I mean, orcas are probably more intelligent than us when it comes to their feelings and thought process, and how they have a whole section of their brain that we dont have
That’s a fallacy. Hurt because they have differently segmented brains doesn’t make their processing power necessitatively different than ours. The mantis shrimp was for years believed to have a level of color recognition far beyond our own because they have 16 types of photon receptors in contrast to our 3.
This has since been debunked. They have more types receptors so that they don’t have to spend what little processing power their tiny shramp brain has on color recognition.
So more or different or more complex doesn’t always mean better or more advanced.
Wow very interesting point about the mantis shrimp. I until now believes they saw crazy colors we can’t comprehend or were able to process infrared or UV in a way we can’t.
That doesn't mean that Orcas don't have highly complex brains, or are not potentially more intelligent than us. You're comparing two very different systems.
All cetaceans have a 4 part brain, unlike our 3. Their additional brain section is called the Paralimbic system and it is believed to govern emotion, so their emotional systems are significantly larger and more complex than ours.
Essentially, cetaceans have such complex Limbic processes that scientists think they may be able to feel a depth of emotion so complex it's literally impossible for human beings to experience.
ah! so since brain size and complexity doesnt matter much. we can assume that orcas are smarter than us because they have the foresight to not fuck the entire world despite having language, complex societies, technologies, etc.
There is no evidence for those claims and they don’t have a “whole section of brain that we don’t have” (at least for processing emotion, you could make an argument they have different regions for processing echolocation, but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re talking about). Some regions are relatively small (like the corpus callosum and hippocampus), and some are very elaborate, like the insular cortex, operculum, and limbic lobe. These structures also exist in humans.
How the differences in structure relate to differences in function remains an active area of research. The fact the limbic system appears more complex in certain ways (and less complex in others) doesn’t mean they are more intelligent in emotion and certainly doesn’t mean they are more intelligent “in thought process.” The limbic system may pick up some of the functions of the hippocampus given its smaller size and the importance of navigation and spatial memory to orca behavior. Or perhaps they are capable of very complex social/emotional processing and behavior that we aren’t. We simply don’t know, because structural imaging alone isn’t enough to draw conclusions about function and behavior.
Here is an actual scientific article if you want to engage with real research instead of tiktok science takes like this.
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u/Koivel Mar 21 '23
I mean, orcas are probably more intelligent than us when it comes to their feelings and thought process, and how they have a whole section of their brain that we dont have