Let me elaborate, how likely is that there’s an animal on earth that’s smarter than us? By smarter, I understand intelligence is a nuanced topic unique to different animals, so for the sake of argument, let’s talk about, mathematics, critical thinking about where and how to apply those mathematical concepts, and creativity in any form.
Chimpanzees are considerably better than us at short-term memory.
“intelligence is a nuanced topic” Understatement champion. Applying your examples “in any form” still doesn’t really work since those examples are built on communicating the steps as well as the result. If an animal can intuit precision without showing the work, do we still give credit for intelligence? Jumping spiders, for example, have an extremely developed intuition for parabolic trajectories, but I’d bet real money there’s no neural structure in their brains that looks like y^2 = 4ax.
And yet every professional physicist will tell you that physics IS math, and that if you don’t understand the math, you can’t understand physics, and shouldn’t try.
As a physicist, physics is not math. Math is a tool you can use to do physics, but you can absolutely do physics without it. In fact, qualitative physics is the best kind.
Physics is a mathematical model with the most proven utility to humans.
If you have a model more applicable to a situation, youre free to use it, but its pretty unlikely to be as broadly applicable as modern mathematical physics (A thousand times so when considering computers).
But yeah the study of physics is 100% math (And its not 100% a perfect model of reality! Thats why we study it).
Yeah I did expect my language wasn’t precise enough, so to be more clear, animal that can excel at maths or creativity in a similar way humans do.
All sorts of animals have superior application-specific circuitry. Like bearded vultures that, while in flight, can drop bones precisely onto rocks to break them open and get at the marrow. But they lack the general-purpose processing power needed to abstract such skills into mathematical representations. Same abstraction likely needed to apply one skill creatively to other uses or apply logic to analyze something.
I’m no neuroscientist/biologist, but I could see an ideal scenario and measurement setup where dolphins and orcas maybe rival our general-purpose intelligence. But whatever it is, it still isn’t enough for them to build any recognizable society yet.
There may be some mental tasks that other animals can probably do better than humans. However, if you’re talking about complex topics like mathematics, I would bet on modern humans being better given that being good at math is far more likely to be an evolutionary advantage to humans over other animals.
All animals are smarter than humans in multiple ways.
A cat is better at catching a rat than a human.
A fish is better at swimming.
A bear is better at catching salmon.
As my professor always likes to point out.
A cat is really good at being a cat. A human is really good at being a human.
Just because dolphins don’t want to do capitalism or build bombs doesn’t mean they aren’t as smart as us.
Just because racoons don’t have complex vocal language doesn’t mean they don’t have have complex language.
We can’t evaluate animals based on human abilities.
I have to wonder if whales or dolphins can do math. They have the curiosity required and some of the largest brains around.
If bees can do math surely so can dolphins
I think humans are not really more intelligent than most beings; we have a unique ability to manipulate physical things, but most animals are not crazy enough to follow and do that because our species pays a very high price for that in happiness.
It’s that sacrifice we all individually made to be like most other humans, as babies, that make us think our way is superior and look down on other animals.
