No way. Octopuses are generally regarded as being no more intelligent than a dog or a cat.
Octopuses are higher than dogs on many top 10 smartest lists. I did not see cats on any of those.
The 10 Smartest Animals in the World â 2024 AZ Animals #6
Top 10 smartest animals in the world: BBC #3
The Smartest Animals on Earth: Fact Animal #8
Animal IQ Rankings: Top Most Intelligent Animals in the World: Science Blog #8
Top 10 Smartest Animals: Geniuses of the Animal Kingdom: Nature of Home #6
10 of the Worldâs Smartest Animals: World Atlas #2
15 Animals Who Are Probably Smarter Than You: Readers Digest #5
Top 10 Most Intelligent Animal Species on Earth: ListVerse #6
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Still no way they can be smarter than people. Even the smartest cetaceans were ranked at ~3 IQ if I recall correctly.
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Octopuses beat dolphins on a few of those lists. Also, I know someone who canât do math as well as a dolphin. The average human may be intelligent, but some people are WAY below average.
Also: where the heck did you find a cetacean IQ test?
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Canât remember where but I remember I saw it as a ârealisticâ IQ test on dolphins, as opposed to the more âfriendlyâ tests which ended up getting the great apes an IQ score of ~60, which is just absurd.
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âRealisticâ means that a dolphin is impatient and asking them them to stay in one spot for an hour long IQ test leads to them swimming off without trying to complete it. You have to be creative for someone that doesnât care to take a normal test.
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How are you even supposed to measure the IQ of a cetacean? Theyâd have to know what each question means and too have means of answering themâŚ
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I assume with a water proof keyboard that speaks for them. You can teach them the button that makes sound 1 has meaning A and the button that makes sound 2 has meaning B, etc. Though I am not sure how many buttons you would need to properly test IQ.
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It also should be noted that various kinds of animals can have different types of intelligence, for instance whale songs have been reported to contain lots of data.
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Not necessarily. A flat worm has the problem that 2d connections cannot form nearly as complex clusters as 3d connections can, but you can both layer connections, and form a more complex thin shape. Think of a maximal surface area as the goal, not 2d flatness. Why? because then you donât need to do anything to supply the brain with oxygen. Additionally, the idea that brains evolved because flat, spread out, clusters fundamentally donât work seems quite presumptuous. I assume it tended to happen for the same reason heads evolved. Have a mouth somewhere? obvious spot for taste and smell. you put this mouth on the front unless youâre a cephalopod, and while you want to eat stuff in front of you, youâd also like to see it, so this cluster is a great spot for eyes. If half your senses are concentrated in the head, a large ganglion of nerves nearby makes much more sense for connecting and collating information. Once you start getting smarter making this ganglion (or an attached one) cross-reference different senses to have a sense of your environment around you makes most sense than spreading it out or putting one in your rear end and running a long cable to the front. Youâll note the only intelligent animals without a distinct head, cephalopods, have far more brains than any other intelligent animal. This isnât a coincidence, If your tentacles are just as important as your senses and your eyes are on the other side of the tentacles from the mouth, you might as well spread out and put brains in your tentacles.
Not really. Digestive, yes, but you can shortcut the circulatory and respiratory setups by having a lot of surface area and no thick parts. Diffusion works. This has the problem of ruining musculoskelatal systems, but thatâs fine, try filter feeding or symbiosis of some kind. You canât hunt, but thatâs fine.
That isnât a but. Itâs a conditional requirement. If youâd like to get by on low energy food then you have to large and efficient. Good observation. Weâll either be large and efficient or not do that.
The deciding factor is cold-bloodedness. Plus their brains are mostly redundant as far as intelligence goes. Having 8 stupid tentacles is nice, but itâs not like they do much brainstorming or abstract thinking.
Anthropic principle / top ten lists arenât a scientific anything / if the race is close enough the top ten will leave behind a lot of close runner-ups like maybe cats
IQ is bs. Itâs bs when used to measure humans and a million times worse when used to measure non-humans. Iâm not going to rant about âdifferent kinds of intelligenceâ for ages. Who cares how valid emotional intelligence is in comparison to logical intelligence, we know what we mean when we say intelligence and if all sorts of it are even a little valid, an animal or human able to do several kinds of intelligence is smarter than one. IQ tests are bad even then. They rely entirely on human language (even if translated to dolphin or whatever, it wouldnât necessarily make sense to them without our social constructs or math) or in rare cases human pattern recognition of visual datasets. For example, both sorts of questions would cause a bee to fail to recognition the pattern 1 > 2 > 3 > 4. Bees can count to around 4. we have proved this, but they donât do it automatically when you show them pictures or try talking to them, even in bee dances. They would fail that IQ test question, but if you teach bees patterns of how and when to go to certain flowers that require counting to predict, theyâre become very, very, reliable up to numbers equal to 4. This goes the other way too. If you have a human solve a logic puzzle about where they are relative to where they started by following a chain of specific movements, youâll almost always wind up testing how much information they can logically string together. A pigeon would use exactly 0 logic. They would turn around, fly exactly as far as they had predicted, and be where they started. They couldnât even learn to do it the human way without some crazy requirements, because they have compasses in their heads! Bees would do the same thing with polarized light by the way.
Actual benchmarks of intelligence we have are much less convenient than a single number. Recognizing yourself in a mirror, counting, spacial cognition to find your way out of a maze, memory, ect. Octopuses are very logically intelligent by these measures, but they donât live very long and arenât very good at relationships and communication. Depending on how much a given top ten list weighs logic verses cooperation, theyâll either put cats and dogs on top, or octopuses (ignoring that all the research most top tens have going into them is read last yearâs top ten and checking if a sensationalist article said a previously ignored animal was really smart).
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Not to mention that modern AIs can apparently score pretty high on such IQ tests. While those AIs are basically just more advanced versions of web browser result suggestors.
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I think you meant to refer to âpredictive text inputâ as your example.
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Uh yeah, I forgot how exactly it is called.
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I donât think the advantage of close proximity of the senses alone can compensate for the lack of complex power supply systems of the brain; to draw an analogy, it would be like builders, instead of simply laying a long wire from a hydroelectric power station to a city, digging a river bed so that it flows close to the city. The advantage of slightly reduced energy losses will not compensate for the enormous costs of digging out an entire river bed. And here, the advantage of a shorter distance from the brain to the sense organs will not compensate for the costs of maintaining complex brain support systems that consume a lot of energy. So I think there is some significant advantage to concentrated over a tubular nervous system like worms. In addition, the nerve signal moves very quickly (300 m/s), which is why any noticeable delay appears only in organisms the size of a whale/sauropod (they have to lay nerves tens of meters long); for other organisms, it essentially doesnât matter whether the nerve is 10 centimeters or 2 meters long.
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If I recall correctly itâs still greatly useful for many smaller animals when dodging attacks from larger animals (like honeybadgers vs lions)
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