View source for DumbAnimals


Are we [[DumbAnimals]]?

Are amimals really dumb?

Well "dumb" means "cannot speak", so what we are really asking is can we really communicate ideas or are we stupid?  Are we superior to animals in our understanding of oursElves and our environment?

In "The Gods Must be Crazy" the bushman called the city person illiterate because they could not read the marks of the ground of what had happened there.  Similarly we are no more adept in the world of an animal than they are in our world.  And we are after all, animals.

 When we regard animals as being less intelligent than ourselves it is perhaps that we measure their kind of intelligence against our own, seeing at best the overlap between ours and theirs.  Very few people have an understanding of dolphin intelligence.  We naturally see it as less than our own yet we appearently do not farm and herd fish with the kind of sophistication which they do.  Were aliens to exist and were they to look at us, they might see us as very stupid, and we might see them as stupid too, if their [[AlienIntelligence]] were too alien for us.

We are often selfish, at times hostile, and sometimes savage.  We breed like animals.  Like most animals we also exhibit social behavior.  We are animals.  We have evolved in an [[EvolutionaryGameTheory|evolutionary system|]] which in many places favors bullies, rapists and murderers in apparent disregard for [[GoodAndEvil]].

Animals are highly effective in their own domain.  We are generally innefective in the areas where they excel.  We don't yet understand their language of sound and behavior very well, nor the language of scents used by insects.  They generally are ineffective in our language.

[[LivingWithAnimals]] my experience is that animals are not stupid, and they have a social sensivity that is individual and rich.  But the jury is still out on Humans.  I am awed by the endless [[|http://www.personalityresearch.org/intelligence.html kinds of intelligence]] that are being discovered and am clearly too stupid to comprehend them all.

We think we know ourselves and we think we know those we encounter.  But we see ourselves with blinders.  What is obvious to others about ourselves we generally fail to see.  And we never really know what someone else is thinking.  We are all wired differently.  We could never know another person really unless we were them and could observe ourselves from the outside.

Yet we bask in the illusion of understanding and self righteousness.  Science taught in the fifties is way different from science taught today.  But people believe today's science is true.  It is the nature of science to discover how we are wrong.  And we can expect that all of the current scientific theories are wrong, that someday we will discover a greater truth.  Energy is concerved? Well sort of, but you can convert it to matter.  Matter and Energy are conserved?  Well sort of, but not in the quantum.  On top of that, everyone is, at times, guilty of improper [[StatisticalThinking]] that makes a mockery of science and the truth.

====If we apply critical thinking
====
to human activity, we must conclude, as Socrates revealed, that we don't know what we think we know.  We are in ignorant bliss of the world outside our small understanding just like the deer, the dog, and the crow.  We are stupid.

====If we fail to apply critical thinking,
====
then we are stupid by choice====
====

====But being a dumb animal is a great thing, whether we know it or not.
====

Animals are cool.  [[LivingWithAnimals]] [[TheGoodLife]], human or otherwize, is wonderful.  Intelligence is evident is how they live and socially interact, and if we open our eyes to it we will find it in the song of a bird and the dam of the beaver as we do in human music, art, science and technology.  The animal brain is very much like the [[HumanBrain]] and their bodies are very much like ours.  The cells that comprise us are like all the cells comprising the life organism on earth.
----
[[|http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID<code>0002F4E6-8CF7-1D49-90FB809EC5880000&catID</code>2 Smart People Believe Weird Things]].
Rarely does anyone weigh facts before deciding what to believe.

Although the above might represent a biased misapplication of science they succeed is demonstrating the validity of their thesis by their own scientific prejudice.