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Crows are even smarter than we thought

leshokunin
67 replies
17h41m

We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully. If we accept that human children are smart, then we must accept that species at equivalent levels of cognition are as well.

Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart, and more intelligent than a human child.

Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life. It feels to me a bit like thinking the earth is the center of the universe. Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.

evanmoran
24 replies
15h8m

I like the sentiment, but human children who are 2 completely dominate all known animal intelligence. They can speak in sentences and use tools in complex ways. There may be studies that show a raven might use a stick to help it find food. Well, a two year old will carry a stool halfway across the house to reach the scissors that will open a bag of veggie straws :) At 3 they can recognize letters _easily_ and start learning how to read. At 4 they can with a bit of practice learn the piece moves of chess and start strategizing.

Animals can definitely be intelligent, and we should learn more about them and how they perceive the world, but when you play with a 2.5 year old for five minute there is no doubt that humanity is beyond special.

_huayra_
8 replies
14h22m

The real separation (and is something that comes long after 2 years of age in humans) is the ability to observe one's thoughts. I totally get that dolphins and elephants and many "big brain" mammals can have social structures, long memories, and the ability to pass down behaviors directly (e.g. "here's how you hunt fish effectively" may not be in dolphin genes, but they do a damn good job of it, or also the "fads" of orcas like the "salmon hat" or, more recently, attacking sailboats).

The absolutely blistering pace a child can learn at, though, is indeed quite a sight to behold.

deberon
6 replies
14h1m

In the time it took me to learn a new programming language, my kid learned how to be a whole entire human being. Including free thought and autocorrect mode. I don’t know what makes us special in the animal kingdom, but watching that happen certainly feels special. Do whales feel the same way about their young?

hungie
5 replies
13h54m

Whales almost certainly do not feel the same way. They feel like whales about their young. That's not to discount whales: that feeling may be profound and emotional for them. But it's probably alien to the human experience.

rrr_oh_man
3 replies
11h55m

Why probably?

roenxi
0 replies
8h33m

For starters, whales aren't tool users. So it'd be something of a surprise if evolution had programmed them to feel joy when their offspring use tools. Humans, on the other hand, seem to get a bit of a kick out of teaching other people (especially kids) to do things which makes a lot of evolutionary sense given how strategically central tools are to our species.

hungie
0 replies
11h19m

I dunno, I've never spoken with a whale to compare notes.

DFHippie
0 replies
7h34m

I feel that people who study animal intelligence started with the dictum "don't assume similarity to humans" and immediately interpreted it as "assume dissimilarity to humans".

conradev
0 replies
12h0m

I’m sure their sensory experience is different from ours, but is the feeling truly alien? We share enough genetics to share the same brain chemicals, for one

stubish
0 replies
13h31m

One interesting aside in this article was that the crows don't teach each other how to make tools. But a child might steal a tool from a parent and work it out. This demonstrates the problem solving type of intelligence, working out how to reshape a wire to a useful shape for instance. But not a 'higher' intelligence teaching or demonstrating to others. Which is kind of odd, as I see young birds following their parents and imitating and learning. So I guess this shows parent birds don't teach, but young birds instinctively follow around and learn?

imoverclocked
2 replies
10h36m

I've interacted with 6 month old puppies that can outsmart a 2-3 year old human baby.

Fawns/calves/... can walk almost as soon as they are born. It takes humans far longer to learn that.

If you put a 2-year old human child with every single possible benefit on its own into the wild, its chances of survival are pretty slim. Some creatures never see their parents and thrive.

IMHO, humans are special to other humans because we are built to value "our own." We have "us vs them" deeply ingrained such that many humans can't even accept that we are also animals. We also tend to value the things we can do over the things other species can do. This leads to arguments about how great we are at recognizing things we have evolved ourselves and our environment to do.

bejd
0 replies
9h43m

Fawns/calves/... can walk almost as soon as they are born. It takes humans far longer to learn that.

Humans are helpless at birth because we have big brains and walk upright. Which means narrower hips which means we need to be born before the brain is fully developed.

aidos
0 replies
10h21m

Ability to survive != intelligence

Off the back of this comment I’ve just flicked back to a random video of my then 2 yo where we have a discussion about how houses in real life aren’t normally the colour of the ones in the kids book she’s reading.

wruza
1 replies
11h53m

A quick search on youtube shows that crows are much smarter than just getting food with a stick. Also isn’t the general agreement/stereotype about dogs having 5 years old int stat?

evanmoran
0 replies
3h0m

I’ve seen this before as well, but as a parent with two kids who loves to wonder about this very question, I can assure you a five year old (a kindergartener) is much, much smarter then a dog. They are filled with ideas and imagination, math / reading / writing capability, creative drawing and of course a massive spoken language advantage. Sure, they’d still lose in a fight, but then they’d (correctly!) tell their parents what is happening and we’d call animal control :)

tomalbrc
1 replies
12h24m

Difference being that the 2 year old human would not survive in the wild whereas most other species would easily after 2 years of age

pessimizer
0 replies
1h53m

Depends on the species. A few can run, hunt, and keep up with the group within hours of birth. Some, like marsupials, are born blind, deaf, with an inability to swallow unaided, looking like weird larvae, and must live in their mother's pockets until they can handle anything. People and cats are like marsupials.

As cats get older, their parents teach them survival skills (by showing interest in certain activities that the kittens imitate, not through more explicit instruction; there are cat studies that show this.) It takes kittens probably a year to mostly learn how to be cats. As people get older, we shove a summary and guide to 3000 years of written and tested guidance into them and show them how to brush their teeth properly. It takes about 15 years.

No big difference between humans and animals here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precociality_and_altriciality

drivebyhooting
1 replies
13h38m

I have quite a bit of exposure to kids that age range. The behavior you described is FAR from normal.

card_zero
0 replies
11h17m

Yeah, putting in effort for vegetables?

valbis
0 replies
7h14m

I agree. At birth a human is much less capable than most animals - but the learning algorithm is so much better that they'll surpass any other non-human organisms in 2 years. This is honestly amazing an one of the best thing to witness when you are a parent. It's baffling - not only seeing your child learn new things, but also witnessing the ever increasing pace at which they learn new things.

saghm
0 replies
10h51m

Speaking in sentences and learning chess moves seems more due to having the physical capacity for speech (and therefore conversation) than something attributable to raw intelligence, and picking up a stool and moving it requires the ability to pick up and carry a stool, which would be pretty hard for crows or dolphins. I feel like any test of raw intelligence would need to be independent of physiology/ability to understand instructions, which is pretty hard to do.

bumby
0 replies
5h37m

Just to play devils advocate, I think part of what the OP may be saying is that our intelligence is mapped to our survival. From that perspective, animals can be more intelligent than a 2 year old. A stray cat is infinitely more capable of surviving the wild than a 2 year old human; they are more “intelligent” in that survival capacity by far. So again, to the OPs point, it depends on how we’re measuring intelligence; if it’s based on the skills humans are specialized for, of course humans will be shown to be more intelligent.

boesboes
0 replies
10h5m

That is not the entire story, pigs have been shown to score higher on emotional intelligence (iirc) than human children age 4-6. As in, they have a higher ability for empathy and emotional distress than most toddlers.

WalterBright
0 replies
10h44m

I taught the kids to dive bomb crows.

FrustratedMonky
0 replies
5h50m

"humanity is beyond special"

My own offspring is so cute, surely we are unique in the universe.

AI in the future, talking to another AI: "These humans are so cute, just give them little challenges like increasing shareholder value, they will learn to speak up in meetings and move things around. They aren't really intelligent, but they can be trained to make things for us".

andewulfe
13 replies
17h24m

Ted Chiang has an excellent short story on this subject, regarding the construction of the Arecibo radio telescope as told from the perspective of a parrot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Silence_(short_story...

It's very short. Worth a quick read and a long thought.

theamk
10 replies
14h7m

Here is my long thought:

People have been trying to talk to animals for thousands (tens of thousands?) of years, and no "animal myths" were discovered. Some researchers have dedicated their live trying to understand the animals (story mentions one of them), but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all.

And alien life is not special in that regard - if we are able to successfully contact aliens, and then many thousands of people spend a century or two interchanging the messages with them, and all this would yield same artifacts that most Earth's 5-year-old kids can produce... then people would lose interest in aliens as well, and stop building things like Arecibo.

guerrilla
8 replies
13h16m

but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all.

It's a good thing people who accomplish great things don't think like that or we'd have no science at all, because for millions of years we didn't. If they did, they would have had to conclude it isn't possible to predict the future. Yet here we are, knowing why apples fall (or whatever.)

theamk
7 replies
11h59m

Some people searched for structure of the atom, and found great things. Other searched for perpetuum mobile, and found nothing. We know that they will never find anything, but it does not stop them, there are still youtube videos being made today.

