[DethNinja]

Animals definitely do dream, any cat or dog owner can tell that but even smaller animals like rats do also dream.

We are vastly overestimating the cognitive capacities of humans, we should in fact have higher respect for other intelligent species living with us.

[interfixus]

Rats have played smarter tricks on me than any other animals I've seen. Sophisticated stuff involving quite precise guessing as to what my next steps would be. Call it theory of mind if you like. My dog is smarter in a generalised way, but boy can you do interesting things with a brain the size of a pea.

But the octopusses. The most fascinating part is not really their level of intelligence per se, but that it has evolved from scratch completely independent from us vertebrates. Bona fide aliens in our own backyard. Deep lessons on what converges and what doesn't.

[neom]

I've had pet rats most of my life and they're so smart. They are cunning and manipulative for sure, they're so good at learning my behaviors and acting accordingly. Their food motivation is really crazy, check out what this lady has managed to get her rats to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA

[ClassyJacket]

I saw a video recently of a rat setting off a trap with a stick:

https://youtu.be/luiXzz5myIk

[wilg]

Yeah I’m confused by this, isn’t it commonly understood animals dream? What other explanation is there for my dog moving her sweet little feet and barking softly while she’s asleep sometimes.

[dmix]

The brain structure / nervous system of cephalpods is quite different from vertebrate species I'm pretty sure. A lot of the similarities of the complexity/development are based on convergent evolution. So it's not as straightforward of a comparison. At least in this context.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2018.0095...

[wilg]

not a direct rebuttal, but I would watch a game show called “are you smarter than an octopus”

[speed_spread]

Writing questions for that show would be harder than writing shared unit tests for Haskell and BASIC.

[disillusioned]

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin gets into the cephalopod-human communication challenges rather magnificently, if you're looking for a remarkable hard scifi read, though you have to go through the (also great) Children of Time start of the series.

[2000UltraDeluxe]

Both are excellent books, worth a read.

[speed_spread]

Finished Children of Time two weeks ago. Now I want to be a spider.

[13of40]

I think that depends on whether the panel of judges is all humans or they have a couple of octopuses sitting there as well.

[Xorakios]

Might sound snarky but really just curious (and I'm older ;)

Are we close to standardizing on pluralization in English into 's and 'es?

octopuses instead of octopi fishes instead of fish aquariums instead of aquaria

media and mediums diverged a long time ago, but it seems as though the last few years has seen a dramatic shift

oh good golly, a better question might be: how often do you read your own post and realized you already know the answer :)

[wilg]

now this is smart television producing!

[5-]

http://augustss.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-basic-not-that-any...

[girvo]

My puppy's soft dreaming growls and her dreaming "bark" (which sounds more like a "bweep!" noise) are the cutest thing in the entire world

[ChatGTP]

I couldn't agree more with you.

I've had a bit of an ant infestation at a house I'm renting temporarily and I've been watching them and seen them do some pretty amazing stuff, intelligent stuff. Such as organize themselves in ways to solve pretty complex problems and even try help other injured or dying ants. These are ants, they're tiny little things.

Then I read the article here about killer wales destroying ships and other things they've learned, also the fact they get depressed when in captivity.

I couldn't agree more with you, and I also think it' why we should me more careful with the harms of our technological progress. It's not up to us alone to decide if we deploy some technology that destroys habitats, we should be equally careful when trying to "fix" habitats that we don't do a lot of harm as well.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

One of the strangest behaviours I've seen from ants is seeing them(forest ants I believe) walk around on a catnip plant, clearly intoxicated, i.e unable to do anything but walk back and forth meaninglessly on the branches. And yet they seemed to seek out these catnip plants in significant numbers, which almost suggested some vague intent to get high.

[ChatGTP]

I love those little guys even more now ha

[TechBro8615]

As fascinating as the ants are, have you told the person you're renting from about the ant infestation? You might want to do that sooner rather than later, lest they blame you for the ants...

[ChatGTP]

Infestation was too strong of a word. Yes they know it happens before the seasons change this time of year if any food is left around.

[megnaro]

Anyone who agrees with or is intrigued by the above comment may very well enjoy Frans De Waal's book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Publisher link: https://wwnorton.com/books/Are-We-Smart-Enough-to-Know-How-S...

[girvo]

Parrots dream too, including wild ones. While I appreciate the need for scientific rigour, I'd be more surprised if octopuses didn't dream at all, considering their capacity for intelligence that's already been shown.

[Tagbert]

It’s one thing to believe that other vertebrates dream. There is a clear evolutionary link between them and us. Octopus, as mollusks, are very far away on the evolutionary tree. When our lineages split, brains were rudimentary, if they existed at all. If we assume some kind of intelligence in an octopus, is there any reason to assume that it works like ours does? Do they need dreams? Are dreams inherent in any intelligent being or are they a function of how our particular brains operate. I don’t think that that is a settled question.

[graycat]

> Octopus, as mollusks, are very far away on the evolutionary tree.

Yes, but for some fast, short, rough guesses, regard intelligence as thinking that yields advantages in surviving in the real world. Then guess that in general intelligence is a source of effective response to the real world. Then, whatever the size of the evolutionary and/or genetic tree, notice that we are all in the same real world. So, all of our examples of intelligence are effective responses to the same real world and, thus, the many examples might have a lot in common.

