Choosing what traits one considers exceptional, will by definition select what species one considers exceptional. The average fish makes the most exceptional human look slow in the task of swimming. The average bird will sing a song way more complex than the best human singer. Sperm whales - and presumably other whales as well - have a complex language that rivals if not exceeds human language.

The term human exceptionalism - or a bit more provocative the human supremacist mindset - decides that humans are the most special and thus deserve to be treated differently than all the other life on earth. Killing billions of teenagers in an industrialized fashion is ok as long as it's just a cow.

I challenge you reader to ask yourself, is the arbitrary line of humans vs non humans more justified than the equally arbitrary line of white humans vs non white humans?

That said, in a world of scarce resources and competition, tribalism and “team-thinking” are not bugs, but features, evolutionary tools for survival. From that lens, human supremacism isn’t a moral claim, but a pragmatic stance: of course we prioritize our own species. We are team human.

As for whether we're destroying the planet, it's a complex picture. I'd recommend False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg, it pushes back against overly apocalyptic assumptions and argues that while climate change is real and serious, we're not necessarily headed for collapse. Doesn't excuse inaction, but does complicate the narrative.

Ultimately, we are Team Earth. The scarce-mongering behind tribalist features does not bring pragmatism but rather sabotage.

Worth noting your hypocrisy too here. As a member of the human species who obviously participates in it and its complex technlogical sphere (you are after all using digital tools and the hardware they run on to comment about how terrible we are on HN), you're a direct beneficiery of background industrial processes that themselves kill all kinds of animals and plants every year, while you lecture people on things like slaughtering cows.

How is that arbitrary? It seems like one of the most clearly non-arbitrary delineations possible.

For what it's worth, IMO, humans have created seed banks and will be the only species to preserve and revive extinct species, so yeah, humans are more important.

That seems like a meaningless word salad. Human versus non-human is a clear, objective delineation with no randomness about it.

I'll take it one step further. The fact that your immune system prioritises you over the life of a single bacterium is no different to the Holocaust. Provocative, but it does make us realise that we're walking gas chambers who should take immunosuppressants immediately.

But besides, this is not the point. What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks to justify that we’re somehow a “disease” roaming the planet. As if a tapeworm that were to achieve total worldwide domination would stop and think “wait, I shouldn’t reproduce further because other creatures may suffer”. Same story with any other mammal.

The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species. Keeping the environment safe from us is extremely important, but undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species whose only virtue is being less successful at surviving than us is strange. With our own moral codes, no less.

Don’t worry, we’re correcting that in record time. Though it would have been nice to not destroy so many species along with us.

> To the point where as few as 1% of our species even needs to think about making food.

And the rest would just die, unable to find food, if left alone in the wilderness.

> What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks

The idea of exceptionalism is also human-developed, so as soon as you want to go that route no argument in this conversation matters.

> The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species.

Successful at good things and bad things. Including bad for us. You don’t really see other species developing whole profit industries to knowingly market and sell cancer on sticks, for example.

> undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species

That argument cuts both ways. It’s perfectly fair to say someone with your view is undermining the harm we cause and romanticising our achievements.

> being less successful at surviving

None of us can survive indefinitely under water, or in radiation, or in the vacuum of space. Yet we know of other species who do. Humans are exceptionally frail, considering. After we’re gone, other species will remain. We won’t be so impressive then.

The odds of continuing to be exceptional at survival are not looking great.

And compared to species that have been around for multiple geological ages, our survival time barely rates a mention.

The one thing we're truly exceptional at is influencing our own environment. The only creatures to have more of an impact were the cyanobacteria responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event, which literally transformed the Earth's atmosphere.

As for the disease line - we're supposed to be intelligent, and terraforming our home planet to make it more dangerous and less inhabitable when we know and understand we're doing this is not the most convincing proof of that claim.

And other species haven't been surviving on this planet any longer than us just because they didn't evolve significantly during that time while we did.

You do realise people are already dying of climate change, right? Not only directly from heat waves, but other natural disasters caused by the rapidly shifting climate.

