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If we separate by intelligence ... humans are clearly quite exceptional. We can pick a great many animals, and say that if we separate by intelligence, they ar

If we separate by intelligence ... humans are clearly quite exceptional. We can pick a great many animals, and say that if we separate by intelligence, they are expectional, doing things that other species can at best only crudely approximate. Human specialised intelligence is really good at doing human specialised things. I think I'd agree that humans do some things with their intelligence that might put them into a fresh category, but the point I'm suggesting is that humans are not the only creature with an exceptional intelligence.

pc86 9y ago
Yes dolphins and octopuses (and others I'm forgetting, I'm sure) have intelligence far and above their peers. But human intelligence is clearly much greater, isn't it? If humans are at a 100 and "normal" animals are at a ~5, the fact that octopuses and dolphins are in the 25-30 range doesn't mean they're equivalent to humans, or that human intelligence is limited to "human specialised things," it just means they're smarter than birds or snakes or crocodiles.
- EliRivers 9y ago
  But human intelligence is clearly much greater, isn't it? I think I'm going to say that "greater" doesn't really fit. Specialised in a different way, yes. I think that trying to apply a single value on a single scale simplifies it to a nonsense. How are you measuring this? How are you coming up with numbers? A Clark's Nutcracker can remember the location of tens of thousands of hidden pine seeds over a 15 mile radius and find them even though it's now a snowy winter and the seed was buried months previously. Clearly, this bird is smarter than pretty much every human I ever met. A chimp (at least one chimp) is better at remembering random numbers than a human (at least some humans, including a memory champion); https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/are-humans-smarter-than-chimps-think-again/ https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/are-humans-smarter-th... It's usually about this point the guy on HN who claims animals can't think because they have no formal spoken language turns up.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    I find that hard to believe. Does the nutcracker remember, or just get the same environmental cues each time they visit a location? Does it remember whether the seed is gone? Does it search locations that have no seeds? How could this feat even have been validated? Who recorded thousands of seed hiding actions, and monitored all winter over 15 square miles?
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    - lukeschlather 9y ago
      You can pick apart any feats of memory in this fashion. The fact is animal memory is not like computer memory. When we say a person or an animal "remembers where something is" we don't mean they have a detailed photo-realistic map in their head. We mean they've stored exactly enough information to allow them to navigate to the object.
      - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
        Or, as I suggested, they store nothing but rather depend on environmental cues to choose where to store (and later where to look). Which seem far, far more likely than a prodigious memory. And no, a real feat of memory can easily be measured and proven. The subject modifies a large list of items (e.g. seed in knothole), then later retrieves said item exactly once. That would be real evidence.
        EliRivers 9y ago
        What papers on the subject I found with a quick search suggests that moving the markers a little leads to the bird not finding the stash, but then searching again nearby. This would suggest to me that they do not simply try places that they might have hidden seeds, without remembering if they did or did not hide seeds there, because the number of places that they did not hide seeds so massively outweigh the places they did hide seeds and if they just thoroughly searched every possible area, they'd spend all their time searching and no time eating. Unless, of course, they're got some really strict criteria that limits the number of places - which would itself be a pretty intelligent thing to do. If I, as a human, needed to hide and remember tens of thousands of objects in a 15 mile radius, that's exactly how I would do it. These creatures are at least as smart as me. I understand that human memory champions do the same in terms of using locations as a crutch for memory, with their memory palaces and so on. They build themselves spatial pictures and clues. So this bird has a memory as good as human memory champions? As for keeping track of where they hid things by noting where they were in relation to other things; isn't that what humans do? If you removed all landmarks, buildings and everything from my city and replaced it with a flat, featureless plain, I would not be able to identify the location of my house. I find my house by looking at other things to work out which way to walk. Anyway, I'll stop here because we're both using unprovable axioms as our basis. I suggest that human intelligence is very specialised and that we struggle to even see other specialised intelligence, so limited are we in our thinking. You suggest that humans have a wide ranging general intelligence (poorly defined as that concept is), superior to all others? Neither of us can disprove an axiom, although we can both spend all day suggesting things that creature A can do that creature B cannot. The test you suggest does strike me as very human focussed; reminds me of tests showing that some creatures can't remember faces based on showing them human faces. Turns out that humans are really good at human faces, and some other animals are really good at other kinds of faces. I do appreciate your civil tone, though. You did come across as a sealion at the start (which is why I ignored you), but that turned out to be a misread on my part.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > But human intelligence is clearly much greater, isn't it? Our current method of evaluating non-human intelligence is mostly taking tasks humans are known to do and seeing if we can get animals to do them, which biases it toward finding animals performing at no greater level in any dimension than humans. We don't really have a coherent model of what intelligence is, much less an unbiased interspecies test of it. Humans obviously have the most human-like intelligence; any other superlatives attached to human intelligence should probably be prefaced with “apparently” rather than “clearly”.
  - EliRivers 9y ago
    We don't really have a coherent model of what intelligence is Indeed. Going further, the idea that "general intelligence" can exist is something I'll countenance; the assumption that humans have it is a conceit without convincing evidence, based on a sample of one.
    - cgmg 9y ago
      > the assumption that humans have it [general intelligence] is a conceit without convincing evidence Why do you make this claim? Engineering, science, and mathematics are all convincing evidence that humans have general intelligence. Humans also score highly in measures of intelligence like https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329 https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329.
- wastewaste 9y ago
  There might be some of the humans, who we grant special status, who are below the average dolphin, which calls the whole idea into question.

pc86 9y ago

Yes dolphins and octopuses (and others I'm forgetting, I'm sure) have intelligence far and above their peers. But human intelligence is clearly much greater, isn't it? If humans are at a 100 and "normal" animals are at a ~5, the fact that octopuses and dolphins are in the 25-30 range doesn't mean they're equivalent to humans, or that human intelligence is limited to "human specialised things," it just means they're smarter than birds or snakes or crocodiles.

