Humans DO have a history of degrading the inner lives of animals and it's a problem. We don't even know for sure that humans are exceptional intellectually compared to gorillas in an objective sense, we're just deriving that from the aforementioned telescope example which is not scientific in the slightest.
Humans have plenty to be proud of but with things like "we're more intelligent" or "we're more emotionally developed" as opposed to "we got a lucky combination of things" I'd rather be really careful.
Humans have enough a history of degrading the inner lives of fellow humans, let alone other animals.
“New evidence suggests that dolphins, like elephants and the great apes, may comprehend their own mortality.”
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/do-dolphin...
[citatation needed]
I do believe I have seen animal examples of all three of your statements, an logically, there must have been among our ancestors, but the onus isn't really on me.
And yes you can. I use expressions all the time very much like "to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence that God exists".
I never claimed that you can't use noncommittal language to dismiss things for which there is no evidence; I just don't really feel like there is any point.
While some animals see their own reflections and use them to examine parts of their own body that they could not otherwise see.
Animal research has a long history of finding animals exhibiting something that has been touted as a human-only trait; the weight of experience seems to be heading towards the idea that there is no human trait exceptionalism, only a combination of various traits to various degrees. So many traits that someone has posited as the uniquely human trait has subsequently been seen in animals. Maybe one day someone will find something, but thus far the record isn't good.
One could harshly propose that's a failure of imagination (probably shared by almost everyone else, self-included; I introspect in words too), limited by one's own experiences; since you've got language and use it always to introspect, and probably cannot even remember not having language, you cannot conceive of introspecting without it. More so, since it was your field of study; you've immersed yourself in it to a great degree. I wonder if baby humans without language introspect. It seems there is some evidence young humans do [0]. These people say they've seen it in animals, but I'm no expert [1].
I honestly don't know, but I believe that humans are part of a spectrum of animal and I take the opposite assumption to you; that until proven otherwise, we have no singularly unique trait.
[0] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2007-08-toddlers-capable-intr...
I suppose "introspection" is a pretty woolly term, though, and we could disagree about what the bounds of it are. The abstract about "metacognition" in rats is interesting but I think a little broader than what I had in mind.
As an aside on the general conversation at hand, I suspect that the experience of humans is so much based on being a human that we struggle even to think about not being human; that we have so many assumptions we carry about what thinking is and what language is and so on. My favoured example of this is an experiment showing that humans have a special ability for recognising faces, based on giving other primates tests of face recognition. Go humans!
When the test was repeated, some time later, using faces from their own species instead of human faces, it turned out that they were actually also pretty good at it. The original experiment had used human faces to test with, because those were obviously much more distinctive. I suspect, but cannot prove, that we're trying to reason about non-humans from within a prison of human thought and experience and assumption that affects everything.
Many species have better memories than humans, including most monkey/ape species. We have exceptional dexterity while dolphins don’t, so is it a fair fight to judge intelligence by putting a telescope into orbit? Do dolphins have as high a rate of depression in their species as humans? Do they have as many wars as us? Again, are we really that much more intelligent than these other species? Measuring intelligence is hard because we don’t have a rigorous definition.
And if “more intelligent” is a valid reason you are immediately entering a weird area where it is okay to eat a baby because hey, it’s less intelligent! But I doubt many people would think that’s a valid reason, so we’re back to speciesism. which is also problematic because then we appoint the human as sole judge and juror of all living things.
Personally I don't think it's relevant to this discussion. Saying that consciousness is more complex than "you either have it or you don't" seems like a trivial observation.
Peter Singer argues [2] that "the fundamental interest that entitles a being to equal consideration is the capacity for suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness" (and that this applies to any being, human or not). I think that this is a much more interesting approach. Yes, this makes things more complex ("where do you draw the line") but it also seems more honest.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Applied_ethics
No other animal can do this as far as we know.
1. Objects can be repurposed for some other use that what they see in nature.
2. Certain objects are better suited than others, though they are similar.
3. A fore said objects can be modified further to increase efficiency.
4. This knowledge is often passed among communities and families through observation or teaching rather than as genetic changes.
>> Both bonobos and chimpanzees have been observed making "sponges" out of leaves and moss that suck up water and using these for grooming
>> Elephants have been observed digging holes to drink water, then ripping bark from a tree, chewing it into the shape of a ball thereby manufacturing a "plug" to fill in the hole, and covering it with sand to avoid evaporation. They would later go back to the spot to drink.
>> Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins made up of approximately 41-54 animals, are known to use conical sponges (Echinodictyum mesenterinum) as tools while foraging. ...During sponging, dolphins mainly target fish that lack swim bladders and burrow in the substrate. Therefore, the sponge may be used to protect their rostrums as they forage in a niche where echolocation and vision are less effective hunting techniques. Sponging may be socially learned from mother to offspring.
>> Woodpecker Finches have been observed to use a different type of tool with novel functional features such as barbed twigs from blackberry bushes, a plant that is not native to the islands. The twigs were first modified by removing side twigs and leaves and then used such that the barbs helped drag prey out of tree crevices.
Let me know when the whales, monkeys and dolphins put a telescope into orbit. And let me know what the grieving orca thinks about generational knowledge transference or the afterlife.
Human exceptionalism isn't simultaneously a degradation of the amazing traits of other species. Just because humans are exceptional intellectually compared to gorillas, that doesn't actually take anything away from gorillas.