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Are You Smarter Than an Ant?
Or Does ChatGPT Prove That “Intellect” is Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be?
A while back @josue.r wrote a philosophical piece called The Allure of Being Awake which said, among other things,
We, mere humans, are not too different from ants or sheep…
The human bias bothered me on a lot of levels — this whole idea of human “supremacy” in terms of evolution, etc. seems pretty ignorant when you look at the larger ecosphere of the earth and the arc of history.
So I exercised my privilege on the internet and said so:
But why should we be? What hubris it is to think that we, for some reason, have a “higher” status than they! Ants, especially, have been much more prolific on this planet than humans…
Having sounded my barbaric yawp into the void, I didn’t think much about it. I didn’t think I’d really changed Salvador’s perspective, and while I agreed with most of his piece I knew that my own opinion had not been swayed by his piece.
That opinion being the basic belief that we are just another animal on this rock hurtling through space, with a bowl of electrified jelly sitting on top of a zygote-reproducing machine enjoying the self-induced survival mechanism popularly known as “free will.”
