Your Conflicts Depend on False Knowledge ($)
It’s not what you believe that makes you human, it’s what you don’t believe.
“Unlike animal knowledge, mature human knowledge is not a natural phenomenon.”
— Michael Williams (2015), philosopher
There are pet therapists (Levine, 2023), and you can imagine what they do: behavioral training. It’s not what I do for people, but it might not be so different either.
There have been many discussions about what makes humans different from other animals, and most of these proposed differences have not stood up. Humans make tools, and so do animals. Animals have self-awareness, and several species can recognize themselves in a mirror.
Animals certainly have complicated societies in which they recognize their place and the expectations of others. And up until the recent past, geologically speaking, humans lived nature-based lives, and had no special impact on anything.
Knowing and Learning
Primatologists are getting serious. All those interesting documentaries about primate society (Nicholson, 2023) have only made it clear that biologists and filmmakers have been serving us the low hanging fruit. Scenes of animal working collectively, raising families, and fighting wars are interesting because they resemble human behavior, but they tell us little. What we really want to know, and what we’re inferring from these movies without real evidence, is whether animals think like us.
Chimpanzees are our closest living relative. We had closer relatives, the Neanderthals, but they went extinct. No one knows why. Chimps share 95% of our DNA, but given how complicated we are, that’s not surprising. It’s not even clear whether DNA has anything to do with how we think.
Animal behaviorism is interesting, but it’s an indirect path to understanding. Primatologists are now studying the psychology of primates, and now we’re getting some insight.
“The last few decades have seen a huge leap forward in our understanding of non-human culture, with a particular intensity of research on primates. Phenomena once thought to be uniquely human have been found again and again amongst primates and, indeed, across the animal world. It seems that the more we examine social learning in non-human animals including our fellow primates, the less we find it to be limited to humans.”
— Stuart Watson, et al. (2018, p. 224)
Two aspects of primates that notably differ from humans are how we learn, and how we think. Language is a big part of this, but it’s not as clear as one might suspect. Primates have language, but their language is notably different. What they can’t do in language matches what they don’t do in thinking, but which comes first, the language or the thinking?
Primates don’t learn like we do. They do learn from each other, and this go beyond mimicry. They’re not just copying each other, they’re actually gaining insight from each other. Human learning involves gaining insight, but an uncomfortable amount of our learning is little more than mimicry. Most schooling is little more, which is why it contributes nothing to a person’s development.
Conceptual breakthroughs are rare in primate societies, at least it appears so. And when such a breakthrough occurs, such as developing a new way to find food, its adoption is slow. There is no formal animal school of learning, and there are no group discussions. Well, maybe there are, but we would don’t see them as creative.
False Beliefs
There is a difference between primate and human thought that is subtle and uncertain, but I think it’s crucial. It’s the ability to understand a false belief.
If you struggle with distinguishing true and false beliefs, maybe you need to evolve your thinking. Call me and we can talk about it. It’s free.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Stream of Subconsciousness to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.