When I was little I had a small bb gun and would shoot cans in the backyard. A couple times i shot a crow and it would bounce off their strong chest and they would fly off seemingly unfazed. One time by pure chance I hit a crow in the neck and it died instantly, crashing down into my neighbor's yard. It was very shocking because I had not killed anything like that before. Immediately crows started circling my parents house, making an incredible amount of noise. I was so scared, I jumped over the fence to retrieve the dead crow. At this point crows started to dive bomb me and I thought for sure the whole neighborhood must know what is going on. I buried the crow in the backyard and the crows continued to be in high places around the house making noises until evening. The coordination and the intentional effort they made to disrupt and stop me was something I have never forgotten.
This had a big effect on me, I thought of it's family, and how they were trying to protect it. Needless to say I have not shot another bird since.
This is a hard way to learn it, but I think the recognition of non-human animals as being alive in the same way we are is quite a profound moment. Just that realisation of this thing that was previously just a robotic, animated part of "the natural world", like a blade of grass that can move, suddenly being - in its own way - related to itself and others of its species. People find this easy with pets, I guess, but I think the moment you recognise a farm or wild animal as being of a similar kind as you, it can really change your perspective.
I've never felt the desire to kill anything larger than a mosquito or fly and never have. Wanting to kill something is definitely not a feeling everyone experiences as a kid.
I had a similar experience when I was a kid shooting a .22 and was like “no way I can hit this bird” and totally did. I instantly felt like a huge prick as I stood there watching this bird die. I went back to get my gun to humanely finish it off but didn’t manage to find it again when I walked back. First and last time I’ve ever thoughtlessly harmed an animal
Angry, dive bombing birds are so horrible. I'm sure they awaken something deep within me. I once passed under a crow's nest and they warned me but apparently I didn't pass it quickly enough, and as I looked up, one had spread its wings right above me and flew right over my head! Aaaah! I didn't know how scary that was until it happened to me. And I definitely didn't expect them to look huge like that with the wingspan + surprise effect.
Your parents should have told you not to harm animals for no reason to begin with, and the fact that this isn't the takeaway from this story is frankly very concerning.
> The coordination and the intentional effort they made to disrupt and stop me was something I have never forgotten. This had a big effect on me, I thought of it's family, and how they were trying to protect it. Needless to say I have not shot another bird since.
This is the kind of dismissive response that isn't good for anyone.
It would have been much improved if you could somehow provide a foundation for why you think what you think and if you could leave the things that you literally just made up out of it.
I vibe with his comment, so I'll go to bat for his statement, even though I don't precisely know what he was going for.
Kids are very variable, and a simple one time statement of "don't hurt animals" will absolutely not move the needle much in one direction or the other as far as your kid's temperament. Some kids are inclined towards violence from a very early age. Biting, throwing rocks, eye pokes, you name it. The amount of socialization it takes to remedy this can be immense, we're talking tens of thousands of little lessons and lectures, rather than a single "don't do that".
And for what its worth, I'm speaking second hand as well. My daughter is on the complete opposite end of the violence spectrum, passive to the point of shutting down completely if someone intentionally hurts her, which is also a behavior you need to coach against for practical reasons. I've talked with parents on the violent end though, and their problem is at least an order of magnitude harder to deal with.
w.r.t. valval's comment, I agree in that I think these kinds of behaviors are mostly invisible to people not only to people without kids, but also to people whose kids haven't been the age in question in a couple of years. People forget things they themselves have experienced rather rapidly. I have lots of coworkers with multiple kids who still publicly display surprise when someone with a 0-2 year old is suddenly out frequently because their baby is sick or has a medical appointment.
I do agree that his comment is too dismissive, but I think its a reflexive response to a world at large that oversimplifies child rearing to the detriment of parents, which is how I read your comment.
Ah yes, because only parents know how to parent. It's not a qualification.
And his behaviour is certainly different from my experience as a kid of never wanting to and never actually harming anything beyond flies and mosquitos.
I've posted this comment before but I grew up in Florida on a decent amount of land for a curious child. One day I was feeding the crows some stale cuban bread, there were probably 5 of them sitting on the fence watching me throw the bread. Each one would fly down and take a piece.
One of them flew down and tumbled, his friends started laughing something fierce. His friends then all took turns mimicking his tumble in the grass, you can just tell they were laughing. One would dive bomb into the grass and flop around like an athlete faking an injury while the others were squawking up something fierce.
The article title perhaps mischaracterizes the significance of these findings.
The paper finds that Hooded crows—who are not specialized tool users—demonstrate some of the same abilities that have already been observed experimentally in New Caledonian crows—who are specialized tool makers, including:
the ability to manufacture tools from novel materials, select or manufacture a tool depending on the specifics of the task,
…etc.
The authors cite a dozen papers published over the last 20 years that have documented these findings in NC crows, as well as Goffin’s cockatoo (who, like the Hooded crow, are not specialized tool users).
The significance of this paper must be that the abilities are more widespread in crows than previously thought, which is stated in the article, but blotted out by the juicier headline.
Sometimes I wonder whether we're being watched by a super intelligent species beyond our current detection that occasionally places objects in certain configurations in front of the smarter of our species throughout history, and writes articles based on their observations titled things like, "homo sapiens smarter than previously known: demonstrates understanding of unified theory of electromagnetic waves through RF send/receive devices"
You should turn it into a short movie using AI. I have thought something similar but more along the lines that in the universe above us, we are 3 days into a science experiment and either a) they don't know we exist or b) the look in with their microscope and see patterns for cities or c) they have a statistical measure of how many have developed ecosystems and set off a nuclear weapon. But on the scales they are viewing, the known universe might fit into a 50cm sphere (their dimensions).
I also like the idea of everything being a simulation (like in Matrix) but managed/set up by an alien civilization and just experimenting or having fun with us, or us actually just being their avatars… and we are them!!! Alright, time to go to bed.
The scenario you described is what myth, tradition, fiction and science are all telling me these days.
It's not even for SciFi movies now, with VR tech and assuming we have a couple order of magnitude more compute, it's actually plausible to actually think about building the simulation for real. (Isn't that what Meta was supposed to be about?)
Honestly I envision this concept a lot; I was first inspired by Men in Black where a cat has a universe in a bauble attached to a collar around its neck. The bauble looks like a marble.
Or flip it around entirely— perhaps not this at all, because it’s the same human perception of “us smarter than them” but pretending “us” is “something else”. I like the idea that our plane of existence is present but inconsequential in some other reality— like a shadow, or gravity. It’s not that crazy of a stretch when we can barely accept that maybe the other species on our own planet can Think, it’s just a completely foreign framework of existence from what we know, so therefore, it cannot be.
In a prehistoric veld, a tribe of hominins is driven away from its water hole by a rival tribe. The next day, they find an alien monolith has appeared in their midst. The tribe then learn how to use a bone as a weapon and, after their first hunt, return to drive their rivals away with it.
Here are a few cultures bits about crows from a village in Northern India.
- If a crows is sitting near your house and screaming, you are about to get guests or visitors.
- During monsoon time, a whole month is devoted to feed your ancestors. We put food out on leafs (banana is hard to find, peepal or turai squash leaf does the job). It's mostly eaten by crows. It is believed that ancestors visit you back as crows.
I never saw local crows doing extraordinary "smart things". They were very good at stealing food: especially butter during winter. But never heard about a crow opening a latch.
While nesting, they will dip a dry branch in water to make it soft so that they can bend it without breaking when making nest.
I never liked crows as kids. They would often kill small squirrels (chipmunks rather) and sparrows whom I liked very much -- though rarely.
> This kind of feat, according to animal behavior researchers, requires the ability to form “mental templates.” Essentially, a mental template is an image in the mind of what a particular object looks like, even when that object is not present.
As someone with aphantasia, can I get points for recreating something I've seen _without_ having an "image in the mind"?