We've wandered pretty much the entirety of the planet and made it to the moon. Nuclear weapons.

Controlling the scope of the conversation to exclude the counter-arguments, too, demonstrates the special place afforded humanity by the Creator.

In case it isn’t clear, I agree with you.

/Every/ other species that has /ever/ lived will cease to exist (at the latest, in a billion years or so).

Humans are the only ones (so far, anyway) that have any hope of surviving more than that.

That seems pretty exceptional to me :P

Disclaimer: the fact that we're exceptional doesn't mean we don't do dumb things and we shouldn't improve and do better.

"Will exist long after humanity" -> maybe, maybe not. If we're smart, capable and humble enough, we could, in principle, intentionally outlast them.

By "intentionally" I mean: we can design our future lightcone such that, by whichever measure you care to choose, there are still humans around. Yes, bacteria could be still around, but it won't be because they _chose_ to be around, it will be because it just so happened that the universe arranged itself in a way that they are still around.

By "in principle" I mean: if we spent enough resources, energy and smarts and built a civilization around this goal, we could plausibly (given the known laws of physics) do this. Whether we _will_ do it or destroy ourselves first any of the possible various means, is an open question.

Lineages of bacteria that exist today, here, will only keep existing in the _far_ future (billions of years from now, after the sun chars Earth and then spends its energy budget) if it just so happens that a panspermia event kicked some off our solar system and then they just so happen to find a suitable solar system to keep existing.

We can design our future, bacteria can't.

Even if I'm wrong, and it does survive _that_, then it eventually won't survive the sun spending its entire energy budget.

We're the only ones that could intentionally (as in, actively design our future lightcone) to survive that, so that makes us special in my book.

Many people forget the animals feel emotions very much the same as us, that they act and feel very much like us, and what separates is our ability to work together- and specialise, our individual intelligence is not terribly far away - but we have specialised in education so we’ve optimised our minds to work in a collective society and to specialise in certain trade craft.

we think of animals as being “dumb” and we get surprised when they show signs of intelligence.

- sent from my iPhone, which I can’t build a single component of; using software I can’t write, using electricity I can’t generate, while sitting on a sofa I can’t manufacture in an apartment I can’t build.

Being highly programmable is part of our distinction. You can't build any of these things, but you can learn to build all of them.

Your possible pinnacle isn't just not chewing the couch.

We're pre-paradigmatic for qualia, we don't know what structures (brain or otherwise) give rise to it in order to guess what set of qualia can be had by any given system. Until we do, I can't even quantify my expectations on the variance from increased evolutionary distance, I don't even have a quantity to express the variance of.

Accepting death for me is a more mature way of understanding how life works, than trying to prolong life.

That said, I personally prefer prolonging life, but I do it only because I'm afraid.

Fear can be understood as simply wiring that influences the behavior so that an organism is less likely to die. That's how I see fear of death. But sometimes death of an individual is a better solution for the group, or even for the organism itself. The problem with humans is that we have somehow developed a view that death is the ultimately worst thing to happen, and we evade it with all our imagination, trying to find elixirs of immortality since we are aware what's going on, no matter what, not matter the cost other species pay for us.

We don't see our limits and that's our problem, because we think we're exceptional and we deserve everything because of it. And it's very, very egocentric.

We are not exceptional, in the sense that we don't automatically deserve more because we can paint pictures or compose music. We value ourselves based on things that don't even matter to other species. Instead, what we should do is to accept the responsibility that comes with the effectiveness of our brains, and figure out how it fits in the bigger picture of the ecosystem we're living in. But all we do with it is we exploit everything, making it serve us, because "we're exceptional and we deserve it".

Even in this thread it's visible, people don't even spend a minute to consider this: 'whhatt?? humans not exceptional? i don't see any animals thinking about their exceptionalism, haha!'

If so that is a relatively recent demonstration of exceptionalism. Given the long timeline of human existence it could even be argued that it is accidental that this proof of exceptionalism developed among the humans and not among some other species.

