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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Scientists investigating video of a cow using tools, and later conducting some basic psychology experiments on said cow, say their findings could expand the list of animals capable of tool use.
Oh no, not more tool users!
How will humans continue to pretend that they’re so special and God’s gift to the Earth if we go around proving we’re not so special!?
I heard a fascinating notion on the radio the other day - the thing that makes us unique as a species is that we’re storytellers. Other animals can teach each other things, like whales and dolphins teaching their young how to hunt fish, or crows warning each other that one particular person is shady; but no other species invents Santa Claus to demonstrate that one should give for the joy of giving.
Humans have a unique capacity to not only understand complex, abstract ideas about how we should interact with each other; but also to reinvent and transmit these ideas in an evolutionary eyeblink. This memetic transmission and interpretation of societal ideas is having an impact on the earth as profound as when genetic transmission came along. And it’s done through our capacity to tell each other stories, about how things might be and how we think they should be.
I wonder how much of our sense of self, as an ongoing narrative, stems from that ability to invent a story.
I think the ability to amass, retain, and augment information learned by our ancestors is our killer feature. Storytelling is an important part of it, using rhythm and rhyme to help us remember and pass on those stories, being able to encode those stories as art and writing, they’re all ways to make it easier for the next generation to get up to speed quickly and then push the boundaries of understanding even further, instead of every generation having to relearn all the basics the hard way. It’s not perfect and it’s still incredibly lossy, but I think that’s why we broke out and became, I think it’s fair to say, the dominant lifeform on the planet. Is that the bar for sentience? I don’t think so, but I don’t really have a better one.
Also we invented santa claus to teach kids that every authority figure in your life will willingly engage in a conspiracy to gaslight and bribe you in order to make you behave the way they want you to.
Our tool use and application of our intelligence is still quite unique. Special is a loaded term, but humans are very different from all other life forms on this planet - and of course, in many ways, still very much the same.
We’re only so different because we already murdered or fucked the species that were similar enough to be a threat.
Also, scientific advancement has been so rapid that it is wholly inaccurate to compare modern humans to apes and then gesture to technology… It wasn’t even 400 years ago that Newton was explaining what gravity is, and 400 years is a damn blip on the evolutionary scale of a species that can live 100+ years.
But that’s just further proof that we are special. In just some 5000 years we broke the nature meta countless times, and we’re doing it again and again faster and faster, we’re so fucking smart we’re doing the Paleoproterozoic extinction (“Oxygen holocaust”) all over again.
No it’s not. No it is not proof that we are special. We have NO IDEA what differences make such things unique. To pretend it is our gift alone is to be a self-centered piece of shit.
What do you mean by this? Make what things unique? Why do we have to understand the differences to be sure that the outcome is unique?
I also think you’re a piece of shit, if I may respond directly to this indirect insult; now, can we get back to talking normally?