metonymy4u

One of the oldest human problems has been the question of how to explain our penchant for suffering. Humans seem to suffer emotionally in ways that other animals do not. Although we do not think this is a true as we once did (we are now more aware of social cognition in dogs, grief in elephants, self-harming behaviors in apes and even a possible case of a dolphin suicide as described in the movie “The Cove”), still it seems that no other species can manage to be so unhappy in the midst of so much economic largess. Why is this? One cause, I believe, is the size of our brains. Our large brains which have more intense, long lasting and overwhelming emotions than other animals, and which also have the cognitive ability to derive hypothetical relationships between simple events. So we can learn not just to be afraid of things that terrify us, but we can also learn to be afraid of terror itself, and learn to wage war on it, even though it is wholly a pigment of our imagination. The ability to derive relationships that are never directly experienced was Kant’s revolutionary insight into human cognitive ability. It was the answer to the problem of the poverty of the stimulus (e.g. how do we get from counting apples in an orchard to the concept of numbers ad infinitum) that had stumped philosophers from Plato to Hume. And although I believe other animals exhibit this ability as well, no other animal has based their entire being upon it the way humans have. The problem is that the same ability which gives us the geometry to build a house or plan an orchard also enables fear of the inevitable “other,” and builds the bombs to kill it.

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i’ve never seen a people so surrounded by wealth, yet so poor.

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One of the ironies of the so-called postmodern world seems to be that, in the name of guaranteeing freedom, we have determined that we must stand for nothing in particular. The problem is that when one stands for nothing, it makes it very hard to stand up for anything. Including freedom.

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Humans commonly assume that we are superior to other species in our communicative abilities. That human language is more complex, more abstract, more precise, more useful, and more sophisticated in some fundamental way than non-human language. But does the data support this assumption? In what way is human communication essentially more advanced than animal communication? Elephants and whales perfected long distance communication millions of years before humans invented email and text messaging, canids are some of the most gregarious species on the planet, and were probably that way long before their domestication by humans 16,000 years ago, and birds and spiders regularly complete astonishing feats of engineering that would challenge the most advanced graduate student in our most prestigious universities. I think that the problem is that animals that seem to have a predilection for human study, like cetaceans, apes and elephants, just haven’t figured out how to teach us the complexities of their language yet. That, or they’re not sure yet whether they really want to have anything to do with those bat-ass crazy humans.

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