/lit/ - Literature

Uhhhhh nothing.

>>4289899
A greater degree of egotism.

>>4289905

Nice contribution to the thread, good thing I can filter your tripcode anon

>>4289899
the fact that we are not participating in natural selection, we create the world we live in

>>4289913
What dies tgar even mean?

We are animals

there is nothing separating us from animals, only that we are more successful.

a good read on the subject is The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond.

If aliens came to earth, they wouldn't be able to tel the difference between us and any other animals. Other animals manipulate their environment too, don't they? We just do it more. And that's the only aliens would be able to tell, but they wouldn't respect or understand our technology or society. It would be absolutely incomprehensible.

>>4289899
Read The Lives of Animals by Coetzee and decide for yourself.
The points made might be a little extreme, but the book leaves enough room for the reader to come with his own conclusions.

It's a difficult question. I'm not convinced by Descartes that animals are just machines. But I'm yet to find a satisfying answer.

>>4289899
Schopenhauer and Heidegger discussed the fact that we know how we will die is what seperates us from the animals. This allows us to dread.

pre-emptively to make this argument less stupid - there is nothing that qualitatively, in the strictest sense of the word, separates us from animals. After all, we evolved from animals, and for pedanticfags we still are animals. however, there are obviously immense qualitative differences between us and animals, i would say to the point of it being reasonable to call qualitative. For instance, we appear to have a very well developed "superstructure" - a set of norms that are totally capable of changing over time depending upon the socialisation that we ourselves create, and changing our behaviour as a result without any biological change.

>>4289933
we have no idea whether animals are aware of their own mortality. it seems that they are aware of mortality - elephants have been observed performing "death rites" to fallen members of their kin

>>4289944
Humans aren't even aware of their own mortality.

The transcendental egoism that fulminates in the infinite possessive of our souls

>>4289949
Wow what a useless sentence.

>>4289946
My humanity's debatable, but I'm terrified of my inevitable physical/mental decline and death.

>>4289952
Useless sentences separate us from other animals.
Res Ipsa Loquitur, no?

>>4289949
top kierks

>>4289965
I just kierked out loud from reading that.

> nothing seperates us from the animals
> nothing

What the fuck I reading

>>4289998
/lit/ was never very good at technical questions

Only man assigns values to things in order to maintain himself

>>4290000
Deus meus, look at those quads!

>>4289926
no they would see a little bit of themselves in us too. things as sophisticated as computers do not really blend in with any type of behavior from any other type of creature. if they were advanced enough creatures to leave their planet, they would see this.

>>4289928
of course they are not machines. both machines and animals are both systems though. animals are biochemical systems built for survival as a result of natural selection. machines are made of metal and shit.

>>4289933
bumblebees know they are going to die when they sting, they dont sting every threat they face, only the sting when they know it will be worth it

>>4290043
Mon dieu! Dios mío.
我的上帝

>>4290268
Dio mio! Mein Gott!
Istenem! My God!

>>4289899
The difference between humans and animals is that we're aware of being aware.

Human brains evolved to be heavily influenced by culture, where techniques, rituals, etc. are passed down from generation to generation. What started out with the passing down of techniques for weapon making and hunting escalated and amassed into our society today.
Some animals have culture as well, but very limited and indirect, and as such they haven't developed as much as humans.

>>4290266
Do they really 'know' that they're going to die or is it just a response or habit that is passed down through their genes? I'm guessing the ones who are wary of stinging survive and the ones who sting carelessly die off and don't reproduce.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZAL64E0DI

If you look to science instead of philosophy you'll actually find answers to such questions.

inb4 butthurt armchair philosophers.

>>4289899
It's not art, culture, language, mathematics, tool usage.

There's no categorical divide, we're just better at these things than they are.

>>4290295
That's an hour long dude. What is the unique trait?

>>4290302

You can spend hours on /lit/ each day, probably. You can spend an hour to watch this video to get the answer.

the ability to store information outside of our genome

>>4289899
Hentai.

