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2 days agoHumanity’s distinction is that it is aware of its own place within nature
That’s pure hubris. It’s neither evident that we DO understand our place, or that other creatures understand less well than we do. This is the sort of thing we tell ourselves for our own psychological needs, not because we have evidence that leads us to believe these things. We could quite easily “understand” a facile pretense presented to us by more fundamental layers of our own nature, crafted to bend our choices and perceptions towards those that benefit our DNA but harm individuals. Or, we could simply be wrong. There is no way to test our math.
Well then it’s not really inherent. You’re talking about culture; we don’t just innately divine the nature of existence, we argue with each other and come to some kind of consensus. But the thing is, culture is arbitrary and almost necessarily wrong. None of us agree with each other about our place in nature. This quality you are citing does not exist in reality.
Think about how a human struggles to understand death and mortality. Ten years after a loss, our mind still seeks ways to reconnect with a person we knew, still tries to find ways to talk to that person. Our minds are kept from fundamentally accepting and understanding death. But most mammals do not behave like this. We tell ourselves it’s because we understand death and they do not, but if you examine the behaviour like an alien anthropologist, it looks like many non-human animals DO understand the nature of death, and we do not. We do not see reality, we see what our evolution wants us to see.