Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway.

• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “Why are we here?”

  “One of life’s great mysteries isn’t it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a God, watching everything. You know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don’t know man, but it keeps me up at night.”

  “What? I mean why are we here, in this box canyon in the middle of nowhere?”

  source

  • yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    if you wake up in a compound, catered to your every need by weird alien captors, “why am I here?” is a pretty obvious question.

    source

    • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You ask the aliens why you are there, meaning the cell they imprisoned you, and they tell you how their species created humans and what humans purpose is. You immediately go catatonic by the revelation.

      source

      • yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Well, the information that aliens created us for some particular purpose would certainly be of academic interest to me. It’s empirically interesting, but normatively insignificant.

        For that, I would need to learn about the aliens’ philosophical progress (if any).

        source
  • Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Oh man, RvB reference in the wild after all these years. Warms my heart.

    source
• theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  They already understand the second order questions though. Why would they ask the humans?

  They know what’s outside their enclosures, they know they’re there because the humans want them there, they know strange humans like to see and interact with them through the glass. They just don’t care, so long as they have their tribe around with things to do and they get tasty food

  Animals understand existence better than humans do. They understand life and death better than we to. Our higher intelligence makes second order questions complicated because we put ourselves through mental gymnastics

  We should be asking apes about the meaning of life, not the other way around

  source

  • yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    No, they don’t. Second-order questions aren’t just the prosaic things any intelligent creature would ask, such as “why am I here?” or “what do you want from me?”

    but also the more esoteric, “what sort of creature are you?” And “what sort of creature am I?”

    Animals (and, indeed, most humans) don’t ask second-order questions at all because that requires abstraction, which is the sort of reasoning that requires enormous amounts of education and curiosity.

    source

    • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      but also the more esoteric, “what sort of creature are you?” And “what sort of creature am I?”

      I agree, but that is the kind of question they do think about. Koko was “a wonderful gorilla person” in her own words

      There’s a dog that uses one of those word button mats that thinks small dogs are cats, dogs are dogs, and that she’s a human (or that her owner is also a dog, she’s convinced she’s the same as her owner and always gets confused when it’s explained otherwise)

      They don’t ask, because they already know what they think. They aren’t confused about where they stand in the world, it’s learning human categorization that confuses them

      source

      • yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Most humans can’t even contemplate these questions. We have a lot of depressing research showing that most people can barely engage in abstract reasoning at all, let alone willingly.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
• Tonava@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  To be fair a lot of people don’t ask the latter questions either

  source