Sunday, January 07, 2007

Man as an animal - 2

Continuing to what I wrote before, I am of strong opinion that animals also think, they also learn and they also have consciousness. The reason why we as a humankind have been able to achieve so much that we crossed a certain threshold of 'intelligence' and 'communication' combined. We are definitely more intelligent than other animals what supports us in achieving all this is communication. Our ability to speak with so many different sounds allows us to form very comprehensive languages and communicate all sorts of ideas to other humans. In other animals such communication of ideas is very restricted. Once I had read one article where it was said that Neanderthals though may be were more intelligent than us were restricted in their communication since their structure didn't allow them to speak as well as humans. They were very weak in communication compared to homo sapiens (us). While this may or may not be true the point of communication is worth noting down.
The reason I used word threshold in the second line in above paragraph is because most of you must know when some characteristic of any system is increased beyond certain threshold it alters behaviour of the system very significantly. Those of you who are familiar with cybernetics or systems theory can imagine a positive feedback loop which is primarily weak becoming very strong due to a certain factor becoming extremely strong.
What supports my arguments above is:
  • What we have achieved is through thousands of years of learning and not overnight.
  • Whatever science ,technology, philosophy, etc. we are so proud of today (and which is the basis of all the achievements of human kind today along with its experiential learning ) is through some wise and very intelligent people who came up with ideas and the ones who could implement these ideas, all others have just adopted these ideas through the very rich communication we have.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good words.

nikone said...

Thanks, Vila