Crows are even smarter than we thought
nautil.us
nautil.us
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jimmy-john-liautaud-huntin...
That was the takeaway.
And his behaviour is certainly different from my experience as a kid of never wanting to and never actually harming anything beyond flies and mosquitos.
It would have been much improved if you could somehow provide a foundation for why you think what you think and if you could leave the things that you literally just made up out of it.
Kids are very variable, and a simple one time statement of "don't hurt animals" will absolutely not move the needle much in one direction or the other as far as your kid's temperament. Some kids are inclined towards violence from a very early age. Biting, throwing rocks, eye pokes, you name it. The amount of socialization it takes to remedy this can be immense, we're talking tens of thousands of little lessons and lectures, rather than a single "don't do that".
And for what its worth, I'm speaking second hand as well. My daughter is on the complete opposite end of the violence spectrum, passive to the point of shutting down completely if someone intentionally hurts her, which is also a behavior you need to coach against for practical reasons. I've talked with parents on the violent end though, and their problem is at least an order of magnitude harder to deal with.
w.r.t. valval's comment, I agree in that I think these kinds of behaviors are mostly invisible to people not only to people without kids, but also to people whose kids haven't been the age in question in a couple of years. People forget things they themselves have experienced rather rapidly. I have lots of coworkers with multiple kids who still publicly display surprise when someone with a 0-2 year old is suddenly out frequently because their baby is sick or has a medical appointment.
I do agree that his comment is too dismissive, but I think its a reflexive response to a world at large that oversimplifies child rearing to the detriment of parents, which is how I read your comment.
One of them flew down and tumbled, his friends started laughing something fierce. His friends then all took turns mimicking his tumble in the grass, you can just tell they were laughing. One would dive bomb into the grass and flop around like an athlete faking an injury while the others were squawking up something fierce.
Probably the funniest thing they saw in weeks.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crows-perform-yet...
I haven't read it yet but there's also a sci-fi book about intelligent society of crows (Children of Time series):
TIL the average corvid is notably smarter than the average compsci undergrad
The paper finds that Hooded crows—who are not specialized tool users—demonstrate some of the same abilities that have already been observed experimentally in New Caledonian crows—who are specialized tool makers, including:
the ability to manufacture tools from novel materials, select or manufacture a tool depending on the specifics of the task,
The authors cite a dozen papers published over the last 20 years that have documented these findings in NC crows, as well as Goffin’s cockatoo (who, like the Hooded crow, are not specialized tool users).
The significance of this paper must be that the abilities are more widespread in crows than previously thought, which is stated in the article, but blotted out by the juicier headline.
Here’s the actual paper, which as usual, is more substantive than the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-024-01874-6
You should turn it into a short movie using AI. I have thought something similar but more along the lines that in the universe above us, we are 3 days into a science experiment and either a) they don't know we exist or b) the look in with their microscope and see patterns for cities or c) they have a statistical measure of how many have developed ecosystems and set off a nuclear weapon. But on the scales they are viewing, the known universe might fit into a 50cm sphere (their dimensions).
I also like the idea of everything being a simulation (like in Matrix) but managed/set up by an alien civilization and just experimenting or having fun with us, or us actually just being their avatars… and we are them!!! Alright, time to go to bed.
It's not even for SciFi movies now, with VR tech and assuming we have a couple order of magnitude more compute, it's actually plausible to actually think about building the simulation for real. (Isn't that what Meta was supposed to be about?)
- If a crows is sitting near your house and screaming, you are about to get guests or visitors.
- During monsoon time, a whole month is devoted to feed your ancestors. We put food out on leafs (banana is hard to find, peepal or turai squash leaf does the job). It's mostly eaten by crows. It is believed that ancestors visit you back as crows.
I never saw local crows doing extraordinary "smart things". They were very good at stealing food: especially butter during winter. But never heard about a crow opening a latch.
While nesting, they will dip a dry branch in water to make it soft so that they can bend it without breaking when making nest.
I never liked crows as kids. They would often kill small squirrels (chipmunks rather) and sparrows whom I liked very much -- though rarely.
As someone with aphantasia, can I get points for recreating something I've seen _without_ having an "image in the mind"?
