The Observer's Blog

I don't know if animals lack souls. I seem to recall some biblical references to the lion lying down beside the lamb in heaven.

1. This would be hard to prove in a general sense, but I think could be proved if you agreed on what you meant by "affected the planet" -- but I bet a case could be made that mitochondria have affected the planet more than humans. On the "things humans notice" scale, of course, humans will win.

2. The most drastic differences in traits between humans and "most other animals" is in things like raising young, relationships, survival methods, group tactics, etc. But when you get right down to the animals that are most like the human species, you're left with very few specific traits, and a lot more of differences in degree. For example, beavers and apes put their environment to use for them by building and tool use -- but they don't have semi-conductor fabrication plants. Humans are also (amongst our primate peers, anyway) the most widespread species, in that we inhabit nearly the entire surface of the earth.

3. On an individual level, you should feel different. How many chimpanzees have blogs or can perform a spectral analysis on the light from remote stars? On a civilization level, we are very different but probably less different than we think in some ways.

4. I find the prospect of finding "human-like" (in the literal, primate-evolved sense) things living on other planets highly unlikely, only because there were so many paths evolution could have traveled. On the other hand, I find the prospect of finding selection-driven replicators that we would consider intelligent very likely, for the same reason.

5. I can't think of anything that's worth coming at from a spiritual perspective, but that's only because I don't know what that means.

I have wondered about that for a long time, Matt, --I mean about you not knowing what a "spiritual perspective" is. A lot of athiests are pretty committed to their athiesm. It's just an anti-religion. But that doesn't seem to be the case with you. Yet because so many, many people DO have a "spiritual perspective," some kind of sense of the divine, do you think that this may be an element of the human distinction of which you are bereft? Like being tone deaf, or red-green color blind?

Seriously. Because while there is no way to assess, say, equine spirituality, I do sort of operate on the assumption that this God thing is among the most significant of our species' distinctions from others. Imagination. Creativity. Not just problem-solving, like, if I put a stick in this hole, ants will climb out for me to eat, but CREATION. I don't see other species with a compulsion to make new things. Any. And I think that's related to the "spiritual sense," hence my belief that horses don't believe in God. Now, Matt doesn't believe in God either, but he is still very creative, so while these may be comorbid, they're obviously not interdependent. What do you think, Matt? Trent?

And are you guys left-handed?

L. Yes, well you can argue about animals being in heaven. I think I was trying to say something more like humans are the only animals that were made in God's image. That counts for something on the "spiritual" (I'll define this in a second) side of things.

1. By "affected", I mean directly. And I was trying to avoid signifcant things life (in general) has done like create lots of oxygen, prevent widespread soil loss with root systems, etc. by restricting myself to things a single species has done. As a species. Directly.

2a. I think the traits you mentioned can be found in other animals. If we simply put all these cool traits into one animal that just makes us a super-animal: still animal. The challenge is to come up with a single trait that makes all humans different from all animals. How exactly would you say building semiconductors is different from building a dam?

2b. I like the geographical point.

3. I can analyze stellar spectra because I was taught how to. I can write a blog because I was taught language. Other animals (mainly apes I guess) seem to be able to understand and use our language system. If you worked hard enough I bet you could teach them to identify the spectral types of stars (which would be great for astronomers because that's pretty tedious, boring work).

5. Spiritual perspective: using non-empirical arguments, especially relying on metaphysical constucts.

A. I'd refer you to my 2a about your statement that other animals don't create. Not just dams but offspring. And again I bet a primate could do art or something. Also, we don't know too much about these other species (Neanderthals, etc.), but they conceivably were equals with us in creating. I'm right-handed.

Yeah, it's possible that whatever triggers most people to believe in things they can't, by definition, see or understand was never triggered in me, or it's genetic and it was missing in the first place, or any number of things. I'd wager that it's more a product of how people react to their environments and what types of explanations they identfy as plausible, but I'd accept evidence that it was genetic if someone had any. If anything, I was encouraged (like others) to believe things exited that I had no way of experiencing, and then I realized that was ridiculous at some point. I think what you're ultimately saying is that I'm probably a horse.

Really though, please define "spiritual perspective" for me. Pretend I'm a small child if you have to. I don't understand what it means. A perspective is a way of looking at something. For one, if we assume there are spirits, how do we know their perspective? Two, if we mean "a perspective that views things in the spiritual realm rather than the material realm", how do we have any information whatsoever about what the spiritual realm is, or that it exists?

Moving on to Trent, who I'm predicting will be the breakout member of 2006 for this fake organization...

