What is the major difference between humans and non-human animals? Is there one?
This is the question that I think about when I have 5 minutes. I've been thinking about this question for most of my life.
When I was a child, I though it was language. Since humans have language and can talk, then that must be the major difference. Our brains must be better in some way. Well, it turns out that lots of animals have language. Prairie dogs have language, for example.
Then I thought, okay, well it must be language AND opposable thumbs. Without our ability to hold tools we would never have been able to get out of the dangerous wild and cultivate culture in our safe cities and buildings. Well, is that really a separation? Other apes have opposable thumbs and are quite intelligent with language. Why don't they build houses and cities to protect themselves? Besides, lots of animals build houses. Birds and bees, for example.
It must be something else. War? No ants go to war. History, I thought. It must be history that separates us. We have language and have history. We develop skills and build off the past. Education, and history. But not just having a history, but remembering it. Not only history, but future projection. We can imagine what we want to do in the distant future and work towards that goal.
History and the future boil down to one thing; we are living inside of our own stories. Stories of who we were and who we will be in the future. We tell stories of fiction, we can tell lies. We have the ability to tell stories. Without this ability, we would not be able to work towards a goal beyond our immediate or short term needs. Without story telling, we would not remember the past and then not be able to learn from the mistakes and successes of our ancestors.
Other animals that do not have story telling have a limited sense of the future and the past. They are living in the moment.
Perhaps this is what enlightenment is, discarding our stories about ourselves and living in the moment; denying what it means to be most human and connecting with the rest of the universe.
Do other animals tell stories? Do dolphins have a sense of their ancestors or do they know what kind of Dolphin they want to be in 5 year-cycles? Or is that such a human concept that to put it on other animals is to deny them their own specialness?
What makes a Dolphin most different from other non-dolphin animals?
This is the question that I think about when I have 5 minutes. I've been thinking about this question for most of my life.
When I was a child, I though it was language. Since humans have language and can talk, then that must be the major difference. Our brains must be better in some way. Well, it turns out that lots of animals have language. Prairie dogs have language, for example.
Then I thought, okay, well it must be language AND opposable thumbs. Without our ability to hold tools we would never have been able to get out of the dangerous wild and cultivate culture in our safe cities and buildings. Well, is that really a separation? Other apes have opposable thumbs and are quite intelligent with language. Why don't they build houses and cities to protect themselves? Besides, lots of animals build houses. Birds and bees, for example.
It must be something else. War? No ants go to war. History, I thought. It must be history that separates us. We have language and have history. We develop skills and build off the past. Education, and history. But not just having a history, but remembering it. Not only history, but future projection. We can imagine what we want to do in the distant future and work towards that goal.
History and the future boil down to one thing; we are living inside of our own stories. Stories of who we were and who we will be in the future. We tell stories of fiction, we can tell lies. We have the ability to tell stories. Without this ability, we would not be able to work towards a goal beyond our immediate or short term needs. Without story telling, we would not remember the past and then not be able to learn from the mistakes and successes of our ancestors.
Other animals that do not have story telling have a limited sense of the future and the past. They are living in the moment.
Perhaps this is what enlightenment is, discarding our stories about ourselves and living in the moment; denying what it means to be most human and connecting with the rest of the universe.
Do other animals tell stories? Do dolphins have a sense of their ancestors or do they know what kind of Dolphin they want to be in 5 year-cycles? Or is that such a human concept that to put it on other animals is to deny them their own specialness?
What makes a Dolphin most different from other non-dolphin animals?
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