What’s So Special About Humans?

Josh Landy

We humans think we’re so smart. But are we really that unique?

Alison Gopnik

Do other animals have language, thought and culture?

Josh Landy

Shouldn’t we start to treat them a little better?

Alison Gopnik

This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy

…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Alison Gopnik

And I’m Alison Gopnik, sitting in for Ray Briggs, and we’re coming to you from Kepler’s books in Menlo Park.

Josh Landy

Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy.

Alison Gopnik

And across the bay at UC Berkeley, where I teach psychology.

Josh Landy

Alison’s been a guest—and guest host—on this show many times. Thank you so much Alison for stepping in once again tonight.

Alison Gopnik

 It’s a pleasure. And many thanks to the Kepler’s literary foundation for hosting us.

Josh Landy

Welcome, everyone, to Philosophy Talk.

Alison Gopnik

Today, we’re asking what’s so special about humans?

Josh Landy

I think there are lots of things that make us special,

Alison Gopnik

Like what?

Josh Landy

Well, language. For one thing, look at the two of us yapping back and forth at each other. You couldn’t do this show with a pair of dolphins.

Alison Gopnik

I think you’re underestimating other animals. I mean, think of a new study that shows that crows can hold grudges against humans for years, and not only hold grudges, but communicate them to other crows. They can let their crow friends know which humans have behaved badly and ought to be attacked.

Josh Landy

Okay, so thank you for the warning that that’s that’s useful, especially for me, but I’m not convinced that that’s more than instinct, right? I mean, look, it makes perfect sense for crows to have evolved some kind of mechanism where they gravitate toward kind people and avoid mean people, or maybe peck at them. That way, they’re going to end up with more food and fewer rocks thrown at them. I totally get that, but I don’t think that’s morality.

Alison Gopnik

Well, there’s lots of other examples. Elephant moms collaborate to take care of other elephant moms babies. If you give a monkey an unfair distribution of food, they get mad and throw it around. People have even seen dolphins helping beached whales back into the ocean.

Josh Landy

I mean, that’s a cute thing when it happens, and it makes for very cute videos. But I don’t think that’s morality. You make it sound like these dolphins are acting on a moral code, like there’s some dolphin 10 Commandments, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s fish. I don’t think that these non human species have richly worked out moral codes like human beings do, because, you know, we have the capacity for complex thought and for language.

Alison Gopnik

But we’re just as shaped by evolution as other animals. You want me to think that when a dolphin does something nice, it’s just their evolutionary programming, but when a person does something nice, it’s because they believe in an abstract moral law of niceness, but we’re actually no different. It’s just that we’ve learned to rationalize our instincts after the fact.

Josh Landy

Geez, Alison, I didn’t know you were such a cynic. I still prefer to think that when you are nice to meet which you are all the time, you’re doing it out of choice, not just following some kind of evolutionary algorithm. I mean, when we human beings have moral intuitions, we can deliberate about them, we can articulate them, we can write them down, teach them to our children. All of that seems very different to me.

Alison Gopnik

Well, now I think you’re starting to make sense, because I do think that there’s a difference between humans and other animals that’s rooted in childhood and culture.

Josh Landy

Okay, that’s music to my ears. Tell me more.

Alison Gopnik

Well, one of the distinctive things about humans is that we have a much longer childhood than any other species. So chimps are producing as much food as they’re consuming by the time they’re about seven years old, and the earliest that humans do that is about 15 and mice. Son is 35 and in our culture, we’re still doing mortgage and tuition checks. Oh no. But even though that long child is literally and metaphorically expensive, it actually has some important benefits, because it seems as if it’s that that enables us to pass on information from one generation to another. That’s the basis of culture, and that really does seem to be something that makes us different from other animals.

Josh Landy

Okay, but if I were you, Alison, wouldn’t I be taking a devil’s advocate position here and saying to you, I bet other animals do that too. I mean, think about those orca mumps teaching their orca pups some hunting techniques, for example.

Alison Gopnik

Sure, I mean, other animals have some elements of culture, but they don’t seem to do it on nearly the scale that humans do, and importantly, they don’t do it with nearly the consequences. Look, if you look around this room, nothing in this room existed in the Pleistocene. We’re in this beautiful bookstore inside a big constructed building on a major thoroughfare full of cars, for better or worse, human beings have transformed their environment to an unprecedented degree, and culture is the thing that lets us do that.

Josh Landy

That makes a lot of sense to me, but I’m still wondering, Aren’t there other animal species that also transform their environments? I mean, beavers build dams, birds build nests. Ants, they construct these incredible underground cities. I feel like we human beings, we sometimes just get too wrapped up in our own achievements, and we just don’t notice all these miracles around us, above us and below us.

