Comment by MangoToupe
4 days ago
> orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.
I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.
Next time I’m at the zoo, I’ll run this by the zebras to see what they think.
:) I’m being sarcastic but it seems self evident to me that human cognition is a unique treasure on this planet and—while it’s true that ants and octopus and other creatures do some amazing things—-they’re not even close to us. We can agree to disagree but I’m just psyched about the psyche.
While I agree with you, I think, having cognition is not black and white. There are animals with great cognition skills especially among predators. Our brains are essentially anticipation machines capable of predicting the future — a trait uniquely advantageous when hunting other animals. We just happen to have specialized on this trait to the extreme (and otherwise lack good sensory organs or impressive innate weapons).
Whenever this topic comes up I have to think about this octopus who escaped an aquarium. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inky_(octopus)
I think it’s pretty fair to say humans have advanced cognition. There is no myth here, other animals barely use tools, change the world around them, create and pass on information, etc
> There is no myth here
The myth is in reducing complex behavior to a single dimension and calling it "advanced" rather than, well, more human-like. I'm skeptical of the utility of this "advanced" conception. There's no objective reason to view tools, language, etc as particularly interesting. Subjectively of course it's understandable why we're interested in what makes us human.
Good grief. This is what 20 years of language policing has wrought. People who are nervous (hiding behind ‘skeptical’) about words like ‘advanced’ when, by any number of dimensions, human cognition is uncontroversially superior, more advanced, more fluid, more deep, more adaptive, more various (pick one, nervous people) to that of spiders or cows.
Or is that all just a ‘myth?’
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Humans have fingers and thumbs and sophisticated wiring of throat, lips, and tongue.
Wire up a gorilla with the equivalent hands and vocalization capacity, negate the wild hormonal fluctuations, and give that gorilla a more or less human upbringing, and they're going to be limited in cognition by the number of cortical neurons - less than half that of humans, but more than sufficient to learn to talk.
The amazing thing isn't necessarily that brains get built-in environmental shortcuts and preprogrammed adaptations, but that nearly everything involved in higher level cognition is plastic. Mammalian brains, at the neocortical level, can more or less get arbitrarily programmed and conditioned, so intelligence comes down to a relative level of overall capacity (number, performance of neurons) and platform (what tools are you working with.)
Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.
By co-opting neural capacity for some arbitrary human capabilities equivalent, you might cripple something crucial to that animal's survival or well-being, the ethics are messy and uncertain, but in principle, it comes down to brains.
What makes us interesting as humans is that we got the jackpot set of traits that drove our species into the meta-niche. Our ancestors traits for adaptability generalized, and we started optimizing the generalization, so things like advanced vocalization and fancy fingerwork followed suit.
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Animal intelligence is often underestimated, (e.g. there's a famous test that shows that chimpanzee working memory is better than ours) but our use of language is qualitatively different from other animals. Some animals have rudimentary communication, but no other animal is capable (as far as we know) of recursive, infinitely variable language structure like us.
Objective reason: humans have done the most change to the planet (and have put stuff into space). No other species has done that.
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I think it's funny that humans think humans are uniquely advanced. The brain thinks the brain is the most awesome machine in the universe :-)
Homan cognition is more advanced than in any other animal. I think it is clear enough. Humans are not the only animals that evolved higher intelligence, but we have a combination of attributes that made it really effective: we are larger animals (with room for a big brain) with a social structure and a relatively long lifespan (good for passing knowledge).
Ants beat us when it comes to society, but in a sense, we may also consider multicellular organisms as a society of single cells. Still impressive, and there is a good chance for ants to outlive us as a species, but we are still orders of magnitude more intelligent than ants, including collective intelligence.
By intelligence, I mean things like adaptability and problem solving, both collective and individual. It is evident in our ability to exploit resources no animals could, or our ability to live in places that would normally be unsurvivable to us. It doesn't mean we are the pinnacle of evolution, we have some pretty good competitors (including ants) but we are certainly the most advanced in one very imporant area.
I think this is the best argument yet. Not sure how much I agree, but it's a satisfying analysis. Cheers.