It's important to tell former from latter. Unexplored things are not the same as things that have been explored and found false.

card_zero
3 replies
11h10m

Though perpetual motion is reasoned to be false, rather than declared false because statistically we never had any luck trying, or by an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines.

Cupertino95014
2 replies
6h6m

It isn't just statistics and bad luck for PM inventors. There are physical reasons arguing strongly that it's impossible.

guerrilla
0 replies
6h5m

That is what the person you're responding to meant.

card_zero
0 replies
3h49m

That's what I said. How are you reading the opposite?

guerrilla
2 replies
11h14m

People started searching for the structure of the atom in like 400 BC and didn't make any progress until they knew how. We know why perpetual motion isn't going to be found, so there's no reason to look for it in the first place. This isn't a relevant argument.

card_zero
1 replies
10h57m

Searching for animal intelligence certainly feels like an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines, and similarly, people keep on enthusiastically nearly finding it. And of course this is plagued by a lack of a good definition, and crows unlocking puzzles and other animals doing other scraps of smart stuff.

guerrilla
0 replies
10h41m

It seems like nonsense to be searching for things without perfectly clear criteria. Don't look for things if you don't know what you're looking for, or at least don't call it "looking for", just call it what it is: "poking around and brainstorming."

Cupertino95014
0 replies
6h0m

There's plenty to find. Ask any dog or cat owner.

I think if your 4-year-old aliens were found, many humans would find them charming and fun pen pals (assuming they're not dangerous).

It would be useful as the fly by of Pluto, where we finally found out things we couldn't possibly have known looking from here.

leshokunin
0 replies
16h56m

It (like the rest of his oeuvre) is a wonderful read

api
4 replies
17h27m

IMO all life is intelligent in some way or form. Evolution itself is even intelligent in that it’s a learning system that adapts and solves problems.

milchek
2 replies
16h53m

It’s an interesting idea. Reminds me a little of some parts of Christopher Langans CTMU theory in that everything serves to simply further develop intelligence in the universe.

Aerroon
1 replies
14h47m

While I'm unskilled with CTMU theory, what you mentioned could be considered a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics, right? Intelligence might decrease entropy locally, but they always increase entropy globally to do so. Ie we accelerate the natural process of increasing entropy.

Intralexical
0 replies
13h34m

That's the second law.

haswell
0 replies
15h26m

Evolution is just a concept/idea that describes whatever is actually happening out there.

It seems evolution is emergent given the physical ingredients and laws of nature, which points to some kind of inherent intelligence in the fabric of all stuff. By observing it for long enough, it becomes apparent that the stuff is behaving in a way that can be described as evolution (this is not some kind of appeal to intelligent design).

To whatever extent evolution is "intelligent" or "learning and solving problems", it is the underlying primordial stuff of existence at play. Thinking about this always blows my mind.

AndrewKemendo
4 replies
17h5m

Fully agree in theory - especially that humans aren’t capable of defining a consistent agreed upon measure for - basically anything - let alone something as culturally amorphous as “intelligence”

The problem with this line of reasoning though is that it proves too much, and has the same problem, clumping intelligence into too small of classes for the level of ethical differentiation that humans can manage. The implications of such a philosophy would upend nearly all philosophical grounding for all ethical traditions

Even Rawls don’t have an avenue for a society that treats mosquitos with the same dignity that we treat human babies

So yes, but also we’re stuck with this cognitive dissonance that makes humans believe that ANY human is better than all (insert behaviorally demonstrable intelligence threshold).

For example: All individual humans are more important than all individual octopuses. However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses. This despite knowing that Octopuses have more demonstrable intellect than most humans below a certain age and many humans of any age.

cabbageicefruit
1 replies
16h14m

However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses

What do you mean by this? Are you stating this as an opinion? Or something people generally agree upon? Or something else?

I think most people, if forced to choose, would save 1 human at the expense of thousands of octopuses. Not saying this is right or wrong. Just wondering what metric you’re using to gauge importance.

david422
0 replies
15h55m

I think he's actually saying that humans will value a couple of humans more than thousands of octopuses, just phrased oddly.

wruza
0 replies
11h26m

Idk, for me one man vs one octopus is sort of not my business. But, in a pressure-less situation with a man vs thousands of octopuses, my trolley would probably go over a man, especially if the tracks already lead to him or he has valuable gear. Call me unethical, but I find most of “ethics” human-ist as in race-ist. It is a justification algorithm for the most part rather than true ethics.

leshokunin
0 replies
15h17m

What is Rawls?

zvmaz
3 replies
6h59m

Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life. It feels to me a bit like thinking the earth is the center of the universe. Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.

Hopefully one day we will stop eating them, too.

mjan22640
1 replies
24m

All eukaryotes except plants eat other life.

zvmaz
0 replies
1m

No all "life" eat other sentient "life".

devbent
0 replies
1h28m

On one hand, eating another intelligent being seems to be an obvious moral wrong.

On the other hand, many of the creatures we eat will happily eat us if given a chance.

theamk
3 replies
15h34m

Which age of human child do you mean? I could argue even bugs are "more intelligent" than 1 week old baby - at least they can eat and run away from danger.

If we re-define "intelligence" as "smarter than a human baby", then this word covers most animals (and probably some plants too) and becomes useless. When doing species comparison, I think it only makes sense to compare adults to each other, and perhaps even "average" or "75th percentile" adults.

leshokunin
2 replies
15h18m

My point is that we don't frame animal intelligence as something comparable with humans or somewhat close. I'm not trying to create a leaderboard of intelligence. I think we should consider other species as capable of intelligence, and treat it with the same dignity we give to children.

theamk
0 replies
13h58m

Every species, including worms and ants? Because they are surely smarter than 1-week old human baby, they can eat and move.

We don't treat children well because of their intelligence - otherwise, no one would care about newborns. We care about them because they are of the same species as us.

As for "dignity", I am not 100% sure what you mean, but in humans it comes directly with being able to function as a member of the society. For example, someone who cannot navigate city (be it because they are young or because of their developmental difficulties) will not be free to wander wherever they want.

filoeleven
0 replies
4h12m

In (at least) one of Iain Banks’ Culture books, he says that technological progress is not a ladder, but a rock face. The tech which a species develops depends a lot on the conditions of their evolution, and encountering wildly different techs that seem miraculous or incomprehensible to one’s own species is fairly common.

I think of “intelligence” in a similar vein. We can recognize it when it’s close enough in proximity to the path we humans have taken. The further away another species is from that, the less we are able to recognize/judge their level of intelligence. I like this metaphor because it emphasizes the limits of our own abilities to understand vey foreign things. That’s not to say that we could never get better at it, but there will almost certainly always be more outside of our circle of understanding than inside it.

I’m also reminded of the drunk searching for his house key beneath a street light. It’s not where he dropped the key, but he’s searching there because “that’s where the light is.”

wruza
2 replies
11h41m

That this “animals no conscious” is default feels like a sort of all-anthropic religion. I don’t get how one imagines being an animal and… it just exists as an automaton? And for some reason exactly humans are all conscious/intelligent, even brain damaged (in literal sense). I bet “those looking like me are very special” is somewhere in our genes, playing an obsolete role competing with other humanoid groups.

randallsquared
0 replies
6h43m

One can imagine being a thermostat, or a car. The question of what it is like to be a bat skips the hard problem.

devbent
0 replies
1h21m

I don’t get how one imagines being an animal and… it just exists as an automaton? And for some reason exactly humans are all conscious/intelligent,

So far evidence points to the simpler solution that all living creatures are automatons and that there is no mechanism by which self determinism can exist.

Wide acceptance of such a belief would pretty much ruin society so it is best if we all just go on pretending we are masters of our own destiny.

AlbertCory
2 replies
15h44m

Hear.

I really believe that, when people ask if some organism is "intelligent" or "conscious" (answer is usually No), they're just asking how similar it is to a human. Intelligence or consciousness is not a Thing; it's just a set of behaviors that have proven adaptive to some species. Crows have somewhat more of those behaviors than we'd thought.

By way of example, many animals have much better smell than we do because that is adaptive for them, and it's not quite as much of an advantage for us.

As for what kind of "consciousness" they have -- they have what they need. We can't know what it's like to be a bat, because we're not bats. It's probably not like being a flying human with sonar, but we'll never know.

gnz11
1 replies
6h55m

Intelligence or consciousness is not a Thing; it's just a set of behaviors that have proven adaptive to some species

This just reduces consciousness down to the "easy problem" and ignores the "hard problem" though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...

AlbertCory
0 replies
6h22m

let's see: I've met exactly one of those (Dennett) so I'll go with him. How's that for insight?

