I went through my bookmarks and found an old hacker news discussion thread where people are going in circles with some quite sincerely insisting that crows are more intelligent or every bit as intelligent as humans and that it’s a kind of specieism and arrogance to suggest humans are more intelligent.
I felt like I was losing my mind reading that thread, which I think is why I bookmarked it.
I get appreciating the remarkable intelligence of animals and understanding their capabilities and the application of different forms of intelligence in different contexts. And the importance of having humility when it comes to understanding human intelligence and how a lot of our productive capacity comes from standing on the shoulder of giants. But take all of those caveats and add them all together and none of them I think at the end of the day amount to the idea that we should be uncertain about whether humans are more intelligent than crows.
I think there’s a trap here of vortex of excessive humility that seems like a virtuous principle, but ends up missing the forest for the trees and putting people in the preposterous position of insisting that there’s nothing special about humans building jumbo jets or being able to run hospitals compared to crows who apparently in the right circumstances could if they wanted to.
So I’m not crazy, right? Can reasonable people agree that humans are more intelligent than crows? And if that question sounds like a crazy question to ask in the first place, I’m glad you agree. But check out the Hacker News thread and try not to lose your mind.
I’m not sure I agree that we have no such thing as a common understanding of intelligence nor that we should view the kind of intelligence we’re familiar with in humans as distinctly belonging to humans, such that it’s just a matter of not being able to decode or decipher other forms of intelligence.
I also think it can be pretty clear when we can see demonstrations of, say, deployed sophistication in engineering capacity, such as what people seem to think they’re observing with extreme capabilities of alien spacecrafts executing impossible right angle turns or other such things. (whether those videos are true or not). And not everything is like that surely, but clearly we can imagine what it’s like to conceive of intelligences better or worse than our own, at least with specific enough examples targeted on just illustrating that particular point, which demonstrates an important principle that these things are discernible in at least some cases.
I do think it’s very true that we have to be careful in the assumptions we make about intelligence because the way an octopus is intelligence is indeed different from the way a predator in the savannah is different and similar.
But I think it’s getting a little too lost in the sauce to think that it means we can’t understand what it would be like for there to be a demonstration of distinctly advanced intelligences, and for that matter, the very project of appreciating animal intelligence absolutely culminates in the takeaway of appreciating the special and unique intelligence of certain animals like dolphins or crows, or elephants. The very process of being careful in assessing and understanding the intelligence of other creatures sometimes absolutely does involve us selecting out ones that seem to stand above and beyond.
However much is true of the differences of intelligence to domain specificity, the cumulative forms of intelligence and the depth of it that humans are capable of demonstrating eclipses such questions.
Oh and I think that’s the root cause for your post: there can not be a common agreement of those positions because they are axiomatic, as in fundamental definitions.
If you define intelligence one way it’s very clear that humans have more of it. if you use an (aggressive, in my opinion) species agnostic definition even tied to motivation it’s at least not that clear cut.
Personally I’m more with you but I find the thought experiment fascinating. To quote Douglas Adams:
“”“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”“”
I think if we are stuck that way, we would really be stuck. But I think we can appreciate intelligence as dynamic and not as a question that’s tied to axiomatic definitions. You see this in related fields, e.g. we don’t have a definition of consciousness, but research is about closing in on a definition, and we are able to add to our body of knowledge in meaningful ways. There’s fascinating new studies suggesting insect consciousness is plausible, for instance. Cancer is not one single thing, but there’s still cancer research, and so on. So we sometimes know based on representative instances, e.g. whatever it is, it’s like that.
It’s convenient to frame it merely as a matter of definition, because that means there’s no overarching truth, there’s just “by human standards, THIS is intelligent but by crow standards THIS is…” But unfortunately I think cross domain comparison, or clusters of related features (family resemblance) is real enough that there’s There there, more like cancer or consciousness than relative definitions.
I did refer to your original question on how there are people who disagree on the statement that humans are more intelligent: if you treat that as a question about which axiom is in effect instead of a change of arguments or makes more sense.
You’re reference to the consciousness discussion is an awesome one btw! I would describe “closing in on a definition” as “agreeing on a common axiom”.
But that’s not happening on a forum post where people off various backgrounds and believes fight (instead of argue).
To make it clear: I’m in agreement with you, I only tried to expand what you already started by my train of thought on why that thread you linked is the way it is :)