Why humans need to rethink their place in the animal kingdom
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
Ant colonies have a similar biomass to humankind [1]. If humans aren't exceptional, do we acknowledge some sort of responsibility to provide for ants? Can they draw on welfare?
If we separate by intelligence ... humans are clearly quite exceptional. Even then though, if we reject human exceptionalism we will need convoluted definitions. Can a town itself sue you for leaving because the intelligence of the town itself decreases? Is a corporation a philosophical as well as legal entity? Can they feel pain? A corporation can 'speak'; to some extent independently of the people in it.
Humans may well not be exceptional in the harsh world of facts and science. We still have to act as though we are or we may as well give way to nihilism. The line has to be drawn somewhere.
We can pick a great many animals, and say that if we separate by intelligence, they are expectional, doing things that other species can at best only crudely approximate. Human specialised intelligence is really good at doing human specialised things.
I think I'd agree that humans do some things with their intelligence that might put them into a fresh category, but the point I'm suggesting is that humans are not the only creature with an exceptional intelligence.
I think I'm going to say that "greater" doesn't really fit. Specialised in a different way, yes. I think that trying to apply a single value on a single scale simplifies it to a nonsense.
How are you measuring this? How are you coming up with numbers? A Clark's Nutcracker can remember the location of tens of thousands of hidden pine seeds over a 15 mile radius and find them even though it's now a snowy winter and the seed was buried months previously. Clearly, this bird is smarter than pretty much every human I ever met.
A chimp (at least one chimp) is better at remembering random numbers than a human (at least some humans, including a memory champion); https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/are-humans-smarter-th...
It's usually about this point the guy on HN who claims animals can't think because they have no formal spoken language turns up.
And no, a real feat of memory can easily be measured and proven. The subject modifies a large list of items (e.g. seed in knothole), then later retrieves said item exactly once. That would be real evidence.
I understand that human memory champions do the same in terms of using locations as a crutch for memory, with their memory palaces and so on. They build themselves spatial pictures and clues. So this bird has a memory as good as human memory champions? As for keeping track of where they hid things by noting where they were in relation to other things; isn't that what humans do? If you removed all landmarks, buildings and everything from my city and replaced it with a flat, featureless plain, I would not be able to identify the location of my house. I find my house by looking at other things to work out which way to walk.
Anyway, I'll stop here because we're both using unprovable axioms as our basis. I suggest that human intelligence is very specialised and that we struggle to even see other specialised intelligence, so limited are we in our thinking. You suggest that humans have a wide ranging general intelligence (poorly defined as that concept is), superior to all others? Neither of us can disprove an axiom, although we can both spend all day suggesting things that creature A can do that creature B cannot.
The test you suggest does strike me as very human focussed; reminds me of tests showing that some creatures can't remember faces based on showing them human faces. Turns out that humans are really good at human faces, and some other animals are really good at other kinds of faces.
I do appreciate your civil tone, though. You did come across as a sealion at the start (which is why I ignored you), but that turned out to be a misread on my part.
Human level of intelligence is clearly far greater unless you impose some very arbitrary restrictions on human abilities so they can be beaten by some very specific animal abilities.
I would suggest that the evidence indicates otherwise. Written language seems to have taken humans tens of thousands of years to work out, so coming up with that system is clearly not fairly easy. Keeping track of 50000 locations over a 15 mile radius such that they can be found again six months later in winter under a foot of snow using marks in the ground made with a stick, without a written language? That seems... difficult.
Our current method of evaluating non-human intelligence is mostly taking tasks humans are known to do and seeing if we can get animals to do them, which biases it toward finding animals performing at no greater level in any dimension than humans. We don't really have a coherent model of what intelligence is, much less an unbiased interspecies test of it.
Humans obviously have the most human-like intelligence; any other superlatives attached to human intelligence should probably be prefaced with “apparently” rather than “clearly”.
Indeed. Going further, the idea that "general intelligence" can exist is something I'll countenance; the assumption that humans have it is a conceit without convincing evidence, based on a sample of one.
Why do you make this claim? Engineering, science, and mathematics are all convincing evidence that humans have general intelligence. Humans also score highly in measures of intelligence like https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329.
