Imagine you placed a baby orca brain in a baby human head. and raised it in a healthy human household. Would this creature be smarter and more capable than a primate? Would it be good at math? Understand speech?
Or would it yield completely unimpressive results because orcas aren’t as smart as we give them credit for?
Assume the head can expand indefinitely and don’t worry about it’s weight. Also assume the brain is well connected with the nervous system and it adapts to it and it knows how to deal with all parts of the body. It can hear, see, move its tongue, etc.
There’s probably other reasons why it realistically wouldn’t work, but it’s just a hypothetical/thought experiment. The flip of that is how much of todays technology, society and culture would exist if we didnt have hands or tongues and lived under water?
I expect it would spend the rest of its life lying flat on the ground flapping around. I don’t think it would ever learn to walk or manipulate things with its hands/arms because it’s brain isn’t wired for that. It would also be very, very unlikely to learn speech or math. Brains have some plasticity, but not an infinite amount, and a brain wired by evolution to think like a whale is not going to understand how to think like a human.
The same thing that happens if you try to put an Intel 80286 chip into an 11th generation LGA1200 socket – the connectors don’t fit.
This is not just a trite observation. The orca brain evolved for the orca body, and the human brain for ours. The physiologically-aligned brain functions are inseparable from the cognitive ones. Even if you could somehow rig up a partial approximation of equivalent mind-body connections as per your assumption, this hybrid being would be unable to experience the world the way a newborn does and learn the way a baby learns.
Looks like no one is reading the last paragraph, you’re missing the point of the question. I’m aware that different brain species would likely have portability issues, but you’re supposed to assume that somehow they are solved for the thought experiment. If its easier for you to think about, a different question (less cool imo) if orcas were genetically modified to grow hands and feet, walk and live on land, have vocal cords similar to ours- how close in capability would they become to us.
And brains at the newborn stage are much more adaptable than you guys think.
Orcas modified to walk on land and have modified vocal cords would still think like orcas. To think like humans they would also have to be genetically modified to think like humans. At which point “an animal modified to think like a human would think like a human” is a tautology.
I don’t think you really need to modify the brain all that much to get them from instead of moving fins to moving hands. Again, i think people seriously underestimate the flexibility of the brain in infanthood
Well, thats the question. im not sure how smart they are other than vague claims that they’re
smart as humans
smarter than humans
smart as teenagers
From a first glance it doesn’t look like they are any of those. They don’t use tools, build structures, draw drawings or communicate in writing. but maybe they don’t use tools, or write because their limbs arent suited for them. Or maybe their environment and culture isn’t suites for it
Is it just their environment and body that’s limiting their technological progress? Or are they just not as smart as we’re led to believe.
Or technology isn’t a necessary outcome of intelligence. People on various areas of the Earth developed technologically at very different paces. Does that mean they have very different levels of intelligence?
But they all developed some technology at somepoint
even if its just spears, axes and wooden huts, that’s much more than can be said of orcas. i don’t know of tribes that didnt do something more technologically impressive than the orcas we see
I think you’re right in a way - brains, as they develop in a growing infant, learn the capabilities of the bodies they are developing in. A human baby with six fully functional fingers on its right hand will learn to use all six of them (to mercilessly slay swordsmiths), even though that’s not a standard configuration, and in the case of loss of that extra finger in adult life, that grown-up human will feel the loss in roughly the same way as a five-fingered human reduced to four.
Brains adapt, but the extent to which they are capable of adaptation is not unlimited. How an orca brain could grow up to drive a human body will be largely dependent on the general functions of the brain - the parts of the brain, more than the detailed operation of those parts.
We as humans developed technologies adapted to our human structure.
Why develop spears when you are the spear? why walls and building when you can swim freely in the ocean and have heat isolation?
But orcas have complex interactions, including “songs” which varies from one group to the other (languages?) and having specific ways of hunting different preys, teaching them to their youths (education?)
If an orca’s brain was put in a human body, would the parts of the brain dédicated to the sonar adapt to the speech? would the parts flapping the fins adapt to hands and legs? would the parts managing the 3D displacement adapt to 2D displacement?
Maybe yes and maybe no. We can’t know for sure cause we haven’t enough data.
The thought experiment is to assume it does adapt, and subject it to an intellectually stimulating human environment (there’s this study where a married couple, who are also scientists raise a baby monkey alongside their child, give him the same clothes and teach him the same things, and treat him as though he’s their human offspring to see how much environment played a role) then wonder would they be more capable than monkeys? as capable as a normal human? or much less so? would they be able to write? pass grade school tests in math?
Frmale chimp, not a monkey. The chimp hit a developmental wall and the child started acting like a chimp.
But eventually, as NPR notes, Gua hit a cognitive wall: No amount of training or nurturing could overcome the fact that, genetically, she was a chimpanzee. As such, the Psychological Record authors write, the Kelloggs’ experiment “probably succeeded better than any study before its time in demonstrating the limitations heredity placed on an organism regardless of environmental opportunities as well as the developmental gains that could be made in enriched environments.”
To be fair they cut the experiment short because they were afraid of their child imitating the primate,
before any proper conclusions could be made.
Its not unheard of for humans to not speak by the time they’re 16 months. If they continued the experiment would the primate have a better grasp of language than what was achieved? probably, but not to the level of the human.
We don’t know if whales have language, and even if they do, it’s probably language that works very differently from human language, because we’re both cognitively far past our most recent common ancestor. So our orca probably wouldn’t be able to learn human language, because language is a Really Big Deal to humans: Large portions of our brains are devoted to processing language. And of course, a human incapable of language is going to have a very limited life.
For that matter, another large portion of our brains is devoted to processing vision, and that’s going to be much less developed in orcas, too, because they don’t make nearly as much use of their eyes as we do. On the other hand, they correspondingly have a large portion of their brain devoted to processing sonar, and with human ears and vocal apparatus (and air instead of water for the medium), that’s going to all go to waste.
All of which is to say, it’s not just a matter of how much intelligence we have, but the ways in which we’re intelligent.
“The brains of those who are born blind make new connections in the absence of visual information, resulting in enhanced, compensatory abilities such as a heightened sense of hearing, smell and touch, as well as cognitive functions (such as memory and language) according to a new study led by Massachusetts Eye and Ear researchers”
If you make all the genetic modifications necessary to fit the whale into the one answer that you want to hear from us, then you will get the behavior that you want to hear.
