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You're communicating ideas across unknown thousands of miles with a stranger in near realtime and are able to comprehend each other, for one.

No cat or dog has managed that feat yet.

No cat or dog has managed to reproduce fire to the degree that evolution has changed their gut to adapt to the increase in available calories.

The big brain comes with down sides, but one thing it does have is utility.

Germ theory of disease has made it so a scratch isn't fatal anymore. Why, after all, do cats play with their prey? To tire it out so there's less chance of injury when they go in for the kill.

We just figure out how to farm it instead and mold it to our needs.

The utility is that it's predictive of future observations, like all good language.

Tool use allowed humans to colonize the planet and outcompete all rivals. We became a super predator species. We even gained the ability to look beyond our home. We look for evidence of other such advanced tool users in space.

There's a lot of data that seems to fit. I'd say the science heavily leans this way - things like the dog/cat talking button studies, AI vocalization research in primates, whales, and birds, a whole ton of biological research across mammals, and most data start to paint a picture of mammalian brain structure being more important than particular quirks of human brain biology.

There are some theories of function out there, like that of Numenta, which seems consistent across mammal brains, and is at least partially explanatory of cognitive function at a cellular level. There's also value to be found in LLMs and AI research in understanding networks and recursion and what different properties of structures that perform different functions have to conform to.

Pilot whales and blue whales and some other species have upwards of 45B cortical neurons, and if higher cognitive function is conserved across species, then they'd have the potential to be significantly more intelligent than humans - all else being equal.

A useful thought experiment is to compare different species to feral humans. Absent culture, the training, education, knowledge, and framework for understanding reality, without language, natural and wild living is pretty grim and intense. There's a whole lot we take for granted underpinning our abilities to reach the heights of technology and abstract use of language and thought.

It could be humans and primates have some sort of magic sauce - a particular quirk of networking or neurochemistry that augments relative capabilities, as opposed to embodiment or other factors. People have sought the magic sauce for decades, however, and that doesn't seem to be a viable explanation.

Humans have not left Earth's gravity well. We've built probes that have, but humans have only gotten as far as orbit.

Please never change (in thus regard at least)!

I agree with you, it's not obviously clear what "advanced" means in this context if we don't automatically equate it with humanlike.

brother we could easily eliminate 99% of life on the planet tomorrow or drastically alter the composition of the atmosphere if we wanted to.