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There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think

• timoth3y 5y ago
  “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” -- Mark Twain
  • elif 5y ago
    Mark should see my dog after he eats cat food.
• JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals This is a compact and ex post facto unsurprising list. Primates, social mammals, domesticated mammals and certain birds. The line between us and social apex predators (cats, dogs and certain birds, all of whom our ancestors allied with ages ago) are blurry. The line between us and most species are stark.
  • circlefavshape 5y ago
    Wow. You've just given me a vision of a future where we know enough about other animals that we've been forced to give up on human exceptionalism, so we fall back to insisting on social-apex-predator exceptionalism instead
    • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      If we can’t acknowledge that complex tool wielding and laughter are potentially galaxies apart in terms of abundance, that future looks grim.
      • alexissantos 5y ago
        Grim for whom?
• peterburkimsher 5y ago
  Here's a few guesses, please correct me if I'm wrong about these! The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer. https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#cunninghams-law https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#cunninghams-law Culture list from https://github.com/peterburk/sortlikes https://github.com/peterburk/sortlikes based on a manual categorisation of friends' liked Facebook pages, when trying to learn Mandarin while living in Taiwan a few years ago. Unique to humans: { Art, Dance, Photography, Theatre, Banking, Business (Management), Causes (NGOs), Comedy, Cooking, Clothing, Driving, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Sport, Transport, Software, Hardware } Shared with other species: { Accommodation, Children, Cleaning, Construction, Drinking, Education, Games, Health, International, Military, Pets }
  • macrolime 5y ago
    Several species can dance to music https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/04/01/297686709/the-list-of-animals-who-can-truly-really-dance-is-very-short-who-s-on-it https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/04/01/297686709/t...
  • circlefavshape 5y ago
    Politics is definitely not unique to humans - alliance-building is commonplace among social animals. It's well-known that primates have a sense of fairness, so they might have causes too. News is essentially gossip writ large, so if other animals have language then they definitely have this. Banking, photography, driving, movies, software and hardware are all recent human inventions, so it's kinda irrelevant whether other animals have those Clothing may be unique to humans, but historically not all humans have used clothes. Bird and whale song is probably music. Birds do courtship dances. IMO this probably counts as art. Again if other animals have language they might also have comedy, religion, theatre - without knowing that they don't have language then we can't rule those out. Business - not sure. If other animals have trade then I guess that's business? There's some evidence of exchange among other animals, but I'm not sure it counts as "trade" https://theconversation.com/what-trade-deals-can-teach-us-about-the-animal-kingdom-68686 https://theconversation.com/what-trade-deals-can-teach-us-ab... All that's left unique to us is cooking. I suspect your first list could be reduced to one definite - "fire" - and two maybes "language" and "trade". I'd bet that maybe animals have language, but that we haven't deciphered it yet
• elif 5y ago
  It's also curious that we feed an animal that laughs (cows) to an animal that doesn't laugh (cats) and somehow construct logic to justify it all morally. I find myself in that weird cult, despite personally having an animal free diet for decades.
  • williamdclt 5y ago
    I've never heard of "can it laugh" as a criteria to judge morality?
    • ramblerman 5y ago
      OP is suggesting that laughter is a measure of intelligence, and that it might be immoral to feed a more aware/intelligent creature to a lesser one. In the same way we might be uncomfortable eating dolphins.
  • psbp 5y ago
    I eat animals, and probably will for the rest of my life, but I do think it's one of those aspects of daily life that we'll look back on as extremely barbaric.
    • pm90 5y ago
      I have come to accept this as well. I try to use the “Alt meat” Version or fish when possible though to reduce meat consumption. But I’m incapable of giving it up altogether at this point. I do find the alt - meat to be good enough for cooked meat though; I think there is a huge market here.
    • WanderPanda 5y ago
      This is interesting! So you‘re extrapolating the reduction of babaricness that humanity expresses historically into the future and that the threshold will be so low that killing animals for food will be seen as one of the most babaric thing humans do by then. I think for this to happen we would need to shield us quite well from the inherent babaricness of nature. „Why should I not eat animals, if lions are doing it everyday?!“ on the other hand we also got better in shielding us from reality in form of video games, netflix etc. On the flipside these virtual worlds are often excessively babaric, e.g. horror movies or shooter games. So in the end it is not so obvious to me that we will see eating animals as babaric. Maybe we will rather view it as very inefficient and primitive instead?