As another, I thought "mental template" is the perfect term, since it's neither image nor visual.
I assume (since you mention points), you can recreate a geometric drawing (say, a floor plan, or a bicycle*)? What would you call that if not drawing from a mental template?
* It seems, at least with bicycles, some people who do this "visually" are terrible at it: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/can-draw-bikes-memory-definite... ... I look at those, and think, how T.F. do they think that would work? Then I realize they aren't thinking how it works to draw it, they are drawing what they see and they don't look at things closely enough to understand their shape.
I actually quite like the term “mental template” but then they immediately equated it to an image.
The best way I can describe my aphantasia is that I think about objects three dimensionally. There’s nothing visual about it, but I can think about the relation of “points” (really surfaces) in terms of the whole.
Yes. I think this is one that is non-euphemistically "differently abled".
Given a choice, I would trade the postcard recall ability for the ability to multi-dimensionally map concepts and then "see" the gaps, as if a periodic table missing some elements, so you know what key areas need working on even though (because) they aren't in evidence.
As another someone with aphantasia, I remember what something looks like, so I draw what I remember. That memory is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like. For simple things, that's enough. For complicated things, I sketch out what I remember of the overall appearance, look at it and gauge how far off it is and what is off, and add in details to gradually reduce the difference.
I'm not a very good artist, so it'll always look kind of bad, though oddly it doesn't feel like aphantasia is all that much of an obstacle to my ability to draw. It's more just skill in making things look "right", skill that is learnable and seems like is necessary to learn by anyone, include those without aphantasia.
It's difficult to communicate to someone without aphantasia, because to them apparently the memory of what something looks like is an image. It's similar to the question about whether I dream in color. I mean, I dream in color just as much as I read in color. If asked, I could tell you what color something is. It's part of my knowledge of what that thing looks like. But knowing what color something is and seeing the thing in color are definitely not the same. I don't dream in images at all. I certainly don't dream in "black and white". Colors and grayscales only have meaning in an image.
(And maybe it's just me, but if the color of something never strikes me as an important characteristic, I will have no memory of what color the thing is. Right now, I couldn't tell you what color the walls of the next room over are, despite seeing it every day. Even though I could probably roughly model the entire room and get the dimensions and positions of everything about right.)
Though I'm skeptical that "normal" people are as restricted to images as their descriptions often imply. Not everything is 2D, so memories are going to have to include at least some shape information. And I'm sure you have all kinds of associations of the texture and feel of things you visualize, and if it's prickly how much it would hurt to bump into it or hold it in your hand. Memories are rich multi-sensory things, and they aren't just limited to point-in-time sensations either.
Interestingly, your description of remembering what something looks like matches my experience exactly, but in my dreams I see vividly. Aphantasic except in my dreams?
Are you ever able to control your dreams? And if you are do you lose “video” on them but still retain perception on what is happening? That’s how I and other aphantasics I know experience it
I don’t know if it’s true for others with aphantasia but this seems like solid description to me.
I draw a square by knowing that squares are closed objects with four equal length sides that meet at 90 degree angles. I don’t think that explicitly every time, but regardless there's no visual stimuli.
Somewhat? But I think it might lead you slightly astray. With SVG text, there's an interpretation step to get to the image. If you ask a question about the image represented by the SVG, you'd probably do SVG --> image --> result. With my memory of what something looks like, I don't really process it into an intermediate image form, even if I'm drawing something out. For the above example, it's more like memory --> result. More similar to a regular person's image --> result than something like memory --> visual representation --> result. In all cases, some sort of processing happens on the --> lines.
My knowledge of what a square looks like includes the right angles at the corners, the equal length of the sides, the alignment with one side at the bottom (not part of the mathematical definition, note), some sense I can't describe of the overall shape, the closed shape, the straight sides, etc. Some of it corresponds directly to mathematical notions, some of it is the feel, some of it is associations with how they work in practice or where they've shown up. When drawing it, I rely mostly on the straight sides, the 90° angles, and the closed shape. I'm not logically figuring out what those together imply, I just start with drawing a straight line segment and then close it off with 3 more segments at right angles to each other, and confirm that it looks right at the end. If you ask me what part would be most painful to bump into, I do something very close to visualizing the pointy corners, but I don't picture them so much as retrieve my association with their sharpness.
Dunno if this makes sense or how generalizable this is to other people, I'm just kind of laying out my stream of consciousness impressions of my brain's workings.
Fun facts, according to Quran in human very first murder crime when one of Adam's sons killed his younger brother out of disagreement on offerings to God, the crow showed him how to properly bury the dead body:
Then Allah sent a crow digging a grave in the ground for a dead crow, in order to show him how to bury the corpse of his brother. He cried, “Alas! Have I even failed to be like this crow and bury the corpse of my brother?” So he became regretful.
Do you have to have seen a human die to know that a human could die? Surely Cain had seen plenty of animals die. I think you might not be giving Cain enough credit (or maybe too much credit) by assuming he couldn’t have put 2 and 2 together
I think I've come to an inevitable conclusion that there appears to be at least two "sources" of intelligence, genetic, and (I guess for lack of a better word), "learned". Learned could mean all kinds of things, the capacity measurement of IQ, the effort by parents to fill that capacity, social normative steering, whatever.
But genetic really means "instinct" in the way that a day old deer can stand, run, graze (I live in an area with lots of deer, so I get a first-hand chance to observe them).
Suppose a sci-fi story, where humans encounter a fantastically advanced alien species. Over the course of the story events occur where individuals in the alien species see not learn anything at all, while later generations seem imbued with those same learnings. What humans are encountering might be instead incredibly advance, and highly encoded instinct.
Is that not intelligence?
I'm reminded of the schools of buddhism, where a differentiation is that you are able to achieve enlightenment in one-lifetime or in many.
The main distinction between life and non-life appear to be the ability to experience the universe. A blade of grass is alive no different than a human, but entirely different from a rock. Experience seems to be some kind of basis for intelligence, without which it cannot exist, thus perhaps, all experiential beings are intelligent in some way.
Every living thing has survived everything its ancestors' environment threw at them and made it to "now".
"Intelligence" should be adaptive, and general purpose.
Complex systems that are unable to grow or change are basically the definition of an unliving "mechanism", contrasted against an intelligent mind/being.
Yeah there's definitely instinctual and then "lived/learnt" intelligence. Not sure about the biological mechanism for the latter becoming the former.
I was thinking about this the other day actually, how all of our advanced behaviours and emotions and society are really just formed on the foundation of basic biological principles/evolution. Every supposedly complex behavior can be explained by this.
The ultimate meaning of life is to live long enough to pass on genes if you're fit enough to make this happen, then you age and for all your learned experience you will become slow and eventually be the gazelle at the rear of the herd that the lions catch, saving the younger newer generations. With the possibility of one of those younger gazelle also dying beside you, if it wasn't aware or fast enough - preventing it from passing on genes.
Even complex and strong emotions were evolved for a purpose, those that could empathise and work together did better, same with language. Then we get side effects like depression etc in the same way that you can physically injure ourself, our minds can be injured as well.
Basically spent a couple hours thinking about the future of machine learning.
I have always loved crows. I used to carry a bag of unshelled peanuts in my car to feed to them if I saw them. One day I was pulled over and saw a lone crow. So I threw a peanut and watched him open it easily with his beak and eat the nuts. Then I threw 2 peanuts and he picked up both in it's mouth and flew a short distance away and ate them. I always new crows could fit 2 peanuts but not 3 so I thought what would you do if I throw 3? So I do and for a moment he tries to fit all of them in his mouth but can not. So he flies about 15 feet away to a cement path walkway and on the side of it I watched him bury one of the peanuts. Smart I thought. Then he immediately flew back and grab the other nuts. I have always been impressed by that moment.
There are tons of crows around my house. I feed them, I know them, they know me, but they are so hard to become friends with. They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence. Otheriwse, they are probably the best parents among the birds. They little ones have such characters and the entire extended family takes care of them.
