http://www.thinkatheistradio.com/albums/dr-bruce-hood/
What Animals Are Self-Aware? (The Mirror Test As Evidence):
There have been approximately 8.7 million different species in the history of the Earth (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/science/30species.html?_r=0) 99.9 percent of which have gone extinct, and so far only .000000103448275862068965517241379 percent of those have the capacity for some level of self-awareness. This doesn't mean we can do anything we want to animals, but following Draper, since none of our 'standard' theodicies seem to apply to animals and infants, we wouldn't expect them to suffer as much as developed human beings on theism, but we would expect this on the hypothesis of indifference. So, which hypothesis does the data support?
Animals that have passed the mirror test include:
- All great apes:
- Humans – Humans tend to fail the mirror test until they are about 18 months old, or what psychoanalysts call the "mirror stage".[3][4][5]
- Bonobos[6]
- Chimpanzees[6][7]
- Orangutans[8]
- Gorillas - Initially it was thought that gorillas did not pass the test, but there are now well-documented reports of gorillas (such as Koko[9]) passing the test.
- Bottlenose dolphins[10]
- Orcas[11]
- Elephants[12]
- European Magpies[13]
http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/Five%20levels%20.pdf
| degrazia_selfawarenessanimals.pdf |
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