[Piers]

Humans-Animals-consciousness-brain.

While other mammals have the same basic brain engine as humans there are I think some hardware and software differences. I think the software differences are the most significant.

Size as a proportion of body mass appears to be a very important feature of the hardware configuration. Humans do very well here, but there are some other animals that come close to the human ratio.

The most important software upgrade has to be human language. You are to a large extent what you think, and thanks to language humans can construct much more sophisticated thoughts. Also the layer of logic added to language through words like ‘and, not, if…” support a level of reasoning that would otherwise be imposable to match. A further mathematics upgrade gives access to technology, and makes human society orders of magnitude more sophisticated than that of other animals.

I think it is clear that other mammals can think and communicate with each other, however due to inferior software can not do so at the same level of humans. Other animals thoughts are likely to be mainly in the form of remembered experiences, however in the higher animals I would expect some level of abstraction derived form rudimentary communication.

One question that you can ask, is ‘is there any further hardware upgrades to the human brain that say chimpanzees and dolphins don’t have or is the difference just power and software.’ I am refereeing to these three possibilities.

One might for instance hypothesise that human level languages needs a brain above a certain power for support, so it’s a threshold effect, and while some animals have nearly the same ‘brain power’ its just below the threshold needed to support human language and its logic and maths upgrades.

Conversely, it might be possible for higher order mammals to think in a humanlike way, it just needs their brains to have the correct programming.

Alternately is there some extra hardware feature in the human bran that humans have uniquely developed to support language. This would prevent other animals ever being able to match human thought processes without a similar modification, and would give justification to the position a human being is a higher order forma of animal.(as compared to their society being of a higher order.) I don’t know maybe some anthropology researcher can enlighten me?

While considering differences between animals and humans, I think it is important to clearly realise that all the higher order animals share the same basic framework, but humans have made significant modifications in some area, mainly language and associated improvement in reasoning. However it follows that any feature humans have that are not directly connected to these changes is going to be shared by at least the higher order mammals.

One poster mentioned that other animals do are unaware of the fact that they will die. I wonder if he has worded in an abattoir.

Imagine some higher order mammal that sees her mate die in great pain over a couple of days. Do you think she will not be able to remember the experience and make the logical leap of imagining herself having the same fate?