"Intelligence" may imply "not uselessly exposing yourself to danger". As long as they don't know what they could win by becoming more familiar there is no reason for them to do so. You may try to let them discover such a reason...
Humans are probably the most unpredictable beings the crows have seen.
How would they ever know you're not a threat for sure? Usually, it's hard for a human to kill another (unless with a lethal weapon and lots of intention), but it's really easy for a human to kill a bird, even recklessly or carelessly.
Note that humans in developed societies are generally much "nicer" than what we have been for thousands of years. And even so, for many individuals today, they're not different from our barbaric ancestors...
"They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence."
Frankly, you don't have enough information for that conclusion.
First of all, from a bird's point of view, we are massive, clumsy and extremely powerful creatures the size of a 10-story building. If I had to live around such creatures, I would keep my distance just in case. Something that big can hurt you even without intending to do so.
Second, you don't really know if they can trust you. It is entirely possible that someone else in your neighbourhood / region fed them, gained their trust, then hurt them (or maybe "just" captured them for some time etc., an ornithologist would do). In that case, once bitten, twice shy. Most long-lived smart birds probably witnessed their kin being killed by humans; people would be expected to suffer from a bit of PTSD after that.
Third, there may be other factors at play. For example, you might smell bad to them. We generally underestimate olfactory impressions, but few of us would love to be close friends with someone who smelt strongly of, say, gasoline. Personally, I have the experience that ticks avoid me, I had just three in my entire life, approximately once in a decade, even though I go to nature fairly frequently and Czech woods are infested like hell. I must be repulsive to them.
If you have a cat or a dog, they might be smelling them off you.
I have watched crows wait at stoplights in order to cross the road, even when flying over it would have taken a few seconds. It’s funny how the sign of intelligence in this case was laziness.
I have crows nesting in a tree just outside my house. Crows are monogamous, so I see the same pair flying together all the time. Several months ago, they started to look a bit frazzled, they have chicks growing up. So I started giving them bits of food (meats and thawed mice).
They are now bringing me pieces of colored glass :) They also caw if I wave at them.
> Crows are monogamous, so I see the same pair flying together all the time.
We see hundreds of crows every morning and dusk. Even close up, I’m hard pressed to distinguish most of them from one another. Perhaps ours in Southern California are more uniform than yours? Or perhaps you’re viewing them with binoculars?
Their nest is about 15 meters from my window, and they often sit on a fence about 5 meters from my window. And because it's always the same pair, you learn how they look after a while.
I probably won't be able to distinguish them in a big flock, but we only have a few crows that regularly fly around my area.
Recently, their chicks also started flying around, so I also keep seeing them. They are slightly smaller, with really nice glossy "baby" feathers.
Make sure you are kind to our crow friends, judging by the trajectory of these articles I fear their intelligence is growing as fast as ours is dropping.
While that's definitely a joke, I wouldn't be that surprised by a human getting outwitted by a crow even today.
We have come a long way from Descartes argument that animals are no more than automata. Which supported our unabashed exploitation of countless species.
It is now abundantly clear that animals have their own phenomenological experience of the world, and their intelligence is part of a continuum, shaped mostly to survive in their niches. And some species demonstrate a higher level of general intelligence - something in which we are quite easily the best.
Although, it's worth noting that some cultures (Buddhists or Jain's for example) did give animals their due with respect to their lives and intelligence.
Descartes couldn't figure out how humans weren't automata either. That's where his explanations start getting supernatural, and not particularly insightful. Any kook can babble on about an invisible pineal gland soul-thread.
edit: I think the interesting thing for people is how insight like Descartes' becomes useless when he tries to distinguish us from automata.
It's not abundantly clear what the ability to have phenomenological "experiences" means in relation to our moral values regarding what we shouldn't do with the creature. I mean, we do have moral values about animal rights, but they start with the animals we actually relate to (pets) and are in essence human rights by proxy. Then out of a sense of consistency we try to extend these rights to all the wild animals, many of them busily eating one another and blatantly not caring about nice things or participating in our value system.
As far as I can tell, current theories are that animals are also somewhat conscious and intelligent, but that we're all, including humans, automata, with zero or near zero free will.
I don't even know what that means or why it worries people, I think it's a big red herring. (And near-zero is a confusing concept.) We're machines that make choices, spontaneously and deterministically (which is not a contradiction). People fretting about free will are getting caught in some kind of category error that confuses the physics of time with being controlled by an invisible tyrant.
Law is one practical aspect of free will that people generally don't talk much about.
For example, criminal law generally assumes people have free will, and thus should be responsible for their actions. If we take the stance that people are in fact merely deterministically doing what they are fated to do given circumstances, some of the punishments doled out to convicts might make people feel uneasy. (Eg. if being poor made the person commit theft... shouldn't we tackle the issue of poverty instead of locking up starving people?)
Contract law also assumes people are free to make agreements. Like, signing a contract with onerous terms because that's the only option a person has to avoid something worse.
In short, free will provides a kind of cop out for moral philosophers to blame individuals for their own failures. You may or may not agree with this approach, I'm not advocating for or against, but anyway that's one of the practical consequences of free will.
Funny, to me it seems people talk about this one a lot. And the same answer applies. Yes, we have free will and responsibility (because we can respond). Also yes, we do what we do because of physical mechanisms which means you could say we're "fated" (leaving aside the irrelevant complication of chance and probability).
However, the law is only concerned with people doing (codified) wrong. It lets people off for being insane, because dealing with insanity falls outside of its mission. And similarly it can let people off on compassionate grounds, if for instance they stole food due to being hungry due to poverty. Punishing people for bad luck isn't its mission either. And a contract signed under duress isn't supposed to be valid, because the law's mission isn't to enable formalized bullying. Of course in reality the law is sketchy, lacks compassion, fails to recognize forms of duress. But generally speaking the idea is that it's restricted to the bad things a person freely did, as opposed to things that happened to the person.
So then you might say, well, do we freely do anything at all, because it's all just physics and mechanisms. But a lot of the mechanisms are in our brains, thinking sanely (if immorally), so yes, we do act freely, when not coerced.
It's important to separate the part of fate which is the things we're probably going to think, which is our responsibility, from the part of fate which is the things that the outside world is probably going to do to us, which is outside of our responsibility.
I'm not sure I get your point -- it looks like you're starting from the conclusion that people do have free will, which of course does not create problems I mentioned.
What I was trying to say is that if one believes determinism is incompatible with the concept of free will, then they cannot think the law is fair because nothing has free will. And I'm hypothesizing that people who think that way might be a bit queasy about determinism etc.
FWIW, I personally believe free will exists for reasons outside the scope of this discussion, and I doubt it's necessary to conclude first whether it exists or not to get my original point across...
This isn't surprising. Birds are incredibly intelligent, and crows/ravens are up there. Magpies too. We have grackles here in Houston; those fuckers are clever as well!
This is just as interesting as any other article on finding that X can do Y where X isn’t human and Y is a behavior that humans value.
What would be even more amazing to me is finding cognitive things that other animals do that humans can’t. Of course, many humans can’t do mental math so … maybe the quest is ill defined?
Some marine mammals can do cognitive things with 3D echolocation that humans can't. (A few visually impaired people have learned to do a bit of echolocation but in a much more limited way.) Cephalopods use multiple mini-brains to independently control their arms in a way humans can't.
The only bit of animal behaviour research I have ever found to be really interesting or meaningful is that on cephalopods. Their nervous system is very different to ours, and it seems like that difference shows clearly in their learning abilities.
Aren't humans a bit lacking in the "instinct" department? I don't think we can do something as complex as say a spiderweb without needing time to learn or first.
We put a lot of effort and funding into trying to contact other intelligent lifeforms in this universe. Why should we believe we can understand each other if we can't even understand the intelligent lifeforms right next to us?
