| animal vs human "intelligence"
Posted: 5/12/2008 9:04:44 AM | | I was watching this fasinating nature tv show about the acute fine instincts of animals and how they're superior to humans in a lot of ways. They sense a WHOLE heck of a lot of things, one of them being danger for example. It made me wonder why Bambi can sense danger and get away but too often that not people don't getting attacked or sometimes even worse. This posed several philosophical/scientific questions for me. Does this mean animals are in a way smarter than people? Maybe that depends on the definition of the word "intelligence" ( are humans that dumb....)??? Why was nature created so that animals have such instinctual skills (if you can call it that) as opposed to their highly evolved human counterparts? | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/12/2008 10:27:17 AM | Does this mean animals are in a way smarter than people?
No, it doesnt. They just have far more sensitive senses and know their envirnoment very well.
Maybe that depends on the definition of the word "intelligence"
I define intelligence as not being afraid of vaccum cleaners. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/12/2008 2:33:09 PM | Seems that animals and humans evolved to best match their/our environments.
Tall humans to see far over flat plains. Short stocky humans to survive cold climates. Small, slightly built humans to survive where resources are limited. Animals have evolved in the same way. Bambi's ears and sense of smell .. predators with forward looking eyes including humans, high flying birds with sharpened distance eyesight, prey birds and animals with eyes on the sides of their heads to better see beside and behind them. I'm not wanting to define intelligence as being being the same as being physically evolved to better navigate the environment.
...an interesting aside .. Stephen Hawking suggested what we have come to know as intelligence will likely someday destroy us all. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/12/2008 3:01:17 PM | Like expat57 said, it's not that they are smarter generally, just at those strong points. I will use the word smarter for that, because with those senses comes a need to dedicate more of the brains power to handling all that extra information, in the case of Bambi the extra power to determine distance and angle of sounds and smells to a much more accurate degree than we can.
If your interested in this subject, I'd suggest to also look up Emergence, which is an intelligence that forms from a set of simple instructions (solo or group). It appears more in nature than for humans, but humans are not excluded from Emergence. Like ants have 5 basic instructions their tiny brains process, take one out of it's colony environment and it looks like chaos, but when introduced to a society of ants, they fall into the hierarchy via those 5 instructions. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/12/2008 4:50:51 PM |
I define intelligence as not being afraid of vacuum cleaners.
Damn. Well, at least I still have my health. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/13/2008 4:21:20 AM | Animals have maintained their 6th sense. I'm certain during our hunter/gatherer cave man days, we also had that 6th sense. (animals behavior 30 minutes before an earthquake is a prime example) We've become so dependent on technology, we've lost that part of our abilities.
As far as dog's intelligence.... Im impressed by the fact that they have learned to understand the Human language. When will we learn to understand dog barks? | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/13/2008 6:31:29 AM |
. . . during our hunter/gatherer cave man days, we also had that 6th sense
The hunter/gatherers you mention are the ancestors of the hunter/gatherers known as the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert .. (and other African cultures) .. there is no '6th sense' in these people. They do have a lovely, cooperative, community oriented rather than greed for personal gain nature .. which seems to be a large part of what has kept them alive as a community the last 50,000 years. They are not philosophical, they are not 'intellectual' in the sense of interest in sciences and such. Also things that might have kept them surviving all these years. They have survived until the intelligence of modern man displaced them from their environment to mine for diamonds there .. makes one wonder what exactly is intelligence and is it even a good thing to have....in the whole scope of contemplation.
Animals and '6th sense' -
How Monarchs know to fly their next leg north .. or the whole trip south ..
Why whales migrate in their hemisphere only ..
These and others .. I'm sure there has been research into the scientific basis for instinctive behaviors of animals .. conclusions made or acceptance that no conclusions have yet been possible .. but that animals are psychic or some other metaphysical '6th sense' explanation? .. Even though I have not read what is available to the general public on this topic .. I choose to think not. It's still about the evolution for survival.
Dogs understanding human language ..
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/06/63792
The most interesting to me point of this article is at the very end .. the difference between the ability to identify .. and understanding abstract concepts. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/13/2008 10:35:44 AM | | I think animals are smarter. They aint conditioned the way we are. They dont pass on belief systems and negative attitudes to their offspring. They dont murder each other for fun or personal gratification, only for food and survival. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/14/2008 10:30:31 AM | --They dont murder each other for fun or personal gratification, only for food and survival--
Chimpanzees regularily band together and hunt and kill other chimpanzees.
