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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

#121

Post by hungie »

deberon wrote: post #118
_huayra_ wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real separation (and is something that comes long after 2 years of age in humans) is the ability to observe one's thoughts. I totally get that dolphins and elephants and many "big brain" mammals can have social structures, long memories, and the ability to pass down behaviors directly (e.g. "here's how you hunt fish effectively" may not be in dolphin genes, but they do a damn good job of it, or also the "fads" of…

In the time it took me to learn a new programming language, my kid learned how to be a whole entire human being. Including free thought and autocorrect mode. I don’t know what makes us special in the animal kingdom, but watching that happen certainly feels special. Do whales feel the same way about their young?

Whales almost certainly do not feel the same way. They feel like whales about their young. That's not to discount whales: that feeling may be profound and emotional for them. But it's probably alien to the human experience.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#123

Post by drivebyhooting »

evanmoran wrote: post #98
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…

I like the sentiment, but human children who are 2 completely dominate all known animal intelligence. They can speak in sentences and use tools in complex ways. There may be studies that show a raven might use a stick to help it find food. Well, a two year old will carry a stool halfway across the house to reach the scissors that will open a bag of veggie straws :) At 3 they can recognize letters _easily_ and start l…

I have quite a bit of exposure to kids that age range. The behavior you described is FAR from normal.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#124

Post by Intralexical »

Aerroon wrote: post #103
milchek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I'm unskilled with CTMU theory, what you mentioned could be considered a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics, right? Intelligence might decrease entropy locally, but they always increase entropy globally to do so. Ie we accelerate the natural process of increasing entropy.

That's the second law.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#125

Post by stubish »

_huayra_ wrote: post #112
evanmoran wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the sentiment, but human children who are 2 completely dominate all known animal intelligence. They can speak in sentences and use tools in complex ways. There may be studies that show a raven might use a stick to help it find food. Well, a two year old will carry a stool halfway across the house to reach the scissors that will open a bag of veggie straws :) At 3 they can recognize letters _easily_ and start l…

The real separation (and is something that comes long after 2 years of age in humans) is the ability to observe one's thoughts. I totally get that dolphins and elephants and many "big brain" mammals can have social structures, long memories, and the ability to pass down behaviors directly (e.g. "here's how you hunt fish effectively" may not be in dolphin genes, but they do a damn good job of it, or also the "fads" of…

One interesting aside in this article was that the crows don't teach each other how to make tools. But a child might steal a tool from a parent and work it out. This demonstrates the problem solving type of intelligence, working out how to reshape a wire to a useful shape for instance. But not a 'higher' intelligence teaching or demonstrating to others. Which is kind of odd, as I see young birds following their parents and imitating and learning. So I guess this shows parent birds don't teach, but young birds instinctively follow around and learn?

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#126

Post by moi2388 »

Seriously animal researchers are so weird..

Of course animals can form mental representations of shapes. Do you think they wouldn’t be able to form a mental representation of another one of their species? Their surroundings? Objects they commonly interact with?

It’s getting them to reproduce it on command that’s tricky, but that has nothing to do with their capabilities

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#127

Post by nirav72 »

kibae wrote: post #108
nirav72 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m surprised no one has attempted to train crows for use in asymmetrical warfare. At least before the advent of cheap drones.

Pigeons were used in WW1 and WW2 for communication. Paddy the pigeon [0] flew 230 miles across the English channel to relay the success of the D-Day invasion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_(pigeon)

I've known about pigeons being used for communications and even bottle-nose dolphins being used for clearing mines in WW2. But I'm just curious if they've ever attempted to use crows for reconnaissance or early warning systems. Especially for use at something like forward operating bases that are always prone to enemy ambushes. Or maybe even using crows to alert of enemy movements.

I watched a video earlier today on a YT channel I follow called Curious Droid. This episode went into how the U.S military had a hard time determining vietcong troop movements due to the thick jungle foilege. So DARPA developed this concept of electronic fenses, where the airforce would drop these sensor packages into the jungle. The package would have sesmic sensors and microphones to capture movement of enemy forces through the jungle. The problem was that this being the 1960s/70s - the batteries only lasted couple of weeks. Also data storage and tranmission rates weren't advance enough at the time to send that information to a centralize location far from the contested area. So they had to have an aircraft loitering above to collect this data and then fly the collected data to a processing facility in Thailand. By the time the data was classified and analyized, the intelligence collected wasn't really actionable for the commanders in the field.

Here is the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feDk6oaeVAY

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#128

Post by guerrilla »

theamk wrote: post #116
andewulfe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here is my long thought: People have been trying to talk to animals for thousands (tens of thousands?) of years, and no "animal myths" were discovered. Some researchers have dedicated their live trying to understand the animals (story mentions one of them), but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all. And alien life is not special in that regard - if we are able to…

> but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all.

It's a good thing people who accomplish great things don't think like that or we'd have no science at all, because for millions of years we didn't. If they did, they would have had to conclude it isn't possible to predict the future. Yet here we are, knowing why apples fall (or whatever.)

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#130

Post by Intralexical »

bane wrote: post #106

I think I've come to an inevitable conclusion that there appears to be at least two "sources" of intelligence, genetic, and (I guess for lack of a better word), "learned". Learned could mean all kinds of things, the capacity measurement of IQ, the effort by parents to fill that capacity, social normative steering, whatever. But genetic really means "instinct" in the way that a day old deer can stand, run, graze (I li…

> Is that not intelligence?

"Intelligence" should be adaptive, and general purpose.

Complex systems that are unable to grow or change are basically the definition of an unliving "mechanism", contrasted against an intelligent mind/being.

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