I wonder whether they feel some kind of enjoyment from these kinds of actions
Crows can identify singular persons, hold grudge against them and disseminate the information around to make sure that particular person has a hard time [0].
Magpies are also very smart birds, aggressively protecting their nests and offspring from cats and other threats. So they may have identified that fox somewhere else.
Also, IIRC, magpies and crows are somewhat related.
[0]: https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...
They are both corvids (members of the family Corvidae) along with ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays and others. Most corvids are fairly smart.
I like to imagine they go back to their group of bird bros and say: "Ha! Made him flinch!".
It goes beyond humour, you can see it in a lot of scenarios and it ruins politics. There are people who appear literally unable to consider hypothetical scenarios. Not in a nasty way, they're sometimes wonderful people to have on hand. They simply only deal in reality as they see it. You can walk them slowly through a "and what if ... happens?" and they can't do it.
So if you're not able to make the right mental context switch at the right moment, you won't get the joke.
All humor? (Honest question)
I was under the presumption that e.g. slapstick or schadenfreude humor doesn't need linguistics, and is therefore seen in many animals. Animals that don't have any form of language but do have rather intricate social systems or even ranks and caste systems. but do have humor. E.g. where breaking or pushing those systems is the humor.
E.g. "boss gorilla slips on a banana peel haha".
Yeah. I don't blame her for getting mad.
Human intelligence is defined by behavior we humans value. Intelligence tests are geared to measuring these aspects.
Intelligence tests devised by animals would look totally different - and it's quite thinkable humans wouldn't do too well taking them.
Wouldn't assume that animals have less language ability than we humans, unless we totally figured out what other species are really talking about. Unless we do this is just an assumption.
I can't say that I've understood it all, but he appears to criticize scientists for not thinking about play seriously, and instead reducing most aspects of animal behavior to things like survival, fitness, and evolutionary pressure.
This has to be both right? Animals (and humans) evolved play because it has evolutionary benefits, but the immediate reward for play must be fun.
I know the turn of phrase is popular even amongst biologists but I still think it’s weird to put it this way.
Evolution is a dynamic feedback loop on a multi-generational time scale. Plenty of neutral things can be transmitted for a long time without being culled out by evolutionary pressure and social behaviour can remain for a long time without being genetic at all.
It also shows who is best to lead a fight. Play much like curiosity, makes you able to navigate your environment. It very much has extreme usefulness.
To simplify a lot, either you have offsprings and your genes spread or you don’t and they don’t. Evolution is not a purposeful process towards fitness. It’s a reification of the results of the way genes are passed, how they and the environment affect individual characteristics and how an individual fitness to their current environment impacts their chance to mate.
Play hones reflexes. Its entire purpose is to train young animals on tactics, and on how to use their body, and on their local environment.
Put another way, if you aren't trained to use your body, you're more likely to die. The same goes with not learning tactics. Or what the local environment is like.
If you don't know what a tree is, if you don't know what a hole in the ground is, what a hill is, how well grass hides you or not, you are at a major disadvantage, if you're hunting, OR if you're hunted!
There can be other mechanisms to learn things, but play is one of them, and having children teach each other, lets the adult protect, and gather food to feed. It also ensures that youth is trained up on the current environment, not one that the parent recalls from youth.
Evolution is an abstraction subsuming other mechanisms. It doesn’t care about usefulness. That’s a finalist bias. Individuals reproduce or they don’t.
The rest of your post is pure conjecture. You can’t work backward saying: this thing is useful therefore it’s evolved. That doesn’t make sense especially for complex behaviour.
My sorta crank belief is that we are massively underestimating the intelligence and consciousness of animals (and possibly even plants?)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722...
Like, I'm all for "we're underestimating animal brains" but they do have to have brains.
Do I think forests are conscious in the same way that we are? No. I do think "consciousness" is not a binary, and that we have poor tools and insufficiently-developed models for understanding it.
I don't have evidence I have consciousness. You assume you have it, but if you didn't what would really change? It's a made up word and the semantic value of the sentence "I have consciousness" is something like "I am special". Can you define consciousness in an objective way such that, were I to not have consciousness anything would be different for me?
It's the secular word for "soul", but at least the religious people have some ideas about what their woowoo nonsense terminology means.
The fact that I experience anything at all (as opposed to being an unthinking being as we assume robots or machines to be) seems like something to me. I can't explain what it is, but it seems different to anything else I observe in the world.
The roomba robot doesn't experience, it just goes through its routine. You're more sophisticated (a robot made out of meat), so the behaviors and internal state are more sophisticated. Your "experience" is just one of many illusions you are prone too. You can go look up some of them that it's possible for you to be aware of, they're pretty crazy.
The statement I quoted is just another wording of "of course I have consciousness!".
This is entirely separate from whether one's perceptions are an accurate representation of reality, or whether one's experiences correspond to the parts of the brain that respond to things.
"it's possible for me to be aware of anything" <--- restating your premise. Not evidence that your premise is true. Your definition of consciousness is circular.
If you don't believe that you have experiences of any kind then there is indeed no point in us discussing things further.
If you do believe that you have experiences of some kind, then I can tell you that I am taking to be definitional of consciousness - that when I say "conciousness", that's what I mean - and we can start from there.
When a log crackles as it burns, those crackles do not correspond to an experience of suffering.
It can solve mazes. [0]
"They remember, anticipate and decide." [0]
They practice primitive agriculture: "they carry, seed and prudently harvest their food" (though no cultivation - what dummies!). [1]
And here's the kicker: "P. polycephalum ... spends most of its life as a single cell containing millions of nuclei, small sacs of DNA, enzymes and proteins." [0], but "When prey bacteria become scarce, Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae aggregate by the tens of thousands and produce a multicellular migratory slug that becomes a fruiting body in which about 20% of cells die to form a sterile stalk. The stalk aids the dispersal of the remaining cells, which differentiate into spores in a spherical structure called the sorus ..." [1]
Isn't this exactly the opposite? Read Aristotle or Aquinas and they have all kinds of definitions about why humans are fundamentally different in nature than animals; and Darwin, whose work made it much more palpable to believe that humans were just another kind of animal, did his work smack in the middle of the Victorian era.
As a counterpoint, I recommend reading Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton. If humans are just animals, they're the most bizarre animal we've ever seen.
This was at the same time part of an argument against (human) slavery. "The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs ..."
Quite apart from the suffering being a supposition (essentially based on the "duck test"), this leaves unaddressed the question of why the ability to suffer should confer rights. Elsewhere he makes the point that adult animals have more morality than similarly aged humans (toddlers), which is at least in the same ballpark as the idea of rights. But I don't think we even know why we grant creatures rights.