91–100 of 304 posts
We consider this smart and intelligent, but many people don't want to admit that LLMs are intelligent?
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…
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…
Which age of human child do you mean? I could argue even bugs are "more intelligent" than 1 week old baby - at least they can eat and run away from danger. If we re-define "intelligence" as "smarter than a human baby", then this word covers most animals (and probably some plants too) and becomes useless. When doing species comparison, I think it only makes sense to compare adults to each other, and perhaps even "aver…
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…
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…
… but what makes us special is that we’re the only ones who care ?
What if ego is the unique human trait?
What if the reason my goats don’t communicate with me isn’t because they’re dumb… but because they couldn’t care less ?
- If a crows is sitting near your house and screaming, you are about to get guests or visitors.
- During monsoon time, a whole month is devoted to feed your ancestors. We put food out on leafs (banana is hard to find, peepal or turai squash leaf does the job). It's mostly eaten by crows. It is believed that ancestors visit you back as crows.
I never saw local crows doing extraordinary "smart things". They were very good at stealing food: especially butter during winter. But never heard about a crow opening a latch.
While nesting, they will dip a dry branch in water to make it soft so that they can bend it without breaking when making nest.
I never liked crows as kids. They would often kill small squirrels (chipmunks rather) and sparrows whom I liked very much -- though rarely.
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…
Animals can definitely be intelligent, and we should learn more about them and how they perceive the world, but when you play with a 2.5 year old for five minute there is no doubt that humanity is beyond special.
The article title perhaps mischaracterizes the significance of these findings. The paper finds that Hooded crows—who are not specialized tool users—demonstrate some of the same abilities that have already been observed experimentally in New Caledonian crows—who are specialized tool makers, including: the ability to manufacture tools from novel materials, select or manufacture a tool depending on the specifics of the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."