this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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"intelligence is a nuanced topic" Understatement champion. Applying your examples "in any form" still doesn't really work since those examples are built on communicating the steps as well as the result. If an animal can intuit precision without showing the work, do we still give credit for intelligence? Jumping spiders, for example, have an extremely developed intuition for parabolic trajectories, but I'd bet real money there's no neural structure in their brains that looks like y^2 = 4ax.
And yet every professional physicist will tell you that physics IS math, and that if you don't understand the math, you canβt understand physics, and shouldn't try.
As a physicist, physics is not math. Math is a tool you can use to do physics, but you can absolutely do physics without it. In fact, qualitative physics is the best kind.
Physics is a mathematical model with the most proven utility to humans.
If you have a model more applicable to a situation, youre free to use it, but its pretty unlikely to be as broadly applicable as modern mathematical physics (A thousand times so when considering computers).
But yeah the study of physics is 100% math (And its not 100% a perfect model of reality! Thats why we study it).
Yeah I did expect my language wasn't precise enough, so to be more clear, animal that can excel at maths or creativity in a similar way humans do.
Unfortunately, by the tightening up the language, the question resembles more and more "Are there animals with human brains?" To which of course we have to say no, so somewhere along the scale before the question turning into that there must be some version that is an interesting question with an interesting answer.
So what kind of answer are you looking for? An intelligence that resembles human problem solving sufficiently that we could somehow use it ourselves? A fungus can solve a maze through branching in a way that we can't so its solution isn't useful for a human actually in a maze. But maybe a linear algebraist could apply the technique to families of problems and a solver could be implemented in specialized hardware more efficiently than a Turing machine GPP.
But I don't think we left any non-human intelligent species around to compete with us, if you're looking for a conversation. Neanderthal was the last.