Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

Brain size isn't necessarily a very good correlate of intelligence. For example dolphins and elephants have bigger brains than humans, and sperm whales have much bigger brains (5x by volume). Neanderthals also had bigger brains than modern humans, but are not thought to have been more intelligent.

A crow has a small brain, but also has very small neurons, so ends up having 1.5B neurons, similar to a dog or some monkeys.

Not sure neuron number correlates to smarts, either.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

There are 100 million in my gut, but it doesn't solve any problems that aren't about poop, as far as I know.

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

If the suspiciously round number is accurate, this puts the human gut somewhere between a golden hamster and ansell's mole-rat, and about level with a short-palated fruit bat.

Agreed. It's architecture that matters, although for a given brain architecture (e.g. species) there might be benefits to scale. mega-brain vs pea-brain.

I was just pointing out that a crow's brain is built on a more advanced process node than our own. Smaller transistors.

That makes sense. Birds are very weight-limited, so there's evolutionary pressure to keep the mass of the control system down.

I suspect there is more going on with your gut neurons then you would expect. If nothing else, the vagus nerve I had to direct communication link.

I like to think that it is my gut brain that is telling me that it's okay to have that ice cream...

Don’t assume whales are less intelligent than humans. They’re tuned for their environment. They won’t assemble machines with their flippers but let’s toss you naked in the pacific and see if you can communicate and collaborate with peers 200km away on complex hunting strategies.

Let's toss a whale on land and see if it can communicate and collaborate with peers 10 ft away on anything. I don't think being tuned to communicate underwater makes them more intelligent than humans.

It's probably more relevant to compare intraspecies rather than interspecies.

And it turns out that human brain volume and intelligence are moderately-highly correlated [1][2]!

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7440690/ [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

Right, but what is also important to remember is while size is important what is also key here is the complexity of a neural circuits. Human brain has a lot more connections and is much more complex.

> I don't think being tuned to communicate underwater makes them more intelligent than humans.

Your responding to a claim that was never made. The claim was don't assume humans are smarter than whales. Nobody said whales are more intelligent than humans. He just said don't assume.

Why would he not "assume" that when humans have shaped their world so far beyond what it was, creating intricate layers of art, culture and science; even going into space or in the air? Man collectively tamed nature and the rest of the animal kingdom in a way that no beast ever has.

Anyway, this is just like solipsism, you won't find a sincere one outside the asylum. Every Reddit intellectual writing such tired drivel as "who's to say humans are more intelligent than beasts?" deep down knows the score.

> Why would he not "assume" that when humans have shaped their world so far beyond what it was, creating intricate layers of art, culture and science; even going into space or in the air? Man collectively tamed nature and the rest of the animal kingdom in a way that no beast ever has.

Because whales or dolphins didn’t evolve hands. Hands are a foundational prerequisite for building technology. So if whales or dolphins had hands we don’t know if they would develop technology that can rival us.

Because we don’t know, that’s why he says don’t assume. This isn’t a “deep down we know” thing like your more irrational form of reasoning. It is a logical conclusion: we don’t know. So don’t assume.

It is very naïve to think that the availability of such tools isn't partly responsible for that intelligence; “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”. And it seems too man-centric of an excuse: you can see all our civilization being built on hands so you state that there can't be a way without.

The "they MIGHT be as intelligent, just lacking hands" theory can't have the same weight as "nah" in an honest mind seeing the overwhelming clues (yes, not proof, if that's what you want) against it. Again, same way that you can't disprove solipsism.

The difference is that my conclusion is logical and yours is an assumption.

Dolphins, Orcas, whales and other intelligent cetaceans do not have Hands and live in an environment without access to a technological accelerator like fire.

The absence of both of these things is an incredible crippler for technological development. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you're never going to achieve much technologically without these.

I don't think brain size correlations is as straightforward as 'bigger = better' every time but we simply don't know how intelligent most of these species are. Land and Water are completely different beasts.

Intelligence isn't measured by ability to create technology or use tools.

Intelligence is the ability to use experience to predict your environment and the outcomes of your own actions. It's a tool for survival.

Okay and how have we determined we have more intelligence than those species with this measure ?

Clearly we haven't, given that there is very little agreement as to what intelligence is. This is just my definition, although there's a lot behind why I define it this way.

However, I do think that a meaningful intelligence comparison between humans and dolphins, etc, would conclude that we are more intelligent, especially based on our reasoning/planning (= multi-step prediction) abilities, which allows us not only to predict our environment but also to modify it to our desires in very complex ways.

>However, I do think that a meaningful intelligence comparison between humans and dolphins, etc, would conclude that we are more intelligent, especially based on our reasoning/planning (= multi-step prediction) abilities

I'm not sure how you would make meaningful comparisons here. We can't communicate to them as they communicate and we live in almost completely different environments. Any such comparison would be extremely biased to us.

>which allows us not only to predict our environment but also to modify it to our desires in very complex ways.

We modify our environment mostly through technology. Intelligence is a big part of technology sure but it's not the only part of it and without the other parts (hands with opposable thumbs, fire etc), technology as we know it wouldn't exist and our ability to modify the environment would seem crippled to any outside observer regardless of how intelligent we may be.

It's not enough to think that the earth revolves around the sun, we need to build the telescopes (with hands and materials melted down and forged with fire) to confirm it.

It's not enough to dream and devise of flight, we need the fire to create the materials that we dug with our hands and the hands to build them.

It's not enough to think that Oral communication is insufficient for transmitting information through generations. What else will you do without opposable thumbs or an equivalent ?

Fire is so important for so many reasons but one of the biggest is that it was an easy source of large amounts of energy that allowed us to bootstrap technology. Where's that easy source of energy underwater ?

Without all the other aspects necessary for technology, we are relegated to hunter/gatherer levels of influencing the environment at best. Even then, we still crafted tools that creatures without opposable thumbs would never be able to craft.

Another angle to look at intelligence is that not all species need it, or need it to same degree. If you are a cow, or a crocodile, then you are a 1-trick grass-munching or zebra-munching pony, and have no need for intelligence. A generalist species like humans, that lives in a hugely diverse set of environments, with a hugely diverse set of food sources, has evolved intelligence (which in turn supports further generalization) to cope with this variety.

At least to our own perception, and degree of understanding, it would appear that the ocean habitat(s) of dolphins are far less diverse and demanding. Evidentially complex enough to drive their intelligence though, so perhaps we just don't understand the complexity of what they've evolved to do.

Evolution is a blind, dumb optimizer. You can have a mutation that is over-kill and if it doesn't actively impede you in some way, it just stays. It's not like it goes, "Ok we need to reduce this to the point where it's just beneficial enough etc".

That said, i definitely would not say the Ocean is particularly less diverse or demanding.

Even with our limited understanding, there must be adaptations for Pressure, Salinity, light, Energy, Buoyancy, Underwater Current etc that all vary significantly by depth and location.

And the bottlenose dolphin for instance lives in every ocean of the world except the Arctic and the Antarctic oceans.

Conclusion noted: nuke the whales before they nuke us.

(/s)

> You can have a mutation that is over-kill and if it doesn't actively impede you in some way, it just stays.

Right, but big brains do actively impede you - they require a lot of energy, so there needs to be some offsetting benefit.