They’re correct that they are many measures by which humans are not exceptional. Quite a lot, actually. But there clearly is something different about humans, something exceptional. Is it language? Is it our capacity for thought? I think what it actually is that makes us different is absolutely up for debate, and even traits we thought were exclusive to humans may not be.
So I’m not sure we know exactly what it is that makes us different, but we clearly are in some way. There is no other animal that has developed anything close to the capabilities we have.
Would any other species on earth, in a billion years, ever develop the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, let alone even know what they are?
account42 · 19m ago
Even those other measures at which other animals excel are largely done better by humans once you include the use of technology.
ForHackernews · 5m ago
> Would any other species on earth, in a billion years, ever develop the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, let alone even know what they are?
A billion years is a very very long time. Humans and chimps diverged about 7-8 million years ago. Given no human competitors and a billion years there's no reason some other great apes or raccoons or something couldn't develop a space programme.
hereme888 · 6h ago
Humans developed methods to empirically study the best ways for consoling bereaved mothers, and develop statistically-guided time-frames for normal vs. pathologic grieving periods. Then we use functional MRI imaging to study if monkeys undergo similar brain-signaling patterns (previously academically theorized to be similar, based on other research studies), decoded by advanced software, powered by advanced chips, powered by nuclear power plants. The report is curated by artificial intelligence, and handed by a robot to the human. That's human exceptionalism.
scott_w · 1h ago
I have a number of issues with your statement.
Firstly, most humans who ever lived didn't do those things. Are they not exceptional? Are they lesser in some form? Did human exceptionalism only start when we invented computers or science? I assure you, many prior civilisations saw humans above animals (source: The Bible), yet hadn't done the things on your list.
Secondly, you listed outcomes. These are value judgements. As the article points out, humans did those things but we can't do basic things like smell water from miles away or see internal organs by just clicking. Animals don't value LLMs or mathematics, in fact many humans don't!
The challenges to human exceptionalism aren't based on outcomes (because that's subjective) but tries look at what makes humans unique in a way that can't be replicated in any form. This has to be more than "we're better at X" or "we can combine X and Y to achieve Z" because, unless trait X or Y only exist in humans, then another species could conceivably replicate it given enough time for evolution.
So problem solving wouldn't make us exceptional because we see it in other species. Language might but we do see rudimentary communication in other animals like corvids and cephalopods so perhaps humans just hyper-specialised in that. Hell, scientists have observed orca pods being unable to communicate across regions, hinting that there is a form of language.
Just being better at these traits doesn't suffice because there are plenty of things other animals are better than humans at. We don't consider that exceptional in the same way.
griffzhowl · 6m ago
I didn't interpret GP as trying to give necessary and sufficient conditions for human exceptionalism. I think it's just supposed to be a (perhaps) humorous and ironic example of a way in which humans are exceptional. So yes it's an extreme example because it references the whole of modern science and technology, but it also brings out the irony: the paper challenging human exceptionalism is dependent on this whole network of scientific and technological development which is as far as we know unique to humans
Voultapher · 3h ago
We are also responsible for driving extinction rates to 1000+x above baseline in just a couple hundred years. We are also capable of altering our biosphere so much that it will become unlivable in many areas for many species - us included. And despite knowing it, we do very little against it.
Choosing what traits one considers exceptional, will by definition select what species one considers exceptional. The average fish makes the most exceptional human look slow in the task of swimming. The average bird will sing a song way more complex than the best human singer. Sperm whales - and presumably other whales as well - have a complex language that rivals if not exceeds human language.
The term human exceptionalism - or a bit more provocative the human supremacist mindset - decides that humans are the most special and thus deserve to be treated differently than all the other life on earth. Killing billions of teenagers in an industrialized fashion is ok as long as it's just a cow.
I challenge you reader to ask yourself, is the arbitrary line of humans vs non humans more justified than the equally arbitrary line of white humans vs non white humans?
Treegarden · 3h ago
I agree with you on several levels, what we call “exceptional” is entirely dependent on the metric we choose. Every species excels in its niche, and human exceptionalism is just our own preferred framing. It's fair to say it often functions like supremacism: a belief in our moral or functional superiority over other life forms.
That said, in a world of scarce resources and competition, tribalism and “team-thinking” are not bugs, but features, evolutionary tools for survival. From that lens, human supremacism isn’t a moral claim, but a pragmatic stance: of course we prioritize our own species. We are team human.
As for whether we're destroying the planet, it's a complex picture. I'd recommend False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg, it pushes back against overly apocalyptic assumptions and argues that while climate change is real and serious, we're not necessarily headed for collapse. Doesn't excuse inaction, but does complicate the narrative.
matheusd · 1h ago
> Choosing what traits one considers exceptional, will by definition select what species one considers exceptional.
/Every/ other species that has /ever/ lived will cease to exist (at the latest, in a billion years or so).
Humans are the only ones (so far, anyway) that have any hope of surviving more than that.
That seems pretty exceptional to me :P
Disclaimer: the fact that we're exceptional doesn't mean we don't do dumb things and we shouldn't improve and do better.
Drakim · 49m ago
Are you sure? I'm pretty sure there are types of bacteria that has existed long before humanity existed, and will exist long after humanity is gone.
dgfl · 2h ago
What we’re exceptional at is survival. To the point where as few as 1% of our species even needs to think about making food. Also, citation needed on the complexity of whale songs exceeding the complexity of human language.
But besides, this is not the point. What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks to justify that we’re somehow a “disease” roaming the planet. As if a tapeworm that were to achieve total worldwide domination would stop and think “wait, I shouldn’t reproduce further because other creatures may suffer”. Same story with any other mammal.
The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species. Keeping the environment safe from us is extremely important, but undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species whose only virtue is being less successful at surviving than us is strange. With our own moral codes, no less.
latexr · 51m ago
> What we’re exceptional at is survival.
Don’t worry, we’re correcting that in record time. Though it would have been nice to not destroy so many species along with us.
> To the point where as few as 1% of our species even needs to think about making food.
And the rest would just die, unable to find food, if left alone in the wilderness.
> What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks
The idea of exceptionalism is also human-developed, so as soon as you want to go that route no argument in this conversation matters.
> The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species.
Successful at good things and bad things. Including bad for us. You don’t really see other species developing whole profit industries to knowingly market and sell cancer on sticks, for example.
> undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species
That argument cuts both ways. It’s perfectly fair to say someone with your view is undermining the harm we cause and romanticising our achievements.
> being less successful at surviving
None of us can survive indefinitely under water, or in radiation, or in the vacuum of space. Yet we know of other species who do. Humans are exceptionally frail, considering. After we’re gone, other species will remain. We won’t be so impressive then.
TheOtherHobbes · 1h ago
We're exceptional at survival so far.
The odds of continuing to be exceptional at survival are not looking great.
And compared to species that have been around for multiple geological ages, our survival time barely rates a mention.
The one thing we're truly exceptional at is influencing our own environment. The only creatures to have more of an impact were the cyanobacteria responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event, which literally transformed the Earth's atmosphere.
As for the disease line - we're supposed to be intelligent, and terraforming our home planet to make it more dangerous and less inhabitable when we know and understand we're doing this is not the most convincing proof of that claim.
account42 · 57m ago
Oh please spare me the doomerism. There is no reason to believe that humans will go extinct any time soon, whether you believe climate scare prognoses or not.
And other species haven't been surviving on this planet any longer than us just because they didn't evolve significantly during that time while we did.
latexr · 48m ago
> climate scare prognoses
You do realise people are already dying of climate change, right? Not only directly from heat waves, but other natural disasters caused by the rapidly shifting climate.
smitty1e · 1h ago
> What we’re exceptional at is survival.
We've wandered pretty much the entirety of the planet and made it to the moon. Nuclear weapons.
Controlling the scope of the conversation to exclude the counter-arguments, too, demonstrates the special place afforded humanity by the Creator.
philipallstar · 2h ago
> I challenge you reader to ask yourself, is the arbitrary line of humans vs non humans more justified than the equally arbitrary line of white humans vs non white humans?
I'll take it one step further. The fact that your immune system prioritises you over the life of a single bacterium is no different to the Holocaust. Provocative, but it does make us realise that we're walking gas chambers who should take immunosuppressants immediately.
Voultapher · 1h ago
This is an ethical question and there will be no simple or clear cut answers, as an engineer myself I know that can be frustrating. Personally I project my experience of the world onto other beings - of course that's fraught with issues. I'd give the chance that bacteria experiences complex emotions like suffering and imprisonment in a similar fashion than I do as very low. But a cow, which is a mammal like us and I've seen show complex emotional reactions first hand, I'd rate that chance much higher. So you're right if we take the idea to its extreme its not very useful anymore. But only because an extreme version of the idea seems ridiculous does not preclude the idea from being valuable in moderation. Reducing some likely suffering is better than doing nothing in my book.
themk · 1h ago
This is an odd take. If a bunch of "exceptional" humans start attacking me, I'm going to fight back. That has little to do with how I normally treat others (human or not).
latexr · 1h ago
To be fair, the word “exceptional” doesn’t make a distinction between good or bad. We humans could be exceptionally delusional about ourselves and exceptionally shitty and detrimental to every species including our own.
In case it isn’t clear, I agree with you.
snozolli · 3h ago
the arbitrary line of humans vs non humans
How is that arbitrary? It seems like one of the most clearly non-arbitrary delineations possible.
For what it's worth, IMO, humans have created seed banks and will be the only species to preserve and revive extinct species, so yeah, humans are more important.
Voultapher · 1h ago
It's arbitrary in the sense that the process to arrive at that line is arbitrary and could and has yielded myriads of other lines. In the same sense that skin color is a very clearly measurable trait, and yet the implications derived from this trait are arbitrary and not inherently connected to the trait.
southernplaces7 · 3h ago
What you sound like is a self-indulgent fanatic, overall. Either way, you're wrong about human exceptionalism in that it's evident in most aspects of our existence vs. that of all other species. It's also something that (with better use of our capabilities) could let us not only protect the other species of the earth against disasters that previously would have led to mass extinctions, but also possibly even revive species that have already gone extinct, including many that we ourselves have extinguished.
Worth noting your hypocrisy too here. As a member of the human species who obviously participates in it and its complex technlogical sphere (you are after all using digital tools and the hardware they run on to comment about how terrible we are on HN), you're a direct beneficiery of background industrial processes that themselves kill all kinds of animals and plants every year, while you lecture people on things like slaughtering cows.
