“Considerations on orca intelligence” by Towards_Keeperhood
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Follow up to: Could orcas be smarter than humans? (For speed of writing, I mostly don't cite references. Feel free to ask me in the comments for references for some claims.) This post summarizes my current most important considerations on whether orcas might be more intelligent than humans.

** Evolutionary considerations**

** What caused humans to become so smart?** (Note: AFAIK there's no scientific consensus here and my opinions might be nonstandard and I don't provide sufficient explanation here for why I hold those. Feel free to ask more in the comments.) My guess for the primary driver of what caused humans to become intelligent is the cultural intelligence hypothesis: Humans who were smarter were better at learning and mastering culturally transmitted techniques and thereby better at surviving and reproducing. The book "the secret of our success" has a lot of useful anecdotes that show the vast breath and complexity of [...]

Outline:

(00:24) Evolutionary considerations

(00:29) What caused humans to become so smart?

(01:36) Is it evolutionarily plausible that orcas became smarter?

(03:54) Behavioral evidence

(05:30) Evidence from wild orcas

(06:21) Evidence from orcas in captivity

(07:06) Thoughts on orca languages

(08:12) Louis Hermans research on teaching bottlenose dolphins language understanding

(09:53) Neuroscientific considerations

(09:57) Orca brain facts

(10:37) Interspecies correlations between cortical neurons and behavioral signs of intelligence

(12:08) How much does scale vs other adaptations matter?

(14:40) Overall guess

(15:21) Aside: Update on my project

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First published: December 29th, 2024

Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dzLwCBvwC4hWytnus/considerations-on-orca-intelligence)

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