Higher Intelligence

That's a myth.

While you're waiting for them, any response to my #44?

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Ok, isn't that kind of surprising? Catholic Scientist was doing a good job listing out animals (relatively) closely related to us,in the same line of descent, who have basically the same brain as we do, more or less. That seems like it should be a feasible approach.That's not the case with these cephalopods. We (and dogs and dolphins and boa constrictors and possums and birds) are a kind of fish. Cuttlefish are a kind of mollusc. That's insane, our probable common ancestor will be something rather like a slug or a worm or a larva.Here this is Jean Boal talking, the biologist / animal behaviorist who is doing much of the work: NOVA | Kings of Camouflage | Spineless Smarts | PBS Originally you know I took these claims with a big grain of salt. This behavioral training idea, it could mean a lot of things. Germs can be "trained", conditioned responses are a commonplace throughout the animal {and vegetable!) kingdom. But that's just mental mothballs in light of what the research is showing. Octopus - WikipediaWhen I look at what we have on tap of these creatures
http://www.cephbase.utmb.edu/
I see them behaving much like dogs and dolphins in terms of problem-solving, communication, and plain unpredicability ("free will"). I feel it would not be that hard to write a linear program that simulated a particular shark or bug "thinking" (response) behavior. I don't know that we are smart enough ourselves yet to be able to simulate cephalopod problem-solving. Cephalopod intelligence - WikipediaAnyway this line of thinking is important to our question in that it indicates that intelligence, even by the strict "mental" definition CS has put forward for us, is not unique to ourselves and our line of descent. It has developed independently in both higher mammals and higher molluscs.

You're a real funny guy! I'm just saying, the way you tell the story, it's very funny!

Hi onifre, I really appreciate your comments. I think this is an insightful way of looking at the relationship between consciousness on the one hand and intelligence and instinct on the other. Is intelligence just conscious instinct? What do you guys think about the idea that our consciousness or self-awareness or greater-intelligence or whatever it is we feel makes us advanced simians so profoundly different from every other species whose brains we don't have a direct insight to is a direct result of specific changes in our development which directly affect our parietal cortex? Corante – The Latest News & TrendsThe gist of the whole "pineal gland" meme seems to be that we have a vestigial optical system in the top of our head that we share with lizards and other "creeping things". For a small portion of our childhood, this ancient proto-eye still receives a little light through the thin semi-transparent flesh of our heads. Then at around 18 months the anterior fontanelle finishes suturing itself together and that light has gone out forever. Around this same time we develop an imagination, self-awareness, advanced language skills, the whole shebang. Our posterior parietal cortex, which manages this primitive eye for the animals which depend on it, gets re-used as a key regulator for our own visual center and movement systems. The Parietal "Eye"Is the source of our religous/supernatural ideas simply a feeling of direct awareness that we once experienced before we had self-awareness which has been shut off, but which we still retain physiological memories of and can use to re-stimulate those primal animal feelings?Is the real cure for the creationist simply trepanation? BME: Tattoo, Piercing and Body Modification News

If you took the time to read the entirety of what is written at that link, you would see that the author finally arrives at the conclusion that his procedure produced no lasting effects. I enjoy smoking as much as the next guy, so I'm not judging, but the supposed 'benefits' of increased alertness and attention, as well as the ability to recall dreams sound a lot more like what happens when you put down the pipe after smoking a little too much for a little too long.That's not to say that some creationists might not benefit from a little drug induced thought, but they should probably stop short of drilling holes in their skulls because some people fancy, like a conspiracy theorist, that tenuously stringing together ancient rituals with little pop-sci tidbits constitutes the formation of scientific theory.So I ask, why do you present it as evidence, and what exactly is this evidence supposed to support? As a casual observer who has just read this thread, I honestly don't even know what you're attempting to argue or explain. You just seem to be clinging to any piece of information posted here or elsewhere and constructing this 'house of cards', as you call it.

