Many animals have higher intelligence than they are given credit for normally, but who can tell exactly what type of intelligence it is.

Sea mammal can communicate between the members of their pods using sound, but no one is sure about how sophisticated that communication is.

Most birds have some sort of a navigation system that makes it possible to return to the same nesting place year after year. Some people think that it is nothing more than pattern recognition that lets them identify the places. But even that is incredible considering the distances some of them fly each year, how do they store and retrieve the memories?

Lots of dogs are capable of picking up things from their owners, like who they like and who to keep away from, But how they do this is unknown. It might be that they are capable of reading our body language or understanding the different tones of voice used to the different people the owner interacts with, or even that they do understand the words we used to a certain extent.

Our biggest problem is that we have not been able to learn their languages so we have no idea if they appear to be really intelligent some times or are capable of having higher thought levels most of the time.

If things like memes are actually part of how the mind and society work.
If an animal is somehow capable of picking up on a powerful meme, is it possible, for a brief moment, for the animal to have a more powerful insight or thought? — wax

Has this idea about memes been confirmed? A meme might appear as a simple visual shot of meaning, or a phrase, but, really, what sort of meaning?

I've wondered and thought about memes for years.
i'm not sure what definitions of them there may be, or what research there may have been on the idea, but to me, a meme could be like a computer algorithm that can interact with other algorithms, and in the process copy itself into other systems....
I has been compared to a biological virus, that spreads and evolves.
It is a bit like an idea; if you accept that it is a good idea, you might tell other people the idea, and it might morph along the way, ie evolve, but it is my opinion that a meme is the thing that ideas are made of, ie an interconnection of other idea-type things/processes..and idea might be made of countless memes, and in the spreading of the idea, the memes are also spread, and develop and evolve..

It is an interesting idea....something that Richard Dawkins may be remembered for for a long time.

It seems to me me, though, that even if a dog understood a meme, would that dog be able to pass it on to another dog. If the meme goes no further than one dog is it actually a meme?

Could you consider hand signals and voice commands to a dog as being a meme?

Take a dog who is the pet of someone. Maybe by their interactions they pick up on a way of thinking, which enables them to understand something they wouldn't have been able to understand if they had just been born into and lived in a pack of wild dogs. — wax

I think it’s very likely they will have a different understanding of us, and a ‘vocabulary’ that wild dogs wouldn’t have.

How is même being deigned here (roughly)?

“an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme.”

“a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.”

If an animal is somehow capable of picking up on a powerful meme, — wax

Without language it's a stretch. Sure birds and bees communicate - but memes require abstraction and abstraction requires the ability to interpret symbols, which is something above and beyond stimulus and response.

:up: . "Ideas" seem to be conceptual. Concepts are a tricky, slippery thing, but it requires parsing out information that only language provides. Humans, if not anything else, are the animals that generate conceptual thought via language use. Language may even have coevolved with our species- in other words language became a ratcheting mechanism that increased other cognitive capacities, like forms of memory, problem-solving, planning, etc. which then magnified further with cultural learning that language provides the foundation for. It is really this cultural learning that that memes are in the realm of. Bird calls and ape tool-making are two possible counterexamples you can provide, but in the case of bird calls, the birds are programmed to always mimic surrounding bird noises.. they have no other choice but to do this. That really isn't meme spreading. It isn't an idea that is accepted. Tool-making in apes only goes as far as one generation and doesn't catch on and spread, evolve, multiply, become something new. Each generation starts over. This tells me that there may be a proto-culture but that idea transmission is too weak, if existent at all. It also may be a result of simple mimicry (monkey see, monkey do) and not an accepted idea, as happens in cultural transmission.

Language may even have coevolved with our species- in other words language became a ratcheting mechanism that increased other cognitive capacities, like forms of memory, problem-solving, planning, etc. which then magnified further with cultural learning that language provides the foundation for. I — schopenhauer1

I read that the development of hands, and the opposable thumb may have also acted in the same way, in that a person can have and idea, and then try to put it into practice, and that can lead to a feedback circle that leads/lead to the evolutionary development of the brain/mind.

This process may have gone on in other animals, like monkeys and chimps.

In connection to words, I once heard that there was the idea that all words are rooted in the formation to references to the hand....I'm not sure about that; even chimps must have other things to think about other than what they do with their hands.