Voultapher · 1h ago
Congratulation you discovered the "very useful" argument "You are part of society so you can't criticize it".
dijit · 3h ago
what you say is true, but I think we become a bit too optimistic about our own individual exceptionality.
Many people forget the animals feel emotions very much the same as us, that they act and feel very much like us, and what separates is our ability to work together- and specialise, our individual intelligence is not terribly far away - but we have specialised in education so we’ve optimised our minds to work in a collective society and to specialise in certain trade craft.
we think of animals as being “dumb” and we get surprised when they show signs of intelligence.
- sent from my iPhone, which I can’t build a single component of; using software I can’t write, using electricity I can’t generate, while sitting on a sofa I can’t manufacture in an apartment I can’t build.
moi2388 · 3h ago
As long as you’re not chewing your couch and barking at your phone, I still think you’ve got the dogs beat
latexr · 1h ago
Most people do or are highly susceptible to figuratively bark and fume at their phones. Doomscrolling, getting depressed by looking at lying influencers, being victims of selective arguments and rage bait… Good on dogs for not falling for that, perhaps we could learn from them. Good news is we can: just go play outside, have fun, run, throw a ball. And then turn that into a highly competitive sport, waste money and throw slaves at building stadiums to support a deeply flawed business which pits people against each other based on the colour of their shirt… No! Bad human! Sit. Can’t leave you alone for a minute without you trying to destroy everything.
dijit · 3h ago
Sure, but I did those things too until I was “trained” (socialised).
latexr · 1h ago
We still do. How is arguing on HN, Reddit, Facebook, or any other social network different from barking at our phones? We’re doing it with our fingers instead of our mouths, but otherwise it’s pretty similar.
MonkeyClub · 1h ago
Good boy :)
Being highly programmable is part of our distinction. You can't build any of these things, but you can learn to build all of them.
Your possible pinnacle isn't just not chewing the couch.
Tarq0n · 2h ago
Animals have emotions, but jumping to their qualia being the same as ours seems unjustified.
ben_w · 2h ago
While I would expected higher variance as the evolutionary gap increases, IMO the null hypothesis should be that their qualia are the same space as ours.
We're pre-paradigmatic for qualia, we don't know what structures (brain or otherwise) give rise to it in order to guess what set of qualia can be had by any given system. Until we do, I can't even quantify my expectations on the variance from increased evolutionary distance, I don't even have a quantity to express the variance of.
themk · 2h ago
I feel like defaulting to not having the same is unjustified. Given that we have so much in common.
bryanrasmussen · 2h ago
in short human exceptionalism became clear about 300 years ago, and has been becoming more clear with each succeeding year?
If so that is a relatively recent demonstration of exceptionalism. Given the long timeline of human existence it could even be argued that it is accidental that this proof of exceptionalism developed among the humans and not among some other species.
I actually believe in human exceptionalism, in that many of the features spread around various species are all found highly developed in the human, but really that is an argument for all species exceptionalism. There are very few species that do not some collection of interlocked traits that make them exceptional in some way, it just happens that our exceptionalism is one that allows for triumphalism at the same time.
darkwater · 4h ago
Yes, but it also just could be that we are at a more "advanced" stage but given enough time some other species has the potential to do the same.
tovej · 1h ago
The human biomass and its byproducts do grow at an exceptional rate, that's true, we are exceptional. But being exceptional in one way should not be mistaken for being supreme or better, which I feel like a lot of commenters are suggesting.
This growth is clearly unsustainable, and the bubble, so to speak, will eventually pop. Other species have managed to survive for an exceptional time, e.g. the horseshoe crab, or most species of moss. There are species whose individuals might be older than human civilization, like the glass sponge. There are species that will survive in extreme conditions where humans would perish, such as tardigrades. Are we better than them?
Another point: evolution has caused living beings to reach equilibria where the whole system can thrive, where each species has a role. These systems have reached self-regulating states, where e.g. an overpopulation of predators will be cut down due to an absence of prey during the next generation.
Is human society better than that? Because humans are destroying this balance through unprecedented growth, which these systems cannot respond to. Our growth is not only unsustainable from the point of view of human survival, but unsustainable from the point of view of the earths ecological systems as a whole.
bmitc · 3h ago
All of that is predicated on our technology, which does not make us inherently exceptional.
account42 · 50m ago
Where do you think that technology came from then?
self_awareness · 4h ago
All you've written is important only to humans. Other species don't give an F about MRI. So if you value your humanism based on traits important only to humans, then it's about egocentrism, not exceptionalism.
account42 · 48m ago
You don't think other species would value the ability to diagnose and treat internal body conditions if they could conceive of the concept?
joduplessis · 5h ago
These sorts of (sorry to say, but) dumb articles (+ books) I don't expect to see on HN.
martindbp · 4h ago
Humans bad. I think it's an ideological off-shoot from environmentalism. If you recognize that humans are the cause of environmental issues then we are the problem. If we are the problem, then we should try to discredit our specialness so that we can motivate there being fewer of us (anti-natalism).
ragazzina · 2h ago
It's the opposite. "Human special" is an ideological off-shoot from religion and fear of dying. From a scientific point of view, humans are not special in any sense. We are a primate species that evolved through natural selection, just like every other organism.
Mistletoe · 1h ago
I assure you if aliens visited or looked for earth they would consider humans exceptional.
theonething · 4h ago
It's such a tired trope.
plastic-enjoyer · 3h ago
You see this stuff everyday here in the form of AI hype. The whole ideology behind the powers that drive AI is that humans are dumb and inefficient and need to be replaced by artificial intelligence as the next stage in human evolution.
lan321 · 51m ago
That's kind of the negative take. The positive take is that work should be automated whenever possible. The endgame is having everyone enjoy life and only working when we want the 120-inch instead of the 90-inch TV, or enjoy working.
It's not that simple due to power imbalances with automation and the eternal pursuit of better living standards, but that's kind of the goal. The world chooching away by itself like a Factorio map and people purely consuming.
fleischhauf · 2h ago
from an intelligence perspective the human brain is ultra efficient
mettamage · 3h ago
We would be able to challenge human exceptionalism way more effectively if we could fully decode the languages of other species. The first thing we'd notice is:
1. language features we have and they don't understand
2. language features we both have
3. language features they have and we don't understand
Probably in that order.
Then it's just a question of gathering a couple of different species that are seemingly intelligent. Such as: corvids, octopuses, whales, etc. And see if the species can be reasoned with. If so, then you can set up schools where you can train them on human things and vice versa. Eventually you can form interspecies groups and really test the hell out of things.
Doing it that way will really challenge human exceptionalism, as well as the exceptionalism of that particular species.
I know it sounds a bit far off, but I figured that we might be able to get there with AI. I mean, we're getting better and better at giving machines tons and tons of data, and it somehow makes some sense of it.
So far, I think it's not necessarily the human species that is exceptional. It's the revolutionary periods it went through in order to become more exceptional hunters, so we could dominate and control the world in the way we want to. Things such as: discovery of fire, agriculture (+ creating defensive settlements) and antibiotics. We couldn't kill bacteria for a long time. We still have trouble with viruses and are getting into trouble with bacteria again. Could dolphins or whales have done it too, if they were land creatures?
account42 · 42m ago
Ok, but why do you expect us humans to be the ones to do all of this study if you don't already recognize that we are exceptional?
317070 · 3h ago
It doesn't help that the main conclusion of over 100 years of this kind of animal language research, is that -- and I quote -- "animals don't have language" [0]
This is the conclusion of linguists. Linguists’ definition of language necessarily includes a productive grammar. It’s not enough to be capable of uttering from a long list of sounds or signs. To have language we must be able to regularly construct novel and unique communications composed of strings of symbols governed by grammatical rules.
All animals that we’ve studied — including great apes we’ve attempted to teach sign language — have so far failed to demonstrate the acquisition of grammar. This means the number of unique communications they can express is exactly limited to the number of utterances they know.
mettamage · 3h ago
The most charitable viewpoint I can give is: that can be true or that can be false. Time will tell.
If it's true, then we are exceptional but how can we truly know at this point? I mean, Michael the Gorilla told us about what poachers did [1].
If it isn't true, then it shows how in the prevailing consensus we are still too arrogant. In that case, we don't understand that well what sets us apart and what doesn't.
It will probably be a nuanced discussion either way regardless of what the truth is probably due to the definition of language. But in this particular case I'd want to characterize it: some way of communicating that is about as effective as whatever it is that humans do, when they speak out loud.
Also, when you look nowadays at some of the dog/cat videos and they press those buttons, they clearly are capable of communicating something. I remember one dog inventing a word for ambulance given the words he/she knew. Ah, found it! [2]
There's clearly a lot more research to be done here. I hope AI can accelerate it. I know AI is a tricky business, but one can hope.
I wonder if part of the nuance here is understanding what language and communication are, respectively. I am definitely not in my own lame here, but at first glance of Great Ape Language Wikipedia article and some comments, it seems like that it is not addressed? My admittedly infantile assessment is this; all language is communication, but not all communication is language.
For example, I can issue a warning to another human by using the words "step back or there will be a problem." Assuming they also speak English, my structured sentence conveys the warning in a clear way.
My neighbor's dog can also issue a similar warning by growling as I move into it's space. It's not using any sort of structure or specific messaging, rather a universally understood sound that conveys some sort of feeling related to caution and fear.
I use the "warning" example since fear/caution are extremely powerful and seem easiest to convey across species. Again, not adept at this, so my example might be dumb. I'm super interested in understanding more about this, though.
Not a good book by any means, but there has been surprisingly little written about people who go from having no language to their first language post-puberty and are asked about their experience of living without language.
Language is extremely important to living as a human, even outside of social relations. Memories don't form well, it is really hard to keep events in order of time, it is hard to order places in space and not get lost. It's even hard to remember people.
It's an engineer take, of course, but I like understanding systems by what happens when they break.
0xEF · 43m ago
> I like understanding systems by what happens when they break.
Same, though I am not an engineer, more a denizen of the adjacent service and repair field, but I have been dabbling in development, lately. Fixing broken things because I grew up in a household that was too poor to think of anything as disposable is how I learned probably 90% of what I know, providing me with an understanding of the fragility of systems and the importance of anticipating maintenance the design process.
