Unpopular Opinion
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Individually, we are above average. But our advantage over other animals is language x technology. We are able to collect knowledge, preserve it and pass it down to our descendents. This body of knowledge spanning 10,000 years is the reason for our supremacy. We are a proto-hive mind.
Other animals pass down cultural knowledge
Not to the same degree, show me the animal with internet storage or books.
Again humans are biased towards methods that use artifacts/tools.
If you're a whale underwater your whalesong is as good as the internet, but whatever its not a physical object and its a totally sustainable method that doesn't require harvesting half the planet so WE DGAF, doesn't count!
Whale song is not as good as the internet, and we're biased toward tools because the jump from word-of-mouth to written information was a colossal paradigm shift. "On the shoulders of giants" is only possible because we aren't bound just by our living memory and traditional stories. Cultural knowledge aint shit compared to cuneiform tablets.
I just want to pick you peoples brains at this point.
Human survival strategy is very min/max glass cannon right now - we are dependent on complex, unsustainable, rapidly degrading systems for survival yet feel superior to other animals for those very same systems. Seems profoundly dumb to me in a way we fail to see because we are so obsessed with our intellect.
As I said in another comment, maybe it can be said 'we are most intellectual' species but its in a kind of rain man way where we lose other necessary wisdom about how to survive long term on the planet.
Your argument makes no sense because humans have been passing down oral history for ages too before the internet and writing. It was literally one person's job to memorize everything and then teach it to the next "history holder." That's why we have such shit record keeping before we invented books. And why ballads and songs were also used to help memorization.
However to a lesser extent books, but definitely the internet is far beyond a basic data aggregator. It allows instant communication across the entire world akin to telepathy, seemingly endless space for knowledge good or bad, entertainment, business enabling/generating, allows you to 1 way communicate with the dead by reading wisdom from some person 1,000 of years ago. You keep saying "well humans have a tool bias", yeah no kidding because the tools we make LITERALLY CHANGE THE WORLD, for good or bad. I believe it was the phantom menace who so aptly put it, "the ability to communicate doesn't make you intelligent."
okay why doesnt the oral histories of other species count? They seem to pass down tradition and behavior for just as long, and we cannot observe their inner beliefs about more than that. So why are you assuming only humans do it?
Cetaceans have a structure in their brain that we don't have that MIGHT allow them to experience life as a group. That is different than internet but not WORSE just because it doesnt require an external tool. Why are you obesssed with a way of being that 'CHANGES THE WORLD' so that you go extinct?
We'll agree that our 'tool intelligence' doesn't make us wise at least
You're the one arguing animals are smarter because they passed down history orally. Yes some of humanity's tools have impacted the environment but we also have the capability to save not only ourselves but literally every other species. No single animal ever comes close to this. Period. Call it a god or savior complex, fine, but the truth remains humans are the only species we have ever encountered in the known universe with that kind of power and potential.
As to your evidence of cetaceans, I'm not sure that matters considering it's all hypothetical unproven. You're trying to weigh something that we can actually confirm against abstract conjuncture like they're on the same level. I might be a millionaire some day, does that mean I should spend like I am one now?
yet to be shown. We assume we can turn this around
Until we're all dead, its the truth.