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Comment by Podgajski | Hacker News Reader

What makes human cognition so important? Because you have it?

You are no more special than a mosquito.

OP said nothing about human-level intelligence being important - just that this may mean it's rarer than previously thought.

Seems like you've got an axe to grind, badly enough you go after it where it isn't.

Rare compared to what? We don’t even know what mosquito cognition is so how can we say whether that’s rare in the universe or not? Do you know what it’s like to be a mosquito?

I get the down votes on the previous comment, though, The bias that humans are somehow special and important is so strong it’s hard for us to acknowledge. And I can link that feeling of specialist to the destruction of the environment. And to climate change.

And because I have a different viewpoint than the majority of people here on our existence, does not mean I have an ax to grind, it just means I have a different opinion.

Oh come on, a mosquito and an entity capable of imagining and predicting a Higgs boson are equivalent?

Most humans I encounter* are no better than most mosquitos at discussing spin statistics in general, let alone a particular boson.

No 60-day old humans are better than any mosquitos at discussing science in general, let alone spin statistics.

*and I am fortunate to have been in the sort of study groups where, when one young lady uttered "*sigh*" another immediately responded with "sigh star!"

I share your jadedness, but humans at least have the potential to do so, a mosquito is several orders of magnitude away from that. I still have hope that humans can change, mosquitos will never change their behavior.

How do you know mosquitoes never change their behavior?

Last 50 million years. Maybe it’s a freak Poisson distribution tho and they suddenly grow massive brains in the next year

Not jaded, there are just much better ways to distinguish mosquitos and humans than a test which not only tests an accident, instead of an essence, but uses an accident that puts 100% (<1 million physicists/8b people ~= 0%) of humans on the mosquito side.

Some better triage methods:

  <= 500 g
  able to fly unaided
  can navigate by shallow CO2 gradient

Man I’m in awe with everything nature produced and think our life is so disconnected from the real world, but there’s tons of other metrics upon which we beat mosquitoes. It’s not like mosquitoes choose to be in equilibrium with nature, reducing any pressures that contain them they’d happily suck the world dry and then die out last

Are you really trying to argue with a hacker news poster that people are smarter than mosquitos?

One more proof of how weird and unique humans and their behavior are

What Freetail do you think humans are doing?

Look at yourself importance! So what? It’s different, but is it special? What do you know about the consciousness of a mosquito? Nothing! Because you’re not a mosquito! For all we know, they could be saying the same things about themselves as we are saying, about ourselves, that we are somehow special.

We on on the brink of world war and climate collapse and what role did the mosquito play in this? For we know the mosquitoes have gone past comprehending what a Hicks bozon is and decided it’s much easier to forget about it all and just suck our blood as we continue to overpopulate the planet.

Ok I’ve had my fill of internet contrarian philosophers to continue this conversation. If anything were life’s only chance of escaping the death of our star

Again, assuming life only exists on earth. You do not care about humanity, you are afraid of your own mortality so you create these science fictions.

I don’t and am not. But suggesting that mosquitoes communicate about purpose and mortality is silly

You’re not a mosquito so you don’t know. You can’t talk to mosquitoes so you don’t know. That’s a scientific fact.

It’s a creature with 200,000 neurons

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