>>4289899
Time-binding.

I illustrate this in my behavior classes by asking if you were going rabbit hunting in the snow and could take a hunting dog with a stuffy nose or a two year old child, which would be the best aid in rabbit hunting?

The answer is of course the two year old, because humans, even infant ones, are the only animals that know what tracks mean. they know that they mean a rabbit was here before, and that he went thatawy and if you follow the tracks you'll eventually come to him. Humans are the best hunters in the world, and that was true even before we had anything more than pointed sticks, because we knew where the game had gone even with no scent, or confusing secnets, and no game visible. we became persistance killers and could continue a trail no other animal cold. we coopted wolves not because they were better trackers, they weren't, we were, and they were better at bringing down and harrying game at close range.

weirdly we have a very good idea , based on genetics and archaeology, of exactly when this trait came out of africa and got included into the cro magnon gene pool. it caused, we believe, the explosive burst of the formerly pretty stabel post ice age populations out of the european and mediterranean colonies and all over the rest of the world.

>>4290336
You've obviously never seen a bear riding a unicycle

>>4290374
Animals don't understand tracks? Are you basing that on something or just making it up?

>>4290295
A valuable contribution to the thread, I am sure. Your attempt to jump in and say "STOP TALKING AND THINKING AND LOOK AT THIS INSTEAD BECAUSE IT HAS ALL THE ANSWERS" is why people don't talk to scientists about this kind of stuff. You look unwilling to talk about a subject, and the addition of the video makes you look like a dogmatist.

You could have taken 5 minutes to distil the relevant information, and present it as an argument. Thus not only would you have contributed to the conversation but you would have looked intelligent, rather than informed.

As to animals, they have no independent mind-awareness. They cannot conceive of a mind separate from theirs; thus they cannot understand that other individuals can know or think things that are different from its thoughts. If an animal could speak, it would never ask a question, because it cannot imagine something outside its sphere of knowledge. This is similar to young human children. More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test

symbolic language is the answer.

>>4290393
nope. no animal understands tracks. dogs track by differential scent. anybody who's hunted with them has seen them casting back and forth fruitlessly trying to pic up a scent when there's a line of tracks right in fron t of them clear as day. there are gaze-hunters but they looks for the actual animal, tracking patterns and movement. Birds can track shapes, but not the shapes left by other animals in a matrix.

Human beings are the only animals that have figured out, consciously or instinctively, how to follow a trail. and we did it so recently that no animal has ever evolved to hide its trail, or avoid matirces that preserve tracks.

to follow tracks involves the mental concept of the past, and the future, which only man has.

>>4290416
If only humans have a concept of past/future, why do animals stockpile food for the winter? Why do they migrate? Why do they patrol territories?

Surely they haven't our level of temporal imagination, but I think there are plenty of examples that refute your core point.

>>4290415
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_%28gorilla%29

>>4290416
>the mental concept of the past, and the future, which only man has.

If this were true, operant conditioning wouldn't work.

>>4290425
those are behavioural tropes. they occur in animals that don't even use a cerebral cortex, like birds and insects. simple multiplier behaviors, not cognitive.

>>4290431
you're oversimplifying. i don't mean animals don't learn or have memory. they're responding to cues from past events, but they can't put together the difference between than and now. there are humans born occasionally with the same problem. we believe they are throwbacks who lack the Fox cluster or some gene that integrates it.

>>4290436
They react and behave to stimuli by applying them to a temporal dimension other than the current. So what if the difference isn't cognitive? Do you think the human conception of time spontaneously occurred in our brain? Aren't there conditions inherent to the world whereby reactions, both in us and in animals, are applied to the future? These reactions exist on multiple levels, whether behavioral or cognitive doesn't matter.

>>4289917
>Luis CK scholar

>2013
>still thinking in terms of Plato's ideas
>making up arbitrary categories and trying to fit things in them

>>4289917
Wow, this is the worst post on this board I've read this year.

