[southernplaces7]

>but I don't really find the intellectual capacity of mice to be particularly interesting.

But you should find their self-direction capacity incredible and their ability to instinctively behave in ways that help them survive and propagate themselves. There isn't a machine or algorithm on earth that can do the same, much less with the same minuscule energy resources that a mouse's brain and nervous system use to achieve all of that.

This isn't to even mention the vast cellular complexity that lets the mouse physically act on all these instructions from its brain and nervous system and continue to do so while self-recharging for up to 3 years and fighting off tiny, lethal external invaders 24/7, among other things it does to stay alive.

All of that in just a mouse.

[ben_w]

> But you should find their self-direction capacity incredible

No, why would I?

Depending on what you mean by self-direction, that's either an evolved trait (with evolution rather than the mouse itself as the intelligence) for the bigger picture what-even-is-good, or it's fairly easy to replicate even for a much simpler AI.

The hard part has been getting them to be able to distinguish between different images, not this kind of thing.

> and their ability to instinctively behave in ways that help them survive and propagate themselves. There isn't a machine or algorithm on earth that can do the same,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

> much less with the same minuscule energy resources that a mouse's brain and nervous system use to achieve all of that.

Is nice, but again, this is mixing up the intelligence of the animal with the intelligence of the evolutionary process which created that instance.

I as a human have no knowledge of the evolutionary process which lets me enjoy the flavour of coriander, and my understanding of the Krebs cycle is "something about vitamin C?" rather than anything functional, and while my body knows these things it is unconventionable to claim that my body knowing it means that I know it.

[southernplaces7]

I think you're completely missing the wider picture in your insistence on giving equivalency to the mouse with any modern AI, LLM or machine learning system.

The evolutionary processes behind the mouse being capable of all that are a part of the long distant past, up to the present, and their results are manifest in the physiology and cognitive abilities (such as they are) of the mouse), but this means that these abilities, conscious, instinctive and evolutionary only exist in the physical body of that mouse and nowhere else. No man-made algorithm or machine is capable of anything remotely comparable and its capacity for navigating the world is nowhere near as good. Once again, this especially applies when you consider that the mouse does all it does using absurdly tiny energy resources, far below what any LLM would need for anything similar.

[GOD_Over_Djinn]

Evolution is an abstract concept, and abstract concepts cannot be “intelligent” (whatever that means). This is like saying that gravity or thermodynamics are “intelligent”.

[rowanG077]

Evolution is not an abstract concept. It's a concrete algorithm with some abstract steps.

[ben_w]

You might be surprised with what we've done by implementing the same thing as software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm