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I think the point the article was trying to make was that 'our kind of intelligence' is neither a single, well-defined entity - for example, the author points o

I think the point the article was trying to make was that 'our kind of intelligence' is neither a single, well-defined entity - for example, the author points out that chimps might be more 'politically' intelligent than ourselves - nor is it likely to be one thing that made us into what we are ("Thinking seriously about evolutionary cognition may also help us stop looking for a single magic ingredient that explains how human intelligence emerged"). If this hypothesis is true, other species might not necessarily display 'our kind' of intelligence, even given time, because they are in different contexts than ourselves, and introducing a single phenomenon (say, trade), is then unlikely to produce beings who think similarly to ourselves.

hyperpallium 10y ago
Note I said "alien intelligences" :) It's hard to know how different or in what way without a decent sample size. But the similarity I anticipate is our reflexivity, we can think about ourselves, our actions, our plans, others - even about thinking. We have an ability to abstract that is lacking in animals, and it would be pretty obvious if they had it because it's so useful, Though surely some species or individuals have its beginings or precursors - it just hasn't taken off yet. This reflexivity/abstraction reminds me of the Chomsky formal language hierarchy. Regular expressions are very useful but less powerful than context free grammars. And once you get to recursively enumerable, anything is possible. A similarity is that each non-terminal in a CFG generates a language, and can be used to define other languages - each is a level of abstraction. BTW I'm partial to the idea that spiders may be the next intelligence, as the brain-body ratio is off the chart (because they're small, yes...). But they aren't social. tl;dr I disagree with the article that other animals' intelligences are not less, just different. We have something better. Though it won't always be so. Of course, there are many other facets of our intelligence - our long term memory, motor skill memory, working memory, language ability, visual processing etc - that we are very strong in; I think mostly the best. It's hard to know how important they are to "our kind of intelligence" (which I think there is a clear definition of, given above).

hyperpallium 10y ago

Note I said "alien intelligences" :) It's hard to know how different or in what way without a decent sample size. But the similarity I anticipate is our reflexivity, we can think about ourselves, our actions, our plans, others - even about thinking. We have an ability to abstract that is lacking in animals, and it would be pretty obvious if they had it because it's so useful, Though surely some species or individuals have its beginings or precursors - it just hasn't taken off yet. This reflexivity/abstraction reminds me of the Chomsky formal language hierarchy. Regular expressions are very useful but less powerful than context free grammars. And once you get to recursively enumerable, anything is possible. A similarity is that each non-terminal in a CFG generates a language, and can be used to define other languages - each is a level of abstraction. BTW I'm partial to the idea that spiders may be the next intelligence, as the brain-body ratio is off the chart (because they're small, yes...). But they aren't social. tl;dr I disagree with the article that other animals' intelligences are not less, just different. We have something better. Though it won't always be so. Of course, there are many other facets of our intelligence - our long term memory, motor skill memory, working memory, language ability, visual processing etc - that we are very strong in; I think mostly the best. It's hard to know how important they are to "our kind of intelligence" (which I think there is a clear definition of, given above).