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Why humans need to rethink their place in the animal kingdom
- ciconia 9y agoI've been watching Black Mirror recently and have reflected on this - human exceptionalism. We'd like to think of ourselves as gods, or almost-gods, and with technology we are surely achieving some god powers. But we always seem to fall back to misery just when we thought we've conquered nature - human nature, animal nature. The greatest lesson we'll ever learn is our own insignificance in this world. Only then will we stop fighting the world, and indeed each other. Only then will we stop destroying, and accept our true place and destiny among all living things.
- metafunctor 9y agoLiving an insignificant life and living in misery are not the same thing.
- taneq 9y agoAlmost the opposite; one of the things that most bedevils successful humans is the drive to make their lives significant.
- Fnoord 9y agoYup. I just saw Happy People: A Year in the Taiga [1] about heart of Siberia where hunters live a solitary life of hard labor and independence most of the year. They have very little impact on the world, but I think most people are generally ignorant of things like their Co2 footprint. Significant or insignificant goes many ways.. [1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1683876/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1683876/
- Robotbeat 9y agoMaybe the "Great Filter" is the acceptance of insignificance by technologically intelligent lifeforms: Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. - George Bernard Shaw.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y agoThese two approaches are not mutually exclusive. We can simultaneously accept the world as it is yet work to make it what we wish it were.
- foxhop 9y agoI really like Black Mirror. Not to distract from your point, but I feel like the writers need to broaden their dystopian topics to other forms of tech. They also miss the "punch line" on many of their episodes, they line things up so perfectly and then don't commit. It's almost a let down not to see things crumble completely. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirro... The ending should have been streamed lived to the masses, like a virtual "dog fight". That would pull the entire world into the story and force the intelligent viewer to think about how even as a bystander we are all part of the problem.
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- roenxi 9y agoEven if we can't justify drawing a sharp line between humans and everything else, you get into very tricky ground if you do not. Ant colonies have a similar biomass to humankind [1]. If humans aren't exceptional, do we acknowledge some sort of responsibility to provide for ants? Can they draw on welfare? If we separate by intelligence ... humans are clearly quite exceptional. Even then though, if we reject human exceptionalism we will need convoluted definitions. Can a town itself sue you for leaving because the intelligence of the town itself decreases? Is a corporation a philosophical as well as legal entity? Can they feel pain? A corporation can 'speak'; to some extent independently of the people in it. Humans may well not be exceptional in the harsh world of facts and science. We still have to act as though we are or we may as well give way to nihilism. The line has to be drawn somewhere. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)
- circlefavshape 9y agoThe sum of the mass of all human approximately equals the sum of the mass of all ants ... and therefore if humans are not special ants we need to consider whether ants are entitled to welfare payments? What??
- EliRivers 9y agoIf we separate by intelligence ... humans are clearly quite exceptional. We can pick a great many animals, and say that if we separate by intelligence, they are expectional, doing things that other species can at best only crudely approximate. Human specialised intelligence is really good at doing human specialised things. I think I'd agree that humans do some things with their intelligence that might put them into a fresh category, but the point I'm suggesting is that humans are not the only creature with an exceptional intelligence.
- pc86 9y agoYes dolphins and octopuses (and others I'm forgetting, I'm sure) have intelligence far and above their peers. But human intelligence is clearly much greater, isn't it? If humans are at a 100 and "normal" animals are at a ~5, the fact that octopuses and dolphins are in the 25-30 range doesn't mean they're equivalent to humans, or that human intelligence is limited to "human specialised things," it just means they're smarter than birds or snakes or crocodiles.
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- chb 9y agoHumans should have reconsidered their place within the global ecosystem well before the twenty-first century, but our limited longevity and innate myopia, along with rapacious capitalism and religious dogma, kept us from doing so. Now we've destroyed the one thing that sustains us, and to what end?
- gumby 9y agoWith respect to the author, he has it backwards (Wittgenstein and humans’ anthropomorphic assumptions are at the core of my work these days). Humans always discuss non-human actors in human terms. This can be useful (think of Dennet’s “the thermostat wants to keep the room at 70degrees”) but also lead down a false path (the “queen” of a hive isn’t the boss — innfact there is no boss). So the very model the author decries is a specfic tool to avoid these kinds of errors. Animals that killed humans were sometimes tried and hanged in medieval Europe. That’s a foolish absurdism. And people do understand this — his example of the elephant minders shown that people can adapt these models just fine. This conception of agency explains some opposition to, for example, self-driving cars. People are confused when they can’t make eye contact with a car’s driver. They make assumptions as to why certain material shows up in their Facebook feed. Etc. I’m not working on cars, but am working on on systems that don’t violate human assumptions.
- mannykannot 9y agoThe authors of this review and the books reviewed are not proposing a return to that sort of literal anthropomorphism; they are calling for a less dogmatic, more realistic look at the evidence. It would be something of a problem for evolutionary theory if every scrap of conscious and intelligent behavior was exhibited by Homo Sapiens alone. The current situation is probably a contingency of history: between now and the last common ancestor of us and chimpanzees, many species have come and gone, with some of them leaving evidence of intermediate cognitive abilities.
