steal from tourists and then exchange the goods for treats. [1] And that was entirely self-learned/taught. That, to me, seems somewhat more impressive than putting a ball in a drawer, yet didn't really leave me with any awe beyond what one would normally have when interacting with monkeys. And such things leaves me decidedly unimpressed with chimps and a drawer, and even more cynical about the language used to describe it.
[1] - https://www.sciencealert.com/how-wild-monkeys-in-bali-took-t...
It does not even need scientific study to see these. Its common enough for causal observation.
It is strange that people put other mammals in same category with birds for example. Thinking that humans are separate kingdom. I'm closer to pig than pig is to chicken.
We’re not unique in our ability to imitate, but we are unique (for now) in our ability to imitate well enough that imitated behaviors are stable enough to evolve.
There is, make fire and cook.
Cooking is to apply heat to transform raw ingredients into a different, often edible form. Bees make honey by collecting nectar from flowers, storing it in their honey stomach, and then regurgitating it into honeycomb cells. During this process they add enzymes to the nectar and fan their wings to reduce the water content, transforming it into honey. Bees transform raw material, but not by heating it.
Also, figuring out how to make fire is pretty hard. I’d argue it isn’t something “humans do” in general. It is one of the earliest examples of something that somebody figured out, (or maybe it was figured out independently in a couple different places) but mostly it is a taught skill.
Teaching and long distance running are our special abilities. In both cases other animals might do the thing, but we’re much better at it than they are.
IIRC that's more like a Australian media stunt from one single source, never verified or replicated.
There's this one guy trying to explain why there's wild fire and it's not any human's fault, which inadvertently caused a great debate "animals can utilize fire".
It doesn't bother me. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Everything is a sliding scale.
Eagles can 'see' better than humans. No one is is up in arms about how wonderfully unique human eye-sight is, how Eagles are using 'just instincts'. Humans are divine in how complex their sight is, that it could never occur in other animals or machines. Totally impossible that we would ever have a machine that can 'capture images'.
But there is laundry list of features that some animal does better.
Humans on whole do everything 'ok'. Humans have a lot of features, and for each feature they aren't the 'best', but on aggregate they do them all together on average better. They are one animal that combine total features better than any single animal.
Guess my point, is when it comes to 'mind' people are still thinking humans are divinely 'exceptional'. But really, it is one more 'feature' that the human animal does best, but that does not mean other animals don't have the same feature, but scaled down.
Seems like people complaining that 'bees' aren't intelligent are just trying to keep humans propped up on a pedestal. When really, it is one more feature that is scaled.
I think it is all on a continuum, humans are animals. But putting us on that continuum makes all the animals look like absolute garbage, intelligence-wise. If we want to put humans in the game, we’re going to be absolutely dunking on, like, every animal in terms of ability to abstract and teach concepts.
I'm arguing against the group that think humans aren't animals, that they are imbued with some extra metaphysical secrete sauce that we are incapable of understanding.
This group usually come out strong against any of these studies that hint at some continuum that includes humans and animals on same scale. Even if humans are on far end of the scale.
As a species we definitely have some narcissistic tendencies.
I think this is true. The evidence being our ruthless exploitation of our fellow animals without any regard to their interests, suffering, etc.