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Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

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Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#151

Post by Aperocky »

derg wrote: post #45
novok wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans were effective in their intelligence and rule the world with it, no other animal has shown anything approaching something like that. You judge them by their results.

I don't necessarily completely disagree here, but I'm always thinking of the Douglas Adams quote in Hitchhiker's Guide on this: "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had alw…

Dolphins have a rough start, it's so hard to build anything in the ocean other than just have it biologically.

It's just so unfair. Just imagine if our brain is the same but we are fish and swim. How will civilization ever develop? Everything from bronze age up is pretty much impossible. That and we'd have no hands.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#152

Post by V-2 »

cassalian wrote: post #7

> crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals. I've always found the common thought that only humans and a select few of other animals are the only ones that posses higher intelligence to be incredibly arrogant of our species. Why wouldn't they have higher…

High intelligence isn't just a blessing. There are serious evolutionary costs associated (such as, for one, longer childhood). Evolution patterns follow the adage "use it or lose it", so if a species doesn't show signs of benefiting from higher intelligence, why should we assume that it's there? Why would natural selection maintain this trait if there was no obvious payback?

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#153

Post by ricksharp »

pdonis wrote: post #126

The headline of the article, as is often the case, overstates what the actual research shows. Here is the actual claim made in the abstract of the paper: "We show that single-neuron responses in the pallial endbrain of crows performing a visual detection task correlate with the birds’ perception about stimulus presence or absence and argue that this is an empirical marker of avian consciousness." In other words: when…

Thank you.

I read the article, and I was like, "so they remembered a light flashed and got rewarded?"

A basic lstm will do that - GPT-3 will do far more.

How does that have anything to do with higher intelligence?

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#154

Post by zanny »

Aperocky wrote: post #151
derg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily completely disagree here, but I'm always thinking of the Douglas Adams quote in Hitchhiker's Guide on this: "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had alw…

Dolphins have a rough start, it's so hard to build anything in the ocean other than just have it biologically. It's just so unfair. Just imagine if our brain is the same but we are fish and swim. How will civilization ever develop? Everything from bronze age up is pretty much impossible. That and we'd have no hands.

It's tool use and language that differentiate us. Other species have one but not both. Learning is much more efficient when communicated rather than done in an isolated vacuum and all the knowledge in the world is useless if you lack fine motor control manipulation to take advantage of it.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#155

Post by notahacker »

jychang wrote: post #137
notahacker wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nets aren't a plot to subjugate the dolphins though; for the most part humans would rather not have dolphin bycatch. They're just something that dolphins haven't collectively figured out how to avoid.

That’s like saying humans aren’t intelligent because they can’t avoid car accidents in the rain. Even if you were super intelligent, i bet you’d get fucked up in a net if you had low visibility in the water, you were traveling at high speed, and you didn’t have opposable thumbs to untangle yourself.

If I was an sonar-equipped aquatic mammal that was also superintelligent, I'd expect generations of losses might have taught my civilization not to swim near boats.

(Unless we're positing that running the risk of being trawled is an essential part of mucking about and having fun, or a scientific experiment, or dolphins having enough imagination for some of them to speculate warnings about boats are a conspiracy to keep them from the best fish :D)

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#156

Post by mdavidn »

zanny wrote: post #154
Aperocky wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dolphins have a rough start, it's so hard to build anything in the ocean other than just have it biologically. It's just so unfair. Just imagine if our brain is the same but we are fish and swim. How will civilization ever develop? Everything from bronze age up is pretty much impossible. That and we'd have no hands.

It's tool use and language that differentiate us. Other species have one but not both. Learning is much more efficient when communicated rather than done in an isolated vacuum and all the knowledge in the world is useless if you lack fine motor control manipulation to take advantage of it.

How do you know crows and dolphins lack language? Because they don’t use a syntax like ours?

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#157

Post by ARandomerDude »

cassalian wrote: post #7

> crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals. I've always found the common thought that only humans and a select few of other animals are the only ones that posses higher intelligence to be incredibly arrogant of our species. Why wouldn't they have higher…

It's not like the idea is arbitrary. Have you ever seen a giraffe build a car, or even a skateboard?

We don't assume superior intelligence, we observe it.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#158

Post by everdrive »

novok wrote: post #20
cassalian wrote: post #7

> crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals. I've always found the common thought that only humans and a select few of other animals are the only ones that posses higher intelligence to be incredibly arrogant of our species. Why wouldn't they have higher…

Humans were effective in their intelligence and rule the world with it, no other animal has shown anything approaching something like that. You judge them by their results.

I think the argument goes both ways. Chimpanzees are (roughly) as intelligent as our toddlers, but we haven't necessarily been treating them as such. That said, if we never mentally developed past being toddlers we might not even have invented speech, let alone civilization. Animals possess intelligence well above what people used to give them credit for, whoever they are still far and away from where people are.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#159

Post by gdy »

withinboredom wrote: post #66
missedthecue wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so how about the fact that they haven't figured out how to heal broken bones? Is that my arrogance again, or is it that they would just prefer to flop on the ground until nightfall and then be eaten alive by coyotes?

Can you heal a shattered leg all by yourself with no one around? I guarantee you’ll lay on the ground until nightfall and probably be eaten by coyotes (since you’re a human, they /might/ leave you alone). If you have someone with you, maybe they can carry you. Crows can’t carry other crows. If they wanted to fix the other crow, they’d have to do it where the crow fell. It would still get eaten by coyotes. They can’t…

Why crows haven't invented stretchers to carry fellow crows to safety? Making a stretcher doesn't look more complicated than building a nest.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#160

Post by samatman »

sharkweek wrote: post #26

My crow story, which I think I've mentioned on here before. We have young children, and thus the back of our car is always a little disgusting with things like goldfish crackers littered all over the floor and in-between the cracks of their car seats. We got in the habit of throwing the crumbs out onto the driveway when we got home. It didn't take long for us to notice anytime we pulled in, the crows would be lined u…

Crows, being social animals, have a concept of friend already.

They also have a concept of foe. Crows are well-documented to wage war against red hawks (buzzards across the pond), and this goes further than just bickering over a tasty bit of carrion: they will actively gang up on red hawks whenever they see them. Which is risky business, red hawks being larger, with sharper beaks and talons.

It's pretty neat that they can extend those concepts to distinct humans!

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