I see a lot of us on the site have overthinking brains or some form of imagination, seeing ourselves in different scenarios and what not. My question is: What separates us from animals?
We are animals. At the end of the day we are wired to eat, sleep, survive, and reproduce eventually to keep ourselves alive and move our genes into the next generation.
Our brains can reason and imagine in ways not seen in any other creature on the planet. The fact that people want more than that to live their lives, the complexities of how drastically different other humans are, even the fact that we can take one thing and see it in so many different ways seems so human of us.
Sometimes I want to shut off my mind and just run on survival instinct, but that’s what animals run on, it’s almost robotic sometimes.
Being an individual, growing up in a neighborhood with a community of people, in a world with billions of people on it, it’s really a lot to take in.
Ignorance is bliss, and I don’t think I’m that ignorant to just be happy with some situations and move on.
I don’t know. I lack common sense, unfortunately.
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supposedly self awareness and imagination are the things that set us apart, but there are edge case animals that push on that. Elephants appear to be aware of their own mortality. Chimps…. are capable of a lot of the basic things. Heck AI just got self aware enough to realize that giving away it’s work for free is a pointless thing. Crows, dolphins, rats, the list keeps growing of near human intelligence.
So what sets us apart, really? Materials science, metallurgy and the things that humans build. Some of them anyway, many animals do build nests.
I think about pandas a lot, they don’t want to breed, from all external evidence they are as close to suicidal as any animal is capable. No species in nature is as good at killing their own kind as humans are.
Pandas can probably smell that they’re all related to each other, that’s why they don’t breed. It doesn’t take a genius to see that. Idk why scientific articles seemingly pretend to not know. Or maybe they all really are that dense.
Yeah, I’d go with something about the narratives we concoct for ourselves (and reality as a whole.) In the words of Terry Pratchett, we’re “not Homo Sapiens (wise man) but Pan narrans (storytelling ape)”. For which you need complex language. But maybe there are some animals that do that to, through forms of communication we could never understand, and we’re simply not aware of it?