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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully. If we accept that human children are smart, then we must accept that species at equivalent levels of cognition are as well.

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.

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I like the sentiment, but human children who are 2 completely dominate all known animal intelligence. They can speak in sentences and use tools in complex ways. There may be studies that show a raven might use a stick to help it find food. Well, a two year old will carry a stool halfway across the house to reach the scissors that will open a bag of veggie straws :) At 3 they can recognize letters _easily_ and start learning how to read. At 4 they can with a bit of practice learn the piece moves of chess and start strategizing.

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 real separation (and is something that comes long after 2 years of age in humans) is the ability to observe one's thoughts. I totally get that dolphins and elephants and many "big brain" mammals can have social structures, long memories, and the ability to pass down behaviors directly (e.g. "here's how you hunt fish effectively" may not be in dolphin genes, but they do a damn good job of it, or also the "fads" of orcas like the "salmon hat" or, more recently, attacking sailboats).

The absolutely blistering pace a child can learn at, though, is indeed quite a sight to behold.

In the time it took me to learn a new programming language, my kid learned how to be a whole entire human being. Including free thought and autocorrect mode. I don’t know what makes us special in the animal kingdom, but watching that happen certainly feels special. Do whales feel the same way about their young?

Whales almost certainly do not feel the same way. They feel like whales about their young. That's not to discount whales: that feeling may be profound and emotional for them. But it's probably alien to the human experience.

I’m sure their sensory experience is different from ours, but is the feeling truly alien? We share enough genetics to share the same brain chemicals, for one

Why probably?

I dunno, I've never spoken with a whale to compare notes.

For starters, whales aren't tool users. So it'd be something of a surprise if evolution had programmed them to feel joy when their offspring use tools. Humans, on the other hand, seem to get a bit of a kick out of teaching other people (especially kids) to do things which makes a lot of evolutionary sense given how strategically central tools are to our species.

I feel that people who study animal intelligence started with the dictum "don't assume similarity to humans" and immediately interpreted it as "assume dissimilarity to humans".

One interesting aside in this article was that the crows don't teach each other how to make tools. But a child might steal a tool from a parent and work it out. This demonstrates the problem solving type of intelligence, working out how to reshape a wire to a useful shape for instance. But not a 'higher' intelligence teaching or demonstrating to others. Which is kind of odd, as I see young birds following their parents and imitating and learning. So I guess this shows parent birds don't teach, but young birds instinctively follow around and learn?

I have quite a bit of exposure to kids that age range. The behavior you described is FAR from normal.

Yeah, putting in effort for vegetables?

Difference being that the 2 year old human would not survive in the wild whereas most other species would easily after 2 years of age

Depends on the species. A few can run, hunt, and keep up with the group within hours of birth. Some, like marsupials, are born blind, deaf, with an inability to swallow unaided, looking like weird larvae, and must live in their mother's pockets until they can handle anything. People and cats are like marsupials.

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.

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

A quick search on youtube shows that crows are much smarter than just getting food with a stick. Also isn’t the general agreement/stereotype about dogs having 5 years old int stat?

I’ve seen this before as well, but as a parent with two kids who loves to wonder about this very question, I can assure you a five year old (a kindergartener) is much, much smarter then a dog. They are filled with ideas and imagination, math / reading / writing capability, creative drawing and of course a massive spoken language advantage. Sure, they’d still lose in a fight, but then they’d (correctly!) tell their parents what is happening and we’d call animal control :)

Speaking in sentences and learning chess moves seems more due to having the physical capacity for speech (and therefore conversation) than something attributable to raw intelligence, and picking up a stool and moving it requires the ability to pick up and carry a stool, which would be pretty hard for crows or dolphins. I feel like any test of raw intelligence would need to be independent of physiology/ability to understand instructions, which is pretty hard to do.

I taught the kids to dive bomb crows.

I've interacted with 6 month old puppies that can outsmart a 2-3 year old human baby.

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.

Ability to survive != intelligence

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.

>Fawns/calves/... can walk almost as soon as they are born. It takes humans far longer to learn that.

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.

That is not the entire story, pigs have been shown to score higher on emotional intelligence (iirc) than human children age 4-6. As in, they have a higher ability for empathy and emotional distress than most toddlers.

I agree. At birth a human is much less capable than most animals - but the learning algorithm is so much better that they'll surpass any other non-human organisms in 2 years. This is honestly amazing an one of the best thing to witness when you are a parent. It's baffling - not only seeing your child learn new things, but also witnessing the ever increasing pace at which they learn new things.

"humanity is beyond special"

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".

Just to play devils advocate, I think part of what the OP may be saying is that our intelligence is mapped to our survival. From that perspective, animals can be more intelligent than a 2 year old. A stray cat is infinitely more capable of surviving the wild than a 2 year old human; they are more “intelligent” in that survival capacity by far. So again, to the OPs point, it depends on how we’re measuring intelligence; if it’s based on the skills humans are specialized for, of course humans will be shown to be more intelligent.

Ted Chiang has an excellent short story on this subject, regarding the construction of the Arecibo radio telescope as told from the perspective of a parrot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Silence_(short_story...

It's very short. Worth a quick read and a long thought.

The actual story is here: https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510/

It (like the rest of his oeuvre) is a wonderful read

Here is my 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.

> but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all.

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.)

Some people searched for structure of the atom, and found great things. Other searched for perpetuum mobile, and found nothing. We know that they will never find anything, but it does not stop them, there are still youtube videos being made today.

It's important to tell former from latter. Unexplored things are not the same as things that have been explored and found false.

People started searching for the structure of the atom in like 400 BC and didn't make any progress until they knew how. We know why perpetual motion isn't going to be found, so there's no reason to look for it in the first place. This isn't a relevant argument.

