I recently re-read Gwern’s Drug Heuristics, and this jumped out at me:
....In other words, from the starting point of those wormlike common ancestors in the environment of Earth, the resources of evolution independently produced complex learning, memory, and tool use both within and without the line of human ancestry....
...The obvious answer is that diminishing returns have kicked in for intelligence in primates and humans in particular5354. (Indeed, it’s apparently been argued that not only are humans not much smarter than primates55, but there is little overall intelligence differences in vertebrates56. Humans lose embarrassingly on even pure tests of statistical reasoning; we are outperformed on the Monty Hall problem by pigeons and to a lesser extent monkeys!) The last few millennia aside, humans have not done well and has apparently verged on extinction before...
...The human brain seems to be special only in being a scaled-up primate brain41, with close to the metabolic limit in its number of neurons...
If I had more time, I’d try to look more into the intelligence tests that are given to animals. Assuming animals are smarter (in some sense of the word), then why are humans dominant? I think the answer to this might be something like “Humans evolutionarily stumbled upon language, then encoded this in our genes, and language allows us to reason about the world, which is something raw animal intelligence/pattern-matching cannot do.”
I think it’s an interesting hypothesis, but I don’t know where I’d start trying to evaluate it, or how likely I think it’s true.
Huh! Yeah, that’s super interesting, but it seems like it might be hard to actually tackle. The finding of info on animal intelligence as well as the supporting of specific reasons for human dominance anyway both seem a little messy. I’ll put it on the list of options though :)
Another question I find interesting about animal consciousness I have is whether or not they can recognize cartoons. Cartoons are abstractions/analogies of the real-world. I’m curious if this abstract visual pattern recognition is possessed by animals, or if it requires human-level abstract pattern recognition. There are also some computer vision papers about classifying cartoons, and using artificially generated data-sets (since you mentioned it had to involve humans, animals, and robots).
I recently re-read Gwern’s Drug Heuristics, and this jumped out at me:
If I had more time, I’d try to look more into the intelligence tests that are given to animals. Assuming animals are smarter (in some sense of the word), then why are humans dominant? I think the answer to this might be something like “Humans evolutionarily stumbled upon language, then encoded this in our genes, and language allows us to reason about the world, which is something raw animal intelligence/pattern-matching cannot do.”
I think it’s an interesting hypothesis, but I don’t know where I’d start trying to evaluate it, or how likely I think it’s true.
Huh! Yeah, that’s super interesting, but it seems like it might be hard to actually tackle. The finding of info on animal intelligence as well as the supporting of specific reasons for human dominance anyway both seem a little messy. I’ll put it on the list of options though :)
Another question I find interesting about animal consciousness I have is whether or not they can recognize cartoons. Cartoons are abstractions/analogies of the real-world. I’m curious if this abstract visual pattern recognition is possessed by animals, or if it requires human-level abstract pattern recognition. There are also some computer vision papers about classifying cartoons, and using artificially generated data-sets (since you mentioned it had to involve humans, animals, and robots).