"Is Man Just Another Animal?" Professor Steve Jones says...

[gorski]

Point of order.

This isn't true. It's not even nearly true. On the binned thread you leaped in to be rude to several posters who'd been nothing but nice to you, or hadn't addressed you directly at all. You're regularly not nice to people who dare to disagree with you. (Not counting myself in this - I've lost patience and been rude to you on several occasions.)

Who? No BS!

 

[Supine]

Gorski, do you know what these letters stand for?

K
P
C
O
F
G
S
C

Do some research. The answers you seek are contained within...

 

[gorski]

Supy and @ all: do you know what "speculative philosophy" means?

Well, the most useless search on Earth will yield at least the right kind of questions, if not a philosophically worthy answer (you will have to keep on doing it for a few decades, probably) and you might begin to understand the issues here... Terribly rewarding!!!

 

[Knotted]

Geniuses who state that sociopaths still are Human Beings forget we do not just see them as morally flawed Untermensch, but take their rights and sometimes even life away, especially from from genocidal maniacs, child murderes etc. If they "disagree" with this assessment, I presume they would take them in and sleep with them, take care of them and... fuck them...

Humans can do terrible things. I'm amazed I have to say something so banal and evidently true. Those humans who do terrible things are no more like chimpanzees than the rest of us. Pol Pot ate cooked food, you know! And if morality is a unique human trait then so are hypocrisy and immorality. The above is an actual example of biological determinism btw.

Your logical fallacy is no true scotsman

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

One of the things that separates us from animals is our capacity for independent thought. Gorski. Another one is our ability to hold a number of contrasting and oppositional thoughts at the same time.

You seem critical that posters don't agree with you. You base your question in purely philosophical metaphysical terms and you get annoyed when posters decide to discuss more than philosophy and metaphysics.

Have you read this book ?

And in an interview...

"Even though Wittgeinstein is perhaps the most widely admired philosopher of the twentieth century, at least amongst mainstream philosophy, nobody really pays attention to his main conclusion: you can’t really do anything when you do this stuff, you should stop it. He basically said you should try to be a therapist for young people who are starting out in philosophy, to get them away from the field and turn them into something more useful. No more of this fruitless, self-deluding endeavor."
See more at: 3quarksdaily: Philosophy is a Bunch of Empty Ideas: Interview with Peter Unger

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

One of the things that separates us from animals is our capacity for independent thought. Gorski. Another one is our ability to hold a number of contrasting and oppositional thoughts at the same time.

You seem critical that posters don't agree with you. You base your question in purely philosophical metaphysical terms and you get annoyed when posters decide to discuss more than philosophy and metaphysics.

Have you read this book ?

And in an interview...

"Even though Wittgeinstein is perhaps the most widely admired philosopher of the twentieth century, at least amongst mainstream philosophy, nobody really pays attention to his main conclusion: you can’t really do anything when you do this stuff, you should stop it. He basically said you should try to be a therapist for young people who are starting out in philosophy, to get them away from the field and turn them into something more useful. No more of this fruitless, self-deluding endeavor."
See more at: 3quarksdaily: Philosophy is a Bunch of Empty Ideas: Interview with Peter Unger

Sounds like Unger has an interesting opinion.

Any reason why we should give it credence?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

A different point of view:

As philosophers, we need to keep explaining why that’s a problem, why philosophy matters. We need to keep making the case, loudly and often, that our discipline is not simply a fun pastime for people who like to argue or quote Levinas in smoke-filled coffee houses. Rather, philosophy is the condition for all our knowing, all our enquiry. It is the only way we can answer those basic human questions we cannot help but ask: what is there, what do we know, how are we to live?


In making that case, we could do a lot worse than cite this quote from Bertrand Russell (which the Australasian Association of Philosophy recently posted on their Facebook page):

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected.

Why philosophy matters | New Philosopher

 

[maomao]

Sounds like Unger has an interesting opinion.

