https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
Is it possible this mass of mycelium has some form of intelligence that is difficult for humans to measure? Maybe it "knows" things we can barely conceptualize. What about trees that stand in place for hundreds, or even thousands of years?
https://www.treehugger.com/the-worlds-oldest-living-trees-48...
Perhaps the trees experience time differently due to their slow growth, and they too have "witnessed" many different events in their environment over time, encapsulating them in the rings and structures within themselves.
We could write this off as non-sense as trees have no nervous system, but maybe a lack of such a system doesn't necessarily preclude some type of intelligence we just don't consider "intelligent".
There are whole worlds to be discovered yet here on our little blue dot of a planet
That's actually the plot of a Garrett P.I. novel.
Just look at all the cases in human history where other people were reduced to primitive beings and could be treated more cruelly. If we can rationalize these actions towards fellow humans, I assume that the barrier for accepting animal emotions is even harder to break
I think it cuts so deep into people's psychology, and frequently religion. The very notion that we are not the apex of anything. And that we no longer need to eat other animals to live and be healthy. Too much to bear for many, so it frequently results in low-quality conversation, laden with emotions.
The fact remains, however. Non-human animals are not that different from us. Pretty much all mental behavior is represented in the animal kingdom. They, in so many ways, are us. And we are them.
Why should it be otherwise, after all? It would be strange to have a quantum jump in mental behavior with humans, and only primitive behavior in all other animals.
It'll probably take some centuries for humans to see other animals as inherently worthy of respect.
The complexity of human language, social structure, and technology is not even in the same ballpark as animals. Humans make iPhones and travel to space and write War and Peace. We dominate the world, changing its very climate and wiping countless species off the planet, and no other species even tries to stop us.
It seems a bigger stretch to think other animals have similar emotions to humans than the opposite.
That's true only for a small subset of humans. 99.9% of humans achieve no feat as you describe.
You can easily make the case for attributing these feats to smaller subsets. E.g., Africans, Native Americans do not make iPhones, travel to space, etc. And therefore its ok to colonize them. I think that sounds familiar to history.
If you go by this notion, it would rather make sense to attribute these feats to a small elite and not humans entirely. And by that logic, this elite is siphoning money, creating riches for their own benefit. Which is probably what is happening in most countries (more so if they are authoritarian).
I think its simply about a feeling of superiority, might makes right. If you can, you abuse others for your own benefit. Whether they are a human or another animal.
You can have a conversation with 99.9% of humans, something you can’t do with any other animal. The other list of accomplishments is not even needed to surpass what animals can do.
You have to be intentionally being obtuse to suggest that the gal between humans and animals is not an order of magnitude away from the gap between humans and other humans.
By the way, you can't have a proper conversation with someone, if you don't speak the same language.
To answer your other argument, there is a different fundamental level of 'superiority' over animals that you could never argue for over humans. Even the most 'primitive' of civilizations have been able to articulate their resistance to oppressors in a way no animal has ever even come close to doing. Again, the orders of magnitude difference between humans and animals makes it a completely different comparison than between humans and 'weaker' humans. It is insulting to humans to imply it is the same thing.
Are humans more intelligent than animals though? By human definitions and metrics? Unquestionably. However, I am not convinced that humans are truly superior in every facet of intelligence.
I have mental health issues, I breathe in toxic air, consume poisonous food and drink, wait in traffic to go to some miserable office, to be surrounded by miserable people, to do meaningless work. I do all of this so that I may survive and placate myself with the leftovers. Other "intelligent" humans give me concoctions that alter my brain chemistry in order to help me cope and distract myself from our Sisyphean existence.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished for believing he was more intelligent than the gods. I sometimes wonder if we, too, are punished for believing we are superior to nature. Perhaps true intelligence is not defined by our metrics after all.
To add on to your argument in the context of this quote, I also think this is also an extremely compelling argument for not only the arrogance of mankind, but the true stupidity of mankind.
We treat our one and only planet -- source of survival -- like its rental. Hopefully within the next century, we can develop some method to eat those iPhones because we might not have many options left.
People are wrongly taught when they're children that as a human they're special.
Mostly it's with good intentions (encouraging ethics and responsibility), but often the message is rudimentary or lost along the way.
I personally really appreciate the definition of intelligence from Dr. David Krakauer, a mathematical biologist. Krakauer once said on Sam Harris' podcast (episode 40):
Intelligence is, as I say to people, one of the topics about which we have been most stupid. All our definitions of intelligence are based on measurements that can only be applied to humans. An IQ test is not interesting if you’re trying to calculate the intelligence of an octopus — which I would like to know, because I believe in evolution. I think we need to understand where these things come from, and having a definition that applies just to one particular species doesn’t help us. We’ve talked about entropy and computation, and they’re going to be the keys to understanding intelligence.
Let’s go back to randomness. The example I like to give is Rubik’s cube, because it’s a beautiful little mental model, a metaphor. If I gave you a cube and asked you to solve it, and you just randomly manipulated it, since it has on the order of 10 quintillion solutions, which is a very large number, if you were immortal, you would eventually solve it. But it would take a lifetime of several universes to do so. That is random performance.
Stupid performance is if you took just one face of the cube and manipulated that one face and rotated it forever. As everyone knows, if you did that, you would never solve the cube. It would be an infinite process that would never be resolved. That, in my definition, would be stupid. It is significantly worse than chance.
Now let’s take someone who has learned how to manipulate a cube and is familiar with various rules that allow you, from any initial configuration, to solve the cube in 20 minutes or less. That is intelligent behavior, significantly better than chance. This sounds a little counterintuitive, perhaps, until you realize that’s how we use the word in our daily lives. If I sat down with an extraordinary mathematician and I said, “I can’t solve that equation,” and he said, “Well, no, it’s easy. Here, this is what you do,” I’d look at it and I’d say, “Oh, yes, it is easy. You made that look easy.” That’s what we mean when we say someone is smart. They make things look easy.
If, on the other hand, I sat down with someone who was incapable, and he just kept dividing by two, for whatever reason, I would say, “What on earth are you doing? What a stupid thing to do. You’ll never solve the problem that way.” So that is what we mean by intelligence. It’s the thing we do that ensures that the problem is efficiently solved and in a way that makes it appear effortless. And stupidity is a set of rules that we use to ensure that the problem will be solved in longer than chance or never and is nevertheless pursued with alacrity and enthusiasm.”
Especially to our mammalian brethren, who have many of the same underlying neurological mechanisms (though in differing quantities).
Dogs have co-evolved with humans for thousands of years.
Remembering names seems like a useful albeit unsurprising skill, especially when it comes to recognizing/avoiding danger.
“The bear/wolf/demon tribe is back!”
Will we ever stop looking down from our heavenly pedestal? Can we instead treat at our earthly contemporaries as different but equal?