I see the forward was written by Oliver Sacks, whom I've read and enjoyed in the past, but from more of a pop-Psychology angle. But what you say about language being related to how we think of time and forming memories strikes me. I once heard that Indigenous Australian cultures had a different concept of time than Western culture does, passed down through the language used in their folklore. I posit that we can some evidence for proof of this happening in Western cultures currently with the way that we talk about decades.
With the advent of the year 2000, we lost the ability colloquially refer to the decade we were presently in. Prior to that, we were living in "the 90's," perhaps being born in "the 60's, 70's or 80's." Each of those decades even evokes a certain composite memory of the styles of clothing people may have worn, or the music we listened to, popular automobiles, etc. The character of the decade coalesced around the colloquial name.
2000 hit, and we didn't know how to refer to it. Some folks tried to make the "aughts" happen, which felt awkward or "the 2000's" which seemed to generalized and not specific enough to be referring to the current decade. Then 2010's, which we didn't really even bother calling "the Teens" as I recall, because by then we'd fallen out of the habit of referring to time by decade.
The result is seeing a movie from 2005 and feeling like that was so very long ago, versus when I watched Star Wars for the billionth time in 1997 and the 20 years that had passed since it's release didn't seem like much time at all; only two decades.
Anyway, getting a ramble on to show agreement, but you get the idea. I might have to look for some science fiction authors who have tried to tackle this, see what sort of thought-experiments we can do when we strip language as we know it from the development of the human mind.
xg15 · 1h ago
Agreeing with your distinction. Also, you could "issue the same warning" by growling like the dog, too - or by waving your hands frantically or shaking your head, etc. This would absolutely convey the same information and count as an act of communication, but we wouldn't describe it as using language.
But the information in that example is also relatively simple. There are other kinds of information that are much harder to convey without language, talking about future or hypothetical events or abstract concepts, etc.
There seems to be evidence that dolphins use sounds to identify each other and to coordinate tasks that involve a number if animals. I think this is much more interesting and strongly hints that something language-like is going on there.
Interesting reads, thank you. You're right in that the complexity of the information matters when it comes to how it can be communicated, although I also think of the bit, as in the smallest unit of information, and how we have accomplished communicating some wildly complex information by cramming a billion transistors into microchips. Still blows my mind while it seems like it's become so commonplace for most people.
When I first learned about the dolphin "names" whistle, I thought of the way dogs supposedly identify each other by scent in the way that there's subtle differences that our olfactory system is not able to pick up on, but theirs is. In both cases, it begs me to ask what that means for consciousness. If the dolphins and dogs can assign individual labels to each other and recognize those labels when used later on, does that imply they form some sort of a personal identity? I also have to wonder how language, as opposed to other forms of communication, promotes the birth of that identity, but so much of this is over my head in a way that leaves me grasping at how to, well, communicate my own questions so that I receive answers that promote better understanding of the phenomenon and its challenges.
CMCDragonkai · 1h ago
Is language still unique to humans given the rise of LLMs lol!
gizajob · 1h ago
Peter Singer was writing popular ethics books concerning exactly this kind of specieism (or speciesism) some 50 years ago.
Let me rescue it, then. It's a valid point that other species don't have literature. It shows that they don't have ideas. If they did, it would be really obviously evident. Instead we have to look hard for traces of memetic transmission of idea-like behaviours involving sticks and leaves, and rocks and shells, and calls and signs. These memes don't go anywhere, and the animals aren't creative. If they develop, it's by accident.
dang · 5h ago
That's better, yes! Although it makes me want to cite this other guideline:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
- because I think the article already addresses this "other species don't have literature" argument, though it doesn't talk about literature specifically.
card_zero · 5h ago
But the article, or the book it's promoting, isn't making any very strong point. I checked. It's saying that animals have great senses, and some of them can see Saturn's rings on a clear night. But they don't know or care that they're seeing Saturn's rings, and they don't have telescopes anyway, and we do and can see the rings much better if we want to, because we do want to, because we think about the things that we can see. So, I don't know, maybe there's nothing to talk about here except sidetracks.
self_awareness · 4h ago
Valuing other species based on human traits is misleading. Literature doesn't mean anything to animals, it's not applicable. Same thing as the ability to glow isn't applicable to humans, but is for bacteria. Ideas are a human-only trait. Trying to argument that animals don't have ideas, therefore they are worse, is like saying that humans are worse than dolphins because humans can't breathe under water.
If you value animals based on human traits, humans will always be better. Because you take your own good traits which other species don't have. But that's not the point. Animals have animal traits. For example, low factor of self-extinction is something we should be learning from from animals. Acceptance of death. Limiting the use of our own resources. Taking these aspects into consideration make humans a stupid race that destroy the environment they live in.
bmitc · 3h ago
> It shows that they don't have ideas.
That is false. If you gave a whale five digits and an opposable thumb and have them live on land, you'd strongly reconsider that. Even without this, it doesn't take very long when studying animals to see that they have a plethora of ideas. Orcas demonstrate strong examples of this all the time.
And how can you possibly claim that you know any animal's internal dialogue?
> If they develop, it's by accident.
Human evolution is no different.
dgfl · 2h ago
Apes do have opposable thumbs. They still don’t really engage in any intellectual activity that we can recognize beyond basic communication. They probably have an internal dialogue, but their curiosity and capacity for communication stops at immediate needs like hunger and danger.
roarcher · 2h ago
The article's premise is "some animals are better at specific things than humans, therefore humans are not exceptional", or stated differently, "humans are only exceptional if they're the best at literally everything".
It seems obvious to me that this is a fairly useless definition of "exceptional" that would not be accepted in any context other than an ideological one.
Yes, HN is better without shallow dismissals. Perhaps we should extend that idea to shallow articles as well.
miramba · 40m ago
One man’s snarkyness is another man‘s critical and teaching comment.
keiferski · 6h ago
I understand the popularity of these kinds of theses, and I definitely support better treatment of animals.
But in general I think this is also reflective of a negative trend in Western culture, which is something like a collapse of the “divine potential” of man. I don’t mean it in the literal religious sense (although that’s where it came from), but in the sense that many people increasingly see themselves as just evolved apes, not as creative beings with limitless potential. There are many reasons for this cultural trend (evolution, secularism and the collapse of religion as a foundation for our idea of self), and so on.
The key, to me, is in understanding that this “evolved ape” narrative is a fundamentally a narrative. What’s needed is a new story that factors in these scientifically true facts of evolution etc. but isn’t so flat and unimaginative in placing them into an arch-narrative.
It probably needs to start with a shift from essence to process as foundational. In other words, the deflationary account of humanity sees itself as “just an evolved ape” because we categorize things as if they were unchanging, static entities. A shift to a process-oriented idea means that value can grow in complexity and develop over time, and so therefore there isn’t anything deflationary about being descended from microscopic organisms.
It reminds me of philosopher Feuerbach’s ideas on God, which are essentially that humanity has externalized its own qualities and greatness into an abstract being, and become estranged from our own potential.
exe34 · 5h ago
Have you read any Carl Sagan? I'd say most of his texts put humans on a pedestal of responsibility, rather than admiration.
card_zero · 5h ago
The "pale blue dot" is really irritating too. He thinks we need to learn a lesson in humility because we're physically small. Makes no sense.
HappMacDonald · 3h ago
No, it's about putting things into perspective.
We are accustomed to seeing our lives and the power of dictators and the influence of tiktok content creators etc as these enormous, reality-defining things. And then we look up at the sky — with extreme rarity thanks to light pollution — and often perceive little more than a tableau as if looking at an aesthetically pleasing poster in a waiting room.
Pale blue dot flips that on its head as it should, clarifying that everything we normally view as so important does not have to be confused with the fundamental nature of reality. If there is something wrong with our environment, the fact that it is small in a grander scheme means that we have a better chance of changing it than we might have otherwise supposed.
Tolkien offers a similar quote I'd like to offer to compare and contrast with Sagan:
```
Frodo sighed and was asleep almost before the words were spoken. Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.
```
qwerty59 · 5h ago
Well put
ceejayoz · 5h ago
> many people increasingly see themselves as just evolved apes, not as creative beings with limitless potential
I mean, we are. Other apes also have creative potential. I'm probably better at it than most of them are, but they're probably better than me at climbing trees.
account42 · 13m ago
Yet you can cut down those trees to build housing more suited to you or plant new ones which requires long-term planning. If climbing trees was important to us we'd build machines to do it better than any ape that ever lived. That's human exceptionalism. It's why humans have conquered the globe while apes live in the space we let them.
keiferski · 4h ago
You missed my point, entirely…
Humans are considered “evolved apes” because of our (culturally defined) system of categorization. Humans are just as related to every other species (itself a word that implies a static entity that actually isn’t) in our ancestry. It also isn’t really accurate to claim a microorganism ancestor of humans is some kind of proto-ape, or proto-human.
The point is that process is more accurate as a label. The choice of focusing on apes is a cultural one, not something inherent to the structure of biological reality.
ceejayoz · 4h ago
> Humans are just as related to every other species…
This is just silly. We are significantly more related to chimps than fungi. Humans are scientifically classified as apes, because we share close similarities in characteristics and very recent evolutionary history.
NotGMan · 1h ago
Perhaps the author would do best to stop using all of this human exceptionalist inventions such as sevage, medicine and food production and she should go live out in the forest in a hut made from dirt.
Imagine my tax money is paying for this take. Academia is a scam.
foxglacier · 3h ago
I only got half way through but it didn't get to our general purpose intelligence which trumps pretty much everything else. Most of the greater capabilities other species have, humans can do better using technology which we made for our own use so it's kind of an extension of ourselves.
Even in pre-historic times, humans were herding prey to kill using earthworks, for example. We can also live in cold climates by wearing clothes and building houses and fires, as well as hot climates by not doing those things. We can build defenses against predators. We've been using technology to enhance our abilities since forever. That's exceptional. No ape poking a stick into a hole comes anywhere close to that.
I don't care that eagles can see better than humans. A camera can see better than an eagle and a plane can fly better than an eagle but we don't say that cameras or planes are anywhere close to being comparable to human life. Those abilities are easy ones. Hell even a rock can live longer than a sea sponge, and humans are obviously exceptional compared to rocks.
No comments yet
naveensundar · 6h ago
> Eagles see a lot better than we do. Sea sponges live much longer. Dolphins are really good at echolocation; people are generally really bad at it. And yet we keep proclaiming how special we are. As Webb puts it, “Hamlet got one thing right: we’re a piece of work.
