Re: planets

Ajin-Kwai wrote:
>
> Ummm, I'm just wondering what makes us assume that ANY higher animal
> showing "intelligence" is not sentient (octopii, chimpanzees, dolphins,etc.)
Well, then why don't we say that ants are sentient?  We have to have
something to define sentience, or intelligence, for that matter.  Maybe
ants are really super-intelligent, but their thought-processes are so
alien from ours that we can't understand them?  Sentience is, of course,
a poorly-defined concept at best, but I'd say that language is a part of
it, and there's been no evidence of language in non-human animals,
except MAYBE (and this is highly doubtful, IMO) chimpanzees (and even
there, AFAIK, no one's claimed that it exists in nature) - but I don't
want to get into THAT discussion again.

Obviously, there's no way to prove that they DON'T have language either,
but I feel that with the evidence we have, it's more likely that they
don't.

Also, I've heard that many dolphin experts say that claims of dolphin
intelligence are greatly exaggerated - that they're really not much
smarter than cats or dogs, that they're sense of play misleads humans
into thinking of them as more intelligent.  Whether or not that's true,
I'm not qualified to say.  Also, I've noticed that people tend to assign
intelligence to the cute dolphins, but are less willing to assign it to
the less cute octopi.

--
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