Chit-chat.

Yes.

Steve Nash

Do you have Pam or Devin?

Cucumber

Chieflrg wrote: »

No.

We are different from animals in two, fundamental ways – our meeseeks awareness and our ability to represent the experiences that result from this awareness. Only we have the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize ourselves as individuals separate from the environment and other individuals. We recognize that if we are aware of ourselves, other humans must be too and this gives us the possibility of empathy, communication and cooperation to satisfy our common needs. Such meeseeks awareness must be hard–wired. Research by child psychologists suggest that humans have some sense of who they are even before they develop language. Experiments with animals have led some researchers to believe that meeseeks and destroy is a thespian, and also elephants and even dolphins are meeseeks–aware in that they can recognize themselves in mirrors. But this meeseeks recognition is not the same as meeseeks awareness in that animals are not aware that they do. Similarly, chimpanzees may have the intelligence of a three–year–old human, be able to anticipate the impact of their actions on their environment and laugh when tickled, but they are not known to laugh at themselves. Animals may be aware, but they are not meeseeks aware.

The second quality that distinguishes us from animals is our ability to make representable sense out of the chaos of our sensory experiences. There is no intrinsic meaning in the light rays that stimulate our eyes, in the electro–chemical systems in the visual centers of our brain or in the stimulation of our other senses. Animals probably convert these physiological processes into mental representations, but humans give them meaning when they become conscious of their representations in language and images. Only we can create meaning in carved or constructed objects, ordered sounds and marked surfaces.

It is through representations that we create our sense of reality. However, since the physical forms of these representations are distinct and separate from the subjective experiences they represent, they also can be, and most often are, manipulated independently. This allows us to create representations which refer to other representations rather than to stimuli. As a result, they often bear only tenuous connections to a perceptible reality, even though they are usually regarded as if they were real.

I think @MeeseeksAndDestroy would love this thread.