Oh yeah? But which one of those species is writing a book challenging their own exceptionalism.
self_awareness · 4h ago
Well imagine a tiger saying: "humans? lol, how can I take them seriously when they have so short claws?". You just did the same.
booleandilemma · 2h ago
But we are exceptional. No other animal has developed technology to leave earth. No other animal would have the hope of defending our planet against a threat from space, like an asteroid. We need to stop denying our exceptionalism and take responsibility for it.
xeonmc · 6h ago
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
No comments yet
bee_rider · 6h ago
Humanity is obviously an exceptional species. We’ve launched 100% of the spaceships. Only 4% of the mammals on Earth are not either humans, or one of our domesticated species. We’re changing the climate.
I get the noble sentiment of wanting re-contextualize things to be less human-centric. But, for better or worse, we’ve taken control of the planet. It is our responsibility to take care of it. And if we do manage to, we’ll do so because the alternative is human suffering or extinction.
N_Lens · 7h ago
Exceptionalism seems to be a phase in our developmental journey, and a feature of certain stages of conscious development. For example, in Chinese, China is called “the middle kingdom”, with the characters 中国. You can see that the first character is “middle” (box with a line through the middle). This is also an example of exceptionalism because the underlying meaning is that China is the Central kingdom, much like people believed Earth to be the center of the Universe in the past.
Similarly, the American philosophy of “manifest destiny” (ugly as it is), also carries that same scent of exceptionalism. And so does the “divine right of Kings” from our history. Modern prosperity gospel exploits those same flaws in our cognitive make-up.
In contemporary times we see these philosophies as egocentric and perhaps outdated. But just like children pass through very egocentric stages (well some never grow past that), so too does collective human consciousness evolve past exceptionalism and towards maturity and humility.
rz2k · 6h ago
I often read the top comment to Hacker News articles believing they are unlikely to be a heuristic response. That means reading each sentence, digesting it, and thinking through everything carefully.
I'm confused by this one, because I am missing original thought. It sounds more like a collection of response patterns related to how various targets are supposed to be assessed in value.
satvikpendem · 5h ago
HN's comment sorting algorithm means the top comment changes often, so I don't think it's worth it to do as your first paragraph states.
LoganDark · 5h ago
> I'm confused by this one, because I am missing original thought. It sounds more like a collection of response patterns related to how various targets are supposed to be assessed in value.
I feel like the comment is meant to propose that exceptionalism is like a collective phase, by pointing out a bunch of places where exceptionalism has appeared historically.
card_zero · 6h ago
Those are all examples of people looking down on other people.
To describe humans as exceptionalist, you must claim "animals are people too", but you didn't say that part. Or perhaps "rocks are people too", that would also work, but we don't tend to anthropomorphise rocks because they don't have faces. Or maybe "LLMs are people too". Whatever the claim is, it's an extraordinary claim, and yet you've chosen to present it in the form of a patronising telling off as if it was a foregone conclusion.
frotaur · 14m ago
There is a philosophical/probabilistic argument that explains why 'rocks are people too' holds less weight than 'pigs are people too'.
We cannot be sure pigs feel anything or have qualia, but from comparison to humans, and let's say, human babies, they at least exhibit the exteriorities of e.g. feeling pain, fear. So, I would assign a non-negligible probability that they do, in fact, have qualia and can feel pain.
Scale that up to a billion farmed pigs, the expected suffering inflicted is huge. Now yes, 'Pascal's wager' and so on, but for rocks, the argument does not work as well.
If you claim for example that rocks suffer when you walk on them, I can claim an equally substantiatex claim that rocks feel sublime extasy as you walk on them. As it stands, we don't have much reason to believe one more than the other, and they cancel out.
All that to say that you don't need to be certain that 'pigs are people too' for its consequences to be seriously considered. And each argument for why you consider pigs to not be people, ask yourself whether it is equally applicable to human babies.
Geee · 3h ago
Religions show this anthropocentrism extremely well. In Abrahamic religions there's supposedly God whose sole purpose of existence is to be there to guide and save humans. How does that make sense? Doesn't he have anything else to do? Why would he care?
We are like vibe code to him. I think it's quite narcissist to think that there's an omnipotent being who cares about us, and values us as the next best thing since himself, worth of saving after death. Which is a ridiculous, but nevertheless quite a natural delusion for humans, because we are human.
I'm just saying that religions would be more realistic if God had some other purpose and humans are a side effect of that, or maybe just a hobby. The anthropocentric perspective is a dead giveaway that God is a human hallucination.
Espressosaurus · 7h ago
It’s a nice idea, but evidence needed. We’re still plains apes underneath it all, and that has implications about our ability to plan long term, cooperate in groups larger than 1000, and especially cooperate with groups that are not part of what we perceive to be our in-group.
As witnessed by worldwide developments over the last 15 years.
Or all of human history if I’m taking a broader scope.
ljlolel · 7h ago
Maybe after AI there won’t be need more than 1000 people on the planet
echelon · 6h ago
Which 1000? Who chooses? (Not us, I assume.)
I suppose this is the real answer to why we won't need UBI. The oligarchs will just wait in their bunkers while the world's population is eradicated by death bots.
That seems the more likely outcome to me than a post-scarcity utopia.
exe34 · 5h ago
I think crashing world economy and starvation will do it just fine.
I know people point out that Malthusian predictions have always failed so far - but the reason we got to >7G humans is that an enormous amount of science and engineering went into making things better, a large part of which was spearheaded by the US because world peace and prosperity was in the interests of millionaires and billionaires. Now they've decided this isn't in their interest anymore, so I worry that the trend in scientific progress that got us here will be more like the tide - we're now flapping our fins on the beach and the water is receding.
dingnuts · 7h ago
ok settle down there Stalin
ljlolel · 7h ago
… As in people are choosing not to have kids
somenameforme · 6h ago
This isn't how things work. Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely. So when certain groups stop having children, all they do is remove themselves from the gene pool while maximizing the 'genetic share' of those having many children whose children will also disproportionately often do similarly.
This is why many assumptions about the future are simply incorrect. For instance people think humanity will become more secular because it has through most of our lifetimes so surely that trend must continue on into the future? But secularity is inversely correlated with fertility. So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
It's also why the concept of us reaching a 'max population' is rather silly. We will reach a point where the population begins to decline due to certain groups removing themselves from the gene pool, but as the other groups continue to reproduce and produce children who, in turn, reproduce, that population will stabilize and then eventually go up, up, and away again. In other words it's just a local max.
card_zero · 5h ago
You don't inherit secularity. I mean you do, but children copying their parents is not the only way ideas spread. Otherwise secularity would never have spread in the first place.
(That's if we accept that it makes people disinclined to spawn offspring, and that this was always the case and never changes.)
somenameforme · 5h ago
Of course it's not the only way ideas spread but it is the most relevant. Parents' religion (and many other values) are, by a very wide margin, the most predictive traits for determining what those traits will be in their children.
This is one (of many) reason why having children is so rewarding. The idea of 'transferring ones consciousness' into something is nonsense - at best you die and then have a chatbot that does a questionable imitation of you. But with children you directly transfer many of your genetic and physical/mental characteristics, and you can then instill your environmental characteristics into them. It's about as close as you can realistically get to 'transferring your consciousness.'
Interestingly this, like many things, also only becomes even more true as we age. Depending on your age, you might find yourself having more similarities with your own parents than you might care to acknowledge, depending on your relationship with them.
card_zero · 5h ago
It's not the most relevant. The enlightenment spread secularity. Books spread secularity. Childless hermits can write those. Come to think of it, religions spread through childless hermits writing books, too.
somenameforme · 5h ago
Yes, it literally is, and this isn't ambiguous. You can find a zillion studies contrasting the religion of people to those of their parents. For instance here [1] is an overview from Pew. 84% of adults who were raised in e.g. a completely Protestant home are Protestants themselves. That strong of a correlation simply doesn't leave room anything else to significantly matter.
If you then isolate that sample to situations where both parents were Protestant and also talked about religion a alot, 89% of their children ended up as Protestant! For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
Effects have mechanisms. Not everything works by correlation. In fact nothing really works by correlation. Things work by causes. Indoctrination, that's pretty effective, but so are heresy and sedition, and revolutions in thought, and sea-changes. Pew probably isn't monitoring those.
somenameforme · 3h ago
People leaving some faith would obviously be the inverse of those who stay with it. So for Protestantism, it'd be 16%, or 11% for highly religious households. In deciding to look up the numbers for Islam, it's somewhat unsurprisingly only 1%. [1]
---
"Based on survey data collected in 117 countries and territories from 2008 to 2024, we estimate that about 1% of people who are raised Muslim leave the faith. This loss is offset by a comparable influx of people joining Islam."
---
Wiki has a nice table on Islam in particular here. [2] They broke 10% of the world population sometime around 1820. They broke 20% 170 years later, around 1990. And they're expected to to break 30% about 60 years after that, by 2050. We're trending towards a majority Muslim world, simply because of fertility, all the while people not having children somehow think people in the future will somehow share their values.
A 84% reproductive cultural "replacement rate" means that in order to maintain the population protestants need to have an average of 2.38 (2/0.84) kids to have the same number of protestants in the next generation.
The real number is actually much higher than that because what you really need is to measure how many children of two protestants also marry a protestant. This percentage is lower than (pew estimates this as 75%) so now you need to have have an average of 3.17 (2/(.83*.75) kids just to maintain the protestant population.
These are, of course, woefully inaccurate numbers and exclude all kinds of factors. The reason I present them isn't to try to estimate what the numbers are but to make it clear that "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely" is not simply not anywhere near true. You just can't accurately estimate the growth rate of a cultural identity by looking at the birth rate.
> For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
That's not what the science says. The rates of transmission are only slightly higher and definitely don't approach 100%.
These transmission rates also aren't "natural laws" but contigent effects that are driven by any of a number of different cultural, religious, economic and legal factors.
Even if a minority cultural identity does manage to grow through reproductive practices, it can still be fragmented by schisms (especially common with religious identity) or out competed by memetically superior identities that pulls converters from a wide range of cultural identities.
Your view is here is incredibly simplistic and ignores all kinds of basic evidence from throughout history.
somenameforme · 3h ago
I'm enjoying these conversations but kind of having really similar conversations in a number of different threads - so let me link to this [1] as a response, and would prefer if we could continue there. One of the few times I miss the old school non-threaded forums!
