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Animal intelligence & problem solving


paigetheoracle

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Watching an experiment on TV recently (BBC Television, The One Show), made me question whether humans are more intelligent than animals. The same problem was given to a crow in a lab and people on the street. The crow got the answer instantly but most of the people didn't (Glass of water, with sweet floating on top and a pile of stones on the table).

 

Could our definition or beliefs in what makes us superior be wrong, if we just see intelligence as simple problem solving? If we discount physical attributes (opposable thumb/ bipedal stance) and brought in this plus motivation, as well as Dr Allan Snyder's observation that humans see what they want to see (project) rather than what is necessarily there (Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin, page 300 & 303), would this lead to a better understanding of what the brain actually is, in all life forms?

 

(Moderators - again not sure if this should be here or in Biology)

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  • 3 months later...

Oh, it seems like a good fit in a psychology forum to me.

 

I'd say that "intelligence" is a poor psychological measurement in the best of situations - least of all across diverse species. Organisms evolve to better exploit their niches, and we cannot apply what makes us successful in our niche to what makes the raven successful in its niche (or vice versa) and expect to be able to make straightforward comparisons between the two.

 

In response to your comment about biased perception (and by implication, functional fixedness,) I'd argue that it is a by-product of the immensely complex ability of humans to use abstract concepts, that our concepts could change our perception of the world. This shortcoming that shows through in a few specific tasks seems like a symptom of our great problem-solving ability. Sure, a crow can get some candy out of a glass - but we never asked it to design a skyscraper, fly into space, do differential equations, or write a poem! It is only by applying a great variety of tests that we can characterize the behavioral repertoire (or "intelligence", if one insists on that terminology) of any particular species.

 

That said, I think that many people don't give other animals the credit they deserve when it comes to the complex and variable behaviors they can exhibit.

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I hadn't noticed this thread before. Thank you for putting it here.

 

People discount the intelligence of both non-humans and their fellow humans seemingly because we are only interested in the measurement of intelligence, not in its acquisition and application.

 

My cat has been teaching me how to hunt. I'm not a very good pupil and get bitten very often. She, however, is a very good pupil. I show her videos of lions hunting. She purrs all the way through them and immediately puts into practice the lessons she learns. (This causes problems because after she pushes over a squirrel in the yard, I don't rush over and grab the squirrel by the throat like the lions on the videos.)

 

I personally went from theoretically very intelligent to theoretically very stupid while I was in school. I lost the ability to take tests as I developed synechdoche. Each question seemed to create a cascade of sensations that I couldn't understand and that would make my mind wander off. When I ignored my kaleidoscopic visions and all the other sensations rushing through my brain, my answers were pretty much the literary equivalent of a monosyllabic grunt. My mind was working, but not in the way it was supposed to work. It still works in the wrong way, and has caused me a lot of trouble around here.

 

The problems humans face in educating each other can be understood much better if we look at all forms of intelligence and embrace them--even in a science forum. This is the right place for this thread and this thread is very important not only for the animals but also for the humans who are not smart enough to understand that there is advanced intelligence all around them. If we really want to exploit the best minds, maybe we should open our own minds enough to find them.

 

--lemit

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Do you mean you developed synesthesia?

 

Without a good measurement of "intelligence", it's impossible to talk about its application and acquisition. If we don't agree on a way to measure it (which we probably won't, because intelligence tests are not very reliable and questionably valid,) then we can't compare it between organisms.

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Do you mean you developed synesthesia?

 

Bingo! At least I got the first four letters right.

 

But why discuss a discomfort with language when you can just demonstrate it?

 

Without a good measurement of "intelligence," it's impossible to talk about its application and acquisition. If we don't agree on a way to measure it (which we probably won't, because intelligence tests are not very reliable and questionably valid,) then we can't compare it between organisms.

 

Welcome to the social sciences. You'll probably have to wend your way through the murky swamp of the humanities to the realm of the nonverbal before you understand what I'm trying to explain. Be sure to take lots of string.

 

--lemit

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Watching an experiment on TV recently (BBC Television, The One Show), made me question whether humans are more intelligent than animals. The same problem was given to a crow in a lab and people on the street. The crow got the answer instantly but most of the people didn't (Glass of water, with sweet floating on top and a pile of stones on the table).

I’ve seen similar demonstrations of crows bending a piece of wire into a hook, then retrieving a food treat from a bottle with it, a test I imagine many humans would fail, especially in an impromptu “on the street” interview.

 

More dramatically, to the best of my knowledge nearly, all of our close relative species, the chimpanzee, would fail these two tests, while nearly all crows would pass them, challenging the idea of a exception-less correlation between brain size and such problem solving.

 

I’d be wary, however, of drawing strong parallels between what is actually occurring in the brains of crows, chimps, and humans, when they attempt to “solve problems” like these, asking myself if, despite its startling ability, crows really attempt to “solve a problem” in the sense that even the most unsuccessful human do.

Could our definition or beliefs in what makes us superior be wrong, if we just see intelligence as simple problem solving?

If we define “what makes us superior” as simply a higher score measuring success at a predefined single or collection of mechanical problems, then yes, I’d say our definition is wrong. However, I don’t think most people who think much about “what makes us superior” use such a definition (though its informative to compare the performance of humans to other humans on such tasks in “multidimensional intelligence” test).

 

In his 2007 follow-up book to his famous (at least in my crowd) 1979 Godel, Escher, Bach, I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter concludes that every adult non-human animal is, compared to an adult human, “small souled”, or, more precisely, “small-‘I’ed”. What he means is that we humans think much more about ourselves – about “I” – and by generalization, about the “I”s in other humans (and, incorrectly, in non-human animals, infant humans, and even sometimes inanimate objects and devices), than do other animals. Doing this, he argues, requires “a representational system that knows no bounds in terms of the extensibility or flexibility of its categories”. Without attempting to explain precisely what’s meant by this quote – which I think Hofstadter doesn’t quite achieve in 350 pages of trying – I think he’s fundamentally right.

 

This “big souled” “having an ‘I’” is, I think, what most people who think about the question at least intuitively believe makes us humans “superior”. Though non-human animals range from having effectively no “I” to having an “I” critically recognizable as similar to a typical human’s, we humans seem to me to have the biggest “I”s on Earth.

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