Searching for animal intelligence certainly feels like an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines, and similarly, people keep on enthusiastically nearly finding it. And of course this is plagued by a lack of a good definition, and crows unlocking puzzles and other animals doing other scraps of smart stuff.

It seems like nonsense to be searching for things without perfectly clear criteria. Don't look for things if you don't know what you're looking for, or at least don't call it "looking for", just call it what it is: "poking around and brainstorming."

Though perpetual motion is reasoned to be false, rather than declared false because statistically we never had any luck trying, or by an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines.

It isn't just statistics and bad luck for PM inventors. There are physical reasons arguing strongly that it's impossible.

That is what the person you're responding to meant.

That's what I said. How are you reading the opposite?

You're right: you said "statistically we never had any luck trying, or by an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines." as an antithesis.

I took "reasoned to be false" as sort of a weak and refutable statement.

There's plenty to find. Ask any dog or cat owner.

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.

Hear.

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.

> Intelligence or consciousness is not a Thing; it's just a set of behaviors that have proven adaptive to some species

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...

let's see: I've met exactly one of those (Dennett) so I'll go with him. How's that for insight?

> 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.

> 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.

Hopefully one day we will stop eating them, too.

On one hand, eating another intelligent being seems to be an obvious moral wrong.

On the other hand, many of the creatures we eat will happily eat us if given a chance.

All eukaryotes except plants eat other life.

No all "life" eat other sentient "life".

That this “animals no conscious” is default feels like a sort of all-anthropic religion. I don’t get how one imagines being an animal and… it just exists as an automaton? And for some reason exactly humans are all conscious/intelligent, even brain damaged (in literal sense). I bet “those looking like me are very special” is somewhere in our genes, playing an obsolete role competing with other humanoid groups.

One can imagine being a thermostat, or a car. The question of what it is like to be a bat skips the hard problem.

> I don’t get how one imagines being an animal and… it just exists as an automaton? And for some reason exactly humans are all conscious/intelligent,

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.

Fully agree in theory - especially that humans aren’t capable of defining a consistent agreed upon measure for - basically anything - let alone something as culturally amorphous as “intelligence”

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.

> However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses

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.

I think he's actually saying that humans will value a couple of humans more than thousands of octopuses, just phrased oddly.

What is Rawls?

Idk, for me one man vs one octopus is sort of not my business. But, in a pressure-less situation with a man vs thousands of octopuses, my trolley would probably go over a man, especially if the tracks already lead to him or he has valuable gear. Call me unethical, but I find most of “ethics” human-ist as in race-ist. It is a justification algorithm for the most part rather than true ethics.

Scientists need evidence, rather than just assume intelligence because 'it is obvious', or that other species think the way we do. So just because we see a crow using tools, we should not assume that they learn from their parents and experiment and play and refine just like a human. Because it turns out they don't, and we have learned new things about them, and because of these differences, ourselves. So I don't think it that these silly scientists are surprised animals are intelligent. Why waste your life researching animal intelligence if you think your efforts will be pointless? Who in this century actually believes that all animals are unintelligent? The only arguments are to what degree and which species, and maybe quibbling about what that word actually means. But I don't think anyone has demonstrated equivalent to human child levels of cognition yet, with any species. We can teach a child words and grammar and communicate complex and abstract and even imaginary thoughts, and that is just the very beginning. A human child is so incredibly smart it can develop into a human adult. Other species are very different, and claiming equivalence is comparing apples to oranges. We see intelligence in such alien organisms as an octopus or a hive of bees, and the more we learn, in many ways we are understanding that we actually are alone and special. It seems more and more likely that if we are ever going to interact with another species as peers, the first is going to be a species of our own creation, and not dolphins or cockatoos.

I don't understand how we could possibly think we are at the top. There are, what, several million species of animal we are aware of, so statistically, we are likely at the middle of the curve. We just aren't aware (or barely aware) of the millions of species more advanced than us, similar to how ants and mosquitos have no idea of our existence.

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.

> We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully.

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.

I think your statements are written in a very confident manner that comes across as trying to win, but this is a nuanced question.

> 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/

Which age of human child do you mean? I could argue even bugs are "more intelligent" than 1 week old baby - at least they can eat and run away from danger.

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.

My point is that we don't frame animal intelligence as something comparable with humans or somewhat close. I'm not trying to create a leaderboard of intelligence. I think we should consider other species as capable of intelligence, and treat it with the same dignity we give to children.

Every species, including worms and ants? Because they are surely smarter than 1-week old human baby, they can eat and move.

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.

In (at least) one of Iain Banks’ Culture books, he says that technological progress is not a ladder, but a rock face. The tech which a species develops depends a lot on the conditions of their evolution, and encountering wildly different techs that seem miraculous or incomprehensible to one’s own species is fairly common.

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.”

Sure, alien high tech is alien... you cannot appreciate ICs without microscopes, nor custom-designed organisms without solid understanding of biology, nor poetry without language and culture.

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"?

IMO all life is intelligent in some way or form. Evolution itself is even intelligent in that it’s a learning system that adapts and solves problems.

It’s an interesting idea. Reminds me a little of some parts of Christopher Langans CTMU theory in that everything serves to simply further develop intelligence in the universe.

While I'm unskilled with CTMU theory, what you mentioned could be considered a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics, right? Intelligence might decrease entropy locally, but they always increase entropy globally to do so. Ie we accelerate the natural process of increasing entropy.

That's the second law.

You're right. I thought I corrected it, but I guess I only had the thought.

Evolution is just a concept/idea that describes whatever is actually happening out there.

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.

> more intelligent than a human child

Hoover Dam. Smart, stupid.

https://x.com/BrianReganComic/status/1630659105080889344

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