Comment on Boksops -- Ancient Superintelligence?

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:30:40 GMT

Huh? My point was that tiny brains are enough to control bodies much larger than those of elephants so large bodies simply can't need large brains in order to walk.

But you do need a bigger brain to handle all your body systems AND do "intelligent" things on top of the walking and mating and ...

I was thinking more along the lines of some fairly general learning metrics such as number of patterns of sound that can be retained for 10 years.

So, because elephants can store more sounds over longer periods, that means they're really more intelligent than humans, and we're just pandering to our own status-hungry egos when we say they're not (because it's the ratio that matters)?

That doesn't work. Raw storage capacity isn't what we think of as intelligence, at least not the interesting kind we're trying to develop. Is my 300 Gig hard drive, which can store a LOT more patterns of sound over 10 years, intelligent? No. So why would this be a relevant metric for gauging animal intelligence?

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