Anyhow, that link gets into the exact rate of transfer for Islam, the consequent growth over time, and so on. I think you'll be surprised!
any idea how secularism started at all? by your logic, it should have been snuffed out before we even knew about it.
somenameforme · 4h ago
Largely by a mixture of hypocrisy and commercialism. Catholicism has struggled mightily with this issue throughout its history, and is a big part of the reason that Protestantism even exists today. Get it, "Protest"ant? When people claim to hold values, and then act in apparent contradiction of those same values, it doesn't exactly inspire one to themselves adopt those values.
And that's been a major player, especially in the West, for the past ~70 years where you have politicians wearing religion on the coat of their sleeve, and then going and killing hundreds of thousands of people over what is overtly about oil, economics, and geopolitics - lofty moralistic rhetoric notwithstanding. Then you have things like the pedophilia scandals high within the Catholic hierarchy, made even worse by coverups.
This is probably why religions like fundamental Islam, Haredi Judaism, and so on are even more heritable. Those who follow such religions tend to very much live their proclaimed values. For instance I really don't agree with people like Khabib Nurmagomedov on many of his values, yet he lives those values, even when they hurt him in the short-run, and I find it very inspirational. I can only imagine how young (or older for that matter) Muslims see him. Integrity in life is just so important.
exe34 · 2h ago
is secularism a result of hypocrisy in the flock in this scenario?
exe34 · 5h ago
or indeed men in robes frothing at the mouth about men in dresses.
wing-_-nuts · 5h ago
While I'm not sure I agree with you entirely, I will say that any culture that fails at reproducing itself will ultimately be replaced by one that does.
The sad thing is that culture will probably have less concern over individual rights and freedoms, and much more likely to be collectivist and religious.
Not sure I like where this is headed, honestly, but I hope I'm not around to see the fall of liberal democracy.
dragonwriter · 4h ago
> While I'm not sure I agree with you entirely, I will say that any culture that fails at reproducing itself will ultimately be replaced by one that does.
You make the same mistake as GP in confusing memetics with genetics. Cultures survive by ideas and behaviors spreading, not by genes. People can spread ideas without having children, and people can have lots of children and have their ideas die out.
dragonwriter · 4h ago
> This is why many assumptions about the future are simply incorrect. For instance people think humanity will become more secular because it has through most of our lifetimes so surely that trend must continue on into the future? But secularity is inversely correlated with fertility.
And has been for the many generations over which humanity has gotten more secular.
> So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
But for generations that hasn’t been what has happened, despite the correlation between religiosity and fertility not being a novel thing that developed this century? Why could that be? Because religion isn't a genetic trait. Fertility of populations and popularity of ideas and practices have some interaction, sure, but not in the simplistic “spread of a genetic lineage determines spread of culture and ideology” way you are trying to push here.
somenameforme · 4h ago
Two things I'd say here. First, is that the 'hereditary' nature of religion is even stronger than I assumed. 84% of adults (quite relevant as we skip the rebellious teen years) who were raised in e.g. a completely Protestant home are Protestants themselves. That bumps up to 89% in households where their parents regularly talked about religion! The relationship is likely even stronger for more 'rigorous' religions such Islam or Haredi Judaism, religions which also correlate extremely strongly with fertility.
The second thing is that you're likely dramatically overestimating the secular population. Gallup has been polling people on religion since 1948. Here [1] are those data. As recently as 2004, the percent of people with no religion was in the single digits, so the overall relevance was low. And the inverse correlation between secularity and fertility is also quite new driven by a rather large number of new factors - antagonistic attitude towards gender roles, the embrace of non-marital sex largely enabled by the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, and so on. So in general, we're entering into relatively uncharted waters, but it's not hard to see what lies ahead as consequences of fertility decisions lag behind those decisions themselves by ~60 years.
Thats a nice summary of what I belive the "great filter" is as far as the fermi paradox.
energy123 · 7h ago
We are a nasty, self-centered species on a biological level. You can patch that with prosperity and culture, but these things are impermanent and subject to regression, so it's not a durable solution. The only durable solution is altering the biology, but that itself is not without significant risk.
armchairhacker · 6h ago
Do you consider yourself nasty and self-centered? Or do you think you're particularly nice, and "we...species" is referencing other people?
Or just say "some people are still nasty and self-centered, although others have at least have decency to care for others after their own needs are satisfied".
HKH2 · 6h ago
I don't agree with the OP, but the OP did say 'on a biological level'. I don't think the OP exists purely on a biological level.
Root_Denied · 6h ago
It's possible to believe that humans, as a species, in aggregate, are nasty and self-centered, all while maintaining that individuals can stray from that trendline. There's evidence for this in studies on mob mentality (not just in humans too, but any social animal group) that point to there being an inflection point where either the number of people or the circumstances (or a combination of both) pushes the group to act in predictable - and often nasty - ways.
"a person is smart... people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- Tommy Lee Jones as "K" in MIB
keiferski · 6h ago
This is such a useful line, and I think about it all the time. It’s amazing that it came from a blockbuster alien movie.
energy123 · 5h ago
I consider my intrinsic nature to be that, yes, with contextual constraints like culture and sufficient food preventing that nature from acting in the world. And this is just an observation and a description, it's not a moral judgement. It's how it is.
HKH2 · 6h ago
Maybe we're just not good at working in big groups (Dunbar's number) and we need a legal system as a result.
foxglacier · 3h ago
Compared to what other species? Basically all of them eat each other. Many of them kill their own babies, kill other members of their species who're a competition threat, kill whatever weaker animals they can, etc. I've never heard of another species being altruistic simply for the unselfish welfare of members of other species.
ljlolel · 7h ago
Biology works itself out
aw1621107 · 6h ago
Not necessarily, depending on how broad a view of "biology" you're talking. For example, take the many, many, many species that have gone extinct over time. Their biology sure didn't seem to have "work[ed] itself out".
ljlolel · 6h ago
No more reason to care for a species than for an individual sacrificing itself for the group population
xeonmc · 6h ago
Is the ability to propagate culture part of our biology?
russelldjimmy · 7h ago
Thanks for sharing this perspective. It’s given me something to think about.
card_zero · 6h ago
Specify what.
nis0s · 7h ago
As noted in the article, this thesis isn’t exactly new. Human reasoning is what ultimately makes humans exceptional—they both prod consciousness in themselves and other beings. The point that we’ve underestimated the cognitive complexity of other animals is an important one. No other animal is capable of going beyond the confines of this planet, and the fact that only humans can enable such thing is quite exceptional.
ljlolel · 7h ago
When we go to space we will absolutely take fruiting plants with us. Are we just the legs and reproductive organs of the plants?
breckenedge · 7h ago
We’re just meat tubes for microbe mobility.
HKH2 · 6h ago
Controlled by our RNA overlords.
nis0s · 6h ago
Sure, and then we’ll change any aspect about that fruit or plant to suit our needs in a new environment. Co-evolution and parasitic evolution is a pretty cool thing itself.
ljlolel · 6h ago
We are a cell in the system
ghssds · 7h ago
Maybe someday we'll be the reproductive organs of the biosphere as a whole, giving birth to other biospheres on another planets.
dvrj101 · 7h ago
we might as well take a cat, are we still serving goddess Bastet ?
Or we're just the cells of cultures, or religions, or corporations, or governments, or the ecosystem consisting of all biological life, or the universe.
Or each of us is the more-structurally-defined society or construction of a group of cells, or DNA, or molecules.
goatlover · 6h ago
What function does the word "just" serve in these kinds of statements? Humans are "just" collections of atoms. So is all other ordinary matter, but what does that mean? Humans are "just" colony of cells. So is all other multi-cellular life, but what is the significance? Everything is "just" excited fields waving or strings vibrating, but again, what does that tell us above some fundamental level?
armchairhacker · 6h ago
Unfortunately "just" is filler, I try to be concise but wasn't there. In fact it's worse, by "or" I really mean "and/or"; in a way, we're simultaneously the cells of cultures and religions and etc.
The point is that we typically think of humans as "conscious" and "alive", but consciousness isn't physical; whether a human is conscious or a "ghost in the shell" makes no difference to the universe. In theory, a cell or ecosystem could also be "conscious", "sensing" and "thinking", since it also makes no difference. Furthermore, although its sensations and thoughts would be much different than any human's, they aren't completely unimaginable.
For example, an ecosystem reacts to changes, experiments, and adapts via evolution (and cells react to things and display some level of sentience). Thus, evolution can be considered a form of thinking: like how we form and execute ideas to survive and prosper, an ecosystem forms and creates species to increase the coverage of life over the planet.
card_zero · 4h ago
Evolution creates knowledge, but it certainly doesn't cogitate, otherwise it would design things rationally and with purpose. Instead we get eyes that filter light through their own nerve circuitry, and lots of side effects and happy accidents, and millions of kinds of beetle, and no wheels.
goatlover · 6h ago
The robotic ships we send out aren't. I never understand that need to deny that in certain ways (but not other ways), humans are exceptionally different from all other life on this planet. Which results in sophisticated, world-altering, space-exploring technologies. For better or worse. And it's what we look for most in the stars. To detect not just alien life, but technological civilizations.
somenameforme · 6h ago
It's not reasoning that makes humans exceptional. Reasoning without execution is completely irrelevant. Humans are exceptional because of what we do. For instance we've managed to use our skill sets to do things like put a man on the Moon.
And in fact this sort of achievement will be critically necessary for the survival of any species. Earth has had numerous mass extinction events, and we're well overdue for another one. And on a long enough time frame, even the Sun itself will eventually engulf the Earth. The only way to 'win' this game is technology and expansion outward into the cosmos.
And it may well be that that elephant beaten into a parlor trick of painting from the article (seriously, don't look up how elephants are 'trained'), is brought along so that its species may too eventually continue to persist into the future, thanks to humanity.
glial · 6h ago
> No other animal is capable of going beyond the confines of this planet, and the fact that only humans can enable such thing is quite exceptional.
One thing humans seem to be uniquely good at is picking goalposts that separate us from other species.
y-curious · 6h ago
He/she says as they type on a keyboard to post on the internet using electricity they pay for with currency :P
I would say very complex tools are one way to differentiate ourselves
card_zero · 5h ago
We're also unique for worrying about our arrogance, and about the future of other species, and we seem to have a unique urge to spin nebulous arguments for animal rights out of any wisp of an idea.