Because symbolic communication is vastly simpler to define and use and translate than non-symbolic communication.
If whale songs and crow language could be written down in discrete symbols, we could figure them out too.
And with higher intelligence we assume that the symbolic language of mathematics will be a universally shared starting point.
The kind of analog pattern-matching required to decipher animal language seems to be notoriously difficult to do if your brain doesn't already come with the right analog "circuits".
I definitely hope that we'll have an AI breakthrough at some point that can decipher animal language, however. One thing's for sure though -- it won't be LLM's since they operate at a symbolic level.
“Science? Nonsense! In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally useless! I must tell you that we really have no desire to conquer any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth up to its borders. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle to make contact, but we'll never achieve it. We are in a ridiculous predicament of man pursuing a goal that he fears and that he really does not need. Man needs man."
The article could be clearer how many shapes they had to train to and something like complexity eg vertex count. A triangle and a square can be a judgement call when you're using your beak to tear it off.
I'd worry "eh good enough" is distorting the outcome.
I think there is an intelligence / co-operation grid where low intelligence high co-operation gets you herd like protective nature but crows aren’t great on co-operation - not at herd scale
Intelligent sparrows though - that would be deeply scary
I once had the opportunity to watch two crows attacking a swarm of sparrows.
I've never seen birds hunting birds before so it made me watch the whole scene for 3-5min and I was baffled how the crows systematically 1) induced chaos trying to isolate a sparrow from the swarm then 2) killed it and 3) while one crow was busy eating it the other crow kept the infuriated swarm at distance. After a while 4) the crows changed jobs.
Corvids and parrots upended our beliefs about bird intelligence and made us realize there's more than one way to organize a brain. We still have a lot to learn about them.
It cuts both ways. We've discounted animal abilities out of arrogance, but we've also paid attention to those abilities that most remind us of ourselves.
In this case, crows are doing something that is interesting but doesn't appear to be spontaneous tool-making but rather a form of mimicry that may have hard-wired instinctive basis. Is it human-like learning? Is it "smart" the way a human is smart? Doesn't look like it.
We're finding through LLM research that smaller models aren't necessarily dumber, so much as their intelligence is more limited in terms of domains and knowledge encoding ability. Those small brains might have limited knowledge encoding ability, but that doesn't mean they can't reason about the things they have encoded.
What does size have to do with anything? We should not assume that the human brain size to brain capability ratio is the highest in nature, or even that it’s in the top half of all creatures.
Humans are just arrogant and overconfident. We’re an incredibly flawed species and we’ve created incredibly flawed societies.
Maybe not surprising, but exciting! This kind of pessimistic take is what really surprises me. Crows can make mental templates, this is something we didn't know earlier, and is really neat, as far as I can tell.
1. we do not live underwater, so lots of tools and stuff possible (iE: fire).
2. we have usable hands with thumbs. This allows much better tooling. Ravens only have their beak and are comparatively handicapped in technical developments.
3. we do not die during/after reproduction. This allows for accumulation of knowledge instead of every generation starting to learn from scratch. That’s octopus handicap.
4. we have reasonably enough raw strength and compensate weaknesses with social groups and tools/weapons to eliminate basically all competition where we lived. And managed to increase food production for exponential population growth, again some way of tooling ultimately.
… so it for me boils down to the fact that we, among several intelligent species, have been the lucky ones to leverage tooling in the most efficient way.
And especially ravens/crows are absolutely in the ballpark of humans when it comes to intelligence. They have actual language to communicate facts to others, they have social structures/rituals similar to ours, they make tools to accomplish goals, even with multi-step-plans. Heck, they even „use“ other animals like wolves: since they are not capable of opening a fresh deer corpse to get to the meat, they search for the nearest wolf and guide him to the corpse for win-win food sharing… some wolf packs have even been seen essentially protecting raven flocks/eggs, so ravens literally can have kinda dogs.
I agree, it’s likely many subtle, accumulated factors.
I think the interesting question, that we may never be able to answer, is whether crow intelligence is such that they could have developed on our trajectory as well, had things been different. Or is our intelligence, while similar to crows and other animals in many ways, fundamentally different in some way? Or was early hominid intelligence middle of the pack and it was just the other factors you mentioned that gave it the edge it needed?
That seems true, and yet when we try to pin down specific differences there always seem to be exceptions. Like chimpanzees making stone tools. There's a spectrum of intelligence, not a binary difference between humans and everything else.
Ravens are bigger than crows. They also have diamond tails, throat feathers, and deeper sounds. Ravens also travel in pairs while crows are frequently in groups.
"If you see a corvid and think, 'ooh, is that a raven?', then it's a crow. If you instead think, 'dear lord that's the biggest bird I've ever seen', then it's a raven."
Their intelligence was clear to me growing up around them, without knowing anything about crows specifically. They clearly have intelligent interactions with each other and the environment, and have a "theory of mind" of people approaching them/interacting with them. They could also figure out how to open/untie garbage bags, gang up to bully other birds and take their food, etc. In the mornings, right outside our house, they would congregate on a tall pine tree and it really looked like they were having a daily standup - one of them yells loudly, others listen silently, then start making noise together :)
Some years ago I started leaving food in my patio for one crow that lived in an electric post nearby. Then he started leaving random shiny stuff in the outside table: pieces of metal, coins and once an SD card. The most suprising thing to me was that the stuff was always in the exact center of the round table.
same what is amazing is that they seem to know we are attracted to shiny stuff: constantly glancing at our phones, counting coins, jewelry
i dont know if this urban legend is true but apparently one guy was raking in a few hundred bucks a month by training crows to find coins and cash on the street
Communicating about something not immediately present is called displacement [1] and it's a property of language, not limited to vocalization, thought to be unique to just a few species: humans, ants, bees, corvids, etc.
Of course animals can form mental representations of shapes. Do you think they wouldn’t be able to form a mental representation of another one of their species? Their surroundings? Objects they commonly interact with?
It’s getting them to reproduce it on command that’s tricky, but that has nothing to do with their capabilities
Crows are definitely smart, but I've seen other birds outsmarting them before. It seems to me that social behavior is a bit overweighted when it comes to attempting to measure animal intelligence.
Input Story
Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates (www.bbc.com)
690.0 by hhs None None | hide | comments
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Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates (https://www.bbc.com) similar stories
690 by hhs 38929 12/11/2019, 11:51:28 PM | hide | 356 comments
2.
When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015) (http://news.nationalgeographic.com) similar stories
626 by reimertz 6120 7/19/2016, 8:38:24 PM | hide | 227 comments
3.
Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute (https://www.statnews.com) similar stories
679 by felixbraun 2132 9/24/2020, 3:37:33 PM | hide | 377 comments
4.
How to Befriend Crows (https://fediscience.org) similar stories
800 by karmanyaahm 1146 12/26/2022, 10:27:11 AM | hide | 212 comments
5.
A girl who gets gifts from birds (https://www.bbc.com) similar stories
506 by th0br0 1454 2/26/2015, 6:10:40 AM | hide | 136 comments
6.
Crows found to be smarter than we think (https://www.wsj.com) similar stories
108 by lxm 137238 11/3/2022, 12:14:24 PM | hide | 91 comments
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Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020) (https://www.statnews.com) similar stories
368 by SubiculumCode 5082 3/24/2022, 11:23:05 AM | hide | 217 comments
8.
