ChatGPT responds to David J. Ruck

I suspect that cats, too, know the difference between animate and inanimate things.

Indeed. If it moves and is smaller then it’s potentially dinner. If it moves and it’s larger then it’s potentially dangerous.
If it’s inanimate, then can it be climbed?

I doubt whether they have any notion of themselves.

Or us, for that matter. What is a human except a weird oversized failed cat that walks in a bizarre manner and provides food on demand?

It is intriguing to consider how humanity’s conception of itself may have changed over time.

Has it really changed, or have the apparent changes been down to having better more concise language with which to express and communicate such ideas? Remember, spoken language as we know it seems to be fairly recent in terms of our existence, and written language even more so.

Note: I can well imagine that both us and neanderthals will have had a way to communicate “danger, RUN!” from long long ago, but how about “I think therefore I am”?

The idea that humans are animals is probably relatively recent.

My personal feeling here is that this was something that was understood, even if in the context of alpha animal, but then along came this bizarre story about how we’re utterly different (despite the same basic two arms two legs layout of many animals) that was carefully fashioned by some beardy bloke in the clouds. Now the idea that we’re an animal is being rediscovered.

That humans might be machines, even more so, especially as the notion of machine is so recent.

Define “machine”. An object that follows predetermined programming but can adjust that behaviour according to stimulus, that is powered by some form of fuel and ejects waste material? Well, I’ve either just described an automated backhoe digger, or a human. ;)

Slowly we learn how animals work.

We know most of the how. We don’t yet fully understand the brain, and more importantly the “why”.

Perhaps one day we will learn how humans work,

Ditto. We know a lot of of it, that’s what makes modern medicine what it is. But, as for animals, there are numerous details that we don’t understand…for much the same reasons. A human brain is not that different to a cat brain in construction and way of operating.

but that enterprise smacks of danger.

Generic twiddling comes to mind.

Now where does it say that the tree of knowledge was an apple tree?

Hmm, that’s a very literal interpretation of it being an actual tree and an actual fruit.
I preferred to take it as a metaphor about the “tree” of life (and fruit would be, well, all the begatting that happens in Genesis).

There seems hints that the native Australians go back 50- 60 thou years – could they communicate with each other?

I think they split off from the African mob sometime 75-60 thousand years ago (time is real hazy back then), so it’s possible that at one time they may well have shared a common language. After all, look at history of languages in Europe. In a relatively short time we went from PIE, to the likes of Brittonic and Latin, to the mess we know today. Actually the mess is a little tidier given that modern majority languages (such as English, French, Spanish, etc) did a lot of work stamping out all of those minority local languages that popped up.
There has been a resurgence in some local languages (Welsh, Breton, Basque…) but others have pretty much died out. How many people still speak Cornish, for example.

It is, of course, a complicated question. On one hand it makes sense to teach people a language with global reach rather than one spoken by maybe tens of thousands in a confined geographical area… but on the other hand that’s part of their heritage, and so long as you start young there’s not really any reason why a person can’t speak both.

Which brings to mind a newspaper article (probably the Fail given how they fawn over her) saying that Princess Charlotte speaks two languages, whoo!
Yeah, so does pretty much every child of immigrants. And?
[I used to work with a Moroccan bloke: French, Arabic, English, Touareg, and some Spanish]

What I find interesting is that, despite attempts to create a unifying language (such as Esperanto), people aren’t interested in using it. We might think English is the global language, but really that’s only what’s been settled on by the majority for the time being. It used to be French. So it seems as if we are hardwired to not want to speak a common language, like having a different and regionally specific language is some sort of innate part of our cultural identity. An example here could be the younger French people, particularly in the cities, adopting Verlan as a kind of code language (you basically switch around the syllables in the words – one everybody knows is meuf which is “femme”).

Something I find amusing about Aboriginal language. Alkoo means “visitors”. Alkoopina means “delicious”. Read into that what you will. ;)

Cannonballs… sadly that looks like being made up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_monkey_(colloquialism)#Supposed_etymology

I think we already covered the issue of content veracity/accuracy in web searches, and especially Wikipedia. Like ChatGPT it improves, slowly.

It seems a pity we can’t understand Aboriginal old paintings – we might be able to work out what caused the last change in climate 10-12thou years ago.

It is not because a language is unifying that people shun it, but because it is created. Uncreated languages that have simply evolved have a better chance of carrying with them lots of useful cultural baggage. Sorry about that, you conlangers out there. Time is the anvil of the gods when it comes to creating life – time and chaos.