[Merrill]

There must be some difficulty in studying biological brain intelligence to distinguish between features that contribute to intelligence and those which are simply path dependencies from millions of years of nervous system evolution.

Over that time, brain function was mostly concerned with aiding the organism to find food, grow, reproduce, and avoid being eaten, rather than language, logic, mathematics, arts, and so forth. Its rather astonishing that humans are somehow now able to do the latter, using brains evolved to do the former.

[swatcoder]

You're overstating human difference.

We appear to have a capacity for substantially greater sophsitication in those domains, but none are unique to us except when we artificially define them to be. Remember that words like "language", "logic", "art", etc are cultural inventions with a fuzzy and fluid relationship to whatever real-word "stuff" they refer to, not natural kinds that themselves have sharp and perennial definitions.

Unless you choose to define the word as that which only humans can acheive, a spider's web elegently reflects "mathematics" just as much as some beautiful proof in set theory; a conflicted bird debating itself over which stem to use in its nest reflects artistic attention just as as a painter choosing their next color; a cat chirping or mewing or yowling reflects language just as me writing this comment.

The sophistication doesn't go as far, by our eye at least, in any of these animal examples, and so we don't expect the spider to confirm Fermat's Last Theorem or the bird to feature their nest in a gallery (actually...) or a cat to compose formal poetry, but the essential bits that we extend with our sophistication are all ancient and widespread throughout nature.

It's still astonishing that any life can do so many of the things it but I guess that's apparently what billions of years of "pretraining" on unfathomably efficient machines gets you.

Incidentally, it's wild to see people believe that a stream of fmults pushing through a trillion transistors would get you even close to the sophistication of any of life's intelligence. For current-AI-skeptical materialists, it's usually not a doubt about whether silicon and software might conceivably be intelligent, but it can just seem absurd to believe the grossly crude and narrow innovations of recent years are even close. You need to have a very shallow, narrow, almost willfully blinded, appreciation of the "intelligence" exhibited throughout all biological life to think that you unlocked the silicon version of it all in a pretty-good chatbot running on Azure.

[genman]

This is a little too hard core anthropomorphism for me.

[theduder99]

no need for billions of years of pre-training, they were designed that way from the start :)

[CamperBob2]

Full of bugs?

[mycall]

It isn't just humans that can do math. Ants to geolocation [0] by counting their steps in relation to the distance they walked from their nest. They do this with just a small amount of neurons.

[0] https://blog.cambridgecoaching.com/ants-go-marching-fun-fact....

[genman]

Chickens can count. Humans can do abstract math, any math.

[fluidcruft]

Well, humans can do any math that human brains can comprehend. That doesn't mean "any math" any more than if a chicken we're to claim that chickens can do any math (because they cannot comprehend human math).

[edgyquant]

Why would there be a difference at all here? Finding food and avoiding being eaten requires a great deal of intelligence, is surely the basis of human logic, and is the foundation for language. It’s all one interconnect network and every bit of it is a piece of the greater intelligence.

[kaba0]

I think the the emergent behavior is still the most plausible. There really is not much difference between our brain and a chimpanzees, it is definitely not accounted for genetically to be that much more intelligent.