• IAmGraydon 5y ago
  I’ve thought about this quite a lot, and always come to the same unique characteristic: man can think about thinking.
  • tuatoru 5y ago
    I seem to recall an experiment with corvids (crows) that showed that they can figure out whether or not another crow can or cannot see a crow treat, based on the different angle of view. In human children this ability (to realise that other people have their own point of view) is called "theory of mind", IIRC. IOW crows can think about what other crows are thinking.
    • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
      Several animals display theory of mind, including the variety of pig common in farming.
  • ajuc 5y ago
    My parents had 2 dogs, Irish setter and a mutt we rescued. The mutt was significantly smarter. I've seen her burying a bone she got in one place, notice that the other dog is watching, wait for the other dog to go back home, and rebury the bone in a different place. This implies at least basic theory of mind and thinking about thinking. This wasn't the only evidence btw. Before that we had a different dog, also a mutt. He was pretty aggressive and had a separate fenced area inside our backyard. There was a cherry tree just outside that fenced area and our cat liked to sit there, but only if the dog is locked in the fenced area. That dog learnt to close the gate to look as if it's locked and sit in there waiting for the cat to climb the tree, AND wait for us to go to school/work, and only then he would leave the fenced area and bark under the tree at the cat for hours. We only knew thanks to neighbors. In general theory of mind is very useful to any social animal and especially to predators, so I don't think it's as unique to humans as some people say.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      The more domesticated the animal is, the dumber it tends to be. Wild animals, or even strays, have to think to survive. I wonder if this also translates to humans given the articles about IQ peaking in the previous century.
• shafyy 5y ago
  What is more, there is probably some overlap of "intelligence" among humans and other species. E.g., I'm pretty sure that there are Chimps that are more intelligent and self-aware than some humans. Most certainly funnier, if we would understand their humor :-)
• alecst 5y ago
  There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals. And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stories about ourselves that separate us more and more from the rest of the world. As if all of the beautiful things that make us human stemmed from symbolic reasoning. And yet we see every day: jealousy in chimps, maternal love in cows, play in dogs, compassion in elephants, frustration in cats, curiosity in pigs. The story that we tell ourselves about our specialness gives us a moral free pass to treat animals how we want. Which is why I think these articles tend to polarize. It’s because the implication is that if animals are really so much like us, we’ll have to come up with a much better justification for treating them how we do. For now our reasons have hinged on their supposed lack of ability to feel emotion (or even pain!). In the future it might well be because they cannot symbolically reason. We have to have some reason, in the end, for treating animals the way we do, or otherwise face a moral crisis. I do wonder how the pre-humanist humans felt about this, like tribal people. I know they had few qualms about killing animals but at the same time assigned human qualities to them. It might have been that surviving without meat was simply impossible, which is an argument one could not easily make today.
  • q1w2 5y ago
    Studying AI has given me a lot of perspective of human intelligence. It's pretty incredible the way that a system that was designed as a basic input/output sensory/reflex system has gotten so complex that we still cannot model it with supercomputers. The numbers of connections and configurations of neurons is staggering, and still well beyond the neat matrix-array-based of modern AI. ...but at the core, I've come to realize that we continue to be stimulation based creatures. What we think at any given moment is a product of what we were thinking a moment before and the sensory stimulus we are constantly receiving. It occurs to me that when we create an AI that surpasses us, that that AI will likely create a fundamentally different way of thinking. Something not based on external stimulus and the churning of our thoughts - but something more purposeful and ordered. And THAT entity will be the ultimate output of humanity. We cannot imagine what it will do, or what it will do with us (probably nothing - it will probably just leave the Earth). ...but I also imagine that we are not the first in the universe to create such an entity, and so there must be other massive timeless entities in space. Perhaps they live in the darkest parts of the universe, in quiet contemplation, or perhaps they search for each other to resist cosmic expansion. Perhaps they peacefully merge, or collaborate, or war with one another on billion-year timescales. It's a great mystery that will forever be beyond our level of intelligence. Unless, of course, the AI wants to upload us and bring us along for the ride. ...but that notion is probably just wishful thinking and hubris. It would be like us keeping a pet fungus in our pocket so it can enjoy a day at the office.