I would of course start by visualising it in my head, but I know that's not how aphantasia works.
I'm not a very good artist, so it'll always look kind of bad, though oddly it doesn't feel like aphantasia is all that much of an obstacle to my ability to draw. It's more just skill in making things look "right", skill that is learnable and seems like is necessary to learn by anyone, include those without aphantasia.
It's difficult to communicate to someone without aphantasia, because to them apparently the memory of what something looks like is an image. It's similar to the question about whether I dream in color. I mean, I dream in color just as much as I read in color. If asked, I could tell you what color something is. It's part of my knowledge of what that thing looks like. But knowing what color something is and seeing the thing in color are definitely not the same. I don't dream in images at all. I certainly don't dream in "black and white". Colors and grayscales only have meaning in an image.
(And maybe it's just me, but if the color of something never strikes me as an important characteristic, I will have no memory of what color the thing is. Right now, I couldn't tell you what color the walls of the next room over are, despite seeing it every day. Even though I could probably roughly model the entire room and get the dimensions and positions of everything about right.)
Though I'm skeptical that "normal" people are as restricted to images as their descriptions often imply. Not everything is 2D, so memories are going to have to include at least some shape information. And I'm sure you have all kinds of associations of the texture and feel of things you visualize, and if it's prickly how much it would hurt to bump into it or hold it in your hand. Memories are rich multi-sensory things, and they aren't just limited to point-in-time sensations either.
Is this similar to calling an .svg "not an image" if it's viewed in a text editor rather than on a canvas?
I draw a square by knowing that squares are closed objects with four equal length sides that meet at 90 degree angles. I don’t think that explicitly every time, but regardless there's no visual stimuli.
My knowledge of what a square looks like includes the right angles at the corners, the equal length of the sides, the alignment with one side at the bottom (not part of the mathematical definition, note), some sense I can't describe of the overall shape, the closed shape, the straight sides, etc. Some of it corresponds directly to mathematical notions, some of it is the feel, some of it is associations with how they work in practice or where they've shown up. When drawing it, I rely mostly on the straight sides, the 90° angles, and the closed shape. I'm not logically figuring out what those together imply, I just start with drawing a straight line segment and then close it off with 3 more segments at right angles to each other, and confirm that it looks right at the end. If you ask me what part would be most painful to bump into, I do something very close to visualizing the pointy corners, but I don't picture them so much as retrieve my association with their sharpness.
Dunno if this makes sense or how generalizable this is to other people, I'm just kind of laying out my stream of consciousness impressions of my brain's workings.
It's more like a scene which I can manipulate both camera angle and content at will. I can also imagine sound
What I have a hard time is imagining smell. I can remember distinct smell but the scenes in my head usually don't have smell
I assume (since you mention points), you can recreate a geometric drawing (say, a floor plan, or a bicycle*)? What would you call that if not drawing from a mental template?
* It seems, at least with bicycles, some people who do this "visually" are terrible at it: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/can-draw-bikes-memory-definite... ... I look at those, and think, how T.F. do they think that would work? Then I realize they aren't thinking how it works to draw it, they are drawing what they see and they don't look at things closely enough to understand their shape.
The best way I can describe my aphantasia is that I think about objects three dimensionally. There’s nothing visual about it, but I can think about the relation of “points” (really surfaces) in terms of the whole.
Given a choice, I would trade the postcard recall ability for the ability to multi-dimensionally map concepts and then "see" the gaps, as if a periodic table missing some elements, so you know what key areas need working on even though (because) they aren't in evidence.
Then Allah sent a crow digging a grave in the ground for a dead crow, in order to show him how to bury the corpse of his brother. He cried, “Alas! Have I even failed to be like this crow and bury the corpse of my brother?” So he became regretful.
But genetic really means "instinct" in the way that a day old deer can stand, run, graze (I live in an area with lots of deer, so I get a first-hand chance to observe them).
Suppose a sci-fi story, where humans encounter a fantastically advanced alien species. Over the course of the story events occur where individuals in the alien species see not learn anything at all, while later generations seem imbued with those same learnings. What humans are encountering might be instead incredibly advance, and highly encoded instinct.
Is that not intelligence?