Any reason why we should give it credence?

He wrote a book about it so you can make your mind up. Or you could just google 'why is philosophy important' and copy and paste that up to make it look like you're having a conversation. Oh, you did that already...

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

But: I don't want to read the book, just because someone posts a paragraph and says 'there you go'. The poster doesn't even indicate if he/she agrees with whatever it is that Unger says in the book.

I believe that philosophy is worthy in and of itself. The passage I found conveys my thoughts on the matter better than I could.

 

[Spymaster]

Bees and a few others are the perfect example of what being "nice" is on this board: just abuse, no contribution, not even a vague effort - the only effort they do is how to duck and dive any meaningful discussion. So, fuck off, you mindless cunts, then!!!

Now come on, Danny La Rouge has offered you polite, reasoned, debate and you've not responded to his second post at all. Instead you're just calling everyone cunts!

That's beyond ridiculous.

I've just read the whole thread and I'm not sure what you are trying to argue. You keep referring to SJ but I'm also not sure which parts of his contributions you think are the knock out blows.

I'm not going to be on the thread much but I'll read your argument with interest if you make it coherently.

Please at least respond to DLR. He's quite a clever chap who has engaged you perfectly reasonably.

 

[maomao]

But: I don't want to read the book, just because someone posts a paragraph and says 'there you go'. The poster doesn't even indicate if he/she agrees with whatever it is that Unger says in the book.

No, that's what you did. bubblesmcgrath included it as part of a longer criticism of gorski 's insistence that philosophy is the only discipline capable of answering the question. I actually had no idea from what you posted whether you agreed with the text you copied and pasted or had just thrown it up in the interests of balance.

We all tend to see a question through what we know. My degree was in linguistics so the original question (are humans animals) is a fairly dull question of semantics. Check a fucking dictionary. And the new question in the title of this thread is a loaded one.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Check a fucking dictionary. .

Which word would you like me to look up?

The thread is about an interesting topic; too bad it has degenerated into something resembling a bunch of teenagers yelling at each other in an echo chamber.

I recognize your invitation to join you in that echo chamber; but please accept my respectful rejection of your offer.

 

[maomao]

Which word would you like me to look up?

The thread is about an interesting topic; too bad it has degenerated into something resembling a bunch of teenagers yelling at each other in an echo chamber.

I recognize your invitation to join you in that echo chamber; but please accept my respectful rejection of your offer.

Reading comprehension still a problem eh Johnny? I was not inviting at all and am happy for you to post less.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I'll post just as much as ever; I'll just communicate with you as little as possible.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Sounds like Unger has an interesting opinion.

Any reason why we should give it credence?

It's not just an interesting opinion. That's why. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is the work that sets out to demonstrate that there is nothing to say, that no content is possible to the kind of inquiry that philosophy seeks. He even warns readers at the start how little they will take from it. He is demonstrating the idea that all logic is tautologous. More than that the Tractatus is intended as a proof.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

It's not just an interesting opinion. That's why. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is the work that sets out to demonstrate that there is nothing to say, that no content is possible to the kind of inquiry that philosophy seeks. He even warns readers at the start how little they will take from it. He is demonstrating the idea that all logic is tautologous. More than that the Tractatus is intended as a proof.

We're making some progress. You say, we should give what Unger says, credence, because Wittgenstein says something similar.

Should everything Wittgenstein says be accepted at face value, because Wittgenstein said it?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

We're making some progress. You say, we should give what Unger says, credence, because Wittgenstein says something similar.

Should everything Wittgenstein says be accepted at face value, because Wittgenstein said it?

Nope. I have read the Tractatus though, for my sins, in one of my sporadic attacks of philosophy. It convinced me.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Nope. I have read the Tractatus though, for my sins, in one of my sporadic attacks of philosophy. It convinced me.

