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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

#191

Post by ackbar03 »

beejiu wrote: post #189
kibae wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Hilariously, during WW2 there was also a research project to build guided missiles using pigeons in the nose cone. "The nose cone of the missile would be split into three compartments, with a lens projecting an image of the intended target onto a screen at the front. A pigeon in each compartment, trained by operant conditioning to recognise the target, would peck at it continually." https://www.military-history.org/f…

Worms still use them as homing missiles for their Armageddon battles

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#192

Post by roenxi »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #149
hungie wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why probably?

For starters, whales aren't tool users. So it'd be something of a surprise if evolution had programmed them to feel joy when their offspring use tools. Humans, on the other hand, seem to get a bit of a kick out of teaching other people (especially kids) to do things which makes a lot of evolutionary sense given how strategically central tools are to our species.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#195

Post by hnfong »

0xblinq wrote: post #81
sitkack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found Gary Larson's alt account. You should turn it into a short movie using AI. I have thought something similar but more along the lines that in the universe above us, we are 3 days into a science experiment and either a) they don't know we exist or b) the look in with their microscope and see patterns for cities or c) they have a statistical measure of how many have developed ecosystems and set off a nuclear weapo…

Lots of ideas here for SciFi movies. I also like the idea of everything being a simulation (like in Matrix) but managed/set up by an alien civilization and just experimenting or having fun with us, or us actually just being their avatars… and we are them!!! Alright, time to go to bed.

The scenario you described is what myth, tradition, fiction and science are all telling me these days.

It's not even for SciFi movies now, with VR tech and assuming we have a couple order of magnitude more compute, it's actually plausible to actually think about building the simulation for real. (Isn't that what Meta was supposed to be about?)

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#196

Post by hnfong »

card_zero wrote: post #181
literalAardvark wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, current theories are that animals are also somewhat conscious and intelligent, but that we're all, including humans, automata, with zero or near zero free will.

I don't even know what that means or why it worries people, I think it's a big red herring. (And near -zero is a confusing concept.) We're machines that make choices, spontaneously and deterministically (which is not a contradiction). People fretting about free will are getting caught in some kind of category error that confuses the physics of time with being controlled by an invisible tyrant.

Law is one practical aspect of free will that people generally don't talk much about.

For example, criminal law generally assumes people have free will, and thus should be responsible for their actions. If we take the stance that people are in fact merely deterministically doing what they are fated to do given circumstances, some of the punishments doled out to convicts might make people feel uneasy. (Eg. if being poor made the person commit theft... shouldn't we tackle the issue of poverty instead of locking up starving people?)

Contract law also assumes people are free to make agreements. Like, signing a contract with onerous terms because that's the only option a person has to avoid something worse.

In short, free will provides a kind of cop out for moral philosophers to blame individuals for their own failures. You may or may not agree with this approach, I'm not advocating for or against, but anyway that's one of the practical consequences of free will.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#197

Post by hnfong »

nikolay wrote: post #48

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.

Humans are probably the most unpredictable beings the crows have seen.

How would they ever know you're not a threat for sure? Usually, it's hard for a human to kill another (unless with a lethal weapon and lots of intention), but it's really easy for a human to kill a bird, even recklessly or carelessly.

Note that humans in developed societies are generally much "nicer" than what we have been for thousands of years. And even so, for many individuals today, they're not different from our barbaric ancestors...

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#198

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

ycombinete wrote: post #188
jiggawatts wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

During Covid crows started harassing a lot of people in our area while walking around. I realised it was because they didn’t like someone who wore a blue mask. If I took my mast off or wore a different style of mask they’d leave me alone, and bother other people who looked similar to me with a blue mask on.

I used to joke about all the venues which suddenly announced themselves as ‘corvid secure’ in 2020, but maybe this was what they were talking about.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#199

Post by eru »

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)

Didn't they have wireless communication? What benefits did the pigeons have?

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#200

Post by card_zero »

hnfong wrote: post #196
card_zero wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know what that means or why it worries people, I think it's a big red herring. (And near -zero is a confusing concept.) We're machines that make choices, spontaneously and deterministically (which is not a contradiction). People fretting about free will are getting caught in some kind of category error that confuses the physics of time with being controlled by an invisible tyrant.

Law is one practical aspect of free will that people generally don't talk much about. For example, criminal law generally assumes people have free will, and thus should be responsible for their actions. If we take the stance that people are in fact merely deterministically doing what they are fated to do given circumstances, some of the punishments doled out to convicts might make people feel uneasy. (Eg. if being po…

Funny, to me it seems people talk about this one a lot. And the same answer applies. Yes, we have free will and responsibility (because we can respond). Also yes, we do what we do because of physical mechanisms which means you could say we're "fated" (leaving aside the irrelevant complication of chance and probability).

However, the law is only concerned with people doing (codified) wrong. It lets people off for being insane, because dealing with insanity falls outside of its mission. And similarly it can let people off on compassionate grounds, if for instance they stole food due to being hungry due to poverty. Punishing people for bad luck isn't its mission either. And a contract signed under duress isn't supposed to be valid, because the law's mission isn't to enable formalized bullying. Of course in reality the law is sketchy, lacks compassion, fails to recognize forms of duress. But generally speaking the idea is that it's restricted to the bad things a person freely did, as opposed to things that happened to the person.

So then you might say, well, do we freely do anything at all, because it's all just physics and mechanisms. But a lot of the mechanisms are in our brains, thinking sanely (if immorally), so yes, we do act freely, when not coerced.

It's important to separate the part of fate which is the things we're probably going to think, which is our responsibility, from the part of fate which is the things that the outside world is probably going to do to us, which is outside of our responsibility.

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