Alison Gopnik

Well, I still think there’s an important difference between us and other animals, but we actually have the perfect guest to help us see whether that’s true and why it is true. If it is, it’s the scuba diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, whose latest book is “Living On Earth.”

Josh Landy

But first, let’s hear more about those amazing communicating animals. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sarah Lai Stirland, to listen to them. She files this report.

News anchor

Some-foul mouthed parrots at a British zoo are in big trouble for swearing at guests.

Sarah Lai Stirland

In 2020, give African gray parrots made headlines around the world for their linguistic antics.

News anchor

They were donated to the Lincolnshire wildlife park within the same week. Well, the birds had to be quarantined together. You know how parrots are. They’d start talking, and soon they were cussing at each other. Then they put them on display, and they cussed at the visitors, who then started swearing back at the parrot.

Sarah Lai Stirland

But I wonder, were the parrots really speaking or just mimicking? Isn’t language what makes us special and superior to animals. Linguists have long argued that language is, quote, uniquely human, but others disagree.

Rivka Galchen

There’s a lot of sense-making

Sarah Lai Stirland

Rivka Galchen is the author of a New Yorker article titled “How scientists started to decode birdsong.”

Rivka Galchen

It’s about the language of birds and about whether language is the right word for what they’re doing.

Sarah Lai Stirland

Galchen writes that researchers are finding the notes that birds sing, for example, often serve specific functions.

Superb Fairywrens

[chirping]

Sarah Lai Stirland

Those were two unique songs that superb fairywren mums in Australia sing to their eggs.

Rivka Galchen

When the eggs hatch, when they become nestlings, they use a note, almost like a code that came from their mother’s call while she was sitting on the nest.

Sarah Lai Stirland

The chick’s password notes ensure that their mum will feed them, and not the cuckoo hatchlings whose mothers ditch them. But birds, like superb fairy wrens, can’t yet be said to communicate like humans.

Rivka Galchen

Almost no one I spoke to has this sense that we’re kind of gonna put it into Google Translate and find out you know what they’re saying or what they’re gossiping about.

Sarah Lai Stirland

That’s because animal communications have evolved in the context of their specific environment.

Arik Kershenbaum

It would be a mistake to think that animals necessarily talk like we do.

Sarah Lai Stirland

Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at Cambridge University, is the author of a new book titled “Why Animals Talk.” He himself recently gave a public talk organized by a group called Interspecies Internet.

Arik Kershenbaum

They’ve been through a set of evolutionary pressures. They have adaptations that suit them in the niche that they occupy. We’ve been through our evolutionary pressures, and we have behaviors that suit the niche that we occupy,

Sarah Lai Stirland

Humans share similar social traits with other animals, like birds, elephants, wolves and cetaceans, like whales and dolphins, the evidence suggests that our communications arose out of our need to coordinate, says Kershenbaum.

Arik Kershenbaum

What is driving complex communication is social intelligence.

Sarah Lai Stirland

These humpback whales are creating a bubble net to catch herring. Humpbacks are usually solitary creatures, but they come together to coordinate these hunts in Alaska. UC Santa Cruz Professor Ari Friedlaender leads teams that study whales foraging behaviors.

Ari Friedlaender

It’s very clear that there are certain calls that these animals use repetitively, and in different types of situations, there’s dialog back and forth of information being shared, and that it’s for very functional purposes, like for foraging in a group,

Sarah Lai Stirland

Friedlaender is one of many scientists working with the AI community to correlate behavior and sound attributes like tones and notes. It’s a huge amount of information other animals use more than sound to communicate. For example, bees dance an El elephants secrete chemicals and use their senses of touch and sight as well. Some researchers also point out that animal communications are as much about emotional states as information. So it’s likely as fruitless to try and translate their sounds into human words as it would be to try and translate a piece of orchestral music.

Rivka Galchen

It even seems silly to say who’s smarter or less smart. They’re just like such radically different kinds of intelligences.

Sarah Lai Stirland

Again, the New York is Rivka Galchen.

Rivka Galchen

It kind of reminds me of the way that people are about children in schooling, that you both want to instill in your child, this sense that you’re really special, you’re different from everyone else.

Sarah Lai Stirland

But at the same time…

Rivka Galchen

You’re not special. You shouldn’t expect to be treated differently, you know.

Sarah Lai Stirland

For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sarah Lai Stirland.

Josh Landy

Well, that report was genuinely special, and not just in the way that parents say to their children. Thank you very much, Sarah. I’m Josh Landy here with Alison Gopnik, who sitting in my regular co-host Ray Briggs, and we’re at Kepler’s books in Menlo Park.

