definition of intelligent creatures

Hey all,

I don't know if this has been touched on before in this forum or not, but I did want to bring it up even if it meant for me to simply get an answer.

I was reading the History of Tyria, Volume 1 by Thadeus Lamount (posted on the official wiki) and came across this paragraph:

Let me just point out that they include minotaurs, imps and "all the races of the land" as intelligent creatures.

So what is classified as an animal? Very obviously, the animal companions is a good start, but surely these cannot be the limit of this category.

On top of that, are minotaurs and imps really intelligent creatures? I understand that the Guild Wars universe is a fantasy and anything is possible, but minotaurs certainly do not exhibit the qualities of being intelligent. In fact, no minotaur possesses magic in the game (except one boss, Cootle Sizzlehorn. Aurochs, Wendigos, and Bison are considered part of the minotaur race, but that is only as far as game mechanics. I would argue that a Minotaur is of a different species than an Aurochs, Wendigo, or Bison.)

Drakes, whom possess magic, are animal companions to some enemies, but this may be a game mechanic caveat.

Grawl are the only species that I would really question their level of intelligence. Aloe, spiders, drakes, drydars, and many other races I would immediately classify as unintelligent, and by that I mean lacking rational thought. But Grawl certainly have exhibited their own form of language and social design, even if they have never spoken English.


So my question really, out of this whole thing is: Was magic simply given to all races, or are the animalistic creatures we find actually intelligent?

Furthermore, is it reasonable to compile a list of unintelligent vs intelligent creatures? And finally, does it even matter?

I would say that intelligent would be the difference between a single celled organism with a mind of it's own and a full animal with a brain and the ability to use it. I think your thinking of like human intellgence when what should really be meant here is ability to think.

I don't believe that "think" is a good word to use either.

Animals have a brain, but they act on instinct, memories, and conditioning. There is no thinking involved. Animals are not intelligent.

Humans are able to think, as in, even if I continue to burn my hand on the pot, I can still have the willpower to put my hand on the pot and keep burning it if I wanted to. Animals are slaves to their instinct, where we have the freedom to act against it.

But I can understand your argument, that their word "intelligent creature" may not have been aptly chosen.

Umm no, animals do think, they can learn

Not only that, if something can't think and is/was a living thing, it's either something like a plant/single cell organism or it's dead.

Animals do show signs of problem solving, thus thinking, thus intelligence.

Although to be fair, I've always seen "intelligent" to be a some what vague term based on how people seem to have differing opinions on what is considered "intelligence"

In my old house, we had a fire place that was more of a metal unit. Didn't sit inside the wall. One day while we had a fire going, my cat jumped on it and EXTREMELY quickly jumped off.

He never went near it again, even when there was not fire in it meaning he learned that it wasn't exactly the safest thing.

What your cat exhibited was conditioning, not cognitive thought.

But I don't want this to be a discussion about where the tipping point between instinct and a thought process is, so I'll let this argument go and focus on the main point.

What creatures are intelligent, and can we use "possesses magic" as a specific difference between intelligent and non-intelligent, or is there simply a flaw in this piece of the lore of the world?

I'd have to go with cats having intelligence not just conditioning. Ever seen a cat try to open a door? Not just the lever kind, but even knobs that have to be turned...than watch them troubleshoot how they are going to make it happen. Yay people with too much time on there hands, a camera, youtube and a cat with creativity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8L4KNrPEs0&feature=fvst

Birds with problem solving skillz

You can skip to about 40 seconds for the important part

All creatures are intelligent. The difference is their levels.
Conditioning is learned, yes, but overtime, like habits.
My cats would run and hide from us whenever we have to give them medication because they hate it. Running and hiding is intelligence. They tasted the meds once and decided they did not ever want to taste it again, so they came up with a plan to run and hide. That is intelligence.

Its all in the context.

No need to get bogged down on what defines intelligence, based on the original statement, Intelligent probably meant creatures with some form of society so not just thinking and problem solving.