The existence of the hard problem is disputed. It has been accepted by some philosophers of mind such as Joseph Levine,[10] Colin McGinn,[11] and Ned Block[12] and cognitive neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela,[13] Giulio Tononi,[14][15] and Christof Koch.[14][15] On the other hand, its existence is denied by other philosophers of mind, such as Daniel Dennett,[16] Massimo Pigliucci,[17] Thomas Metzinger, Patricia Churchland,[18] and Keith Frankish,[19] and by cognitive neuroscientists such as Stanislas Dehaene,[20] Bernard Baars,[21] Anil Seth,[22] and Antonio Damasio.[23]

Generally if you solve the easy problem you have a better idea of what's left and whether it's worth effort. So let's just go with that for now.

stubish
0 replies
13h57m

Scientists need evidence, rather than just assume intelligence because 'it is obvious', or that other species think the way we do. So just because we see a crow using tools, we should not assume that they learn from their parents and experiment and play and refine just like a human. Because it turns out they don't, and we have learned new things about them, and because of these differences, ourselves. So I don't think it that these silly scientists are surprised animals are intelligent. Why waste your life researching animal intelligence if you think your efforts will be pointless? Who in this century actually believes that all animals are unintelligent? The only arguments are to what degree and which species, and maybe quibbling about what that word actually means. But I don't think anyone has demonstrated equivalent to human child levels of cognition yet, with any species. We can teach a child words and grammar and communicate complex and abstract and even imaginary thoughts, and that is just the very beginning. A human child is so incredibly smart it can develop into a human adult. Other species are very different, and claiming equivalence is comparing apples to oranges. We see intelligence in such alien organisms as an octopus or a hive of bees, and the more we learn, in many ways we are understanding that we actually are alone and special. It seems more and more likely that if we are ever going to interact with another species as peers, the first is going to be a species of our own creation, and not dolphins or cockatoos.

speedchess
0 replies
4h19m

We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully.

If we can't define or measure intelligence meaningfully, how can you even claim we are 'intelligent' to begin with?

Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart

The have levels of intelligence, but they are clearly not very smart. You couldn't even teach them the multiplication table or the basics of number theory.

and more intelligent than a human child.

No species you listed is smarter than a human child.

Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life.

At the very least, we know that mammals with brains have some level of intelligence. Nobody claims humans are the only 'intelligent' life on earth. The claim is we are the most intelligent. And probably the only creatures intelligent enough to ponder about death, mortality, identity and soul.

Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.

Or maybe elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orangutans will better understand what other minds are like and they'll better understand how they are not alone or special? After all, they are 'very smart' according to you.

colordrops
0 replies
10h49m

I don't understand how we could possibly think we are at the top. There are, what, several million species of animal we are aware of, so statistically, we are likely at the middle of the curve. We just aren't aware (or barely aware) of the millions of species more advanced than us, similar to how ants and mosquitos have no idea of our existence.

This idea of the universe and the round earth must be an extremely narrow view of reality similar to the entire universe of pond water some microbe lives in. More advanced beings perhaps live in higher dimensional spaces far more complex than our experience. Maybe this is what people encounter when they smoke DMT.

tux1968
51 replies
17h59m

Have posted this before, but it really left an impression about crows, and the bond between their mates:

Years ago I was putting out the garbage in the back alley behind our building where I lived on the 8th floor. A crow attacked me out of the blue. Distracted by the attack, the back door slammed shut behind me. Since my key was only good for the front door, I had to walk around the building. That damn crow followed me the entire time, dive bombing my head, and screaming bloody murder at me. It was a little spooky.

When I finally got back inside and upstairs, I went and looked out the living room window, which looked out the same direction as the back alley. The crow had flown back around and was at the 8th floor looking in the window, from the other side of the pigeon netting we had on our balcony. On the inside of the pigeon netting, was another crow, desperately trying to figure out how it could escape. Not really sure how it had got itself through the pigeon netting in the first place.

I went out and sliced a hole through the netting and the trapped crow quickly joined its mate outside, who finally stopped screaming bloody murder. To this day it still amazes me that the crow's mate, knew which apartment I lived in and spotted me downstairs.

natmaka
33 replies
15h51m

We should establish that the crow would only 'attack' any human living in this flat (and neglect any other human walking by this back alley).

nirav72
23 replies
14h46m

I’m surprised no one has attempted to train crows for use in asymmetrical warfare. At least before the advent of cheap drones.

kibae
10 replies
14h33m

Pigeons were used in WW1 and WW2 for communication. Paddy the pigeon [0] flew 230 miles across the English channel to relay the success of the D-Day invasion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_(pigeon)

eru
3 replies
7h43m

Didn't they have wireless communication? What benefits did the pigeons have?

jonplackett
1 replies
6h26m

Harder to intercept?

eru
0 replies
5h13m

You'd want to encrypt your communication in either case.

EvanAnderson
0 replies
4h2m

Triangulation of the sender (or the receiver by way of emissions of the receiving set) was a problem in WWII. There's also the problem of traffic analysis. I would think birds would be immune to both.

mbs159
1 replies
11h2m

I find it fascinating how scientists still haven't definitively figured out how magnetoreception in birds works. Humans have utilized homing pigeons for thousands of years [1], but it is still a mystery as to how it works. To quote a paper from 2019 [2]:

> Yet in spite of considerable progress in recent years, many details are still unclear, among them details of the radical pair processes and their transformation into a nervous signal, the precise location of the magnetite-based receptors and the centres in the brain where magnetic information is combined with other navigational information for the navigational processes.

1. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-egypt-pigeon-p...

2. https://doi.org/10.1098%2Frsif.2019.0295

oniony
0 replies
9h50m

I thought I read that they had detected something in the birds' eyes.

beejiu
1 replies
9h9m

Hilariously, during WW2 there was also a research project to build guided missiles using pigeons in the nose cone. "The nose cone of the missile would be split into three compartments, with a lens projecting an image of the intended target onto a screen at the front. A pigeon in each compartment, trained by operant conditioning to recognise the target, would peck at it continually."

https://www.military-history.org/feature/pigeon-guided-missi...

ackbar03
0 replies
8h39m

Worms still use them as homing missiles for their Armageddon battles

nirav72
0 replies
13h24m

I've known about pigeons being used for communications and even bottle-nose dolphins being used for clearing mines in WW2. But I'm just curious if they've ever attempted to use crows for reconnaissance or early warning systems. Especially for use at something like forward operating bases that are always prone to enemy ambushes. Or maybe even using crows to alert of enemy movements.

I watched a video earlier today on a YT channel I follow called Curious Droid. This episode went into how the U.S military had a hard time determining vietcong troop movements due to the thick jungle foilege. So DARPA developed this concept of electronic fenses, where the airforce would drop these sensor packages into the jungle. The package would have sesmic sensors and microphones to capture movement of enemy forces through the jungle. The problem was that this being the 1960s/70s - the batteries only lasted couple of weeks. Also data storage and tranmission rates weren't advance enough at the time to send that information to a centralize location far from the contested area. So they had to have an aircraft loitering above to collect this data and then fly the collected data to a processing facility in Thailand. By the time the data was classified and analyized, the intelligence collected wasn't really actionable for the commanders in the field.

Here is the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feDk6oaeVAY

TeMPOraL
8 replies
10h20m

They'd still be better than cheap drones at remote pick-pocketing - if you could train them to spot and snatch coins and bills.

I was wondering about the opposite too. Could you train a crow to watch you throw a marker, say a pebble of specific color, and then fly to the location it landed to perform specific action? Say, if we go for personal mischief instead of warfare:

- red marker = find whatever interesting object there is (e.g. man-made things it can carry, or money), and fetch it;

- blue marker = grab a payload from you and deposit it at location (e.g. a piece of paper, a "stinky bomb")

- orange marker = hover over location for a while, or explore it (useful with e.g. crow-mounted camera; throw marker over a fence or on a roof, get footage of place you can't get to)

- violet marker = make noise, scare away meanest looking people or animals near target (say, to chase away partying college students that decided to occupy the nearby children playground before sundown, or to remind the neighbor blasting his car radio at 5:30 in the morning that there exists small children, or decency, or noise rules) (both totally random hypothetical scenarios, yes); alternatively, to patrol the area for a while and make noise if people show up;

- rose marker = find nearest switch or lever, flick it;

Etc.

Of course the crow would need to be trained to fetch the marker back after executing the action, as to prevent accidental repeat actions, make markers reusable, and ensure there's no evidence left behind :).

ChrisMarshallNY
5 replies
9h37m

I suspect they would be difficult to train, because of their attitude. We see this with many wild animals. Dogs train easily, but coyotes and wolves, who are even smarter, are much more difficult to train.

One of my favorite nature vignettes, is a part of Planet Earth, by the BBC, about Cape Hunting Dogs[0]. It looks like a military assault. They are really clever, and work well, as a team.