I'm reminded of the schools of buddhism, where a differentiation is that you are able to achieve enlightenment in one-lifetime or in many.
The main distinction between life and non-life appear to be the ability to experience the universe. A blade of grass is alive no different than a human, but entirely different from a rock. Experience seems to be some kind of basis for intelligence, without which it cannot exist, thus perhaps, all experiential beings are intelligent in some way.
Every living thing has survived everything its ancestors' environment threw at them and made it to "now".
"Intelligence" should be adaptive, and general purpose.
Complex systems that are unable to grow or change are basically the definition of an unliving "mechanism", contrasted against an intelligent mind/being.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
It's a first contact story about an alien species that doesn't have consciousness.
I was thinking about this the other day actually, how all of our advanced behaviours and emotions and society are really just formed on the foundation of basic biological principles/evolution. Every supposedly complex behavior can be explained by this.
The ultimate meaning of life is to live long enough to pass on genes if you're fit enough to make this happen, then you age and for all your learned experience you will become slow and eventually be the gazelle at the rear of the herd that the lions catch, saving the younger newer generations. With the possibility of one of those younger gazelle also dying beside you, if it wasn't aware or fast enough - preventing it from passing on genes.
Even complex and strong emotions were evolved for a purpose, those that could empathise and work together did better, same with language. Then we get side effects like depression etc in the same way that you can physically injure ourself, our minds can be injured as well.
Basically spent a couple hours thinking about the future of machine learning.
The key thing is the biological evolution that seeks rewards for survival and reproductive partner selection over generations.
Forget AGI… this would be way cooler to try.
… but what makes us special is that we’re the only ones who care ?
What if ego is the unique human trait?
What if the reason my goats don’t communicate with me isn’t because they’re dumb… but because they couldn’t care less ?
Hold a bucket of grain and they will have the incredible urgent desire to communicate with you.
How would they ever know you're not a threat for sure? Usually, it's hard for a human to kill another (unless with a lethal weapon and lots of intention), but it's really easy for a human to kill a bird, even recklessly or carelessly.
Note that humans in developed societies are generally much "nicer" than what we have been for thousands of years. And even so, for many individuals today, they're not different from our barbaric ancestors...
Frankly, you don't have enough information for that conclusion.
First of all, from a bird's point of view, we are massive, clumsy and extremely powerful creatures the size of a 10-story building. If I had to live around such creatures, I would keep my distance just in case. Something that big can hurt you even without intending to do so.
Second, you don't really know if they can trust you. It is entirely possible that someone else in your neighbourhood / region fed them, gained their trust, then hurt them (or maybe "just" captured them for some time etc., an ornithologist would do). In that case, once bitten, twice shy. Most long-lived smart birds probably witnessed their kin being killed by humans; people would be expected to suffer from a bit of PTSD after that.
Third, there may be other factors at play. For example, you might smell bad to them. We generally underestimate olfactory impressions, but few of us would love to be close friends with someone who smelt strongly of, say, gasoline. Personally, I have the experience that ticks avoid me, I had just three in my entire life, approximately once in a decade, even though I go to nature fairly frequently and Czech woods are infested like hell. I must be repulsive to them.
If you have a cat or a dog, they might be smelling them off you.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/misguided-slaug...
They are now bringing me pieces of colored glass :) They also caw if I wave at them.
They are also keeping pigeons and seaguls away.
We see hundreds of crows every morning and dusk. Even close up, I’m hard pressed to distinguish most of them from one another. Perhaps ours in Southern California are more uniform than yours? Or perhaps you’re viewing them with binoculars?
I probably won't be able to distinguish them in a big flock, but we only have a few crows that regularly fly around my area.
Recently, their chicks also started flying around, so I also keep seeing them. They are slightly smaller, with really nice glossy "baby" feathers.
While that's definitely a joke, I wouldn't be that surprised by a human getting outwitted by a crow even today.
It is now abundantly clear that animals have their own phenomenological experience of the world, and their intelligence is part of a continuum, shaped mostly to survive in their niches. And some species demonstrate a higher level of general intelligence - something in which we are quite easily the best.
Although, it's worth noting that some cultures (Buddhists or Jain's for example) did give animals their due with respect to their lives and intelligence.