EliRivers 9y ago
But human intelligence is clearly much greater, isn't it? I think I'm going to say that "greater" doesn't really fit. Specialised in a different way, yes. I think that trying to apply a single value on a single scale simplifies it to a nonsense. How are you measuring this? How are you coming up with numbers? A Clark's Nutcracker can remember the location of tens of thousands of hidden pine seeds over a 15 mile radius and find them even though it's now a snowy winter and the seed was buried months previously. Clearly, this bird is smarter than pretty much every human I ever met. A chimp (at least one chimp) is better at remembering random numbers than a human (at least some humans, including a memory champion); https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/are-humans-smarter-than-chimps-think-again/ https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/are-humans-smarter-th... It's usually about this point the guy on HN who claims animals can't think because they have no formal spoken language turns up.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  I find that hard to believe. Does the nutcracker remember, or just get the same environmental cues each time they visit a location? Does it remember whether the seed is gone? Does it search locations that have no seeds? How could this feat even have been validated? Who recorded thousands of seed hiding actions, and monitored all winter over 15 square miles?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - lukeschlather 9y ago
    You can pick apart any feats of memory in this fashion. The fact is animal memory is not like computer memory. When we say a person or an animal "remembers where something is" we don't mean they have a detailed photo-realistic map in their head. We mean they've stored exactly enough information to allow them to navigate to the object.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      Or, as I suggested, they store nothing but rather depend on environmental cues to choose where to store (and later where to look). Which seem far, far more likely than a prodigious memory. And no, a real feat of memory can easily be measured and proven. The subject modifies a large list of items (e.g. seed in knothole), then later retrieves said item exactly once. That would be real evidence.
      - EliRivers 9y ago
        What papers on the subject I found with a quick search suggests that moving the markers a little leads to the bird not finding the stash, but then searching again nearby. This would suggest to me that they do not simply try places that they might have hidden seeds, without remembering if they did or did not hide seeds there, because the number of places that they did not hide seeds so massively outweigh the places they did hide seeds and if they just thoroughly searched every possible area, they'd spend all their time searching and no time eating. Unless, of course, they're got some really strict criteria that limits the number of places - which would itself be a pretty intelligent thing to do. If I, as a human, needed to hide and remember tens of thousands of objects in a 15 mile radius, that's exactly how I would do it. These creatures are at least as smart as me. I understand that human memory champions do the same in terms of using locations as a crutch for memory, with their memory palaces and so on. They build themselves spatial pictures and clues. So this bird has a memory as good as human memory champions? As for keeping track of where they hid things by noting where they were in relation to other things; isn't that what humans do? If you removed all landmarks, buildings and everything from my city and replaced it with a flat, featureless plain, I would not be able to identify the location of my house. I find my house by looking at other things to work out which way to walk. Anyway, I'll stop here because we're both using unprovable axioms as our basis. I suggest that human intelligence is very specialised and that we struggle to even see other specialised intelligence, so limited are we in our thinking. You suggest that humans have a wide ranging general intelligence (poorly defined as that concept is), superior to all others? Neither of us can disprove an axiom, although we can both spend all day suggesting things that creature A can do that creature B cannot. The test you suggest does strike me as very human focussed; reminds me of tests showing that some creatures can't remember faces based on showing them human faces. Turns out that humans are really good at human faces, and some other animals are really good at other kinds of faces. I do appreciate your civil tone, though. You did come across as a sealion at the start (which is why I ignored you), but that turned out to be a misread on my part.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> But human intelligence is clearly much greater, isn't it? Our current method of evaluating non-human intelligence is mostly taking tasks humans are known to do and seeing if we can get animals to do them, which biases it toward finding animals performing at no greater level in any dimension than humans. We don't really have a coherent model of what intelligence is, much less an unbiased interspecies test of it. Humans obviously have the most human-like intelligence; any other superlatives attached to human intelligence should probably be prefaced with “apparently” rather than “clearly”.
- EliRivers 9y ago
  We don't really have a coherent model of what intelligence is Indeed. Going further, the idea that "general intelligence" can exist is something I'll countenance; the assumption that humans have it is a conceit without convincing evidence, based on a sample of one.
  - cgmg 9y ago
    > the assumption that humans have it [general intelligence] is a conceit without convincing evidence Why do you make this claim? Engineering, science, and mathematics are all convincing evidence that humans have general intelligence. Humans also score highly in measures of intelligence like https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329 https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329.
wastewaste 9y ago
There might be some of the humans, who we grant special status, who are below the average dolphin, which calls the whole idea into question.