346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the topics that we've talked about frequently on the podcast is the nature of intelligence, especially, of course, because we're thinking these days about artificial intelligence. Is that a good label? At what point?

Are AI programs counting as intelligence? But even when you put that aside, just thinking about human intelligence and other intelligences in the natural world. There are certainly senses in which human beings as a species are different than other species. We're the only species that has podcasts and invented calculus and things like that. But is that a single fundamental difference between human beings and other species?

Or is it an accumulation of many things? Or is it just something that we got there first in some sense? Different aspects of humanity have been suggested as the origin of our differences, tool use, language use, maybe even how we speak and the shape of our throats and esophaguses, sheer brain power, number of neurons, social organization, but none of it seems to be quite the thing that tells the difference. So obviously one To attack one's strategy to think about this question is to better understand animals and what they can do, how they are similar to human beings, how they are different than human beings, etc.

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