Quote:
Originally Posted by duga
It sounds like you are making the classic mistake that we evolved from apes. I'm sure you know this, but for the sake of others I will just point out we did not evolve from modern apes. We had a common ancestor and subsequently diverged in our evolutionary paths. It is very likely modern apes evolved self awareness in the past few thousand years and in no way infers that self awareness evolved long before the scenario I mentioned earlier.
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What I am suggesting is that our common ancestors some 5 to 8 million years ago may have been self-aware. The reason I'm using Coco as an example is of course not because we come from gorillas, but to show that all the great apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas) are self-aware in mirror tests. The other great apes live lives which we assume are closer to what our common ancestors did. That indicates that our ancestors didn't have to crawl down from the trees, get up on two legs and shift diets before they could evolve to become self-aware. I'm guessing that our (chimps and humans) ancestor wasn't "dumber" or less able to be self-aware than chimpanzees are today. At least I can't think of a reason why that should be an immediate assumption.