Caption for a Gahan Wilson cartoon (for which you don’t actually need the drawing, except that it;s two women having tea looking at a dog):
"Poor Fifi hasn’t been the same ever since that veterinarian put the brain of his hunchbacked assistant in her head.
I can’t imagine the shell (body) containing the brain would affect any changes in the brain itself. In the movie, “Ghost in the Shell”, the PERSON was the brain. The artificial body housing it had no effect on the brain itself.
I can’t imagine that the rest of the body wouldn’t effect any changes in the brain; there’s continual interplay between the brain and the rest of the body through the nervous system, the glandular system, and probably even the various biota affecting both of those. I don’t think movies are a useful guide to go by; whoever writes the movie wants to tell a particular type of story, and is rarely concerned about inconvenient facts.
Kids throwing tantrums would have to find some other way of pushing Mom and Dad’s buttons than holding their breath…
“This year has reportedly seen a spate of attacks by orcas (“killer whales”) against boats in the Strait of Gibraltar”
So, if you put an orca brain in a human body it attacks boats in Gibraltar. There ya go.
True, but those are all autonomous bodily functions controlled by the brain on a subconscious level. I can’t imagine how they would have any affect on the cerebral cortex.
Only if you promise to free him.
You never lost your temper or had trouble concentrating because you were hungry?
You never in your life did anything because your hormones were making you horny? and you don’t think anybody else ever did either?
Your conscious mind never reacted to the adrenalin produced because something scared you?
Of course, but that isn’t at all the issue as I understand the OP (quote below).
Would this creature be smarter and more capable than a primate? Would it be good at math? Understand speech?
If it were adjusted so that it worked with a human body, it wouldn’t be an orca; and it couldn’t think like one, because orcas think with orca senses which are drastically different from human senses.
But those aren’t higher order thinking skills, which are the things the OP listed. An orca brain isn’t suddenly going to evolve just because it is housed in a human body. Being housed in a human body will not allow an orca brain to learn math, learn human language, etc because the orca brain will have the same limitations it always had because, in the end, it is an orca brain.
The real problem here is that the thought experiment itself is faulted. An orca brain would have to undergo major changes before it could even “run” a human body so, in actuality, it wouldn’t even be an orca brain anymore.
I suspect the best response is to invert it: what would happen if we put a fetal human brain in a fetal orca’s body, assuming that they’d be able to breathe and swim?
They would be pathetic orcas who could not do the basic tasks of orca living or communicating with other orcas. Other baby orcas would shun them. They would die right off.
Are humans therefore not as smart as we think they are?
I think the question was, does an orca brain have higher order thinking skills; just in a different format than humans do? I don’t think we have an answer to that; but I don’t think the experiment suggested in this thread would give us an answer to that. I think what we’d need would be some way to figure out whether orcas are using language, if not in our format. There are people working on that sort of thing.
But the different format, if there is one, is going to be drastically affected by being in such a different body. That’s why it’s hard for us to tell.
On that, I agree with you.
If nothing else, putting the brain in a human body would radically change how other humans (and other orcas, for that matter) interact with it, and who the baby is interacting with and how will certainly have effects on its mental development.
I’d like to know more about these claims. The Week wrote:
A killer whale’s brain can weigh as much as 15 pounds (6.8 kilograms), with some evidence to suggest that their IQ is equivalent to that of a 15- or 16-year-old human, according to Orca Torch.
Ok, 1) Brain weight is correlated heavily with body weight, though I understand there is some evidence that the brain weight/body weight ratio might be correlated with animal intelligence.
Some researchers have done research on the IQ of humans and killer whales and found that the IQ of Orcas is equivalent to that of fifteen or sixteen-year-old humans.
“Some researchers.” I have difficulty trusting the scientific credentials of OrcaTorch given that they also say:
Orca is a kind of whale that is fearless in challenging everything, free and unconstrained to parade all over the sea as it pleases. They conquer all the difficulties with team spirit and wisdom. They are the overlords of the sea and the best symbol of underwater adventure spirit．
Being named after the Orca, inheriting the excellent characteristics of the Orca combined with world advanced technology, OrcaTorch has developed a series of dive lights and underwater video lights which are extremely bright, have long beam distance, long runtime, high waterproofness, high impact resistance， convenient operation, etc．
Absent claims in a peer reviewed paper, I don’t think we need elaborate thought experiments to debunk claims like the above.
A very good thread on that.
The question of how to evaluate intelligences very alien to our own, one that potentially solves different sets of novel problems than we do, is an important one, whether it is evaluated our fellow large brained planetary denizens, computer based intelligences, or potentially a non terrestrial one. Doing what we do is a myopic, even narcissistic, answer.
The studies referenced in that thread were part of what I was thinking of.
I know you knew about that thread! But you hadn’t linked to it and some here who had not read it may find the information there edifying.
True. I didn’t mean to imply that you meant otherwise – apologies!