Another day when there is no God

Agreed. He has a fine mind and I agree with much he has to say as well. I wonder why someone thought what he said "hurt their brain".

In his ideas on consciousness he mainly credits 'language' for the level of consciousness that we have attained and other animals have not.
That is about the only thing in it I disagree with because there is nothing to stop other animals from developing language and indeed, many researchers say they already have.

This is an interesting point because it raises the question of why consciousness as we know it has not evolved many times in other animals. We presumably developed it is a matter of a geological eye-blink, something like 100,000 years.
Since it is obviously has great survival advantages, I wonder why hasn't it developed hundreds of times before?

Just mental navel gazing, I don't have anything else to do today.

Many animals don't seem to me to lack consciousness, just the ability to use it as do we.

I have to go along with that. They don't perceive the world in the same way that we do. If I say to the dog, "where's Bella?" she looks at me as though I were goofy, because of course, she always knows where I am by the scent of me.

Many allegedly more intelligent humans can't, don't or won't delay gratification. Miss Cleo, however, could. Each morning, I would give the dogs charcoal treats. One morning, I gave them out, and then went outside for a smoke. When I came back in, I saw Cleo looking at me with a happy expressi0n and realized she had not eaten her treat yet. Then I realized that she wanted to play "Is that my treat?" in which I pretend to take it away, and she pretends she will bite me. She had waited until I came back in because she enjoyed the game as much as the treat.

Parrots are pretty damned smart, too.

I love the intelligence of birds. And I consider my dog in his own way as smart as me. There is nothing he doesn't have figured out, about his environment and the wife and me.

Evolution of the horse

Authentic yeti shoes found

Mephistopheles serves Faust and wins his soul.

This is an underwater sculpture, in Grenada, in honor of the African Ancestors that were thrown overboard the slave ships during the Middle Passage of the African Holocaust.

Wow what a powerful --and heartbreaking- image!

Steam powered ditch digger

Marine biologist Silvia Maciá was boating on the north coast of Jamaica in the summer of 2001 when she noticed something soar out of the sea. At first she thought it was a member of the flying fish family—a group of marine fish that escape predators by breaking the water's surface at great speed and gliding through the air on unusually large pectoral fins. But after tracing the creature's graceful arc for a few seconds, Maciá realized this was no fish. It was a squid—and it was flying.

With her husband and fellow biologist Michael Robinson, Maciá identified the airborne cephalopod as a Caribbean reef squid (Sepioteuthis sepioidea)—a lithe, torpedo-shaped critter with long, undulating fins. They think the squid was startled by the noise of the boat's outboard engine and estimated that the 20-centimeter-long mollusk reached a height of two meters above the water and flew a total distance of 10 meters—50 times its body length. What's more, the squid extended its fins and flared its tentacles in a radial pattern while airborne, as though guiding its flight.

"It was doing this weird thing with its arms where it had them spread out almost in a circle," recalls Maciá, who teaches at Barry University in Florida. "It had its fins kind of flared out as much as it could—it really looked liked it was flying. It hadn't accidentally flopped out of the water; it was maintaining its posture in a certain way. It was doing something active."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-squid-fly/

I have a parrot story that still amazes me even today:

My friend’s parrot participated with them by watching them play ping pong and cheering them on. 🏓

After a particularly contentious game, this parrot spoke the phrase “great game”! However, this bird never was taught this phrase and no one had ever said the phrase in the bird’s presence or within its earshot. The bird somehow ““knew” what to say and when to say it!

Parrots speak in mysterious ways.

That’s for sure. They seem to be able to speak in ways that indicate an understanding of what the meaning of their words and not just random responses. Wish the same were true about certain Presidents of large democratic countries.

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519): Spiral staircase, 1516.
Château de La Rochefoucauld, France.

That is breathtaking edgar.