Japan Fights Crowds of Crows (2008) (https://www.nytimes.com) similar stories
81 by DyslexicAtheist 33392 6/1/2018, 7:38:56 AM | hide | 83 comments
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Scientists Have Found Another Species of Crow That Uses Tools (http://www.theatlantic.com) similar stories
198 by okket 40747 9/14/2016, 2:11:22 PM | hide | 103 comments
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Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim (https://www.scientificamerican.com) similar stories
111 by kposehn 13804 11/5/2022, 1:21:56 PM | hide | 95 comments
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Ravens score just as high as big-brained chimps on cognitive tests (http://arstechnica.com) similar stories
160 by shawndumas 66678 4/20/2016, 7:18:38 PM | hide | 60 comments
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The Secret Lives of Urban Crows (https://www.seattlemet.com) similar stories
106 by robteix 2074 11/21/2017, 9:41:28 AM | hide | 23 comments
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Crows can perform as well as 7- to 10-year-olds on cause-and-effect tasks (http://www.news.ucsb.edu) similar stories
179 by evo_9 57420 7/25/2014, 11:39:58 AM | hide | 72 comments
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A bird feeder that accepts bottle caps for food (https://www.boredpanda.com) similar stories
368 by matthewsinclair 2368 11/22/2020, 2:16:57 PM | hide | 102 comments
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Footage of Australian Raven Attacking a Wing Drone in Canberra, Australia (https://www.linkedin.com) similar stories
240 by adrian_mrd 15030 9/20/2021, 3:20:08 AM | hide | 323 comments
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Ravens parallel great apes in flexible planning for tool-use, bartering (2017) (https://science.sciencemag.org) similar stories
72 by jelliclesfarm 11691 6/26/2019, 3:55:17 PM | hide | 47 comments
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How to tell a raven from a crow (2012) (https://www.audubon.org) similar stories
210 by souterrain 1216 4/14/2019, 7:25:56 AM | hide | 100 comments
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Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero (https://www.quantamagazine.org) similar stories
231 by digital55 12579 8/10/2021, 10:21:10 AM | hide | 150 comments
19.
The Crow Whisperer: What happens when we talk to animals? (https://harpers.org) similar stories
133 by drdee 5054 4/12/2021, 10:23:44 PM | hide | 74 comments
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How Animals Perceive the World (https://www.theatlantic.com) similar stories
80 by pseudolus 150124 6/14/2022, 4:37:46 PM | hide | 17 comments
Have posted this before, but it really left an impression about crows, and the bond between their mates:
Years ago I was putting out the garbage in the back alley behind our building where I lived on the 8th floor. A crow attacked me out of the blue. Distracted by the attack, the back door slammed shut behind me. Since my key was only good for the front door, I had to walk around the building. That damn crow followed me the entire time, dive bombing my head, and screaming bloody murder at me. It was a little spooky.
When I finally got back inside and upstairs, I went and looked out the living room window, which looked out the same direction as the back alley. The crow had flown back around and was at the 8th floor looking in the window, from the other side of the pigeon netting we had on our balcony. On the inside of the pigeon netting, was another crow, desperately trying to figure out how it could escape. Not really sure how it had got itself through the pigeon netting in the first place.
I went out and sliced a hole through the netting and the trapped crow quickly joined its mate outside, who finally stopped screaming bloody murder. To this day it still amazes me that the crow's mate, knew which apartment I lived in and spotted me downstairs.
"In a creative experiment that relied on rubber masks of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other distinctive mugs, researchers have shown that American crows have an uncanny ability to pick a familiar human face out of a crowd."
I vaguely remember a doco (about a study?) where they established similar fear in crows using similar masks. They tracked these crows, waited for them to breed, and tested how the babies responded. Saw this over a decade ago now I'd guess, so my memory is fuzzy, but IIRC the takeaway was that the parent crows were able to communicate the knowledge to their offspring that these masks were bad news.
My dad always told a story about a guy at work who spotted a crow nest not too far up a tree and decided he would steal the baby crow and raise it. The crows attacked him as he did it and in the end the baby crow died in his care. Sad. But at least after that my dad said every single day he would pull up to work and if any crows were there they would dive bomb him. Only him. My dad said this carried on for years.
Assuming that the crows attacking years later were not conveyed a detailed account of the original events, this is an interesting model also applies to many human group behaviors:
"this is the guy we hate, it gives a great feeling of community expressing that hate. Yeah, there's probably a reason why we hate him, but that's besides the point"
A friend used to jog around the university I worked at; he'd jog past an area that, for a month out of the year, was under a hawk nest. He came by commenting that he'd been dive-bombed by a hawk that was obviously guarding it's nest he said it had bonked him on the head and yelled at him -- he decided not to go jogging that way for a while after. I was kinda impressed that the hawk had "bonk human on head" mode as well as "use lethal claws to kill things and eat them later" mode -- seemed like an interesting level of restraint to bonk but not cut the human.
That the crow had a mental map of the building sufficiently detailed to know "human on 8th floor may be able to help Charles get out out of net in front of human's cliff cave if I yell at him" seems several orders of magnitude more complex...
I've had owls do the same thing, and thankfully without talons in full attack mode. "Aggressive owls" weren't a thing I recall growing up in the Midwest, but they're sure in the Pacific Northwest.
It has been established already that crows remember human faces for years, that they mourn, and that they attack people they associate with the death of their mates (while being quite friendly with other people they know well).
About 6 eagles live nearby. I often see them circling overhead hunting wabbits. (Occasionally they'll bag a small aircraft.) One day, I was out for a walk and one of them was gliding at eye level and passed me. I could have touched its wingtip it was so close.
My gawd, what a magnificent bird. I then understood why combat pilots would paint them on the sides of their fighters. It was much bigger than I realized, and the size of those talons - I was not going to get it mad at me!
Raptor talons are really serious weapons - they are the killing mechanism, not the beak. In larger birds comparable to a Rottweiler’s jaw in power. They also have a ratchet-like behaviour, so the bird has to actually want to let you go once you have been grabbed, and struggling usually only makes the bird grip harder
Oh yea, their claws are wild. I got to experience the Tucson Desert Museum demo[0] (it's still going, but this was 16+ years ago)... it's amazing. The falconer had a leather covered arm even though the bird is a close friend.
They are smart AF, but watch out for the beak too if it's injured/scared. A vet told me, if you handle a raptor, protect your hands, they can take a chunk.
yeah, I volunteer at a UK raptor conservancy. For handling most of the birds a falconer's glove is okay but for the bald eagle we have a long leather guard for the whole arm - it's actually a boot that someone cut the foot off. A couple of the handlers describe being seriously gripped by a bird - you just have to keep still and grin and bear it until the bird decides to let go.
I got a scratch on the side of my head once from a black kite that 'clonked' me with its talons as it flew past but this was just messing about, not a serious attack.
One other thing is how I would feed the birds. Some of them (e.g. a hooded vulture) I would pass food to their beak with my bare hand but with other birds this would be a good way to lose a finger.
Also, their Egyptian vulture likes playing with shoe laces (undoing them by pulling) and also tugging on leg hair if you are wearing shorts. The Yellow-billed kites like grabbing people's hats if they are wearing them.
If the crows who live in the area didn't do this for every other day, but only on that ocassion - and stopped when the issue was solved, I don't think we need to establish anything, it's kind of established already.
> and neglect any other human walking by this back alley
Not just the back alley. The back alley itself has nothing specifically to do with it. The test would have to be something like the crow attacks this person but not anyone else around the building generally. That doesn't really make a lot of sense from the crows perspective either though... it's concerned with the plight of its mate, so why focus instead on a random person who's a decent distance away unless it can perceive a specific connection, e.g., by recognizing them.
It's moot anyway. I think it's pretty well established crows can recognize human faces.
The idea is that we already are sure they attack there, and therefore limiting the experiment to this back alley may be sufficient: there is no immediate need to extend the perimeter to the whole zone around building, however if the experiment fails it may be considered.
> it's pretty well established
IMHO an experiment gets better with each neglected assumption.
They'd still be better than cheap drones at remote pick-pocketing - if you could train them to spot and snatch coins and bills.
