Oppression, genocide, discrimination, slavery, and other evils arise from refusing to see us all as equals based upon our common humanity.
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Cat intelligence is often underrated but the human mind belongs to an entirely different order of being from the feline mind.
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The comparison doesn’t really work but it underlines the *doctrine* that human intelligence is just another type of animal intelligence.
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The assumed equivalence between animal behavior and the human mind is a feature of contemporary science beliefs, not of evidence.
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He told colleagues he is planning a new book, tentatively titled “Why Liberals Should Ditch Darwin and Consider Intelligent Design.”
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Neanderthals cannot be the missing link that many paleontologists are looking for. But if the human mind has no history, there is no missing link.
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It’s not stone tool use that is exclusive to humans; vultures can do that. It’s the ability to form abstract ideas — like the study of tool use among animals.
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In reality, where language is concerned, there is a vast gulf fixed. It is not between primates and other mammals but between humans and all other life forms.
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The study, along with recent studies of Neanderthal tools and stone circles, is making the idea that they were intellectually inferior increasingly untenable.
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Our intelligence interacts dynamically with our environment in a way that machine intelligence doesn’t.
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This recent find in evolution studies is strikingly negative. There is no physical limitation to chimpanzee speech; rather, the limitation is a mental one.
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We learn nothing specific here about how our remote ancestors thought but we have learned something useful: Big Think sees this as cutting edge science.
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Aboitiz concludes, “In the end, the dualistic dilemma between subjective experience and mechanistic explanations seems to me inescapable.”
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Plant philosophy seeks to change the definitional understandings of “intelligence” to elevate the moral status of plants relative to humans.
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Humans have reason and ethics and other animals don’t, and there is no evidence that these qualities — that shape our societies — simply “evolved.”
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The “human evolution” narrative that ignores the critical distinction handicaps the thinking of philosopher Hugh Desmond and many others.
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Given that human consciousness is a Hard Problem in philosophy, we can expect useful discussions to follow — but also a good deal of silliness.
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If the law grants geological features, viruses, and pond scum “rights,” our economies and human exceptionalism will be the victims.
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Panpsychism is very much a materialist theory. It avoids absurdity by admitting that human consciousness is real — but then tries to make it part of nature.
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It will be interesting to see whether other orangutans in the area begin to imitate their new neighbor in using chewed akar kuning leaves to treat wounds.
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