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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 th

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.
chimprich 9y ago
A human can come up with a system to help them record hidden pine seed locations or random numbers fairly easily though - marks in the ground or paper and pencil, for example. You'd have a huge challenge getting even the cleverest non-human animal to even use such a system, let alone invent one. Human level of intelligence is clearly far greater unless you impose some very arbitrary restrictions on human abilities so they can be beaten by some very specific animal abilities.
- EliRivers 9y ago
  A human can come up with a system to help them record hidden pine seed locations or random numbers fairly easily though - marks in the ground or paper and pencil, for example. I would suggest that the evidence indicates otherwise. Written language seems to have taken humans tens of thousands of years to work out, so coming up with that system is clearly not fairly easy. Keeping track of 50000 locations over a 15 mile radius such that they can be found again six months later in winter under a foot of snow using marks in the ground made with a stick, without a written language? That seems... difficult.
  - chimprich 9y ago
    I suspect early humans would have been able to make marks on trees to record routes or food caches for millennia before coming up with the more abstract idea of an alphabet. This would have been good enough for this task. The earliest cave paintings known are something like 40,000 years old; surely anyone capable of that could come up with a food marking strategy.
HeroOfAges 9y ago
A great deal of my thinking is done using an internal monologue. I have no problems with my hearing or speech, so that internal monologue happens to take the form of spoken language. While I don't think formal spoken language is necessary to think, I would think some sort of formal language is necessary for higher levels of thought.

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.

chimprich 9y ago

A human can come up with a system to help them record hidden pine seed locations or random numbers fairly easily though - marks in the ground or paper and pencil, for example. You'd have a huge challenge getting even the cleverest non-human animal to even use such a system, let alone invent one. Human level of intelligence is clearly far greater unless you impose some very arbitrary restrictions on human abilities so they can be beaten by some very specific animal abilities.

EliRivers 9y ago
A human can come up with a system to help them record hidden pine seed locations or random numbers fairly easily though - marks in the ground or paper and pencil, for example. I would suggest that the evidence indicates otherwise. Written language seems to have taken humans tens of thousands of years to work out, so coming up with that system is clearly not fairly easy. Keeping track of 50000 locations over a 15 mile radius such that they can be found again six months later in winter under a foot of snow using marks in the ground made with a stick, without a written language? That seems... difficult.
- chimprich 9y ago
  I suspect early humans would have been able to make marks on trees to record routes or food caches for millennia before coming up with the more abstract idea of an alphabet. This would have been good enough for this task. The earliest cave paintings known are something like 40,000 years old; surely anyone capable of that could come up with a food marking strategy.

HeroOfAges 9y ago

A great deal of my thinking is done using an internal monologue. I have no problems with my hearing or speech, so that internal monologue happens to take the form of spoken language. While I don't think formal spoken language is necessary to think, I would think some sort of formal language is necessary for higher levels of thought.