Excerpt: "Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. And not just the obvious cases—primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alien-seeming creatures that evolved on ever-more-distant limbs of life’s tree. In recent years, it has become common to flip through a magazine like this one and read about an octopus using its tentacles to twist off a jar’s lid or squirt aquarium water into a postdoc’s face. For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not."
I like to ponder what thinking must be and feel like for various nonhuman animals. The octopus for example probably thinks in a sort of multiple way since the arms have their own brains. Geese probably have short, goal-oriented and high emotion thoughts. Goldfish i imagine have picture-based thoughts. I could go on. Perhaps a rich benefactor wants to sponsor me to study this?
When do we think? A moment similar to when an animal was threatened. Either threatened to fulfill a desire or defend himself.
How is it different from humans? Reasonable
Animal will is only limited to coercion as far as experiencing, real time action. While the human beyond experiencing. Meaning, that humans are able to plan an experience in the future.
Short/Long Term Thinking
Animals can think but their thinking is in a short term, while human thinking can be short term or long term.
Tactical/Strategic Thinking
This didn't mean that when human thinking was in a short term, then humans were animals. It's not like that. But it's the fact that God gave animals to think tactically. whereas humans can not only think tactically, but also can think strategically (through planning).
Domination
That's why humans can dominate animals, because humans also have tactical weapons through their tactical thinking to subdue animals
Short Term Planning
Even human's short-term planning is not categorized as the result of short-term thinking, but through long-term thinking that is able to plan short-term strategies to anticipate tactical steps from animals (which were even shorter than human short-term strategies)
Human planning is still longer than animal short-term thinking.
Tactical & Strategic
Did animal have a strategy. No!
Seeing a strategy in animals, it's not really strategy, it's short term tactical thinking.
It's just that because the pattern is a "thought pattern", there is a resemblance to that in humans, "there are signs of thinking".
And because through thinking humans can strategize to overcome situations, then when it was seen that animals were able to overcome situations with a pattern similar to human thinking, then it's said that animals could make strategies. No!
Even though animals could think like human , it's just that animal thinking has limitation compared to human thinking.
Thin Boundary
This thin characteristic makes researchers suspect "animals could think as we did" hehe. It's old story... they just about knew lately. Too late then, hehe. So don't be overestimate, since actuallly it's because the thin line was invisible.
The thin line? Animals cannot plan their own future experiences, whereas humans can.
So any pattern of behavior seen in animals in dealing with situations similar to humans (can be taught, can choose, can count blah blah blah), actually has limitations that are far from those of humans.
We first reached out to Tim Link after hearing an amazing story from a friend of goop who’d lost her cat (stay with us). The friend in question got news that her cat had ran …
