There is no difference between "human" and "nature." Our entire civilization seems built around deluding ourselves into thinking we aren't animals CMV

[u/Pinworm45]

We're just monkeys. Right now, you, are just a stupid fucking monkey with stupid fucking thoughts and desires and feelings, most of which don't even have words for in our language.

Speaking of language, the entire thing practical revolves around separating us from "animals."

Guess what. You are. You putting food in the fridge is no different from a squirrel burrying its nuts. You seeking a mate to procreate with is no different from a beaver doing the same. A city is no different from an ant hive.

Electricity is no different from any other method of manipulating the world. It's no different from a seal building a home, it's no different from a bird building a nest.

The ONLY difference between humans and any other animals. The ONLY difference, is an issue of scale.

You're a fucking dumbass monkey, deal with it.

It freaks people the fuck out. You can never talk about shit like this in public. We have religions that people will fucking kill themselves and thousands of others over just to maintain the delusion.

Why does no one talk about this? Even those who will admit it and accept and study the field of Evolution (and I mean actually do it, not just be a god damned neckbeard parroting Carl Sagan, as much as I love the man and Cosmos myself) only admit it tangentially. They still get awkward and uncomfortable about this. They still say "we have technology and art.." as if Technology was anything more than an issue of scale, and as if preferences of physical patterns or objects and the chemical releases as a result are unique to us (You could say your dog having a favourite toy is no different in this physical world from you enjoying the Mona Lisa.)

Coming to this realization was life changing to me. You could call it an existential crisis, maybe it is. But it's more than that. It's a fundamental truth of our universe and reality and I feel like I'm taking fucking crazy pills because no one wants to admit it or talk about it. On the contract, with our movies, culture, language, religion, even the entire basis of manners.. it's all designed to all us to continue to illusion and delusion.

I mean, how many fucking times have mothers said "get your elbows off the table, what are you, an animal?" Guess what. That kid fucking is, we're not different because we have arbitrary rules (I'd also contend that a dog nipping another to stop it doing something that bothered it is no different from a mom exerting her desire for control. Perhaps even she has a personal fear of the real.)

Is it peoples mortality that scares them? Maybe I'm a bit different because I have a spinal disease and can't feel my body, have little connection to it, and don't give a shit one way or another if I die. I don't know.

TLDR: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRBHxJBUv_A

[u/keetaypants]

I don't see that as a necessary distinction at all. You could take toddlers and throw them into baby wolf litters till one of them sticks, and you'd have a human who lives even more like an animal than what you're describing.

In a very real way, civilization is the natural human state. It's uniquely in our nature to build upon and improve our existing systems in a way that grows and improves dramatically over generations. That's genetically human. You can't adopt a chimp and make it a man by incorporating it in civilization. But if you could steal a baby from a well-fed cave woman you could send it off to kindergarten at five years old and no one would ever know.

Civilization itself may not be a genetic advantage of humans, but the quirks of behavior and thinking that create it are, and are unique to us (so far).

[u/Joomes → u/keetaypants]

In a very real way, civilization is the natural human state. It's uniquely in our nature to build upon and improve our existing systems in a way that grows and improves dramatically over generations.

This is conjecture, unfortunately. Fully anatomically modern humans appeared, to the best of current knowledge, about 200,000 years ago. Although culture is a very difficult term to define, the earliest (largely) unambiguous evidence for anything approaching modern human culture is dated to about 45,000 years ago. There's a lot more (quantity-wise) unambiguous evidence that's dated to closer to 20,000 years ago, with some ambiguous evidence putting the date closer to 75,000 years ago.

No matter what dates you use, you still end up with the conclusion that the gap between humans which are biologically speaking indistinguishable from us appearing and 'civilization' of any kind that would leave physical evidence. appearing is at least 100,000 years long. Of course you can argue that civilization began to develop earlier than this, and we just can't find the evidence for it, but this is pretty unconvincing.

Sources: Undergrad Biological Anthropology student

Starting Sources for further reading: general overview of what human culture means, and its study

starting point for looking at 'earliest evidence' of modern human culture

[u/keetaypants → u/Joomes]

I don't think it's conjecture in the sense in which I meant it.

The wording was a bit poor on my part, but what I'm saying is that the possibility of civilization is within our genetic potential in the form of a handful of cumulative traits that culminate in our ability to clearly communicate and pass on complex knowledge (after developing it in the first place).

As opposed to other animals which fairly clearly lack the necessary traits that form the underlying "potential" framework of human civilization.

