From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, reflecting on Tom Wolfe’s new The Kingdom of Speech at Evolution News & Views:
I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities — the intellect’s ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing — and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses. We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals. We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language — a simulacrum of our abstract minds — has no root in the animal world. More.
No, language has no root in the animal world, as such, but the entire naturalist project (nature is all there is and humans are merely animals) depends on treating it that way, even if the results are ridiculous. Even if we are informed that pigeons, dolphins, and orangutans have the rudiments of human speech.
Trust us, it’ll get crazier. A lot is at stake.
See also: Can we talk? Language as the business end of consciousness
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