What seperates man from anything else?

Glaucon's answer is excellent, but I'll come at it from another angle...

our dissatisfaction is not homeostatic.

(this is the real cause and our intellect and our public intellect are merely results of this)

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Animals certainly can become depressed and behave suicidally. They can also go crazy.

Rescue dogs often suffer depression if they are only finding dead people, some times to the point where they become dysfunctional. To cheer them up their handlers will have some one hide in some rubble for them to find alive.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

maybe chimps plateau at that point because they need not go further? Humans may have evolved past that state because our learning continued, we used it to make our world more comfortable, civilized, etc. and had more time and capability to learn. Circle of learning and improvement.

I just opened myself up to a firebombing of higher thought, didn't i?:fright:

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

do you have a link to that??

 

Animal empathy is common in humans who work with them; a dairy farmer can explain his herd to himself (and anyone else). People who ride horses etc, or work with primates (not use them for wind-up toys or accessories, i,e, trophies so they go crazy) will tell you about intelligent animals who they empathize with. Ask David Attenborough the question.

The animal intelligence question: answer "animals have intelligence which approaches human intelligence"; this only implies that "intelligence" is something humans have.
However, animals don't do as much as we do (as them animals), we do animal things though, we do intelligent animal things

 

I can see animal empathy. I've never seen animals self destruct

 

Exactly. When my female boxer died a few years ago, my male Doberman shortly after she passed, for probably the next six weeks, looked around the house for her, was much more mopey than normal and was a bit snippier as well. I found out from my dog trainer that I should have let him see her body so he could get closure.
So I know animals, at least dogs, feel emotions too.

 

Arrogance.

 

Man is not the only animal who dances to music.
The article
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/m...03.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=dancing cockatoo&st=cse
The youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s

 

The specific piece, no, it was a TV speciel interest piece on the rescue dogs working the Pakistan earthquakes.

But if you can wade through the adoption sites there are similar bits out there...

Search and rescue missions constitute traumatic experiences, both physically and psychologically.

Bob Deets and his three-year-old dog Kinsey flew in from Texas to join the 9/11 relief effort. Ground Zero was an unprecedented and stressful experience for both of them, he said.

“Kinsey lost 12 pounds in 11 days,” Deets said. “It’s not unusual to see dogs have problems due to disaster work.”

Many handlers reported depression or stress-related behavior changes in their dogs directly following the search and rescue effort, according to Otto.
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/pavement/archive/9-11-rescue-dogs/

Most experts recommend search-and-rescue dogs work for four hours at a time with hour-long breaks in between. But due to the chaos and lack of trained canines in Peru, the Canadian dogs put in shifts that lasted as long as 11 hours, Montier said .

The International Rescue Dog Organization dispatched 11 dogs to Peru, of which only Dante and Kiora were from North America.

Ruth said both dogs became emotionally affected by the lack of survivors.

"After the third day I could see Kiora was getting stressed," she said. "I could tell she didn't really want to go to work. She'd go to a pile but what she really wanted to do is run away. She wanted to sleep all the time, she didn't want to eat. She was depressed." http://www.canada.com/topics/techno...=d7dd9162-da9d-45b7-8932-a84fb03b8e50&k=69673

 

The fact that we can recognize an outbreak and do something about it is something no other species can do.

lol enmos. You have to be purposely ignorant to say something like that to the least. We have accomplished great things.

 

Yes, but our intelligence gives us the ability to mimic and surpass the abilities of every other species on this earth. We aren't naturally able to fly, yet it is humans not birds that have been to the moon. We can't dig as well as many animals, yet we've leveled mountains and rerouted rivers to suite our needs. We aren't as fast as a cheetah, but it is a human that broke the speed of sound. We lack claws and fangs, yet we are the top preditor on earth pushing many other species into extinction without even trying.

We have spread to all corners of the world, turned its resources towards our ends. To say that we're the same as all the other animals is just silly.

 

Suicide. Animals have rudiments of everything else humans have (intelligence, empathy, emotions....) but NO animal can commit a willful suicide.

 

Like what ? And try to come up with something that doesn't just look good from our own point of view.

 

Why is it silly ?
We're as much the same as all other animals as a frog is the same as all other animals, or an ant, or whatever animal.
And what do all these accomplishments actually mean ? That we're sort of a jack of all traits ? Ok.

 

Not only that, we are the ONLY species on earth that is aware of the fact that its lifespan is finite and that everyone dies sooner or later.

 

Why is that an advantage ?

 

The problem is that mankind take itself way, way, way, way, way too seriously. Instead of relaxing and enjoying stars together with wolves, it thinks those stars were created for humans so that the best dead hairless monkeys could be cherry picked by sweet baby Jesus for an eternal thing. Yeah, you got that right, human existence is soooooo much more profound that existence of an ant, we are just loaded with tonnes of mission and purpose as long as we stick our heads in our arses and don't think how silly they actually are.

 

Read the thread title; says nothing about advantage, just what separates us.

 

Ever watched cows being shipped to a butchery, it appears that they are well aware of their very short remaining life span. Some cows may cry.