So from that view Descartes argument holds, but the conclusion that such a life has no meaning does not.
edit: I think the interesting thing for people is how insight like Descartes' becomes useless when he tries to distinguish us from automata.
For example, criminal law generally assumes people have free will, and thus should be responsible for their actions. If we take the stance that people are in fact merely deterministically doing what they are fated to do given circumstances, some of the punishments doled out to convicts might make people feel uneasy. (Eg. if being poor made the person commit theft... shouldn't we tackle the issue of poverty instead of locking up starving people?)
Contract law also assumes people are free to make agreements. Like, signing a contract with onerous terms because that's the only option a person has to avoid something worse.
In short, free will provides a kind of cop out for moral philosophers to blame individuals for their own failures. You may or may not agree with this approach, I'm not advocating for or against, but anyway that's one of the practical consequences of free will.
However, the law is only concerned with people doing (codified) wrong. It lets people off for being insane, because dealing with insanity falls outside of its mission. And similarly it can let people off on compassionate grounds, if for instance they stole food due to being hungry due to poverty. Punishing people for bad luck isn't its mission either. And a contract signed under duress isn't supposed to be valid, because the law's mission isn't to enable formalized bullying. Of course in reality the law is sketchy, lacks compassion, fails to recognize forms of duress. But generally speaking the idea is that it's restricted to the bad things a person freely did, as opposed to things that happened to the person.
So then you might say, well, do we freely do anything at all, because it's all just physics and mechanisms. But a lot of the mechanisms are in our brains, thinking sanely (if immorally), so yes, we do act freely, when not coerced.
It's important to separate the part of fate which is the things we're probably going to think, which is our responsibility, from the part of fate which is the things that the outside world is probably going to do to us, which is outside of our responsibility.
What I was trying to say is that if one believes determinism is incompatible with the concept of free will, then they cannot think the law is fair because nothing has free will. And I'm hypothesizing that people who think that way might be a bit queasy about determinism etc.
FWIW, I personally believe free will exists for reasons outside the scope of this discussion, and I doubt it's necessary to conclude first whether it exists or not to get my original point across...
Glad to see this in the original article. I had been wondering whether they were in the pocket of Big Crow.
What would be even more amazing to me is finding cognitive things that other animals do that humans can’t. Of course, many humans can’t do mental math so … maybe the quest is ill defined?
However, this has subsequently been debunked[1].
Still impressive on the part of chimps!
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNrWUS13th8
[1]https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/humans-1-chimps-0-correc...
- Solaris
If whale songs and crow language could be written down in discrete symbols, we could figure them out too.
And with higher intelligence we assume that the symbolic language of mathematics will be a universally shared starting point.
The kind of analog pattern-matching required to decipher animal language seems to be notoriously difficult to do if your brain doesn't already come with the right analog "circuits".
I definitely hope that we'll have an AI breakthrough at some point that can decipher animal language, however. One thing's for sure though -- it won't be LLM's since they operate at a symbolic level.
I'd worry "eh good enough" is distorting the outcome.
Intelligent sparrows though - that would be deeply scary
I've never seen birds hunting birds before so it made me watch the whole scene for 3-5min and I was baffled how the crows systematically 1) induced chaos trying to isolate a sparrow from the swarm then 2) killed it and 3) while one crow was busy eating it the other crow kept the infuriated swarm at distance. After a while 4) the crows changed jobs.
To me, the assumption that animals can’t do things we later discovered they could do is the surprising thing. Such arrogance we humans have.
Humans are just arrogant and overconfident. We’re an incredibly flawed species and we’ve created incredibly flawed societies.
I think our arrogance is also part of why we succeed as a species.
1. we do not live underwater, so lots of tools and stuff possible (iE: fire).
2. we have usable hands with thumbs. This allows much better tooling. Ravens only have their beak and are comparatively handicapped in technical developments.
3. we do not die during/after reproduction. This allows for accumulation of knowledge instead of every generation starting to learn from scratch. That’s octopus handicap.
4. we have reasonably enough raw strength and compensate weaknesses with social groups and tools/weapons to eliminate basically all competition where we lived. And managed to increase food production for exponential population growth, again some way of tooling ultimately.
