Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway.
yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoElephants are wise in that they’re concerned with (some of) the things that matter most — social bonds and creature comforts. But, as far as we know, they can’t abstract away from those concerns to scrutinize them abstractly, or analytically, or reflect on the nature of wisdom or the metanormative conditions of their own experience.
We can do that — due to some freak accident of evolution that probably has to do with the recursivity of language and the self-referential nature of subjective experience. And again, when I say “we,” I mean some humans sometimes.
theneverfox@pawb.social 1 day ago
What are you even saying? What evidence do you have?
That sounds like a bunch of unfounded nonsense to me.
Elephants seem to clearly understand life and death, cause and effect, who fucked them over and where they ran off to
I’d bet the average elephant has a better grasp on the meaning of life than the average human
yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
theneverfox@pawb.social 22 hours ago
But that’s exactly what I’m saying. There are elephants out there contemplating morality. Even dogs do it, even if it’s massively based on the rules we impose on them
Not math though. Math exists in the minds of humans, it doesn’t even exist in the universe. There is no two of anything, there’s one object and another similar object
What does exist are ratios and harmonics, and animals have no problem understanding them
yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours ago
This is incorrect. Every animal we’ve ever researched, including insects like bees, can do basic arithmetic. The ability to do math has evolutionary advantages.
Anyway, not a single one of the examples you’ve given involves second-order reasoning. These are all prosaic interactions with the environment, which is how most animas (yes, including dumb humans) experience the world.
First-order reasoning: “What is moral?” Second-order reasoning: “Do moral beliefs constitute knowledge claims?”
First-order reasoning: “One plus one is two.” Second-order reasoning: “number theory is either inconsistent or incomplete.”
First-order reasoning: “What does this word mean?” Second-order reasoning: “How is meaning grounded in language?”
The examples I gave you are extreme, but to be fair you seem extremely confused.