Alison Gopnik

Our guest today is a professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney and the author of many books, most recently, Lliving On Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World.” Please welcome back to Philosophy Talk… Peter Godfrey-Smith.

Josh Landy

So Peter, I still think very fondly of a day some years ago, when you took me octopus watching in Manly Bay in Australia, that was fantastic, and it made me wonder, where has this new book taken you on your travels.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in Central Australia, partly because, having done a lot of octopus hours, I wanted to broaden my perspective, the new book has quite a lot about birds, and there’s a little patch of territory that might become the new Manly Cove for me in Central Australia, where the parrot behaviors and the parrot life bring me back now regularly.

Alison Gopnik

So Peter, before Josh and I were arguing about whether there’s really something distinctive about human beings, and we couldn’t really agree about whether and how special we are. What do you think?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

I think culture is the is the right one word answer. In the history of philosophy and related sorts of inquiry, people have come up with all sorts of extravagant, metaphysically loaded accounts of what makes humans different. And with respect to those features, the gap keeps narrowing, and with respect to basic behaviors, also, the gap between humans and Non Humans keeps narrowing. But culture as a way of living in cultured forms of life, I think that really does make humans special. It’s not just things like language, the kind of tolerance that we see between diverse collections of humans. I’ve been here for a while now, and I’ve seen almost no violence.

Josh Landy

The night is young!

Peter Godfrey-Smith

For many non human species, especially our near relatives, that would be a notable event. So culture and certain social patterns of living.

Josh Landy

Does culture importantly include writing? I mean, how big of a difference does writing itself mark or is that just sort of one aspect of culture among many?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Writing in a way that surprises me still. It’s such a late comer. Its origin is so different from what one might have expected. We think of writing now in a bookstore, we think of written language as this astounding, limitless repository for memories, for thoughts, for skills. Writing seems to have originated mostly. In a context surrounding bookkeeping, who owes whose money, who hasn’t paid their taxes. If we think about the big gaps, the big gulfs between ways of living, the culture, no culture Gulf, I think, just seems very big within human cultures, though, relevance of writing, not quite so big.

Alison Gopnik

But what about telling stories. I mean, I’m a grandmother, and I’m recognizing that one of the things that grandmothers do most of all is pass on stories, tell things to their children. And as I was saying to Josh before, I think that relationship between those that long period of childhood, and also this long post menopausal grandmotherhood, elderhood that we have is really one of the keys to what goes on in culture, and maybe some of the other animals, like the orcas, are like that. But what do you think?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

It makes sense to me, it’s not something I’ve thought that much about the distinctive role of narrative within human social life, but especially in a bookstore, and especially when you, in your opening discussion, talked about the lengthy periods of childhood and inculturation that humans undergo, it makes total sense that narrative is an integral part of how we handle social life.

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re asking what’s so special about humans with Peter Godfrey-Smith from the University of Sydney.

Alison Gopnik

Is your dog the smartest dog in the world? Could she build her own dog house? What do you think animals can and cannot do?

Josh Landy

Culture, construction and communication—along with questions from our live audience, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Kiffness

The time has come for me to sing an ancient husky melody, writtenmany years ago by my people in the snow.

Josh Landy

Could animals pass down their ancient musical cultures just like human beings do? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Alison Gopnik

except your intelligence. I’m Alison Gopnik, sitting in for Ray Briggs, and we’re asking what’s so special about human with Peter Godfrey-Smith, author of “Living On Earth.”

Josh Landy

Got a question or comment about life on planet Earth? Join the discussion by raising your hand, and Heather over here will put you on the list and bring the mic to you when it’s your turn.

Alison Gopnik

So Peter, all animals respond to the environment, but we’ve been talking about the way that culture lets us change it, but your book is full of beautiful examples of how other animals change their environment and have shaped the Earth. What’s your favorite example?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Well, my favorite example is not an animal example. It’s a different kind of organism. We’re breathing oxygen right now. An oxygen rich atmosphere is not a natural atmosphere for a planet like this, and sometime over 2 billion years ago, some particular microorganisms, cyanobacteria, invented a kind of photosynthesis, a new kind compared to other sorts that had existed in which oxygen is produced as a byproduct. Now there are many things that make this significant, but the thing that’s begun to really sort of sit in my mind as a big thing is the fact that without that kind of invention, life could exist on a planet, but it will be a kind of fringe dweller, most likely in special environments, special places, a kind of marginal inhabitant, once you have oxygen, producing photosynthesis, which has different kinds of raw materials, plentiful raw materials, water, carbon dioxide. Life can be everywhere it can it can become ubiquitous on a planet. With more life, you get more evolution. You get more different kinds of organisms. Evolving animal life becomes possible. So although animals as transformers, is a big theme of the book. We owe it all to these microorganisms doing their thing for in a new way before any animals existed.

