Chaos and cause

Physically speaking, humans are a middling mammal with an odd hair pattern, a badly evolved back, and a mouth that no longer fits all our adult teeth. All of which is why we really like brains.

intelligence has inadvertently become a ‘human success’-shaped cookie cutter we squish onto other species. Switching from baking to sports metaphors, we could say that everyone else – animals, amoebas, AIs and aliens – has to play the game on a field that we have laid out, according to rules that we have established and proven ourselves extremely c... See more

Instead of a measurable, quantifiable thing that exists independently out in the world, we suggest that intelligence is a label, pinned by humanity onto a bag stuffed with a jumble of independent traits that helped our ancestors thrive.

it’s hard to empirically quantify intelligence because it exists only relative to our expectations – expectations that are human and, moreover, individual to particular humans.

The things we call intelligence have transformed us from small, slow, physically weak apes to the solar system’s most lethal apex predators. However, when we ask whether other animals are intelligent, we’re not usually asking what capacities or kinds of bodies were advantageous in their evolutionary past. We’re really asking whether they do things ... See more

we tell ourselves that humans do something clever or tactical because our brains have simulated that this course of action will produce favourable outcomes, but when we learn that ants do the same thing by enacting preprogrammed responses to pheromones, surely that doesn’t count.