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Crows are even smarter than we thought

nautil.us

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Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#51

Post by tetrisgm »

andewulfe wrote: post #38
tetrisgm wrote: post #33

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 hum…

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.

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

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#52

Post by milchek »

api wrote: post #37
tetrisgm wrote: post #33

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 hum…

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.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#55

Post by nullhole »

jiggawatts wrote: post #45
tux1968 wrote: post #27

Have posted this before, but it really left an impression about crows, and the bond between their mates: Years ago I was putting out the garbage in the back alley behind our building where I lived on the 8th floor. A crow attacked me out of the blue. Distracted by the attack, the back door slammed shut behind me. Since my key was only good for the front door, I had to walk around the building. That damn crow followed…

Corvids can recognise faces and they are territorial and know the humans in their territory.

A cheeky experiment was done to prove this back in the aughts:

https://www.science.org/content/article/caveman-or-dick-chen...

"In a creative experiment that relied on rubber masks of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other distinctive mugs, researchers have shown that American crows have an uncanny ability to pick a familiar human face out of a crowd."

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#56

Post by cduzz »

jiggawatts wrote: post #45
tux1968 wrote: post #27

Have posted this before, but it really left an impression about crows, and the bond between their mates: Years ago I was putting out the garbage in the back alley behind our building where I lived on the 8th floor. A crow attacked me out of the blue. Distracted by the attack, the back door slammed shut behind me. Since my key was only good for the front door, I had to walk around the building. That damn crow followed…

Corvids can recognise faces and they are territorial and know the humans in their territory.

A friend used to jog around the university I worked at; he'd jog past an area that, for a month out of the year, was under a hawk nest. He came by commenting that he'd been dive-bombed by a hawk that was obviously guarding it's nest he said it had bonked him on the head and yelled at him -- he decided not to go jogging that way for a while after. I was kinda impressed that the hawk had "bonk human on head" mode as well as "use lethal claws to kill things and eat them later" mode -- seemed like an interesting level of restraint to bonk but not cut the human.

That the crow had a mental map of the building sufficiently detailed to know "human on 8th floor may be able to help Charles get out out of net in front of human's cliff cave if I yell at him" seems several orders of magnitude more complex...

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#57

Post by corytheboyd »

lr4444lr wrote: post #7

Sometimes I wonder whether we're being watched by a super intelligent species beyond our current detection that occasionally places objects in certain configurations in front of the smarter of our species throughout history, and writes articles based on their observations titled things like, "homo sapiens smarter than previously known: demonstrates understanding of unified theory of electromagnetic waves through RF s…

Or flip it around entirely— perhaps not this at all, because it’s the same human perception of “us smarter than them” but pretending “us” is “something else”. I like the idea that our plane of existence is present but inconsequential in some other reality— like a shadow, or gravity. It’s not that crazy of a stretch when we can barely accept that maybe the other species on our own planet can Think, it’s just a completely foreign framework of existence from what we know, so therefore, it cannot be.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#58

Post by textlapse »

How cool would it be to have a reinforcement learning playground to teach ‘crows’ and ‘octopuses’ and ‘cuttlefish’?

The key thing is the biological evolution that seeks rewards for survival and reproductive partner selection over generations.

Forget AGI… this would be way cooler to try.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#59

Post by analognoise »

tetrisgm wrote: post #33

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 hum…

> more intelligent than a human child

Hoover Dam. Smart, stupid.

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

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