Well, clearly we’re special enough to take over the world. I’m not sure how we can be sure that chimps or dolphins don’t have something that could be called introspection. (That’s partially an expression of my opinion and partly of my personal ignorance—I welcome enlightenment on the topic.)
Following The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and many other sources, I suspect the dominating differences between chimps and us is abilities we have evolved that greatly enhance the effectiveness of our working together in large groups. The more you enable cooperation, the more things like complex language and cognition suitable for highly specialized (i.e. a specialized cog in a larger machine) production.
It seems to me that introspection is valuable even in a non-cooperative world: if I can fine tune my reactions to prey and my attractiveness to the opposite sex, that is valuable in a band of 20 possibly nearly as much as it is valuable in a band of 20,000.
I love watching the “naturalness” with which female humans game the attractiveness-system. While at a young age I don’t think their instrospectiveness extends to them realizing they are gaming a system, I do think that they spend a lot of time studying themselves and figuring out how to enhance their attractiveness with increasingly well developed skills and clever fashion decisions. Is there anything like this “self-enhancement” in an individually customized (introspective) way among other primates or other animals?
Well, clearly we’re special enough to take over the world. I’m not sure how we can be sure that chimps or dolphins don’t have something that could be called introspection. (That’s partially an expression of my opinion and partly of my personal ignorance—I welcome enlightenment on the topic.)
I wonder when and how we started time-binding.
Following The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and many other sources, I suspect the dominating differences between chimps and us is abilities we have evolved that greatly enhance the effectiveness of our working together in large groups. The more you enable cooperation, the more things like complex language and cognition suitable for highly specialized (i.e. a specialized cog in a larger machine) production.
It seems to me that introspection is valuable even in a non-cooperative world: if I can fine tune my reactions to prey and my attractiveness to the opposite sex, that is valuable in a band of 20 possibly nearly as much as it is valuable in a band of 20,000.
I love watching the “naturalness” with which female humans game the attractiveness-system. While at a young age I don’t think their instrospectiveness extends to them realizing they are gaming a system, I do think that they spend a lot of time studying themselves and figuring out how to enhance their attractiveness with increasingly well developed skills and clever fashion decisions. Is there anything like this “self-enhancement” in an individually customized (introspective) way among other primates or other animals?