Helmut10001 · 6h ago
Just thinking of bacteria who possibly escaped planet earth at sometime. Given this argument, such bacteria would be classified more intelligent than humans.
mannyv · 5h ago
Well humans have killed or enslaved 98% of the other species on the planet, so yes humans are exceptional.
theonething · 4h ago
And other species have killed countless humans, so in the way you're framing it, no humans are not.
bamboozled · 33m ago
and viruses, bacteria etc.
self_awareness · 4h ago
I think the number of chickens killed last year could be higher than the number of humans killed since 0 A.D. by an animal.
tovej · 1h ago
That's easily true. 75 billion chickens are slaughtered every year, and the estimate for total historical human population is a little over 100 billion, most of whom died for reasons other than animal attack.
cladopa · 3h ago
"[...]unethical behavior as unethical.[...]for example, you live in a nation in which corruption is open and rampant, you might not be much agitated when you learn that your neighbors cheat on their taxes."
When you live in a country where routinely public servants steal over 50% of public money like Russia or Ukraine, Cuba, Venezuela, with oligarchs raking billions(from your money), it is not unethical to protect your money and not let them steal your work.
I had family members that protected their money from Argentinian Government years ago. Everybody did that there. They lost part of their savings(20% or so) but had they not made illegal things like not reporting their savings to the Government, the Government would have taken more than 99% of their savings by inflation.
In some places in the world, like South Africa, the Government is the one with criminal behaviour. Imagine you wanted to protect your money from Hitler after Austrian (illegal)occupation. They occupy your land by force, they kill rebels and change the law in order to confiscate asserts from nationalists or jews and use the money to invade new territories and propaganda. Not following the law is the ethical thing there.
ValveFan6969 · 6h ago
"A new book challenges human exceptionalism" I wonder if there's any non-human prints available...
narrator · 6h ago
Have a kid and tell me it's just the same as having a dog or a cat.
People can say random strangers are no better than animals no big deal, but random strangers have been getting little respect and the bad end of the deal for quite a while. It's different when it's someone you actually care about.
adidoit · 43m ago
As AI tools get more powerful, unfortunately, we will see a lot more articles like this because our cognitive superiority is ostensibly being challenged.
The psychological aspects of being cognitively surpassed by silicon on many dimensions are already happening.
Demis Hassabis said there's a paucity of philosophers who are helping us understand this moment. I think he's absolutely right. Hopefully, we can come out with a more human-centric viewpoint soon.
swah · 26m ago
Hope those machines are creationists and remember us..
bamboozled · 34m ago
The truth is, all these epic machines were made by humans, I'm not sure if AI means the end of our species or whatever, but ultimately, they're our children and the product of all our efforts, so...idk what to think about that?
So I’m not sure we know exactly what it is that makes us different, but we clearly are in some way. There is no other animal that has developed anything close to the capabilities we have.
Would any other species on earth, in a billion years, ever develop the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, let alone even know what they are?
A billion years is a very very long time. Humans and chimps diverged about 7-8 million years ago. Given no human competitors and a billion years there's no reason some other great apes or raccoons or something couldn't develop a space programme.
Firstly, most humans who ever lived didn't do those things. Are they not exceptional? Are they lesser in some form? Did human exceptionalism only start when we invented computers or science? I assure you, many prior civilisations saw humans above animals (source: The Bible), yet hadn't done the things on your list.
Secondly, you listed outcomes. These are value judgements. As the article points out, humans did those things but we can't do basic things like smell water from miles away or see internal organs by just clicking. Animals don't value LLMs or mathematics, in fact many humans don't!
The challenges to human exceptionalism aren't based on outcomes (because that's subjective) but tries look at what makes humans unique in a way that can't be replicated in any form. This has to be more than "we're better at X" or "we can combine X and Y to achieve Z" because, unless trait X or Y only exist in humans, then another species could conceivably replicate it given enough time for evolution.
So problem solving wouldn't make us exceptional because we see it in other species. Language might but we do see rudimentary communication in other animals like corvids and cephalopods so perhaps humans just hyper-specialised in that. Hell, scientists have observed orca pods being unable to communicate across regions, hinting that there is a form of language.
Just being better at these traits doesn't suffice because there are plenty of things other animals are better than humans at. We don't consider that exceptional in the same way.
Choosing what traits one considers exceptional, will by definition select what species one considers exceptional. The average fish makes the most exceptional human look slow in the task of swimming. The average bird will sing a song way more complex than the best human singer. Sperm whales - and presumably other whales as well - have a complex language that rivals if not exceeds human language.
The term human exceptionalism - or a bit more provocative the human supremacist mindset - decides that humans are the most special and thus deserve to be treated differently than all the other life on earth. Killing billions of teenagers in an industrialized fashion is ok as long as it's just a cow.
I challenge you reader to ask yourself, is the arbitrary line of humans vs non humans more justified than the equally arbitrary line of white humans vs non white humans?
That said, in a world of scarce resources and competition, tribalism and “team-thinking” are not bugs, but features, evolutionary tools for survival. From that lens, human supremacism isn’t a moral claim, but a pragmatic stance: of course we prioritize our own species. We are team human.
As for whether we're destroying the planet, it's a complex picture. I'd recommend False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg, it pushes back against overly apocalyptic assumptions and argues that while climate change is real and serious, we're not necessarily headed for collapse. Doesn't excuse inaction, but does complicate the narrative.
/Every/ other species that has /ever/ lived will cease to exist (at the latest, in a billion years or so).
Humans are the only ones (so far, anyway) that have any hope of surviving more than that.
That seems pretty exceptional to me :P
Disclaimer: the fact that we're exceptional doesn't mean we don't do dumb things and we shouldn't improve and do better.
But besides, this is not the point. What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks to justify that we’re somehow a “disease” roaming the planet. As if a tapeworm that were to achieve total worldwide domination would stop and think “wait, I shouldn’t reproduce further because other creatures may suffer”. Same story with any other mammal.
The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species. Keeping the environment safe from us is extremely important, but undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species whose only virtue is being less successful at surviving than us is strange. With our own moral codes, no less.
Don’t worry, we’re correcting that in record time. Though it would have been nice to not destroy so many species along with us.
> To the point where as few as 1% of our species even needs to think about making food.
And the rest would just die, unable to find food, if left alone in the wilderness.
> What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks
The idea of exceptionalism is also human-developed, so as soon as you want to go that route no argument in this conversation matters.
> The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species.
Successful at good things and bad things. Including bad for us. You don’t really see other species developing whole profit industries to knowingly market and sell cancer on sticks, for example.
> undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species
That argument cuts both ways. It’s perfectly fair to say someone with your view is undermining the harm we cause and romanticising our achievements.
> being less successful at surviving
None of us can survive indefinitely under water, or in radiation, or in the vacuum of space. Yet we know of other species who do. Humans are exceptionally frail, considering. After we’re gone, other species will remain. We won’t be so impressive then.
The odds of continuing to be exceptional at survival are not looking great.
And compared to species that have been around for multiple geological ages, our survival time barely rates a mention.
The one thing we're truly exceptional at is influencing our own environment. The only creatures to have more of an impact were the cyanobacteria responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event, which literally transformed the Earth's atmosphere.
As for the disease line - we're supposed to be intelligent, and terraforming our home planet to make it more dangerous and less inhabitable when we know and understand we're doing this is not the most convincing proof of that claim.
And other species haven't been surviving on this planet any longer than us just because they didn't evolve significantly during that time while we did.
You do realise people are already dying of climate change, right? Not only directly from heat waves, but other natural disasters caused by the rapidly shifting climate.
We've wandered pretty much the entirety of the planet and made it to the moon. Nuclear weapons.
Controlling the scope of the conversation to exclude the counter-arguments, too, demonstrates the special place afforded humanity by the Creator.
I'll take it one step further. The fact that your immune system prioritises you over the life of a single bacterium is no different to the Holocaust. Provocative, but it does make us realise that we're walking gas chambers who should take immunosuppressants immediately.
In case it isn’t clear, I agree with you.
How is that arbitrary? It seems like one of the most clearly non-arbitrary delineations possible.
For what it's worth, IMO, humans have created seed banks and will be the only species to preserve and revive extinct species, so yeah, humans are more important.
Worth noting your hypocrisy too here. As a member of the human species who obviously participates in it and its complex technlogical sphere (you are after all using digital tools and the hardware they run on to comment about how terrible we are on HN), you're a direct beneficiery of background industrial processes that themselves kill all kinds of animals and plants every year, while you lecture people on things like slaughtering cows.
Many people forget the animals feel emotions very much the same as us, that they act and feel very much like us, and what separates is our ability to work together- and specialise, our individual intelligence is not terribly far away - but we have specialised in education so we’ve optimised our minds to work in a collective society and to specialise in certain trade craft.
we think of animals as being “dumb” and we get surprised when they show signs of intelligence.
- sent from my iPhone, which I can’t build a single component of; using software I can’t write, using electricity I can’t generate, while sitting on a sofa I can’t manufacture in an apartment I can’t build.
Being highly programmable is part of our distinction. You can't build any of these things, but you can learn to build all of them.
Your possible pinnacle isn't just not chewing the couch.
We're pre-paradigmatic for qualia, we don't know what structures (brain or otherwise) give rise to it in order to guess what set of qualia can be had by any given system. Until we do, I can't even quantify my expectations on the variance from increased evolutionary distance, I don't even have a quantity to express the variance of.
If so that is a relatively recent demonstration of exceptionalism. Given the long timeline of human existence it could even be argued that it is accidental that this proof of exceptionalism developed among the humans and not among some other species.
I actually believe in human exceptionalism, in that many of the features spread around various species are all found highly developed in the human, but really that is an argument for all species exceptionalism. There are very few species that do not some collection of interlocked traits that make them exceptional in some way, it just happens that our exceptionalism is one that allows for triumphalism at the same time.
This growth is clearly unsustainable, and the bubble, so to speak, will eventually pop. Other species have managed to survive for an exceptional time, e.g. the horseshoe crab, or most species of moss. There are species whose individuals might be older than human civilization, like the glass sponge. There are species that will survive in extreme conditions where humans would perish, such as tardigrades. Are we better than them?
Another point: evolution has caused living beings to reach equilibria where the whole system can thrive, where each species has a role. These systems have reached self-regulating states, where e.g. an overpopulation of predators will be cut down due to an absence of prey during the next generation.
Is human society better than that? Because humans are destroying this balance through unprecedented growth, which these systems cannot respond to. Our growth is not only unsustainable from the point of view of human survival, but unsustainable from the point of view of the earths ecological systems as a whole.
