Secular Pinoy

I don't know if this has been tackled in the forum before, but I'll ask anyway. Is human conciousness sufficiently different from "higher animal" conciousness that it is no longer just a quantitative difference but a qualitative one?

Btw, I'm not sure if this topic fits in this forum, or in EvoCre, or in SciSkep.

Bill

I think that this question fits fine in this forum, although it might also be appropriate to address in either of those others. It is a question that is fairly central to modern philosophy as it leads to "what, exactly, distinguishes humans from animals, anyway?"

My own answer is that the human brain does demonstrate a qualitative difference from any other animal brain. As Terrence W. Deacon showed in his book <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=625" target="_blank">The Symbolic Species : The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain</a>, the human brain does have a way of thinking that is qualatatively different from all other animals. We can think symbolically.

This sort of thinking is demonstrated by a cartoon I saw not long ago. It had a series of creatures marching out of the ocean, each thinking "eat, sleep, reproduce." However, at the end of the series, there is a human who is thinking "what's it all about, anyway?" The idea that its all about "eat, sleep, reproduce" seems to be inadequate for our human way of thinking.

== Bill

[ July 05, 2002: Message edited by: Bill ]</p>

Ierrellus

Infidel Pariah,

Personally, I do not see how human cognition has advanced very far from that of the animals. I opt for quantitative rather than qualitative advance on the part of humans. Sure, we can symbolize; but our symbols inevitably revert to our animal constituency.

Animal behaviour shows
1. territorialism
2. social adjustments for individuals
3. fuel and waste system
4. reproductive systems, with monogamal
preference
5. fight or flight responses
6. grooming
7. body and pheronomal communication {dances}
8. emotional intensification of responses
9. reactions to pleasure/pain
10. memory
11. manipulation of environment
12. personal attachments--interspecies

etc. etc. I could list 100 such animal attributes. Humans have simply romanticized their animal behaviour to agree with religious or philosophic views of human superiority over animals. Symbolism may have made humans more dysgenic and unable to cope with biospheric necessities.

Asking why we do these things has never prevented us from doing them!

Ierrellus

PAX

[ July 06, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>