Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, October 31, 2013, 19:03 (4041 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A book explores the issue:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mind-reviews-the-gap&WT.mc_id=SA_D...-QUOTE: Although he presents both "romantic" and "killjoy" interpretations of animal ability, his sure-handed, fascinating book aims neither to exaggerate the wisdom of animals nor to promote the exceptionalism of human beings.-This sounds well balanced, but the next quote requires close attention.
 
QUOTE: Instead Suddendorf distills the gap into two overarching capacities: the ability to imagine different scenarios beyond what our senses perceive and a strong drive to link our minds together, by looking to one another for information or understanding. These two capacities transform common animal traits into distinctly human ones: communication into language, memory into planning, and empathy into morality. Suddendorf reminds us that many extinct hominins shared both capacities, making them more similar to us than to the great apes.-There is scarcely anything in the above paragraph that can't be applied to our fellow creatures. They can certainly think beyond what their senses perceive, because they plan for the future, remember the past, and can work out strategies for coping with their enemies. Our own imagination of course stretches way beyond our needs, but I would say that our art, philosophy, literature, music etc. are the result of our self-awareness, which is unquestionably a degree of consciousness far, far beyond that of other beings. However, I'd hesitate to draw any conclusions from this ... I still see no reason to assume that we are anything but descendants from earlier primates. As for the rest: many animals, birds, insects, micro-organisms have a strong drive towards cooperation, and look to one another for information, which would be no use without understanding or communication! If we take language to be a means of communication, then we can say that ours is far more complex than those of our fellow creatures ... but that means degree, not kind. It could only be kind if we insisted on a definition of language that restricted it to human language! Memory into planning is essential if non-humans are to survive. Does anyone seriously think that adults don't teach their young in the animal world? Empathy into morality is tricky, since it's difficult to separate morality from what is deemed to be good for society ... whether human or animal. But there are many cases of "love" and sacrifice between members of the same species, and even between domestic animals and their owners. In my view we take far too much for granted, and the approach that emphasizes difference in kind risks engendering the same insensitivity (lack of empathy) towards our fellow animals as towards fellow humans who are also in some way "different" from ourselves.