- prepend 9y agoI have twice the biomass of the average human. Should I get two votes?
- danielam 9y agoThe view more or less described by the article probably has its (most recent, at least) origin in Descartes. Cartesian metaphysics posits two kinds of things in the universe, namely, mind and matter. Mind is associated with thought, desire, emotion, sensation, consciousness, etc. Matter, of course, is not. Of all life on earth, only man is a composite of mind and matter. Non-human animals are therefore mindless which is to say devoid of emotions, desires, sensations, consciousness, etc. This view, I claim, goes against common sense. Try telling anyone who owns a dog that Spot is merely a machine devoid of emotions, desires or consciousness. In the context of intellectual history, this Cartesian view is rather recent. Aristotle, for example, describes plants, animals and human beings quite differently in De Anima. In his analysis, human beings entail all faculties that are essentially proper to animals, and non-human animals entail all faculties that are essentially proper to plants; the entailment is transitive so that the faculties essentially proper to plants are entailed by human animals. For Aristotle, animals are living things that possess the faculties of locomotion. The only faculties that essentially differentiate human beings from other animals are the intellectual faculties. So in this sense, human beings are "exceptional" in the sense that among the animals, they alone are known to possess intellectual faculties, but it is not so extreme as the Cartesian position. Still, it is an important difference with important consequences.
- gkya 9y ago> Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” But Ludo, mind if I ask how much time you’ve actually spent with lions? Thought not. Because that’s rubbish, at least in the sense that humans and lions couldn’t possibly have common ground for a conversation. Wittgenstein can beat me in any logico-philosophical contest of his or anyone else’s choosing, but he hasn’t spent as much time as I have hanging out in the bush with lions. How can I take this seriously now...
- kiliantics 9y agoPreposterous really, it should be Ludi, not Ludo.
- Arnt 9y agoThe article argues that we because our existing differentiation between humans and those others, we need a revolutionary change, meaning a large change. That last bit is very nicely done rhetorically. But I don't see any actual argument in the article that the practical effects of the philosophical shift have to be large, or even will be large.
- haZard_OS 9y agoThe author is, to put it mildly, mistaken to say that "most of our science, philosophy, and religion" assume a hard division between humans and other animals. Most of our religion? Yes. Most of our philosophy? Maybe. Most of our science? No. Wrong. How could anyone post-Darwin write what this author has written...unless the person is utterly ignorant of anything approaching modern biology?!
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- foxhop 9y agoThis is a great article. > "The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind." I think deep down we all inherently know this. This is largely why I try my best (although it is difficult) to eat mostly vegetarian. I think if it were a matter of survival killing and eating is natural, however what we do with live stock and factory farming is obviously unethical. It's hard to watch footage of the process, from birth, life, and ultimate death of animals in captivity. It reminds me of a video game I played called "Prey" (great game, worth playing even today). A recent film that strikes this chord but misses the chance to drive it home is "Arrival" (2016). Another recent film is "Bladerunner 2049" (looking at the farming practices of both protein and replicants) There are countless documentaries on Netflix (and likely other services) regarding factory farming animals which are worth watching. They certainly helped clear some of my own ideological barriers.
- jlos 9y agoIf the difference is of degree, could the degree be discrete rather than continuous? What I mean is that is that of the shared faculties between higher animals and humans, such as language, it does not appear as if increasing animal capacity by some factor would yield near human capacity. Instead, it seems that animals and human operate in different, discrete, levels of using a faculty. Using language again, and I'm going to have to dig through my magazines to find the book reference, but recent research by Noam Chomsky into animal language reveals that it is fundamentally different than human language. Human language is non-linear and recursive, that is, words can have antecedents and self-referential clausal structures, whereas animal language is all linear; the current sound is always in direct relation to the previous sound. Moving from even highly developed animal language to human language, then, is not simply a continuous increase but a discrete one. Not disagreeing with you here, just trying to nuance the point that to suggest that rather than seeing humans as fundamentally similar to animals and on a higher continuum, that we are fundamentally similar to animals and yet at a discretely higher level not achievable by increasing any given factor of those animals' faculties.
- simonh 9y agoFair points, but does it follow that because human communication is significantly different from animal communication, that therefore all other aspects of the human experience must be equally remote from those of animals? I think that’s an inference too far. The parts of our brain responsible for language are quite different from those of animals, but the parts of our brains responsible for body image, sight, hearing, locomotion and emotional experience are pretty unremarkable compared to other higher mammals. Therefore it seems likely that our experience of those things is unremarkable too, at least when it comes to mammals. It’s just that we can talk about it, and they can’t
- JackFr 9y ago> I try my best (although it is difficult) to eat mostly vegetarian. But presumably you don't hold lions to the same ethical standard. > what we do with live stock and factory farming is obviously unethical. I don't disagree, but it is specifically the belief that it is unethical that makes us special.
- pixl97 9y agoGiven the ethical dilemma presented in this article, after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that cannibalism is acceptable.