So often we are quick as a society to judge our fellow man and to condemn anything that is not like us? If we are Christians we judge Muslims and Jews? If we are Black we judge whites and Hispanics. If we are poor we judge the rich. It is always someone else's fault. You know we also do this with criminals don't we? Recently this topic of conversation came up in an online think tank when a member stated; "The public has the perception of us vs. them with respect to law-breakers." Well it is human nature to categorize things. "Criminal" is a word, which is a label, it is a noun representing a "person" and therefore used to categorize. This is how the human brain does things, how it decides where to commit something to memory and imprint the data. As far as this setting up a mentality of us being better than those we label as criminals, that to is human nature and inherent. Are you asking to educate people to re-wire their brains to think differently? If so, yes that can be done thru memorization responses in educational reward or penalty testing. But if we teach the human brain not to categorize and see all things in shades it can cause issues with higher learning in various other research fields and we will need humans for that too. Humans run the systems and flows of civilization and the way their brains work help achieve that, do they not? And in philosophically asking this question the next question is; should we rewire human thinking to not see categories? So whereas you see a mailman, instead you have to call the image something else such as a man. But that is a categorization also in that a man is different than a female or woman. So you have to call it a person. But is that fair to the dog? Dogs are people too? You see the problem with the re-wiring of the human brain in categorizing. And to your point about us being better than them. I think many dogs are much more honest than many people. Which genetically we know that is true because humans are exceptional at deception, which is one thing, which clearly separates us from other species in the animal kingdom. Perhaps we might all consider this philosophy and think on this in 2006. |