But if you could train crows, they would probably be marvelous.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MRS4XrKRFMA

hypercube33
2 replies
7h29m

Badgers are incredibly smart and we seem to not be able to train them at all. There's a pair on YouTube that figure out how to escape their sanctuary

KineticLensman
1 replies
4h25m

Honey badgers? I visited a place in Africa where a pair were housed in an old tile-sided swimming pool because they could get through anything else. Until someone left a long-handled garden tool in there and they used it to climb out. One of the two was never seen again. The other was caught in a lion enclosure - it had cornered of the lions who was trying to avoid a fight, allegedly.

jonplackett
0 replies
6h28m

It’s interesting how our view of animal intelligence is massively shaped by the animals we see every day - pets, farm animals, zoo animals. All animals that have had their natural intelligence degraded substantially.

TeMPOraL
0 replies
8h56m

Train is a bit of a shorthand here, though. Basic operant conditioning probably won't cut it. But the idea itself came to me after encountering similar thread about crows on HN many years ago - both comments and referenced articles would contain personal anecdotes about human-crow relationships, and from those I gathered that it's possible to kind of befriend a crow (or a group), and teach them behaviors as a kind of play.

So, I don't expect it's easy to train crows like dogs and pigeons, where one person "pre-trains" them and gives/sells them to someone else. But I think it should be possible to "train" a crow for yourself - bond with it and have it voluntarily indulge you reliably enough that it's pretty much like training.

cultofmetatron
0 replies
4h9m

They'd still be better than cheap drones at remote pick-pocketing

for that literal reason, they are illegal to keep as pets in srilanka

andylynch
0 replies
6h24m

Thinking about markers, the falconer at a railway station I frequent paints the pigeons he wants his bird to pursue with a green laser.

beezlewax
1 replies
12h52m

This is a bit in a Chris Morris movie called Four Lions.

d1sxeyes
0 replies
11h43m

Barry says we come out blurry

KineticLensman
0 replies
4h26m

ISTR a study where someone tried to train crows to collect litter in return for small food treats. It worked fine until the crows discovered some old pizza and decided it was better than the study's rewards.

WalterBright
3 replies
10h38m

About 6 eagles live nearby. I often see them circling overhead hunting wabbits. (Occasionally they'll bag a small aircraft.) One day, I was out for a walk and one of them was gliding at eye level and passed me. I could have touched its wingtip it was so close.

My gawd, what a magnificent bird. I then understood why combat pilots would paint them on the sides of their fighters. It was much bigger than I realized, and the size of those talons - I was not going to get it mad at me!

KineticLensman
2 replies
10h17m

Raptor talons are really serious weapons - they are the killing mechanism, not the beak. In larger birds comparable to a Rottweiler’s jaw in power. They also have a ratchet-like behaviour, so the bird has to actually want to let you go once you have been grabbed, and struggling usually only makes the bird grip harder

jakeogh
1 replies
9h40m

Oh yea, their claws are wild. I got to experience the Tucson Desert Museum demo[0] (it's still going, but this was 16+ years ago)... it's amazing. The falconer had a leather covered arm even though the bird is a close friend.

They are smart AF, but watch out for the beak too if it's injured/scared. A vet told me, if you handle a raptor, protect your hands, they can take a chunk.

Same goes for long billed birds[1].

[0] https://www.desertmuseum.org/visit/rff_index.php

[1] https://youtu.be/MstjYUmdCwo?t=430

KineticLensman
0 replies
5h17m

yeah, I volunteer at a UK raptor conservancy. For handling most of the birds a falconer's glove is okay but for the bald eagle we have a long leather guard for the whole arm - it's actually a boot that someone cut the foot off. A couple of the handlers describe being seriously gripped by a bird - you just have to keep still and grin and bear it until the bird decides to let go.

I got a scratch on the side of my head once from a black kite that 'clonked' me with its talons as it flew past but this was just messing about, not a serious attack.

One other thing is how I would feed the birds. Some of them (e.g. a hooded vulture) I would pass food to their beak with my bare hand but with other birds this would be a good way to lose a finger.

Also, their Egyptian vulture likes playing with shoe laces (undoing them by pulling) and also tugging on leg hair if you are wearing shorts. The Yellow-billed kites like grabbing people's hats if they are wearing them.

pmichaud
0 replies
59m

You’re not wrong, but crows definitely recognize individual people.

jmull
0 replies
6h23m

and neglect any other human walking by this back alley

Not just the back alley. The back alley itself has nothing specifically to do with it. The test would have to be something like the crow attacks this person but not anyone else around the building generally. That doesn't really make a lot of sense from the crows perspective either though... it's concerned with the plight of its mate, so why focus instead on a random person who's a decent distance away unless it can perceive a specific connection, e.g., by recognizing them.

It's moot anyway. I think it's pretty well established crows can recognize human faces.

hashmal
0 replies
10h37m

It has been established already that crows remember human faces for years, that they mourn, and that they attack people they associate with the death of their mates (while being quite friendly with other people they know well).

gmd63
0 replies
12h47m

Should also establish that the crow on the balcony is the same one that attacked after line of sight was broken during the trip back upstairs.

coldtea
0 replies
5h19m

If the crows who live in the area didn't do this for every other day, but only on that ocassion - and stopped when the issue was solved, I don't think we need to establish anything, it's kind of established already.

jiggawatts
13 replies
17h8m

Corvids can recognise faces and they are territorial and know the humans in their territory.

nullhole
3 replies
16h45m

A cheeky experiment was done to prove this back in the aughts:

https://www.science.org/content/article/caveman-or-dick-chen...

"In a creative experiment that relied on rubber masks of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other distinctive mugs, researchers have shown that American crows have an uncanny ability to pick a familiar human face out of a crowd."

000ooo000
1 replies
15h42m

I vaguely remember a doco (about a study?) where they established similar fear in crows using similar masks. They tracked these crows, waited for them to breed, and tested how the babies responded. Saw this over a decade ago now I'd guess, so my memory is fuzzy, but IIRC the takeaway was that the parent crows were able to communicate the knowledge to their offspring that these masks were bad news.

eru
0 replies
7h41m

I remember that story from the documentary called 'A Murder of Crows'.

cduzz
2 replies
16h45m

A friend used to jog around the university I worked at; he'd jog past an area that, for a month out of the year, was under a hawk nest. He came by commenting that he'd been dive-bombed by a hawk that was obviously guarding it's nest he said it had bonked him on the head and yelled at him -- he decided not to go jogging that way for a while after. I was kinda impressed that the hawk had "bonk human on head" mode as well as "use lethal claws to kill things and eat them later" mode -- seemed like an interesting level of restraint to bonk but not cut the human.

That the crow had a mental map of the building sufficiently detailed to know "human on 8th floor may be able to help Charles get out out of net in front of human's cliff cave if I yell at him" seems several orders of magnitude more complex...

mikestew
1 replies
16h14m

I've had owls do the same thing, and thankfully without talons in full attack mode. "Aggressive owls" weren't a thing I recall growing up in the Midwest, but they're sure in the Pacific Northwest.

ycombinete
1 replies
9h33m

During Covid crows started harassing a lot of people in our area while walking around.

I realised it was because they didn’t like someone who wore a blue mask.

If I took my mast off or wore a different style of mask they’d leave me alone, and bother other people who looked similar to me with a blue mask on.

YurgenJurgensen
0 replies
7h57m

I used to joke about all the venues which suddenly announced themselves as ‘corvid secure’ in 2020, but maybe this was what they were talking about.

roughly
0 replies
12h12m

I always chuckle at this study - "Ah shit, they've got the masks on again."

14
1 replies
12h23m

My dad always told a story about a guy at work who spotted a crow nest not too far up a tree and decided he would steal the baby crow and raise it. The crows attacked him as he did it and in the end the baby crow died in his care. Sad. But at least after that my dad said every single day he would pull up to work and if any crows were there they would dive bomb him. Only him. My dad said this carried on for years.

usrusr
0 replies
11h31m

Assuming that the crows attacking years later were not conveyed a detailed account of the original events, this is an interesting model also applies to many human group behaviors:

"this is the guy we hate, it gives a great feeling of community expressing that hate. Yeah, there's probably a reason why we hate him, but that's besides the point"

m463
1 replies
15h18m

But did you get crow credit for the save??

theginger
0 replies
10h0m

I wonder if the crow thought it had bullied you into releasing the crow you had captured or convinced you to rescue one that had trapped itself.

running101
0 replies
6h24m

Maybe it was because you were A human, not the fact it was specifically you.

naikrovek
12 replies
18h28m

I don’t know why these things are surprising.

To me, the assumption that animals can’t do things we later discovered they could do is the surprising thing. Such arrogance we humans have.

nkrisc
4 replies
18h19m

I think it is at least a bit surprising. There is clearly something different between humans and all other animals.

nradov
1 replies
17h58m

That seems true, and yet when we try to pin down specific differences there always seem to be exceptions. Like chimpanzees making stone tools. There's a spectrum of intelligence, not a binary difference between humans and everything else.

https://www.livescience.com/which-animals-use-stone-tools

card_zero
0 replies
9h45m

So, it seems true and seems not true. I agree, that's how it seems.

anonyfox
1 replies
10h48m

Biological Jackpot advantages, or: sheer luck.