Josh Landy

This is something I love about your book. It often feels like a kind of love letter to planet earth that you see glories of hidden wonders that don’t meet the naked eye, like what cyanobacteria are doing for all of us, or have done in the in the historical past, the fact that we’re, as you put it, connected to the oldest history, just by virtue of the fact that our cells are the residue of cells, or the residue of cells going back as far as the mind can, can roam the fact that beauty exists in the world. Is that how it feels to you when you’re writing this book? Did you? Did you experience a sense of wonder in the face of facts about our planet?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

I can’t think of it like that. When I was writing it, it felt like just a series. Attempts to zoom out. Think about bigger and bigger collections. Think about a bigger stage, more and more characters, more and more of the history, trying to get back far enough to see the whole and given that life has been around on Earth for most of the Earth’s existence, life is not a late comer on this planet. It’s been around for a majority of the history of the earth and a good chunk of the history of the universe, given that you can think of it as a love letter to the earth, as well as this awkward, ungainly attempt to see everything at once.

Alison Gopnik

So what do you think about how life emerged in the first place? I mean, again, the point that you just made about the fact that life has been around for a very good chunk of the life of the universe, which we tend to think of as being quite a remarkably long time. How did it happen? Why did it happen? Did it happen? Do you think it happened anywhere else except here?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Let me emphasize also that the realization that led to part of the book. I was in a seminar in on the East Coast, and was a dinosaur scientist giving a standard account of how the human species is this late, arriving, half dressed arrival. You know, the last little tiny scrap of the universe is time. And I thought to myself, Well, that’s true of our species, but it’s not true of life as a whole. And if you think of us as just one part of life as a whole, then you get these surprising results, that life has been around for most of the Earth’s history, for about a quarter of all of known time. Yeah, it’s amazing. The fact that it’s been around for most of Earth’s history makes it natural to suspect that it probably could arise fairly readily on other planets. Life was present on earth fairly soon after the planet became even a candidate for being inhabited. Then the next question, in part, is that question that I raised by talking about the cyanobacteria. Can life on other planets go from being a kind of fringe dweller to being a major player in the way that it is here?

Josh Landy

So I mean, there’s a number of places where you talk about the way things might have gone, right? You could easily have had a planet Earth with no life. Thank you, cyanobacteria and other, of course, many other factors for having life. There’s also possibility that could not have been human life. And of course, there’s a more general possibility there could not have been consciousness, right? And you talk quite a bit about the origin of consciousness, that needn’t have happened, right? You could easily have had a put an algae planet, or basically something like that. So where does consciousness come from, and how does it fit into the overall picture?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

I’ve come to think it is an aspect of the animal way of being, to put it briefly. So if you had an algae planet, then right? No consciousness, if you had a planet in which everything was Bacteria also. But if animals are as in fact, they are these quite large, multi cellular beings that are invested in action, that are consequently invested in sensing, that achieve a point of view and have these very physically unusual machines inside them, nervous systems. I’ve come to think that with all those ingredients, consciousness is it’s not an add on or a surprising extra element, it’s something integral to the animal way of being.

Alison Gopnik

Is there something sort of depressing about the fact that if you were just a happy plant, you know, waving around in the bottom of the ocean, you wouldn’t know it, whereas, when you become an animal that has prey and predators and is trying to get make a living, that’s when consciousness really kicks in.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

There goes my love letter.

Alison Gopnik

Well, that’s those 35 year olds. You know? That’s the life, the life of the 35 year old, perhaps, perhaps the fact that they’re spending all their time trying to get resources and deal with prey and predators is compensated for my consciousness. The upside is that they’re conscious.

Josh Landy

And that’s, of course, another thing that some philosophers are pointed to as a potential differentiating feature this metacognition, right, the ability to think about our own thought process, although I’d be prepared to lay money that some other species are doing that too. But there’s a, I feel like there’s a, you know, before we get too gloomy, there’s a beautiful argument that you mount in your book for consoling it. So, so, yes, once we have this awful thing called consciousness, we can get riddled with existential angst and self doubt and self loathing. And you know, this is, I’m a literature professor. This is not only what we read about. This is what we do, but I’d love it, Peter, if you could tell us a little bit about your argument for not fearing death. I. Found this incredibly moving, this idea that if you if you actually situate yourself correctly, if that’s the right word with regard if you really understand the way the world is, in the part that you play in it, that’s gonna make your one, all of our future easier to swallow.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

