> orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.
I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.
I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.