This is an offshoot of one of the vegetarian thread, but it is not really on topic with those so I thought I would ask these questions in a new thread.
On the topic of sentient beings, is there anything scientific about determining if an animal is sentient or not? By this I mean awareness and consciousness.
Or is it just our perception, so while I may say a cow is pretty much not a sentient creature someone else can say it is and there is no way to really settle it between us?
Someone had mentioned that in the animal kingdom there was a coninuum with humans being the ‘most’ sentient and then something like earthworms or the such settling in toward the bottom.
But to me it seems that there is a a striking gap between humans and all other animals. After all no other species has masterd fire or invented the wheel. Dolphins and chimps may be smart but they are not going to any time soon paint the Mona Lisa or write the Ode to Joy. And they may be able to violent as a means of survival but they do not organize and exterminate on ideological grounds like humans do for war. Medicine, technology, etc. set us far apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, but why?
Are humans just higher order animals or are we also apart from them in a fundamental way?
Humans are tho only animal to have the abillity to conciously change their environment. As the environment dictates who you are, as we changed it more and more we became more and more different. That is the fundamental difference.
If you’re interested in how close we are to our animal relatives, Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee is a great read.
Whether you want to include animals in a continuum of sentience or not depends on how you define sentience… I’m under the impression that a lot of people define that word specifically in order to describe the difference between animals and people.
I don’t mean to nitpick, but pretty much ALL animals are sentient. “Sentient” means to have the ability to be aware of and percieve the world through senses. Cats can see, hear, touch, smell and taste; they’re sentient, as are tuna, houseflies, and chimpanzees.
I agree with RickJay. In my psychology class the professor pointed out that houseplants are “sentient,” because they can sense sunlight and turn to receive more light. They sense and react to the environment. So do microoganisms for that matter. We classified, more or less arbitrarily, that plants were on sort of a level 1 of sentience, dumb animals on a level 2, and chimps and humans on a level 3.
Of course we don’t have chimps writing poetry or anything, so we want to think we’re on sort of a level 4, and I tend to think so too, but for the purposes of the class we grouped them together, because physiologically and behaviorally we’re much the same. But I think the distinction I draw between chimps and people isn’t psychological or biological, but spiritual, and that’s a whole other subject.
Read Sagan’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”. Not his best work (and he’s not a biologist), but it’s interesting nonetheless. In it, he describes how humans are animals that differ only in degree of brain power. For every human trait, some animal also has a similar trait. (This was a threat I started a while ago.)
Of course, there used to be other animals that were just as smart as us (Neanderthals) - and that was only 30,000 years ago.
And? I mean, do they have a use for them? What would a dolphin possibly do with fire, or a dog with a wheel? You might also point out that humans have not developed the ability to breath underwater without mechanical assistance.
And natural selection is affected exactly how by being able to write music?
Ah, but we have, as you point out developed the ability to breathe underwater, with mechanical assistance. You didn’t really address my point. It wasn’t really so much why animals haven’t developed these things, but why humans have. You may think it is simply a more advanced level of natural selection. Meanwhile, tripoverbiff seems to think (as do I) that there is a more spiritual reason, consciousness in humans that simply does not exist in other animals. Meanwhile someone like Fanny May seems seems to be of the opinion that in fact the spiritual aspect is present in most animals as well.
tripoverbiff:
Actually I think the spiritual aspect is the heart of the issue here.
RickJay:
I think that is one defintion. I think Merriam-Webster allows that sentience can also mean a higher form of awareness of sconsciousness.
Fanny May:
I just don’t believe this. I think if they have these aspects they are much bser then ours. I don’t think animals have any more hopes then “I hope I find some food” or “I hope I have sex so I can perpetuate the species”.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that we didn’t always have all the technological niceties that we have now. At some point in pre-history we had no implements at all, and perhaps not even a language that we would recognize as such today. It took us tens of thousands of years to get to this point, and it could very well have been luck (the right person born at the right time) that it didn’t take us hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years to get to this point.
Perhaps if the dolphins had their Plato, Descartes, Newton, and Einstein born before ours, then they would be riding around on land in water filled bubbles. I doubt it, but you can’t really use the fact that we’ve invented things as proof we are sentient.
Just to reiterate - at some point there were humans of the same species as us that had made no “advancement” as we call it. Were they not sentient?
Then how do you explain the actions of elephants when they come across the bones of dead elephants . Their behaviour changes , they gently rub the bones and seem to become sombre . When they come across other animal bones the just walk over/past them . oldscratch said:
Termite mounds are built in such a way that the air in cooled at the base and circulated around the rest of the structure or in otherwords Air Conditioning .
Uhh. You’re missing my point. Sure they can do this. And termites can destroy a tree. However, these are not concious acts. They are purely instinct. They are no different from a dog being a pack animal. A beaver cannot react to it’s environment the way a person can. The beaver can not use it’s knowledge of building dams to build other structures. Why? Because it’s not knowledge it’s instinct.