To call it an argument, I think, is too much in a way. I’m not trying to make the case that we shouldn’t. The suggestion is that there’s a way of seeing our place within the whole that makes the coming onto the scene and leaving the scene seem not disturbing, seem like a natural feature of things. The book begins with most of a poem by Walt Whitman, in which he imagines the mother of all, looking on it onto a Civil War battlefield, and talking about the recycling of molecules, of chemicals, of parts, the fact that the destruction will give rise to new beings, new forms, the fact that you can see the materials that made you up as something you owe to earlier forms of life and something you will pass on to later ones. The idea of renewal and recycling as the basis for a positive perspective, that is one of the ideas I think of as central in the book. I don’t think it’s an argument, because it’s also possible to see things differently. If a person says, I don’t care about renewal or recycling, all I care about is the fact that my experiences will end and I don’t want them to, I don’t have an argument against that person. What I can do, along with Whitman and some of the scientific side is just offer a different way of looking at the situation.

Alison Gopnik

Yeah, this is the old joke about I don’t want to live forever through my work or my children. I want to live forever by not dying.

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk and we’re alive and kicking at Kepler’s books asking what’s so special about humans. Our guest is Peter Godfrey-Smith from the University of Sydney, and we have a question from our live audience, if you can tell us your first name, where you’re from, and what’s your question or comment?

Russell

Hi, my name’s Russell. I am a local. I live here in Menlo Park. I wanted to pick your brain about neuroscience and philosophy of mind. What do you think the prospects are for dramatic improvements in neuroscientific understanding of our brains? Like, I feel like we have a lot of data coming from a lot of different types of investigation, but it still seems like it’s a very sort of scattered thing, as opposed to something that we understand a lot in a very straightforward way, like our livers and kidneys and such. Are you optimistic that we’ll reach a point where, like, we really understand what the striatum and the cerebellum and all the complicated bits in our brain, how they work together to produce all of this? And will that have what sorts of major philosophical implications would like an almost complete understanding on a scientific level of the brain have?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

The thing that I’m optimistic about, in a way that makes me a little different from some of my colleagues and peers, is the following. I think that although at present, it is still hard to imagine having a description of the processes in a brain, not just a human brain, necessarily, but one with quite different parts, the brain of an octopus, the brain of a bee, although it’s still hard now to imagine having a description of those processes and thinking to ourselves, all right, it’ll feel like that, like such and such to be the organism that has this brain. Here’s what it feels like to have these processes going on. I think that will be solved. I think a kind of wholesale pessimism on that question is not justified. I don’t know how long it will take, I would think decades rather than centuries. Part of what it might take, I think, is a rethinking of which kinds of processes physically in our brains are relevant to creating felt experience. I think it’s not just the cell to cell connections. I think there are large scale dynamic patterns that sometimes get neglected in these discussions that are probably part of the story, but I am optimistic about solving that problem.

Josh Landy

We have another question from our live audience. Tell us your name, please. Where you from and what your question

Speaker 3

Hi Peter, my name is Levine. I’m from Cupertino. My question is, ants have slaves. Ants communicate, and ants have hierarchy. So they have certain if we want to understand this certain consciousness among them, maybe I don’t know. So like, is there correlation between conscious. And evolution, right? And if that is the case, are higher species more conscious? Is there a measure? How we can measure consciousness? Is it possible?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

I think that consciousness is brought about through evolution. So in a world in which there was no biological evolution, you wouldn’t get any consciousness. The case of insects that you mention is very interesting right now, when I wrote the first book in the series that this book is the third book in insects, were regarded as kind of very dubious case for any kind of discussion of felt experience when you mentioned ants, but bees are in some ways better understood, and even in that case, it was thought, well, they’re probably just little robots. One of the things that’s happened in the years since the first book was published and the present time is that the evidence for something like felt experience, subjective experience, consciousness in insects has become far stronger. I wouldn’t suggest for a minute it’s decisive, but it’s become a serious idea, rather than a kind of you know your position is crazy, because it implies that bees are conscious. It’s become a relatively mainstream part of the landscape. This includes a recent paper suggesting that there’s real evidence for something like pain in bees. Now, when I say pain, a natural question to ask, is right? Is the right word to use? The word pain, the human concept of pain. I think that as work on non human animals, especially animals far from us, like the insects, like the octopuses. As that work continues, I expect the language we use to describe these phenomena to start to transform. And as we get scraps of an explanation, our sense of what we’re explaining will shift. This will probably include notions of gradation and degree, as you suggested, but it will probably include linguistic and conceptual shifts that we can’t even yet really imagine. Now, despite awareness of those shifts, I feel confident saying, look, I think it feels like something to be an octopus, and it very likely feels like something to be a B on the questions of detail, I expect our framework to be different a few decades from now.

