Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 18, 2013, 02:17 (3776 days ago) @ xeno6696

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> >Matt: 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.-I'll bet the hominins came with those capacities, which is a tremendous jump in mentation.
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> > Matt: 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.-And that is where we differ. We have discussed hands and brain motor areas. Our skeletons are really quite different in regards our upright posture, which appears to have started developing along that track about 20+ million years ago.Huge brain, totally different posture and style of locomotion. And why should the hominins drop from the safety of trees? It required more plastic brains to think their way out of trouble. And what was the driving need in nature to make them adapt that way. We know of none
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> Matt: I'm with you on this. I often ask myself the thought-experiment question, what would we be if we never developed language? 
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> 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. 
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> 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.-You are onto a key issue, especially since we now know how plastic the brain really is. And how the DNA of neurons is modified all the time to handle memory and new knowledge.-The key point comes down to how different does one have to be to be different in kind. Of course we came from monkeys with tails, but the apes are still in the trees and look at us. And for no good reason I can see, so it must become a philosophical debate of how many degrees difference do you need to conclude that we are part of a most unusual development, Paul Davies key point in his essays on that subject.