Fair enough, and perhaps I did not use the right word. There is certainly a difference in the way humans behave in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom, of varying degrees of course. If we look specifically at monkeys though it is obvious the difference. I suppose behaving in a way that I have described as “conscious” can be taught, and perhaps it is simply the same for humans. But we do it nearly as a whole while monkey populations do not unless humans intervene and teach them to behave in these ways in a crude manner. Even then they have the tendency to still rip your fucking face off. Anyway that is a long way of saying you are correct, and understanding consciousness would need a complete understanding of communication between species.
The behavior you ascribe to monkeys seems to be sitting in plain view all around you in fellow humans. It sounds to me that what you're describing is "impulse control" rather than "consciousness". It's a slippery concept and evades definition, because we have to use "consciousness" to describe "consciousness", which, thus far, has proven to be impossible. We have abstracted the "observer" or "experience" out of a lot of scientific concepts, but we seem to fall into a trap of recursion every time we try to apply those same abstraction tools to the concept of abstraction itself.
I didn't mean to pick on you and I was inconsiderate in my response. I don't know if there's as much separation between humans and animals as what initially appears, though. It might be easier to see brutality and tribal behavior in the animal kingdom than in our own kingdom, but I think that's a side effect of living in unprecedented physical wealth, luxury, and prosperity for the human race, which has abstracted almost all of us away from the front lines of human experience.
You are so right and I think it shows in situations and areas of desperation in which we have a higher tendency to return to those primal instincts of survival.
After some time to better articulate my thoughts, I think I have gotten more concise in what I was trying to originally get at. Man has the tendency to ponder, worry about our own impending demise and more simply the stresses that tomorrow may bring. Not many animals have that forward thought. But again, to your point, how do we even know that?! Thanks for the food for thought.
Fair enough, and perhaps I did not use the right word. There is certainly a difference in the way humans behave in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom, of varying degrees of course. If we look specifically at monkeys though it is obvious the difference. I suppose behaving in a way that I have described as “conscious” can be taught, and perhaps it is simply the same for humans. But we do it nearly as a whole while monkey populations do not unless humans intervene and teach them to behave in these ways in a crude manner. Even then they have the tendency to still rip your fucking face off. Anyway that is a long way of saying you are correct, and understanding consciousness would need a complete understanding of communication between species.
The behavior you ascribe to monkeys seems to be sitting in plain view all around you in fellow humans. It sounds to me that what you're describing is "impulse control" rather than "consciousness". It's a slippery concept and evades definition, because we have to use "consciousness" to describe "consciousness", which, thus far, has proven to be impossible. We have abstracted the "observer" or "experience" out of a lot of scientific concepts, but we seem to fall into a trap of recursion every time we try to apply those same abstraction tools to the concept of abstraction itself.
I didn't mean to pick on you and I was inconsiderate in my response. I don't know if there's as much separation between humans and animals as what initially appears, though. It might be easier to see brutality and tribal behavior in the animal kingdom than in our own kingdom, but I think that's a side effect of living in unprecedented physical wealth, luxury, and prosperity for the human race, which has abstracted almost all of us away from the front lines of human experience.
You are so right and I think it shows in situations and areas of desperation in which we have a higher tendency to return to those primal instincts of survival.
After some time to better articulate my thoughts, I think I have gotten more concise in what I was trying to originally get at. Man has the tendency to ponder, worry about our own impending demise and more simply the stresses that tomorrow may bring. Not many animals have that forward thought. But again, to your point, how do we even know that?! Thanks for the food for thought.