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I found in intercultural situations that you miss a lot when you try to apply your point of view to others. So animals might not see the world at all in the bin
by erikb 13y ago
I found in intercultural situations that you miss a lot when you try to apply your point of view to others. So animals might not see the world at all in the binary shapes of self awareness and non self awareness. They might see something completely different. Instead of finding a way to apply our logic onto the animals thinking we should spend more time understanding how they think and might be surprised and educated by what we find.
- mhb 13y agoThe only terms in which we can understand things are ones we understand. That seems to be what the mirror experiment is about - trying to understand how animals see themselves. Doesn't your comment apply to any insight which humans discover about animals since we must necessarily express it in terms we understand?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- erikb 13y agoMaybe I didn't show the difference clearly enough. On one side you have an assumption on how things work and you just check if they apply and assume if they don't apply then the negative must apply. But often there are more options we simply don't know about. So if your assumption A is false it doesn't mean it must be "not A -> B", it can as well be C which you don't know exists as well. And if your assumptions proofs correctly it can actually be because of D, which looks quite similar to your assumption A. You are absolutely right that we can not avoid completely to fall into this fallacy. But we can try to mimize its effect by not asking "A or not A?" but instead ask "What is that?" and "How to describe that?".
- bane 13y agoI always found David Brin's idea of "whalesong" thinking for uplifted dolphins (vs. the rational mind) fascinating to ponder on. I fully expect that different living things (plants included) experience the universe in ways that we simply are unable to imagine or really accurately describe.