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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

If we're wondering whether animals dream, I'll go with "overestimating" too. Yes, we're smarter than all other animals. No, we aren't that much smarter.

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I’m comfortable claiming that building rocket ships and flying to the moon and back[1] counts as “that much smarter” than maybe using a twig to get termites out of a mound or escaping a fish tank in an aquarium.

[1] including of course inventing the necessary physics, math, logic, and actually doing the engineering in addition to pulling off the mission. And, of course, dreaming of doing it.

Edit: If octopuses or dolphins or whatever animal people think is so clever is in fact so clever, then someone should prove it by teaching them some form of durable symbolic information storage system and teach them to teach other members of their species what they have learned. If they can't do that, then they're not even close to as smart as we are, full stop.

Just because we got here first doesn’t mean another species couldn’t eventually do those things. It took us a while to get to rockets.

Sure, perhaps in 60 million years we’ll be extinct and Octo Sapiens will be colonizing Alpha Centauri, but today right now on this planet the gulf in intelligence between humans and the other creatures is gigantic.

The point is that intelligence isn’t measured by thing you know or what your society can do.

.. but it is measured that way because we say it's measured that way.

If an octopus wants to come up with a better measurement they are welcome to do that but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Who is “we”? Intelligence is not defined by the knowledge you have or things your society can do, it’s a capacity for reason and logic and etc.

Maybe get started here and do more research:

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

> More generally, it can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

I think this lines up with what I consider intelligence. The "we" is the human race and most of us acknowledge we are the most intelligent life on Earth using the measure we invented (retaining, passing on, and using knowledge). I won't be convinced otherwise unless some other being out there proves to us that they can do it better.

I’ll give up and admit defeat, but I still think it’s stupid to dismiss animal intelligence. Perhaps some day we’ll discover how to communicate with octopi and we could then work with them, perhaps. Call me crazy, but imagine we could work with them to go to places humans couldn’t because of needs we have that octopi don’t? Maybe it’s easier to send them to the nearest star, or something, I don’t know.

I don't think it's crazy to think what you're suggesting and I'm open to the possibility of pretty much anything being possible in the future. Of course we'd have to work out if we are actually communicating with them, whether they actually understand what we're proposing to them, and if we can unambiguously confirm their consent to be sent to another star in an effort to save all of Earth's species.

Before all that happens I think it'd be better to work out an arrangement where they help us crack some of the mysteries in the ocean first.

I think that the crucial difference between animals and humans there is not necessarily one of definite intelligence but that we have a civilization and written language; no one person or group of people could have gone from discovering things like gravity, energy, algebra, etc all the way to spaceflight in one lifetime, but because we have long-term records we can work on things across generations.

What makes you think they don't already have such and we're simply too dumb to grasp how it works for them?

Don't you get the problem with your view? You're testing for human cleverness and then assuming all else is generally incompetent. This gets even more tricky when you start actually contemplating consciousness.

Also, can you build a rocket ship and fly to the moon and back? Why do you get to claim the feats of the smartest but other groups of beings do not get that benefit?

To that I say - if you're so much smarter than an Octopus, then make yourself look exactly like a rock.

I would also venture that the apparent gulf between us and other animals is largely due to writing things down as you have inferred - but the ability to create an external persistent knowledge store is the cause more than the effect; the ability to store and share knowledge likely doesn't require a huge leap in brain power, but it does grant us a huge bonus, and builds on itself.

> To that I say - if you're so much smarter than an Octopus, then make yourself look exactly like a rock.

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

Meh, that's up there with the best we can do and an Octopus is still miles better without even trying - can you build and don such a suit tailored exactly to your current environment in a matter of seconds?

Great until thermal detection is used: “the warmth of the heavy suit can make a wearer stand out more than a standard soldier when viewed”

An octopus won't show up on thermal imaging?

Water is infrared opaque for the most part!

You should keep in mind that octopuses don’t live very long. The intelligence they gain in their very short lives is remarkable. Add to this that they live in water and therefore can’t have fire and can’t have writing. It’s not just brain power that matters… I don’t know that humans are the smartest critter on the planet, we may just be the most learned and the most able to exploit our surroundings. It’s cool and all, but I really don’t know for sure that humans are “smarter” than octopuses, porpoises, or orcas. We’d need evidence that didn’t rely on particularly human stuff.

Orcas do teach their young to hunt and speak in the manner of their group, or clan, or pack. Different groups of orcas have their own culture. I wouldn’t be surprised if dolphins do the same

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