"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal
More and more evidence that they’re smarter than we’ve given them credit for.
What this article suggests is that we’re so used to thinking of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution that we’ve misled ourselves into thinking that qualities like intelligence must be strictly correlated with how much the animals resemble us anatomically. But more recent research is showing that birds, despite being very different anatomically, have brains that are capable of cognitive feats we hadn’t suspected.
And they may be capable of feats we are not. We have conflated intelligence with how we are intelligent.
To (perhaps) add to what Christopher said above, they could also be conscious in ways we are not conscious. We cannot really imagine other qualia from those we experience. But I wonder whether animals sense them. (One major alternative is that they sense a color like violet when they look at something ultraviolet. So same qualia but under different conditions.) I think even a different hierarchy of senses would lead to a different kind of imagination. In The Once and Future King, T.H. White has Merlin teach Arthur to imagine being a fish. It is a fascinating exercise. With new research, we could follow this exercise with other creatures on a much deeper level. Whatever contraction of mind might be entailed in some directions, expansion of mind would be required in others.
To (perhaps) add to what Christopher said above, they could also be conscious in ways we are not conscious. We cannot really imagine other qualia from those we experience. But I wonder whether animals sense them. (One major alternative is that they sense a color like violet when they look at something ultraviolet. So same qualia but under different conditions.) I think even a different hierarchy of senses would lead to a different kind of imagination. In The Once and Future King, T.H. White has Merlin teach Arthur to imagine being a fish. It is a fascinating exercise. With new research, we could follow this exercise with other creatures on a much deeper level. Whatever contraction of mind might be entailed in some directions, expansion of mind would be required in others.
A Thinking Reed 
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