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It seems to me more and more like the biggest, only real difference between most animals and humans is their lack of sophisticated communication. Certainly they

• firebaze 5y ago
  Another point of view could be intelligent animals like whales see another dimension of existence we simply cannot understand. Maybe they just think further, they deeply understand the fractal nature of the laws of the universe and they came to the conclusion, that nothing they'll ever do will have an influence to improve anything at all, since nothing is really bad, so they just sing their songs and propagate reasonably? :) /semi-sarcastic viewpoint Maybe this comes across as an emo-anti-intelligence-nature-knows-it-best post. It wasn't intended to, at all. It even isn't meant to.
• steve_adams_86 5y ago
  This is precisely why I’ve transformed my eating habits. I realized that while I can’t prove these animals have a conscious experience like mine (or one I would value as I do the human conscience, I suppose), I also can’t prove that they don’t. We can all read and likely have many experiences indicating that animals, in many circumstances, actually behave much like humans do. And for all the arguments that animals do x or y because they’re responding to stimulus, well... So are we. It really clicked a while back and since then, I just can’t go back. I no longer feel sufficiently different from a cow or a pig in order to feel comfortable eating them. I certainly don’t judge others for disagreeing either though. Just as I don’t judge wolves for eating caribou or fish for eating fish. Humans operate under the illusion that they have free or stronger will than these animals, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore. I’m not even clear on why I had this revelation or why it matters enough to me to act on it! It’s all very absurd in a way.
  • p1necone 5y ago
    Occams razor tells me that other animals probably do have a concious experience just like ours. Sure, they could have all the same internal organs as us (at least with mammals, and reptiles/birds to a slightly lesser extent), a similarly structured brain, be evolved from the same common ancestors and exhibit all the same outward signs of being conscious and self aware but somehow be totally different from humans. But that would be much more complicated than the simple explanation that they are just like us, but less intelligent.
    • jack9 5y ago
      > Occams razor tells me that other animals probably do have a concious experience just like ours. For most mammals, everything is so similar...including responses to stimuli like light, sound, temperature, pain, pleasure, even predictive behavior (knowing when they have done something to provoke a human response) that the same principle leads me to believe it's likely they have a very similar experience.
      • jamiek88 5y ago
        Everyone who has lived with a dog has seen the sheepish ‘I fucked up look’ when you’ve got home instead of the pure exuberance usually experienced You know immediately there’s a mess to clean up! I mean they clearly dream too. If dreaming isn’t evidence of an inner life I don’t know what is.
        • steve_adams_86 5y ago
          I personally loved having this realization. All these creatures of the earth are probably having very rich and significant experiences. If it’s not limited to humanity, then wow, the world really is so alive. I still struggle to imagine a bug having a conscience that resembles mine. I’m not sure why. I tell myself they don’t have the brains for it or the sensory capabilities or whatever. I’m probably wrong.
    • r721 5y ago
• stormbrew 5y ago
  > Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything imaginable. I mean, this whale seems to be doing about the same thing I do with my cats. I don't really see how you can derive any directionality here about how 'rich' their communication is from that. It's likely cats are intrigued and also baffled by what we're 'saying' when we do this. That's not to say I think cats have as rich of communication as we do, just that we can't even manage to make much sense of other species' vocal communication, let alone mimic any meaning present in it, even when we are pretty sure it is actually simpler than ours. From that it seems way overly confident to state that all failure on our part to recognize depth is because of a lack of it.
  • lrem 5y ago
    There's been some research on coyotes or similar animals, can't remember. They managed to figure out about 30 "words". Interestingly one of that tiny budget was for a human and another one for a human with a gun.
• crooked-v 5y ago
  You may be interested in this Youtube channel, wherein a dog owner has been teaching the dog to use a gradually expanding set of talking buttons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXy7NTGHAyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXy7NTGHAyQ There's another channel where someone's been doing the same with some measure of success with a cat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooCEYMaNL8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooCEYMaNL8I
  • stormbrew 5y ago
    You seem to have accidentally pasted the same youtube link twice? I'm definitely curious about the cat one and haven't seen that before :)
    • crooked-v 5y ago
      The duplicated link is now fixed.
• matz1 5y ago
  Not sure why my morality has to change, doesn't matter if pig turn out to have conscious experience like mine, I will still eat it.
  • jonathanlb 5y ago
    Ok, I’ll bite (no pun intended): if it were socially acceptable to eat people, would you?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • matz1 5y ago
      I wouldn't, like I wouldn't eat dog/monkey even though its socially acceptable in certain place, in my mind its disgusting. Pig on the other hand its delicious.
      • spaetzleesser 5y ago
        That’s what I don’t get. Why are some animals acceptable to eat and some are aren’t? I know people who get totally outraged over dog or horse meat at but have no problem with beef or pork. Pigs are very intelligent and emotional. Way more than horses who aren’t that smart in comparison.
        • matz1 5y ago
          I can only speak for myself. I don't eat dog/monkey i think it because my upbringing/culture thus it create disgusting feeling in my brain. I have no problem with pigs because I've used to it since childhood and i find it delicious. It has nothing to do with it being intelligent/emotional.
        • Larrikin 5y ago
          I find it hypocritical too, but there are some animals that also just don't taste that great compared to what is "common". Whale meat for instance resembles beef, in kind of the way alligator resembles chicken. But whale and gator are pretty terrible in comparison to the more common animal so they just aren't worth it to eat.
• gizmo686 5y ago
  There are a lot of components needed for civilization. In the case of humans, agriculture was a big one, as it led to the feasibility of cities and specialization of labor. Absent specific adaptations to agriculture, tool making is essential for it. Advanced civilization is greatly helped by written communication (although human history shows we can get pretty far without it), which again depends on tool making. Without the ability to make tools there is only so far a species can get. Human superiority also depended on non-intelligent traits. Without evolving the ability to sweat, we might never have had the opportunity to develop civilization. Regarding brain size, larger animals need larger brains just control their bodily functions, so looking at brain size without controling for body size does not tell you much. If you look at brain:body ratio, humans are pretty high up, but not a crazy outlier [0] (figure 7.13), and not the best [1]. A simple ratio probably not the best test, and seems to favor small animals. A more advanced measure exists [2], but suffers from a bit of a fine tuning problem. There is also an implicit assumption that "intelligence" is a single dimensional value, which is simply not the case. For instance, beyond being a tool for communication, language seems to be a tool for thinking as well, but is clearly not a result of a general "intelligence" we have. Our overall intelligence is likely the result of a bunch of specialized systems within the brain [0] https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/text/text_cult_3.html https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/do... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Comparisons_between_groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Compa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient
  • jamesgreenleaf 5y ago
    Environmental conditions are a big factor as well. We've existed as humans for ~300k years, but it was only ~10k years ago that we learned agriculture and civilization-building. That coincided with the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, when the world got warmer, the glaciers melted, and the sea level rose by 400 feet. We must have had those capabilities all along, but it was only when the conditions were right that they were able to be fully expressed.
  • rand0mx1 5y ago
    Regarding your brain-body ratio https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/18/eabe2101 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/18/eabe2101
• bmitc 5y ago
  > It seems to me more and more like the biggest, only real difference between most animals and humans is their lack of sophisticated communication. Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything imaginable. How do you know all that? There is ample evidence that whales, and in particular orcas, have complex intelligence and communication. If you can't understand what a whale is talking about, I'm not sure how you can make these claims.
• hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Actually, I think many animals might communicate better than humans, but we don't know how they do it. I wouldn't completely suprise me if their are certain animals using telepathic thought? Or, some way if communicitating we haven't a clue existed. (And yes I know telepathic thought has been completely debunked in humans. Actually, there's a million sitting stomewhere if any person can successfully pass a institutes telepathic ability test. To date the money is still there, or a higher amount? My point is we know so little about other species.)
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • jamiek88 5y ago
    Well whales can communicate across thousands of miles without satellites so there’s one example! :)
• Matumio 5y ago
  A major distinction of humans is that we are a cultural species. We have evolved to pass down large amounts of knowledge to the next generation. Being good at communication (and motivated to use it for teaching) kind of follows from this. We are not game-changing smart at figuring out new tools. But we are excellent at copying innovations from others, remembering them and fine-tuning them over generations. On this I highly recommend Joseph Henrich's book: "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter".
• jobigoud 5y ago
  > only real difference between most animals and humans But if I'm not mistaken this is not true of early humans, even "anatomically modern" humans. We don't really know when language evolved but it's probable that early humans did not "speak" for a long while.