Comment by LPisGood
4 days ago
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
4 days ago
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?’
This entire subthread belongs on the 'HN Simulator' story.
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Ever since humanity crawled from the muck it’s had some dude yapping about how uniquely cool and special humans are because it feels good to do and to listen to. As we’ve learned more, we’ve realized that the underlying principles of our thinking apparatus are more similar to those of animals than we thought and we’ve continually found more high-level capacities, like surprisingly complex language, in various animal species. In my opinion, it’s valid to want to talk then about a non-dichotomous view of species’ cognition and, personally, I like it because it’s a whole lot less boring.
I'm not nervous, I just don't see the utility. Perhaps you can elucidate this for me.
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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.
> 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.
While I don't disbelieve this out of hand, I can think of different things that might easily make this untrue. On what evidence is this assertion based? Is it just "our brains are essentially similar and much of it is not hard wired therefore they should perform the same" or is there deeper science and/or testing behind this?
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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.
> humans have done the most change to the planet (and have put stuff into space).
I think we have a long way to go to catch up with algae.
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Also objective:
As far as we know humans are the only species to leave Earth’s gravity well. No other species has been able to do that in 4 billion years.
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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 :-)