Building semiconductors is different than building a dam for a few reasons. One, the amount of planning and conceptual knowledge needed to know HOW to build it and THAT it needs to be built is orders of magnitude different. Two, you don't just fabricate semiconductors out of the logs that happen to be near the river where you are. Three, the purpose for building is different. Basic warmth and shelter in one, and information exchange, data storage, knowledge advancement, etc. for the other.

I read an interesting study about elephants that were allowed and/or taught how to paint. Their paintings were presented before a panel of "experts" who were asked to provide as much information about the person who painted them as possible, shown only the painting. Now, I think this says more about the state of modern art than anything else, but apparently the experts were able to correcly guess the gender of the elephants. So I guess human male painters and elephant male painters paint alike, while human female painters and elephant female painters paint alike. In another study, a group of (bonobos, I think) some type of monkey was studied and found to have a very complicated "grammar" in the types of screeches they emmitted. These differences were indistinguishable to the human ear, but indicated things like "that bird might pick us up and eat us, so run away" or "that bird is safe, keep gathering food". They also had consistent evidence that monkeys with this advanced grammar were more versatile and in more places than similar monkeys w/out the advanced grammar. The speculation was that the same techniques allowing the monkeys to do this had advanced into speech and language in humans.

Challenge -- identify a piece of information you've acquired via non-empirical means.

D. My guess is that humans are/were superior to neanderthals in both creative capacity, and/or strength, thinking speed, etc. And that we destroyed them, hopefully in a method that would be considered inhumane by today's standards.

Amazing that you have so much time to post comments, Matt...

And yes, Trent, I agree about man being specifically created in God's image...as set apart, beautifully unique from the rest.

as for suicide, whales and dolphins beach themselves for various reasons even rebeaching if some specialized rescue crew puts them back in the water.

Okay, so I guess I buy the semiconductor argument since you pointed out how it's fundamentally different in terms of function instead of just different in terms of difficulty. A very skilled beaver could build semiconductors, but why would it?

I was under the impression that beaching of underwater mammels was technically not suicide. Maybe it's just from the Straight Dope article I linked. It claims beachings are only done by unhealthy whales or whales following an unhealthy leader.

After talking to a cunning young linguist I think the case may be solved. He claims that no animals display the able to use language creatively: "they can talk about their feelings and sorta abstract relational properties and things, but they can't do things like talk about how they felt yesterday or how they might feel if they don't get that banana on the table." He also pointed out some case from the 1930's: "At 16 months, the chimp knew about 100 words, which was more than the human, but never went beyond that. And even though it knew all the words in the sentence, 'I say what I mean' it couldn't tell the difference between that and 'I mean what I say.'" So apparently other animals have a strict upper limit on the number of words they can learn, and I think some people suggest that this indicates a fundamental difference in how humans use language versus animals. I think there's enough evidence here to make language a sufficient discriminator between humans and animals.

So it's interesting that the only measurable difference between an individual animal and an individual human may be creative language. And that difference is enough to make the human species as a whole have these other traits: geographically dispersed, reducing biodiversity, changing habitats, comitting suicide, etc. I think that any other species with this individual trait (like maybe the Neanderthals or hobbits) would therefore be human-like.

Matt, does something I read in a book count as non-empirical information?

I meant that in a raw information acquisition sense, and the "I read" portion of that is a conceptual as opposed to perceptual experience.

Regarding faith or proof, sentience or insentience, conception versus perception, I count myself fortunate that I can seperate the two. I believe I have a soul, and that I differ from the animals in that I am conscious of this belief. I expect no one else to subscribe to this belief, which is why, I suppose, I shall be founding no great new Faith. No Martin Luther I.

Well, Ari spares me the spiritual perspective explanation. There it is. I could go into it more, but this is more important.

Trent, monkies making more baby monkies is procreation. It is not CREATION. And I know about the elephants, and that doesn't count either. You've just given them a tool and taught them an expressive trick, given them another medium. They may even enjoy painting, but they did not conceive of it. They don't have a compulsion or desire to create. Or destroy. (Though Amber knocked me back on my heels with the cetacean suicides. There is something deeply amiss there. The explanations proffered so far are merely feasible, but by no means convincing.)

Matt, you're talking about spiritual now in that woo-woo John Edwards spiritualist kind of way. I'm speaking of it as a sense, a kind of intelligence. I don't speak math, but I speak God. And I will tell you that I am certain these two languages, or ways of knowing, are empirically interrelated in an obvious way we've yet to discover or simply notice, like that girl who finally figured out you can fold a piece of paper in half 12 times, however many hundreds of years after everyone else quit bothering.

I cannot prove His existence, but I already intuitively understand it. And that's a damn sight better for me than, say, math, which I don't understand, cannot use, and yet must accept on faith based on someone else's reproducible competence with it.