I haven't read Wittgenstein for many many years, but I don't recall it convincing me back then, that young students should be encouraged to eschew philosophy, and instead work toward a hard science or engineering degree.

 

[yield]

I haven't read Wittgenstein for many many years, but I don't recall it convincing me back then, that young students should be encouraged to eschew philosophy, and instead work toward a hard science or engineering degree.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Wittgenstein's analytical philosophy was an attempt to make it a hard science like mathematics

Give me Spinoza or Kierkegaard any day.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I haven't read Wittgenstein for many many years, but I don't recall it convincing me back then, that young students should be encouraged to eschew philosophy, and instead work toward a hard science or engineering degree.

Point about the Tractatus was that at the time of writing it, W thought he'd basically 'finished' philosophy. Finished it off, more like, given that he was demonstrating that there's basically nothing to say. I read the T as a dismemberment, logical statement by logical statement, of the very idea of metaphysics. There's no such thing, beyond the statement that existence is, that experience is. That's it.

 

[bi0boy]

Apparently humans are the only animal that can accurately throw things. This doesn't mean we are not animals.

 

[danny la rouge]

I didn't want to comment before watching the lecture. Finally got round to that today, and found it reasonably interesting, so that was worthwhile.

First thing to say is that he doesn't answer the question, if, that is, one makes the assumption that the question hinges on the word "Just".

He does of course illustrate that humans are not other animals. But this is uncontroversial. Humans are of course not other animals, just as snails are not other animals.

Jones, being a snail specialist, would be able to deliver an illuminating lecture on the ways that snails differ from other animals. I might even watch it. He's an entertaining speaker.

But the word "just", in the case of snails, would not be used. I wonder if this "just" is justified merely by our ability to use language. I'm not convinced it is.

Jones discusses human jaw musculature, and how it differs from other primates. He uses it to introduce the well-known chicken-and-egg conundrum of cooking and brain size. We have a large brain powered by our ability to cook/other animals do not cook because they don't have the mental ability to do so. So, yes, as far as we know we are the only currently living species that cooks (to any great degree: some other animals do leave foodstuffs to ferment). But he quite rightly points out that if cooking is indeed the cause of brain size growth, then our pre-homo sapiens ancestors must have cooked in order for the brain size change to happen. And indeed the evidence suggests they did.

So cooking is something only currently unique to our species. Our ancestors also did it.

Gorski suggests that as well as being the only cooking species, we're the only historic species. If we define historic as being since the inception of written records, then I have no problem with that being something that marks us out from other animals. However I would have a problem with it being a necessary condition for inclusion in our species, since that would mean that we became human only when records began. We'd then have another chicken-and-egg situation of this emergence into history.

There is nothing in Jones' address to support Gorski's idea that humans are non-animal. There are plenty of illustrations of how we differ from others. But since we'd need to in order to be considered a distinct species, I don't find that a proposition of any startling or revelatory nature.

I’ll try to put it another way.

The Larus gull species are a group of species which circle the North Pole; they are a phenomenon known as a ring species. ( Ring species - Wikipedia ). At one end of the loop, are the Larus argentatus argenteus, familiar to us here in the British Isles as Herring gulls, and as we move round the Pole, each successive population having darker and darker wings, each population forming species which can hybridise with the neighbouring species, until we reach at the other end of the loop, back in Europe, L. fuscus or the lesser black backed gull, which does not hybridise with the Herring Gull at the start of the loop.

Each successive neighbouring population can be seen as a gradation from the next, a merging series of successive stages where it is not either sensible or really possible to say where one species stops and another starts, but at either end of the loop, two sufficiently distinct species as to not normally interbreed, although they can inhabit the same geography.

As well as through space, this must also have happened through time. Each generation of any species can interbreed with the next, and will see their children and grandchildren as being essentially the same as themselves. And yet, we know that species change over time. That holds for humans too. If we travel far enough back in time we will reach a generation with which we Homo sapiens cannot hybridise.

