Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 21:57 (3994 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: A book explores the issue:
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> 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.
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> This sounds well balanced, but the next quote requires close attention.
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> 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.
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> 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. -
I'm with you on this. I often ask myself the thought-experiment question, what would we be if we never developed language? -I think that a significant part of our rapid appearance and development has to do with the fact that we developed language, and we figured out how to abstract it, and that level of abstraction allowed us first, to gain a foothold in our own individual consciousnesses. -I can't put down the idea that by first learning a few words, we started altering our brains, and this alteration rapidly fed back into our genome.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"