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Thanksgiving

Are you more thankful for......

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Ramie 2 Nov 23
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1

I'll have to go with cognitive thought. Opposable thumbs seems to be almost as important, but perhaps if we have cognitive thought, we can find ways to manipulate the physical world without thumbs.

2

Because only one option was available, I had to choose opposable thumbs. Why? Because without them we would not be able to manipulate much of our environment. I would have liked to choose both thumbs and thought, but cognitive thought wouldn't be of much use if we couldn't do anything with it. At least with the thumbs we would have the tools to survive long enough to develop the thought element.

Without cognative thought, we wouldn’t make tools to use with opposable thumbs.

The tools I was referring to were the hands. The ability to manipulate things would help us survive. Without that capability, cognitive thought has little use beyond intellectual exercise, @Annaleda

I don’t agree. There are animals, and people, who have adapted without opposable thumbs. It’s about the mind, where the body can follow.

@Annaleda, adapting is one thing. All life either adapts or goes extinct. However, to have the chance to utilize the cognitive capacity demands at least a little dexterity. With that in place, then one has the tools available to be able to do things. Cognitive capacity serves no purpose by itself. Let's say that the most advanced and intelligent life on planet Jin was a large snail with immense cognitive capacity. Now, you tell me what this creature will accomplish. It can't write. It can't speak. Of what use is its cognitive abilities?

How do you know it can’t ‘write’? How do you know it can’t ‘speak’? How do you know it’s not happy?

Most technology is created for the sake of creation.

Clothes for example. We don’t need clothes in a warm climate, where we originated from. It’s a human concept that makes people put them on. Most animals know to stay away from extreme environments that are detrimental to their health.

Writing, again, is a human concept. Communication comes in many forms. I’ve even seen people write with their feet. No opposable toe helping.

@Annaleda -- I know it can't write because it doesn't have the appendages needed to handle a utensil that will enable it to write and because of that it has also never developed the need to write. I know it can't speak because I specified it was a snail. Had I generalized and said it was a gastropod, then we could imagine it had some form of appendages useful for writing and perhaps some form of organs allowing for communicating complex, abstract ideas. It's a snail, okay? Oh, and I didn't say it wasn't happy. I made to allusion to its emotional state.

Now to what drives technology. The main driver of technology is necessity. What enables technology is the capacity to manipulate things. Dolphins we know are quite intelligent and are self aware. They have an absolute minimum capacity to manipulate things. They have no technology -- but they also have no real need for technology. Same goes for elephants, though they do have a bit more ability to manipulate things, but still inadequate. All technology is limited by the ability of any species to manipulate/make things. Just for a bit of interest, we have observed chimpazees and some bonobos fashioning and using stone tools. Evolution marches on.

Clothing was a good example, but an erroneous conclusion was drawn about its purpose. Originally, clothing was an extreme necessity because as we migrated out of Africa we were exposed to harsher environmental conditions than we had faced on the savanna. The first clothing would have been impossible without the capacity to manipulate things. Our need for food drove the technology behind improving our ability to obtain it and a spinoff of that was the ability to skin animals with similar technology repurposed. It was not a simple process to arrive at the ability to use these skins with fur on them for clothing. Tanning had to be developed to keep the skins at least reasonably supple and a method to retain the fur was needed. Once all was in place and our skills at cutting, forming, and sewing were up to par, we could improve our chances of survival in the colder climates in which we found ourselves. None of this happened overnight. All of it required the ability to think abstractly and to communicate the ideas to others. None of it could have come about without the capacity to manipulate things. We could think about it. We could talk about it. Without the ability to manipulate things, we could have done nothing about it.

I appreciate your attempt, but it falls short. Writing is not a human concept. It is a capacity for communication and manipulation (yes, including the feet) that allowed the human to invent a technology that would allow us to make a record of what was needing to be communicated without committing it to memory, which we knew was fallible. All of this language, writing, technological advance, was generated out of necessity, out of the need to survive.

6

I'm thankful for opposable pinky toes and thoughtful turkeys. 🙂

Alive or dead thoughtful Turkeys?

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