Josh Landy

We’ve got another question from our wonderful live audience at Kepler. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Chiara

Thank you. Hi. I’m Chiara from San Francisco, and I wanted to try to turn the human exceptionalism on its head. And I have to believe that there are fellow critters out there who kind of cooperate better than we do, who create community better than we do, and who live in harmony with their environment better than we do. And so I’m wondering, as opposed to what makes us special, where have we gone wrong? And I’m wondering if there are any characteristics in the other animals that we live beside, such as, I don’t know, selfishness or greed or things like that.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

We’ve certainly got things wrong. There’s no we’ve got some things wrong. There’s no question about that. We’ve also gotten some things right. And though I don’t want to be sort of too upbeat and optimistic on this point, I find myself thinking that one of the important features of human life is the fact that everything can be discussed. Language can be turned upon any topic, any two ideas can be brought together. Pretty much anything can be questioned, as this show exemplifies. And for that reason, the idea that we’re intrinsically a selfish species, intrinsically a violent, coercive, destructive species that never strikes a plausible note with me, because I think it’s up to us with our rational linguistic discursive faculties to work out what kind of species we want to be from here on other species, I agree, sometimes can look less destructive. There’s a pretty dark side to lots of non human life as well, though. So I wouldn’t want to make the general comparison. I would prefer to respond by expressing the potentiality that we have in human culture and our capacity to reflect and debate.

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re questioning what’s special about human beings with Peter Godfrey-Smith from the University of Sydney, author of “Living On Earth.”

Alison Gopnik

There are other kinds of questions to ask when we think about humans and animals, including ethical questions. Should we ban factory farming? Should we stop eating meat altogether? Should some parts of the planet be human free?

Josh Landy

We’re coming to you from Kepler’s books in Menlo Park. We’ll take more questions from our live audience when Philosophy Talk continues.

Simon & Garfunkel

Zebras are reactionaries, antelopes are missionaries, pigeons plot in secrecy, and hamsters turn on frequently. What a gas,you gotta come and see at the zoo.

Josh Landy

Are the animals at the zoo more human than we think? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Alison Gopnik

…except your intelligence. I’m Alison Gopnik, sitting in for Ray Briggs, and our guest today is Peter Godfrey-Smith from the University of Sydney, and we’re at Kepler’s books asking what’s so special about humans?

Josh Landy

So Peter, with the powers vested in us by Kepler’s Literary Foundation, we’re going to make you Tsar for the day. We’re going to make you Tsar of human animal relations. So what’s the first thing that you would do as tsar to improve the situation for non human animals?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

The first thing I would do is end factory farming, industrialized farming that involves confinement of animals for all, or nearly all of their lives with no ability to express their natural behaviors. I think there are lots of things that we might think about changing, but in terms of just the size of the problem and clarity of the moral side of it. I think factory farming, especially of pigs and chickens, they would be my first port of call. I think that’s where I would direct my efforts.

Alison Gopnik

What about eating meat? That’s something that you talk about in the book, and that’s a question that lots of people think about every day.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

I think of this in terms of two rounds of discussion, if we imagine we’re all trying to work out how to handle this side of human animal relations. Round One is a discussion of whether we are giving lots and lots of animals on Earth lives that are not worth living. And I think the answer is yes in the factory farming context. And also as part of round one, I imagine us asking, should we stop doing this? And I think the answer is also Yes. Then there’s round two, where we imagine that the worst abuses are over, and the question is, okay, do we proceed on with humane farming? If so, is it only humane farming that doesn’t routinely involve the killing of animals? Do we turn our back completely on animal husbandry and the keeping of animals for food? Do we turn our back in cases where the animals are sentient, but not otherwise. In that second round of discussion, I think there are a lot of defensible parts. There are lots of reasonable patterns of valuation. You might think that humane farming is basically of animals like cattle. It’s a good deal for everybody. The cattle get a better time, probably than most wild non humans get. You might think that’s a reason to think that humane farming should continue. If someone says, in response to that, no, the stage of killing is just a unique harm. We should just not be doing any of that and move to an entirely plant based diet. I don’t think either position is unreasonable in that round two setting, I think agreement is likely and possible, and something we should work towards in the first round. I think agreement is unlikely, and I think disagreement is not so problematic in the second round.

