[gwern]

Density is also important. If we look at other things - some recent studies have been done on number-counting (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.052...) or bird brains (https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/neuroscience/2020-herc...) - density jumps out as a major predictor. African elephants may have some more neurons, but the density isn't as great as a human where it counts, so they are remarkably intelligent (like ravens and crows), but still not human-level. There are diminishing returns in both directions. We have more neurons than any bird as much or more dense, and we have more density than any elephant with as many or more neurons. Put that together, and we squeak across the finish line to being just smart enough to create civilization.

An analogy: what's the difference between a supercomputer, and the same number of CPUs scattered across a few datacenters? It's that in a supercomputer, those CPUs are packed physically as close as possible with expensive interconnects to allow them to communicate as fast as possible. (For many applications, the supercomputer will finish long before the spread out nodes ever finish communicating and idling.) But you need to improve both or else your new super-fast CPUs will spend all their time waiting on Infiniband to chug through, or your fancy new Infiniband will be underutilized and you should've bought more CPUs.

[throwaway5486nv]

My understanding is more than the density configuration of the neurons matters most. The reason is in some cases neural network with drop out's perform better than fully connected neural network. This proves less dense networks can be more intelligent.

[thesz]

>This proves less dense networks can be more intelligent.

Case in point: https://openai.com/blog/block-sparse-gpu-kernels/

[More-nitors]

maybe this is like 20nm vs 10nm vs 5nm?

[user90349032]

And yet, no animal except humans is self aware. Really makes you wonder why that is.

[moomin]

Probably that you don’t know how to measure what you’re describing.

Plenty of animals recognise themselves in the mirror, for instance.

[988747]

I wouldn't say "plenty" - few primates, dolphins, orcas, elephants, and, strangely, magpies. But the grounds for that claim are shaky for some of them, the only 3 species we are 100% sure about are chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans. Magpies, for example, require "a training" (whatever that means).

[rjzzleep]

Probably cause we've only tested a few, not that it matters though. Humans take a pretty long time to recognize themselves in the mirror. I wonder if the mirror test would change if we would expose the animals for a almost a year before doing the test, just like humans.

That said even ants pass the test, i.e. they were recently(2015) tested.

But the whole thing can be characterized as: "Let me make up a random test, according to my personal opinion of what defines cognition and then see if a random animal I choose passes it".

Every couple of years we have requests of slews of psychology papers requested to be invalidated because they're unreproducible.

[user_7832]

> But the whole thing can be characterized as: "Let me make up a random test, according to my personal opinion of what defines cognition and then see if a random animal I choose passes it".

But of course! How do we know that humans are, indeed, the smartest? What if we've been failing every single test that mice have been throwing at us over the past millennia, and they wonder why we are so dumb?

(This is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in case you're wondering if I've gone mad. Not that one wouldn't presuppose the other :)

[kaba0]

The mirror-test is biased to vision, though.

Dogs pass the scent-based mirror test for example, their eyes are just simply not the primary way of interacting with the world.

[Swizec]

There are lots of self aware non human animals.

Dolphins and elephants are famous examples, most primates as well. Even many birds show levels of self awareness and theory of mind (they know the difference between what they know and what others know)

[attemptone]

There are also lots of non self-aware human animals :P

[visarga]

Seems like being a social animal is necessary for self awareness.

[Swizec]

In fact there is a popular theory[1] that bird intelligence evolved because of the way their social structures work. Birds mate for life but they cheat. Every bird wants their partner to be loyal and itself to sex as many other birds as possible.

This means birds have to keep track of who can and can't see them cheat, who knows and who doesn't. There's even evidence that they rat each other out (2nd degree info) if they think there's a reward to be had. All of this requires immense intelligence, which happens to prove useful in other contexts.

There's also a bird species who does this with food caches. Easier to steal from others than to build their own so a plethora of deceptive tactics developed to ensure others can't see where you're storing those delicious nuts. Complete with fake caches, lying, and espionage.

[1] I learned about it in The Genius of Birds

[saltminer]

Thievery in nature is really interesting, squirrels also do it.

https://www.labroots.com/trending/plants-and-animals/15629/s...

[Ardon]

You might be interested in the theories on the evolution of human intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligenc...

This is exactly the question the field is about, and I find it fascinating to read about

[tpoacher]

depends on your definition of self aware.

Most cats and dogs I've seen correctly recognise themselves in the mirror after the novelty of seeing one for the first time wears off.

[t-3]

My cats use reflections to spy on and stalk each other, which seems to me a way more significant sign of intelligence than looking at themselves.

[dr_dshiv]

Self awareness is social self awareness. Viewing oneself as a social actor.

[stjohnswarts]

that is simply incorrect bonobos, orcas, elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees, etc have all shown degrees of self awareness.

[stjohnswarts]

Haha downvoted for stating the obvious and something that can be found in seconds on any google search. Never change HN.

[0ldskool]

Is that something that can/has been proven? From my understanding there are many other smart animals that are self aware.

[stjohnswarts]

There is proof, and you can find lots of studies and papers on it. HN is a bit cultish and likes to think that humans are far above every other creature on the planet in importance.

[q845712]

are you sure? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals