demagogue on 30/3/2016 at 03:04
Quote:
Although there is no overarching, agreed-upon definition of ritual, similarities between ritualized animal behaviour and the repeated, stereotyped behaviours commonly observed during human rituals have already been proposed by anthropologists and ethologists as having a common origin, as well as sharing similar neurological pathways.
I take the punchline of a quote like this to be best framed as: we have more in common with animals than animals have with us.
I think we have a lot of instinctive practices that we like to wrap in the cloak of having some deep meaning or significance and climb on our high horse, but if you got to the root of it, what a person feels in their gut that's driving the thing isn't so different from what other mammals feel driving them.
Given a choice between propping up animals to us or lowering us down to animals, I tend to find the latter more believable.
I'm tempted to say the same between humans and AI (or the track AI are on for the near-future), but that's for another thread.
