The Anomaly that is Man

[Anomalocaris]

Perhaps that shows we don't have a privileged position. If we did, it would be comprehensible that the universe should be comprehensible.

But really, not everything gnomish utterances of Einstein reflect wisdom rather than ignorance or mental fart.

That's quite gnomish of you. I rather agree with Einstein. Our ability to comprehend certain limits to our present comprehensibility, and therefore push the boundaries into what initially seems absurd, is, if anything, what makes our position privileged and more importantly, continually interesting.

It is somewhat strange to regard our position as being privilieged when evolution seem to have produced a continuous spectrum of facilities for comprehension in long line of ancesters to Homo Sapien sapien. With our current state of understanding of mental processes and how they relate to physical structure of the brain, it is not clear to us at what point the most basic form of what we might consider comprehension could first have occurred. It may have occurred with homo erectus, it may have occured with the last common ancester between humans and chimps, it may have occurred 70 million years ago with the first tree shrew. Who is to say, given the current low state of empirical knowledge of how comprehension occurs in the brain, no form of comprehension whatsoever occurs in the first plecental mammals, or mammal like reptiles? Or dinosaurs? Or birds? Some birds like crow certainly seem to exhibit what looks exquisitly comprehension like behavior, such as the comprehension that dropping pebbels into a jar would raise the level of water in it to the point where the bird could sip off the top.

How much comprehension, and of what nature, actually existed in other parts of the sanimal kingdom, or how much each of them pushed the boundaries of comprehension, is an loosely bounded unknow at present.

So where does that leave the assertion of our previliged position?

Now leave aside the speculation of how much comprehension occurred outside the realm of homo sapiens. Let us assume for the sake of argument that comprehension is a clearly distinct neurologicawl activity from cognition of any other sort. Let us also assume that such activity as comprehension has never occurred until the first homo sapien sapien arrive on the scene. So what? How does that privilege us?

Every single function, no matter or trivial and common place, has to have evolved for the very first time on earth, or even in the universe, at some time in the past. So at some time in the past, any biological function would have been possessed by only a single species, or even only a single individual, ever.

So does that make that species or individual privileged?

Are you a privileged individual because no one else has ever experienced 13.6123245356653 billion years post big bang before you?