What is so special about us?!?

[Tiberius]

The only rational thing most creationists come up with to separate us (humans) from the animal kingdom is our intellect and through that, our related behaviour / rationality. What exactly is so special about this?

In almost every other attribute, you can find examples in the animal kingdom that kick the crap out of us. Our eyesight is terrible compared with birds, our strength pitifully weak compared with various other animals like bears and elephants, and our speed makes us more like snails when you compare it with cheaters, lions, fish, and birds...again!

So with us coming at best around an "average" in the animal kingdom, why is our intellect so special?

[Zhalentine]

Because with our intellect we can manipulate things to dominate all animals.

[Purple Rabbit]

I think for bible thumpers the biological specialty of man is dwarfed by the choice of their alleged god for man on a special and rather sick assignment of forced obedience and worship of him. I guess it can get kind of lonely and boresome when you are a first cause and you're left with your own perfection.

[Violet]

More than this... what is so special about organic life? Often people insist that there is a fundamental difference between organic life and computers (aside from the tautologically true I mean)... but I myself don't see it. I think the only way to consider humans 'so special' is to not think... but perhaps that's just me.

[Autumnlicious]

What makes man so special is the ability to comprehend abstractions and act on then to change its environment.

Organic life is not special - it merely is the only form of life. Since life is defined very fuzzily, it turns out that being organic is not a requirement for life. What we call organic, though, is merely the compounds involved in life. So we have retroactively named a family of chemicals for their appearance in life, not the other way around.

And arguing that one is better than the other is a subjective trap with no answer.

[Pippy]

Humans are sentient. Dolphins may also be, but most animals don't demonstrate the same level of consciousness and thought as humans. That is the difference. I have lots of love for animals though, non-human people. I think there is a marked difference between organic and non-organic too. My brain is likely a stronger system than most computers. May be not at math or reading 1's and 0's at speed, but at problem solving and memory and creativity. Humans are special, although we don't know why, or even in what exact ways...

[theVOID]

Humans are sentient. Dolphins may also be, but most animals don't demonstrate the same level of consciousness and thought as humans. That is the difference. I have lots of love for animals though, non-human people. I think there is a marked difference between organic and non-organic too. My brain is likely a stronger system than most computers. May be not at math or reading 1's and 0's at speed, but at problem solving and memory and creativity. Humans are special, although we don't know why, or even in what exact ways...

Supercomputers are starting to surpass our brains in sheer number of functions per millisecond, it will be about 20 years or so before the PC market has that power. But everything is more likely to go cloud, so in 20 years we will all probably have terminal devices.

The main known link between brains and intelligence is the mass and surface area of the brain compared to the body size. The more massive the body the more brain function is required to regulate it, that is why many animals with brains far more massive than ours don't have the same intelligence, because their bodies are also massive.

The surface area is also crucially important and is believed to be a large part of what separates us from animals with comparable brain/body mass.The crevasses on the surface of the human brain are much deeper than comparable animals, making the flow of electrical signals far more 3 Dimensional and also allowing for a far more complex mesh network between neurons. The surface of the brain is where our body map is located, it is where out brain has it's own representational image of our entire body, it's position on the top of the skull making it vulnerable is one of the main reasons head trauma is so much more dangerous than it should be. Having the advantage of deep crevasses on the surface of the brain leads to features like enhanced motor function and allows us to do the intricate things we do with our fingers, it improves our ability to fill in the blind spot we all have in our eyes by interpreting the data, plays a large part in the appreciation of music (there was a study where all animals with the deeper crevasses from a variety of animals all reacted far better to musical stimulation) and a long list of other things.

That's got a big part to do with why we are the way we are, good combination of brain/body mass and surface area of the brain. It's not the whole story, but if you want to know how we were able to be like we are now, i would say evolving that functionality was key in allowing us to become human.

[Violet]

@Pippy: Please calculate the following number without a computer: 413 + 2(32 + 45) - 382 + 47428 / 43

How long did that take you? Compare it with the computer you are using right now, and it takes the computer approximately as long to do such as it takes for you to type it in. To be honest... it doesn't take long to figure out which system is 'stronger'.

As for memory... can you store tens of thousands of musicals perfectly in your head, and have a filing system so efficient that you can find it in almost an instant? Such a feat is beyond our current capabilities... but well within a computer's capacity.

Computers were designed for problem solving (math, simulations, etc)... but I think I know what you mean. To be able to do what you suggest would require a synthetic intelligence ('AI'), and those will eventually be able to outperform organics easily (combine their current capacities with the ability to 'think', clearly far superior).

As for creativity, that depends on the SI, the programming behind it/them, the capabilities of the platform, and on it's environment (among other things). As with humans, it depends on the 'individual' SI (or platform for many SI).

[Autumnlicious]

@Pippy: Please calculate the following number without a computer: 413 + 2(32 + 45) - 382 + 47428 / 43

How long did that take you? Compare it with the computer you are using right now, and it takes the computer approximately as long to do such as it takes for you to type it in.

To be honest... it doesn't take long to figure out which system is 'stronger'.

False benchmark.

Howabout this:

The vector space calculations it takes to facilitate bipedal motion - can a computer the same size of a human brain do them faster and in tandem as efficiently as the human brain? Answer - No.

The machine merely makes up for the lack of ability with raw functions per second. Your comparison is as useful as BogoMIPS is.

Computers are excellent at doing a small series of actions (read: instruction sets embedded in architecture) fast. Complex neurological systems are adept at doing an enormous set of parallel calculations simultaneously using the same interconnects without any form of interrupts.

The closest you will get to an artificial brain will be through usage of memristors, which are not coming any time soon. So until then, comparing computers to a living brain is an impossible comparison when it comes to life.

[Edwardo Piet]

Nothing is special IMO. Intellect isn't special. I see no reason to believe it is - we just think it is because we have the intellect to think "Aren't we special? We have intellect!" I reckon.

So I think it's a kind of a circular thing... the fact we have the ability to think that we're special is why we do

EvF