Max Bennett: belief

Transcript context

…Why are we superior to animals? So there's been such a long history of us pontificating on the various chasms or attempting to create a chasm intellectually between us and other animals. The most famous form of this, which I think still shows threads in modernity, is from Aristotle where, he sort of took the same kind of ideas that you see in Maclean's triune brain, where, you know, other animals might have these basic instincts. They might have some form of emotions, but what they all lack, which which humans uniquely have is this notion of reason. We can uniquely reason about things in the world. And I think as, I try to argue in the book and I think most comparative psychology demonstrates quite clearly is there's clearly forms of reasoning that we see in other animals. And so, you know, of all of the different abilities and capacities that seem unique to humans, the 1 that stands out as most salient is undeniably language. Because, we we, despite many painstaking attempts, have not even been able to teach chimpanzees, bonobos, or gorillas, to speak with with the same degree of fidelity of of human like language. Now, there is some controversy as to the extent to which did Kanzi and Koko and Washu pass the threshold that we define as language. And so that can be debated where do we draw the line. But undeniably, most people would agree that these, you know, nonhuman primates do not learn language naturally without painstaking attempts to teach them. And then when they do learn language, it does not show the same sort of flexibility as humans. Now what makes language unique is 2 things. 1 is declarative labeling. So there is a distinction between imperative labels and declarative labels. An imperative label is is learning that a phrase, a cue, leads if you take an action response to a cue, you get a reward. So when a dog, responds to a specific cue with a response and then you give them a treat, that that's not what we define as language. It's an imperative label. A declarative label is when I say dog, and in your head, you know that reference is a concept or a thing. Now we have a label for a concept or a thing. And so, it's not at all clear that other species perform these types of declarative labeling. And if they do, it surely independently evolve. Like we're we're quite confident that early primates didn't have this ability. The second thing that makes language unique is grammar. So we can take these declarative labels that reference things or actions, and then we can weave them together in certain structure, and the structure itself has meaning. So that basic example is just the ordering of phrases. So if I say Ben hug James, that means something different than James hug Ben, despite the fact that it's the same phrases, or the same declarative labels. The order, presents meaning. ring of phrases. So if I say Ben hug James, that means something different than James hug Ben, despite the fact that it's the same phrases, or the same declarative labels. The order, presents meaning. So there's a whole interesting world of of why language if it is the case that language is the fundamental difference, why why is it language that has allowed humans to sort of take over the world? And that's another interesting topic we should discuss. But I would argue that primarily what makes humans different is language. And and Aristotle's idea of reason, we see at least in smaller forms of other animals.…

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