Josh Landy

Yeah, you make a really interesting and paradoxical point in your book about, if we didn’t eat cows, there would be fewer cows, right? So to want an animal not to die is to want that animal not to live. That’s a fascinating argument. I’d never thought about before.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

There are probably too many cows on Earth right now, but right to move to a wholly plant based diet is to end a particular way of being a non human animal, which is being a farm animal. And I think some of the lives of farm animals, to use the expression I used a moment ago, quite a good deal. Quite a good deal. So to move away entirely from the consumption of meat, except in the case of lab grown meat, which I think is an important possibility, is to. Really end a certain kind of way of life for animals, which it’s not obvious to me, is a bad way.

Josh Landy

We have another question from our live audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Unknown Speaker

Yeah. Hi. My name is Manik. I’m from Fremont. I want to go back to the discussion on consciousness, because I think it’s quite interesting. So if you look at various levels of consciousness, from ants to humans. So if you extrapolate that now, we are entering the domain of artificial intelligence. So my question is, do you think that AI can develop consciousness?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

I think that if AI was to become conscious, it would be AI in a different kind of machine, a different kind of hardware, from the computers that we have around now, when I answered the earlier question on consciousness, I said, you know, I think we’re learning from neuroscience. It’s not just the network properties in a brain that matter to the presence of experience. It’s sort of larger, more diffuse, dynamic patterns as well. Now those sorts of things people never try to produce in a physically real way, as opposed to a simulation in a computer. If you think that those things are important, then you should think a conscious artifact will be a more brain like artifact, maybe not literally alive, but it will have more in common with what’s in in our heads than anything you’ll find on a desktop. Now, you know one way to express the point is to say, you know, we’re in Silicon Valley. This is a an invitation to all the hardware engineers listening to get to work, and then I think to myself, is it really the right message? I mean, suppose there’s a kind of barrier between the felt side of the mind and the more information processing cognitive side of the mind, such that brains are very good at doing both, and computers are good at doing the latter, but don’t have the right hardware for the former. Maybe that’s not a bad way for things to be. Maybe we should if there’s a sort of a gap of that kind that’s present, maybe we should not be so trying so quickly to bridge that gap.

Alison Gopnik

A bigger question that we haven’t kind of gotten back to, about our special role as humans, is about, is there something about the way that we’ve reconstructed or changed the earth, changed the environment that you think is really sort of qualitatively different from all these other ways that that life has been an essential part of the Earth? Is there something about our you know, our effect on climate change is an obvious example that’s presumably not as big as the cyanobacteria effect on climate, but it sure seems important to us.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Well, lots of organisms have had big effects on climate. So when, as well as the familiar rapid carbon cycle that involves photosynthesis and respiration, the one that couples plants and animals. There’s what’s known as the slower or inorganic carbon cycle, although inorganic is the wrong word, because life is involved, which involves carbon going from the atmosphere into the oceans into rocks forming under the oceans, being brought out through volcanos, back into the atmosphere. Now, that cycle has been profoundly affected by various kinds of life, especially land plants, which alter the patterns of weathering, sending the mixes of chemicals into the ocean that become those rocks forming at the bottom of the sea, plants, fungi, all sorts of microorganisms, have had significant effects on climate cycles. What we have done is just speed things up very much in the last few centuries. And I guess for me, that falls into this category of similar kind of effect, but a difference in magnitude. In this case, not so much as more of it, but a faster, a more rapid effect.

Josh Landy

And Peter, that takes us back to kionna. It’s question about the unique damage that human beings have done to not just our environment, but everybody’s environment. We don’t have much time left. But are there one or two things you could say about the way forward, what can and should we be doing at this point to try to address the damage that’s been done?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Well, one discussion in the book on this question I think of as potentially one of the more controversial parts of the book, and that’s a place where I argue for a partial re weighting of priorities in relation to climate change as one problem and habitat destruction as a separate problem. Climate change dominates progressive politics and environmental discussion so much now that. I worry that it is taking attention away from what I see as an equally important, equally urgent problem, which is habitat destruction, the loss of species. The two problems are tied together, undeniably, but being tied together is not being the same problem. In the case of loss of species, once they’re gone, they’re gone. In the case of loss of species, local action can be meaningful. You can do things locally that make a difference in a way that does not apply in the case of climate change. So for various reasons discussed in that latter part of the book, I argue for a kind of shift of emphasis where, in comparison to the present situation, more focused attention is put on habitat preservation, trying to prevent species going extinct, prevention of the pollution of the oceans by all sorts of contaminants and various linked problems, and having probably just a little bit less anxiety about climate change, especially in relation to the salience of this other collection of problems.

