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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

#41

Post by Flop7331 »

teleforce wrote: post #26

Fun facts, according to Quran in human very first murder crime when one of Adam's sons killed his younger brother out of disagreement on offerings to God, the crow showed him how to properly bury the dead body: Then Allah sent a crow digging a grave in the ground for a dead crow, in order to show him how to bury the corpse of his brother. He cried, “Alas! Have I even failed to be like this crow and bury the corpse of…

To be fair to Cain/Qabil, he didn't know ambushing Abel/Habil was going to kill him. Nobody had died before.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#42

Post by Retr0id »

jumploops wrote: post #22

> This kind of feat, according to animal behavior researchers, requires the ability to form “mental templates.” Essentially, a mental template is an image in the mind of what a particular object looks like, even when that object is not present. As someone with aphantasia, can I get points for recreating something I've seen _without_ having an "image in the mind"?

I'm curious, could you describe your mental process of recreating a shape you've seen before? (via drawing, I suppose)

I would of course start by visualising it in my head, but I know that's not how aphantasia works.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#45

Post by jiggawatts »

tux1968 wrote: post #27

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…

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

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#46

Post by Blahah »

andewulfe wrote: post #38
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…

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.

The actual story is here: https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510/

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#47

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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…

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 implications of such a philosophy would upend nearly all philosophical grounding for all ethical traditions

Even Rawls don’t have an avenue for a society that treats mosquitos with the same dignity that we treat human babies

So yes, but also we’re stuck with this cognitive dissonance that makes humans believe that ANY human is better than all (insert behaviorally demonstrable intelligence threshold).

For example: All individual humans are more important than all individual octopuses. However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses. This despite knowing that Octopuses have more demonstrable intellect than most humans below a certain age and many humans of any age.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#48

Post by nikolay »

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.
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