Re:Why humans need to rethink their place in the animal kingdom
by EliRivers on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:53AM
(#16133234)
We don't really have a coherent model of what intelligence is
Indeed. Going further, the idea that "general intelligence" can exist is something I'll countenance; the assumption that humans have it is a conceit without convincing evidence, based on a sample of one.
Re:Why humans need to rethink their place in the animal kingdom
by cgmg on Sunday January 14, 2018 @03:58AM
(#16143400)
> the assumption that humans have it [general intelligence] is a conceit without convincing evidence
Why do you make this claim? Engineering, science, and mathematics are all convincing evidence that humans have general intelligence. Humans also score highly in measures of intelligence like https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329.
Our current method of evaluating non-human intelligence is mostly taking tasks humans are known to do and seeing if we can get animals to do them, which biases it toward finding animals performing at no greater level in any dimension than humans. We don't really have a coherent model of what intelligence is, much less an unbiased interspecies test of it.
Humans obviously have the most human-like intelligence; any other superlatives attached to human intelligence should probably be prefaced with “apparently” rather than “clearly”.