Josh Landy

Well, Peter, I don’t know whether human beings are special, but you’re a special human. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Thanks, Josh. Thanks, Alison.

Josh Landy

Our guest has been Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, and author of Living On Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World.”

Alison Gopnik

We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and live it up in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Josh Landy

Now… So fast he’s a species unto himself—it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales

Ian Shoales… I often think about evolution when I’m not trying to save democracy or the movie industry or stray bits of string. Humans seem to think evolution is a done deal. It stopped around the time we kicked Neanderthals to the curb any further changes of just mopping up the gene pool and, of course, paperwork. But we also think evolution means progress, new improved, like Dog Beating or adding hexafororphan to toothpaste. But evolution doesn’t mean better. It just means change. We think we’re so darn smart, but we are our own worst enemy as well. We know having just voted intelligence does not guarantee the so called survival of the fittest. Trilobites and Cockroaches have been with us for ages, and they are dumb as rocks, who also subsist, albeit lifelessly, as evidence of our evolutionary superiority, we often go to see dinosaur bones on display. That was enough for a while, but now we prefer audio animatronic skeletons in the museum stage dinosaur fights between Allosaurus and Triceratops. We even brought back dinosaurs to movies where they are the equivalent of zombies in a zombie movie, except they’re stuck in an island and then they get loose. Everybody knows how to kill a movie zombie, but you never kill a Movie Dinosaur. You put it back in the leash, ship it back to Monster Island to hibernate with Godzilla until the next go round. What we watch tells us who we are. Looking back on history, you can see it is Riven and clear through with horrors, aimless, animosities, and our old friend, narcissism, which has really come into its own as a cardinal sin, especially malignant narcissism, which doesn’t make sense if you think about it, the mythical Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. Is that malignant? Rude, I guess? Of course, Narcissus was not a real person. Narcissism is best known today as a symptom, a paradigm, you might say, much used by mental health professionals and podcasters. But of course, paradigms are always changing, and humans are locked into their own narcissism traps. Anthropomorphism rules the day. God is a very strong man with a white beard. Jesus is born as a man to teach us as men and women. Now, too grudgingly, all the old Greek Roman gods look like men and women, except they were meaner, Fairies, elves, trolls, all sort of human, fanciful knock offs of various humanoid types. We invent beings that look like us, angels, gray aliens. We’re happy with the way we are by and large, until we can contemplate mortality, but then that’s why we got God in the first place. But we also operate on ourselves, make ourselves prettier and improve our eyesight, fix a leg, our hearing, spice genes. But we don’t see that as evolution, but as home improvement, like putting a deck on the house or buying a gun. Now, we used to think that thoughts and deeply held beliefs made us special, allowing us to form nations. But the truth is, we are driven by shiny things and loud noises. We think we’re stuck evolution wise, but we make everything around us a parody of humans, so that we become one spiritually with our phones and gadgets. We have Siri and such that we address by name like it’s a family pet or a butler in a British mystery. I have four remorse for my television and another four the DVD VCR, combo pack, my human tentacles. Our choice of entertainment these days leans towards bland yet grotesque true crime and movies based on comic books we stopped reading in seventh grade. Yet we’re excited and alarmed that AI might write our movies for us in the future, don’t they already? But if AI takes over the boring tasks of writing brochures and instruction manuals, birthday cards and movies, it may be a blessing less boring work for writers. But if there’s nothing to write, why do it? Why get an education? Wikipedia will tell us what we need to know. More AI can write their papers and read them, leaving us with more free time to watch sporting events. We will become one with AI. That will mean more people won’t pay attention, which will lead to misinformation, which is what we really want. As a matter of fact, with the advent of social media, I happen to think that we have devolved into. Well, trolls? Yes, I happen to think that we humans are overgrown homunculi with stunted souls and baskets full of half baked grievances, which we throw at the walls when bored. We’d much rather believe that goblins might give us gold rather than earn it from the sweat of our brow or the brow of another. Isn’t that what crypto is all about? Goblin gold cursed if you spend it, disappears in the dawn. Hello? I gotta go..

Josh Landy

Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland, Stanford, Virginia University, copyright 2024.

Alison Gopnik

Our Executive Producer is James Kass. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research, and Dan Brandon is the Technical Director.

Josh Landy

Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Becky Barron, and Pedro Jimenez.

Alison Gopnik

Thanks also to Heather Birchall and the Kepler’s Literary Foundation for hosting today’s event.

Josh Landy

Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from subscribers through our online community of thinkers.

Alison Gopnik

And from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Josh Landy

The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Alison Gopnik

Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy

The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org where you too can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Alison Gopnik

And I’m Alison Gopnik. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy

And thank you for thinking.