Context: Bees learn to play golf and show off how clever they really are
This, above, is yet another example of dynamical (organic) systems’ intrinsic problem-solving aptitude. I really think we have put the ontological cart before the horse in terms of how we characterise and represent intelligence. Slime moulds have demonstrated problem solving aptitude of substantial computational sophistication; bees, crows, whales (and so on) exhibit problem-solving and knowledge (i.e. encoded information) transfer.
If non-linear, adaptive dynamical systems are endemically predisposed towards the sophisticated encoding of abbreviated patterning or algorithmic heuristics in and as their form and flow, and if the patterned aptitude of animal (or more generally – organic) intelligence is not a difference in kind so much as in or of degree, then we might not be so surprised to learn that intelligence and problem-solving is a distributed property of all non-trivially complex dynamical systems, entities and artefacts. Brains under this view become a special case of a broader principle of self-organisational, recursive and combinatorial bias in (logic and) physics towards autonomously self-propagating and algorithmically-concise information processing.
Extracting ourselves from the center of this system unveils useful insights.
Daedelus Kite 