[jaharios]

While Humans can be seen as the most intelligent, we are hyper focused on "human way of thinking" in a way that we lose our "basic" instincts and abilities that other animal have.

My dog can understand my voice tone and emotions way better than I can understand hers, also animals can understand the difference sounds we make (words) that affect them, way better than our understanding of animals sounds.

Don't get me wrong we can make tools and we can experiment and be able to suppress all other animals. But a solo, "naked" human is like an office worker in world of manual labor.

[Kostchei]

Depends on your life experiences and working environment. If you have worked in prisons and places with a lot of physical violence you can (some don't) acquire a distinct and accurate sense for emotion and threat, based on sound and body language. The actual words don't matter so much, but the interaction of tone, distance, stance etc, they tell you a huge amount. People can be saying "no" and be just asking a question or pleading their case, and they can be saying "yes" and mean "i want to kill you". I used to follow the tone, and when it was going to end badly, make sure I was standing behind the person who was about to start violence (being responsible for physical security in that environment), just as it was about to kick off... Pretty grim work. But yes, you can use your intelligence to learn that stuff. Don't need to be a puppy.

[darkerside]

Yeah, I think we spend so much of our childhoods, if they are healthy, learning to disregard those signals. Authority figure yelling but will not hurt us. Trust.

We rational humans overthink our first instinct and even learn to ignore it. And it helps us function in traditional society.

[unification_fan]

> Don't get me wrong we can make tools and we can experiment and be able to suppress all other animals. But a solo, "naked" human is like an office worker in world of manual labor.

Nah most of it is nurture. Raise a human in the wild and he'll be more in tune with nature. We have become alienated from the environment we evolved in and that's why you feel like a "naked office worker" on your own planet despite being the result of billions of years of adaptation.

Most humans simply ignore animals when they communicate. Both because they're ignorant and because they won't bother to listen. You can't expect an animal to talk with human words, but they talk all the time. Pets actively have conversations with us.

Plus there's this hardwired notion in our culture that humans are inherently superior to all animals but that's a very self-centered and short-sighted understanding of the world. We are more intelligent, yeah, but that's about it.

[idiotsecant]

>We have become alienated from the environment we evolved in.

Before we start painting with all the colors of the wind too much in this thread, this is not entirely a bad thing. We are removed from stressors such as 'being eaten by large predators' and 'dying of infections from wounds'. There is a lot of 'nature' that out ancestors would be quite happy to be 'alienated' from.

[neom]

I'd argue we've gone far beyond alienated. We're actively rejecting and dismantling, en-masse, the very systems we foundationally operate within.

[jaharios]

I agree, I am not saying that it is not nurture, in fact the opposite. Hyper focused on "human way of thinking" is not something you are born with, you adapt to it. In fact if you don't do it early you will never be able to 100%, in a way we rewire our brain to cope with how we want it to operate to be able fit in.

Our language for example, requires to be "forced on us" from early stages or you will never be able to "get it" [1]

> Most humans simply ignore animals when they communicate. Both because they're ignorant and because they won't bother to listen. You can't expect an animal to talk with human words, but they talk all the time. Pets actively have conversations with us.

With my dog I can understand angry/playful/sad/afraid/(give me food) barking/sounds and especially body language. But hearing "dog words" in random barking? Impossible.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experimen...

[darkerside]

> We are more intelligent, yeah, but that's about it.

You say that like it's not the defining characteristic of our power over the natural world

[knallfrosch]

If you had a 5 meter tall dog master family responsible for giving you food, shelter and keeping you safe from dog-driven cars, you'd be quite good at reading dog expressions too.

[JumpCrisscross]

Who had bred you to be good at reading their emotions. Dogs not only grew eyebrows that wolves don't have, they literally evolved a new facial muscle [1]. (African wild dogs have a precursor to it. But it's morphologically distinct in dogs.)

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dogs-have-special-...

[serf]

I don't think that it's as easy a two-way-street as that makes it seem.

humans developed extraordinary nuanced expression that most other animals cannot get near matching the depth and breadth of primarily because of the role that those expressions play in society itself.

an aardvark never has to put on a front so that their children aren't taken away by CPS. A donkey's livelihood is never reliant on them selling a poorly maintained used car to a sucker. Rhinos don't run for mayor.

BUT when you start considering animals that do seem to have a culture and society -- take for instance bonobos -- you start to see increased depth and breadth of expression and emotional response.

That signals to me that (most) emotions and expression come after the point of them playing a larger role than just familial maintenance. They seem to be largely reinforced by the needs of a growing social network that uses them to determine individual roles and the prioritization of 'maintenance of the group' rather than the individual.

that said, I am sure your example individual would be good at reading the expressive state of the 5 meter tall dog; I just contend that the emotional states of that dog are more simple and straight-forward than his human pet -- although maybe not since these dogs drive cars...

further research is needed on 5m car-driving dogs.