Acknowledging human responsibility for non-human parts of reality is surely a legitimate moral position, whether or not it is one that you hold?
My understanding is that some (or even many) societies have maintained more holistic moral positions, that don't elevate humans beyond other parts of the world, so it seems like a viewpoint people may even be predisposed to, given the right conditions.
It strikes me that the difficulty with accepting the possibility of human responsibility for non-human parts of reality may simply be a consequence of the moral position that is currently quite widespread - something like the one you describe. That position requires a line to be drawn (as OP noted), or perhaps rather values to be assigned, to the human and non-human, but that valuation is impossible in practice, and so really it just allows us to accommodate our own interests whenever the need takes us, and ignore our hypothetical responsibilities.
As to the specifics of your point, I think the answer has to be no: if your position is explicitly to not elevate humans over other living beings then surely it is a contradiction to err on one side or the other?
Nihilism isn't the ultimate end.
I'd say that if you can choose between eating a fruit, and killing a bird and eating it's flesh, a virtuous agent would eat the fruit.
It's unnecessary to go the utilitarian way of trying to draw the lines and meet every single exception to the rule.
Acting in the world as a virtuous agent is a much more practical approach.
Would you test and experiment on someone who has a nervous system capable of feeling pain and suffering, if it could save thousands or even millions of people? Given the data of the lack of success of a huge percentage of studies, you would, being virtuous, deduce that it's better to seek other means of testing instead of doing a hit and miss approach on animals.
People don't behave as virtuous agents, and they do not act kindly. Especially not to those they deem less worthy than them.
That's why stuff needs rethinking and regulation.
Even if one, for the most part, cares for the world around them, is it virtuous to attempt to ensure the survival of a species like the panda? As a species it would vanish without any outside intervention.
I think the only obvious route is to treat other living things the way we would like to be treated - after all, we have a common ancestry and a case could be made that we're just one big multicellular organism
The reason I consider humans the most competitive is because we could potentially wipe out any form of life (for some, we would have to go too). As for the special thing, I don't think we're special in the sense that we have some innate quality that separates us from other animals, we're just more intelligent. Some unknown gap between the smartest animals and us results in the situation we see today: humans have created technology and industry, pursued math and science. No other species has, as far as I know (or at least not to a degree that makes it significant relative to human understanding)
I'm pretty sure virtue ethics is as practical as you can get and still stay in the realm of philosophy.
Virtue ethics is there to give you guidance of which questions to pose and how to act when coming up with the answers.
There's no need to delve on the metaethics of a particular case.
For your subjective idea of virtue.
It's the pragmatist philosophy.
> That's why stuff needs rethinking and regulation.
I assume the regulation will be done by the angels, as people do not behave as virtuous agents.
Nihilism thus loses its muster.
Not necessarily provide for them, but the opposite extreme (not caring if they exist) isn't all that much better and hubris born out of the notion that humans are so exceptional and at the center of everything.
Because this ignores the fact that our habitat (Earth) doesn't just revolve around our existence, our existence is just a part in a vast ecosystem which can only work because life exists in all kinds of shapes and forms.
Nature isn't optional, it's what allowed us to get where we are today, the more we forget this the more likely we are to make mistakes which can't be reversed and will ultimately lead to the destruction of our one and only habitat.
This is a funny statement, because it is prefaced with a pretense of abandoning human exceptionalism, and then goes on to ask a question with implicit human exceptionalism; As if the ants need humans to take care of them even though they've been around for ~92 million years.
> "The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind."
I think deep down we all inherently know this. This is largely why I try my best (although it is difficult) to eat mostly vegetarian. I think if it were a matter of survival killing and eating is natural, however what we do with live stock and factory farming is obviously unethical.
It's hard to watch footage of the process, from birth, life, and ultimate death of animals in captivity. It reminds me of a video game I played called "Prey" (great game, worth playing even today).
A recent film that strikes this chord but misses the chance to drive it home is "Arrival" (2016). Another recent film is "Bladerunner 2049" (looking at the farming practices of both protein and replicants)
There are countless documentaries on Netflix (and likely other services) regarding factory farming animals which are worth watching. They certainly helped clear some of my own ideological barriers.
