Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

Post by pilsetnieks » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 11:40 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #155

jychang wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ke…

Post by notahacker » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 11:45 PM UTC

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…

Post by Twirrim » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 11:46 PM UTC

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…

Post by tomc1985 » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 11:47 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #163

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…

> Why wouldn't they have higher intelligence? Because almost no other animal appears to think ahead of time , master fire, build tools that did not exist before? You can come up with numerous explanations as to why it's that, but what one's species' brain can come up with will be a serious constraint as well.

Post by mdavidn » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 11:48 PM UTC

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…