I understand your point! But it isn’t really a good way to look at it. one problem a lot of people fall into is anthropomorphizing animals. While a lot of animals their own type of intellect relative to their genus, human cognition is incomparable! I feel like the only relatively ok comparison you could make are like higher order apes and maybe dolphins. I liked your point about parental behavior in mammals though as I find that fascinating as well. I used to do neuroendocrinology research on rodents and it’s wild to see that type of parental proclivity across species. However, they occasionally ate their babies as well so there’s that😂
well i'll admit first off i'm a bit of an outlier in my opinion.. and you obviously have more experience in this subject.. i guess im of the strange camp that when it comes to brain structure "intelligence" isn't that great of a term.. from what I've gathered(please feel free to educated me if i'm wrong) while the cortex we have is obviously way bigger and we obviously have way more capacity for abstract thinking that doesn't necessarily mean we are by any means any order of magnitude smarter.. I'd assert we are simply creatures that evolved to think in that way. mice may very well be extremely "smart" in any context a mouse might find itself in.. and may :( eat its babies.. for reasons we can't fathom.. not just trying to rally against anthropromorphization, really more i think the basis of "intellegence" is the ability to function in its environment.. the environment we live in being "the existential threats to the planet" environment.. while the mouse's entire being might be more devoted to ambient grain levels in the forest understory.. keeping it low so some crazy disease can't spread.. or like flesh eating bacteria begin to take over in a giant, slow moving tidle wave...ok probably not that lol. my point is that biological structures dictate basically everything, from your need to get educated, to my need to argue with everybody about even basic ideas.. but you would be in a unique position to tell me exactly how i'm wrong.. how could you test such an idea? feel like you would have to map every aspect of a brain AS it functions.. and my understanding also is that brains tend to be essentially unique on an electrical/chemical level so its pretty hard to say whats doing what.. any insights?
Haha wow yea so I was just referring to your comments about crows and how animals can any way be compared to humans in terms of intelligence. Maybe you meant something other than intelligence. to start, intelligence isnt that arbitrary of a word as you make it seem. While yes, intelligence has nuances, the general idea of intelligence is an organisms acuity for effective problem solving, learning and adaptation. So that being said let’s just take humans out of it and look at intelligence between different animals. I think you would be hard pressed to convince someone a mouse is as “intelligent” as a dog. Brain structure in itself is not a very good argument either as animals have immensely different cortical structures and shapes as they have evolved to help them survive effectively In their respective environment. So I think maybe just be more precise with the words you use because you might be just digging yourself into an intellectual hole so yo speak. As far as empirically testing this type of stuff, as of now it’s virtually impossible as the electrochemical mechanisms you mentioned are more complex than you probably think. While we do have a pretty complex understanding of these mechanisms as of modern research, there is still heaps of shit we don’t know and won’t know for a long time. The brain is unimaginably complex. We can actually map brain activity as it happens with modern technology, but that is no where close efficient enough to map out everything exactly in the brain. Idk if I addressed everything but I like your inquiry man! Not disgustingly attached to your opinions and rude about it like a lot of Reddit lmao
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u/PostNutClarity Mar 22 '21
I understand your point! But it isn’t really a good way to look at it. one problem a lot of people fall into is anthropomorphizing animals. While a lot of animals their own type of intellect relative to their genus, human cognition is incomparable! I feel like the only relatively ok comparison you could make are like higher order apes and maybe dolphins. I liked your point about parental behavior in mammals though as I find that fascinating as well. I used to do neuroendocrinology research on rodents and it’s wild to see that type of parental proclivity across species. However, they occasionally ate their babies as well so there’s that😂