on intelligence

okay so theres this type of crow called the New Caledonian. it is presented with a bucket of little pieces of pig heart. thing is, that bucket is inside a cylindrical beaker. this crow is a given a piece of stiff straight wire. this isnt a single smart, trained crow. apparently 90% of all new caledonian crows can perform this feat of tool use.

finding a never-before-seen material and manipulating it into a tool is a complex feat they say even a chimp cant figure out on its own. this crow on the other hand, has also been documented using tools to obtain tools to obtain food. in one experiment a crow, in a similar situation as above, used a provided small stick to retrieve a larger stick, which it then used to retrieve hidden food.

now if material manipulation is seen as advanced pattern recognition and application, then the mentioned meta-tool processe (using a tool on another tool) must be a serious display of the capacity for delayed gratification. i myself have not commonly observed this behaviour in humans, let alone considered the possibility of this occurring in the primate realm. but tweet tweet birdies are doing it now? incredible!

what do i mean by delayed gratification? well for example if an animal could not suppress its immediate desire for a food reward, it would not create for itself a job first. this is why most animals cannot fathom creating a hook from a short wire. forget about creativity (most critters couldnt even keep their eyes off the prize for a period long enough to entertain the idea of tool creation). and if an animal could not suppress its desire for its current tool to work on retrieving the food which is still too far away for that short hook, it would not create for itself yet another job, such as using that tool it made to retrieve a longer piece of wire. but the new caledonian crow can do this. i must say, this bird must possess extreme amounts of intuitive ability in order to entertain multiple intentions in a chronological fashion.

i am almost prepared to believe that these crows are intelligent because of their ability for idea creation and scenario conception. why else would such an animal bend a wire into a hook if it did not believe that a curved wire would work better after experiencing that a straight wire would never do? why else would such an animal use a tool to obtain another tool which it cannot eat, if the bird didnt believe that the other tool would definitely work where the older tool failed to retrieve effectively the food reward (which it can eat).

i would be most impressed if we discovered yet another animal that exhibits similar intelligent displays of delayed gratification. no. i would be more impressed if this hypothetical animal would do something like this not for food or for survival reasons. i would be impressed if this animal did something like this just because it can--more importantly because it knows it can, and does it because it is interested to see just how far its own innovation can reach.

ahh. i guess i can only be impressed by intelligence that is also coupled with a competent curiosity for knowledge itself--an intelligence with potential, so to speak. am i asking for too much? nah. i could ask for more, such as for these clever crows to starting asking themselves why instead of how; "why do i make hooks? why do i have wings? why is the sky blue? why am i asking myself so many questions?"

but then even birds would become philosophers, and they would sit on huge rocks and rub their chins, and they would say cogito ergo sum, and they would start using computers, and then millions of new blogs would pop up on the internet written by clever crows, and then i would be out of a job.