On the topic of, ahem , animals...humans...its all too often many think we are unique and the Universe was created for us etc etc...
Even the humble Magpie is self aware. From '
Philosophy On The Mesa', nothing new, just something inspired by local birdsong:
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There is something fundamentally ironic in the fact that we are now beginning to understand ourselves as homo sentiens (the feeling human being) rather than homo sapiens ( a paradigm shift which has its own philosophical perils), but at the same time we are expanding our knowledge of the rational capacities of nonhuman animals. Birds and dogs seem to be the favorite research subjects reported on by the media right now, rather than apes—birds, because it is just so weird that birds can think (so it has shock value) and dogs, because we just love them so damn much. I can find less-than-academic reasons why we are glued to these topics, but that shouldn’t detract from the astonishing fact that the scientific community has experienced a sea change over the last decade: Even in the late 20th century you couldn’t enter into an academic discussion about animal intelligence without risking the loss of your professional reputation; now it seems that we’re all getting into the fray, legitimately.
So let’s talk some more about birds. We’ll save the dogs for some other time. Did you hear about the rook that can figure out how to raise the water level in a tube so it can reach the worm? Not the Aesop fable, but for real? A thought process that used to be attributed to humans only—chimps can’t do it as fast or as consistently. Other experiments conducted on crows have shown that crows are able to envision a solution to a problem (using a string to get a piece of meat) without having first tried to solve the problem through trial-and-error. The crow brain is proportionally larger than other bird brains, the body mass taken into account. A bit of online surfing brought me to some research published last year, which I had somehow missed: Magpies are now the first bird to pass the mirror self-recognition test—they will try to remove a visible sticker placed on their feathers, if all they know about it is that they see it in the mirror. So move over, humans, apes, elephants, and dolphins—magpies also turn out to have a basic sense of self! For those of us who were astounded and delighted in the 1990s when we read about chimps who would clearly recognize themselves in the mirror (red dot placed on their forehead), this is only one more step in the expansion of the personhood concept: If you know that you are, as an entity, language or not, then you exist on a higher level than beings who may be aware of their surroundings, but not that they are aware of them. Sartre’s old pour-soi vs. en-soi is being recast in another context.
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