Thanks for your post Nausicaa. Let me reiterate that I'm not trying to prove any preconceived idea, I'm just acting out the process of applying the scientific method in a series of "thought experiments" to the pseudoscience of intelligent design.I begin by excluding irreducible complexity from the center stage, it's a straightforward creationist concept which was relabeled at the last minute for legal reasons. I don't mind coming back to it later when it is appropriate but I don't have any interest in debating it straightforwardly, there are several actual biology fans here who refute it throroughly in appropriate threads.So what does that leave? Anything?The general idea with intelligent design (as distinct from straight creationism) is that design theory works on natural stuff as well as artificial, and a design implies a designer. This might just be a semantic ghost, yes? But let's follow it through anyway. The claim is advanced that this theoretical designer must be intelligent, and furthermore must be more intelligent than us, because some of this stuff we see is really amazing, some of it is even so amazing, that we haven't figured out how to do it ourselves yet.ID is supposed to be true, in short, even if evolution itself is a perfectly good fact. This is where it parts ways with IC and other creationist concepts. It's supposed to be genuine science. It claims to be rooted in information theory, it wants us to think it has whole new insights into intelligence.So I say fine, let's do science with it. Let's walk through some basic "is this idea nonsense?" kind of thought experiments with it and see if we can get it to predict anything that is testable. One might think for example, that an Intelligent Designer would produce designs that were superior to the sort of thing we puny mortals would tend to come up with. Now the best refutation of this is to point at a few choice samples like our lower back and the hyena's penis, maybe some babies born with their lips stuck to their forehead and so on, and say Come on, that's not real freaking smart is it? Who designed that?The evidence we actually get from nature doesn't look like intentional design, it's more like an ongoing half-assed process that is extraordinarily wasteful and perverse. In other words, it looks less like the products of our design, and more like the contents of our heads. We think all sorts of things, and various totally weird ideas can change back and forth into other things and so on, before we really make our mind up about anything, and even then we are often wrong. The world is similarly inclined.So fine, we have learned something about our hypothesis. If we are really doing science we modify our hypothesis and move on. The "design" we see in nature is, perhaps, the naked thought of some sort of thinking being. Creepy, huh? But I don't know if it's still science at that point, that sounds like poetry to me.And from there it's a straighforward compare and contrast between evolution and intelligence. Yes, evolution is like intelligence in many ways (if creatures are like thoughts.) Is it, are they? Catholic Scientist and Hoot Mon worked it thoroughly from there. Spider webs are amazing, but they aren't the product of a brain. Single-celled insects are amazing, still no brain involved. Mental activity required to be called "intelligence".And so it goes, evolution isn't intelligent, evolution isn't the intelligence of the earth, evolution is perhaps like intelligence. Ok, in what ways? Well, it solves problems. Is that another ghost? Ok, it remembers some things, it even reuses things it learns in one place at some other point where they turn out useful. Still no? Hmm, why not?And even if it isn't a "real intelligence" it's, you know, so amazing, it ought to get extra credit. I mean, its thoughts are things! That's an amazing thing isn't it. Think as hard as we want, when it's time to make our thoughts real, we have to get up and do some actual work. Right? No?But honestly, we have cut some extreme slack to get the hypothesis along this far. Let's do that one more time, and let's test it. How do we test intelligence? What's the name of that number, how is it calculated?

Yeah that story rocks! Dude got his piercing guy to stick a hole in his head for him! Super funny But it's just filler to illustrate the "third eye" concept. See when I saw what the thread was degenerating to I wanted to leave the table with something drawing a distinction between consciousness and intelligence. Self-awareness or language or a conscience or whatever we like to think we have that critters don't, is a peculiar function of our brains, it might be related to nice high intelligence like we like to think we have. Or it might not. But it's definitely not one and the same.So you know, what do you think about the idea that our species are just the ones whose skulls take a long time to close up completely? Or any similar line of thinking, biological basis for human consciousness, Koestler and Leary and so forth. Is it all just poop? The behavior in a game of cards is a remarkably good example of a stochastic process with signicant emergent properties. Is a poker party intelligent? How about Miss Cleo? Which would be, more intelligent?