>>4290416
If, you've actually been hunting before, you wouldn't be dumb enough to say a baby would be a better hunter than a beagle, especially in the snow, dumbass.

>muh stuffy nose

>>4290446
yes, it did in fact. it was an emergent characteristic of the genes that coontrol the use of language or the coding of information into sounds, preadpted from animal groups. a single mutaion, or possibly two, created a variant, highly conserved amino acid product in the genes on the seventh chromosome. And by highly conserved I mean ludicrously highly conserved. people born with mutations in this gene do not understand the past or future tenses of language, though otherwise normal cognitively.

remember that symbolic, communicative thought requires a concept of the past and you'll see whay this is emergent.

>>4290467
i have hunted with babies and beagles. A beagle that cant smell cant follow rabbit tracks. at all. ever.

>>4290473
>i have hunted with babies and beagles

lol gtfo of here.

>>4290476
hey, i live in kentucky, in the woods. why would this surprise anybody? you prefer blueticks? or you don't think kids like going hunting?

>>4290473
What kind of redneck are you? Were you born in a barn? What kind of beagle can't smell? Why are you limiting rabbit hunting to following tracks and smelling?

Seriously, I've never heard of someone having a preference of hunting rabbits with babies, because some dogs can't smell good.

pls be troll

>>4290482
i think you missed the point of the post, or possibly the whole thread. the point was that the baby would be better at hunting on a snowy day than the beagle that can't smell, because the beagle can't look at the tracks and know where the rabbit went, but the bay, and presumably also the hunter, could.

and this is because of the way the human brain evolved differently from the dogs, as well as from every other animal.

also, hillbilly, not redneck. the difference is subtle, but real.

>>4290472
You seem to have a lot of knowledge about this, but I am confused by your post...
>yes, it did in fact
Spontaneously appear?
>emergent characteristic of the genes that control the use of language
So the genes that control the use of language predate symbolic thought, but a "new" adaptation of this ability is required to produce the human-like mind? The way I read your explanation, no emergent property is needed, because the variant in question is based on a mutation.

Also, I don't understand how this is in difference to animals. I take it from your post you don't think it's simply a matter of complexity.

The behaviour of elephants trumps any claim that humans possess rationality and animals don't.

Elephants do everything humans do. Bury their dead, visit grave sits. They're capable of altruism and revenge.

>>4290506
No one's made the claim animals are incapable of rationality. Fucking bees are rational.

animals tend to be hairy, feathery or have scales or shit like that

we don't

>>4290504
no, it;'s not a difference in complexity at all. it's a true emergent property.

yes, vocal symbolism is tropistic; it developed through multiplier complexes the same way that nest building and zugenruhe and other complex time-oriented behavior did, but when herds started to use it to communicate ideas more complex than simple alarm calls (and of course, whles, birds, frogs, insects all do this too) it made uncoded vocal associative language possible in ways that could be acted on by selection forces to gradually become more complex, and this happened in humans. The genes involved developed slowly, and the associations weren't especially conserved though. there was a lot of variation. then a little before the last big ice age, something happened in africa that changed that overnight. a certain genetic patern, probably produced by a mutation in one or two genes on chromosome seven suddenly showed up in every human population that we can get data for. How do we know? well it's a long story, but you can tell how old a gene or a gene complex that's conserved is by the type of gradual changes that take place in the non-active dna around it. This one gene set we know to come from that time, when humanity just suddenly exlploded, and we know that mutations in that gene in modern humans make them incapable of time binding , understanding tenses in language or, basuically, following tracks.

Hey animal experts, do you guys know what this one is?

>>>/mu/41758576

>>4290508
> what is Aristoteles

>>4290517
Thanks for taking the time to explain it, I've been trying to figure this stuff out for some time, through an exploration of the origins of culture. The "explosion" you mention is damned interesting, I've encountered it elsewhere as well.

