71–80 of 304 posts
This is just as interesting as any other article on finding that X can do Y where X isn’t human and Y is a behavior that humans value. What would be even more amazing to me is finding cognitive things that other animals do that humans can’t. Of course, many humans can’t do mental math so … maybe the quest is ill defined?
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…
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Fully agree in theory - especially that humans aren’t capable of defining a consistent agreed upon measure for - basically anything - let alone something as culturally amorphous as “intelligence” The problem with this line of reasoning though is that it proves too much, and has the same problem, clumping intelligence into too small of classes for the level of ethical differentiation that humans can manage. The implic…
> However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses What do you mean by this? Are you stating this as an opinion? Or something people generally agree upon? Or something else? I think most people, if forced to choose, would save 1 human at the expense of thousands of octopuses. Not saying this is right or wrong. Just wondering what metric you’re using to gauge importance.
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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 we…
I've had owls do the same thing, and thankfully without talons in full attack mode. "Aggressive owls" weren't a thing I recall growing up in the Midwest, but they're sure in the Pacific Northwest.
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…
I've never seen birds hunting birds before so it made me watch the whole scene for 3-5min and I was baffled how the crows systematically 1) induced chaos trying to isolate a sparrow from the swarm then 2) killed it and 3) while one crow was busy eating it the other crow kept the infuriated swarm at distance. After a while 4) the crows changed jobs.
There are tons of crows around my house. I feed them, I know them, they know me, but they are so hard to become friends with. They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence. Otheriwse, they are probably the best parents among the birds. They little ones have such characters and the entire extended family takes care of them.
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…
I really believe that, when people ask if some organism is "intelligent" or "conscious" (answer is usually No), they're just asking how similar it is to a human. Intelligence or consciousness is not a Thing; it's just a set of behaviors that have proven adaptive to some species. Crows have somewhat more of those behaviors than we'd thought.
By way of example, many animals have much better smell than we do because that is adaptive for them, and it's not quite as much of an advantage for us.
As for what kind of "consciousness" they have -- they have what they need. We can't know what it's like to be a bat, because we're not bats. It's probably not like being a flying human with sonar, but we'll never know.
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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."