yeahiknow3
@yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week ago:
I replied to the wrong person. Sorry
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week ago:
Math exists in the minds of humans, [not animals].
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.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week ago:
Elephants 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.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week 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.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week 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).
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week ago:
It’s not that cats can’t ask questions. It’s that they can’t ask abstract questions. That’s quite different.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week 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.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week 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.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week ago:
Well, curiosity comes in different stripes. Investigating your environment is one thing. Asking second-order questions is quite another.
“Can I have food?” vs “What is food?” or “Why am I hungry?”
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 1 week ago:
Yeah, when my cat meows, it is “asking” for snacks. But it’s not inquiring about snacks, or curious about where the snacks comes from or why dogs like snacks so much.
Granted, many humans don’t ask such questions either, but that’s because intellectual acuity is on a spectrum whose overlap with non-human animals, at least in the realm of being an incurious dunderhead, is overwhelming.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Sociocultural boundaries are almost entirely grounded in language. Nation states are almost entirely grounded in imagination.
- Comment on Greed Is Destroying the World 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on I Quit 2 months ago:
Denying intellectual disparities is denying the vulnerability of people with special needs, not to mention average folks who are easily deceived, swindled, manipulated, propagandized, and parasitized by the rich and powerful every single day.
- Comment on I Quit 2 months ago:
You don’t know people who are clearly dumb?
The average ACT score for college bound seniors in Florida is 18. The test costs money, which means they’re trying their best. It’s childishly easy. My cat, who is illiterate, can score almost as high (answering at random). Again, the average is 18. What kind of conversations can you have with people who can’t read basic English? I’m asking sincerely, because as far as I can tell the answer is “none.” Maybe you can discuss the weather? Sports? Idk.
I want to stress that Americans, uniquely, are really weird about testing mental ability, probably because of their history of racism. Nevertheless, mental ability is a real phenomenon. Yes, high IQ doesn’t make you a good person, and it clearly has very little to do with accumulating wealth. But it does make life a hell of a lot easier.
- Comment on Anon is a fact checker 4 months ago:
They’re not. Last I checked the percentage virgins at age 30 was almost double digits.
- Comment on 🎶Somewhere in the ether 🎵 4 months ago:
Yeah, so do most word processors. Microsoft is unique in so many ways.
- Comment on 🎶Somewhere in the ether 🎵 4 months ago:
Fun fact, a few years ago Microsoft Word removed their auto-recovery (pseudo-autosave) feature, and rebranded it so that it’s only available through their OneDrive service.
If you write for an hour and your computer crashes, you’re shit out of luck (unless you have a really old version of Microsoft Word).
- Comment on Resources 5 months ago:
My problem isn’t with that half of your sentence, troglodyte.
- Comment on Resources 5 months ago:
Honest question, are you illiterate?
- Comment on Resources 5 months ago:
And for a goal like this^ I’d slaughter them gleefully.
- Comment on Resources 5 months ago:
A simpler solution is to simply abolish wealth hoarding, impose sensible consumption limits (so, no cars or commercial plane travel, no meat, no 800 watt gaming rigs), and continue to encourage population decline. Boom, everyone is healthy, the air is clean, and you can keep your house.
- Comment on Anon is Illiterate 5 months ago:
Yes, some people enjoy poop. Why don’t you?
- Comment on The only way to be 7 months ago:
He sounds reasonable to me.
- Comment on The only way to be 7 months ago:
That’s the fun part: they were never ancaps at all! Even that incorrect conclusion would have required reading and curiosity.
- Comment on I Worked For MrBeast, He's A Sociopath 1 year ago:
Yes, it’s so suspicious that to cover the crimes of a psychopath with a media empire would take several hours of documentary evidence.
- Comment on I Worked For MrBeast, He's A Sociopath 1 year ago:
Creatures like Mr. Beast need to be destroyed and his carcass displayed as a warning to others. That would be obviously moral but really impractical so I’m not promoting it.
- Comment on How is it possible that praline pecans have less calories than regular pecans? 1 year ago:
Forum discussions around food is a biochemists personal hell. No offense, but you’re all dumb as shit.
- Comment on How is it possible that praline pecans have less calories than regular pecans? 1 year ago:
So I just want to make clear to everyone who hasn’t read the scientific literature, every empirical claim this ignoramus said is false^
I don’t know why people treat food as a religion, but it’s really fucking annoying.