The direct association of temporal understanding still bugs me, though. If time-oriented behavior existed prior to its complexification (as it obviously did) how can the argument that we're different because of our superior understanding be made? For instance, the emergent property could be an epiphenomenally related condition.

>>4290374
What an ignorant, anthropocentric post, full of unsubstantiated claims made by someone who has obviously never been hunting in their life.

Also, understanding a description of the processes under which things came to be a certain way from another way, such as genetics or evolution, hardly gives you a complete understanding of a thing.

>>4290528
Aristotle also believed that if you throw a rock it will continue in a straight line through the air until suddenly dropping. He could've tested this.

He also thought that all planets, suns, etc revolve around each other in perfect circles. This couldn't be tested, and was assumed, until Copernicus.

There's a lot more where that came from, so I'm afraid his imagined animalism isn't applicable to modern cognitive theory.

>>4290532
I hunt every year, and work the check stations at three different deer hunting areas. And all this stuff is common knowledge. you can verify it yourself.

>>4290536
>Aristotle also believed that if you throw a rock it will continue in a straight line through the air until suddenly dropping. He could've tested this.

They didn't have rocks in those days.

>>4289949
>dat awkward use of fulminates

Well, you're pretty much confirmed for thesaurus kiddy.

>>4290540
The point being that he was a rationalist: he thought that everything can be understood through use of thinking alone, but he is demonstrably wrong.

>>4290531
i'm not saying our understanding is superior, whatever that means, just that adding the time dimension is an important part that differntiates the way we think and create things from the way other organisms do it. You can see it as emergnece in that it allows a lot of the cultural adaptations that are charicteristic of humanity which would not be possible without it. Now i understand that a dozen other limiting characteristics might also be suggested with some validity, but we're not chopping for minimums here. The association of evrything humanity did after the explosion had to do with the perception of time, from tracking, to persistance hunting to migratory patterning to keeping track of seasons.

Now obviously some of these things can be done without cognitive encompassing of the past and the future, but persistance hunting, and especially, tracking, cant.

a persistance hunter has to realize that the game he can no longer see, hear or smell is still there. and be able to "follow it into the future" to where his time track and its come together. Tracks in the snow are the most obvious example. without using time words, can you explain how to find the rabbit using tracks?

I think cave drawings explain a bit of this. they clearly depict past or future events. they communicate them non verbally. too,

>>4290538
What, that if you take a two-year old hunting, they aren't going to be loud and annoying and counterproductive?

Or that a canine companion doesn't last longer, deal with the cold better, run faster, and obey better than a human toddler?

Or that looking at animal tracks is even important in predation among other species?

Or that looking at human traits and characteristics, unimportant to many other types of species, is even relevant at all.

Sharks are much better at predation than humans, for instance. It would be ridiculous to compare our cognitive abilities based on our lack of adaptation to their environment. Similarly, many other species are exempt from being judged by this arbitrary standard.

>>4290550
"Here are tracks. Rabbits make tracks. If there are tracks, there is a rabbit. I can't smell the rabbit. The rabbit is far away. But because there are tracks, I can find the rabbit."

Time: present. Nothing else. Time is not needed for hunting.

Or is it? Am I hungry enough that I will follow the rabbit, despite not smelling it? Will I hunt for something else, because I am patient?

How do you know that animals don't follow tracks because they know their prey is too far away to be hunted? Using smell may be a superior technique, but we have adapted to using tracks because we lack this ability?

>>4290553
>>4290553
i really don't think you're reading carefully. Or you're paralogical for some reason.

the post wasn't advocating two year olds as adjuncts to hunting superior to dogs. merely pointing out that a dog without the ability to smell would be helpless to follow a rabbits trail in the snow but a two year old could do it easily.

and nobody's "judging" other animals by human standards either, the point was to differentiate humans from animals by the type of cognition humans use. I don't assume you're saying that the preadtory skills of sharks make them good rabbit trackers either.

the whole hunting thing was to point out a difference between how dogs and other animals do it, and how humans do it.