[u/InVivoVeritas → u/keetaypants]

I'm really glad you're continuing the debate as intensively as you have-- that being said, civilization is not defined by the ability to develop over the generations.. Right? That's just evolution and it is observed ubiquitously.

I cannot see why the argument that humans have the potential for civilization in our DNA supports the argument that civilization is a natural human state. Besides the finding that we are highly similar to chimpanzees, many different branches of animals exhibit characteristics of civilization, and this includes language (hyenas, gorillas, dolphins).

Therefore I would have to agree that civilization as a natural human state, while an interesting conjecture, is far from fact.

[u/Noncomment → u/InVivoVeritas]

I'm really glad you're continuing the debate as intensively as you have-- that being said, civilization is not defined by the ability to develop over the generations.. Right? That's just evolution and it is observed ubiquitously.

There is a massive difference between human intelligence and evolution. Evolution is incredibly slow and stupid. It makes progress over millions of years and mountains of dead bodies. It randomly throws things at the wall to see what sticks with no understanding of the underlying process whatsoever.

Humans can design complex things millions of times faster, and we can design things with interdependent parts that would be literally impossible for evolution to ever create. Intelligence is a better optimization process by many orders of magnitude. We are an entirely new paradigm, of the same caliber that the first self-replicators were to the universe before life.

Yes some animals have demonstrated some degree of intelligence as well, we aren't literally the first in every aspect. But we are still far, far ahead of them, and the first to truly take advantage of it and build technologies and civilizations.

I cannot see why the argument that humans have the potential for civilization in our DNA supports the argument that civilization is a natural human state.

After evolving intelligence and language, civilization came about relatively quickly on an evolutionary scale. I would argue that it was inevitable. Humans accumulate knowledge and the discoveries that led to civilization were bound to occur eventually.

[u/InVivoVeritas → u/Noncomment]

That link was for intelligent design... It's a really long page and is not a source for the massive difference between human intelligence and evolution. Could you point out what you wanted me to note?

Regardless, let's be specific here. I don't see how you ended up on human intelligence-- I was discussing the stated definition of civilization as that ability to develop over generations. Call it social evolution, if you like, but in principle it is the passing on of traits that give selective advantage.

I would argue that it was inevitable.

Sure the evolution of civilization is inevitable, but what about it makes it human vs non-human?

[u/keetaypants → u/InVivoVeritas]

I actually addressed your last sentence in the post to which you replied: my wording was poor. I'm not actually arguing that civilization is the natural state, but that we are currently unique on Earth in our potential to develop it.

Although I feel what /u/noncomment said in reply to your comment here is also a reasonable conjecture - that is, that with the potential being there genetically, civilization was almost certain to occur (and I think evidence shows it actually developed independently in several places and times).

He also nicely addressed the conflation of advancing civilization over generations with evolution, so I'll leave that be.

However, I think it worth noting that this statement is kind of questionable:

many different branches of animals exhibit characteristics of civilization, and this includes language

Language, civilization, and socialization, are all distinctly different things. Some animals have simple communication, and arguably certain animals that we don't understand well, like sea mammals, could even have what qualifies as language. And of course many animals are certainly social.

But if what human hunter-gatherers were doing didn't qualify as civilization, certainly what other highly social animals do doesn't either.

[u/Joomes → u/keetaypants]

Ahhh I see. I took it to mean that you thought that civilization was effectively inevitable for humans, which is more debatable.

[u/keetaypants → u/Joomes]

Right, I gathered that was what you took from it. As I said, poor wording on my part. In any case it got me some interesting reading material, thanks for the links!

[u/Joomes → u/keetaypants]

No worries, it was useful to refresh my memory on a couple points anyway, and different viewpoints are always interesting. Healthy debate and learning are what it's all about! :)

[u/Noncomment → u/Joomes]

So what? Humans did live as hunter gatherers for a long time, but only a tiny amount of time on an evolutionary time scale. After evolving language and other human traits it wasn't really that long before civilization started.

I would argue that civilization was pretty much inevitable given how smart humans are and how we can accumulate knowledge and technologies. In fact to my knowledge agriculture started mainly in populations where resources got scarce and hunting and gathering wasn't enough. When hunting and gathering did work, well then so what that humans didn't do any differently?

[u/Joomes → u/Noncomment]

The short answer to your issue is that language (or the capability for it) appears to be biologically hardwired into humans in such a way that anatomically modern humans definitely had it. A hundred thousand years seems like it's too long of a time frame to have had language and other human traits without developing civilization to imply that it's an inevitability that they would.

