Why are we different from each other?

I suspect that differentiation increases with level of conciousness. If you thinks of levels, proceeding from (for example), molecules, to bacteria, to ants, to dogs, to humans, to God, the more consciousness possessed, the more individual you are. And it is said of God, "there is none like Him". (Only He is truly and fully Individual, and everything is different from Him.)

 

You can't tell unless you define "thinking"

They definitely aren't. Individual experience and learning aside (which most animals are capable of, definitely including fishes), genetic differences also exist. An extreme example of the latter is bisexual or gay flies, produced by mutations of the fruitless gene.

 

So what your asking, if I understand, is what exactly determines the "nature" side of our nature/nurture growth and development?

My first comment is that there is no such thing as the same exact stimulation. Even if two twins are born into the same environment, they experience differences. They're not going to be together every second of every day, and they may be treated ever so slightly differently by their parents and their peers, and so forth. It's a similar environment, but not exact.

My second comment is that I really don't know what determines individuality. I guess it has to do with our genetic makeup, including how we physically are constructed, both body and brain. This combined with our unique set of experiences makes us who we are.

Yes, differences exist in simple animals. It could be due to genetics, or again, because they are from different environments, even if only slightly different.

As for more complex animals, they must think to some extent. I've seen my cat construct pretty elaborate strategies for getting what she wants. She'll try to trick me to get through a door that I don't want her getting through, and do other similar things. Then if it doesn't work out, because I outsmart her, she gets visibly frustrated. It's possible that I am relating human thoughts and emotions on to an animal, but there really is no better way to explain what it is that she does. She constructs plans, and then reacts visibly basically the same way that a human would if her plans don't work out right.

I've also seen my friend's parrot open the lock on his cage after watching my friend open it and close it multiple times. It's not a trivial lock, it takes multiple steps to open. The parrot can understand that by moving a lever a few steps, it can open the door to his cage.

I think higher thoughts, more complex thoughts, are language-based, so an animal can only think so complex of a thought before it hits a limit.

 

Personally I think sleeping started out just a mechanism like bear hibernation, ie: to save energy for a next period of high activity. In our case this was the next day. Without being able to see in the dark, having echo location and such we had no use to be active during the night.
Not every animal has to sleep the way we do. Some stand upright all night, some sharks never stop swimming. There are probably better examples and research about this (please post if you know some) but from my point of view sleep started out for other reasons. To process/reshuffle information wasn't one of them I think because there are other ways to do that.

Oh and on the subject of brains. It's our Tigers claw, our scorpions venom, our sharks teeth, our cheetah's speed. Natural selection selects stuff that works and our brain works quite efficient in our environment. The other animals in the animal kingdom think exactly the same about their abilities.

- Ectezus

 

He's asking the nurture side, I think...

I wouldn't put it past a cat to be such a scheming bastard, but I'd be very cautious when it comes to inferring her state of mind. Coincidentally, I've just seen this in the news: dogs' "guilty look" seems to be a response to the owner's behaviour, not a sign of guilt. Dogs look "guilty" when the owner scolds them regardless of whether they'd actually done something bad. (Press release here.)

Well, IIRC, some can form concepts like "middle" without language (I think that particular study was on a corvid, but I don't have a reference on hand. I think I got the example from Wild Minds, which I haven't read in years.), and fish can apparently count small numbers of objects, so forming abstract concepts doesn't seem language-dependent to me. New Caledonian crows (corvids never cease to amaze ) may be capable of causal and analogical reasoning.

To me, this questions whether complex thought is really dependent on language, though of course it's possible that more complex thought still requires human-grade language. (What counts as complex thought?)

If you put people in a brain imaging machine and ask them to perform various tasks that require thinking, you can get pretty similar, though (of course) not identical patterns. This is how neuroscientists try to figure out how the brain does various things. How unpredictable does it have to be to qualify as thinking?

 

wow a serious roughly non Poe post. im impressed.