Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by pedro1976 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

pedro1976

What separates us afaik is - in bible terms - that we left the paradise, by becoming conscious.

View on HN

You mean I have to do 9 hours of excel a day because a monkey ate a mushroom millions of years ago.

Was it a mushroom or a black monolith?

You just picked the new brand name for my shrooms.

"Black Monolith"

I will email you royalty checks next week.

In biblical terms this doesn't make sense to me because before they left the paradise Adam and Eve already had the task to step down to the animals and name them (step down as in: take care of them).

What separates us, in biblical terms, is that humans were made after the image of God.

If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious?

I feel like the main difference is that we shape the world around us to a degree far greater than any other being, to the point where it affected our evolution tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago. I mean yeah, some animals use tools like sticks or rocks to get food, or build rudimentary shelters like nests, or even plant or store food for next year, but they don't build fires and cook their food, they don't produce more than they need for themselves and their immediate families, etc.

I mean you see a lot of human / societal traits in a lot of animals, but humans have perfected it to an extreme degree. "Top of the foodchain" is another one; sure, in a barehanded 1v1 we probably won't make it out of a bear fight, but as a group we can decimate all other creatures + each other + the whole world.

The first oxygen producing organisms altered the planet way more than us. In a way, they terraformed Earth.

Beavers were arguably greater engineers than humans when modern humans first emerged several hundred thousand years ago.

>If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious?

Well, they don't seen to have that great of a civilization

Octopus and dolphins seem likely to be conscious. Ravens too.

But are they sentient? Can an octopus sit on a board of directors?

Of course, the true test of sentience is whether you can direct a SV startup.

They can’t communicate with humans, and their thought patterns are likely very different to ours. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they are just as complex. Whales and dolphins especially.

How complex are a humans thoughts if not raised by other humans? How much of complex thought is transferred generationally through example and language. An octopus biology may be capable of extremely complex thought, but as a species they are limited by their inability to document and propagate information in written form, unless they have some kind of telekinesis and can beam and download memories from each other.

I'm not a big believer of thought complex thought patterns that fail to manifest in any meaningful way. If they are as sentient, they should have to make a difference.

The same attitude was shown by humans towards other humans a thousand years ago. If they couldn't understand the language of another tribe, they considered that tribe inferior and called them names signifying that.

The ancient Greeks called non-Greek-speaking peoples "barbarians", suggesting they are uncivilised, primitive. To this day, the name of Germany in Polish means "those-who-cannot-speak".

Just because we don't, or can't understand the way those patterns manifest does not imply that they are meaningful.

One of our major advantages against other animals are versatile hands with opposable thumbs.

I wonder what corvids could do if they had hands and not just beaks. They are fairly smart, I would expect them at least to build some more complex structures. Which would trigger a self-reinforcing cycle between improving tools and improving brains.

Now it dawns on me that it might be possible in the future to give them the necessary genes to grow hands ... wild.

> fail to manifest in any meaningful way

To you. If someone doesn't speak to you and doesn't respond "meaningfully" to your input, does that mean they do not have complex thought patterns? With that philosophy, it's probably for the best that you don't take care of sick people :)

Maybe they’re just wiser than us.

I thought it was nothing but octopuses on those.

It's sharks. You don't need that much sentience to sit on the board of directors.

The vampire squids are usually busy doing M&A and securities underwriting.

They can pick stocks better than we can. Imagine if they could read.

I thought it was Original Sin.

And we keep having original sins. The original sin of America is slavery. The original sin of the Internet is advertising. We ain't ever getting back in.

By some interpretations, sentience is the original sin (or at least the consequence of it.) Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, after all, and if you take the serpent at its word, the knowledge was to "be like God, knowing both good and evil."

Then again, the original sin is more likely to be disobeying God to begin with. Although that leads to a chicken and egg question of how it was possible for Adam and Eve to be talked into disobeying God to begin with if humans didn't have the capacity to sin at the time.

Yep, the two are intertwined. This is actually some deep philosophy related to the determinism/free will debate and how it relates to morality, embedded in religious scripture.

Nice euphemism you’ve got there. We didn’t leave paradise. We got thrown out on our bare behinds :)

(Good point though.)

Where's the evidence of that?

I think the poster is clearly speaking within the context of the biblical narrative, and not asserting the factuality of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com