>>4290562
>he post wasn't advocating two year olds as adjuncts to hunting superior to dogs. merely pointing out that a dog without the ability to smell would be helpless to follow a rabbits trail in the snow but a two year old could do it easily

No, a two year old could not successfully hunt or track a rabbit at all, much less "easily."

Please go read your Piaget again. You seem to lack any foundational understanding of human cognition at all.

You have not established any significant distinction between types of cognition that humans use and that which other species use.

You are indeed scrutinizing the whole of the animal kingdom based on an arbitrary supposed success or failure in hunting a specific type of prey that humans hunt, therefore it is anthropocentric. It applies to humans perhaps, but hardly applies to many of the most successful predators in the animal kingdom. Not even to mention that many of the species with the highest levels of cognitive ability aren't even predators.

>>4290590
Actually, a human child would instantly understand that by following the tracks, they could find what made the tracks. Whether this is efficient is a whole other issue, but the guy you're arguing against isn't saying that, but that there is a difference evidenced in the types of cognition used in this instance.

>>4289899
Our advanced ability to communicate ideas and think symbolically. That is all.

>>4290625
Dur, we can talk. But why? How did this ability come to be in us, but not in other animals?

>>4290559
well, you didn't really tell me HOW you can find the rabbit using your logic. And i'm not saying also that a tropistic, multiplier cascade might not have evolved to do this exact thing with out time binding. But i do know that as far has ever been demonstrated, none ever did.

and dogs and other otherwise very intelligent animals have been experimentlly demostrated to be unable to follow even short trackways.

>>4289899
I feel like the argument can be made for the degree of consciousness in the Cartesian sense, the representation of "I". It seems very difficult to argue that animals have reflective or introspective capacities like humans do, but rather they are guided by mere impulse and their external environments. I could be wrong though.

>>4290684
furthermore, it also seems unlikely that animals are capable of abstract thought or grasping any form of objective reality (in the Cartesian sense, once again).

>>4289921
Jesus christ, not this moron again.

>>4290676
If an animal can understand that another animal makes tracks, it's not a stretch to see it will understand that it will find the rabbit if it follows the tracks.

>>4290700
Time and time again, he tries to prove that their is no room for intelligent discussion of any kind on 4chan.org.

>>4290635
Natural Selection

Oh for FUCK SAKE. I am TIRED of people posing this question as if it's some kind of deep thought process to answer.

Our frontal lobes are more developed and we have highly functional hands, this means a greater capacity to process information, understand abstractions and structure meaning, and then to manipulate the surroundings based on those mental structures and patterns.

We don't really need to differentiate from other animals, what would be the point, we are a type of animal, but every animal is a specific type, a specific form of life, so its all differentiated anyway.

People do a kind of backwards thinking when they look for human characteristics and behaviour in animals, no, it's that humans have animal characteristics and behaviour, that's where the resemblance comes from.

Just look at social animals, primates and rodents especially, you'll see what I mean.


I am only scraping the tip of an iceberg, but how about language? How about self-awareness, reason, civilisation, and literature and science. How about love, compassion, hate, apathy, empathy and ennui? How about burial of the dead and religion? Hell, how about a spiritual soul? It's as if this is the only time in our existence that will matter which dictates whether or not we have souls, nah, couldn't be, because the reductive materialist ideology offspring of an ex nihilo creator god religion just happens to be the dominant viewpoint at this point in time so it MUST be the case.

>>4290590
i'm not saying hunting is the difference. I'm saying Time-binding is. hunting was just an example. How was that not clear?

>>4290704
and yet no animal but man can do this. you could look at it as the most primitive precurser of unterpreting symbolic information.

What separates adults from children?

>>4290768
That's a major assumption. Maybe we are the only animal that DO this, because we are the only animal which hunts that lacks a refined sense of smell.

