Susan Blackmore Strange Creatures Summary

To clarify, the “human condition” is an ambiguous term used to describe the foundational aspects of humanity, both the instinctive traits, which all animals have, and the further-evolved or uniquely-human traits, which set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. To illustrate my purpose, I will focus on the both aspects, since both prevent us from thinking logically and acting objectively.

Joseph Henrich began, A Puzzling Primate, by describing how physically inept human beings are when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. He continues with this logic when he demonstrates, that humans in this era, would not be able to survive if placed in the wild forest environment. Due to the biological weakness of humans, culture became a necessary defense mechanism and a form of protection. Culture became a unique way for humans to adapt. Despite the obvious physical weakness of humans, through culture we have rose to be the dominant species.

Human beings did not always hold the reins as the most superior creatures in this universe. A

The species Homo sapiens belongs to the class Mammalia. Humans are the most advanced and structured species the world has ever seen. The human race is the outlier of nature. However, we were not created the way we appear today. We evolved to survive strenuous circumstances and became products of our environment. We were molded by a hostile, ever changing world to survive and eventually become the innovative society we are today. The human race would not be as it is today if the earth was not an ever changing environment. Just as the human race owes its success to the extenuating circumstances of the world, Malcolm Gladwell constantly reiterates in Outliers The Story of Success that humanity’s individual outliers owe their success to their

In this article, Thompson’s uses chess anecdotes to make it easier to understand why technology and our brains work together best. Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen were two New England men who beat the most powerful chess computer. “Why could these relative amateurs beat chess players with far more experience and raw talent? Because Cramton and Stephen were expert at collaborating with computers. They knew when to rely on human smarts and when to rely on the machine’s advice.” (345) This experience shows us that Thompson's thinks that when it comes to technology versus man, you don’t

Once in a life, we have been imitating a fashion and a behavior of an idol or someone. What if imitation is always occurring in everyday life to individuals? In the essay, “Strange Creatures” wrote by Susan Blackmore, she believes that whatever the way individuals act or think is claimed to be imitation. She claimed, to be imitating is what makes us different from animals or other living species. The reason for mimic is because this is privilege of being human nature. Then she gives an example of whenever someone smiles, other smiles back, but animals cannot. What animals can do is to show positive emotions like whipping a tail or actively move around. This phenomenon is called “meme”. The meme is like a copy machine or gene in Blackmore’s

Stop. Look around. Everything around you becomes an integral part of how you live your life. These unique surroundings that encompass individuals possess a power similar to a triggering chemical catalyst which can cause a chemical reaction to happen that normally would not. This power that the surroundings of an individual holds exists in the form of cues and these cues act on the behavior of every individual in society. The cues hold an inherent role on how human behavior is controlled. In Susan Blackmore’s essay “Strange Creatures” she explains the imitative intricacies of how human behavior exists through her meme theory. In a similar attempt to explain behavior, Malcolm Gladwell in his essay “The Power of Context” discusses human behavior from a social perspective through the Broken Windows theory. Individuals control

What it Means to be Human Scientists believe that human beings are capable creatures, whose evolution was fault for distinguishing them from animals. Dwight Garner’s analysis of Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, reasons that cooking is why humans are distinctive from apes. However, some like Melissa Hogenboom, writer of “The Traits that Make Human beings Unique” is opposed to this theory. She believes that human beings and animals are practically the same, the only major difference being their highly developed brains.

As the predominate species of Earth, humans possess qualities that distinguish the race as an ordered civilization, rather than an instinct based animal kingdom. However, what pertains to the human race that allows it to influence the world more strongly than other species? To understand humanity’s effect on Earth, it is imperative to know what a human is. Though genetically similar, humans are greatly distinguishable from animals through basic, yet key characteristics of idiosyncrasy, conscious thought, complex emotions, and advanced psychological development (Stix). Within the subjective realm, humans possess the ability to empathize and act upon free will.

Humans have subjugated the world, populating almost every continent. Homo sapiens have risen to an overpowering, dominant level. But why us? What gave Homo sapiens such an advantage? Homo sapiens are special in a cognitive sense, and the only major evolutionary advantage they have been given is able brains. Humans are intellectually driven- we want to learn things. They have more inventive ability than any other living creature. They enjoy expression and explaining things to those around us. In fact, Homo sapiens think so big and so inventively that human bodies have had to change to fit their ability to think and to create. Humans have learned so much over the course of our 200,000 year existence, and we continue to strive for knowledge.

Humans are undoubtedly intelligent creatures with complex minds and remarkable mass cooperation abilities. As Harari (2015) stated: “Humans control the planet, because they are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers”.

Rene Descartes’ “Discourse on the Method” focuses on distinguishing the human rationale, apart from animals and robots. Wherein, he does so by explaining how neither animals, nor machines possess the same mental faculties as humans. For Descartes distinguishes the human rationale apart from non-humans, even though he does agree the two closely resemble each other because of their sense organs, and physical functions (Descartes, pp22). Nevertheless, it is because the mechanical lacks a necessary aspect of the mind, which consequently separates them from humans. For in Descartes “Discourse on the Method,” he argues that the noteworthy difference between humans, and the mechanical is that machines are only responding to the world through of their sense organs. Whereas humans possess the significant faculties of reasoning, which allows them to understand external inputs and information obtained from the surrounding environment. This significantly creates a dividing ‘line’, which separates humans from non-humans. For in this paper, I will firstly distinguish the differences between the human and mechanical’s mentality in regards to Descartes “Discourse on the Method”. Secondly, I will theorize a modern AI that could possess the concept of an intellectual mind, and then hypothesize a powerful AI that lacks the ability to understand its intelligence. Lastly, in disagreeing in why there are no such machines that is equivalent to the human mind. For humans don’t possess all the

In attempting to answer the question of whether machines are able to think, Turing redesigns the question around the notion of machines’ effectiveness at mimicking human cognition. Turing proposes to gauge such effectiveness by a variation of an ‘imitation game,’ where a man and a woman are concealed from an interrogator who makes

Yuval Noah Harari’s, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, give us a highly detailed description of the history of Homo Sapiens and how they came to take an evolutionary leap at a rate faster than any other living creature on Earth. At the forefront of Sapiens, is Harari’s idea about what made Homo Sapiens become so unimportant to rising up and becoming the most successful species on the planet. Throughout my analysis, I will bring up concepts and idea that Harari brings up throughout the novel.

In the future, we may be able to build a computer that is comparable to the human brain, but not until we truly understand one thing. Lewis Thomas talks about this in his essay, "Computers." He says, "It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious. We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves until we've understood this, and we're not even close" (Thomas 473). Thomas wrote this essay in 1974, and although we have made many technological advances