The comparison to human behaviour is startling.
Dolphins also exhibit similar inter species murder. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/14/2008 11:22:54 AM | | Man has a superior intellect for language. We can lie ourselves into anything. Intelligence is the capacity to process information, which any organism can do, if it has a library card. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/14/2008 12:22:30 PM | I saw an interesting report on TV last year about an experiment involving chimps, in which they displayed a photographic memory ability that was better than any human could produce. The chimps were taught to count to ten, and recognise numbers. They were then presented with a selection of numbers appearing inside little squares on a TV monitor. The numbers would be flashed up for a period, then disappear, leaving only the enclosing squares. The chimps' task was to touch the blank squares in the correct position and ascending order in which the numbers had previously appeared.
As I recall, the chimps were pitched against a separate study group of young people and they (the chimps) performed much better. I remember the numbers being flashed up for increasingly brief split seconds of time and the chimps faultlessly remembering and responding to them.
Apologies to any chimps reading this if I appear to be suggesting that you are "animals." | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/15/2008 8:04:57 AM | ---in which they displayed a photographic memory ability that was better than any human could produce--
Yes, but we dont throw literally our sh*t around. And then theres the whole vaccum cleaner thing. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/15/2008 8:55:31 AM |
Yes, but we dont throw literally our sh*t around. And then theres the whole vaccum cleaner thing.
Humans do have a rather more unfortunate tendency to fill the world with sh*t, which is worse than anything chimps might do with theirs. Also, with humans it's not just the faecal variety that gets spread about.
Give chimps human rights, I say. The savages that eat 'em as "bushmeat" are nothing more than murderous cannibals.
Don't worry about the vacuum cleaner thing. Tolerance of domestic appliance noise is not a universally accepted proof of animal intelligence.. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/15/2008 10:45:57 AM |
Does this mean animals are in a way smarter than people? Apparently, dogs can detect cancer. Not just one or two dogs. Most dogs. Does being able to detect cancer when most people cannot make them smarter in at least one way?
Maybe that depends on the definition of the word "intelligence" ( are humans that dumb....)??? When you read POF, you read about the stupidest things.
Why was nature created so that animals have such instinctual skills (if you can call it that) as opposed to their highly evolved human counterparts? Maybe to teach us humility?
I define intelligence as not being afraid of vaccum cleaners. I saw a film recently about some medieval humans who were transported into the modern day. They were scared of the vacuum cleaner and beat it to death. I define intelligence as not being afraid of vacuum cleaners, when someone who speaks your language explained to you that a vacuum cleaner isn't dangerous, and that you don't use it for sexual relief. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/16/2008 2:25:16 AM |
We've become so dependent on technology, we've lost that part of our abilities. This statement aligns with my views on this particular topic. I think that we have discarded some of our more inate skills and abilities because we went on to create 'things' and situations that meant we no longer needed the abilities. Much like the notion of needing less body hair once we donned clothes. (I so hope that's not taken as an open invitation for excessively hairy people to start going nude.) But I think humans have remnants of some of those abilities, some more than others.
I read something ages ago about (from memory) hyenas (although out of consideration for my fading memory it could have been wolves or coyotes...but a type of wild dog anyway). These individual dogs from one group were being monitored and were wandering solo all over this massive area, definitely not within sight of each other. When one found food, it made no noise, nor did it provide any other obvious sign of beckoning the others, and yet within a short period of time the others from the group appeared and converged on the scene to share the meal. This pattern was observed repeatedly, and was considered to be some form of tuning in to each other's thoughts. I believe that some people have something similar to this ability to tune in to others in their close group (family/partner). I believe we had additional 'sixth sense' type abilities of this nature in the past, but at some point we probably threw them to the curb because we found them all too primitive for our civilised ways.