>>4290775
perhaps you're right; better to say that we're the only animal that has successfully demonstrated it, and certianly the only mammal that has ever given any indication of the ability. A lot of animals have been tested for it, since differentiating between the different types of perception and learning is a big part of animal behavior research. I picked dogs as the example because they're a complex and intelligent set of animal behaviors that doesn't show this useful trait, though scent does compensate somewhat.

certainly no cat, dog, horse, or primate besides humans displays it, even rudimentarily. I have heard that monkeys can be taught to track however, or atleast to follow trackways to rewards, even though other aspects of time binding arent evident. All this really shows though is that they are capable of learning, conditioning and discrimination. They can also be taught to wear clothes and smoke.

>>4290506
>Bury their dead
What

>>4290506
But - can it blend?

>>4290635
Why doesn't matter, what matters is that we can, which means were are separate from animals.

>>4290884
Fuck off, Tallis.

>>4290763
Because your example is flawed, therefore you need a new example to support your thesis.

There is a large body of evidence that other species do in fact have conceptions of time and can attribute events to certain times. For instance Pavlov's dog's associating the ringing of a bell with food. Or species that store food for later (not only time awareness, but also the more nuanced and complex awareness of scarcity). In fact, you might be surprised to learn that the human perception of time is also flawed, and that other species can perceive time in ways that humans cannot.

>>4291701
you're mistaking a tropistic, or condtioned response for actual time binding. There's no interpretation there; it's just a reaction, or at most a simple multiplier cascade. ants or chipmunks storing food, or zugenruhe in birds is not what i'm talking about, and it's certainly not time binding. assuming that they're making a conscious decision based on awareness of coming events which they need to prepare for overlooks the fact that they're preparing for events that they have never experienced, like winter or migration, and storing food when they have never experienced a shortage of it. you're projecting human motives for behaviors onto things that don't think anything like a human. How exactly would a spider convey web building skills to its offspring, or get it ready for the fact that winter would come and it needed to get its eggs to a safe place?
and i'm aware that birds experience time passage at thirty times that which humans do, due to the different wiring of the striatal cortex. not what im talking about either. you're seeing multiplier behavior triggered by simple instincts and writing a disney cartoon over it.

>>4291723
There is no disney cartoon here, and I'm not commiting the pathetic fallacy. What I'm also not doing is holding other species to an anthropocentric, arbitrary measure.

Other species do have a conception of things they have never experienced, as is evidenced by multiple studies:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/09/bird-brains-crows-remember-your-face-and-know-youre-hiding-in-there/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/science/26crow.html?_r=0

>this thread

>>4291783
neither of those articles reference time binding. do you actually know of any study that shows any animal is capable of comprehending the idea of the past and the future, and evinces a behavior that displays that understanding? I really would like to see one, and i'm not saying a dog doesnt remember where it buried a bone, or doesnt recognize someone it met last week. I'm not arguing against the persitence of memory, but the ability to project in either direction.

I guess the problem here is seeing multiplier behaviors and tropistic responses and picking the explanation that fits based on what you'd do yourself. That's why i picked the dog example: he sure looks like he's following those tracks. but take away the smell, and he's lost. And it would be very very useful to a dog in an ice age say, to be able to follow a cold trail in the snow. might be why thay hooked up with people.

Fucking Kierkegaard. Picked The Sickness Unto Death to read for school (and out of interest), but the whole 'you have to believe but you can't ask why because that's defaming faith' thing really put me off. (or that's how I'm reading)

He makes interesting points nevertheless, but the way he puts this just... I'm not an atheist and I greatly dislike aggressive atheists, but it's like he forces me into that position with what he writes. And the whole time I'm thinking that I probably don't completely grasp his points.

>>4291884
Actually if you would read the study itself instead of just the articles, you would realize that what you are calling "time-binding" is not uniquely human and other species possess this "trait" as well.

Here is another article referencing that study which explicitly states this:

http://www.independent.com/news/2011/jan/02/crows-smarter-humans-think/

Please leave with this general semantics anthropocentric nonsense.

'man' is world forming

/heidegger

>>4290043
go back to /fit/

>>4289899
This:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXY2XI00FH8