1. we do not live underwater, so lots of tools and stuff possible (iE: fire).

2. we have usable hands with thumbs. This allows much better tooling. Ravens only have their beak and are comparatively handicapped in technical developments.

3. we do not die during/after reproduction. This allows for accumulation of knowledge instead of every generation starting to learn from scratch. That’s octopus handicap.

4. we have reasonably enough raw strength and compensate weaknesses with social groups and tools/weapons to eliminate basically all competition where we lived. And managed to increase food production for exponential population growth, again some way of tooling ultimately.

… so it for me boils down to the fact that we, among several intelligent species, have been the lucky ones to leverage tooling in the most efficient way.

And especially ravens/crows are absolutely in the ballpark of humans when it comes to intelligence. They have actual language to communicate facts to others, they have social structures/rituals similar to ours, they make tools to accomplish goals, even with multi-step-plans. Heck, they even „use“ other animals like wolves: since they are not capable of opening a fresh deer corpse to get to the meat, they search for the nearest wolf and guide him to the corpse for win-win food sharing… some wolf packs have even been seen essentially protecting raven flocks/eggs, so ravens literally can have kinda dogs.

nkrisc
0 replies
6h3m

I agree, it’s likely many subtle, accumulated factors.

I think the interesting question, that we may never be able to answer, is whether crow intelligence is such that they could have developed on our trajectory as well, had things been different. Or is our intelligence, while similar to crows and other animals in many ways, fundamentally different in some way? Or was early hominid intelligence middle of the pack and it was just the other factors you mentioned that gave it the edge it needed?

lll-o-lll
3 replies
18h22m

Because they have such little brains. When I look at a crow, I think - not much room for brains in there.

pajeets
0 replies
18h10m

parrots too are extremely smart. I swear they know how to perform basic math and know what things are called.

CuriouslyC
0 replies
18h3m

We're finding through LLM research that smaller models aren't necessarily dumber, so much as their intelligence is more limited in terms of domains and knowledge encoding ability. Those small brains might have limited knowledge encoding ability, but that doesn't mean they can't reason about the things they have encoded.

shermantanktop
0 replies
18h17m

It cuts both ways. We've discounted animal abilities out of arrogance, but we've also paid attention to those abilities that most remind us of ourselves.

In this case, crows are doing something that is interesting but doesn't appear to be spontaneous tool-making but rather a form of mimicry that may have hard-wired instinctive basis. Is it human-like learning? Is it "smart" the way a human is smart? Doesn't look like it.

imoverclocked
0 replies
18h21m

Earth isn’t the center of the universe, either. Our arrogance goes way back :)

I think our arrogance is also part of why we succeed as a species.

Xerox9213
0 replies
18h15m

Maybe not surprising, but exciting! This kind of pessimistic take is what really surprises me. Crows can make mental templates, this is something we didn't know earlier, and is really neat, as far as I can tell.

lr4444lr
11 replies
18h21m

Sometimes I wonder whether we're being watched by a super intelligent species beyond our current detection that occasionally places objects in certain configurations in front of the smarter of our species throughout history, and writes articles based on their observations titled things like, "homo sapiens smarter than previously known: demonstrates understanding of unified theory of electromagnetic waves through RF send/receive devices"

sitkack
7 replies
18h9m

Found Gary Larson's alt account.

You should turn it into a short movie using AI. I have thought something similar but more along the lines that in the universe above us, we are 3 days into a science experiment and either a) they don't know we exist or b) the look in with their microscope and see patterns for cities or c) they have a statistical measure of how many have developed ecosystems and set off a nuclear weapon. But on the scales they are viewing, the known universe might fit into a 50cm sphere (their dimensions).

0xblinq
2 replies
15h42m

Lots of ideas here for SciFi movies.

I also like the idea of everything being a simulation (like in Matrix) but managed/set up by an alien civilization and just experimenting or having fun with us, or us actually just being their avatars… and we are them!!! Alright, time to go to bed.

hnfong
0 replies
8h27m

The scenario you described is what myth, tradition, fiction and science are all telling me these days.

It's not even for SciFi movies now, with VR tech and assuming we have a couple order of magnitude more compute, it's actually plausible to actually think about building the simulation for real. (Isn't that what Meta was supposed to be about?)

Aerroon
0 replies
14h45m

That would be one way that heaven, hell, and all the other religious ideas could be true. Hell is just the next experiment over.

thelastparadise
1 replies
18h2m

No, it most definitely is not.

sitkack
0 replies
17h45m

Is a joke, it is very much in the theme of humans as test subjects, a common gag in his comics.

dayjah
0 replies
17h21m

Honestly I envision this concept a lot; I was first inspired by Men in Black where a cat has a universe in a bauble attached to a collar around its neck. The bauble looks like a marble.

thelastgallon
0 replies
15h56m

In a prehistoric veld, a tribe of hominins is driven away from its water hole by a rival tribe. The next day, they find an alien monolith has appeared in their midst. The tribe then learn how to use a bone as a weapon and, after their first hunt, return to drive their rivals away with it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey

corytheboyd
0 replies
16h43m

Or flip it around entirely— perhaps not this at all, because it’s the same human perception of “us smarter than them” but pretending “us” is “something else”. I like the idea that our plane of existence is present but inconsequential in some other reality— like a shadow, or gravity. It’s not that crazy of a stretch when we can barely accept that maybe the other species on our own planet can Think, it’s just a completely foreign framework of existence from what we know, so therefore, it cannot be.

52-6F-62
0 replies
12h17m

We’ve come full circle. Meet the Tuatha de Danann. There is a movie coming out teasing a little at the idea called The Watchers.

jumploops
11 replies
18h6m

This kind of feat, according to animal behavior researchers, requires the ability to form “mental templates.” Essentially, a mental template is an image in the mind of what a particular object looks like, even when that object is not present.

As someone with aphantasia, can I get points for recreating something I've seen _without_ having an "image in the mind"?

Retr0id
7 replies
17h12m

I'm curious, could you describe your mental process of recreating a shape you've seen before? (via drawing, I suppose)

I would of course start by visualising it in my head, but I know that's not how aphantasia works.

sfink
6 replies
16h23m

As another someone with aphantasia, I remember what something looks like, so I draw what I remember. That memory is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like. For simple things, that's enough. For complicated things, I sketch out what I remember of the overall appearance, look at it and gauge how far off it is and what is off, and add in details to gradually reduce the difference.

I'm not a very good artist, so it'll always look kind of bad, though oddly it doesn't feel like aphantasia is all that much of an obstacle to my ability to draw. It's more just skill in making things look "right", skill that is learnable and seems like is necessary to learn by anyone, include those without aphantasia.

It's difficult to communicate to someone without aphantasia, because to them apparently the memory of what something looks like is an image. It's similar to the question about whether I dream in color. I mean, I dream in color just as much as I read in color. If asked, I could tell you what color something is. It's part of my knowledge of what that thing looks like. But knowing what color something is and seeing the thing in color are definitely not the same. I don't dream in images at all. I certainly don't dream in "black and white". Colors and grayscales only have meaning in an image.

(And maybe it's just me, but if the color of something never strikes me as an important characteristic, I will have no memory of what color the thing is. Right now, I couldn't tell you what color the walls of the next room over are, despite seeing it every day. Even though I could probably roughly model the entire room and get the dimensions and positions of everything about right.)

Though I'm skeptical that "normal" people are as restricted to images as their descriptions often imply. Not everything is 2D, so memories are going to have to include at least some shape information. And I'm sure you have all kinds of associations of the texture and feel of things you visualize, and if it's prickly how much it would hurt to bump into it or hold it in your hand. Memories are rich multi-sensory things, and they aren't just limited to point-in-time sensations either.

tbrownaw
2 replies
16h3m

is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like

Is this similar to calling an .svg "not an image" if it's viewed in a text editor rather than on a canvas?

trescenzi
0 replies
15h30m

I don’t know if it’s true for others with aphantasia but this seems like solid description to me.

I draw a square by knowing that squares are closed objects with four equal length sides that meet at 90 degree angles. I don’t think that explicitly every time, but regardless there's no visual stimuli.

hiracat
0 replies
14h29m

That's an amazing description, I don't have aphantasia, but that made me understand what it could be like.

bigyikes
1 replies
16h18m

Interestingly, your description of remembering what something looks like matches my experience exactly, but in my dreams I see vividly. Aphantasic except in my dreams?

