If you were an elephant
To be honest, stuff like this really annoys me.<p>I&#x27;m incredibly interested in animal minds (I just started reading that book that was posted a while back, Other Minds, about octopuses and consciousness, and I&#x27;m really liking it.) And of course, I think that poaching should be illegal and that we should protect and conserve the environment.<p>But...<p>&gt; … the world would be a brighter, smellier, noisier place – and you would be a better, wiser, kinder person<p>No, I wouldn&#x27;t be a &#x27;better ... person&#x27;, I would be an elephant! Elephants have not created great works of art, literature, architecture, and poetry. Elephants have no written language, cannot build complex machines, and have not traveled to other worlds, or even explored their own. People have done incredible things with their bodies and minds in a way that animals simply cannot, period. This is (arguably) all a consequence of evolution being a <i>competition</i>, and humans being predators. People <i>like</i> to fight and win, to be better than something else. And while it would be great if human nature was just competitive enough to produce results, but not make humans physically violent, that would be fantastic! But I don&#x27;t think evolution can exactly fine-tune something like that.<p>This happens every time that animal consciousness is discussed: somebody tries to claim that the animals in question have a completely different way of life than humans, and that their way of life is &#x27;better&#x27;, usually because they are peaceful, and that you are arrogant and ignorant if you don&#x27;t agree. I think that&#x27;s horseshit.<p>This would be almost tolerable if it didn&#x27;t have the subtle feminist jabs hidden in there with the smug moral superiority - &quot;As a boy, your function would be to inseminate, and that&#x27;s all. Government would be the business of the females.&quot; As if being a walking pair of testes was somehow more noble than fighting, struggling, learning, winning, like human boys do. Stop all those pesky masculine behaviors, you &quot;infantile phallocentric [nihilist].&quot; Just be good and dumb and stay where you are.