How Animals Think
This is intellectually dangerous ground, as the author points out, mainly because it asks us to reason -- to form a theory of mind -- about creatures who have minds significantly different than our own. As the author also points out, it&#x27;s easy to fall into either the scoffer or booster categories: we either want to dismiss animal intelligence completely or overstate it.<p>So when I got to this, <i>&quot;a psychological secret sauce—that makes humans different from other animals. The list of candidates is long: tool use, cultural transmission, the ability to imagine the future or to understand other minds, and so on. But every one of these abilities shows up in at least some other species in at least some form.&quot;</i><p>I had to bail out. No other species has a true persistent language. Yes, bits and pieces are here and there -- there&#x27;s no doubt animals communicate, sometimes even about complex things. And there very well be some sort of oral history. But true language in the way we use it? (Insert long discussion here about what that means)<p>Nope. So this article comes down into the &quot;modified booster&quot; category: it&#x27;s so amazing and special <i>simply because we don&#x27;t understand it all</i><p>I honestly believe that what our species needs is a sliding scale of sentience. You can call that a ladder if you want, but no matter how you do it? I&#x27;m not going to eat a monkey, but I&#x27;d eat a cow. Or a fish. Somehow we need to sort that all out, and whether that involves a complex web of indicators or not, the result is going to be a sliding scale, like it or not.