As far as judging an animal's intelligence...we are usually egocentric enough to make comment only based on what we value as intelligence. The "how many dolphins get accepted into university?" kind of reasoning. The dolphins may well ask how many of us have highly developed echo-location, and why we apparently find it endlessly amusing to watch and applaud them repeatedly jump through hoops... when it quite clearly bored the pants off them after the third time. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/16/2008 4:59:09 AM | I it would make more sense to say animals are more adapted to a certain environment than a human being would be. A naked human being for example, unaided by technology, would quickly perish in somewhere like Antarctica, but a penguin would be fine. Evolution has led to some animals having advantages over other animals, but these advantages are relative rather than absolute. A dog has a much better sense of hearing and smell than an adult human, but an adult human has certain cognitive capacities (such as doing advanced calculus or writing a novel) which a dog clearly does not have in any individual member of its species. However, I don't think this automatically entails a judgement of species superiority in favour of a human being over a dog or other animal; a dog can do some things (such as locate objects by smell) much better than a human can. It also doesn't follow that an animal's natural superiority or advantage over humans in some area means that animal is intrinsically better than a human being. One needs additional criteria to make that sort of judgement.
As for intelligence, the word intelligence is somewhat vague and can mean different things. It could mean the mind's capacity to engage in abstract cognition and self-reflection and thought, or it could mean apparently goal-directed behaviour, or the capacity to solve problems. Animals can solve problems and engage in goal-directed behaviour, and perhaps in some species there are also higher cognitive states relating to awareness of self-identity and conciousness. As for comparing animal and human intelligence, we need some sort of definition of intelligence to work with, as well as appropriate concepts with which to measure and compare intelligence in humans and animals. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/16/2008 5:52:05 AM | How Monarchs know to fly their next leg north .. or the whole trip south ..
Why whales migrate in their hemisphere only ..
Monarch's behaviour is easier to understand if you're a man. First of all, Marco Polo found China without any map or even a knowledge that the Chinese invented the wall. Secondly, if you're a man, you know that you start kissing that heavenly leg below the knee... then you travel north. (Is this too racey for this forum? I am very-very new here.)
The whales can be explained easily, too. You know how toilets swirl in a leftward direction when you flush them on the northern hemisphere and they swirl in rightward direction it the southern. Whales, with their three brain lobes, have figured that out, and they are deathly scared that should they venture into the other side they'd flushed down.
But this of course does not explain how the same whale species can exist both on the northern and southern hemispheres. Which they do. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/16/2008 7:48:53 AM | Animal senses are far sharper than human ones...don't confuse yourself by interpreting this as intelligence...it isn't.
With technology, we can far outdo most animal senses. Night vision, hearing, infrared, sonar, echo-location, baisc visual...even the best animal eyesight cannot make out a license plate number from space!
Can an ape have the same reasoning and intelligence as an average 6 yr old? Sure. Same with a bird, dog or dolphin...all have had claims they are "as intelligent" as a 6 yr old. So...how do we rate that? We know a child is not that smart....and has a long way to go before being accepted as an "intelligent" person. Unfortunatly, many of todays society refuse to grow up....ah well...another topic... | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/16/2008 9:43:41 PM | Yes, but we dont throw literally our sh*t around. And then theres the whole vaccum cleaner thing.
People in prison have been known to do that - and there are people like Billy Bob Thornton who are afraid of a lot more than vacuums
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/16/2008 9:52:43 PM | "Yes, but we dont throw literally our sh*t around"
Someone that hasn't yet seen 2 girls 1 cup? Animals don't do that. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/16/2008 9:58:28 PM | | The funny thing here is... humans ARE animals. They seem to understand us a lot better and more consistently then we them. Intelligence based on environment and what we would call generational tradition and oral history is much superior to what we now call education from text books that changes every few years and is taught like a brainwashing en mass.... | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/17/2008 10:58:33 AM | People in prison have been known to do that ---
Thats why there in prison. They have more in common with animals than other humans. | |
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| animal vs human intelligence
Posted: 5/17/2008 3:53:18 PM | When I was a wee little baby, I was very aware of so many things, but I was constantly distracted by these really weird identities that would pet my hair, play with my little fingers and say nonsensical sounds like "goo-goo" and "wut a wittle cutey" all the time.
It made no freaking sense!
These weird occurrences were constantly filling my wee little brain to the brim with random nonsensical information, so my wee little brain would sleep the healing sleep and try to find ways of making these absurd identities and their equally absurd behaviour more deterministic.
Now, after all these years I have come to realize my understanding of the absurd, could only be achieved by replacing my naturally given conscious processing functions with shortcuts meant to better predict, and subsequently behave like the absurd.
A dog can smell cancer, but it can't smell the hilarity in putting a whoopee cushion on my roommate's lazy boy. | |
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