I actually believe in human exceptionalism, in that many of the features spread around various species are all found highly developed in the human, but really that is an argument for all species exceptionalism. There are very few species that do not some collection of interlocked traits that make them exceptional in some way, it just happens that our exceptionalism is one that allows for triumphalism at the same time.

Firstly, most humans who ever lived didn't do those things. Are they not exceptional? Are they lesser in some form? Did human exceptionalism only start when we invented computers or science? I assure you, many prior civilisations saw humans above animals (source: The Bible), yet hadn't done the things on your list.

Secondly, you listed outcomes. These are value judgements. As the article points out, humans did those things but we can't do basic things like smell water from miles away or see internal organs by just clicking. Animals don't value LLMs or mathematics, in fact many humans don't!

The challenges to human exceptionalism aren't based on outcomes (because that's subjective) but tries look at what makes humans unique in a way that can't be replicated in any form. This has to be more than "we're better at X" or "we can combine X and Y to achieve Z" because, unless trait X or Y only exist in humans, then another species could conceivably replicate it given enough time for evolution.

So problem solving wouldn't make us exceptional because we see it in other species. Language might but we do see rudimentary communication in other animals like corvids and cephalopods so perhaps humans just hyper-specialised in that. Hell, scientists have observed orca pods being unable to communicate across regions, hinting that there is a form of language.

Just being better at these traits doesn't suffice because there are plenty of things other animals are better than humans at. We don't consider that exceptional in the same way.

I addressed this in my earlier point: that's measuring an outcome. By this logic, humans before 1700AD were not exceptional. Humans who weren't involved in this are lesser.

We could also point out the fact that no other animals write books (or even come close), and that arguably takes us back to about 3000BC. That doesn't mean that humans before then weren't exceptional, only that it's enough (sufficient) to point out this feature as one example in which humans are exceptional. We haven't really changed biologically since then - these are cultural developments - but there are features of humans that allow these cultural features to manifest and to build upon previous ones.

Of course as we go back in time towards our last common ancestor with chimps and bonobos there are fewer features of human behaviour that make us exceptional, pretty much by definition. The interesting questions are what those features were and when they emerged that allow the later and obviously exceptional developments to occur.

As an aside, I'm not sure what you mean by measuring an outcome - to me, outcomes are all that we measure. Roughly, outcomes=observations. So I think you're using the word "outcome" in a different way

As opposed to a trait. Let's take writing: most humans for most of human history simply couldn't read or write. At some point, we educated humans to be able to read and write.

Now, you're correct in that we've not taught animals to read or write at the level of a human but that's also a question: is there a fundamental trait that humans have that allow for this? Do we have a part of our brain that no other animal has, or could have, that means we can become literate and no other animal ever could?

Or, is this a hyper-specialisation of other traits that are shared but we have more of it? Is it a result of traits like pattern recognition, socialisation, communication and fine motor skills that combined and specialised to turn into reading and writing? Literacy then becomes an outcome of combining those traits in a certain way. We know that other animals have these traits, just not in the same way.

The reason I say this makes it not sufficient is because it reduces "exceptional" to just mean "things humans can do," without trying to look deeper than the surface level things we see. Dolphins being able to see your organs by clicking is pretty fucking exceptional. But because humans can't do it, it's not "exceptional."

When we ask "what makes us exceptional," we're asking "what makes us different from animals?" The fact that our combined traits allowed for different outcomes doesn't make us fundamentally different any more than a frog is different to a cat.

> Do we have a part of our brain that no other animal has, or could have, that means we can become literate and no other animal ever could?

I think clearly yes, depending on what you mean by "could have". I wouldn't rule out the possibility that somehow over evolutionary time some other animals might be able to reproduce human behaviours of reading and writing. But I'm not talking about that: I'm talking about what other animals can do now, and it seems none of them can write or read like a human.