I was wondering about the opposite too. Could you train a crow to watch you throw a marker, say a pebble of specific color, and then fly to the location it landed to perform specific action? Say, if we go for personal mischief instead of warfare:
- red marker = find whatever interesting object there is (e.g. man-made things it can carry, or money), and fetch it;
- blue marker = grab a payload from you and deposit it at location (e.g. a piece of paper, a "stinky bomb")
- orange marker = hover over location for a while, or explore it (useful with e.g. crow-mounted camera; throw marker over a fence or on a roof, get footage of place you can't get to)
- violet marker = make noise, scare away meanest looking people or animals near target (say, to chase away partying college students that decided to occupy the nearby children playground before sundown, or to remind the neighbor blasting his car radio at 5:30 in the morning that there exists small children, or decency, or noise rules) (both totally random hypothetical scenarios, yes); alternatively, to patrol the area for a while and make noise if people show up;
- rose marker = find nearest switch or lever, flick it;
Etc.
Of course the crow would need to be trained to fetch the marker back after executing the action, as to prevent accidental repeat actions, make markers reusable, and ensure there's no evidence left behind :).
I suspect they would be difficult to train, because of their attitude. We see this with many wild animals. Dogs train easily, but coyotes and wolves, who are even smarter, are much more difficult to train.
One of my favorite nature vignettes, is a part of Planet Earth, by the BBC, about Cape Hunting Dogs[0]. It looks like a military assault. They are really clever, and work well, as a team.
But if you could train crows, they would probably be marvelous.
Train is a bit of a shorthand here, though. Basic operant conditioning probably won't cut it. But the idea itself came to me after encountering similar thread about crows on HN many years ago - both comments and referenced articles would contain personal anecdotes about human-crow relationships, and from those I gathered that it's possible to kind of befriend a crow (or a group), and teach them behaviors as a kind of play.
So, I don't expect it's easy to train crows like dogs and pigeons, where one person "pre-trains" them and gives/sells them to someone else. But I think it should be possible to "train" a crow for yourself - bond with it and have it voluntarily indulge you reliably enough that it's pretty much like training.
It’s interesting how our view of animal intelligence is massively shaped by the animals we see every day - pets, farm animals, zoo animals. All animals that have had their natural intelligence degraded substantially.
Honey badgers? I visited a place in Africa where a pair were housed in an old tile-sided swimming pool because they could get through anything else. Until someone left a long-handled garden tool in there and they used it to climb out. One of the two was never seen again. The other was caught in a lion enclosure - it had cornered of the lions who was trying to avoid a fight, allegedly.
Pigeons were used in WW1 and WW2 for communication. Paddy the pigeon [0] flew 230 miles across the English channel to relay the success of the D-Day invasion.
I've known about pigeons being used for communications and even bottle-nose dolphins being used for clearing mines in WW2. But I'm just curious if they've ever attempted to use crows for reconnaissance or early warning systems. Especially for use at something like forward operating bases that are always prone to enemy ambushes. Or maybe even using crows to alert of enemy movements.
I watched a video earlier today on a YT channel I follow called Curious Droid. This episode went into how the U.S military had a hard time determining vietcong troop movements due to the thick jungle foilege. So DARPA developed this concept of electronic fenses, where the airforce would drop these sensor packages into the jungle. The package would have sesmic sensors and microphones to capture movement of enemy forces through the jungle. The problem was that this being the 1960s/70s - the batteries only lasted couple of weeks. Also data storage and tranmission rates weren't advance enough at the time to send that information to a centralize location far from the contested area. So they had to have an aircraft loitering above to collect this data and then fly the collected data to a processing facility in Thailand. By the time the data was classified and analyized, the intelligence collected wasn't really actionable for the commanders in the field.
I find it fascinating how scientists still haven't definitively figured out how magnetoreception in birds works. Humans have utilized homing pigeons for thousands of years [1], but it is still a mystery as to how it works. To quote a paper from 2019 [2]:
> Yet in spite of considerable progress in recent years, many details are still unclear, among them details of the radical pair processes and their transformation into a nervous signal, the precise location of the magnetite-based receptors and the centres in the brain where magnetic information is combined with other navigational information for the navigational processes.
Hilariously, during WW2 there was also a research project to build guided missiles using pigeons in the nose cone. "The nose cone of the missile would be split into three compartments, with a lens projecting an image of the intended target onto a screen at the front. A pigeon in each compartment, trained by operant conditioning to recognise the target, would peck at it continually."
Triangulation of the sender (or the receiver by way of emissions of the receiving set) was a problem in WWII. There's also the problem of traffic analysis. I would think birds would be immune to both.
ISTR a study where someone tried to train crows to collect litter in return for small food treats. It worked fine until the crows discovered some old pizza and decided it was better than the study's rewards.
Not sure it is necessary as the captive crow may communicate it status (croaking "I'm trapped" or "I'm free") with this one, but it would be an insight.
I'm not sure I understand. I'm referring to the assailant crow that allegedly flew around the building and up to the balcony while the original poster was indoors ascending to the eighth floor. I'm not sure how it can be known, given the details in the post, that the assailing crow wasn't a third crow other than the two on the balcony.
We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully. If we accept that human children are smart, then we must accept that species at equivalent levels of cognition are as well.
Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart, and more intelligent than a human child.
Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life. It feels to me a bit like thinking the earth is the center of the universe. Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.
I like the sentiment, but human children who are 2 completely dominate all known animal intelligence. They can speak in sentences and use tools in complex ways. There may be studies that show a raven might use a stick to help it find food. Well, a two year old will carry a stool halfway across the house to reach the scissors that will open a bag of veggie straws :) At 3 they can recognize letters _easily_ and start learning how to read. At 4 they can with a bit of practice learn the piece moves of chess and start strategizing.
Animals can definitely be intelligent, and we should learn more about them and how they perceive the world, but when you play with a 2.5 year old for five minute there is no doubt that humanity is beyond special.
The real separation (and is something that comes long after 2 years of age in humans) is the ability to observe one's thoughts. I totally get that dolphins and elephants and many "big brain" mammals can have social structures, long memories, and the ability to pass down behaviors directly (e.g. "here's how you hunt fish effectively" may not be in dolphin genes, but they do a damn good job of it, or also the "fads" of orcas like the "salmon hat" or, more recently, attacking sailboats).
The absolutely blistering pace a child can learn at, though, is indeed quite a sight to behold.
One interesting aside in this article was that the crows don't teach each other how to make tools. But a child might steal a tool from a parent and work it out. This demonstrates the problem solving type of intelligence, working out how to reshape a wire to a useful shape for instance. But not a 'higher' intelligence teaching or demonstrating to others. Which is kind of odd, as I see young birds following their parents and imitating and learning. So I guess this shows parent birds don't teach, but young birds instinctively follow around and learn?
In the time it took me to learn a new programming language, my kid learned how to be a whole entire human being. Including free thought and autocorrect mode. I don’t know what makes us special in the animal kingdom, but watching that happen certainly feels special. Do whales feel the same way about their young?
Whales almost certainly do not feel the same way. They feel like whales about their young. That's not to discount whales: that feeling may be profound and emotional for them. But it's probably alien to the human experience.
I’m sure their sensory experience is different from ours, but is the feeling truly alien? We share enough genetics to share the same brain chemicals, for one
For starters, whales aren't tool users. So it'd be something of a surprise if evolution had programmed them to feel joy when their offspring use tools. Humans, on the other hand, seem to get a bit of a kick out of teaching other people (especially kids) to do things which makes a lot of evolutionary sense given how strategically central tools are to our species.
I feel that people who study animal intelligence started with the dictum "don't assume similarity to humans" and immediately interpreted it as "assume dissimilarity to humans".
I've interacted with 6 month old puppies that can outsmart a 2-3 year old human baby.
Fawns/calves/... can walk almost as soon as they are born. It takes humans far longer to learn that.
If you put a 2-year old human child with every single possible benefit on its own into the wild, its chances of survival are pretty slim. Some creatures never see their parents and thrive.