Thank you. This is the sort of input I'm looking for in this discussion.

That being said, if what we're looking for is their capacity for social structure, then do drakes have a social structure? I can imagine imps having social structure. Minotaurs... eh... I don't know. Maybe social structure isn't quite the specific difference between a species that can possess magic and a species that can't.

And really, ants have social structure... sort of. The hive can be considered a sort of social structure. But Mantids certainly have magic.

I think this may just have to be a huge caveat in the game. I mean, from a mechanic and balancing standpoint, they couldn't very well create a game world full of non-magic enemies. It would give the players too great of an advantage.

I am also interested in what the original author (Jess Lebow, I believe was the big lore guy at A-Net for the release of Prophecies) meant by the statement, and how Jeff Grubb would answer the question, and what races he considers as "intelligent".

I wouldn't be too quick to say that all these enemies we fight use magic. To quote Erudine in Serenity Temple:

This, coupled with the fact that GW2's enemies will have monster-only skills and no skills available to players, at least they are said to, makes me think that, in lore, these are not the same skills, but rather the monsters use abilities like the PC skills.

Thus, a Moss Scarab, for instance, isn't a necromancer - it merely has vampiric-acting bites.

Maybe to take it a littler further we can make an assumption about Gods.

Presumably Gods have worshippers, beings who recognise and defer to the power of said God.

I would say from the point of view of a God these would be determined to be Intelligent or at least separate from the other living creatures.

For some Gods these creatures would need to have the intelligence and probably a language by which the God could make its wishes known.

Probably need to have some kind of religious hierarchy or Priesthood to act as intermediaries.

Some of the local creatures do have skills similar to the skills we use as characters and I have always assumed that our skills are created from observing the natural ones.
Some are captured directly from such creatures.

The game doesn't go into detail about how skills are created.

btw I am enjoying this discussion

Issue with that is that there are relatively few races in Tyria which worship the gods, so that would mean that very few are given magic.


Personally, I think that the gods lied - to some degree - about magic, as the mursaat and seers predate humanity, and the war between them dates back to the time of the writing of the Tome of Rubicon, long before the gods appeared on Tyria. The seers lost because the mursaat had spectral agony...

Now, while I don't think that the gods had nothing to do with the spread of magic - as they had to of otherwise the reason for Abaddon's imprisonment would be false (he was imprisoned for giving magic too freely and, when the other five reduced it via the bloodstones, he waged a war) - I do not think that there was no magic before the six giving magic to the races.

Rather, I think they merely made it more accessible.

I think the line of having given it to the intelligent creatures merely means that you have to be intelligent - to a degree - to learn and utilize magic. Which can easily be mistaken for "only the intelligent were given the gift of magic."

Could intelligent here mean any form of life that required killing another to survive. It does appear that all the things that utilize magics of some sort could do so out of food gathering necessity.

Been on hiatus from this forum for a bit, since last time I was in it was all but dead. But to put in my own comments for posterity:

First, I think the term people are looking for here is "sapience". Now, defining exactly what distinguishes humans from animals can be hard to pin down (they're often smarter than they're given credit for), but it's generally considered to be the capability to understand a language that can express abstract concepts. Grawl, incidentally, do appear to sneak over that line, since they have a somewhat organised religion.

However, I don't think use of magic is necessarily a sign of sapience - instead being more of a case of the creature having evolved an instinctual use of certain skills. As a rule of thumb, I tend to think of any species that almost universally (bosses don't count, especially when their main purpose is to be a cap target) has the same profession and skills to be cases of instinctive magic (even if they ARE demonstrably sapient), and similarly with creatures such as mantids and mandragors that may have a hive-like caste structure. When you have a range of professions within one species, though, that's more likely to mean that the professions are learned, and capacity to learn magic (rather than instinctively use it) implies the capacity to learn the abstract components behind it and thus sapience.