Using language again, and I'm going to have to dig through my magazines to find the book reference, but recent research by Noam Chomsky into animal language reveals that it is fundamentally different than human language. Human language is non-linear and recursive, that is, words can have antecedents and self-referential clausal structures, whereas animal language is all linear; the current sound is always in direct relation to the previous sound. Moving from even highly developed animal language to human language, then, is not simply a continuous increase but a discrete one.
Not disagreeing with you here, just trying to nuance the point that to suggest that rather than seeing humans as fundamentally similar to animals and on a higher continuum, that we are fundamentally similar to animals and yet at a discretely higher level not achievable by increasing any given factor of those animals' faculties.
I think that’s an inference too far. The parts of our brain responsible for language are quite different from those of animals, but the parts of our brains responsible for body image, sight, hearing, locomotion and emotional experience are pretty unremarkable compared to other higher mammals. Therefore it seems likely that our experience of those things is unremarkable too, at least when it comes to mammals. It’s just that we can talk about it, and they can’t
We fundamentally cannot comprehend how to think or see with our skin. That makes life on this planet even more amazing. So much to learn about life.
This really depends on your moral principles. Ethics is a entire branch of philosophy, and in the realm of philosophy, nothing is 'obvious'.
Humans always discuss non-human actors in human terms. This can be useful (think of Dennet’s “the thermostat wants to keep the room at 70degrees”) but also lead down a false path (the “queen” of a hive isn’t the boss — innfact there is no boss).
So the very model the author decries is a specfic tool to avoid these kinds of errors. Animals that killed humans were sometimes tried and hanged in medieval Europe. That’s a foolish absurdism. And people do understand this — his example of the elephant minders shown that people can adapt these models just fine.
This conception of agency explains some opposition to, for example, self-driving cars. People are confused when they can’t make eye contact with a car’s driver. They make assumptions as to why certain material shows up in their Facebook feed. Etc. I’m not working on cars, but am working on on systems that don’t violate human assumptions.
It would be something of a problem for evolutionary theory if every scrap of conscious and intelligent behavior was exhibited by Homo Sapiens alone. The current situation is probably a contingency of history: between now and the last common ancestor of us and chimpanzees, many species have come and gone, with some of them leaving evidence of intermediate cognitive abilities.
In the context of intellectual history, this Cartesian view is rather recent. Aristotle, for example, describes plants, animals and human beings quite differently in De Anima. In his analysis, human beings entail all faculties that are essentially proper to animals, and non-human animals entail all faculties that are essentially proper to plants; the entailment is transitive so that the faculties essentially proper to plants are entailed by human animals. For Aristotle, animals are living things that possess the faculties of locomotion. The only faculties that essentially differentiate human beings from other animals are the intellectual faculties. So in this sense, human beings are "exceptional" in the sense that among the animals, they alone are known to possess intellectual faculties, but it is not so extreme as the Cartesian position. Still, it is an important difference with important consequences.
Most of our religion? Yes. Most of our philosophy? Maybe. Most of our science? No. Wrong.
How could anyone post-Darwin write what this author has written...unless the person is utterly ignorant of anything approaching modern biology?!
How can I take this seriously now...
But presumably you don't hold lions to the same ethical standard.
> what we do with live stock and factory farming is obviously unethical.
I don't disagree, but it is specifically the belief that it is unethical that makes us special.
The greatest lesson we'll ever learn is our own insignificance in this world. Only then will we stop fighting the world, and indeed each other. Only then will we stop destroying, and accept our true place and destiny among all living things.
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. - George Bernard Shaw.
Not to distract from your point, but I feel like the writers need to broaden their dystopian topics to other forms of tech. They also miss the "punch line" on many of their episodes, they line things up so perfectly and then don't commit.
It's almost a let down not to see things crumble completely.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirro...
The ending should have been streamed lived to the masses, like a virtual "dog fight". That would pull the entire world into the story and force the intelligent viewer to think about how even as a bystander we are all part of the problem.
That last bit is very nicely done rhetorically. But I don't see any actual argument in the article that the practical effects of the philosophical shift have to be large, or even will be large.