IMHO, humans are special to other humans because we are built to value "our own." We have "us vs them" deeply ingrained such that many humans can't even accept that we are also animals. We also tend to value the things we can do over the things other species can do. This leads to arguments about how great we are at recognizing things we have evolved ourselves and our environment to do.
>Fawns/calves/... can walk almost as soon as they are born. It takes humans far longer to learn that.
Humans are helpless at birth because we have big brains and walk upright. Which means narrower hips which means we need to be born before the brain is fully developed.
Off the back of this comment I’ve just flicked back to a random video of my then 2 yo where we have a discussion about how houses in real life aren’t normally the colour of the ones in the kids book she’s reading.
Just to play devils advocate, I think part of what the OP may be saying is that our intelligence is mapped to our survival. From that perspective, animals can be more intelligent than a 2 year old. A stray cat is infinitely more capable of surviving the wild than a 2 year old human; they are more “intelligent” in that survival capacity by far. So again, to the OPs point, it depends on how we’re measuring intelligence; if it’s based on the skills humans are specialized for, of course humans will be shown to be more intelligent.
Speaking in sentences and learning chess moves seems more due to having the physical capacity for speech (and therefore conversation) than something attributable to raw intelligence, and picking up a stool and moving it requires the ability to pick up and carry a stool, which would be pretty hard for crows or dolphins. I feel like any test of raw intelligence would need to be independent of physiology/ability to understand instructions, which is pretty hard to do.
That is not the entire story, pigs have been shown to score higher on emotional intelligence (iirc) than human children age 4-6. As in, they have a higher ability for empathy and emotional distress than most toddlers.
I agree. At birth a human is much less capable than most animals - but the learning algorithm is so much better that they'll surpass any other non-human organisms in 2 years. This is honestly amazing an one of the best thing to witness when you are a parent. It's baffling - not only seeing your child learn new things, but also witnessing the ever increasing pace at which they learn new things.
A quick search on youtube shows that crows are much smarter than just getting food with a stick. Also isn’t the general agreement/stereotype about dogs having 5 years old int stat?
I’ve seen this before as well, but as a parent with two kids who loves to wonder about this very question, I can assure you a five year old (a kindergartener) is much, much smarter then a dog. They are filled with ideas and imagination, math / reading / writing capability, creative drawing and of course a massive spoken language advantage. Sure, they’d still lose in a fight, but then they’d (correctly!) tell their parents what is happening and we’d call animal control :)
Depends on the species. A few can run, hunt, and keep up with the group within hours of birth. Some, like marsupials, are born blind, deaf, with an inability to swallow unaided, looking like weird larvae, and must live in their mother's pockets until they can handle anything. People and cats are like marsupials.
As cats get older, their parents teach them survival skills (by showing interest in certain activities that the kittens imitate, not through more explicit instruction; there are cat studies that show this.) It takes kittens probably a year to mostly learn how to be cats. As people get older, we shove a summary and guide to 3000 years of written and tested guidance into them and show them how to brush their teeth properly. It takes about 15 years.
No big difference between humans and animals here.
My own offspring is so cute, surely we are unique in the universe.
AI in the future, talking to another AI: "These humans are so cute, just give them little challenges like increasing shareholder value, they will learn to speak up in meetings and move things around. They aren't really intelligent, but they can be trained to make things for us".
People have been trying to talk to animals for thousands (tens of thousands?) of years, and no "animal myths" were discovered. Some researchers have dedicated their live trying to understand the animals (story mentions one of them), but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all.
And alien life is not special in that regard - if we are able to successfully contact aliens, and then many thousands of people spend a century or two interchanging the messages with them, and all this would yield same artifacts that most Earth's 5-year-old kids can produce... then people would lose interest in aliens as well, and stop building things like Arecibo.
> but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all.
It's a good thing people who accomplish great things don't think like that or we'd have no science at all, because for millions of years we didn't. If they did, they would have had to conclude it isn't possible to predict the future. Yet here we are, knowing why apples fall (or whatever.)
Some people searched for structure of the atom, and found great things. Other searched for perpetuum mobile, and found nothing. We know that they will never find anything, but it does not stop them, there are still youtube videos being made today.
It's important to tell former from latter. Unexplored things are not the same as things that have been explored and found false.
People started searching for the structure of the atom in like 400 BC and didn't make any progress until they knew how. We know why perpetual motion isn't going to be found, so there's no reason to look for it in the first place. This isn't a relevant argument.
Searching for animal intelligence certainly feels like an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines, and similarly, people keep on enthusiastically nearly finding it. And of course this is plagued by a lack of a good definition, and crows unlocking puzzles and other animals doing other scraps of smart stuff.
It seems like nonsense to be searching for things without perfectly clear criteria. Don't look for things if you don't know what you're looking for, or at least don't call it "looking for", just call it what it is: "poking around and brainstorming."
Though perpetual motion is reasoned to be false, rather than declared false because statistically we never had any luck trying, or by an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines.
You're right: you said "statistically we never had any luck trying, or by an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines." as an antithesis.
I took "reasoned to be false" as sort of a weak and refutable statement.
I really believe that, when people ask if some organism is "intelligent" or "conscious" (answer is usually No), they're just asking how similar it is to a human. Intelligence or consciousness is not a Thing; it's just a set of behaviors that have proven adaptive to some species. Crows have somewhat more of those behaviors than we'd thought.
By way of example, many animals have much better smell than we do because that is adaptive for them, and it's not quite as much of an advantage for us.
As for what kind of "consciousness" they have -- they have what they need. We can't know what it's like to be a bat, because we're not bats. It's probably not like being a flying human with sonar, but we'll never know.
let's see: I've met exactly one of those (Dennett) so I'll go with him. How's that for insight?
> The existence of the hard problem is disputed. It has been accepted by some philosophers of mind such as Joseph Levine,[10] Colin McGinn,[11] and Ned Block[12] and cognitive neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela,[13] Giulio Tononi,[14][15] and Christof Koch.[14][15] On the other hand, its existence is denied by other philosophers of mind, such as Daniel Dennett,[16] Massimo Pigliucci,[17] Thomas Metzinger, Patricia Churchland,[18] and Keith Frankish,[19] and by cognitive neuroscientists such as Stanislas Dehaene,[20] Bernard Baars,[21] Anil Seth,[22] and Antonio Damasio.[23]
Generally if you solve the easy problem you have a better idea of what's left and whether it's worth effort. So let's just go with that for now.
> Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life. It feels to me a bit like thinking the earth is the center of the universe. Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.
That this “animals no conscious” is default feels like a sort of all-anthropic religion. I don’t get how one imagines being an animal and… it just exists as an automaton? And for some reason exactly humans are all conscious/intelligent, even brain damaged (in literal sense). I bet “those looking like me are very special” is somewhere in our genes, playing an obsolete role competing with other humanoid groups.
> I don’t get how one imagines being an animal and… it just exists as an automaton? And for some reason exactly humans are all conscious/intelligent,
So far evidence points to the simpler solution that all living creatures are automatons and that there is no mechanism by which self determinism can exist.
Wide acceptance of such a belief would pretty much ruin society so it is best if we all just go on pretending we are masters of our own destiny.
Fully agree in theory - especially that humans aren’t capable of defining a consistent agreed upon measure for - basically anything - let alone something as culturally amorphous as “intelligence”
The problem with this line of reasoning though is that it proves too much, and has the same problem, clumping intelligence into too small of classes for the level of ethical differentiation that humans can manage. The implications of such a philosophy would upend nearly all philosophical grounding for all ethical traditions
Even Rawls don’t have an avenue for a society that treats mosquitos with the same dignity that we treat human babies
So yes, but also we’re stuck with this cognitive dissonance that makes humans believe that ANY human is better than all (insert behaviorally demonstrable intelligence threshold).
For example: All individual humans are more important than all individual octopuses. However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses. This despite knowing that Octopuses have more demonstrable intellect than most humans below a certain age and many humans of any age.
