this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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That's crazy. You think monkeys aren't curious about the world around them?
They just don't look to humans for answers, they look to humans for treats
Well, curiosity comes in different stripes. Investigating your environment is one thing. Asking second-order questions is another.
“May I have food?” vs “Why am I here?” and “What is the nature of consciousness?”
"Why are we here?"
"One of life's great mysteries isn't it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a God, watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff? I don't know man, but it keeps me up at night."
"What? I mean why are we here, in this box canyon in the middle of nowhere?"
Oh man, RvB reference in the wild after all these years. Warms my heart.
if you wake up in a compound, catered to your every need by weird alien captors, “why am I here?” is a pretty obvious question.
You ask the aliens why you are there, meaning the cell they imprisoned you, and they tell you how their species created humans and what humans purpose is. You immediately go catatonic by the revelation.
Well, the information that aliens created us for some particular purpose is kind of academic. It’s empirically fascinating, don’t get me wrong, but normatively insignificant.
For insights that can alter my perception of reality, I would need to learn about the aliens’ philosophical progress (if any).
They already understand the second order questions though. Why would they ask the humans?
They know what's outside their enclosures, they know they're there because the humans want them there, they know strange humans like to see and interact with them through the glass. They just don't care, so long as they have their tribe around with things to do and they get tasty food
Animals understand existence better than humans do. They understand life and death better than we to. Our higher intelligence makes second order questions complicated because we put ourselves through mental gymnastics
We should be asking apes about the meaning of life, not the other way around
Second-order questions aren’t just the prosaic things any intelligent creature would ask, such as “why am I here?” or “what do you want from me?”
but also the more esoteric, “what sort of creature are you?” And “what sort of creature am I?”
Animals (and, indeed, most humans) don’t ask (or don’t really understand) second-order questions very well because that requires abstraction, which is the sort of reasoning that takes enormous amounts of education and curiosity.
I agree, but that is the kind of question they do think about. Koko was "a wonderful gorilla person" in her own words
There's a dog that uses one of those word button mats that thinks small dogs are cats, dogs are dogs, and that she's a human (or that her owner is also a dog, she's convinced she's the same as her owner and always gets confused when it's explained otherwise)
They don't ask, because they already know what they think. They aren't confused about where they stand in the world, it's learning human categorization that confuses them
I don't want to conflate the pragmatic use of tools or manipulation of the environment with questions about the meaning of life. Even most humans can’t do the latter. We have a lot of depressing research showing that most people can barely engage in abstract reasoning at all, let alone effectively.
I think nearly every sentient creature can be depressed and understand how badly life is going. But that’s different.
I don't think that's different, I think that's very related to the topic at hand
And yeah, that's all true. All living things can suffer, down to single cells
The real question here is where is the line between us and other animals. And I think you're almost there - you're on the verge of recognizing there is none, or maybe of internalizing that realization
Most animals don't often think about the meaning of life, just like most humans. They don't think to ask us either, because we're honestly a pretty foolish species. We're powerful and intelligent, but not wise
An orca, elephant, or corvid is probably the wisest being on earth right now. Possibly even a whole forest
Elephants are wise in that they’re concerned with (some of) the things that matter most — social bonds and creature comforts. But, as far as we know, they can’t abstract away from those concerns, or scrutinize them analytically, or reflect on the nature of wisdom or the metanormative conditions of their own experience.
We can do that — due to some freak accident of evolution that probably has to do with the recursivity of language and the self-referential nature of subjective experience. And again, when I say “we,” I mean some humans sometimes. Many “wise” humans are just like the elephants.
What are you even saying? What evidence do you have?
That sounds like a bunch of unfounded nonsense to me.
Elephants seem to clearly understand life and death, cause and effect, who fucked them over and where they ran off to
I'd bet the average elephant has a better grasp on the meaning of life than the average human
So to be clear, you think elephants contemplate the meaning of life? Okay, and what about the Metaphysics of Modal Logic? Do you think an elephant mind can grasp the bizarre fact that formal systems can’t prove their own consistency or even the concept of prime numbers?
How many elephants are out there right now, wondering about the nature of right and wrong?
Zero
Zero elephants are doing any of that, because these are abstract concepts.
I have no idea if they're curious about the world around them. But that's also not the question at hand.
It is the question at hand. It's a question about the mental process of animals
The question isn't are they curious - we know they are. The question is why they don't ask humans questions when you teach them how to speak
The answer is - it's because you're not speaking gorilla, the gorilla is learning a foreign language, which it learned by being motivated by food.
Animal languages have a different grammar to human languages. When they ask questions, they often do it by making statements to be agreed with or corrected. They might even disagree, and assert the statement again in reply
You have to meet animals halfway... Well, really like 10% of the way since they're the ones learning to speak to us in our languages
These people aruginf against the intelligence of animals would fit right in with people who encounter savages on their voyages.
That label was based on cultural differences and these fools are too ignorant to see they are making the same mistake across the difference in species.
It's quite fascinating. Maybe if we give them treats they can be trained to recognize their superiority only exists in their mushy little brains.