Thanks for the reply. That’s a good point, that creatures other than humans do show intelligence. Also, it was fun to learn about the Fermi Paradox. I also tried to look up what you meant by senor/a/ita/ sapients; I didn’t find anything on Google. What did you mean by that?

Good post, Shawn, but it seems we humans not alone…

You might want to replace human for the more general ‘primate’ activities:

Have a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJAH4ZJBiN8

But at least, as far as we know, the chimps can’t do dual n back — (yet).

If aliens exist, most likely these beings would view what humans are capable of in a manner similar to how humans view short term memory prowess of chimps. They might think: “humans are very good at symbolic language games but they haven’t evolved enough to do telpathy. Maybe some day they’ll figure it out before the sun melts their planet but let’s not
hover in the slow torture of their space-time fabric to find out.” Maybe this
explains the Fermi paradox? (the claims of ufologists notwithstanding).

It’s interesting to consider STM/WM from an evolutionary perspective.

Humans gave up some of their short term memory capacity as a trade for language, long term memory, and higher levels abstract thinking. Yet, our next level of intellectual progression might be a sort of instantaneous mind communication. This sort of thing, however, may not be in the cards — not an inherent potential prospect for development of senor/a/ita sapients. We chose a cognitive path that we will probably have to stay on — expand, but probably not deviate from.