> However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses
What do you mean by this? Are you stating this as an opinion? Or something people generally agree upon? Or something else?
I think most people, if forced to choose, would save 1 human at the expense of thousands of octopuses. Not saying this is right or wrong. Just wondering what metric you’re using to gauge importance.
Idk, for me one man vs one octopus is sort of not my business. But, in a pressure-less situation with a man vs thousands of octopuses, my trolley would probably go over a man, especially if the tracks already lead to him or he has valuable gear. Call me unethical, but I find most of “ethics” human-ist as in race-ist. It is a justification algorithm for the most part rather than true ethics.
Scientists need evidence, rather than just assume intelligence because 'it is obvious', or that other species think the way we do. So just because we see a crow using tools, we should not assume that they learn from their parents and experiment and play and refine just like a human. Because it turns out they don't, and we have learned new things about them, and because of these differences, ourselves. So I don't think it that these silly scientists are surprised animals are intelligent. Why waste your life researching animal intelligence if you think your efforts will be pointless? Who in this century actually believes that all animals are unintelligent? The only arguments are to what degree and which species, and maybe quibbling about what that word actually means. But I don't think anyone has demonstrated equivalent to human child levels of cognition yet, with any species. We can teach a child words and grammar and communicate complex and abstract and even imaginary thoughts, and that is just the very beginning. A human child is so incredibly smart it can develop into a human adult. Other species are very different, and claiming equivalence is comparing apples to oranges. We see intelligence in such alien organisms as an octopus or a hive of bees, and the more we learn, in many ways we are understanding that we actually are alone and special. It seems more and more likely that if we are ever going to interact with another species as peers, the first is going to be a species of our own creation, and not dolphins or cockatoos.
I don't understand how we could possibly think we are at the top. There are, what, several million species of animal we are aware of, so statistically, we are likely at the middle of the curve. We just aren't aware (or barely aware) of the millions of species more advanced than us, similar to how ants and mosquitos have no idea of our existence.
This idea of the universe and the round earth must be an extremely narrow view of reality similar to the entire universe
of pond water some microbe lives in. More advanced beings perhaps live in higher dimensional spaces far more complex than our experience. Maybe this is what people encounter when they smoke DMT.
> We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully.
If we can't define or measure intelligence meaningfully, how can you even claim we are 'intelligent' to begin with?
> Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart
The have levels of intelligence, but they are clearly not very smart. You couldn't even teach them the multiplication table or the basics of number theory.
> and more intelligent than a human child.
No species you listed is smarter than a human child.
> Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life.
At the very least, we know that mammals with brains have some level of intelligence. Nobody claims humans are the only 'intelligent' life on earth. The claim is we are the most intelligent. And probably the only creatures intelligent enough to ponder about death, mortality, identity and soul.
> Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.
Or maybe elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orangutans will better understand what other minds are like and they'll better understand how they are not alone or special? After all, they are 'very smart' according to you.
I think your statements are written in a very confident manner that comes across as trying to win, but this is a nuanced question.
> how can you even claim we are 'intelligent' to begin with?
because I can claim it. You're focusing on semantics and attacking the fact that a set definitions can't be done. I think debating the nature of whether semantics maps to a valid conceptualization is probably not very productive.
No one in this thread has introduced this notion or tried to debate it.
> probably the only creatures intelligent enough to ponder about death
I would invite you to draw your own conclusions from this video, taken from Spy in the Wild. It shows monkeys processing the death of another monkey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaIH5tLmC8U
> After all, they are 'very smart' according to you
Which age of human child do you mean? I could argue even bugs are "more intelligent" than 1 week old baby - at least they can eat and run away from danger.
If we re-define "intelligence" as "smarter than a human baby", then this word covers most animals (and probably some plants too) and becomes useless.
When doing species comparison, I think it only makes sense to compare adults to each other, and perhaps even "average" or "75th percentile" adults.
My point is that we don't frame animal intelligence as something comparable with humans or somewhat close. I'm not trying to create a leaderboard of intelligence. I think we should consider other species as capable of intelligence, and treat it with the same dignity we give to children.
In (at least) one of Iain Banks’ Culture books, he says that technological progress is not a ladder, but a rock face. The tech which a species develops depends a lot on the conditions of their evolution, and encountering wildly different techs that seem miraculous or incomprehensible to one’s own species is fairly common.
I think of “intelligence” in a similar vein. We can recognize it when it’s close enough in proximity to the path we humans have taken. The further away another species is from that, the less we are able to recognize/judge their level of intelligence. I like this metaphor because it emphasizes the limits of our own abilities to understand vey foreign things. That’s not to say that we could never get better at it, but there will almost certainly always be more outside of our circle of understanding than inside it.
I’m also reminded of the drunk searching for his house key beneath a street light. It’s not where he dropped the key, but he’s searching there because “that’s where the light is.”
Sure, alien high tech is alien... you cannot appreciate ICs without microscopes, nor custom-designed organisms without solid understanding of biology, nor poetry without language and culture.
But I think some things are always common - such as not dying from hunger, predators or bad weather. If something as simple as bad weather can cause species to die, _and_ we know there a really simple workaround (houses), and yet there is no sign of it and species just keep dying, can we really call them "intelligent"?
Every species, including worms and ants? Because they are surely smarter than 1-week old human baby, they can eat and move.
We don't treat children well because of their intelligence - otherwise, no one would care about newborns. We care about them because they are of the same species as us.
As for "dignity", I am not 100% sure what you mean, but in humans it comes directly with being able to function as a member of the society. For example, someone who cannot navigate city (be it because they are young or because of their developmental difficulties) will not be free to wander wherever they want.
Evolution is just a concept/idea that describes whatever is actually happening out there.
It seems evolution is emergent given the physical ingredients and laws of nature, which points to some kind of inherent intelligence in the fabric of all stuff. By observing it for long enough, it becomes apparent that the stuff is behaving in a way that can be described as evolution (this is not some kind of appeal to intelligent design).
To whatever extent evolution is "intelligent" or "learning and solving problems", it is the underlying primordial stuff of existence at play. Thinking about this always blows my mind.
It’s an interesting idea. Reminds me a little of some parts of Christopher Langans CTMU theory in that everything serves to simply further develop intelligence in the universe.
While I'm unskilled with CTMU theory, what you mentioned could be considered a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics, right? Intelligence might decrease entropy locally, but they always increase entropy globally to do so. Ie we accelerate the natural process of increasing entropy.
A British university working with a Russian university is far more beneficial to humanity than a British university working with a British weapons manufacturer.
> Researchers have not yet determined whether mental templates related to tool making remain flexible
This quote shows the arrogance mentioned in one of the other comments. A 15 year old crow is somehow going to make a "mental template" that is then as firmly entrenched as a young bird learning the wrong mating song? Nah....
There’s no CEOs excitedly talking about how crows will take over all the work that they’re currently paying humans to do, and how it is absolutely imperative that we allow them to ignore the fact that “shoveling all the data they can find into a for-profit turbo-autocomplete made up of trained crows” may be within the letter of fair use laws, but sure feels well outside the spirit of them.
I think its because animals are many interconnected systems or models which are made to create "intelligent" behavior, like one for speak one for movement and alike. LLMs are trained purely off text, so they are more similar to a very simple animal that only has one type of inputs and outputs like a worm that only knows where its body is and then where it wants to be. LLMs are also only trained for a short period of time, and thats when something interesting is going on and its able to learn and change. We then take a snapshot of it and give it different inputs to get some result instead of to teach it something. I would say that a crow brain that has been frozen and can only get a certain amount of inputs and then only produce a certain amount of outputs is not intelligent.
But you can also give audio and video to multimodal LLMs - although it does become odd to call them LLMs then. And in theory you could give any sensory input data.
You could, and I do think that the more ways they have to get input the more "alive" they will be, but my point in freezing the model in time and then just running inference on it still stands.