It's not that simple due to power imbalances with automation and the eternal pursuit of better living standards, but that's kind of the goal. The world chooching away by itself like a Factorio map and people purely consuming.
1. language features we have and they don't understand
2. language features we both have
3. language features they have and we don't understand
Probably in that order.
Then it's just a question of gathering a couple of different species that are seemingly intelligent. Such as: corvids, octopuses, whales, etc. And see if the species can be reasoned with. If so, then you can set up schools where you can train them on human things and vice versa. Eventually you can form interspecies groups and really test the hell out of things.
Doing it that way will really challenge human exceptionalism, as well as the exceptionalism of that particular species.
I know it sounds a bit far off, but I figured that we might be able to get there with AI. I mean, we're getting better and better at giving machines tons and tons of data, and it somehow makes some sense of it.
So far, I think it's not necessarily the human species that is exceptional. It's the revolutionary periods it went through in order to become more exceptional hunters, so we could dominate and control the world in the way we want to. Things such as: discovery of fire, agriculture (+ creating defensive settlements) and antibiotics. We couldn't kill bacteria for a long time. We still have trouble with viruses and are getting into trouble with bacteria again. Could dolphins or whales have done it too, if they were land creatures?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language
All animals that we’ve studied — including great apes we’ve attempted to teach sign language — have so far failed to demonstrate the acquisition of grammar. This means the number of unique communications they can express is exactly limited to the number of utterances they know.
If it's true, then we are exceptional but how can we truly know at this point? I mean, Michael the Gorilla told us about what poachers did [1].
If it isn't true, then it shows how in the prevailing consensus we are still too arrogant. In that case, we don't understand that well what sets us apart and what doesn't.
It will probably be a nuanced discussion either way regardless of what the truth is probably due to the definition of language. But in this particular case I'd want to characterize it: some way of communicating that is about as effective as whatever it is that humans do, when they speak out loud.
Also, when you look nowadays at some of the dog/cat videos and they press those buttons, they clearly are capable of communicating something. I remember one dog inventing a word for ambulance given the words he/she knew. Ah, found it! [2]
There's clearly a lot more research to be done here. I hope AI can accelerate it. I know AI is a tricky business, but one can hope.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXKsPqQ0Ycc&ab_channel=kokof...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a93PWudceKk
For example, I can issue a warning to another human by using the words "step back or there will be a problem." Assuming they also speak English, my structured sentence conveys the warning in a clear way.
My neighbor's dog can also issue a similar warning by growling as I move into it's space. It's not using any sort of structure or specific messaging, rather a universally understood sound that conveys some sort of feeling related to caution and fear.
I use the "warning" example since fear/caution are extremely powerful and seem easiest to convey across species. Again, not adept at this, so my example might be dumb. I'm super interested in understanding more about this, though.
Any suggestions of further reading?
Not a good book by any means, but there has been surprisingly little written about people who go from having no language to their first language post-puberty and are asked about their experience of living without language.
Language is extremely important to living as a human, even outside of social relations. Memories don't form well, it is really hard to keep events in order of time, it is hard to order places in space and not get lost. It's even hard to remember people.
It's an engineer take, of course, but I like understanding systems by what happens when they break.
Same, though I am not an engineer, more a denizen of the adjacent service and repair field, but I have been dabbling in development, lately. Fixing broken things because I grew up in a household that was too poor to think of anything as disposable is how I learned probably 90% of what I know, providing me with an understanding of the fragility of systems and the importance of anticipating maintenance the design process.
I see the forward was written by Oliver Sacks, whom I've read and enjoyed in the past, but from more of a pop-Psychology angle. But what you say about language being related to how we think of time and forming memories strikes me. I once heard that Indigenous Australian cultures had a different concept of time than Western culture does, passed down through the language used in their folklore. I posit that we can some evidence for proof of this happening in Western cultures currently with the way that we talk about decades.
With the advent of the year 2000, we lost the ability colloquially refer to the decade we were presently in. Prior to that, we were living in "the 90's," perhaps being born in "the 60's, 70's or 80's." Each of those decades even evokes a certain composite memory of the styles of clothing people may have worn, or the music we listened to, popular automobiles, etc. The character of the decade coalesced around the colloquial name.
2000 hit, and we didn't know how to refer to it. Some folks tried to make the "aughts" happen, which felt awkward or "the 2000's" which seemed to generalized and not specific enough to be referring to the current decade. Then 2010's, which we didn't really even bother calling "the Teens" as I recall, because by then we'd fallen out of the habit of referring to time by decade.
The result is seeing a movie from 2005 and feeling like that was so very long ago, versus when I watched Star Wars for the billionth time in 1997 and the 20 years that had passed since it's release didn't seem like much time at all; only two decades.
Anyway, getting a ramble on to show agreement, but you get the idea. I might have to look for some science fiction authors who have tried to tackle this, see what sort of thought-experiments we can do when we strip language as we know it from the development of the human mind.
But the information in that example is also relatively simple. There are other kinds of information that are much harder to convey without language, talking about future or hypothetical events or abstract concepts, etc.
There seems to be evidence that dolphins use sounds to identify each other and to coordinate tasks that involve a number if animals. I think this is much more interesting and strongly hints that something language-like is going on there.
https://www.ecowatch.com/dolphins-language-communication-evi...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8074934/
When I first learned about the dolphin "names" whistle, I thought of the way dogs supposedly identify each other by scent in the way that there's subtle differences that our olfactory system is not able to pick up on, but theirs is. In both cases, it begs me to ask what that means for consciousness. If the dolphins and dogs can assign individual labels to each other and recognize those labels when used later on, does that imply they form some sort of a personal identity? I also have to wonder how language, as opposed to other forms of communication, promotes the birth of that identity, but so much of this is over my head in a way that leaves me grasping at how to, well, communicate my own questions so that I receive answers that promote better understanding of the phenomenon and its challenges.
Many such cases: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
- because I think the article already addresses this "other species don't have literature" argument, though it doesn't talk about literature specifically.
If you value animals based on human traits, humans will always be better. Because you take your own good traits which other species don't have. But that's not the point. Animals have animal traits. For example, low factor of self-extinction is something we should be learning from from animals. Acceptance of death. Limiting the use of our own resources. Taking these aspects into consideration make humans a stupid race that destroy the environment they live in.
That is false. If you gave a whale five digits and an opposable thumb and have them live on land, you'd strongly reconsider that. Even without this, it doesn't take very long when studying animals to see that they have a plethora of ideas. Orcas demonstrate strong examples of this all the time.
And how can you possibly claim that you know any animal's internal dialogue?
> If they develop, it's by accident.
Human evolution is no different.
It seems obvious to me that this is a fairly useless definition of "exceptional" that would not be accepted in any context other than an ideological one.
Yes, HN is better without shallow dismissals. Perhaps we should extend that idea to shallow articles as well.
But in general I think this is also reflective of a negative trend in Western culture, which is something like a collapse of the “divine potential” of man. I don’t mean it in the literal religious sense (although that’s where it came from), but in the sense that many people increasingly see themselves as just evolved apes, not as creative beings with limitless potential. There are many reasons for this cultural trend (evolution, secularism and the collapse of religion as a foundation for our idea of self), and so on.
The key, to me, is in understanding that this “evolved ape” narrative is a fundamentally a narrative. What’s needed is a new story that factors in these scientifically true facts of evolution etc. but isn’t so flat and unimaginative in placing them into an arch-narrative.
It probably needs to start with a shift from essence to process as foundational. In other words, the deflationary account of humanity sees itself as “just an evolved ape” because we categorize things as if they were unchanging, static entities. A shift to a process-oriented idea means that value can grow in complexity and develop over time, and so therefore there isn’t anything deflationary about being descended from microscopic organisms.
It reminds me of philosopher Feuerbach’s ideas on God, which are essentially that humanity has externalized its own qualities and greatness into an abstract being, and become estranged from our own potential.
We are accustomed to seeing our lives and the power of dictators and the influence of tiktok content creators etc as these enormous, reality-defining things. And then we look up at the sky — with extreme rarity thanks to light pollution — and often perceive little more than a tableau as if looking at an aesthetically pleasing poster in a waiting room.
Pale blue dot flips that on its head as it should, clarifying that everything we normally view as so important does not have to be confused with the fundamental nature of reality. If there is something wrong with our environment, the fact that it is small in a grander scheme means that we have a better chance of changing it than we might have otherwise supposed.
Tolkien offers a similar quote I'd like to offer to compare and contrast with Sagan:
``` Frodo sighed and was asleep almost before the words were spoken. Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep. ```
I mean, we are. Other apes also have creative potential. I'm probably better at it than most of them are, but they're probably better than me at climbing trees.
Humans are considered “evolved apes” because of our (culturally defined) system of categorization. Humans are just as related to every other species (itself a word that implies a static entity that actually isn’t) in our ancestry. It also isn’t really accurate to claim a microorganism ancestor of humans is some kind of proto-ape, or proto-human.
The point is that process is more accurate as a label. The choice of focusing on apes is a cultural one, not something inherent to the structure of biological reality.
This is just silly. We are significantly more related to chimps than fungi. Humans are scientifically classified as apes, because we share close similarities in characteristics and very recent evolutionary history.
Even in pre-historic times, humans were herding prey to kill using earthworks, for example. We can also live in cold climates by wearing clothes and building houses and fires, as well as hot climates by not doing those things. We can build defenses against predators. We've been using technology to enhance our abilities since forever. That's exceptional. No ape poking a stick into a hole comes anywhere close to that.
I don't care that eagles can see better than humans. A camera can see better than an eagle and a plane can fly better than an eagle but we don't say that cameras or planes are anywhere close to being comparable to human life. Those abilities are easy ones. Hell even a rock can live longer than a sea sponge, and humans are obviously exceptional compared to rocks.
No comments yet
Oh yeah? But which one of those species is writing a book challenging their own exceptionalism.
No comments yet
I get the noble sentiment of wanting re-contextualize things to be less human-centric. But, for better or worse, we’ve taken control of the planet. It is our responsibility to take care of it. And if we do manage to, we’ll do so because the alternative is human suffering or extinction.
Similarly, the American philosophy of “manifest destiny” (ugly as it is), also carries that same scent of exceptionalism. And so does the “divine right of Kings” from our history. Modern prosperity gospel exploits those same flaws in our cognitive make-up.
In contemporary times we see these philosophies as egocentric and perhaps outdated. But just like children pass through very egocentric stages (well some never grow past that), so too does collective human consciousness evolve past exceptionalism and towards maturity and humility.
