Yep. This was the issue people took with Chomsky’s approach to language, basically the same sentiment. Humans are “special” in some way. It underlines the basis of almost all cognitive, neuroscience, and language research for decades.
It’s crazy to me how much this holds us back, and the amount of cognitive dissonance involved
Take pets. We look at them acting shifty around the sock they know they aren’t allowed to play with, and say “she’s thinking about it”. We avoid words like “walk” because they’ve understood one of the meanings of it. And usually not just the meaning, but the difference between tone and context - most won’t react the same to “should we take her for a walk” and “is he able to walk”. My mom’s dog knew all of our names, and the difference between “soon”, “tomorrow”, and “the day after tomorrow” - she would watch the door all day on the right day
And yet, most people will share all of these observations and turn around to dismiss it as “she’s just a dog”. For them it’s just association and behavioral conditioning, but the same things are different for humans because we’re extra special. Clearly her acting shifty before stealing the sock isn’t planning or considering, it’s instincts fighting against training
But only humans can ever understand, only we make choices. Because we’re extra special
Clearly humans are special in that we’re the only species to have the ability to use tools or a complicated language. But we’re also inferior in very major ways, humans are horrible at reproduction and we need to alter the environment for our survival because there’s no habitat we can thrive in that we don’t make ourselves.
It’s like creatures such as us don’t really belong here or something.
The distinction being made when we talk about “understanding” and “choices” I about the distinction between sentience and sapience.
Dogs are sentient, meaning they have a conscious experience involving emotions and works with memory and instincts to determine motivated actions. This is a complex system that results in complex behaviour like preferring one food over another, stubbornly ignoring your commands, or recognizing when you’re upset and coming up to you to comfort you. It’s beautiful.
Sapience is related to the capacity to be meta/self-aware. This is what is normally meant by “understand” and “choice” when talking about how “special” humans are. As far as we can tell in experiments, dogs do not have the capacity to understand themselves like “I’m a dog who really enjoys walking” or “Good dogs take care of people, so I’m going to choose to take extra care of human because I want to be good.” This is what you might call “wisdom” or “rational” behaviour, and some animals to exhibit sapience to an extent. Both can be involve what we think of as “choices” e.g. selecting one of several options, but they’re distinct behaviours.
Humans engage in both, making it extra confusing. I’m not being particularly meta-aware and rational when I choose to cut off a piece of my steak and eat it. I am being more meta-aware when I choose to slow down my eating because I want to be respectful of my friend who cooked it for me, and I want to savour the moment, appreciating the flavours, texture, and effort that went into its preparation.
My dog knows that I prepare her food and she expresses her emotions and desires to me and she responds to my behaviour/communication. But she doesn’t understand that I chose to rescue her or that we are two people living our short and shorter lives together.
How can we truly know this though - we don’t even really understand sapience on a philosophical level, let alone on a scientific one. The word itself is based on homo-sapien, and ultimately it means “why are we the most special”. It’s been a constant game of moving goalposts
Here’s a paper on animal metacognition. The intro is worth a read
Moving on to more common examples of metacognition, think of the many videos of dogs feigning injury when their human has an injured leg. That’s the same as your example with eating slower
There’s also a recent study I read where they trapped a rat in a tight cage, and another rat would learn to let them out. Then they added chocolate chips - the other rat would usually eat most of them before letting the other one out - but would save at least one
There’s even videos of a dog having a conversation with those word-pads, where they had to be convinced that their owner was human and not a dog, but was adamant that the small dog was a cat
We hold ourselves back, because we’re always starting from the perspective of humans being more, or that animals would act like us if only they were smarter… But ultimately, they have different priorities
Only recently have we started to look for things like language, culture, meta cognition, and every other “human” trait with an open mind. And we find it, everywhere
Whose to say dogs don’t wonder where we go all day, why they get left behind, and ponder their life as a dog?
