Maybe if we are looking for general principles underlying the development of intelligence, we would be wise to leave evolution out of it for a bit.
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It is ironic that otherwise intelligent people must play the “we’re just another animal” game while demanding attention for ideas that only humans can give.
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Real intelligence is embodied. It exists within a living system, interacting dynamically with an environment. AI, on the other hand, is an abstraction.
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Researchers have used the usually avoided term “directed evolution” — which may suggest design — to account for the worm’s tiny, complex brain.
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The worm C. elegans can learn, using both associative and non-associative learning, despite having a brain of less than 400 neurons.
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The researchers have set out to show that bonobos have a theory of mind. Are they willing to consider that dogs might have a similar theory of mind?
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Cat intelligence is often underrated but the human mind belongs to an entirely different order of being from the feline mind.
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The comparison doesn’t really work but it underlines the *doctrine* that human intelligence is just another type of animal intelligence.
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It is way past time for the overburdened courts to dismiss these animal standing cases out of hand at the trial court level.
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Eric Cassell: Engineering greatly reduced electronic circuits. It is hard to see how that could occur in insect brains via a merely random evolutionary process.
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Philosophy prof Jonathan Birch, principal investigator of the Animal Sentience Project at the London School of Economics, has written a book on whether and how animals feel things: The Edge of Sentience (Oxford University Press 2024). It’s not as arcane a topic as it might at first appear. It shows up in new legislation and think tanks. At Amazon, we learn, for example, “In 2021, he led a review for the UK government that shaped the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. In 2022-23, he was part of a working group that investigated the question of sentience in AI.” And as Birch told Marc Bekoff at Psychology Today, I’m probably best-known for my work on invertebrate sentience, which is one part Read More ›
Oxford researchers studied chimpanzee tool use for evidence that chimpanzees really do think a lot like humans. If that were true, it would deepen the mystery.
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It’s not stone tool use that is exclusive to humans; vultures can do that. It’s the ability to form abstract ideas — like the study of tool use among animals.
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In reality, where language is concerned, there is a vast gulf fixed. It is not between primates and other mammals but between humans and all other life forms.
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If the universe is the product of intelligence, in principle, insects could have access to it? But the question is, how, exactly?
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The world of right and wrong, crime and punishment, revenge and forgiveness, is a human one that requires the gift of abstract reason.
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The zoo, where the elephants have lived for years, has a sterling reputation but the advocates believe that they know better what elephants would want.
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But what is the origin of unique octopus intelligence? It’s almost as if the self-assured world of biology needed a shakeup.
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Lizards can be surprisingly intelligent. If there are rules, it’s not clear what role, if any, evolution plays.
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Aboitiz concludes, “In the end, the dualistic dilemma between subjective experience and mechanistic explanations seems to me inescapable.”
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