Yossarrian22
0 replies
14h12m

Are you ever able to control your dreams? And if you are do you lose “video” on them but still retain perception on what is happening? That’s how I and other aphantasics I know experience it

jsnxnxkjx
0 replies
15h35m

When imaginating something, I don't have a literal 2D image in my head

It's more like a scene which I can manipulate both camera angle and content at will. I can also imagine sound

What I have a hard time is imagining smell. I can remember distinct smell but the scenes in my head usually don't have smell

Terretta
2 replies
16h7m

As another, I thought "mental template" is the perfect term, since it's neither image nor visual.

I assume (since you mention points), you can recreate a geometric drawing (say, a floor plan, or a bicycle*)? What would you call that if not drawing from a mental template?

* It seems, at least with bicycles, some people who do this "visually" are terrible at it: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/can-draw-bikes-memory-definite... ... I look at those, and think, how T.F. do they think that would work? Then I realize they aren't thinking how it works to draw it, they are drawing what they see and they don't look at things closely enough to understand their shape.

jumploops
1 replies
14h49m

I actually quite like the term “mental template” but then they immediately equated it to an image.

The best way I can describe my aphantasia is that I think about objects three dimensionally. There’s nothing visual about it, but I can think about the relation of “points” (really surfaces) in terms of the whole.

Terretta
0 replies
2h5m

Yes. I think this is one that is non-euphemistically "differently abled".

Given a choice, I would trade the postcard recall ability for the ability to multi-dimensionally map concepts and then "see" the gaps, as if a periodic table missing some elements, so you know what key areas need working on even though (because) they aren't in evidence.

omnee
8 replies
10h43m

We have come a long way from Descartes argument that animals are no more than automata. Which supported our unabashed exploitation of countless species.

It is now abundantly clear that animals have their own phenomenological experience of the world, and their intelligence is part of a continuum, shaped mostly to survive in their niches. And some species demonstrate a higher level of general intelligence - something in which we are quite easily the best.

Although, it's worth noting that some cultures (Buddhists or Jain's for example) did give animals their due with respect to their lives and intelligence.

literalAardvark
4 replies
10h29m

As far as I can tell, current theories are that animals are also somewhat conscious and intelligent, but that we're all, including humans, automata, with zero or near zero free will.

card_zero
3 replies
10h4m

I don't even know what that means or why it worries people, I think it's a big red herring. (And near-zero is a confusing concept.) We're machines that make choices, spontaneously and deterministically (which is not a contradiction). People fretting about free will are getting caught in some kind of category error that confuses the physics of time with being controlled by an invisible tyrant.

hnfong
2 replies
8h15m

Law is one practical aspect of free will that people generally don't talk much about.

For example, criminal law generally assumes people have free will, and thus should be responsible for their actions. If we take the stance that people are in fact merely deterministically doing what they are fated to do given circumstances, some of the punishments doled out to convicts might make people feel uneasy. (Eg. if being poor made the person commit theft... shouldn't we tackle the issue of poverty instead of locking up starving people?)

Contract law also assumes people are free to make agreements. Like, signing a contract with onerous terms because that's the only option a person has to avoid something worse.

In short, free will provides a kind of cop out for moral philosophers to blame individuals for their own failures. You may or may not agree with this approach, I'm not advocating for or against, but anyway that's one of the practical consequences of free will.

card_zero
1 replies
7h42m

Funny, to me it seems people talk about this one a lot. And the same answer applies. Yes, we have free will and responsibility (because we can respond). Also yes, we do what we do because of physical mechanisms which means you could say we're "fated" (leaving aside the irrelevant complication of chance and probability).

However, the law is only concerned with people doing (codified) wrong. It lets people off for being insane, because dealing with insanity falls outside of its mission. And similarly it can let people off on compassionate grounds, if for instance they stole food due to being hungry due to poverty. Punishing people for bad luck isn't its mission either. And a contract signed under duress isn't supposed to be valid, because the law's mission isn't to enable formalized bullying. Of course in reality the law is sketchy, lacks compassion, fails to recognize forms of duress. But generally speaking the idea is that it's restricted to the bad things a person freely did, as opposed to things that happened to the person.

So then you might say, well, do we freely do anything at all, because it's all just physics and mechanisms. But a lot of the mechanisms are in our brains, thinking sanely (if immorally), so yes, we do act freely, when not coerced.

It's important to separate the part of fate which is the things we're probably going to think, which is our responsibility, from the part of fate which is the things that the outside world is probably going to do to us, which is outside of our responsibility.

hnfong
0 replies
3h18m

I'm not sure I get your point -- it looks like you're starting from the conclusion that people do have free will, which of course does not create problems I mentioned.

What I was trying to say is that if one believes determinism is incompatible with the concept of free will, then they cannot think the law is fair because nothing has free will. And I'm hypothesizing that people who think that way might be a bit queasy about determinism etc.

FWIW, I personally believe free will exists for reasons outside the scope of this discussion, and I doubt it's necessary to conclude first whether it exists or not to get my original point across...

tjoff
1 replies
10h37m

Well, many argue that humans are no more than automata.

So from that view Descartes argument holds, but the conclusion that such a life has no meaning does not.

pessimizer
0 replies
2h22m

Descartes couldn't figure out how humans weren't automata either. That's where his explanations start getting supernatural, and not particularly insightful. Any kook can babble on about an invisible pineal gland soul-thread.

edit: I think the interesting thing for people is how insight like Descartes' becomes useless when he tries to distinguish us from automata.

card_zero
0 replies
10h9m

It's not abundantly clear what the ability to have phenomenological "experiences" means in relation to our moral values regarding what we shouldn't do with the creature. I mean, we do have moral values about animal rights, but they start with the animals we actually relate to (pets) and are in essence human rights by proxy. Then out of a sense of consistency we try to extend these rights to all the wild animals, many of them busily eating one another and blatantly not caring about nice things or participating in our value system.

azemetre
6 replies
16h37m

I've posted this comment before but I grew up in Florida on a decent amount of land for a curious child. One day I was feeding the crows some stale cuban bread, there were probably 5 of them sitting on the fence watching me throw the bread. Each one would fly down and take a piece.

One of them flew down and tumbled, his friends started laughing something fierce. His friends then all took turns mimicking his tumble in the grass, you can just tell they were laughing. One would dive bomb into the grass and flop around like an athlete faking an injury while the others were squawking up something fierce.

Probably the funniest thing they saw in weeks.

meowface
5 replies
16h18m

They probably have rich social lives. I wonder how fine-grained their communication signals are.

shafouzzz
1 replies
6h26m

the first book in the series is amazing. Unfortunately it goes down from there. Could not finish the third one ( Crow one )

stanac
0 replies
6h2m

Third one was interesting but out of place. It didn't move the story forward. Maybe a little bit (I don't want to spoil the ending).

fuzzfactor
0 replies
14h28m

"It's the same story the crow told me, it's the only one he knows . . . "

BeFlatXIII
0 replies
6m

supposedly understood recursion

TIL the average corvid is notably smarter than the average compsci undergrad

mensetmanusman
5 replies
18h21m

Apparently you can scare a few of them like crazy from your land and they will tell their bros to stay away.

pajeets
4 replies
18h11m

This is what I find most fascinating. That crows are capable of gossip, organization, planning and execution.

"you know that dude that lives by the water? protect him he feeds us."

"you know the big guy that walks his dog and barks at us? we found out where he lives."

I've seen crows execute their own (seriously). They would crowd and walk him over the edge and when he fell they would just attack him.

I've seen crows leave gifts behind for feeding them regularly.

I've seen crows protect our property from raccoons and squirrels.

I've seen crows remember people and harass them (even when they moved to another city!)

juancroldan
2 replies
17h51m

Some years ago I started leaving food in my patio for one crow that lived in an electric post nearby. Then he started leaving random shiny stuff in the outside table: pieces of metal, coins and once an SD card. The most suprising thing to me was that the stuff was always in the exact center of the round table.

pajeets
0 replies
17h45m

same what is amazing is that they seem to know we are attracted to shiny stuff: constantly glancing at our phones, counting coins, jewelry

i dont know if this urban legend is true but apparently one guy was raking in a few hundred bucks a month by training crows to find coins and cash on the street

ethbr1
0 replies
17h38m

I had never considered the attack vector of USB stick, distributed by crow...

picafrost
0 replies
10h31m

Communicating about something not immediately present is called displacement [1] and it's a property of language, not limited to vocalization, thought to be unique to just a few species: humans, ants, bees, corvids, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics)

nikolay
4 replies
17h1m

There are tons of crows around my house. I feed them, I know them, they know me, but they are so hard to become friends with. They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence. Otheriwse, they are probably the best parents among the birds. They little ones have such characters and the entire extended family takes care of them.

nightowl_games
0 replies
42m

Have you tried not looking at them? Or wearing sunglasses? Im under the impression they have a kinda natural visceral reaction to eye contact

natmaka
0 replies
15h46m

"Intelligence" may imply "not uselessly exposing yourself to danger". As long as they don't know what they could win by becoming more familiar there is no reason for them to do so. You may try to let them discover such a reason...

inglor_cz
0 replies
4h11m

"They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence."

