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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

#81

Post by 0xblinq »

sitkack wrote: post #19
lr4444lr wrote: post #7

Sometimes I wonder whether we're being watched by a super intelligent species beyond our current detection that occasionally places objects in certain configurations in front of the smarter of our species throughout history, and writes articles based on their observations titled things like, "homo sapiens smarter than previously known: demonstrates understanding of unified theory of electromagnetic waves through RF s…

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.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#82

Post by tedunangst »

cabbageicefruit wrote: post #69
Flop7331 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you have to have seen a human die to know that a human could die? Surely Cain had seen plenty of animals die. I think you might not be giving Cain enough credit (or maybe too much credit) by assuming he couldn’t have put 2 and 2 together

But beasts and man were created in distinct phases, with different rules and instructions.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#83

Post by known »

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…

[dead]

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#84

Post by jsnxnxkjx »

sfink wrote: post #63
Retr0id wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As another someone with aphantasia, I remember what something looks like, so I draw what I remember. That memory is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like. For simple things, that's enough. For complicated things, I sketch out what I remember of the overall appearance, look at it and gauge how far off it is and what is off, and add in details to gradually reduce the difference. I'm not a very good…

When imaginating something, I don't have a literal 2D image in my head

It's more like a scene which I can manipulate both camera angle and content at will. I can also imagine sound

What I have a hard time is imagining smell. I can remember distinct smell but the scenes in my head usually don't have smell

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#85

Post by theamk »

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…

Which age of human child do you mean? I could argue even bugs are "more intelligent" than 1 week old baby - at least they can eat and run away from danger.

If we re-define "intelligence" as "smarter than a human baby", then this word covers most animals (and probably some plants too) and becomes useless. When doing species comparison, I think it only makes sense to compare adults to each other, and perhaps even "average" or "75th percentile" adults.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#86

Post by trescenzi »

tbrownaw wrote: post #70
sfink wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another someone with aphantasia, I remember what something looks like, so I draw what I remember. That memory is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like. For simple things, that's enough. For complicated things, I sketch out what I remember of the overall appearance, look at it and gauge how far off it is and what is off, and add in details to gradually reduce the difference. I'm not a very good…

> is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like Is this similar to calling an .svg "not an image" if it's viewed in a text editor rather than on a canvas?

I don’t know if it’s true for others with aphantasia but this seems like solid description to me.

I draw a square by knowing that squares are closed objects with four equal length sides that meet at 90 degree angles. I don’t think that explicitly every time, but regardless there's no visual stimuli.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#87

Post by azemetre »

meowface wrote: post #64
azemetre wrote: post #61

I've posted this comment before but I grew up in Florida on a decent amount of land for a curious child. One day I was feeding the crows some stale cuban bread, there were probably 5 of them sitting on the fence watching me throw the bread. Each one would fly down and take a piece. One of them flew down and tumbled, his friends started laughing something fierce. His friends then all took turns mimicking his tumble in…

They probably have rich social lives. I wonder how fine-grained their communication signals are.

Probably very good. They've been known to communicate highly specific dangers to other crows and supposedly understand recursion:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crows-perform-yet...

I haven't read it yet but there's also a sci-fi book about intelligent society of crows (Children of Time series):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Memory_(novel)

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#88

Post by haswell »

api wrote: post #37
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…

IMO all life is intelligent in some way or form. Evolution itself is even intelligent in that it’s a learning system that adapts and solves problems.

Evolution is just a concept/idea that describes whatever is actually happening out there.

It seems evolution is emergent given the physical ingredients and laws of nature, which points to some kind of inherent intelligence in the fabric of all stuff. By observing it for long enough, it becomes apparent that the stuff is behaving in a way that can be described as evolution (this is not some kind of appeal to intelligent design).

To whatever extent evolution is "intelligent" or "learning and solving problems", it is the underlying primordial stuff of existence at play. Thinking about this always blows my mind.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#89

Post by naveen99 »

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