hy animals think
Marc Washington © November 1997
hy animals think
The importance of the sentence: Language has the interesting feature in that in the United Nations or in a conference, they can be simultaneously interpreted and in the movies, they can all be dubbed. This means that the human prescribes different sounds to the same subjects-verbs-and objects and that while they may have different ordering, in one "thought-unit" i.e. sentence, they are identical! What is probably common is that man, animal, and insect have the same understanding of the order things occur, and think in "thought-units" i.e. sentences.
The sentence, animal to the human, and the five concentric circles of the brain: From the aquatic invertebrate (1st circle), through the reptile (2nd circle), simple mammal, to the human (5th circle), the "brain" can be described as five concentric circles (here is not the place for detail) where each "higher" creature owns a circle not owned by the creature next lower than it. But, this means that all the four smaller circles are embedded in the human's own brain. Unique to the human is the neocortex enabling more thought. To give voice to thought, we talk for we alone have the Brocca and Wierneke centers. But, the neocortex merely magnifies the fundamental processes which all animals experience and the Brocca and Wierneke sections enable us to verbally articulate them. It is not as simple as that, but the reader will understand the point being made.
The fox has been called "wily" for it can out-think the common person and befuddle the clever hunter. The porpoise is used to assist slow-learning and emotionally deficient children for it can empathize with them and show care and sympathy. It is the dog that the lonely or aged person takes as a companion: an animal that also empathizes and sympathesizes when the human species is too busy to care. People turn to the dog for emotional support. In essence, man and animal think alike as witnessed in hunting animal out-thinking man or how when dog attacks man, he interprets man's thoughts and actions and in perfect counteraction can, if large, kill man.
But, so can any large animal in confrontation: meaning, man thinks like animal (not vice versa). Man only has the advantage over game fish, fowl, or trophy animal when using weapons. On an even playing field with man as naked and unarmed as animal and without gun, net, or trap, man would most often be out-witted and/or overpowered by animal. Meaning, man and animal use the same thought-processes – but this is obscured for the human has weapons and can voice his or her thoughts.
If the Arab world stopped supplying oil to the rest of the world, modern life would become extinct as the city-dweller would have no means to survive and billions would die due to starvation, disease, a winter-freeze. We would again, like our ancestors, take to the forests and woods and there those many remaining would war for land and civilization be thrown back several thousand years, all the gains of the last two thousand years lost in one action. But, the animal would. Meaning that the animal's intelligence would carry them through an oil-stoppage but an oil-stoppage would end man's civilizations. The point being that animals can evaluate a situation sufficiently well to prosper in it. Animals process subject-verb-object information in thought-units logically. But, again, man and animal simply interpret the ordering of subject-verb-object in their simplest thought-units i.e. sentences voiced or unvoiced. And these units added together become thinking. But, in essence, thinking is some ordering of subject-verb-object in thought-units – the simple sentence.