Consciousness and Intelligence: The Animal Experience

Rising Laterally

Did you know that elephants have three times the number of neurons in their brains that humans do?
In this episode, we discuss the wide-ranging topics of animal intelligence and biological consciousness – what does the view out on the world look like for creatures other than ourselves?
We explore the incredible intelligence of exceptional animals like the octopus, the elephant, and the pig, among many others – and question whether humans are really so different from our fellow earth-dwellers.
We also examine the ways in which human intelligence has back-fired on us leading to hyper-categorization, neurosis, and the spread of misinformation.
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0:00 Intro
3:55 Let’s consider the unique intelligence of each animal
5:26 A study on mice and categorization
10:33 Machine Learning and categorization
12:25 Crows are better problem solvers than human children
14:35 Childrearing in nature and the effect on development
18:30 The octopus is an amazing creature
24:44 Humans hyper-categorize
28:09 Overthinking and getting back to a simpler state
30:44 The animals’ perspective of us
31:55 Deer and elephants perceive humans as predators
35:41 More on human hyper-categorization
38:22 Are we creating a world better suited for computers than humans?
42:22 Human adaptability
43:04 Pigs are surprisingly similar to humans
47:34 Bees are able to identify faces
49:20 Hive animals live a shared existence
50:15 The intelligence of swarms
51:22 How army ants self-organize
53:22 The human organism is a collective intelligence
54:19 Stopping the spread of misinformation
56:45 Passing down knowledge generation to generation
1:00:02 Wrap-up
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