Showing posts with label bear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bear. Show all posts

Wednesday 13 August 2014

Reasoning or Instinct?



Written by Mathew Naismith

I came across the following vid which quite clearly shows a bear recuing a crow out of the water, is this a sign of reasoning or instinct?



Wiki
Reasoning: Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, for establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.

Instinct or innate behavior is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behavior. The simplest example of an instinctive behavior is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a clearly defined stimulus.

Science says the only difference between man and beast is reasoning, going by the definitions of reasoning and instinct the bear obviously showed reasoning to me.   The logics was the bear could obviously see that the bird was in trouble, instinct would have told the bear to seize the bird to eat not to save the life of the bird.


This might just be because the bear is in captivity, rescuing the bird could be of human instinct not animal instinct brought about by human interactions, there could however be another explanation here.  Is human consciousness, not just instinct, playing a part here?  Consciousness has no boundaries, it doesn’t judge one life form from another so if one life form becomes more compassionate, would this not also affect other conscious life forms in some way especially if they are interacting?