I would argue that the ability to engage in abstract thought is how humans were able to prosper at all. It is the use of hypotheticals that allow humans to generalize their experiences into a perceivable pattern. For example, “If I were any [hypothetical] farmer, I would need water to make my crops grow” gets turned into “Farmers need water to grow crops”. This is connected with a theory of mind, which, as of now, seems unique to humans.
Depends on your assumptions.
Does that make it true though? There are “advanced modern” societies that don’t have this belief en masse. Some cultures derive their animal rights from a pragmatic view that incorporates the fact that abusing animals is an early sign of sociopathy, which isn’t usually seen as a positive personality trait.
This isn’t necessarily the same thing as sentience. You can make an assumption that it is so, but then the moral treatment becomes fairly dogmatic in its justification. Otherwise the question remains very open. The main issue is that scientists, zoologists, and other animal experts aren’t experts in the field of sentience. That would largely be the domain of philosophers. The only way to remove it from that domain, as far as I can tell, would be to assume a materialist metaphysic and assume that sentience is an evolutionary development. These aren’t light assumptions, and there is still a lot of discussion in those arenas.
He had a bunch of inductive assumptions, as we all do, some of which seem to be wrong. Thomas Kuhn’s “Paradigmatic Science” goes into more detail on this process.
Depends on how you decide to measure “rational thought”. Though, I personally, would concur that animals are capable of being rational (at certain times [much like humans, as humans aren’t usually rational either]). Hence, I prefer to use abstract thought as a more accurate interpretation of Aristotle’s claim in this regard. It isn’t precise in that it isn’t what he would have meant, but it is more accurate to objective reality.
Disagree, somewhat. Rationality is a state of performing a verb (rationalizing). In that regard, humans are fairly constantly using their ability to rationalize, though it doesn’t necessarily connect to objective reality (see “You are two” https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8 ). Personally, I prefer a more precise definition that uses Probability Theory, ie, choosing actions that will maximize expected utility, where there is a function that maps outcomes to a measurement “utils” (pronounced “you-tiles”) and we considered the expected value of some random distribution.
A mandatory Discord clan membership solves all of that. Set the rules there. One of the rules being that if you’re logged into Conan then you’re green-dot active in the Discord. Requiring microphones in discord could also be a thing - especially since it runs on all smart-phones. My gamer buds and I do both just out of common sense and common courtesy - 100% of the time. In that way it would actually be impossible NOT to know exactly who you’re dealing with, what they’re capable of, and what they’re up to.