I have a facility for languages; I can carry a tune and mimic a speech pattern. I see things, sequences of events, which later come to pass, and I am able to recognize them while they are yet in progress. I normally cannot throw a ball through a hula hoop from 30 feet away. I cannot sort. I can feel rhythym, but I cannot reproduce it. I cannot tell time.

You cannot tell God. I am guessing you are not much of a dancer. You are an accomplished logician, but it really does surprise me that you are not more curious about what the experience or phenomenon is that is shared by so many, many members of this species, so geographically dispersed and culturally unrelated. It's glib to dismiss it as an attempt to account for the unknown. That is precisely what that facile explanation is.

There's more to be revealed, Matt. She folded that paper 12 times.

Ok, complete the analogy for me:

hearing: ears
sight: eyes
smell: nose
taste: tongue
touch: skin
spiritual information: X

Which sense organ accepts spiritual stimulus from the world outside your body?

"I cannot prove His existence, but I already intuitively understand it."

This implies that the knowledge originates from within yourself. Is it possible that you have two personalities? One is AE and one is god?

"math, which I don't understand, cannot use, and yet must accept on faith based on someone else's reproducible competence with it."

You're accepting math ON EVIDENCE then, not on faith. You might not understand the details of calculating areas under curves, but you have facts that indicate engineers do, by virtue of planes fairly consistently not dropping out of the sky.

hearing: ears
sight: eyes
smell: nose
taste: tongue
touch: skin
spiritual information: brain

Duh. Those first five are all fairly basic senses, Matt, and naturally, they require the participation of the brain at some level to function... we think (recall that Terri Shiavo's brain was essentially jellified, but she was yet capable of responding to stimuli).

We're talking here about a more refined sense, like the ability to recognize rhythyms or carry a tune or discern a mathematical pattern, all of which are typically defined as "talents," and all of which we do not argue reside somewhere in the cerebral cortex or hypothalamus or in some other portion of the brain, and which may or may not be dependent on some other organ for the reception of stimuli, just as the spiritual sense may. Consider that you may be having a thought, and without the stimulus of some external data input, you could change to having another thought. What causes that? The physiological basis of your rejections belies the limitations of your objection.

I don't see why you would be so skeptical about it.

Okay, my previous answer was not entirely effective, due in large part to the fact that I was trying to type it with someone peering over my shoulder whilst giving my shoulders a proper massage.

First, Matt, I'd say that all those senses receive spiritual stimuli. That's not that hard to groc. Give me a break.

"This implies that the knowledge originates from within yourself. Is it possible that you have two personalities? One is AE and one is god?"

Just because I understand it doesn't mean I'm sourcing it, Matt. Don't be silly. I don't get all the "evidence" of mathematical constructs. I can see the evidence of arithmetical constructs, and I can groc those. But I have to BELIEVE in pi. I have to take it on faith that others who understand these things better than I and who are able to consistently and reproducibly understand them are doing so accurately. Listen, here's what I think about your "evidence:" The Nazis had a lot of convincing pseudo science that provided evidence that Jews were an inferior race. And they had a lot of agreement for it. And the more agreement you get on something, the truer it is. The world used to be flat.

People can do things that I can't do. Some of these things, they cannot even explain how they know how to do them. Explain athletic ability, Matt. Where does it reside? In what sense? In what organ? Where do we find musical talent? It's not in the ears. It's not in the fingers. Where does that reside? Where's your evidence? And not to be too smarmy and smart aleck about it ---and I think you even brought this up once before --- what about the female orgasm? There is apparently no evolutionary purpose for it. There is no "organ" in which it occurs. You personally will absolutely for damned sure never experience one. Yet one presumes you believe in their existence. Why? Based on what empirical evidence?

And what about that paper? She folded it 12 times Matt. TWELVE times. So why are you so convinced that all that we've already locked down the limits of what is knowable?

Oh, AE. Just when I was busy giving thanks for things you're giving me more things to be thankful for. Perhaps I should expand my initial analogy/question to be more direct.

A bird chirps and my ear perceives the disturbance in the air which my brain processes conceptually.

A car approaches and my eye perceives the light entering it which my brain processes conceptually.

A smoker smokes and my nose perceives the odor which my brain processes conceptually.

A fair maiden places a strawberry in my mouth and my tongue perceives the taste which my brain processes conceptually.

The same maiden licks the side of my face and my skin perceives a sensation which my brain processes conceptually.

Please provide a similar sentence which deals with spiritual stimulus and an organ capable of sensory perception which has a pathway to your brain.

...

"And the more agreement you get on something, the truer it is."