Now, let's say there are chimpanzees that we can teach to respond appropriately to things like "Spot has a ball. Spot has a big red ball. What colour is Spot's ball> Blue or Red?" Maybe they can do that. But what about doing the exercises in, say, Loring Tu's Introduction to Manifolds? They're just not doing that. They don't come close. You might say most humans aren't doing that either, which is true, but if you train a human their whole life in an appropriate way then I think most of them can do at least some of those exercises, while no chimp or bonobo has been shown to have this facility. This is just one almost silly example, but I think you can see what I'm getting at.

> Dolphins being able to see your organs by clicking is pretty fucking exceptional. But because humans can't do it, it's not "exceptional."

If this is unique to dolphins, I would say it's definitely exceptional. Even if it's not unique to dolphins, but only a small subset of animals can do it, it's still exceptional to that small subset of animals. There's no reason why "exceptional" should pertain only to one species: different species are exceptional in different ways, and we're asking in this thread about whether and how humans are exceptional. Horseshoe crabs are also exceptional in that they've been physiologically constant for 200 million years or whatever it is. The fact that some species are exceptional in their own ways doesn't mean that humans aren't exceptional in their own ways.

> The fact that our combined traits allowed for different outcomes doesn't make us fundamentally different any more than a frog is different to a cat.

I think I can see what you're getting at: every animal is arguably exceptional in its own way, and picking out the ways in which humans are exceptional as being more significant than others is stacking the deck in favour of finding humans to be uniquely (or exceptionally) exceptional in an anthropocentric way.

It's definitely right to be aware of, and cautious of, anthropocentrism. But this is what I'm trying to get at: the mere fact that something is unique to humans doesn't make it significant or valuable - e.g. being a featherless and relatively hairless biped doesn't seem significant to me. But the fact that we're able to communicate in the way we're doing now, and the fact that we're even capable of sustaining this complex technological society is to me just a clear way in which humans are exceptional. We can look into why that is, and that to me is a very interesting question, and we might find that many of the traits that make this possible are shared in some ways with other animals, but there's just obviously the fact that no other animals come close to being able to replicate it.

Having said that, I do have the feeling that the ways in which humans are exceptional are themselves exceptional: we can consider dolphin sonar or echolocation in bats, or cultural practices like chimpanzees learing from each other how to crack nuts with stones, still it's a long way from creating a sophisticated technological civilization.

This is 100% my point. When people talk about "human exceptionalism," they're referring to this type of "exceptional."

> we might find that many of the traits that make this possible are shared in some ways with other animals, but there's just obviously the fact that no other animals come close to being able to replicate it.

This is true, however I posit this makes us no more exceptional than other animals. Evolution pushed our ancestors down a certain track and this was the result but that also means there's no reason another species can't emerge to do the same thing.

The reason I think this is important is because "human exceptionalism" carries a baggage of divine right (the Bible called it dominion over beasts) that leads us down the wrong path with respect to our understanding of the world and how we treat it. When we engage with other animals on their own terms, we learn so much more about them than if we simply look down on them.

That is on you, that doesn't mean humans aren't exceptional. The fact that we are even discussing our role in nature and how we shouldn't abuse it makes us that exceptional.

If humans weren't that exceptional we would just go and destroy nature everywhere it benefits us with no thoughts about the future or how this could ever hurt us, just like animals does when they have the power to.

Rather I'd call your stance "divine obligations", which is also a stance that humans are exceptional. You don't hold that for any other species than humans.

Let’s start here: humans are literally in the process of doing this via carbon emissions. There seems no way of stopping it as we’re all slaves to economic incentives. If you take a step away from the details of how we do this, you’ll see plenty of animals destroy their local ecology through things like over grazing, and need predators to bring them back under control. Again, the details and scale are different but the base behavioural trait is there: optimising local maxima and causing long term damage.

So no, humans don’t follow a divine obligation: we actually do the same thing every animal does and tries to maximise our short term goals to the detriment of everything else. We’re not exceptional in this regard.

Yeah, ok. I think it should be clear by now that people use the word "exceptional" in different ways, and it's not really clear just from the use of the word which of these ways it is.

