Well humans have killed or enslaved 98% of the other species on the planet, so yes humans are exceptional.
hereme888 · 1h 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.
keiferski · 1h 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.
qwerty59 · 5m ago
Well put
N_Lens · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
card_zero · 57m 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.
russelldjimmy · 1h ago
Thanks for sharing this perspective. It’s given me something to think about.
card_zero · 1h ago
Specify what.
Espressosaurus · 1h 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 · 1h ago
Maybe after AI there won’t be need more than 1000 people on the planet
echelon · 1h 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.
dingnuts · 1h ago
ok settle down there Stalin
ljlolel · 1h ago
… As in people are choosing not to have kids
somenameforme · 58m 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 · 14m 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.)
citizenpaul · 34m ago
Thats a nice summary of what I belive the "great filter" is as far as the fermi paradox.
energy123 · 1h 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 · 1h 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".
energy123 · 14m 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 · 1h 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 · 57m 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 · 38m 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.
HKH2 · 53m ago
Maybe we're just not good at working in big groups (Dunbar's number) and we need a legal system as a result.
ljlolel · 1h ago
Biology works itself out
aw1621107 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
No more reason to care for a species than for an individual sacrificing itself for the group population
xeonmc · 1h ago
Is the ability to propagate culture part of our biology?
naveensundar · 1h 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.
xeonmc · 1h 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
nis0s · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
We’re just meat tubes for microbe mobility.
HKH2 · 46m ago
Controlled by our RNA overlords.
nis0s · 1h 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 · 1h ago
We are a cell in the system
ghssds · 1h ago
Maybe someday we'll be the reproductive organs of the biosphere as a whole, giving birth to other biospheres on another planets.
dvrj101 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 51m 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.
goatlover · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
card_zero · 6m 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.
y-curious · 55m 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
Helmut10001 · 58m ago
Just thinking of bacteria who possibly escaped planet earth at sometime. Given this argument, such bacteria would be classified more intelligent than humans.
bee_rider · 54m 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.
ValveFan6969 · 1h ago
"A new book challenges human exceptionalism" I wonder if there's any non-human prints available...
narrator · 1h 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.
hellojimbo · 1h ago
Classic leftist anti-humanism. This study is never not accurate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
Oh yeah? But which one of those species is writing a book challenging their own exceptionalism.
No comments yet
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-cats-conqu...
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
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.
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.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Heatmaps-indicating-high...
"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