If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

by Justin Gregg

If there’s one lesson we can learn from the tortured life of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, it’s that thinking too hard about things isn’t necessarily doing anyone any favors.

Humans are the why specialist species. It is one of a handful of cognitive traits that separates our thinking style from other animals.

dead facts.20 These are facts about the world that an animal would not have any use for in its daily life.

Sometimes our need to look for causal connections creates more problems than it solves. It creates the illusion of causality where there is none.

tactical deception, which is the closest thing to human-style lying that you’ll find in the animal kingdom. Tactical deception can be defined as “when an individual is able to use an ‘honest’ act from their normal repertoire in a different context to mislead familiar individuals.”

Animal communication involves signals that convey information about a small set of subjects, whereas human language can convey information about any subject at all.

We tell fewer lies as we get older, which might have less to do with our maturing sense of morality, and more to do with the cognitive decline that makes it harder to pull off the mental gymnastics needed to keep track of the nonsense we’re spouting.25

Are humans better off than other species because of our understanding of death?

Nietzsche believed that animals, like children, “play in blissful blindness between the hedges of the past and future.”

An understanding of the inevitability of one’s death is the key difference between human and animal psychology where death is concerned.

So a clear benefit to death wisdom is its involvement in—or perhaps emergence from—other cognitive capacities that have allowed our species to outcompete all other hominids and most other mammals for domination of this planet.

human moral reasoning often leads to more death, violence, and destruction than we find in the normative behavior of nonhuman animals.

The history of our species is the story of the moral justification of violent acts resulting in the pain, suffering, and deaths for billions of our fellow humans who fall into the category of “other.”

Animals, with their less sophisticated normative systems, are the ones living the good life. 33

Consciousness is simply any form of subjective experience. Do you know that disappointing sensation of needing to pee after having just settled into bed? That’s a conscious experience. So, too, is the worry that you feel knowing that you have not studied enough for an upcoming math test.

While science hasn’t found definitive evidence for the exact neuronal structure (or combination of structures) that generate subjective experience, we do know that insect brains have brain structures that we suspect are correlated with consciousness in animals.

Qualia are the currency of action.

We, as a species, have a much larger number of cognitive processes that are potentially able to step into the spotlight of consciousness and generate qualia for us. We’re not more conscious, we’re just conscious of more things.

human minds evolved to allow us to be consciously aware of a large number of cognitive processes that are either completely unique to our species, or things that, for most animals, only happen on the subconscious level.

Prognostic myopia is the human capacity to think about and alter the future coupled with an inability to actually care all that much about what happens in the future.

There are so many examples of research that reveal the hidden forces that control our decisions that it makes you wonder if humans have any free will at all.

As humans, we are victims of our own success. There has never been a species on this planet capable of fundamentally transforming the Earth’s environment like we have.

Linguistic aptitude can be what gives tyrants and leaders their power; think of the influence Hitler’s speeches (and Nietzsche’s writings) had in driving the rise of Nazism in Germany.

Language falls victim to the Exceptionalism Paradox: It is the ultimate symbol of the uniqueness of the human mind, and yet despite its wondrousness, it has helped generate more misery for the creatures on this planet (including ourselves) than pleasure.

Here, then, is the final verdict. Homo sapiens are no more likely to experience pleasure—on average—than other species. Whatever gifts our capacity for language, math, science, etc. have given us, there is no evidence to suggest that my life—as privileged as it is—is filled with more pleasure than the lives of my chickens.

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness.34

Buddhist who seeks to end suffering through the elimination of desire, Nietzsche embraced suffering as a path to meaning.

Is the world a better place thanks to our species’ intelligence?