Ok, first off, *you* don't believe that. Secondly, there's no way that you believe that *I* believe that.

"Yet one presumes you believe in their existence. Why? Based on what empirical evidence?"

Moaning and screaming.

"So why are you so convinced that all that we've already locked down the limits of what is knowable?"

That's not even a sentence, but I don't believe what you're trying to say I believe.

Okay, extraneous grammar notwithstanding, your premise is that there are only FIVE ways of receiving information. I dispute that EVEN THOUGH I can personally only itemize a few pieces of physiological evidence of some other ways to take in information.

However, consider: there are stimuli that tell us that we've had enough to eat. That's not your skin, Matt, and it's not your taste, and no matter how much your stomach grumbles or you see it swell, the satiety messages to your brain are not being transmitted by any of the five senses you have cited. They are sent by other mechanisms.

When you reach around to scratch your bum, how do you know where to grab? How does your hand not end up on your knee instead? That is proprioception, it is not a subset of touch, as it works entirely independently of whether you ultimately touch yourself or not. Your hand knows where your ass is. Proprioception.

In the less concrete, what is intuition, Matt? What the hell IS it? Surely you don't deny "intuition" exists? Why do some people have an uncanny ability to sense danger or the particular direction that things are going? The best entrepreneurs have it. They can read a room, they can "feel" the market, or whatever. It's not their eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin at work. It's something else. Why do you suppose the expression "a sixth sense" even exists?

Aaargh. You're being deliberately obtuse. I don't care whether you call it intuition or God-consciousness or clairvoyance or whatever. There are other ways of knowing besides the five you list, and I'm pretty sure you know that. Memory and imagination, for instance, are both ways of knowing something. Beethoven could still write music long after he couldn't hear it anymore, and he could make it up, too.

And I DO believe that about "agreement," Matt, and so do you. You accuse the faithful of it every day. As though the only reason we believe in God is because our parents taught us to, or because "the other kids all have a savior, please Mom, can't I have a savior too? You never let me have anything good!" How do you think the world got flat in the first place? A bunch of people with a bunch of influence agreed it was flat. And now you've decided that all valid data has to fit a known paradigm that you've approved of or accepted. Known paradigms that you don't approve of or cannot personally experience will not validate any data, as far as you're concerned. It's laughably arrogant. Cute, almost.

Moaning and screaming, my eye. She's faking. Or IS she? How can YOU tell the difference? I daresay you can't. And you can't trust her word, that's for sure. She may not even know herself. So how do you KNOW?

"your premise is that there are only FIVE ways of receiving information"

No, I'm listing five that I know occur, and asking you to either produce a sixth that is used to receive and transmit spiritual information or describe a way that spiritual information enters via one of those five.

But, waaay more importantly...

You're saying that the world actually WAS FLAT when people believed it was flat? If 5 people say the world is flat and 5 say it's round, we don't have a "tie" where they're both right and both wrong at the same time -- 5 of them are wrong and five are right. Actual things can't be true for you and false for me.

Are you submitting Ass-scratching, Memory and Imagination as the ways to obtain spiritual information? I guess you could have a memory of imagining god once while you were grabbing someone's ass. I'll accept that as legitimate.

....and she was definitely faking. I'm going to the corner to cry now.

We'll save the "agreement" argument for some other time.

I just can't even stand the numerous, generous opportunities you've opened up with that ass-grabbing sentence. It's all I can do to contain myself. But as this is a family site, I'ma hush my mouf.

But yeah, I think proprioception, memory and the creative impulse (imagination) are all legitimate mechanisms for experiencing the divine. But if name-dropping counts for anything, apparently, so is orgasm.

Maybe that explains your atheism? Since you're already in the corner, I'll leave it at that.

I had to hush my mouf at the entirety of your last post. I would have written about 3 pages of response otherwise. Let's do one thing at a time instead.

How are memory and imagination ways to receive and process information? Or if that's not what you mean, what do you mean by "experience the divine"?

I can imagine all sorts of crazy things, like one-eyed dragons with laser-shooting eyes, but that doesn't mean my imagination is a source of valid information about the world and that they exist.

Or did you mean "divine" in the sensual sense, as it applies to the ass that was grabbed? Like "hey, nice ass, it's a divine ass"...

Excellent post. On a lighter note, I linked you to our blog.

Wow Trent, 21 comments. I'm really impressed. I'd just like to add my thoughtful analysis to the discussion: AE says
"Why do some people have an uncanny ability to sense danger or the particular direction that things are going?"
Well AE, what happens is some people get bitten by radioactive spiders that allow them to shoot spider webs from their wrists, crawl up walls, and of course sense danger before it strikes!