… so it for me boils down to the fact that we, among several intelligent species, have been the lucky ones to leverage tooling in the most efficient way.
And especially ravens/crows are absolutely in the ballpark of humans when it comes to intelligence. They have actual language to communicate facts to others, they have social structures/rituals similar to ours, they make tools to accomplish goals, even with multi-step-plans. Heck, they even „use“ other animals like wolves: since they are not capable of opening a fresh deer corpse to get to the meat, they search for the nearest wolf and guide him to the corpse for win-win food sharing… some wolf packs have even been seen essentially protecting raven flocks/eggs, so ravens literally can have kinda dogs.
I think the interesting question, that we may never be able to answer, is whether crow intelligence is such that they could have developed on our trajectory as well, had things been different. Or is our intelligence, while similar to crows and other animals in many ways, fundamentally different in some way? Or was early hominid intelligence middle of the pack and it was just the other factors you mentioned that gave it the edge it needed?
In this case, crows are doing something that is interesting but doesn't appear to be spontaneous tool-making but rather a form of mimicry that may have hard-wired instinctive basis. Is it human-like learning? Is it "smart" the way a human is smart? Doesn't look like it.
1. Non-human animals have intelligence and are not “stupid” or automatons.
2. Human intelligence is just so much at an another level that it isnt even close.
"you know that dude that lives by the water? protect him he feeds us."
"you know the big guy that walks his dog and barks at us? we found out where he lives."
I've seen crows execute their own (seriously). They would crowd and walk him over the edge and when he fell they would just attack him.
I've seen crows leave gifts behind for feeding them regularly.
I've seen crows protect our property from raccoons and squirrels.
I've seen crows remember people and harass them (even when they moved to another city!)
i dont know if this urban legend is true but apparently one guy was raking in a few hundred bucks a month by training crows to find coins and cash on the street
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics)
(kitboga related)
Of course animals can form mental representations of shapes. Do you think they wouldn’t be able to form a mental representation of another one of their species? Their surroundings? Objects they commonly interact with?
It’s getting them to reproduce it on command that’s tricky, but that has nothing to do with their capabilities
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Years ago I was putting out the garbage in the back alley behind our building where I lived on the 8th floor. A crow attacked me out of the blue. Distracted by the attack, the back door slammed shut behind me. Since my key was only good for the front door, I had to walk around the building. That damn crow followed me the entire time, dive bombing my head, and screaming bloody murder at me. It was a little spooky.
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.
https://www.science.org/content/article/caveman-or-dick-chen...
"In a creative experiment that relied on rubber masks of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other distinctive mugs, researchers have shown that American crows have an uncanny ability to pick a familiar human face out of a crowd."
That the crow had a mental map of the building sufficiently detailed to know "human on 8th floor may be able to help Charles get out out of net in front of human's cliff cave if I yell at him" seems several orders of magnitude more complex...
They can also "share that knowledge of dangerous humans with other crows". [1]
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/grudge-holding...
"this is the guy we hate, it gives a great feeling of community expressing that hate. Yeah, there's probably a reason why we hate him, but that's besides the point"
I realised it was because they didn’t like someone who wore a blue mask.
If I took my mast off or wore a different style of mask they’d leave me alone, and bother other people who looked similar to me with a blue mask on.
I watched a video earlier today on a YT channel I follow called Curious Droid. This episode went into how the U.S military had a hard time determining vietcong troop movements due to the thick jungle foilege. So DARPA developed this concept of electronic fenses, where the airforce would drop these sensor packages into the jungle. The package would have sesmic sensors and microphones to capture movement of enemy forces through the jungle. The problem was that this being the 1960s/70s - the batteries only lasted couple of weeks. Also data storage and tranmission rates weren't advance enough at the time to send that information to a centralize location far from the contested area. So they had to have an aircraft loitering above to collect this data and then fly the collected data to a processing facility in Thailand. By the time the data was classified and analyized, the intelligence collected wasn't really actionable for the commanders in the field.
Here is the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feDk6oaeVAY
> Yet in spite of considerable progress in recent years, many details are still unclear, among them details of the radical pair processes and their transformation into a nervous signal, the precise location of the magnetite-based receptors and the centres in the brain where magnetic information is combined with other navigational information for the navigational processes.
1. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-egypt-pigeon-p...
https://www.military-history.org/feature/pigeon-guided-missi...
I was wondering about the opposite too. Could you train a crow to watch you throw a marker, say a pebble of specific color, and then fly to the location it landed to perform specific action? Say, if we go for personal mischief instead of warfare:
- red marker = find whatever interesting object there is (e.g. man-made things it can carry, or money), and fetch it;
- blue marker = grab a payload from you and deposit it at location (e.g. a piece of paper, a "stinky bomb")
- orange marker = hover over location for a while, or explore it (useful with e.g. crow-mounted camera; throw marker over a fence or on a roof, get footage of place you can't get to)
- violet marker = make noise, scare away meanest looking people or animals near target (say, to chase away partying college students that decided to occupy the nearby children playground before sundown, or to remind the neighbor blasting his car radio at 5:30 in the morning that there exists small children, or decency, or noise rules) (both totally random hypothetical scenarios, yes); alternatively, to patrol the area for a while and make noise if people show up;
- rose marker = find nearest switch or lever, flick it;
Etc.
Of course the crow would need to be trained to fetch the marker back after executing the action, as to prevent accidental repeat actions, make markers reusable, and ensure there's no evidence left behind :).
One of my favorite nature vignettes, is a part of Planet Earth, by the BBC, about Cape Hunting Dogs[0]. It looks like a military assault. They are really clever, and work well, as a team.
But if you could train crows, they would probably be marvelous.
So, I don't expect it's easy to train crows like dogs and pigeons, where one person "pre-trains" them and gives/sells them to someone else. But I think it should be possible to "train" a crow for yourself - bond with it and have it voluntarily indulge you reliably enough that it's pretty much like training.
for that literal reason, they are illegal to keep as pets in srilanka
My gawd, what a magnificent bird. I then understood why combat pilots would paint them on the sides of their fighters. It was much bigger than I realized, and the size of those talons - I was not going to get it mad at me!
They are smart AF, but watch out for the beak too if it's injured/scared. A vet told me, if you handle a raptor, protect your hands, they can take a chunk.
Same goes for long billed birds[1].
I got a scratch on the side of my head once from a black kite that 'clonked' me with its talons as it flew past but this was just messing about, not a serious attack.
One other thing is how I would feed the birds. Some of them (e.g. a hooded vulture) I would pass food to their beak with my bare hand but with other birds this would be a good way to lose a finger.
Also, their Egyptian vulture likes playing with shoe laces (undoing them by pulling) and also tugging on leg hair if you are wearing shorts. The Yellow-billed kites like grabbing people's hats if they are wearing them.
Not just the back alley. The back alley itself has nothing specifically to do with it. The test would have to be something like the crow attacks this person but not anyone else around the building generally. That doesn't really make a lot of sense from the crows perspective either though... it's concerned with the plight of its mate, so why focus instead on a random person who's a decent distance away unless it can perceive a specific connection, e.g., by recognizing them.
It's moot anyway. I think it's pretty well established crows can recognize human faces.
The idea is that we already are sure they attack there, and therefore limiting the experiment to this back alley may be sufficient: there is no immediate need to extend the perimeter to the whole zone around building, however if the experiment fails it may be considered.
> it's pretty well established
IMHO an experiment gets better with each neglected assumption.
Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart, and more intelligent than a human child.
Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life. It feels to me a bit like thinking the earth is the center of the universe. Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.
It seems evolution is emergent given the physical ingredients and laws of nature, which points to some kind of inherent intelligence in the fabric of all stuff. By observing it for long enough, it becomes apparent that the stuff is behaving in a way that can be described as evolution (this is not some kind of appeal to intelligent design).
To whatever extent evolution is "intelligent" or "learning and solving problems", it is the underlying primordial stuff of existence at play. Thinking about this always blows my mind.
It's very short. Worth a quick read and a long thought.
People have been trying to talk to animals for thousands (tens of thousands?) of years, and no "animal myths" were discovered. Some researchers have dedicated their live trying to understand the animals (story mentions one of them), but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all.
