Well when you find the great badger city where badgers have been able to put aside their differences and work towards common goals together then let me know. I'd love to see it.
In the meantime I'll stick with the assumption that there is still some sort of difference.
And you'll call that difference 'consciousness'. OK.
Meanwhile, I found a great termite city where termites have put aside their differences and work towards common goals together. Also coral. Their city is a thousand kilometres long.
There are some really interesting features in some of the constructs of mound-building termites (Macrotermes spp.) Air flow, thermal control, and water management have been the subjects of some research; it's clearly a fertile area for cross-discipline cooperation by human researchers.
Whatever one makes of the mental capacity of these individual eusocial animals (they're not too bright; you can lure them into termite windmills), collectively they substantially alter their local environment to their benefit.
There are whole valleys full of mounds rising a couple of metres above ground level in places where they are endemic:
That's a lot of biomass with a lot of total neurons, and even though aren't as tightly coupled as the ones in our skulls, they still manage to coordinate a lot of constructive activity. I think it's reasonable to wonder if culture and aesthetics emerge as termite numbers grow large.
I'm not saying that difference is called anything in particular but I can expect wildly different results from interacting with a city than I can from a mound of coral or a termite nest.
Don't be so disingenuous with these ideas of abstract equivalence. Yes humans are arrogant sods but there is some sort of reason or reasons (that are likely not to be purely environmental) that have resulted in this outcome where we're having a conversion via electricity across the planet instead spending most our lives trying to roll a breadcrumb around never having a chance to know one another.
Something about this gig is different isn't it? Are you genuinely asserting that if we could take the brain of a (insert whatever animal you're considering) and put it in a human shell you wouldn't be able to tell the difference? That's extremely bold.
> Are you genuinely asserting that if we could take the brain of a (insert whatever animal you're considering) and put it in a human shell you wouldn't be able to tell the difference? That's extremely bold.
He never said that. So don't be surprised if people downvote you, if you use that kind of manipulative arguing.
so what is the argument beyond "humans so arrogant and humdrum"?
I'm trying to frame where we are by finding out what we are arguing and what we aren't, if we're not there then where are we? That's not manipulative I'm just trying to fix us to specific points so we can progress.
Lets not forget that the parent comment I'm answering is the pithy:
> > We are the only mammal with consciousness
> Uh huh.
Our parent is an unfaithful sarcastic position so I don't see why that gets a pass yet my attempts to solidify the argument justifies this negativity.
I've devoted my professional life to understanding how animals work. It's been the most interesting and challenging topic to study that I can imagine. Science and art knows a lot about what animals do, and a little about how they do it.
Your opening statement
> We are the only mammal with consciousness
is rather controversial, and has been for at least a couple of thousand years. Whether it's true or not is one of the great questions humanity has ever considered. We aren't even sure whether the question is meaningful. Everyone sort of understands what it's getting at, but there is no definition of consciousness that is widely agreed upon. As comments by others have said, for almost all human behaviours once considered exclusive to humans we have found animal behaviours that look very similar.
So, my faithful commentary on your blithely confident statement that ignores the existence of any debate on this topic is: uh huh.
I NEVER SAID THAT.
Look at the user names ya plonk. I was calling YOU out for just responding "uh-huh" when you could have actually broken it down for the OP. But you didn't, you wanted to have fun so you did but with the wrong fucking person. Dick.
Uh huh.