Working through the posts in order,
Interestingly enough there is what is known as the “animal” objection to the psychological criterion for personal identity.
Apart from that brief aside, trix, what do you mean they can’t? If they had a different environment they’d suddenly be Einstien? I’m not sure what you mean.
GD, man may be an animal, but a person is not, two different things, man (homo sapiens, whatever you want to call it) has developed the ability to foster the existence of a person inside him, that is the key difference between a person and an animal (sounds circular maybe but it’s not). (that’s what I meant by my first comment, I don’t buy the animal objection to PI).
Metavoid, lol, very true.
Trix, to a point, but it seems that language is a necessary condition for culture (to be able to develop ideas), otherwise we’d only have a small advantage over other species. Not that I’m disagrreeing with you, essentially I am agreeing with you, but language is a necessary precondition for an advence civilisation and so, (I think) advanced intelligence. Sign language and simple sounds are languages to an extent (that’s how all languages must start off after all). One of the most interesting facts I’ve ever heard about language is that a child will pick up a language (their first anyway) independantly on how often it is spoken to them (up to a point obviously). That is a child to whom it is spoken all the time every day will pick it up at virtually the same rate as someone who is barely spoken to at all. this suggests that language is somehow part of our evolutionary makleup (this is all still very cutting edge psychology/philosophy so I’ve not seen all the ways it’s been interpreted).
Sedm, yeah, it does a lot, but that’s why life is fun.
GD, just realised I’ve just said many of the same things as you in response to trix, sorry. For the most part. I don’t agree with you that an advanced language couldn’t be made out of grunts (there could be a greater role of body language in it for example).