And alien life is not special in that regard - if we are able to successfully contact aliens, and then many thousands of people spend a century or two interchanging the messages with them, and all this would yield same artifacts that most Earth's 5-year-old kids can produce... then people would lose interest in aliens as well, and stop building things like Arecibo.
It's a good thing people who accomplish great things don't think like that or we'd have no science at all, because for millions of years we didn't. If they did, they would have had to conclude it isn't possible to predict the future. Yet here we are, knowing why apples fall (or whatever.)
It's important to tell former from latter. Unexplored things are not the same as things that have been explored and found false.
I took "reasoned to be false" as sort of a weak and refutable statement.
I think if your 4-year-old aliens were found, many humans would find them charming and fun pen pals (assuming they're not dangerous).
It would be useful as the fly by of Pluto, where we finally found out things we couldn't possibly have known looking from here.
The problem with this line of reasoning though is that it proves too much, and has the same problem, clumping intelligence into too small of classes for the level of ethical differentiation that humans can manage. The implications of such a philosophy would upend nearly all philosophical grounding for all ethical traditions
Even Rawls don’t have an avenue for a society that treats mosquitos with the same dignity that we treat human babies
So yes, but also we’re stuck with this cognitive dissonance that makes humans believe that ANY human is better than all (insert behaviorally demonstrable intelligence threshold).
For example: All individual humans are more important than all individual octopuses. However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses. This despite knowing that Octopuses have more demonstrable intellect than most humans below a certain age and many humans of any age.
What do you mean by this? Are you stating this as an opinion? Or something people generally agree upon? Or something else?
I think most people, if forced to choose, would save 1 human at the expense of thousands of octopuses. Not saying this is right or wrong. Just wondering what metric you’re using to gauge importance.
Hoover Dam. Smart, stupid.
I really believe that, when people ask if some organism is "intelligent" or "conscious" (answer is usually No), they're just asking how similar it is to a human. Intelligence or consciousness is not a Thing; it's just a set of behaviors that have proven adaptive to some species. Crows have somewhat more of those behaviors than we'd thought.
By way of example, many animals have much better smell than we do because that is adaptive for them, and it's not quite as much of an advantage for us.
As for what kind of "consciousness" they have -- they have what they need. We can't know what it's like to be a bat, because we're not bats. It's probably not like being a flying human with sonar, but we'll never know.
This just reduces consciousness down to the "easy problem" and ignores the "hard problem" though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...
> The existence of the hard problem is disputed. It has been accepted by some philosophers of mind such as Joseph Levine,[10] Colin McGinn,[11] and Ned Block[12] and cognitive neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela,[13] Giulio Tononi,[14][15] and Christof Koch.[14][15] On the other hand, its existence is denied by other philosophers of mind, such as Daniel Dennett,[16] Massimo Pigliucci,[17] Thomas Metzinger, Patricia Churchland,[18] and Keith Frankish,[19] and by cognitive neuroscientists such as Stanislas Dehaene,[20] Bernard Baars,[21] Anil Seth,[22] and Antonio Damasio.[23]
Generally if you solve the easy problem you have a better idea of what's left and whether it's worth effort. So let's just go with that for now.
If we re-define "intelligence" as "smarter than a human baby", then this word covers most animals (and probably some plants too) and becomes useless. When doing species comparison, I think it only makes sense to compare adults to each other, and perhaps even "average" or "75th percentile" adults.
We don't treat children well because of their intelligence - otherwise, no one would care about newborns. We care about them because they are of the same species as us.
As for "dignity", I am not 100% sure what you mean, but in humans it comes directly with being able to function as a member of the society. For example, someone who cannot navigate city (be it because they are young or because of their developmental difficulties) will not be free to wander wherever they want.
I think of “intelligence” in a similar vein. We can recognize it when it’s close enough in proximity to the path we humans have taken. The further away another species is from that, the less we are able to recognize/judge their level of intelligence. I like this metaphor because it emphasizes the limits of our own abilities to understand vey foreign things. That’s not to say that we could never get better at it, but there will almost certainly always be more outside of our circle of understanding than inside it.
I’m also reminded of the drunk searching for his house key beneath a street light. It’s not where he dropped the key, but he’s searching there because “that’s where the light is.”
