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Suppose you were born an octopus, with your current level of intelligence. What would you do? How would you demonstrate it? Note how difficult it would be to
by shawn 8y ago
Suppose you were born an octopus, with your current level of intelligence.
What would you do? How would you demonstrate it?
Note how difficult it would be to communicate.
I think many animals are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.
- tombert 8y agoI am inclined to agree; we're only semi-recently seeing that animals other than humans and chimps use tools in some fashion, and I don't even know that that by itself is a great measure.
- bdamm 8y agoIf anything it's evidence of our anthropocentric perspective. Use of tools used to be a proof of our intelligence, until people actually started studying tool use by animals and found some birds, chimps, and octopi all use tools naturally, and seals and dogs can be trained to use certain tools. Rather than declare those animals intelligent we seem to have collectively decided that tool use no longer indicates intelligence...
- AstralStorm 8y agoOctopuses are actually quite social - sending visual and tactile signals at each other. You can also spot them lying (less and more obviously) in those signals. https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-lives.html https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-live... The main difference is that they aren't pack animals like dolpins or most primates, so you get a less condensed sample.
- shawn 8y agoInteresting! I'd always heard that octopi lead a life of solitude. Thanks for sharing.
- adrianN 8y agoIt's hard to distinguish your current level of intelligence with all the stuff you've learned. Knowing what I know now I'd probably go for tapping prime number sequences on the glass, but it took millenia of humans that were basically as intelligent as me to figure out that prime numbers are interesting.
- Skrillex 8y agoThat is true. I was thinking that morse code or writing would be effective, but my knowledge of these things is not really intelligence but rather things that I learned by participating in human society.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoIf you were magically transformed into an octopus, communicating with humans would be easy; you could still write. If you were born an octopus, you wouldn't know how to write, but presumably you would be a lot more familiar with communicating with other octopuses.