We adopted three kittens that were found locked into a suitcase and thrown into the trash. Our house is in hills with coyotes so these cats would not survive for any length of time outside. They'd probably also be sent to the pound if we didn't adopt them. I feel bad for confining them in our house but I don't know if there would have been a better outcome for them.

Totally agree on more rare/exotic animals though - they shouldn't be subject to unnatural conditions like this.

Even prisoners walk back into their cells. Comfort doesn’t erase confinement. A bird’s world is the open sky—so an open door doesn’t make a cage any less of one.

How did you arrive at the conclusion that birds like cages?

A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. I don't know where you get "torture" from. What's most important is stimuli such as scratching posts, toys, etc. Otherwise, they're insanely copacetic to the point many "house" cats don't want to leave the home even when being dragged out.

Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel.

That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.

What difference would a house make here? A yard?

It’s for the best, house cats torture the birds and frogs around here and I hate it. I never knew frogs could scream.

Apartment is no good for a cat but suddenly fine for you? It isn’t like it is in human nature to live in a shoebox either. Human nature is to live in the sahel, sleep under the stars, forage, and track game. The office and the apartment is genuinely a prison for the human in their evolved element.

But then you did get one?

it's funny because domesticated cats have much more developed frontal cortexes than their ancestors & it would be one of the things that feral cats lose to genetic drift (meaning, no conservation pressure in the wild). whatever boring stuff we have them do is apparently extremely mentally taxing compared to the wild.

Fun fact: octopus does not come from Latin, which would give the plural an -i ending. It comes from Greek, which means that if you want to be particularly correct about your plurals, then the plural is octopodes.

Neurons are used for more tasks than just problem-solving. Dogs have a good smell, so a big part of their brain is probably used for just this. They seem to be also much more acrobatic and reacting faster in general than an Octopus, so theses are probably also areas where additional neurons are used. Dogs have also a high social intelligence, not sure how Octopi are in that regard.

And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?

Something interesting about the octopus is that it is independent and learning from the time it is tiny.

It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.

This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.

No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.

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Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.

We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.

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For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.

To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.

It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.

The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again.

(We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.)

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There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.

Yeah their nerve cells are much larger. The axons of a giant squid are up to a millimeter in width.

This code base is larger, so it’s certainly a smarter product!

"Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters.

[1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/07/19/fact-check-leonardo-da-...

The prevailing research is “more neurons = intelligence”

And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessary

octopi bucking that trend is an example we need

I mean regarding the domains of intelligence and how to test them.

With humans, performance in one cognitive test correlates with another and so on, generally. So, intelligence across domains.

Researchers test the same with animals. The issue being animals' intelligence being tied to their ecology. The dilemma being what is it worth for an animal solving a task that has no significance in its life. The other argument being if the animals' intelligence is closer/similar to human intelligence, we will find similar results in both.

To be fair, it's not like the baby animals pop into existence at birth, starting from scratch at that moment, but instead they've been growing/incubating for quite some time. Who knows, maybe that's the actual "training phase" for the animals, as what you say is true, they seem to have a lot of instincts already at birth, while human babies seem to almost "popped into existence at birth" with not a whole lot of instincts yet, compared to other animals at least.

What's also fun to think about is the compression ratio of that data. the human genome is in the 725MB range.

Evolution is kinda like pre-training in a sense.

Also illustrates an adaptability-ability trade-off. A human baby is supplied a SOTA brain and sensors and actuators it can make sense of given time. A deer baby is preprogrammed to handle its sensors and actuators. In time, the human baby surpasses the deer baby in general ability.

I got some of those links and links to the summary of the story.

But I did not want a summary (why massacre such a beautiful story *), and neither the later links (pretty bad visual presentation of the story), but the Nautilus link in particular.

I think that's where I had read it first on the web, by far the best layout compared to the other links.

Even a few years ago the Nautilus link used to be the canonical (first) result.

* If I want Michelangelo's David summarised, I think I would mention 'summary' explicitly.

One thing I've learned by following a link from elsewhere in this thread is that while the total count of neurons in an animal's nervous system is not a good proxy for intelligence, the count of neurons in the forebrain is. By that measure, only the orca ranks higher than humans [1].

That doesn't mean language ability is a natural outcome of crossing a certain threshold of brain complexity; if anything it's more likely the other way around: this complexity being be driven by highly social behavior and communication.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

Language also has a lot to do with what we do. We do more complex things than animals, so we say more complex things than animals. The biggest difference in the evolution of human language versus the evolution of elephant language might just be that we have thumbs.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02855-9

Birds have areas of the brain that we would consider language alike. Both for native bird communication and I would also speculate that for human to bird communication.

If you have ever owned a parrot this is blatantly obvious since they actively communicate and vocalize both observations and needs/desires

This reminds me of being told dogs don't feel emotions by someone who never owned one. Parrots most definitely can talk. Their language is extremely primitive but if you've ever been around a grey and it's owner for some time, they definitely talk to each other. The parrot will readily communicate observations and desires.

Isn't that what humans do too? We mimic noises we've heard before and we associate meaning to the noises. Parrots can do that. Our quaker parrot would bite you, then say 'not supposed to bite'. He clearly associated some kind of meaning to that phrase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)

Common misconception. Parrots are much more than just mimicry machines. There is also Apollo the parrot that shows this in detail and following from Irene's research with Alex

Many animals can communicate.

Parrots can't speak fluent English, which shouldn't be surprising. Last I checked, no human is fluent in Parrot or Dolphin.

Though, at least one parrot may have demonstrated an ability to understand language at more than a surface level.

Bumblebee (the Transformer) might have an objection here. Purposeful mimicry can be used for talking on certain complexity. It does not have to be human-level to be communication.

This is also what toddlers do until bit by bit they're repeating everything you say back to you in context.

So do we, otherwise we would all speak our own individual language.

So what you’re saying is that parrots are stochastic parrots.

Like Starlings do.

I mean, isn’t that just what you’re doing too? If you see a cow, and you’ve been taught that ‘cow’ is the sound that describes a cow, don’t you say “cow?”

Dogs do that too.

My dogs eat poop, and therefore are also like LLMs.

Your hypothesis has therefore been peer-reviewed.

Then to put it bluntly; you lied to your audience.

> "I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off."

If your audience conceived it as possibly being a merely repeated phrase that the researcher probably said thousands of times, not something the parrot actually understood, then it is very easy to brush off as something we already knew parrots could do.

"Chicken" is also an idiomatic synonym for "frightens easily." They do have some instinct for avoiding danger.

They definitely cross roads.

In the mountains around Trondheim, Norway, you run into free range chicken farms (and sheep roaming the mountain top). Signs warn you that chickens are about and I think them getting hit is a real concern if you are maximizing chicken freedom.

That said, these aren't busy roads. The more traffic, the more barriers to keep the animals from getting hit.

or perhaps it's an artefact of them having a higher contrast against the asphalt and being somewhat fat and puffy compared to most roadkill animals

Sure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt.

This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.

If you go a bit farther back, we all ultimately come from the same lizard-like amniotes, newly emerged onto land from amphibious ancestors. It just took dinosaurs and mammals a little bit to evolve out of the "four-legged monster with teeth" body type.