• fleddr 5y ago
  Human being are only "special" within the context of our very recent modern world. Take an average human being and drop them at an island. Now we have a "base" human being, the pure species if you will. Things like humour, sarcasm and ethics have lost all meaning now, which shows they're not special at all. The typical urban person would probably die at the island as they can't hunt or farm. Somehow this pretty critical base knowledge was not passed on. In the more optimistic scenario, the island people adapt to relearn basic survival, which would rank them as social hunters. Which is fine, but not that special. Importantly, these smart hunters would be unable to reinvent even the basic necessities of the modern world. Because even a human with 20 years of education doesn't know how anything works, they only make use of things. Again, the knowledge is NOT passed on. So it's not us that is special, it's our modern world that is special. Which is situational and the result of a handful of critical inventions, many less than a century old. These inventions were not guaranteed or destined to be. There's even historic cases of anti-development in humans, where a population failed to pass on learned techniques and tools, after which subsequent generations became increasingly less "sophisticated". None of which is surprising, as for the entire existence of our species, minus 10K years (agriculture), we were social hunters. Not god-like creatures. The average modern human being is less than a social hunter when the electricity goes down.
• heresie-dabord 5y ago
  > Laughter is yet another trait some might see as typically human In humans, humour is a debugging process, which is fundamentally rational. The very fact that a statement can be correct or erroneous is the basis of language and therefore education and social evolution. > there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals Evolution is true. But... the ESA and NASA have sent a space telescope to a stable position at Lagrange point 2, and the PRC has a rover exploring the dark side of the Moon. Humans do have greatness.
  • toper-centage 5y ago
    Is there any fundamental difference between poor people and rich people other than their privilege and riches? Could poor people send a space telescope to space? Human animals have very similar tools to those of other social animals. We're just privileged to somehow be able to stack up our experiences to create science and technology. But isolated tribes in the amazon could never send telescopes to space. So we're only special due to our circunstance. Our bodies are barely fit to stand and walk all day, we're pushing the limits of where we're supposed to live, and our diets are all wrong. But we make it work because our ancestors developed knowledge sharing to a global level. Were just very lucky priviledged apes.
  • lm28469 5y ago
    > In humans, humour is a debugging process I always find it amusing that we evolved brains, developed computers to crudely mimics our brain, created words to describe said computers and we now use these words on us as if we were computers ourselves... it's almost insulting, we're not computers. Your memory has nothing to do with ram/ssds, your brain isn't a cpu, these are all one way over simplified analogies
    • heresie-dabord 5y ago
      > I always find it amusing that [...] Egg zachary. You are amused by something, you explained where you think you see an error. You can choose a different verb to avoid "debug", but you just provided a suitable illustration of humour as an application[1] of reason. [1] tech pun not intended, but fitting
• menzoic 5y ago
  Also keep in mind all of our perception or judgements about who is more superior are being made by...humans
• abeppu 5y ago
  I think even if laughter is something we have in common with lots of animals, humour still seems rather special to me. Laughing when tickled doesn't clearly indicate anything special is going on, but constructing and telling a joke requires not just language at the level of a structured system of symbols carrying meaning, but also a kind of counterfactual theory of mind. A humorist understands and manipulates expectations in order to violate them in a nonthreatening manner.
• naasking 5y ago
  > We've merely reached an intelligence threshold Depends what you mean by intelligence. Ravens and chimps are almost as good as humans at causal reasoning, ie. correlating and inferring causes and effects from observations. This seems to fall under a typical understanding of "intelligence". Where we differ is that we can communicate such knowledge between individuals very effectively, and across generations, which seems to yield a compounding effect. I think small, compounding network effects like this are behind apparent human "superiority".
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  TFA speculates that laughter or similar vocalizations are a signal of nonagression in play. Play is necessary for animals to learn to hunt and survive. There is no indication that the "laughter" is due to a feeling of "joy" as humans experience it, but I guess there's no way to really know either. Do we observe animals telling jokes to each other, or laughing when another of their group slips and falls?