For the most part, I don't expect animal to have the kind of thoughts we do. That is NOT to say they have no resources to operate in a difficult world.

More to the point, we are animals, and we reach down, they reach up toward common feelings. For instance, one can play a perfectly satisfactory game of hide and seek with one's dog. We understand the game, they understand the game, and a good time can be had by all.

We come together on some intellectual tasks too -- like which cup is the hunk of dog chow located, after moving the three cups around. I'm not certain of this, but I think the dogs pay attention to the movement of the cups, Smart dogs, of course, not morons.

another thing regarding memes and language. I gather that chips can be taught sign language to some extent, and babies can be taught it as well...so I think the communication of ideas and memes isn't limited to verbal communication....dogs as well can be taught about things like commands etc...I really do think memes are formed by interactions of all sorts, and when it comes down to it even the interactions of things like the fist cells on this Earth.....I have some theory type ideas that in fact it is memes that formed the so called physical world, the universe, the first cells etc, rather than the other way around. Minds weren't first to create memes; memes were in some ways perhaps first to create the minds that would interact with the world the memes created, through the process of abiogenisis and evolution....;my thoughts are that the physical world and the minds that are part of it aren't two separate system......perhaps I will call this memegenisis..theory.. :)

Maybe God is the ultimate meme generator..

As for other supposedly special traits of humans, de Waal says they have fallen one by one: chimps and other species have been observed showing empathy, regret, and friendship; recognizing faces; recognizing themselves in a mirror; understanding when other creature know or don't know something; remembering distant events; exercising self-restraint; and more. (1)

Preliminary data suggest the chimpanzees do, in fact, understand the meaning of the words.(2) Dogs have also been able to know the referent meaning of dozens of words. There is even this one dog that broke the world record for a recognition task.

:::: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=_6479QAJuz8

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/chimp-intelligence-vs-humans-2017-1
2. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/thinking-like-a-chimpanzee-55484749/

An ant have a human-like philosophical moment is wonderful. I'm more worried about humans having ant-like thoughts.

As for memes I think they have to be either true or emotionally appealing to gain currency and sustain themselves in a population of minds. Truth isn't anyone's property and emotions aren't very reliable. So much for memes.

for a meme to survive it has to just consistently survive(not meaning to be circular but it is true)....a meme might be useful in some way to some groups of people, or as part of some system of thought....I suppose that is a form of popularity..

But if you take the original idea as memes being like viruses...they don't survive because they are useful to their host, they survive because they can be passed between people, and spread amongst the population, and are capable of adapting evolutionarily in order to survive the hosts mechanism of defence....the same might be true of memes, and I think Dawkins thought of religious thinking as a kind of unhealthy meme, originally..

But if you take the original idea as memes being like viruses...they don't survive because they are useful to their host, they survive because they can be passed between people, and spread amongst the population, and are capable of adapting evolutionarily in order to survive the hosts mechanism of defence... — wax

I think this where memes actually differ from a gene, and is possibly the weakness in the potential of memes. A gene is passed on and survives because it does actually offer an advantage, or at least a sustainable position in its environment. So it is useful. A meme would still need more than just the ability to be passed on like a virus. Viruses eventually kill their host, unless the host builds up an immunity. Virus kill off whole populations. Memes are still just ideas. Though having just said that they could or can , and obviously do, create a physical advantage. But you can’t know that at the time, so why hold on to it? I don’t know if it’s helpful comparing memes to viruses.

Have I just talked myself off the page?

This all comes down to how you define sophisticated thoughts, so you need to answer this question first: Does a human raised by wolves have a human level of sophisticated thought?

For me, "sophisticated thought" means the kind of abstract representational thinking that can only be done in a sophisticated language that allows expressing such things. If you have no complex language, you can't ponder questions like the ones raised by this thread because you have no framework with which to conceptualize them. And to invent your own complex internal language with no outside help would require a seriously superhuman brain.

The remaining question, then, is simply whether there are any animal languages that allow the same sorts of abstract representational thinking as human languages. That's an empirical question, for which the current answer is a cautious "no current strong evidence, but we're not sure yet."

(Memes, I think, are irrelevant. Memes are interesting on a sociological level, but no different from other thought on a personal cognition level, and any sophistication in them is a function of language.)

Indeed.