Frankly, you don't have enough information for that conclusion.

First of all, from a bird's point of view, we are massive, clumsy and extremely powerful creatures the size of a 10-story building. If I had to live around such creatures, I would keep my distance just in case. Something that big can hurt you even without intending to do so.

Second, you don't really know if they can trust you. It is entirely possible that someone else in your neighbourhood / region fed them, gained their trust, then hurt them (or maybe "just" captured them for some time etc., an ornithologist would do). In that case, once bitten, twice shy. Most long-lived smart birds probably witnessed their kin being killed by humans; people would be expected to suffer from a bit of PTSD after that.

Third, there may be other factors at play. For example, you might smell bad to them. We generally underestimate olfactory impressions, but few of us would love to be close friends with someone who smelt strongly of, say, gasoline. Personally, I have the experience that ticks avoid me, I had just three in my entire life, approximately once in a decade, even though I go to nature fairly frequently and Czech woods are infested like hell. I must be repulsive to them.

If you have a cat or a dog, they might be smelling them off you.

hnfong
0 replies
8h7m

Humans are probably the most unpredictable beings the crows have seen.

How would they ever know you're not a threat for sure? Usually, it's hard for a human to kill another (unless with a lethal weapon and lots of intention), but it's really easy for a human to kill a bird, even recklessly or carelessly.

Note that humans in developed societies are generally much "nicer" than what we have been for thousands of years. And even so, for many individuals today, they're not different from our barbaric ancestors...

mewpmewp2
4 replies
18h9m

We consider this smart and intelligent, but many people don't want to admit that LLMs are intelligent?

egypturnash
2 replies
15h24m

There’s no CEOs excitedly talking about how crows will take over all the work that they’re currently paying humans to do, and how it is absolutely imperative that we allow them to ignore the fact that “shoveling all the data they can find into a for-profit turbo-autocomplete made up of trained crows” may be within the letter of fair use laws, but sure feels well outside the spirit of them.

mulmen
0 replies
4m

[delayed]

mewpmewp2
0 replies
12h12m

How do CEOs talking anything relate to an intelligence of a thing?

hiracat
0 replies
14h11m

I think its because animals are many interconnected systems or models which are made to create "intelligent" behavior, like one for speak one for movement and alike. LLMs are trained purely off text, so they are more similar to a very simple animal that only has one type of inputs and outputs like a worm that only knows where its body is and then where it wants to be. LLMs are also only trained for a short period of time, and thats when something interesting is going on and its able to learn and change. We then take a snapshot of it and give it different inputs to get some result instead of to teach it something. I would say that a crow brain that has been frozen and can only get a certain amount of inputs and then only produce a certain amount of outputs is not intelligent.

imoverclocked
4 replies
18h17m

This is just as interesting as any other article on finding that X can do Y where X isn’t human and Y is a behavior that humans value.

What would be even more amazing to me is finding cognitive things that other animals do that humans can’t. Of course, many humans can’t do mental math so … maybe the quest is ill defined?

tbrownaw
0 replies
15h57m

Aren't humans a bit lacking in the "instinct" department? I don't think we can do something as complex as say a spiderweb without needing time to learn or first.

nradov
0 replies
18h8m

Some marine mammals can do cognitive things with 3D echolocation that humans can't. (A few visually impaired people have learned to do a bit of echolocation but in a much more limited way.) Cephalopods use multiple mini-brains to independently control their arms in a way humans can't.

CapeTheory
0 replies
18h12m

The only bit of animal behaviour research I have ever found to be really interesting or meaningful is that on cephalopods. Their nervous system is very different to ours, and it seems like that difference shows clearly in their learning abilities.

teleforce
3 replies
18h1m

Fun facts, according to Quran in human very first murder crime when one of Adam's sons killed his younger brother out of disagreement on offerings to God, the crow showed him how to properly bury the dead body:

Then Allah sent a crow digging a grave in the ground for a dead crow, in order to show him how to bury the corpse of his brother. He cried, “Alas! Have I even failed to be like this crow and bury the corpse of my brother?” So he became regretful.

https://quran.com/en/al-maidah/31

Flop7331
2 replies
17h19m

To be fair to Cain/Qabil, he didn't know ambushing Abel/Habil was going to kill him. Nobody had died before.

cabbageicefruit
1 replies
16h6m

Do you have to have seen a human die to know that a human could die? Surely Cain had seen plenty of animals die. I think you might not be giving Cain enough credit (or maybe too much credit) by assuming he couldn’t have put 2 and 2 together

tedunangst
0 replies
15h40m

But beasts and man were created in distinct phases, with different rules and instructions.

milleramp
3 replies
14h27m

When I was little I had a small bb gun and would shoot cans in the backyard. A couple times i shot a crow and it would bounce off their strong chest and they would fly off seemingly unfazed. One time by pure chance I hit a crow in the neck and it died instantly, crashing down into my neighbor's yard. It was very shocking because I had not killed anything like that before. Immediately crows started circling my parents house, making an incredible amount of noise. I was so scared, I jumped over the fence to retrieve the dead crow. At this point crows started to dive bomb me and I thought for sure the whole neighborhood must know what is going on. I buried the crow in the backyard and the crows continued to be in high places around the house making noises until evening. The coordination and the intentional effort they made to disrupt and stop me was something I have never forgotten. This had a big effect on me, I thought of it's family, and how they were trying to protect it. Needless to say I have not shot another bird since.

whamlastxmas
0 replies
5h17m

I had a similar experience when I was a kid shooting a .22 and was like “no way I can hit this bird” and totally did. I instantly felt like a huge prick as I stood there watching this bird die. I went back to get my gun to humanely finish it off but didn’t manage to find it again when I walked back. First and last time I’ve ever thoughtlessly harmed an animal

snet0
0 replies
3h33m

This is a hard way to learn it, but I think the recognition of non-human animals as being alive in the same way we are is quite a profound moment. Just that realisation of this thing that was previously just a robotic, animated part of "the natural world", like a blade of grass that can move, suddenly being - in its own way - related to itself and others of its species. People find this easy with pets, I guess, but I think the moment you recognise a farm or wild animal as being of a similar kind as you, it can really change your perspective.

brcmthrowaway
3 replies
17h22m

What is the difference between a raven and crow?

tczMUFlmoNk
0 replies
13h4m

"If you see a corvid and think, 'ooh, is that a raven?', then it's a crow. If you instead think, 'dear lord that's the biggest bird I've ever seen', then it's a raven."

ianburrell
0 replies
15h25m

Ravens are bigger than crows. They also have diamond tails, throat feathers, and deeper sounds. Ravens also travel in pairs while crows are frequently in groups.

rsync
2 replies
15h11m

What if they’re all, by our own definition, intelligent…

… but what makes us special is that we’re the only ones who care ?

What if ego is the unique human trait?

What if the reason my goats don’t communicate with me isn’t because they’re dumb… but because they couldn’t care less ?

qup
0 replies
3h24m

Okay, but have you been around a goat?

Hold a bucket of grain and they will have the incredible urgent desire to communicate with you.

card_zero
0 replies
10h32m

Ego, motivation, a sense of quest, existential dread, trouble-making. Perhaps so.

picafrost
2 replies
12h54m

We put a lot of effort and funding into trying to contact other intelligent lifeforms in this universe. Why should we believe we can understand each other if we can't even understand the intelligent lifeforms right next to us?

keiferski
0 replies
12h29m

“Science? Nonsense! In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally useless! I must tell you that we really have no desire to conquer any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth up to its borders. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle to make contact, but we'll never achieve it. We are in a ridiculous predicament of man pursuing a goal that he fears and that he really does not need. Man needs man."

- Solaris

crazygringo
0 replies
4h14m

Because symbolic communication is vastly simpler to define and use and translate than non-symbolic communication.

If whale songs and crow language could be written down in discrete symbols, we could figure them out too.

And with higher intelligence we assume that the symbolic language of mathematics will be a universally shared starting point.

The kind of analog pattern-matching required to decipher animal language seems to be notoriously difficult to do if your brain doesn't already come with the right analog "circuits".

I definitely hope that we'll have an AI breakthrough at some point that can decipher animal language, however. One thing's for sure though -- it won't be LLM's since they operate at a symbolic level.

bane
2 replies
14h37m

I think I've come to an inevitable conclusion that there appears to be at least two "sources" of intelligence, genetic, and (I guess for lack of a better word), "learned". Learned could mean all kinds of things, the capacity measurement of IQ, the effort by parents to fill that capacity, social normative steering, whatever.

