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Yep. I've kinda gone full circle on this. My view now is that it's increasingly difficult to say exactly what makes humans special or unique, if anything [0]. S

Yep. I've kinda gone full circle on this. My view now is that it's increasingly difficult to say exactly what makes humans special or unique, if anything [0]. So it's overly anthropocentric to deny the possibility that other species have analogous experiences of the world, or experiences which are richer than ours, or completely inconceivable by us [1]. Sure, there will be people that do anthropomorphise the octopus' actions, but this doesn't deny the possibility that an octopus can experience something analogous to feeling pissed off. (See: my table has four legs therefore it's a dog.) To preempt those who might say "ah, but you can't prove that an octopus does have any form of consciousness" I'd point out that it's practically impossible to do that with humans too. [0] It's certainly not one single ability. Perhaps some fuzzy superset of fuzzy sets. [1] I include consciousness in "experiences", and I'd suggest that human-type consciousness is just one among very many.

klabb3 4y ago
> it's increasingly difficult to say exactly what makes humans special or unique, if anything Absolutely. Every trait previously thought unique to humans that I know of have been found in animals, such as deduction, tool making, intra-species warfare, delayed gratification, play, language, dialects, curiosity, mischieviousness, boredom, empathy, grieving rituals, etc etc. The only generic trait missing from my bingo card is humor (but monkeys seem close). It may very well be that humans just got a constellation of traits that happened to fit really well together. If I was a betting man, I'd say: - Very long brain development time. At birth, our skulls aren't even hard yet, and we're blind. This lets the brain develop at a slow pace towards general purpose problem solving. - Hands are extremely helpful for tool making. - Knowledge sharing. Yes, we're quite smart, but more importantly we can combine our findings through language and persist it over time through writing. This is an incredible change in the topology of knowledge. Even an animal with 3x intelligence would not stand a chance without language.
- BarryMilo 4y ago
  Generally speaking, very good points, just wanted to point out that writing is extremely recent in evolutionary terms. Modern humans are at least 10,000 years old (but more typically viewed as 100,000 years old). Writing, as you probably know, is only around 3000 years old (at least that we can verify).

klabb3 4y ago

> it's increasingly difficult to say exactly what makes humans special or unique, if anything Absolutely. Every trait previously thought unique to humans that I know of have been found in animals, such as deduction, tool making, intra-species warfare, delayed gratification, play, language, dialects, curiosity, mischieviousness, boredom, empathy, grieving rituals, etc etc. The only generic trait missing from my bingo card is humor (but monkeys seem close). It may very well be that humans just got a constellation of traits that happened to fit really well together. If I was a betting man, I'd say: - Very long brain development time. At birth, our skulls aren't even hard yet, and we're blind. This lets the brain develop at a slow pace towards general purpose problem solving. - Hands are extremely helpful for tool making. - Knowledge sharing. Yes, we're quite smart, but more importantly we can combine our findings through language and persist it over time through writing. This is an incredible change in the topology of knowledge. Even an animal with 3x intelligence would not stand a chance without language.

BarryMilo 4y ago
Generally speaking, very good points, just wanted to point out that writing is extremely recent in evolutionary terms. Modern humans are at least 10,000 years old (but more typically viewed as 100,000 years old). Writing, as you probably know, is only around 3000 years old (at least that we can verify).