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Sorry to be crass but I'd assume intelligence is somewhat correlated with mastery of the physical world (I mean if it weren't we wouldn't care about things like AI alignment) and while cetaceans are clever mammals they're not very good at avoiding being soup. I sympathize with them, but if they were "way smarter than us" we would be running and hiding instead of debating how nicely we should treat them.

I already addressed that though. Operating under the hypothetical and assumption that humans could survive in the ocean, humans couldn't develop technology and written history and knowledge in the ocean without having done so on land first, even with our hand dexterity, much less with fins.

Humans existed a long time before proper technology development, and those humans were just as intelligent as modern ones. The ability to create technology is not a requirement for higher intelligence.

Even then, orcas do use tools, what they have access to. Without technology, humans stand no chance against an orca, and that goes for any animal in the ocean, from blue whales to great white sharks.

Then we should expect cetaceans to have developed long verbal/oral lineages, especially as their medium is much better for transmitting sound.

We see dialects, to an extent, in orcas, but we do not see the human behaviors we might expect.

The problem, I think, is in the pure consideration of it as intelligence. This is a limited view.

> Then we should expect cetaceans to have developed long verbal/oral lineages

Why? But nonetheless, they have. They pass on locations, routes, hunting techniques, etc. vocally and behaviorally down through generations.

You and some of the other comments bring up a lot of things that don’t really have much to do with intelligence. They really only have anything to do with a human-centric view of intelligence.

If you cannot build and communicate abstract concepts collectively your ability to select evolutionarily for increased capacity for abstract concepts seems to me to be very limited. I am all for different forms of intelligence, but at least attempt to define it and how it comes about.

You’re implying something is only showing intelligence if it shows complexity (long linguistic demonstrations here)

Isn’t it more intelligence to convey all the information that you need to with the highest efficiency?

We rate a poet who can convey tremendous meaning in few lines as superior to someone who is long winded and their writing is full of bullshit and tropes conveying nothing but using many words.

I’m suggesting that increasing complexity and nuance present in a substrate such as language is a prerequisite for high intelligence because high intelligence in individuals is a feature of groups, not individuals.

One person alone is without language and without advanced tools, no matter how big their brains. See feral children.

It is possible that cetaceans pushed long ago pushed past complex verbosity into communication via wisdom and are all enlightened beings. Maybe they communicate electrically. Maybe they are in a local maximum of telepathic connection. I hope so.

>Humans existed a long time before proper technology development, and those humans were just as intelligent as modern ones. The ability to create technology is not a requirement for higher intelligence.

Is that actually true? In cases of feral or severely neglected children who lack any exposure to human language, isn't there an impediment that prevents them learning more complex language later in life that exceeds anything that could be attributed to reduced brain development due to nutrition?

World wide hasn't intelligence been increasing, and while part of that is due to better nutrition, another part is due to better childhood conditions to enable intelligence? Exposures to the technology of language, written language, and similar at a young age seem to lead to an increased capacity for intelligence later in life.

Isn’t it true? Hominids and Homo sapiens were around millions and hundreds of thousands of years, respectively, before technology more advanced than basic tools showed up. And written history seems even shorter than that.

I’m not for sure what feral or neglected children has to do with this.

To address your later point, intelligence does not equal knowledge. Any increase in intelligence in a person’s life seems to be intralifetime and doesn’t spill over to further generations. Increasing intelligence through diet and behaviors and such are just mechanisms for exposing the underlying intelligence that’s already there.

>To address your later point, intelligence does not equal knowledge.

This is just one of the many paths to the fundamental question that plagues this sort of topic, what is intelligence. Is intelligence the capacity for gaining knowledge or having actually gained knowledge? Or maybe not directly related to knowledge at all, though the previous question was more about the capacity to gain vs the gaining than it was about knowledge.

It is known that the capacity a single individual changes based on what they were exposed to (feral/neglected children being the extreme negative cases, I'm not as well read on extreme positive cases). But perhaps we aren't talking about an individua's capacity and instead we are talking some baseline genetic average capacity for a larger group that doesn't take into account environmental cases pushing it to either extreme? But in such a case have we not defined intelligence so that technology's impact is excluded a priori?

that's an assumption that more intelligence means that they would have to be motivated by revenge and vengeance as opposed to that being a distinctly human flaw

This is a good point, and it reminds me of something. I do wonder if the ability to be content is a sign of higher intelligence. Humans are decidedly discontented, and I can't help but be curious about that being a possible showcase of our ignorance.

"How do you know that? "

I do not know it. I am not an expert and had only limited, (but fascinating) contact with them.

But I would assume, if they would be "way smarter", than they could and would find ways of communicating with us. As far as I know, the research shows that they can communcicate towards each other quite well, but not towards us beyond very basic things.

But of course that reminds me of an old joke:

A donkey and a dog on a farm are talking to each other in the evening and the donkey complains that he has so much work to do, but would like to become a writer. The dog asks: why don't you tell the farmer? The donkey answers, are you crazy? If he finds out, I can read and write, I will also have to do his bookkeeping.

Meaning, maybe whales and co. could communicate with us, but choose not to. But if this would be the case, their reasoning would have to include some very astonishing things, as whales are still hunted - which they likely could almost completely stop by telling us exactly that.

> But I would assume, if they would be "way smarter", than they could and would find ways of communicating with us. As far as I know, the research shows that they can communcicate towards each other quite well, but not towards us beyond very basic things.

That’s a human centric approach and a little strange, because how do we communicate with them? We can’t understand them or communicate with them any more than they can with us.

Old Tom was an orca off the Australian coast who, with his pod, trained humans on how to efficiently catch whales. Old Tom demanded the tongues of the whales, which was given to him by the whalers.

> Whales, dolphins, and orcas are damn smart, and I think there's evidence enough that we cannot conclude that they aren't more intelligent than us.

Where's this evidence? What exactly does "more intelligent" mean to you? Do you think a dolphin can learn to play e.g. Chess? I doubt you can teach them to play even tic-tac-toe.