Assumes far too much for me -- and loads more than philosophers will generally grant. For example, it appears to assume pretty much unlimited free will that no other animal has. Yet beavers change our world quite profoundly. And if (as most philosophers now think) we do not have unlimited free will, then we -- like the beaver -- as nature evolved us to be, and there is nothing magical about the changes we make to world any more than there is that of the beaver. If fact, it would seem we are much harder on it.
'Humans are gods with anuses.'
Gods is used metaphorically, and anus is synecdoche* or metonomy**, where a part represents the whole (and yes, I know how unfortunate that phrase is in this context, where the part is a hole of sorts). If we steelman this, which is the practice of addressing the strongest form of the other person's argument (opposite to strawmanning, where one degrades the argument of another to a weaker form), we can understand God to stand for human intellect (ability to think and communicate in conventional symbols) and anus to mean a physical body, then this makes sense. Gods are incorporeal (no anus) agents who reason using symbols, the beasts are corporeal (have anuses) but lack the godly conventional symbolic reasoning, and man is their intersection.
*syn·ec·do·che - a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning “Cleveland's baseball team”)
**me·ton·y·my - the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing.
You know what is a very well done series on human irrationality? It's called the Psychology of Belief and is on YouTube. It is a series of 12 videos, each of which examines a different form of human irrationality.
That's AntiCitizenX, an interesting anonymous Internet personality. I've seen the first ten of those videos (you mentioned 12) and also recommend them, time well spent:
The Psychology of Belief from AntiCitizenX
[1]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1A9vrsw6Hw Informational influence
[2]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkJc6c3nKMw Insufficient justification
[3]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoCqftOYHX4 Confirmation bias
[4]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJic51MeVaU Misinformation effect
[5]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x19z5Jb_pg Compliance techniques
[6]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwJsNTZFdcU Hallucinations
[7]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCFLHGNc1wo Projection
[8]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jHO-7aodbw Need for closure
[9]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwP9QusSxfc Agenticity
[10]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B09Lou1kv7M Summary and conclusions
One (I no longer recall which) is the source of a citation I have used many times over the years, which helped me arrive at a more concrete definition of truth, which I've also learned is also called the correspondence theory of truth and is the essence of empiricism:
"
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. No matter what answer you give, literally nothing changes. No decision you will ever make in your entire lifetime can ever be influenced by the answer to this question. If nothing changes even in principle with respect to some proposition being true or false, then the distinction between them just vanishes.
"Truth has no meaning divorced from any eventual decision making process. The whole point of belief itself is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, and those effects lead to objective consequences. Take away any of these elements and truth immediately loses all relevance.
"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.
"All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't. If you agree, then we can have a conversation. And if we disagree about some belief, we have a means to decide the issue.
"If this is not how your epistemology works - how you define truth - then we can't have a discussion, and I literally don't care what you think, since it has no effect on anything."
AntiCitizenX goes on:
"
This is philosophical kryptonite for Christians. If God is real and Christianity true, then what tangible manifestation can I produce through that belief in accordance with my actions? If there aren't any to speak of, then there is no truth to the idea that God exists. On the other hand, if you're a Christian, and you reject this type of pragmatic definition of truth, then I don't care about your "truth," and neither does anyone else, including you, since you have conceded that God is irrelevant to any decision anyone could make. Such a belief simply doesn't matter. Concluding God with arguments is not the same as demonstrating God. You need to do better than mere words" - AntiCitizenX
Before the "scientists", the word animal was already used, for example in the Bible, and in there human is not an animal.
Today, we might say
man and the beasts to distinguish the nonhuman animals from man.
Hunger is a feeling and I eat because I have that reason for it.
Yes, the same reason a mouse has for eating. When a mouse gets hungry and pursues a meal, you call that instinct, but when you do it, you call it reason. This is your religion speaking through you, which draws a sharper line between man and the beasts than I have, namely, the ability to reason and communicate in words, where a word is a conventional semantic unit (meaning is agreed upon and not inherent as with the "meaning" of a codon in the genetic code)
I don't just act on basis of instinct, without any reasoning.
Probably and hopefully, but that doesn't make you not an animal in the biological sense. I understand that you don't care about that, but biology doesn't care about what scripture says, either. Your agenda is different from theirs.
normally humans decide to eat by reason, not by instinct, at least I do so.
If you didn't have the instinct of hunger, and had to rely on reason alone to remember to eat, that would look like setting up a system to alert you periodically that is it time to eat as well as instruct you what and how much to eat. And drink. That's what reason without instinct looks like, and it doesn't describe any of us, because fortunately, we have a variety of survival instincts that include hunger and thirst to regulate consumption according to bodily needs.
Please give one example, what was the last thing you did instinctively?
Sleeping comes to mind immediately. And when I do it, it's no different when my dog does it. We both get tired, lie down, and go to sleep. No reasoning needed beyond what my dog does, which you claim is pure instinct. I disagree, since like me, my dog chooses a comfortable place to lie down based in her experience of dog beds versus cold, hard, tile (empiricism, requires reason and learning), but the point is whatever my dog is doing is no different that what I am doing, although I might use language as when I'm at a hotel and put out the Do Not Disturb sign before lying down for a nap, for instance.