[busymom0]

I just shared that about my mom's parrot and then I came across your comment!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101594

[User23]

I think you're vastly underestimating the cognitive capacities of humans. It's not a matter of respect. A healthy three year old already meets or exceeds any animal in cognitive ability, including the ability to improvise tools to solve multi-step problems, pass the mirror test, and know some words.

Human supremacy is an empirical fact. A little 120 pound guy can hop on the back of an elephant and boss it around for life. I've seen 100 pound women make killer whales beg for treats. If anything we don't have near enough respect for our own awesome power over the other creatures we share this world with.

[IMTDb]

> I've seen 100 pound women make killer whales beg for treats

Just like I have seen 3 pound kittens make 300 pounds women’s rush for treats

[stavros]

If we're wondering whether animals dream, I'll go with "overestimating" too. Yes, we're smarter than all other animals. No, we aren't that much smarter.

[User23]

I’m comfortable claiming that building rocket ships and flying to the moon and back[1] counts as “that much smarter” than maybe using a twig to get termites out of a mound or escaping a fish tank in an aquarium.

[1] including of course inventing the necessary physics, math, logic, and actually doing the engineering in addition to pulling off the mission. And, of course, dreaming of doing it.

Edit: If octopuses or dolphins or whatever animal people think is so clever is in fact so clever, then someone should prove it by teaching them some form of durable symbolic information storage system and teach them to teach other members of their species what they have learned. If they can't do that, then they're not even close to as smart as we are, full stop.

[danparsonson]

To that I say - if you're so much smarter than an Octopus, then make yourself look exactly like a rock.

I would also venture that the apparent gulf between us and other animals is largely due to writing things down as you have inferred - but the ability to create an external persistent knowledge store is the cause more than the effect; the ability to store and share knowledge likely doesn't require a huge leap in brain power, but it does grant us a huge bonus, and builds on itself.

[User23]

> To that I say - if you're so much smarter than an Octopus, then make yourself look exactly like a rock.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghillie_suit

[danparsonson]

Meh, that's up there with the best we can do and an Octopus is still miles better without even trying - can you build and don such a suit tailored exactly to your current environment in a matter of seconds?

[lostlogin]

Great until thermal detection is used: “the warmth of the heavy suit can make a wearer stand out more than a standard soldier when viewed”

[BirAdam]

You should keep in mind that octopuses don’t live very long. The intelligence they gain in their very short lives is remarkable. Add to this that they live in water and therefore can’t have fire and can’t have writing. It’s not just brain power that matters… I don’t know that humans are the smartest critter on the planet, we may just be the most learned and the most able to exploit our surroundings. It’s cool and all, but I really don’t know for sure that humans are “smarter” than octopuses, porpoises, or orcas. We’d need evidence that didn’t rely on particularly human stuff.

[j5155]

I think that the crucial difference between animals and humans there is not necessarily one of definite intelligence but that we have a civilization and written language; no one person or group of people could have gone from discovering things like gravity, energy, algebra, etc all the way to spaceflight in one lifetime, but because we have long-term records we can work on things across generations.

[waboremo]

What makes you think they don't already have such and we're simply too dumb to grasp how it works for them?

Don't you get the problem with your view? You're testing for human cleverness and then assuming all else is generally incompetent. This gets even more tricky when you start actually contemplating consciousness.

Also, can you build a rocket ship and fly to the moon and back? Why do you get to claim the feats of the smartest but other groups of beings do not get that benefit?

[mattgeo_j]

Orcas do teach their young to hunt and speak in the manner of their group, or clan, or pack. Different groups of orcas have their own culture. I wouldn’t be surprised if dolphins do the same

[ok_dad]

Just because we got here first doesn’t mean another species couldn’t eventually do those things. It took us a while to get to rockets.

[User23]

Sure, perhaps in 60 million years we’ll be extinct and Octo Sapiens will be colonizing Alpha Centauri, but today right now on this planet the gulf in intelligence between humans and the other creatures is gigantic.

[ok_dad]

The point is that intelligence isn’t measured by thing you know or what your society can do.

[SanderNL]

Ever met a three year old? It’s a complete mystery the human race survived this state of complete suicidal insanity. For all their beauty and cuteness I would be careful with claims of intelligence. It’s very narrow and very specific.

By having kids myself I actually started to demote human intelligence. We are smart eventually but it takes a long, long time and there is a mind boggling amount of stupidity before that stage is reached. Our final stage is indeed very impressive, I agree.

[micromacrofoot]

overestimating our abilities and underestimating everyone else’s seems like part of the human condition really

[busymom0]

My mom has a parrot (would fly away in evening and then come back every morning to eat and then slowly stopped flying away and would stay overnight, so we decided to keep it) and it also has nightmares or something sometimes at night while sleeping. it would suddenly wake up very stressed, run around with feathers shaking etc.

[rafark]

Well said. I couldn’t even finish the video, living in such a small space must be horrible.

[n3storm]

You just reduced all animals on earth variety to one Class or Clade: mammals?

[braingravy]

The difference is dogs, cats, rats, and people all have a much more recent genetic ancestor, so it’s not a stretch to imagine they have similar brain structures that allow for dreaming.

All those Disney movies with singing fish and the like has lead to anthropomorphizing and assumptions that are still being reckoned with scientifically.

[GuB-42]

Dreaming is not a sign of intelligence, it is just a quirk, there is no reason other intelligent species must dream.

Octopuses are intelligent, but their nervous system is very different from ours, less centralized. We think they might dream, but it might just be anthropomorphism.