The Orion's Arm Universe Project Forums

Aussie crows reason at about the level of 5- to 7-year old human children:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/crows-solve-...zqnij.html

Neat Although OA's provolved crows are presumably rather above the mental level of a 7yr old and are also perfectly able to solve the problem that RL crows failed at. So some provolution would seem to still be needed

Todd

We keep seeing more and more evidence that animals we once thought were "stupid" are actually a lot smarter than we had imagined. And we're not just talking about chimps and dolphins, either. Interesting news.

The big question is just how sophont are all these smart animals? Intelligence and self-awareness are complicated qualities. I've often wondered how "smart" a creature could be while still not possessing the same level of self-awareness and potential that Humans possess. We see crows, dolphins, apes and such pull off cool feats with tools and pass the mirror test, but just how capable are they? How aware are they truly? Are they really thinking about these tricks, or are they purely trial and error and they don't actually understand them?

It's a fascinating area and one I really hope we can unravel soon.

(04-02-2014, 08:57 AM)Ares Johnson Wrote: [ -> ]The big question is just how sophont are all these smart animals? Intelligence and self-awareness are complicated qualities. I've often wondered how "smart" a creature could be while still not possessing the same level of self-awareness and potential that Humans possess. We see crows, dolphins, apes and such pull off cool feats with tools and pass the mirror test, but just how capable are they? How aware are they truly? Are they really thinking about these tricks, or are they purely trial and error and they don't actually understand them?

It's a fascinating area and one I really hope we can unravel soon.

As a corollary, could a technically advanced civilization exist that is peopled with beings who lack those levels of self-awareness and potential? In other words, are self-awareness and "potential" (however that may be defined) absolute requirements for an advanced civilization? Watching the nightly news leads me to question just how widespread those qualities are among 21st century CE humans.

Radtech497

(04-02-2014, 10:30 AM)radtech497 Wrote: [ -> ]As a corollary, could a technically advanced civilization exist that is peopled with beings who lack those levels of self-awareness and potential? In other words, are self-awareness and "potential" (however that may be defined) absolute requirements for an advanced civilization? Watching the nightly news leads me to question just how widespread those qualities are among 21st century CE humans.

Radtech497

It's an interesting question: to what extent can intelligence exist without consciousness. This isn't my area of research at all but phenomenon like the Libet delay might indicate they aren't so linked. For a fictional exploration Blindsight by Peter Watts is a fantastic novel.

Self-awareness might be stronger in species that are accustomed to modelling the behaviour of other members of their pack or troop in great detail. Humans (and chimps, dogs, elephants and dolphins) live in groups, and the members of those groups continually model and predict each other's behaviour. By turning this modelling ability back upon themselves, a human can predict eir own behaviour, creating a sensation of 'self-awareness' in the process.

Crows are intelligent, but less social - they may be less self-aware. Rooks, on the other hand, are quite social, so they might be psychologically different to crows.

The Libet Delay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Li..._potential
we post-rationalise our actions to insert an illusion of 'volition' into acts that occur before we are even aware of them, or so it seems.