> Calling someone a "bird brain" is honestly more of a compliment. Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.
One fact that I find very curious is that I see all sorts of animals killed on the road, but never chickens. And I see plenty of them by the road. Maybe they never try to cross roads?
They definitely cross roads.
In the mountains around Trondheim, Norway, you run into free range chicken farms (and sheep roaming the mountain top). Signs warn you that chickens are about and I think them getting hit is a real concern if you are maximizing chicken freedom.
That said, these aren't busy roads. The more traffic, the more barriers to keep the animals from getting hit.
I feel similarly about cats. I absolutely love cats but I didn’t have one for five years because I refuse to own one in an apartment. It seems like people torture animals to make sure that they have some attention when they get home
A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. I don't know where you get "torture" from. What's most important is stimuli such as scratching posts, toys, etc. Otherwise, they're insanely copacetic to the point many "house" cats don't want to leave the home even when being dragged out. Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. T…
> A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically.
And how do you objectively come to this conclusion? Could you say a human prisoner can learn to cope in a prison and present "psychologically" well, but it still feel like a form of torture?
Makes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability.
I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundamental properties that actually create intelligence.
https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510 One of my all time favourite short stories, with or without intelligent parrots. Time for me to read it again. This is the Arecibo story, don't miss if you haven't read it before. "You be good". Strangely enough, was having a lot of difficulty coaxing google to fetch this link.
I’m not sure if you used “Classic Google” or not, but I put the quoted quote in to Google AI Mode (disclaimer; I am one of its developers) and got a full description of the story with links to online hostings of the full text in under 1 second. Not the same URL as your result, and I don’t know the IP validity of the hosting result pages I got, though.
I recalled (once I was reminded of the author) that I read this originally in one of his Anthologies. I strongly recommend to everyone who likes reading and thinking to buy both of his books!
Makes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability. I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundament…
It’s always amazed me how much capability baby animals have right when they’re born, when they have near zero experience with their muscles and balance and senses. Or even just the instinct of a cat to chase a string is universal.
There’s something intrinsic to the structure of brains that seems to pre-encode a lot of evolutionarily useful content without a training phase.
I’d love to take a course on just this topic and what do we know about it.
Makes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability. I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundament…
It’s always amazed me how much capability baby animals have right when they’re born, when they have near zero experience with their muscles and balance and senses. Or even just the instinct of a cat to chase a string is universal. There’s something intrinsic to the structure of brains that seems to pre-encode a lot of evolutionarily useful content without a training phase. I’d love to take a course on just this topic…
To be fair, it's not like the baby animals pop into existence at birth, starting from scratch at that moment, but instead they've been growing/incubating for quite some time. Who knows, maybe that's the actual "training phase" for the animals, as what you say is true, they seem to have a lot of instincts already at birth, while human babies seem to almost "popped into existence at birth" with not a whole lot of instincts yet, compared to other animals at least.
I lived in apartments for a long time then moved into a house. I thought my cat who had never seen stairs would take some adjusting. Nope, he look up them, wiggled his butt, then ran full tilt to the top. Ran full tilt down them too.
One of our cats has arthritis and before we got her treatment she didn’t like them, but she’s perfectly happy now.
If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. They have incredible memories and their own understanding of their world. It looks simple to us but they are not simple creatures. That being said, I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage.
I feel similarly about cats. I absolutely love cats but I didn’t have one for five years because I refuse to own one in an apartment. It seems like people torture animals to make sure that they have some attention when they get home
it's funny because domesticated cats have much more developed frontal cortexes than their ancestors & it would be one of the things that feral cats lose to genetic drift (meaning, no conservation pressure in the wild). whatever boring stuff we have them do is apparently extremely mentally taxing compared to the wild.
Makes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability. I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundament…
that would make for a cute short story where a robot nurses a pet biological that suddenly displays hints of true intelligence after no less than 32 years of parrot-like behavior