Re:A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Hum...
by luplex on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:11AM
(#26340671)
I'm a cognitive scientist. Intelligence is such a badly defined concept, it's almost useless to reason about "intelligence".
In humans, intelligence is often defined as "what is measured by an IQ test", which obviously doesn't work for either babies or animals.
So while you can say "some dogs can learn to understand hundreds of words, just like most babies", you can not really say "being able to tell words/people/emotions apart means an organism is intelligent"
I put gorilla in there specifically for this reason - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)
Gorillas can't produce speech but they can process language at about the level of a 2-3 year old human. Which is roughly the level of intelligence that dogs were being described as having in the article I linked earlier.
>I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands.
well I'm no cognitive scientist and I think differently than you do!
>but I think it's disingenuous to throw out speech just because a dog hasn't evolved vocal chords.
and I think it's disingenuous for out cephalopod overlords to claim I lack the ability to reason about potential threats because I don't shoot ink out of my fingers when in danger.
I mean I don't actually know or care that dogs might be as smart as a three year old or that any of the other animals I named might be; I just accept the findings of experts in the manner as being more likely to be correct than what I might think is the case. Still I am supposing none of the named animals are as smart as I am so I am certainly not threatened by the concept.