I'm confused by this one, because I am missing original thought. It sounds more like a collection of response patterns related to how various targets are supposed to be assessed in value.
I feel like the comment is meant to propose that exceptionalism is like a collective phase, by pointing out a bunch of places where exceptionalism has appeared historically.
To describe humans as exceptionalist, you must claim "animals are people too", but you didn't say that part. Or perhaps "rocks are people too", that would also work, but we don't tend to anthropomorphise rocks because they don't have faces. Or maybe "LLMs are people too". Whatever the claim is, it's an extraordinary claim, and yet you've chosen to present it in the form of a patronising telling off as if it was a foregone conclusion.
We cannot be sure pigs feel anything or have qualia, but from comparison to humans, and let's say, human babies, they at least exhibit the exteriorities of e.g. feeling pain, fear. So, I would assign a non-negligible probability that they do, in fact, have qualia and can feel pain.
Scale that up to a billion farmed pigs, the expected suffering inflicted is huge. Now yes, 'Pascal's wager' and so on, but for rocks, the argument does not work as well.
If you claim for example that rocks suffer when you walk on them, I can claim an equally substantiatex claim that rocks feel sublime extasy as you walk on them. As it stands, we don't have much reason to believe one more than the other, and they cancel out.
All that to say that you don't need to be certain that 'pigs are people too' for its consequences to be seriously considered. And each argument for why you consider pigs to not be people, ask yourself whether it is equally applicable to human babies.
We are like vibe code to him. I think it's quite narcissist to think that there's an omnipotent being who cares about us, and values us as the next best thing since himself, worth of saving after death. Which is a ridiculous, but nevertheless quite a natural delusion for humans, because we are human.
I'm just saying that religions would be more realistic if God had some other purpose and humans are a side effect of that, or maybe just a hobby. The anthropocentric perspective is a dead giveaway that God is a human hallucination.
As witnessed by worldwide developments over the last 15 years.
Or all of human history if I’m taking a broader scope.
I suppose this is the real answer to why we won't need UBI. The oligarchs will just wait in their bunkers while the world's population is eradicated by death bots.
That seems the more likely outcome to me than a post-scarcity utopia.
I know people point out that Malthusian predictions have always failed so far - but the reason we got to >7G humans is that an enormous amount of science and engineering went into making things better, a large part of which was spearheaded by the US because world peace and prosperity was in the interests of millionaires and billionaires. Now they've decided this isn't in their interest anymore, so I worry that the trend in scientific progress that got us here will be more like the tide - we're now flapping our fins on the beach and the water is receding.
This is why many assumptions about the future are simply incorrect. For instance people think humanity will become more secular because it has through most of our lifetimes so surely that trend must continue on into the future? But secularity is inversely correlated with fertility. So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
It's also why the concept of us reaching a 'max population' is rather silly. We will reach a point where the population begins to decline due to certain groups removing themselves from the gene pool, but as the other groups continue to reproduce and produce children who, in turn, reproduce, that population will stabilize and then eventually go up, up, and away again. In other words it's just a local max.
(That's if we accept that it makes people disinclined to spawn offspring, and that this was always the case and never changes.)
This is one (of many) reason why having children is so rewarding. The idea of 'transferring ones consciousness' into something is nonsense - at best you die and then have a chatbot that does a questionable imitation of you. But with children you directly transfer many of your genetic and physical/mental characteristics, and you can then instill your environmental characteristics into them. It's about as close as you can realistically get to 'transferring your consciousness.'
Interestingly this, like many things, also only becomes even more true as we age. Depending on your age, you might find yourself having more similarities with your own parents than you might care to acknowledge, depending on your relationship with them.
If you then isolate that sample to situations where both parents were Protestant and also talked about religion a alot, 89% of their children ended up as Protestant! For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...
---
"Based on survey data collected in 117 countries and territories from 2008 to 2024, we estimate that about 1% of people who are raised Muslim leave the faith. This loss is offset by a comparable influx of people joining Islam."
---
Wiki has a nice table on Islam in particular here. [2] They broke 10% of the world population sometime around 1820. They broke 20% 170 years later, around 1990. And they're expected to to break 30% about 60 years after that, by 2050. We're trending towards a majority Muslim world, simply because of fertility, all the while people not having children somehow think people in the future will somehow share their values.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/10/islam-was...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth#Histo...
A 84% reproductive cultural "replacement rate" means that in order to maintain the population protestants need to have an average of 2.38 (2/0.84) kids to have the same number of protestants in the next generation.
The real number is actually much higher than that because what you really need is to measure how many children of two protestants also marry a protestant. This percentage is lower than (pew estimates this as 75%) so now you need to have have an average of 3.17 (2/(.83*.75) kids just to maintain the protestant population.
These are, of course, woefully inaccurate numbers and exclude all kinds of factors. The reason I present them isn't to try to estimate what the numbers are but to make it clear that "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely" is not simply not anywhere near true. You just can't accurately estimate the growth rate of a cultural identity by looking at the birth rate.
> For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
That's not what the science says. The rates of transmission are only slightly higher and definitely don't approach 100%.
These transmission rates also aren't "natural laws" but contigent effects that are driven by any of a number of different cultural, religious, economic and legal factors.
Even if a minority cultural identity does manage to grow through reproductive practices, it can still be fragmented by schisms (especially common with religious identity) or out competed by memetically superior identities that pulls converters from a wide range of cultural identities.
Your view is here is incredibly simplistic and ignores all kinds of basic evidence from throughout history.
Anyhow, that link gets into the exact rate of transfer for Islam, the consequent growth over time, and so on. I think you'll be surprised!
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44959480
And that's been a major player, especially in the West, for the past ~70 years where you have politicians wearing religion on the coat of their sleeve, and then going and killing hundreds of thousands of people over what is overtly about oil, economics, and geopolitics - lofty moralistic rhetoric notwithstanding. Then you have things like the pedophilia scandals high within the Catholic hierarchy, made even worse by coverups.
This is probably why religions like fundamental Islam, Haredi Judaism, and so on are even more heritable. Those who follow such religions tend to very much live their proclaimed values. For instance I really don't agree with people like Khabib Nurmagomedov on many of his values, yet he lives those values, even when they hurt him in the short-run, and I find it very inspirational. I can only imagine how young (or older for that matter) Muslims see him. Integrity in life is just so important.
The sad thing is that culture will probably have less concern over individual rights and freedoms, and much more likely to be collectivist and religious.
Not sure I like where this is headed, honestly, but I hope I'm not around to see the fall of liberal democracy.
You make the same mistake as GP in confusing memetics with genetics. Cultures survive by ideas and behaviors spreading, not by genes. People can spread ideas without having children, and people can have lots of children and have their ideas die out.
And has been for the many generations over which humanity has gotten more secular.
> So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
But for generations that hasn’t been what has happened, despite the correlation between religiosity and fertility not being a novel thing that developed this century? Why could that be? Because religion isn't a genetic trait. Fertility of populations and popularity of ideas and practices have some interaction, sure, but not in the simplistic “spread of a genetic lineage determines spread of culture and ideology” way you are trying to push here.
The second thing is that you're likely dramatically overestimating the secular population. Gallup has been polling people on religion since 1948. Here [1] are those data. As recently as 2004, the percent of people with no religion was in the single digits, so the overall relevance was low. And the inverse correlation between secularity and fertility is also quite new driven by a rather large number of new factors - antagonistic attitude towards gender roles, the embrace of non-marital sex largely enabled by the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, and so on. So in general, we're entering into relatively uncharted waters, but it's not hard to see what lies ahead as consequences of fertility decisions lag behind those decisions themselves by ~60 years.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...
[2] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx
Or just say "some people are still nasty and self-centered, although others have at least have decency to care for others after their own needs are satisfied".
"a person is smart... people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- Tommy Lee Jones as "K" in MIB
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-cats-conqu...
No comments yet
Or we're just the cells of cultures, or religions, or corporations, or governments, or the ecosystem consisting of all biological life, or the universe.
Or each of us is the more-structurally-defined society or construction of a group of cells, or DNA, or molecules.
The point is that we typically think of humans as "conscious" and "alive", but consciousness isn't physical; whether a human is conscious or a "ghost in the shell" makes no difference to the universe. In theory, a cell or ecosystem could also be "conscious", "sensing" and "thinking", since it also makes no difference. Furthermore, although its sensations and thoughts would be much different than any human's, they aren't completely unimaginable.
For example, an ecosystem reacts to changes, experiments, and adapts via evolution (and cells react to things and display some level of sentience). Thus, evolution can be considered a form of thinking: like how we form and execute ideas to survive and prosper, an ecosystem forms and creates species to increase the coverage of life over the planet.
And in fact this sort of achievement will be critically necessary for the survival of any species. Earth has had numerous mass extinction events, and we're well overdue for another one. And on a long enough time frame, even the Sun itself will eventually engulf the Earth. The only way to 'win' this game is technology and expansion outward into the cosmos.
And it may well be that that elephant beaten into a parlor trick of painting from the article (seriously, don't look up how elephants are 'trained'), is brought along so that its species may too eventually continue to persist into the future, thanks to humanity.
One thing humans seem to be uniquely good at is picking goalposts that separate us from other species.
I would say very complex tools are one way to differentiate ourselves
When you live in a country where routinely public servants steal over 50% of public money like Russia or Ukraine, Cuba, Venezuela, with oligarchs raking billions(from your money), it is not unethical to protect your money and not let them steal your work.
I had family members that protected their money from Argentinian Government years ago. Everybody did that there. They lost part of their savings(20% or so) but had they not made illegal things like not reporting their savings to the Government, the Government would have taken more than 99% of their savings by inflation.
In some places in the world, like South Africa, the Government is the one with criminal behaviour. Imagine you wanted to protect your money from Hitler after Austrian (illegal)occupation. They occupy your land by force, they kill rebels and change the law in order to confiscate asserts from nationalists or jews and use the money to invade new territories and propaganda. Not following the law is the ethical thing there.
People can say random strangers are no better than animals no big deal, but random strangers have been getting little respect and the bad end of the deal for quite a while. It's different when it's someone you actually care about.
The psychological aspects of being cognitively surpassed by silicon on many dimensions are already happening.
Demis Hassabis said there's a paucity of philosophers who are helping us understand this moment. I think he's absolutely right. Hopefully, we can come out with a more human-centric viewpoint soon.