The Criteria For Animal Intelligence

In everything from casual videos to formal articles, one might hear of how allegedly intelligent dogs, octopi, dolphins, pigs, crows, orcas, and other animals are.  Since almost everyone is not a rationalist and therefore does not know what intelligence truly is, what is almost never mentioned here is that intelligence is rationality, and rationality is direct, intentional grasp of the laws of logic.  The only alternative to being rational is making assumptions or neglecting self-evident (axioms like the fact that something which follows from another thing cannot be false) or other logically necessary truths of supreme centrality.  Intelligence can be expressed outwardly using behaviors or words, but it is not actions or the use of language, all of which can be engaged in without true rationality.  A person or animal could go so far as to engage in elaborate activities without any recognition of logical axioms or even any attempts to forsake philosophical assumptions, which exclude rationality and genuine knowledge.

Hunting in coordinated packs (like with wolves or orcas), navigating environmental mazes (like with octopi), reacting to facial expressions/cues (like with dogs), and other such seeming expressions of sensory perceptions--other minds, human or animal, cannot be proven to exist [1]--can be done while a creature is still assuming things or operating on passive sensory perceptions.  What a creature passively experiences with the senses does not make it intelligent or unintelligent.  What it believes and why determine if it is intelligent, which can only be achieved to the extent that it believes in things that are demonstrably true on the basis of strict logical necessity.  The necessary truths of logical axioms are true in themselves, dictating what does and does not follow from a given thing. Since they are necessary truths, they do not depend on anything else and cannot be false, so all else must be consistent with them to even be possible.  There is no way to know other things without knowing logical axioms.

Thus, a conscious being must actively identify, realize the self-necessity of, and embrace axioms to be intelligent.  Axioms like how truth exists (if truth did not exist, this too would be true, so the alternative is impossible) can be known without relying on other things, but not the other way around.  Without knowledge of them, with axioms being absolutely certain as long as someone approaches them while making no assumptions, there is no such thing as a conscious creature being rational.  There is no exception for animals like an ant or an octopus.  It does not matter if ants use teamwork to create mounds or if crows recognize individual human faces or if various cephalopods use ink to effectively obscure their escape from predators.  To be rational (intelligent), a being has to avoid assumptions and come to the correct awareness of logical axioms.

There is no different "standard" of intelligence for different animals like humans and whales.  There is only intelligence, which could only be the grasp of the inherent, immutable, objective truths of logic that underpin and dictate all other things.  Just as a film director or politician can make a decision or believe in something that is itself rational even though the person himself/herself is not (for they would have to be rationalistic enough to know logical axioms for what they are and not make any assumptions about the given matter), a non-human animal, like a human, is not intelligent just because of outwardly observable behaviors, especially if they are driven by instinct instead of awareness of reason and introspection.  It takes intentional alignment with reason to be intelligent, which is more than having the mere capacity for intelligence.

[1].  For some articles where I address this, see here:

A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-gulf-between-minds.html

B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/01/an-unproven-hierarchy-of-consciousness.html