[thisCtx]

I grew up rural.

I buy into a lot of the “bird” wisdom. Science is discovering dogs can smell disease.

Our modern world isn’t more complex, just more distracting with asinine theory chasing. It’s always been ridiculously complex in ways we can’t imagine, we’ve just started realizing it in detail.

Turns out animals with their “lesser” cognitive powers are tuned into the hidden complexity in ways we barely understand.

Yet we deem ourselves the more advanced species.

Humans will surely kill themselves off and the specifically evolved for their ecosystem “dumb” animals will remain.

[pjbk]

That's trial and error knowledge gathered through billions of years and quintillions of individuals from multitude species. Hard to compete with that.

[zadler]

Still, it’s hard to justify a grouse signaling a coming death by sitting on top of a house. That is magic to us at this point and such a tale would usually be met with skepticism. The things about the weather I don’t have much of a problem with.

[erikpukinskis]

Seems perfectly possible to me a bird could sense the difference between a vibrant, active person and a person close to death.

[kebman]

Or could it be that since the farmer was no longer tending to his farm because he was too old, and since there was so little going on there anymore, that the grouse decided to reclaim a great perch with a view?

I once pitched a tent somewhere in the deep forests of Sweden, on a trip with my mother and my sister. I sat the tent up on some natural cushions of dry peat, so the ground was nice and soft to sleep on. As it became darker I suddenly heard a large CRACK about fifty metres away as a big twig was snapped in half. The sound was followed by the deep sniffing of air and loud stomping, so I popped my head out of the tent to take look.

Atop the closest hill was the King of the Forest (that would be a moose), looking like he was pondering some deep mystery while on his evening stroll, his mighty antlers brushing away big branches like they were toothpicks. He wasn't too worried about his surroundings until he noticed my scruffy old head. He stopped dead quiet and opened his eyes wide in surprise. Then he snorted heavily in disappointment, like he was muttering a curse, and then he shuffled his heavy body around and walked the other way.

I got the distinct sense that this proud being had a very sincere distaste for people...

[edeion]

Seems even more possible to me that a grandmother can use something that's fascinating a kid to tell them about bad things looming. That's somehow enchanting the situation.

[CRConrad]

But why would a grouse, a shy wild bird, go smell some dying person inside a house and then fly onto the roof of the house to mark it out? It has no reason to care, and even less to stick around.

[generalizations]

I agree it seems possible, but the motivation for acting that way seems missing.

[thisCtx]

Same motive you have when smelling something rotten; embedded biological response.

[michaelmrose]

Why would it have evolved a response to communicate to a predator species that one of the predators living in a dwelling is going to die in a fashion that would expose itself to a large chance of becoming prey.

Here is a far simpler explanation. Our brains are evolved to find patterns even when they aren't there. Look how weak the correlation is. His family simply discarded all the times the correlation failed to apply and remembered the one time the bird cried not on the day his grandfather died but merely that same year.

[adverbly]

I didn't believe you at first with quintillions... but my back of the envelope came out as sextillion lol...

[schuke]

And to think that science has enabled us to do vastly more in a few hundred years.

[chx]

> Science is discovering dogs can smell disease.

Bees too. Yesterday news included the Dutch training bees to smell covid.

https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/bees-netherla...

[yourapostasy]

> Turns out animals with their “lesser” cognitive powers are tuned into the hidden complexity in ways we barely understand.

I take this as another description of Moravec's Paradox.

Which I do not think of as a paradox, but as one domain knowledge set (information theory/computer science) not intertwingling (to use Ted Nelson's lingo) with another domain knowledge set (biology). The more we delve into the integration of the many biological layers, the more we appreciate how finely-tuned all that biological complexity is to reality's complexity. I bet the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than we even believe in the common scientific narrative today, and we'll need every scrap of power we can bring to bear from quantum computing to help us understand it.

[stjohnswarts]

No humans won't kill themselves off. We're going to be around for a very long time. We are probably the most adaptable complex creatures on this planet. Whether civilization lasts as we know it is another thing.

[rowanG077]

You consider an animal having evolved a sense for certain properties of the natural world so they can survive more advanced the humanity? I seriously cannot comprehend how you can view that as more advanced then humanity going to space, manipulating matter on the atomic level and the most important: beating evolution for the most part.

[thisCtx]

Evolution is a property of reality itself and imbued humans with the abilities you highlight.

We’ve done absolutely nothing to “beat” reality.

Personally I’m leaning into the idea more and more that technology how we think of it, machines, will not be how we survive. I suspect some will be too useful, like nanotechnology and automated manufacturing, but consumer machines will become passé, maybe just too environmentally toxic to build at the scale we do. I doubt humans will make it “off world” for long if at all. There’s a scaling problem to the endeavor I doubt humans will maintain the momentum to overcome.

It took a very specific planet and millions of years of evolution to get here. We cannot possibly do better than reality itself.

Michael Levin’s bioelectrics, manipulation of electric fields to regrow limbs, could be an early peak at crazy future.

Why build VR if we can, for example, mix chemicals, drink it, effectively loading simulated experience like The Matrix, through fine grain manipulation of exotic properties of reality. Earth becomes a lot more sustainable if we’re not eating it up for phones and graphics cards.