51–60 of 103 posts
If anyone is interested in cephalopod intelligence I heartily recommend the book: "Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith.
I do know there are a couple of websites for cephalopod enthusiasts:
This feels like an evolutionary attribution error, if that's a thing. Self control is different from a thumb; there aren't necessarily any genes that code for it.
My first guess would be that, in order for a creature to be as smart as a cuttlefish, it needs to have a mental model of spacetime and of itself. Self-control is just one of the many results of such intelligence.
I agree with the main thesis of the article, stated in the first paragraph. That idea of ”how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence” . I think folks in modern times are less & less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light. Cephalopods have proven to to b…
I believe I underestimated animal intelligence, and as an extension of that, animal consciousness. I have no proof that animals are intelligent or sentient or whatever. I do however have no reason to assume otherwise. As a result I’ve stopped eating meat almost entirely, and I suspect I’ll eliminate it entirely eventually. I still eat fish and shellfish. I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for dec…
But that said, there's so much great vegetarian food to be eaten!
The article doesn't mention this but that test is not very well regarded currently. It's basically a test of food security and trust in adults rather than any particular behavioral benchmark.
>The other part of the experiment was to test how good the six cuttlefish were at learning. They were shown two different visual cues, a grey square and a white one. When they approached one, the other would be removed from the tank; if they made the "correct" choice, they would be rewarded with a snack.
>Once they had learnt to associate a square with a reward, the researchers switched the cues, so that the other square now became the reward cue. Interestingly, the cuttlefish that learnt to adapt to this change the quickest were also the cuttlefish that were able to wait longer for the shrimp reward.
https://rs.figshare.com/articles/dataset/Data_set_raw_traini...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that argument no animal, dolphin, porpoise, dog, gorilla, elephant can be as intelligent as a 2.5 year old baby because none of them have evolved a tongue and vocal apparatus capable of making the correct sounds.
> because none of them have evolved a tongue and vocal apparatus capable of making the correct sounds. And the neurological development to process and produce speech. I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands. I suspect babies do have similar problem solving abilities…
I put gorilla in there specifically for this reason - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)
Gorillas can't produce speech but they can process language at about the level of a 2-3 year old human. Which is roughly the level of intelligence that dogs were being described as having in the article I linked earlier.
>I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands.
well I'm no cognitive scientist and I think differently than you do!
>but I think it's disingenuous to throw out speech just because a dog hasn't evolved vocal chords.
and I think it's disingenuous for out cephalopod overlords to claim I lack the ability to reason about potential threats because I don't shoot ink out of my fingers when in danger.
I mean I don't actually know or care that dogs might be as smart as a three year old or that any of the other animals I named might be; I just accept the findings of experts in the manner as being more likely to be correct than what I might think is the case. Still I am supposing none of the named animals are as smart as I am so I am certainly not threatened by the concept.
I agree with the main thesis of the article, stated in the first paragraph. That idea of ”how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence” . I think folks in modern times are less & less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light. Cephalopods have proven to to b…
I believe I underestimated animal intelligence, and as an extension of that, animal consciousness. I have no proof that animals are intelligent or sentient or whatever. I do however have no reason to assume otherwise. As a result I’ve stopped eating meat almost entirely, and I suspect I’ll eliminate it entirely eventually. I still eat fish and shellfish. I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for dec…
I think personally owning a pet dog and realizing they aren't biological machines simply responding to stimuli has helped me with that realization.
I agree with the main thesis of the article, stated in the first paragraph. That idea of ”how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence” . I think folks in modern times are less & less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light. Cephalopods have proven to to b…
Well, it is objectively inferior. That doesn't mean that it's not intelligence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe I underestimated animal intelligence, and as an extension of that, animal consciousness. I have no proof that animals are intelligent or sentient or whatever. I do however have no reason to assume otherwise. As a result I’ve stopped eating meat almost entirely, and I suspect I’ll eliminate it entirely eventually. I still eat fish and shellfish. I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for dec…
The realization that animals in factory farms have a capacity to suffer, and are undoubtedly subjected to this suffering for the majority of their lives, has made me cut my meat consumption from every meal to occasionally on the weekends. Would love to cut it out completely but have not mustered the willpower to do so. I think personally owning a pet dog and realizing they aren't biological machines simply responding…
I think the parent comment to yours is more about avoiding meat because of compassion to the intellect/consciousness. Rather than avoiding meat in order to eliminate any suffering that may occur during "production" of it.
I'm curious because I'm pretty good at convincing myself that the meat I buy comes from animals that haven't suffered. And if it can actually be guaranteed (moose killed by hunter) I'm all-in on meat. But if I somehow "woke up" and realized that I didn't want to eat other living things because of compassion (or whatever) to their minds? I'm not sure that I could go back from that.
As someone who trained my dog to sit and wait for me outside a shop while I got coffee, which was a similar delayed gratification and I didn't even use treats, I think science might be underestimating just how stupid human children are.
https://www.vox.com/2015/4/7/8360143/dogs-intelligence-scien... On the whole, psychologist and dog researcher Stanley Coren estimates, the average dog's intelligence is roughly as sophisticated as a 2.5-year-old baby's.
A few weeks ago she (on her own) decided to dry her wet painting by taping it to the heat vent. We have never used tape in any way similar to that, and certainly have never used the heat vent to dry anything (it being a long-term safety hazard, and potentially bad for the ventilation system).
She routinely falls on her face because of getting herself into ridiculous precarious situations (in disturbingly similar ways).
The problem is intelligence just isn't 1D no matter how much we wish it was. Delayed gratification, problem solving and communication ability are not necessarily highly correlated enough for a single metric to make sense of the three.