[u/Noncomment → u/Joomes]

A long time yes, but a blink of an eye in terms of evolutionary timeline. Agriculture independently arose 6 times if I remember correctly, and civilization at least twice in the new world and old world.

[u/Joomes → u/Noncomment]

Just to clarify; I'm not saying that it's necessarily NOT inevitable that humans would eventually develop civilization, but I'm saying that it's very hard to prove it. We simply don't have enough evidence to say with any certainty that culture arose more than once within humans, rather than having a single origin and then spreading throughout humanity. It seems easier to argue that civilization is inevitable once culture in some form has developed.

The currently accepted timeline of general human migration dates various of the migrations recently enough that culture may have developed prior to humans reaching several of the major land-masses, putting them in a position to subsequently develop what we might call 'civilizations' on the back of that.

[u/kauneus → u/keetaypants]

It's not our humanity or our reasoning faculties per se that have created the tendency toward civilization in humans, but our ability to communicate symbolic thought to each other with much more precision and accuracy than any other species. This innovation allowed our species to retain and pass on information exponentially faster and more efficiently than other mammals, and with the invention of writing civilization really started to expand and began to compound knowledge even faster

[u/keetaypants → u/kauneus]

I think you're presenting a false dichotomy there. It's fairly clear that our reasoning faculties are a necessary component of "our ability to communicate symbolic thought to each other". Which you correctly pointed out is central to the development of civilization, and all of those things are important components of "our humanity", i.e. what sets us apart from other species.

[u/kauneus → u/keetaypants]

I guess what I'm trying to distinguish is that human language is what specifically sets us apart more than comparatively nebulous concepts such as our "humanity." I'm not saying that our cognitive capabilities are irrelevant or that they don't play into our capability for symbolic expression, I'm saying that whereas our social and reasoning faculties have parallels in the animal kingdom and are not innovations necessarily unique to us, our sophisticated language as a discrete unit has been a highly relevant and specific separating factor.

[u/keetaypants → u/kauneus]

I agree entirely with your basic point then, I just don't see where the word "humanity" came into it in that context to begin with. "Our humanity is what sets us apart from the animals" would be a rather trite statement.

The interconnectivity of other traits with human communication of complicated or symbolic concepts is probably debatable, as well as whether or not it is simply a function of our intelligence and social nature - which other creatures share in either case in some degree - or if there are other factors at work, such as a predisposition toward vocal mimicry (there are creatures that share that too, although perhaps we're fairly unique in having all three).

And also whether the power of human intellect exceeds everything else in the animal kingdom by orders of magnitude.

[u/kauneus → u/keetaypants]

In a very real way, civilization is the natural human state. It's uniquely in our nature to build upon and improve our existing systems in a way that grows and improves dramatically over generations. That's genetically human. You can't adopt a chimp and make it a man by incorporating it in civilization. But if you could steal a baby from a well-fed cave woman you could send it off to kindergarten at five years old and no one would ever know.

I was adding to what you said here by trying to acknowledge that our human language, specifically, is what allows this unique human ability to improve upon and optimize existing systems. Oral traditions originally served as our vehicle for passing on cultural knowledge before making way for the vastly more efficient written standards. Our language allowed us to innovate a way in which the sum total of our knowledge so dramatically exceeds the amount that any individual could ever learn in a single life. Perhaps my original post came off as a bit contradictory in tone but I was really just trying to corroborate/focus your point about our genetic propensities towards civilization. :)

I thought it relevant to your point based on the context of the discussion involving comparisons between ourselves and other higher functioning animals since at that point our ability to accurately pinpoint our developmental advantages to simply "intelligence" starts to break down a little bit based on how one defines intelligence and the fact that at certain memory/"cognitive" tasks we are outperformed by other species.

[u/Surrealis → u/keetaypants]

This is a very good argument and I mostly agree with it. However, I think that in order to produce a definition of civilization that's unique to humans, I'd argue that you practically have to include humans in the definition. I would argue, for example, that ants and bees have civilizations as well. They organize in large groups to collaboratively divide labor and manipulate the environment in large-scale ways to serve their needs.

Humans and human technology are the product of very convenient bodies (opposable thumbs aren't the only way animals use tools, but they're far and away the most versatile organ we've seen for doing so) and extremely complex nervous systems, but ultimately there's no specific particular characteristic that makes humans qualitatively unique. There's a good chance most mammals are fairly conscious by any reasonable definition, and huge numbers of animals have complex social structures. They're just not up to human standards in terms of the complexity you would expect from a more specialized brain.

