This is really interesting research. It’s fascinating to hear about how these experiments are designed in the first place.
If anyone is interested in this topic, I highly, highly recommend the book “Ways of Being” by James Bridle. [0]
It covers such a diverse range of ideas about intelligence, including neural network–style intelligences, that I think pretty much everyone would find something of interest.
One of the takeaways is that these intelligence-seeking experiments have been poorly designed for so long, that they tend to reveal way more about the humans running the experiment than the animals being researched. And part of that is due to how uncomfortable we are with admitting that animals have completely different (not better or worse) ways of being and thinking than us.
It makes you aware of the limitations of our hierarchy-and-comparison-based concepts. For example, even a simple phrase from this article:
> Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.
The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count, and surely if they did count it wouldn’t be by speaking out loud like we do. Saying that their faculties are equivalent to 1-year olds only really serves to diminish them. Not that I’m blaming the author, it’s just so easy to accidentally slip into these very limited ways of thinking.
> The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count
There is very easy to prove spiders can count. They can tell bigger object from smaller, so they have some concept of measure and comparison. They can tell 10 is bigger than 2 and so on.
If anyone is interested in this topic, I highly, highly recommend the book “Ways of Being” by James Bridle. [0]
It covers such a diverse range of ideas about intelligence, including neural network–style intelligences, that I think pretty much everyone would find something of interest.
One of the takeaways is that these intelligence-seeking experiments have been poorly designed for so long, that they tend to reveal way more about the humans running the experiment than the animals being researched. And part of that is due to how uncomfortable we are with admitting that animals have completely different (not better or worse) ways of being and thinking than us.
It makes you aware of the limitations of our hierarchy-and-comparison-based concepts. For example, even a simple phrase from this article:
> Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.
The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count, and surely if they did count it wouldn’t be by speaking out loud like we do. Saying that their faculties are equivalent to 1-year olds only really serves to diminish them. Not that I’m blaming the author, it’s just so easy to accidentally slip into these very limited ways of thinking.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58772732