I'm going out on a limb because I don't really know much about neurology & I may be wrong about facts but.. I think an issue here is that we don't really know what "natural intelligence" is.
For a significant part of the Scientific age we knew about genes in some sense without knowing much about them. We called them traits, observed & measured them. We got to know some "rules" about their inheritance. But it wasn't until genetics got to be a little better understood that we got to know their physical manifestation. We can explain the diference between genetic & cultural (memetic?) inheritance in these terms. A descendant's cooking habits are memetic and her hair colour is genetic.
When it comes to neuroscience I think we're where we were a century ago in biology. Emotions, thoughts, memories. We don't know what their physical manifestation is. We dont know how they work. Since we don't know much about how natural intelligence works I think our common sense definition of intelligence is, to a certain extent: "stuff we can do that computers can't."
I think that if we had a definition that was more functional than observational, you wouldn't be hesitant at all to use "mammalian" in your definition. Whatever processes result in observed human intelligence are almost certainly shared with other species. We'd probably also know what species to draw the lines at: reptiles? invertebrates? fungi?
If apes have intelligence, goldfish don't but octopi do that suggests there multiple versions of natural intelligence.
For a significant part of the Scientific age we knew about genes in some sense without knowing much about them. We called them traits, observed & measured them. We got to know some "rules" about their inheritance. But it wasn't until genetics got to be a little better understood that we got to know their physical manifestation. We can explain the diference between genetic & cultural (memetic?) inheritance in these terms. A descendant's cooking habits are memetic and her hair colour is genetic.
When it comes to neuroscience I think we're where we were a century ago in biology. Emotions, thoughts, memories. We don't know what their physical manifestation is. We dont know how they work. Since we don't know much about how natural intelligence works I think our common sense definition of intelligence is, to a certain extent: "stuff we can do that computers can't."
I think that if we had a definition that was more functional than observational, you wouldn't be hesitant at all to use "mammalian" in your definition. Whatever processes result in observed human intelligence are almost certainly shared with other species. We'd probably also know what species to draw the lines at: reptiles? invertebrates? fungi?
If apes have intelligence, goldfish don't but octopi do that suggests there multiple versions of natural intelligence.