We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Immanuel Kant
Some biologists suggest that lifeforms on the planet exist in a spectrum of self-awareness that could range from nothing more than nerve reflexes, to the highest human awareness of self. (Has anyone thought about what we are really talking about when we say ‘self’? My self, yourself, them self). We must be careful that we don’t fall into the trap of always judging animals by human standards, or else we miss the fundamental beauty of what animals add to Nature’s recipe for the evolutionary scheme of things.
Like Einstein said, you can’t judge a fish’s intelligence by its inability to climb a tree. When we humans limit an animal species’ potential to evolve, due their captivity in sterile, inappropriate and unlovable environments, we engage in the most heinous form of callous slavery, thwarting the unconscious aspirations of entire species to live by Nature’s design. Humans will get a karma regarding animals from a failure to treat them with respect and dignity. Someday scientists will discover that karma is a kind of quantum consequence (at the quantum level).¨
‘Culture’ has been identified as a distinguishing feature of intelligence within many species. The word culture is generally defined as behaviors passed between individuals—and passed down the generations—to be spread within the group, until those behaviors evolve and become characteristic of the entire group. Until rather recently, humans were the only species thought to possess all of the behavioral features constituting what we call culture. This is what Rupert Sheldrake is talking about in his theory of morphic resonance and what I am talking about in the Bio-Photon Electromagnetic ID Subatomic Field pattern.
Today, thanks to a huge accumulation of painstaking science research discoveries, we know that culture is widespread among many species, from chimpanzees to fish and even flies. “Animal culture is so common that even fish and flies have it,” read the headline on an April 2021 article in New Scientist. It detailed how bumblebees pass on unique foraging techniques to others and these quickly become a group characteristic, or how fish learn particular food foraging routes and pass this information on to other fish until it becomes a cultural routine, or how virgin female fruit flies observe what novel techniques older females use to attract males and adopt the techniques in a cultural transmission. (I have observed younger female flies learning from older females in this way.)
Beyond cultural intelligence, another measure of intelligence in a species, at least in its intelligence potential, involves the individual ‘genius’ emerging within each species, the human equivalent Leonardo da Vinci’s of the animal worlds.
“Current and past research is clearly showing us just how smart and emotional animals really are and that they are conscious, sentient beings…we can no longer pretend we don’t know this.” —Psychology Today, August 12, 2013.
‘Consciousness’ and which species possess it has been another one of those term which, like the word intelligence, inspires heated debate among scientists, who can’t even seem to agree on what consciousness means when applied to humans, much less for other species of life.
My own take is that consciousness and instinct does not even reside in the brain, but rather in the bio-electromagnetic field surrounding and beyond the brain, and within the brain. Support for this view has come from recent cognitive neuroscience research showing that many of our psychological functions get generated outside of what we call subjective awareness by non-conscious systems that are both fast and efficient.
We simply don’t know enough. We must be very nosy and interested in wanting to know more so we can treat all species with much more human sensitivity and compassion. One species is not capable of sensing another specie’s whole integrated species system. Having lost the full soul integrated sense of nature means we cannot measure abilities and skills in animals and other species before we have a more suitable map for intelligence and consciousness. How is it possible or fair to judge other species without us even having a proper map, or even accurate definitions, of their and our brains, intelligence, and consciousness? Ditto that for humans.
Further reading
Videos
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