But genetic really means "instinct" in the way that a day old deer can stand, run, graze (I live in an area with lots of deer, so I get a first-hand chance to observe them).

Suppose a sci-fi story, where humans encounter a fantastically advanced alien species. Over the course of the story events occur where individuals in the alien species see not learn anything at all, while later generations seem imbued with those same learnings. What humans are encountering might be instead incredibly advance, and highly encoded instinct.

Is that not intelligence?

I'm reminded of the schools of buddhism, where a differentiation is that you are able to achieve enlightenment in one-lifetime or in many.

The main distinction between life and non-life appear to be the ability to experience the universe. A blade of grass is alive no different than a human, but entirely different from a rock. Experience seems to be some kind of basis for intelligence, without which it cannot exist, thus perhaps, all experiential beings are intelligent in some way.

Every living thing has survived everything its ancestors' environment threw at them and made it to "now".

Intralexical
0 replies
13h13m

Is that not intelligence?

"Intelligence" should be adaptive, and general purpose.

Complex systems that are unable to grow or change are basically the definition of an unliving "mechanism", contrasted against an intelligent mind/being.

theflyingpigeon
1 replies
12h52m

This is interesting. However, too bad a British university is working with a russian university

filoeleven
0 replies
2h50m

A British university working with a Russian university is far more beneficial to humanity than a British university working with a British weapons manufacturer.

ehnto
1 replies
12h37m

Make sure you are kind to our crow friends, judging by the trajectory of these articles I fear their intelligence is growing as fast as ours is dropping.

While that's definitely a joke, I wouldn't be that surprised by a human getting outwitted by a crow even today.

k4rli
0 replies
1h3m

Any crow is definitely smarter than the average Tiktok user.

14
1 replies
12h27m

I have always loved crows. I used to carry a bag of unshelled peanuts in my car to feed to them if I saw them. One day I was pulled over and saw a lone crow. So I threw a peanut and watched him open it easily with his beak and eat the nuts. Then I threw 2 peanuts and he picked up both in it's mouth and flew a short distance away and ate them. I always new crows could fit 2 peanuts but not 3 so I thought what would you do if I throw 3? So I do and for a moment he tries to fit all of them in his mouth but can not. So he flies about 15 feet away to a cement path walkway and on the side of it I watched him bury one of the peanuts. Smart I thought. Then he immediately flew back and grab the other nuts. I have always been impressed by that moment.

qup
0 replies
3h7m

Sounds like they were shelled

wileydragonfly
0 replies
4h57m

And if you split their tongues, according to family lore, they can talk.

tonetegeatinst
0 replies
17h34m

My next AI prediction will be that the next big leap will use crows intelligence in problem solving to advance towards AGI

tomrod
0 replies
18h36m

Neat!

textlapse
0 replies
16h43m

How cool would it be to have a reinforcement learning playground to teach ‘crows’ and ‘octopuses’ and ‘cuttlefish’?

The key thing is the biological evolution that seeks rewards for survival and reproductive partner selection over generations.

Forget AGI… this would be way cooler to try.

t-3
0 replies
17h35m

Crows are definitely smart, but I've seen other birds outsmarting them before. It seems to me that social behavior is a bit overweighted when it comes to attempting to measure animal intelligence.

nunez
0 replies
14h49m

This isn't surprising. Birds are incredibly intelligent, and crows/ravens are up there. Magpies too. We have grackles here in Houston; those fuckers are clever as well!

nonotanymore
0 replies
18h19m

The imprinting seems like a drawback if it can't be changed in new environments.

nforgerit
0 replies
15h49m

I once had the opportunity to watch two crows attacking a swarm of sparrows.

I've never seen birds hunting birds before so it made me watch the whole scene for 3-5min and I was baffled how the crows systematically 1) induced chaos trying to isolate a sparrow from the swarm then 2) killed it and 3) while one crow was busy eating it the other crow kept the infuriated swarm at distance. After a while 4) the crows changed jobs.

naveen99
0 replies
15h25m

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moi2388
0 replies
13h26m

Seriously animal researchers are so weird..

Of course animals can form mental representations of shapes. Do you think they wouldn’t be able to form a mental representation of another one of their species? Their surroundings? Objects they commonly interact with?

It’s getting them to reproduce it on command that’s tricky, but that has nothing to do with their capabilities

lifeisstillgood
0 replies
8h32m

I think there is an intelligence / co-operation grid where low intelligence high co-operation gets you herd like protective nature but crows aren’t great on co-operation - not at herd scale

Intelligent sparrows though - that would be deeply scary

keiferski
0 replies
14h33m

I have watched crows wait at stoplights in order to cross the road, even when flying over it would have taken a few seconds. It’s funny how the sign of intelligence in this case was laziness.

keepamovin
0 replies
15h51m

The title should be humans are dumber than we thought (compared to crows | for thinking crows weren't as smart as they are ) hahaha! :)

jimmytucson
0 replies
16h31m

The article title perhaps mischaracterizes the significance of these findings.

The paper finds that Hooded crows—who are not specialized tool users—demonstrate some of the same abilities that have already been observed experimentally in New Caledonian crows—who are specialized tool makers, including:

    the ability to manufacture tools from novel materials, select or manufacture a tool depending on the specifics of the task, 
…etc.

The authors cite a dozen papers published over the last 20 years that have documented these findings in NC crows, as well as Goffin’s cockatoo (who, like the Hooded crow, are not specialized tool users).

The significance of this paper must be that the abilities are more widespread in crows than previously thought, which is stated in the article, but blotted out by the juicier headline.

Here’s the actual paper, which as usual, is more substantive than the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-024-01874-6

jackmalpo
0 replies
16h40m

There will be an X is smarter than we thought post about every single species until we realize that every living thing is smart

ggm
0 replies
17h57m

The article could be clearer how many shapes they had to train to and something like complexity eg vertex count. A triangle and a square can be a judgement call when you're using your beak to tear it off.

I'd worry "eh good enough" is distorting the outcome.

fn-mote
0 replies
18h18m

Researchers have not yet determined whether mental templates related to tool making remain flexible

This quote shows the arrogance mentioned in one of the other comments. A 15 year old crow is somehow going to make a "mental template" that is then as firmly entrenched as a young bird learning the wrong mating song? Nah....

esquivalience
0 replies
6h18m

"Conflict of interest All the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest."

Glad to see this in the original article. I had been wondering whether they were in the pocket of Big Crow.

erikaww
0 replies
13h12m

hand fed a crow hot cheetos right outside the palace of fine arts. good times.

dilawar
0 replies
15h11m

Here are a few cultures bits about crows from a village in Northern India.

- If a crows is sitting near your house and screaming, you are about to get guests or visitors.

- During monsoon time, a whole month is devoted to feed your ancestors. We put food out on leafs (banana is hard to find, peepal or turai squash leaf does the job). It's mostly eaten by crows. It is believed that ancestors visit you back as crows.

I never saw local crows doing extraordinary "smart things". They were very good at stealing food: especially butter during winter. But never heard about a crow opening a latch.

While nesting, they will dip a dry branch in water to make it soft so that they can bend it without breaking when making nest.

I never liked crows as kids. They would often kill small squirrels (chipmunks rather) and sparrows whom I liked very much -- though rarely.

cyberax
0 replies
38m

I have crows nesting in a tree just outside my house. Crows are monogamous, so I see the same pair flying together all the time. Several months ago, they started to look a bit frazzled, they have chicks growing up. So I started giving them bits of food (meats and thawed mice).

They are now bringing me pieces of colored glass :) They also caw if I wave at them.

They are also keeping pigeons and seaguls away.

auraai
0 replies
4h26m

Their intelligence was clear to me growing up around them, without knowing anything about crows specifically. They clearly have intelligent interactions with each other and the environment, and have a "theory of mind" of people approaching them/interacting with them. They could also figure out how to open/untie garbage bags, gang up to bully other birds and take their food, etc. In the mornings, right outside our house, they would congregate on a tall pine tree and it really looked like they were having a daily standup - one of them yells loudly, others listen silently, then start making noise together :)

TomMasz
0 replies
5h2m

Corvids and parrots upended our beliefs about bird intelligence and made us realize there's more than one way to organize a brain. We still have a lot to learn about them.

RcouF1uZ4gsC
0 replies
17h1m

I think there are two things that are true:

1. Non-human animals have intelligence and are not “stupid” or automatons.

2. Human intelligence is just so much at an another level that it isnt even close.

ProAm
0 replies
16h57m

Adam Carolla did this research in the 90's on Love Lines...I'll die on this hill.

DiscourseFan
0 replies
17h11m

Yes, but how can we develop the next killer app for crows?

Aleksdev
0 replies
15h24m

I would not be surprised if the average crow is as smart or smarter than some people I have met in my life.

29athrowaway
0 replies
4h28m

Never piss off a crow for sure.