Steph (the winner) told me dog 1 likes socks and dog 2 likes trying to play with dog 1 and I cracked my knuckles and said "I'm on it"

it's strange to be living through a mass extinction event while people talk about extinction like this weird thing that's happened one or two times

Anyway I recommend reading Vygotsky if you want a different perspective on this whole "what makes human different" question. A lot (most) of his information on animals is now outdated, but his theories about people are interesting and he takes a very different approach from individualist psychology!

((and when they test for it, they're just testing for associative learning and calling it something else))

this also happens to me whenever I begin drawing something more and more: I used to find baby chimps sort of ugly (in an endearing way but still) and now I love them :_ they're so cute if I saw one irl I think I would just start weeping

Anyway, the book is good.

Like, sure, we CAN for example orient ourselves by forming complex cognitive maps... but is that how we get around day to day, or do we use associations ("when you reach this building, turn left") or maybe a bit of both?

One point that is made in the book but that I would have personally emphasized more is that we have this tendency to assume that associative learning is for other animals, whereas we can access "higher" forms of cognition... but often we don't even have proof that we actually do?

It's amazing how a few simple rules interacting with genomes can produce a seemingly infinite behavioural repertoire. Associative learning is "simple" inasmuch as it doesn't require overly complicated explanations, not in its results.

like ok even IF we decided to accept the premise "humans are inherently superior" it's kind of telling how we don't acknowledge our constant moving of the goalpost isn't it?

"Intelligence is not socially constructed!" is a funny argument when you remember just a few decades ago learning was seen as The Proof Humans Are Smarter and then we saw animals learn all the time so then tools were The Proof Humans Are Smarter but we found all kinds of animals use tools so then-

Biologists unfamiliar with philosophy arriving at the conversation of socially constructed concepts and making the same embarrassing "but I can test it! it's real!" argument over and over again: