<story><title>A man who was raised by wolves</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/28/how-to-be-human-the-man-who-was-raised-by-wolves</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anigbrowl</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Janer says the young boy would have projected his social needs on to the animals and imagined relationships with them. “When Pantoja says the fox laughed at him, or that he had to tell off the snake, he gives us a version of the true reality, what he believes happened – or how, at least, he explained the reality to himself,” Janer told me. “Marcos’s mind was desperate for social acceptance,” he told me, “so instead of understanding the animals’ presence as incentivised by the food, he thought they were trying to make friends.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I continue to be perplexed as to why otherwise intelligent people deny the possibility of personality and social relations among other species, or that of interspecies communication. Then again this is just the mildest example in this story of people&amp;#x27;s capacity for being awful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkoren</author><text>Yeah, I think that Rodríguez absolutely has the right of it here. Animal communication is &amp;quot;simple&amp;quot; in human terms, but is quite rich on its own terms. To anybody who spends quality time with animals in their own comfort zones, it is utterly damned obvious that many animals experience and are entirely competent at communicating love, friendship, curiosity, jealousy, covetousness, and many other thoughts&amp;#x2F;feelings -- and, also, that they are just as able to blur species boundaries as we are. There are varying levels of complexity to this: snakes are too simple-minded to have a sense of humour, for example, but foxes &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; do. Fox humour isn&amp;#x27;t the same as human humour, but when you anthropomorphize them, and they foxopomorphize you, there&amp;#x27;s enough overlap for an intersubjectively meaningful exchange to take place.&lt;p&gt;I think that science&amp;#x27;s unwillingness to acknowledge this has multiple roots.&lt;p&gt;The first is a religious relict of wanting to put Man at the centre of the universe. Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere automata. This became the default &amp;quot;scientific&amp;quot; dogma, to be considered true unless proven otherwise. But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either rationality or observation.&lt;p&gt;The second is the scientific requirement for experimental controls and reproducibility, which is easiest to do in a laboratory. If animals really were automata, running on instinct, then that would be fine. But they&amp;#x27;re (mostly) social creatures, formed through interaction as much as we are. If your understanding of human psychology was formed wholly through the observation of humans who spent their lives trapped in Skinner boxes, you&amp;#x27;d form some rigorously incorrect notions of what humans are capable of. Ultimately, there&amp;#x27;s no way to to get a proper understanding of humans in a non-subjective capacity. Same goes for animals.</text></comment>
<story><title>A man who was raised by wolves</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/28/how-to-be-human-the-man-who-was-raised-by-wolves</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anigbrowl</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Janer says the young boy would have projected his social needs on to the animals and imagined relationships with them. “When Pantoja says the fox laughed at him, or that he had to tell off the snake, he gives us a version of the true reality, what he believes happened – or how, at least, he explained the reality to himself,” Janer told me. “Marcos’s mind was desperate for social acceptance,” he told me, “so instead of understanding the animals’ presence as incentivised by the food, he thought they were trying to make friends.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I continue to be perplexed as to why otherwise intelligent people deny the possibility of personality and social relations among other species, or that of interspecies communication. Then again this is just the mildest example in this story of people&amp;#x27;s capacity for being awful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>carapace</author><text>That exact passage struck me too.&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;com-pan-ion&amp;quot; literally means sharing food together.</text></comment>