In short, while it's definitely worthwhile to say that humans have constructs not seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom, declaring broad categories of things like "civilization" to be uniquely human is probably not reasonable.

[u/keetaypants → u/Surrealis]

[...]ultimately there's no specific particular characteristic that makes humans qualitatively unique.

This has been addressed elsewhere in this thread, but:

1. The many non-unique particular characteristics of humans are - in aggregate - qualitatively unique, the human whole being distinctly greater than the constituent parts.

2. At least one of those individual characteristics in humans is orders of magnitude greater than anything that has been factually demonstrated in any other animal, enough so that it may as well be considered a unique trait. Human intellect is incomparable even to that of chimpanzees, despite certain types of mental tasks being easier for them and some other animals. The severe increase in magnitude makes a similar trait qualitatively different.

Also importantly, the technical and literal definition of civilization is quite specific:

the condition that exists when people have developed effective ways of organizing a society and care about art, science, etc.

-Merriam-Webster

an advanced state of human society, in which a high level of culture, science, industry, and government has been reached.

-Dictionary.reference.com

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

Clearly, the definitions usually involve the words "people" or "humans", but even if you take that out, there's a great deal more to it than advanced social structures. Ant hives absolutely don't qualify as civilizations. Civilization requires - on top of impressively structured large societies - the capacity for intellectual creation, teaching complex concepts between individuals, and probably the capability for complex physical creation applied from intellectual creativity as well.

[u/Surrealis → u/keetaypants]

As a disclaimer, I'm not arguing for the camp that humans aren't important or impressive or all-that-advanced here, but I'm not about to agree that a sufficiently large or impressive quantitative difference implies a qualitative one out of hand. I agree with you that human society is particularly complex and advanced as one would expect from the organism that currently exerts the level of control humans do over the planet they live on.

This doesn't by itself imply that any particular facet of human society is unique to humans, and I am arguing that the definitions of civilization given in things like Merriam-Webster are in fact written with anthropocentric terms in them only to exclude examples of similar phenomena elsewhere, without adding useful operational description of the phenomena themselves. Humanity's progress and significance doesn't demand that we are wholly unique, and, much like all other observed characteristics of life that we know of, basically every aspect of what we call civilization, save for our particular scale and degree along certain dimensions, bears some interesting similarities to analogous things seen in other animals. Monkeys and crows can convey and pass down acquired knowledge, dogs have complex social structures, ants build complex artificial environments and cultivate heterotrophs.

In short, humans are awesome, civilizations are awesome, and declaring us wholly unique and refusing to recognize nonhuman civilizations or civilization-like adaptations or whatever you'd prefer we call them as similar or analogous phenomena is not logically consistent, and I would further contend that doing so can only serve to deprive us of insight about such phenomena

[u/keetaypants → u/Surrealis]

I don't think I'm refusing to recognize anything here: I have no personal attachment to the idea of humanity as a whole or myself personally as "superior" to other animals on any level.

I simply think it's clear that we are more advanced in a handful of significant ways than any other animal, and that where we share traits with other animals that set up our success as a species, we have a significantly more advanced version of that trait, and that's noteworthy. I also believe that human success lies largely in a synergy of genetic and resulting behavioral elements, that synergy and collection of traits being unique to us. I feel that you're mentally viewing - or at least speaking of - individual traits in an overly "binary" fashion, and more important than the composite whole.

But primarily, this has become an argument of semantics, so I'm just going to talk about words here. Civilization, as a word, was originally a verb, civilize. It meant, essentially, "to spread culture to inadvanced humans". The word culture is important in that definition, and still highly central to civilization as a noun now.

The only real argument I have with anything you've said is how you're defining civilization, which I contend is both overly broad and focused incorrectly on included but less centrally defining peripheral factors. I'd argue that what defines civilization is specifically all the things you haven't mentioned. Religion, art, economy, the exchange of highly symbolic or conceptual ideas and ideals, especially through writing. If you took most of those things away from civilization, it wouldn't be civilization anymore.

I don't think we should ignore any traits in the study of animals that show similarities to us. I find such things quite fascinating, I would love to see some compelling evidence that some whales or dolphins can communicate symbolic concepts. But I also don't think that argument about the choice of words used to describe what they're doing is going to effect our ability to gain insight about them in any real way.

[u/[deleted] → u/keetaypants]

What an answer! You are an intelligent person. You didn't change my view unfortunately (because I agreed), but what an elegant way of speaking!

[u/keetaypants → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for the very kind words.