But I think some things are always common - such as not dying from hunger, predators or bad weather. If something as simple as bad weather can cause species to die, _and_ we know there a really simple workaround (houses), and yet there is no sign of it and species just keep dying, can we really call them "intelligent"?
Animals can definitely be intelligent, and we should learn more about them and how they perceive the world, but when you play with a 2.5 year old for five minute there is no doubt that humanity is beyond special.
The absolutely blistering pace a child can learn at, though, is indeed quite a sight to behold.
As cats get older, their parents teach them survival skills (by showing interest in certain activities that the kittens imitate, not through more explicit instruction; there are cat studies that show this.) It takes kittens probably a year to mostly learn how to be cats. As people get older, we shove a summary and guide to 3000 years of written and tested guidance into them and show them how to brush their teeth properly. It takes about 15 years.
No big difference between humans and animals here.
Fawns/calves/... can walk almost as soon as they are born. It takes humans far longer to learn that.
If you put a 2-year old human child with every single possible benefit on its own into the wild, its chances of survival are pretty slim. Some creatures never see their parents and thrive.
IMHO, humans are special to other humans because we are built to value "our own." We have "us vs them" deeply ingrained such that many humans can't even accept that we are also animals. We also tend to value the things we can do over the things other species can do. This leads to arguments about how great we are at recognizing things we have evolved ourselves and our environment to do.
Off the back of this comment I’ve just flicked back to a random video of my then 2 yo where we have a discussion about how houses in real life aren’t normally the colour of the ones in the kids book she’s reading.
Humans are helpless at birth because we have big brains and walk upright. Which means narrower hips which means we need to be born before the brain is fully developed.
My own offspring is so cute, surely we are unique in the universe.
AI in the future, talking to another AI: "These humans are so cute, just give them little challenges like increasing shareholder value, they will learn to speak up in meetings and move things around. They aren't really intelligent, but they can be trained to make things for us".
So far evidence points to the simpler solution that all living creatures are automatons and that there is no mechanism by which self determinism can exist.
Wide acceptance of such a belief would pretty much ruin society so it is best if we all just go on pretending we are masters of our own destiny.
This idea of the universe and the round earth must be an extremely narrow view of reality similar to the entire universe of pond water some microbe lives in. More advanced beings perhaps live in higher dimensional spaces far more complex than our experience. Maybe this is what people encounter when they smoke DMT.
Hopefully one day we will stop eating them, too.
On the other hand, many of the creatures we eat will happily eat us if given a chance.
If we can't define or measure intelligence meaningfully, how can you even claim we are 'intelligent' to begin with?
> Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart
The have levels of intelligence, but they are clearly not very smart. You couldn't even teach them the multiplication table or the basics of number theory.
> and more intelligent than a human child.
No species you listed is smarter than a human child.
> Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life.
At the very least, we know that mammals with brains have some level of intelligence. Nobody claims humans are the only 'intelligent' life on earth. The claim is we are the most intelligent. And probably the only creatures intelligent enough to ponder about death, mortality, identity and soul.
> Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.
Or maybe elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orangutans will better understand what other minds are like and they'll better understand how they are not alone or special? After all, they are 'very smart' according to you.
> how can you even claim we are 'intelligent' to begin with?
because I can claim it. You're focusing on semantics and attacking the fact that a set definitions can't be done. I think debating the nature of whether semantics maps to a valid conceptualization is probably not very productive.
> they are clearly not very smart
Maybe in your opinion. They seem to surprise experts. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2120078/Nata...
> The claim is we are the most intelligent
No one in this thread has introduced this notion or tried to debate it.
> probably the only creatures intelligent enough to ponder about death
I would invite you to draw your own conclusions from this video, taken from Spy in the Wild. It shows monkeys processing the death of another monkey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaIH5tLmC8U
> After all, they are 'very smart' according to you
Why the dismissiveness? It comes across as just trying to win rather than having a genuine discussion. The question is a valid thing to contemplate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10093641/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7471122/
This quote shows the arrogance mentioned in one of the other comments. A 15 year old crow is somehow going to make a "mental template" that is then as firmly entrenched as a young bird learning the wrong mating song? Nah....