| | I've been intrigued for many years with birds. I had an Amazon Red Front parrot for a number of years, and he (or she??) was quite clever in many ways, but incredibly dense in many others. (I got very frustrated at one point trying to teach him (or her?) to PUSH the damn keys on the computer instead of removing them with his beak - and he was a genius with that beak in general.)
I've also spent many lunch breaks at work studying local crows, some of whom I watched through several generations. It's clear that while they may not have much processing power in their little brains, still they will sit and patiently analyze whatever they are confronted with - like running a spreadsheet on a Commodore 64, it works, but it is necessarily s l o w w w. Yet they are VERY quick to learn from not just other crows, but from other birds or even humans when its a matter of perceiving a pattern of cause and effect.
The key difference here is probably one of the number of levels of abstraction that a particular brain structure can support and still deliver results in real-time. I think that Ravens have the capacity for considerable human-quality abstraction, based on many accounts of their behavior, involving imagination, time-binding, trickery - implying the ability to think in terms of another animal's perception, as well as tool using and humor, such as in deliberate pranks.
Problem solving, however, is not generally all that linear a skill. Usually, any significant problem quickly becomes interdisciplinary, and the solutions can be thought of as in algebra - the intersection of sets. If you have more variables than independent equations, then you're not going to get a single point solution. Sometimes just arriving at a finite solution space is sufficient.
So, the usual practice is to mentally envision the problem from several different and independent perspectives. Problems in law and justice, for example, often require aspects of epistemology, ethics, psychology and economics. Real solutions often have to satisfy criteria from several independent viewpoints.
Then, of courser, you get the rationalists who are determined to follow a single equation whereever it takes them. Leonard Peikoff has more or less labled this as the most common sin of objectivists - and as a personal fault, as well.
Ravens, in particular, appear to perhaps have the capacity of maintaining this multi-dimensional perspective, although doubtless not at the level of a normal human. Various accounts of interactions between humans and ravens typically characterize the human side as tending to think of the raven as another person - and perhaps the raven equivalently thinks of people as clever - if ugly and non-flying - ravens. It helps, I'm sure, that ravens have an apparently marvelous sense of self-possession, as well as a clear capacity for empathy.
My one personal encounter up close with a raven came when I noticed what appeared to be a very large crow, who was gleefully throwing the entire contents of a wire-mesh trash container out onto the pavement. A crow would never have let me get nearly that close - as in about five feet. And no normally paranoid crow (which is how they survive to a ripe old age) would have ever put itself deliberately in a confined space like that to begin with.
Yet here was this big bird, diving head first into the ~ four-foot tall container, and emerging triumphant with one food carton after another. When it noticed me, it hardly paused, looked me over and then deciding that I was probably not a threat, looked around significantly at the huge mess it had created, which I took as inviting me in on the joke, which I'm guessing was along the lines of "look how easilly I defeated the humans in their attempts to keep me from the goodies." Or maybe, "look what a grand mess I've made here."
Ravens are just big enough that no half-way smart cat or other common predator is going to try and jump them - not much meat and a lot of nasty beak. So, they don't have to look twenty times before they furtively snatch at a piece of food on the ground in front of them - which is what every crow will do every time. Having the luxury of being reasonably safe and confident in day-to-day survival issues has probably lead to a selection for high intelligence, likely similar to what happened to proto-humans, once they started doing weapons, fire and language.
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