I think it’s pretty fair to say humans have advanced cognition. There is no myth here, other animals barely use tools, change the world around them, create and pass on information, etc
The myth is in reducing complex behavior to a single dimension and calling it "advanced" rather than, well, more human-like. I'm skeptical of the utility of this "advanced" conception. There's no objective reason to view tools, language, etc as particularly interesting. Subjectively of course it's understandable why we're interested in what makes us human.
I think we have a long way to go to catch up with algae.
I agree with you, it's not obviously clear what "advanced" means in this context if we don't automatically equate it with humanlike.
As far as we know humans are the only species to leave Earth’s gravity well. No other species has been able to do that in 4 billion years.
Or is that all just a ‘myth?’
No cat or dog has managed that feat yet.
No cat or dog has managed to reproduce fire to the degree that evolution has changed their gut to adapt to the increase in available calories.
The big brain comes with down sides, but one thing it does have is utility.
Germ theory of disease has made it so a scratch isn't fatal anymore. Why, after all, do cats play with their prey? To tire it out so there's less chance of injury when they go in for the kill.
We just figure out how to farm it instead and mold it to our needs.
Are you going to bring another human, or a goat? Can a goat navigate while you sleep? Can it apply first aid to you? Can it respond on the VHF radio if you get hailed? Can it operate the bilge pump?
What do you or anyone else actually get from such obvious absurdity, I wonder?
If it helps - and I have doubts - does (say) a working knowledge of Galois theory require more advanced mathematical cognition than arithmetic?
Would it be immoral to introduce such ghastly, hierarchical language? Etc.
I see you ignored the obvious rejoinder downthread, which stated that the utility of classifying behaviours or capacities is to help you predict outcomes.
How much more help do you need here? It’s not very complicated, but you prefer to showboat.
Speaking in material terms allows clearer communication of meaningful concepts than floating signifiers. "Advanced" is just a meaningless concept.
> I see you ignored the obvious rejoinder downthread, which stated that the utility of classifying behaviours or capacities is to help you predict outcomes.
It also helps you mispredict outcomes
Because that's the most accurate description of what it is. The more accurately you describe something, the more effectively you communicate, an aspect of more advanced cognition.
Wire up a gorilla with the equivalent hands and vocalization capacity, negate the wild hormonal fluctuations, and give that gorilla a more or less human upbringing, and they're going to be limited in cognition by the number of cortical neurons - less than half that of humans, but more than sufficient to learn to talk.
The amazing thing isn't necessarily that brains get built-in environmental shortcuts and preprogrammed adaptations, but that nearly everything involved in higher level cognition is plastic. Mammalian brains, at the neocortical level, can more or less get arbitrarily programmed and conditioned, so intelligence comes down to a relative level of overall capacity (number, performance of neurons) and platform (what tools are you working with.)
Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.
By co-opting neural capacity for some arbitrary human capabilities equivalent, you might cripple something crucial to that animal's survival or well-being, the ethics are messy and uncertain, but in principle, it comes down to brains.
What makes us interesting as humans is that we got the jackpot set of traits that drove our species into the meta-niche. Our ancestors traits for adaptability generalized, and we started optimizing the generalization, so things like advanced vocalization and fancy fingerwork followed suit.
While I don't disbelieve this out of hand, I can think of different things that might easily make this untrue. On what evidence is this assertion based? Is it just "our brains are essentially similar and much of it is not hard wired therefore they should perform the same" or is there deeper science and/or testing behind this?
There are some theories of function out there, like that of Numenta, which seems consistent across mammal brains, and is at least partially explanatory of cognitive function at a cellular level. There's also value to be found in LLMs and AI research in understanding networks and recursion and what different properties of structures that perform different functions have to conform to.
Pilot whales and blue whales and some other species have upwards of 45B cortical neurons, and if higher cognitive function is conserved across species, then they'd have the potential to be significantly more intelligent than humans - all else being equal.
A useful thought experiment is to compare different species to feral humans. Absent culture, the training, education, knowledge, and framework for understanding reality, without language, natural and wild living is pretty grim and intense. There's a whole lot we take for granted underpinning our abilities to reach the heights of technology and abstract use of language and thought.
It could be humans and primates have some sort of magic sauce - a particular quirk of networking or neurochemistry that augments relative capabilities, as opposed to embodiment or other factors. People have sought the magic sauce for decades, however, and that doesn't seem to be a viable explanation.