humans are very strange animals indeed.

I agree. i think we are just another type of animal.

The people that have trouble with this fact are the ones that strongly believe just as we do, that they are right, in what they have been told and learned by there parents, teachers, fancy books etc.

It's God or Science again. If you can make some one believe that if they commit suicide by exploding a bomb attached to themselves thus killing many others around them they will go to a unproven location of great pleasure then you can make anybody do anything.

These people have had it drummed (probably without choice)into them from an early age that we as Humans are infact something we are not.

Usually.


In some ways that's true, in other ways not. Do other animals have the ability to think and reason?


I've heard people who know a lot about foreign policy, or economics, or other cultures, or speak foreign languages etc accuse others of ignorance too. Still, learning for the sake of understanding is a good thing.

All this feeling from debate over a dog? Do you own a pit bull?

I'm with Vikorr...(though I believe that other animals have some ability to reason, dependent upon species....the more we experiment, the more reasoning we seem to find)...I find it as simplistic to say we are animals like any other, as it is to deny that humans are animals.



Sure, we are animals, however, we are animals with particular abilities and talents, some of which include the ability to choose to act contrary to instinct and our shared animal nature.


Ogionik, I think your position, as stated, is simply a mirror image of the position you criticise. I think the truth is far more complex than either position's extremes.

we arent that advanced, honestly the only great thing humanity as a whole has accomplished that no other animal can claim is that we can leave this planet willingly.

we have nice houses, animals have houses too. we have AC, even prairie dogs create their own colling systems for their burrows, i mean what humans think makes us so much better than humans is that we do things animals do, but we have just refined and perfected them.

I MEANT *"than animals"* im in a rushy rush.

jesus after thinking about it, pitbulls dont go around slaughtering thousands upon thousands, humans do that, wild cougars dont go around launching missiles and participating in war , after thinking about i would say humans are BELOW animals in that we are more intelligent, and fail miserably to utilize that great tool/gift wisely and instead abuse and take advantage of it at every oppurtunity.

and im not granting exception to myself, i can admit i am to weak willed to live how i really would like and have submitted to the will of society.

Humans are a part of nature, like all the other animals and plants which live on this planet. Evolution has donated us big brains, that give us the ability to think, feel emotions -some animals also have, but not human like- and so on.....

We should take over responsibility for mother earth as the dominant species on it.
Stop treating nature like we do nowadays. Let's act as a part of this wonderful world.

i wonder how humans are so sure that animals do not experience emotion like we do.

i didnt know we could communicate on that level. or its more like the majority of humans cannot empathize with animals or take into account their point of view, because animals do not speak a language decipherable to them.

as a matter of fact, my dog probablly expresses more emotion than myself even.

theres happy when i come home

sad when i yell at her

mad when i **** with her

and jealous when i play with other dogs

bored when im on the computer and shes stuck in the room with me

and i would bet my life my dog loves me.

i could go on, i think my dog has at the very least some of the same emotions as me, because she utilizes some of the same body language as humans in the same context a human would display the same emotion in..

But even i do not speak the language of animals, i merely observe similarities.

Of course I think animals don't experience emotions like humans, but I agree that they have emotions. There is no doubt about that, like your dog e shows you every day.

Indeed it is pretty the same with communication. We can use a complex language to tell our opposite about our feelings, experiences, theories, points of view.......
Animals also communicate among each other, though not the way like we do.

In fact, this all is just a matter of the brains size and its state of development.
Emotions in our heads, through chemical reactions.
Different species have different brains and due to that fact, they see the world differently, think like no other creature and the way they feel is also not the same.

It seems obvious that other forms of animal life experience what we call feelings, but emotions are another, perhaps more exclusively human, form of/organization of/conceptual categorizations of feelings.

We experience what we have culturally indentified as "sadness", "remorse", "guilt", "shame", "regret", "romantic love", "anger", "fear", (etc.) and I suspect other animals feel the corresponding physical sensations, e.g., anger for me manifests in a burning sensation in the nose, fear in butterflies in the abdomen, etc.. Other animals may have the burning nose and butterflies but do they feel them as "the emotions", anger and fear? That's a hard one.

im quite sure my dog experiences love in exactly the same way i do.

when my brother died my older dog wouldnt eat for weeks and she lost alot of her original body weight.

coincedence? or sadness and depression without the ability to put her pain into words?

Or maybe emotions are more a cause of environment then species.
Does technology grant us the security needed to develop advanced emotions?

Did he know your brother was "dead"? Or did he have nameless feelings corresponding to the absence of the person he associated with being fed? This is all terra incognita. I'm only guessing of course.

I'm just trying to make a distinction between "feelings" and "emotions." I hope that is clear. Zoology is far from my areas of understanding.

During 1800s, Anthropologists had a problem as to
how to classify human beings. One researcher
proposed the expression "intelligent animal".
After advanced studies on monkeys, it was dropped.
Another researcher proposed "tool using animal".
After observing some animals making wooden tools
and sharpening them with knife like stones, it was
dropped. Another researcher proposed "weapon using
animal". A decade ago, a rare film was shot by an
amateur in an African forest. One short monkey was
hit very badly by a big monkey. The short monkey
prepared a wooden knife using stones and hid it on
the top of a tree. After some days, when the big
monkey came to attack the short monkey, it ran up
to the tree for the weapon it has hid and killed
the big monkey. The one thing that the
anthropologists found with any group of human
beings, even if they did not have contacts with
the out side world for thousands of years, has
spirituality with some form of religion. So, man
is a "spiritual animal" if you want to call him
that way.

The Upanishads say that "Manush" (human) was so
named because he has "Manas" a mind higher than
that of the animals which realizes the divinity in
creation. It was present since the creation of
human beings. Religion is the characteristic
feature of most of the human beings. It was not
attained through reasoning using mind. Illiterate
tribes located in inaccessible forests also have
religion. It is as eternal and and as unchanging
as the Almighty. Disbelief by a few will not
affect it.

"The percentage of atheists in the world is less
than 5%"

http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990c48a.htm

"Atheists are all scientists" ?

http://www.non-religious.com/statistics.html

The category, religious man is problematical. Would you consider a Hindu sage to be the same as a fundamentalist evangelist? Both are "religious," And would you consider a Madeline O'Hare to be equivalent to a zen master (both are "atheists")