A loop of thoughts

hi, I was reading an article about how humans think and found it very interesting. I made notes and added what I think of it in between . These are just snippets, I apologize if it isn't as legible but they're just scattered facts.

If Nietzsche was a narwhal, German philosopher were a fish, his  destructive thoughts would be contained. Humans often tend to love their own intellect than the planet loves us. We think that humans are the only smart species but giraffes who have half a grain sized brains are also thoughtful.

“Octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”

Switch in human thinking, humility comes into play. From going from how unscientific it is for humans to compare their minds to animals to scientists asking how unsmart we are to not know how smart animals are. We are indeed very ignorant and arrogant of our smartness.

I think its because humans are scared to discover how smart other animals / ai can be, hence they don’t want to measure it. Now that ai is invented by us we are only scared of one thing that it will outsmart us.

Humans can do nothing but be in the present, from how we perceive things, primarily thru seeing and hearing we can’t track things since light is perceived at the very instant, so we have no other options unlike animals that detect smell. Animals can detect what is going to happen in the future and the past. If supposedly the owner of a dog was in the room, and the dog enters after the owner has left, it could sense that the owner was ‘there’. This corresponds to a rather psychic thinking.

Adults tend to think that everyone thinks like them and children think the complete opposite. Is that why as kids we can understand life much better and when adults start to realize it, we call it maturity? It is the dilemma of reality; everyone’s reality is different.

If horses and goats could draw images, they would draw their gods as horses and goats.

Is empathy real? Humans can never really understand how intelligent or how an animal thinks. Thomas Nagel wrote an essay of how it would be to be a bat. Even if we try to picture what it’s like to fly like a bat, to have webbed wings and spend most of our life hanging upside down, all we can imagine is what it would be like for us to be a bat and not a bat to be a bat.

Likewise, if we picture ourselves in another person’s shoes, we picture how it would be for us to be in their situation and not them in their situation.  Adults tend to think  that their fellow adults also think likewise, this is where the system is flawed. Can children not experience empathy because they don’t think everyone thinks the system?

Animals are more content in their life because they know that they belong on earth. However, humans on the other hand experience metaphysical claustrophobia a feeling of, “do I belong here?”. It is not completely invalid, since there are major ways that life has been harming humans and vice versa. Hence, trying to escape to another planet might not seem like a bad choice.

Humans are trying to replace their loneliness that god fulfilled with superpowered AI? Scientists are trying to create ‘transhumanist’ thinkers that look forward to a fully virtual future, in which our minds leave our bodies behind and achieve immortality in the form of electromagnetic pulses. Humans function the same, we are united by things that scare us.

We are scared of the unlimited, of the infinite. Hence we find peace in measuring things, from how animals think ( if they are smarter) to measuring the distance of stars. If there is an entity smarter than our species, it is a thought that can’t be comprehended.