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There are at least two things I think differentiate human intelligence from other animals. One is the size of the brain. Just from this difference there is prob

There are at least two things I think differentiate human intelligence from other animals. One is the size of the brain. Just from this difference there is probably no way for a pigeon to ever reach human level intelligence. The other part is perhaps more interesting. For much of human history I'm not even sure that humans could solve sokoban puzzles. In fact if you raise a human without social contact I suspect he would not be able to do it. This appears to indicate that we now have something in our environment (quite possibly what we call language) that allows us to be much more intelligent with the same DNA. Can other species with the same kind of brain complexity/power develop this? That's a very interesting question. This story [1] appears to indicate that at least raising other species as humans doesn't appear to work, but to me, this doesn't mean that there is no way of getting them to our level of intelligence, just that they don't have the same communication tools we do. [1] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/guy-simultaneously-raised-chimp-and-baby-exactly-same-way-see-what-would-happen-180952171/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/guy-simultaneously...

SonOfLilit 6y ago
I'm not sure how much I buy the "size of the brain" limitation, given the brain-size ratio between parrots and chimps hardly reflects their intelligence ratio as far as we can tell. I tend to believe any creature who has the capacity to learn language also has ehe capacity to solve Sokoban and vice-versa, so testing the easier to test of the two should be the first step and figuring how to teach them a complex language should be the second. (By the way, corvids pass such complex information that some people suspect they already have language, although I would bet against. We know of cases where people the crows hated left a place, returned years later to visit and all the local crows still hated them, and it was implied where I read it that it was long enough that it was all a new generation of crows.

SonOfLilit 6y ago

I'm not sure how much I buy the "size of the brain" limitation, given the brain-size ratio between parrots and chimps hardly reflects their intelligence ratio as far as we can tell. I tend to believe any creature who has the capacity to learn language also has ehe capacity to solve Sokoban and vice-versa, so testing the easier to test of the two should be the first step and figuring how to teach them a complex language should be the second. (By the way, corvids pass such complex information that some people suspect they already have language, although I would bet against. We know of cases where people the crows hated left a place, returned years later to visit and all the local crows still hated them, and it was implied where I read it that it was long enough that it was all a new generation of crows.