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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

Human cognition belongs on the timeline of significant events in the evolution of universe.

We may be only in the tiniest of corners (for now), but probably nothing beats it in complexity (... for now).

If you ever observed animals, e.g. just observing how chickens socialize, it becomes absolutely clear that they have similar cognition and perception than humans.

my 3 chickens have deep and complex social dynamics all while being able to pinpoint grains of quinoa off the ground faster than a robot while being able to spot the faintest outline of the tiniest potential threatening hawk 2 miles away in the sky, fully discerned from various crows flying around that don't phase them at all. their little brains are processing far more than me.

Why would you expect the last sentence to be true? Wouldn't you expect the brains of chickens to be vast, and yours to be even more so?

Why, precisely? Larger volume?

Don’t know about you, but over the years I’ve met a lot of humans that can’t obviously outthink a higher-end chicken.

I was asking seriously. But yea, I think there seems to be aspects of human intelligence not shared by our chicken cousins. Both are remarkable, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason to believe a chicken is smarter than a human besides misanthropy.

I never said chickens were smarter than us, I said my chickens are visually processing far more than I possibly can all while engaged in mentally and physically taxing activities.

> my chickens are visually processing far more than I possibly can

This is what I'm responding to. I don't know how to reconcile your two sentences, but no problem.

Let’s put it this way… the common ancestor of humans and chickens is way back, well before the dinosaurs. Their visual processing systems are on an entirely different, essentially unrelated vector from our own… so are their eyes. They can see in ultraviolet, for one, and you can’t, so they’re literally processing far more information than you can even perceive… comparing these two visual systems isn’t apples and oranges, it’s apples and orangutans. The point is to not underestimate what other brains are doing, just because they’re not familiar.

Thanks for the explanation. I see where you're coming from now.

I don't know how scientifically factual this is, it was presented as such but it's hard to believe it in a literal sense but there's a Benn Jordan video called "How The World SOUNDS To Animals" about how different animals perceive time differently. Like flies perceive life many times more slowly than we do which is, allegedly, why they seem to get away when we swat at them, no matter how quickly we move.

If that's true, I'd expect they just perceive time more slowly than we do which is why they're able to appear so much more quick. I still agree they've got a lot going on in those brains I just think this aspect of it is interesting!

Flies feel the rush of air from our oncoming hand and get out of the way, just like we look up from our book (phone, these days) when we feel air from the oncoming subway train we are waiting for.

The secret to killing flies is that they have to fly up first before they can fly away, so you (slowly) put your hands in front and behind them and "clap" them. They feel the air and lift off, right into the center of your oncoming hands.

Humans have reaction times on the order of 100-200ms. But interestingly if you measure reaction by you moving your hands or torso about 10%-20% of that time is just the time it takes for the signal to travel from your brain to the right muscle. Nerves aren't all that fast. That's why many reflexes happen outside the brain, closer to the relevant body part.

With that in mind, it would make a lot of sense if time perception scaled with body size. If you are a big elephant signals need to travel very far, and your muscles have to overcome a lot of inertia. If you can't react quickly anyways you don't need to perceive time as quickly. A fly has little inertia, fast signal times because of the short distances, fast processing because there just are fewer neurons, so there is more advantage to perceiving time more quickly

I can imagine the same would apply to any Super-intelligence. To the singularity, time would simply pass immensely slow because of the parallel computation power, which to us humans on the other hand would look super intelligent.

That's a really interesting way to put it! Thank you! That makes a lot of sense!

Your chicken has a small neural net tuned for hawk-watching and speck-pecking. This can be extremely fast and efficient; just don't ask it to compute an integral or invent the diesel engine or understand a complex web of social relationships or remember its cousin's birthday.

Parrots are a more fitting example imo, 300 million years of separation and they have complex cognition that evolved independently.

Crows are also quite smart too.

> but probably nothing beats it in complexity

Spend a little while seriously watching an octopus, and you may move that needle.

Are you intimating that an octopus is more complex than human cognition? Or just that an octopus is complex?

I mean that it appears that octopus “cognition” — dangerously a word we control and can easily twist to only apply to us — is almost necessarily more complex than human cognition, if for no other reason than they seem to have distributed their “thinking” — another dangerously solipsistic word — into their arms and out into their body, well away from merely their brains.

They're very intelligent for sure, but their neurons are also a lot bigger. About 500 million neurons in an octopus (whole body) vs 86 billion in a human (just the brain.)

Size and quantity of neurons isn’t known to determine intellectual capacity, plus for all we know that’s just RAM… they live a few years, max, we live considerable longer, maybe they literally don’t need as much long term storage to fill with, for example, misplaced nostalgia for 1980s toy commercials?

I would argue that having so much capacity for memory retention that our brains can spare space on frivolous things like that is marvelous in and of itself. Retention of information is arguably as important as the capacity for information. Humans passing down stories for generations, then inventing the written word to preserve ideas for years and year, is itself a beautifully complex thing.

Marvelous, certainly… unique, not necessarily. Some corvids appear capable of passing down skills (tool use) and memories (which humans have harmed previous generations), and just because we lack the ability to understand their stories doesn’t mean dogs, birds, and octopi aren’t passing down just as immense and marvelous communal knowledge via scent, sound, and touch.

As for the written word… I’d call that a running experiment. It’s capable of beauty, certainly… but it’s also capable of Meta (née Facebook) and X (née Twitter). Of course the fact that we can readily coin new terms for new situations — I hereby dub the use of X by its current owner _muskturbation_ — is intrinsically complex, but I’m not sure it isn’t also a direct pathway to both babble and Babble and, ultimately, species-ending atrocity.

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