Yep , I’ll accept that oldscratch but what if our instinct is to use our mind as a tool as a beaver uses his jaws and teeth . We needed to use our brain instead of our brawn and we did . It worked so we kept it up . We have more brainpower , some other animals are stronger , faster have better eyesight . We are animals just clever ones .
Yeah, that is kinda confusing. I did some research and noticed that definitions range from the simple “receives sensory input” which may arguably include houseplants, to the rather narrowly defined “is self-aware” which arguably includes only some mammals.
I’m not sure whether your OP is looking for a qualitative or quantitative answer. For instance: AFAIK only humans have written language That’s a quantitative difference, but does it carry sufficient qualitative differences from other animals for you to consider humans “fundamentally different” from other animals?
From a biological/evolutionary perspective, everything is just a matter of degree. Changes accumulate in small pieces. The result is that everything we use to distinguish ourselves from other animals can, for the most part, be observed to some degree in other animals.
Take my example of written language, for instance. This developed from various behaviors: Basic communication skills (pretty much all animals can communicate with each other on some level), the ability to associate symbols with meanings (even mice can figure out which door has the food based on symbol recognition), etc. At what point do we consider the combination of these behaviors to have transformed into something new? That’s a very hard question to answer without several millennia of hindsight and some arbitrary setting of boundaries.
As I pointed out elsewhere, you could go back in time to the point at which the “first” homo sapien sapien came into being, but be unable to spot her. All you’d see are various possibly qualifying creatues with small genetic differences, many of whom had genetic material very close to ours. Where do you draw the line between the ones that became us and the ones that didn’t? You need hindsight for that.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts. When you look at the parts, you see all kinds of similarities with other creatures, especially those close to us on the genetic tree, like chimps. When you look at the whole, you notice that no other animals have built a national highway system or created nuclear weapons.
A beaver cannot react to it’s environment the way a person can. The beaver can not use it’s knowledge of building dams to build other structures. Why? Because it’s not knowledge it’s instinct.
i’ll bet beavers react to their environment every day of their lives. they learn to avoid danger and where to find food for example. beavers may not have a high level of technology or a fast changing technology, but human technology languished in various “ages” for millenia at a time. [ie, bronze age, iron age…] beavers build their own houses, it is not easy to build a good house, have you done so?? maybe the beavers are oneup one you…
the significant difference i see between people and other animals is our very sophisticated communication and the resulting body of knowledge we have built up over tens of thousands of years. if any of us were placed in the wild, how many of us would be able to produce steel hunting weapons much less motorized vehicles or cell phones?? i think most of us would live at a very animalistis level for the remainder of our life.
Some of this discussion pertains to technology (fire, wheel, SCUBA). However, some animals create and use simple tools too (again, an issue where a human trait is not unique, but rather, greater in extent…in this case, far greater).
I would also note that some animals can react to their environment and solve problems. Most of the experiments probably involve chimps or other primates, but there are examples of overcoming obstacles to reach food, escape from cages, etc.
Sure, a beaver’s dam-building skill is instinct, but this does not exclude it from learning/experience. Perhaps the beaver does not need to build other structures. Hey, before humans developed civilizations and leisure time, we used to spend our days on the basics too…food, shelter, warmth, reproduction.
An animal may have a large array of instincts to help it survive, but it can learn and adapt to various environments (where to find the best food, where the predators are located, etc.).
Anyway, my rambling point is that animals are not mindless. The degree of instinct vs. cognition certainly varies among species, but even humans are not without instinct.
There is more to us as humans than intelligence. If you were born with your current intelligence 75,000 years ago, you’d be highly unlikely to invent the wheel, tame fire and cook over it, invent the bow and arrow, etc etc.
We are certainly highly intelligent creatures, we humans, but if you compare us to our closest competition in the intelligence category, we stick out as unusual by being such incredibly social creatures. Some of the other intelligent creatures are herd or pack creatures, but we are closer to being HIVE creatures–a species so thoroughly social that you would understand damn little about us by studying the individual in isolation.
Going the other direction, if you assembled all the hive creatures for comparison with us, the other social species have no individual intelligence to speak of; in fact, you’d be hard put to point to any that are not insects.
We are the first and (so far) only species to exhibit both high individual intelligence and deeply social hive behavior, and that is why we kick butt.
Koko the Gorilla has changed out concepts of what is and is not merely “animal”. She has a human language, (signing), has sold some of her paintings, (but I wouldn’t buy one), and cried when her pet kitten was accidently run over. She apparently is like a six year old human but is actually a 30 year-old gorilla who was raised by Dr. Penny Patterson at Stanford.
Koko does not just act from “instinct”, but has had the advantage of an enriched environment. She knows she is a gorilla and has expressed admiration for certain male gorillas when shown a “dating video” from zoos. People are also able to do “human” things with an enriched environment, but I’m reminded of what Xenophon said some 2500 years ago;
“If horses could paint, God would look like a horse”.