For me, "exceptional" just means "different", but you seem to be suggesting that people use it in the sense of "better", or something like that. Maybe that's true in some cases, but I would also say that humans are exceptionally destructive, and even in some ways exceptionally evil, in the sense that some people seem to take pleasure in causing harm, which is a feature that isn't shared with many other animals - or at least it's difficult to make the case that this is shared with many other animals. So "exceptional" doesn't mean "better" to me.

Let's try to be objective about things: dolphins are exceptional in their sonar abilities, curiosity, complexity of social organisation for a marine animal, range of sonic vibrations they emit, and so on. We can similarly evaluate the complexity of human behaviours according to objective criteria: our range of vocalizations is objectively more complex than any other species (we could get into the details of this if you like: I think the informational entropy of average human behavioural outputs can easily be shown to be higher than the highest way you have of evaluating non-human vacalisations or behavioural outputs), the comeplxity of human tool use can also be objectively quantified: New Caledonian crows, dolphins, or chimpanzees have technological assemblages which consists of maximally two or three moving parts (let me know if you know of exceptions), while human ones often consist of thousands. We're really comparing one large rock, a nut, and a hammer rock, against a nuclear reactor. It just should be abundantly clear that there's an exception here.

About your ethical point that "exceptionalism" translates into "divine right", I draw the opposite conclusion. Human exceptionalism doesn't mean that we can just do whatever we want, it means that with our increased abilities and awareness comes increased responsibility: we can become aware of the harms we cause to other life and other humans exactly because we're more capable and more preceptive

I’ve already explained why this is the only real definition you can take: because otherwise “exceptionalism” doesn’t create a new meaning, it’s just a synonym for “different,” which means “human exceptionalism” would mean literally nothing.

I know I’m banging on about this definition but I think it’s a really important thing to keep in mind.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to point out humans are better at doing things than animals. That’s an objective fact at this point in time. My point is that this doesn’t make us “different” to other animals any more than any animal is different to another animal! This piece of human exceptionalism is what I object to.

If you want a simpler way of putting it, we can take Douglas Adams’s quote:

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

> To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to point out humans are better at doing things than animals. That’s an objective fact at this point in time. My point is that this doesn’t make us “different” to other animals any more than any animal is different to another animal! This piece of human exceptionalism is what I object to.

Many animals play around all day like Dolphins do, but Humans is the only animal that acts anywhere close to the way Humans do, learning to build new things over generations and doing things like going to space. No animal species has managed to go to space, that makes humanity more exceptional than any animal species. Many animals swim around in the ocean and eat fish, but only one have made spaceships, air planes, cars, computers etc.

Another way to see it is how much would earth change if the species didn't exist. Remove humans and the face of the earth massively changes. Remove dolphins and earth would hardly change at all. Humans have exceptional impact, and thus can be said to be exceptional.

I didn’t say that and neither does Douglas Adams. I’m not even sure how you came to that conclusion. Your entire second paragraph misses my point.

> Another way to see it is how much would earth change if the species didn't exist. Remove humans and the face of the earth massively changes. Remove dolphins and earth would hardly change at all. Humans have exceptional impact, and thus can be said to be exceptional.

Remove bees and many environmentalists think we’ll see ecological collapse. I guess bees are exceptional by that definition.

This growth is clearly unsustainable, and the bubble, so to speak, will eventually pop. Other species have managed to survive for an exceptional time, e.g. the horseshoe crab, or most species of moss. There are species whose individuals might be older than human civilization, like the glass sponge. There are species that will survive in extreme conditions where humans would perish, such as tardigrades. Are we better than them?

Another point: evolution has caused living beings to reach equilibria where the whole system can thrive, where each species has a role. These systems have reached self-regulating states, where e.g. an overpopulation of predators will be cut down due to an absence of prey during the next generation.

Is human society better than that? Because humans are destroying this balance through unprecedented growth, which these systems cannot respond to. Our growth is not only unsustainable from the point of view of human survival, but unsustainable from the point of view of the earths ecological systems as a whole.