Episode 37: Animal Intelligence and Knowledge Creation (part 1)
The Theory of Anything · Bruce Nielson and Peter Johansen
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Show Notes
How intelligent are animals?
In this episode, we introduce our series on animal intelligence rooted primarily in the research of Richard Byrne. Richard Byrne (mentioned in Beginning of Infinity) is a first-class Popperian researcher (though he doesn't realize it).
We first talk about how Bruce got interested in this subject after reading Fabric of Reality (but before reading Beginning of Infinity) and how animal intelligence is at once beyond anything we know how to program but also unbelievably unintelligent at times. We consider how the Pseudo-Deutsch Theory of Knowledge has misled the Deutsch fan community about how much of an animal's knowledge is "in its genes" as well as how many fans of Deutsch (due to the same misunderstandings) have accidentally fallen into Lamarkism because they don't understand the importance of the Baldwin effect on the evolution of animal algorithms.
Links:
- The Monkey Fairness Experiment
- Dog Playing Jenga
- Cat Playing Jenga (Another Example)
- Richard Byrne's book Evolving Insight: How it is we can think about why things happen
- Richard Byrne's book The Thinking Ape: The Evolutionary Origins of Intelligence
- A primer on Donald Campbell's Theory (including animal learning and the Baldwin effect)
- A short summary of how Popper and Campbell (apparently) disagree with David Deutsch on what counts as knowledge creation