We can only think about that in time, but in the past we were not the only species in the genus Homo that existed at the same time as us. Indeed, we did hybridise with H. neanderthalenis, Neanderthals.

So, travelling forward in our species’ timeline, as jaw muscles weaken, cooking skills increase, brain size increases, mental agility increases, at what point do we start being "human"? Is there a point, gorski, at which you can say we cease being animal? Were our weak-jawed, cooking, predecessor species "human"?

And since you say I misunderstood your use of the word “historic” (which you still haven’t defined for me in your sense), at what point does this philosophical historicity enter the picture? Outside of our species? Or after our species has begun? Perhaps when farming begins?

 

[fredfelt]

One of the things that separates us from animals is our capacity for independent thought...

My cat disagrees with that statement!

Us mere moral humans have even identified behaviour that's been described as stubbornness. If I have a chance I'll remind myself of the details, but it's related to how mice handle mazes.

They quickly learn mazes, they also alter their routes in mazes - which can have several different evolutionary explanations. However what is found perplexing is that when their route is interfered with they'll take put extra effort to go back to their original route.

It's one of the many studies that show that, rather than nature being 'red in tooth and claw' other animals seem to have a rich sensory existence. Acting in ways that can be considered to be 'fun', and exhibiting other 'higher' behaviours that were once thought to be exclusively the domain of the human animal.

And if you don't believe me, just ask my cat.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

With the massive caveat that size is not everything wrt brains, our brains have been shrinking since the dawn of civilisation. About 10 per cent over the last 20,000 years.

“You may not want to hear this,” says cognitive scientist David Geary of the University of Missouri, “but I think the best explanation for the decline in our brain size is the idiocracy theory.” Geary is referring to the eponymous 2006 film by Mike Judge about an ordinary guy who becomes involved in a hibernation experiment at the dawn of the 21st century. When he wakes up 500 years later, he is easily the smartest person on the dumbed-down planet. “I think something a little bit like that happened to us,” Geary says. In other words, idiocracy is where we are now.

Lots of theories abound, including that self-domestication has left us with less need to be so smart. In particular, we've become noticeably less sensitive to our environment.

 

[fredfelt]

Apparently humans are the only animal that can accurately throw things. This doesn't mean we are not animals.

Well, if they can't throw, they don't deserve to given any opportunity for self deterministic behaviour. Until it's show that other animals can throw, then our species must be at liberty to use and abuse any other animal as we so desire.

 

[bi0boy]

Well, if they can't throw, they don't deserve to given any opportunity for self deterministic behaviour. Until it's show that other animals can throw, then our species must be at liberty to use and abuse any other animal as we so desire.

Animals know that if they socialise, they will end up having to play rounders in school PE lessons. As they can't throw, they want to avoid this.

 

[fredfelt]

Animals know that if they socialise, they will end up having to play rounders in school PE lessons. As they can't throw, they want to avoid this.

I like the story about how Orangutan can speak, however they choose not. If they let on that they could understand humans then they'd be enslaved.

 

[gorski]

Now come on, Danny La Rouge has offered you polite, reasoned, debate and you've not responded to his second post at all. Instead you're just calling everyone cunts!

Incorrect. Please, be a little bit more precise and discerning. Else, you are doing what a lot of people here are doing non-stop...

I am answering everything I possibly can - as can be seen easily, if one ants to be fair - but right now I am due back to the hospital, for post-op assessment and all... Will answer in more detail later on, when I come back to my senses...

 

[Spymaster]

Incorrect. Please, be a little bit more precise and discerning. Else, you are doing what a lot of people here are doing non-stop...

I am answering everything I possibly can - as can be seen easily, if one ants to be fair - but right now I am due back to the hospital, for post-op assessment and all... Will answer in more detail later on, when I come back to my senses...

I look forward to reading your considered responses to DLR's posts, when you come "back to your senses".

 

[danny la rouge]

Hope the consultation goes well.