Daniel sent us this one — and it's a big one. He's asking which animals come closest to human intelligence, but more interestingly, what the inner worlds of the less famous creatures actually look like. Is there a neurological line beneath which sentience simply can't exist? And then, of course, he asks about sloths. Which means you're on the hot seat today, Herman.
I have thoughts. And a personal stake, obviously.
We always hear about the genius crows and the tool-using octopuses. But what about the animals we actually live with? The feral cat in the alley, the goldfish circling the dentist's waiting room, the cockroach under the fridge — do they have inner lives?
This is one of those questions where the more you dig, the less certain everything becomes. And I love that about it. Because it forces you to confront the fact that we're not even sure what we mean by "inner life" in the first place.
Where do we even start?
Let's start with what we actually mean by intelligence in animals. Because that's where a lot of the trouble begins. We tend to define intelligence in ways that flatter ourselves — problem-solving, self-awareness, tool use, language. But those are human-shaped criteria. It's like designing a test that asks "how good are you at being a human?" and then ranking every species by how close their score is to ours.
The IQ test designed by the species that tops it. And then we act surprised when we win.
And yet, even by our own measures, some animals are genuinely remarkable. Cephalopods — octopuses, cuttlefish — solve puzzles that would stump a four-year-old. I'm thinking of that classic experiment where an octopus unscrews a jar from the inside to get at a crab. That's not just motor skill. That's understanding that the barrier is something you can manipulate, that the solution requires a sequence of actions in order. New Caledonian crows bend wire into hooks to retrieve food. There was a study in twenty twenty-two where they spontaneously manufactured tools from materials they'd never encountered before — not just using what was available, but shaping it to fit a specific problem. Chimpanzees show what looks like theory of mind — they understand that another individual can hold false beliefs. These are not trivial things.
Those are the greatest hits. The Billboard Top Ten of animal cognition. What about the B-sides?
That's exactly what makes this prompt interesting. We celebrate dolphins and crows and elephants, and we ignore the creatures living in our immediate environment. And Jerusalem is a perfect laboratory for this. We have over two thousand feral cat colonies here, according to the twenty twenty-five city census. One of the highest densities in the Middle East.
Every alleyway has its own feline municipal government. I've seen cats in my neighborhood that clearly have territories, routines, alliances. There's a grey tabby near my apartment that only comes out when the bakery on the corner closes at three in the afternoon, because that's when they sweep the flour dust into the alley. The cat knows the schedule better than I do.
Yet most people don't think of them as intelligent. They're just... The same way people look at pigeons and see flying rats instead of birds that can navigate by magnetic fields and recognize individual human faces across months of separation.
Let's dig into the feral cat question. What do we actually know about what's going on in their heads?
Quite a bit, though it's uncomfortable for cat people and dog people alike. There was a twenty twenty-three study from Kyoto University on cat object permanence. Cats can track hidden objects — they know something still exists when it disappears from view. That's a cognitive milestone human infants reach around eight months.
The cat knows the toy went behind the couch. Not exactly shocking if you've ever watched a cat stare at the exact spot where a mouse disappeared for forty-five minutes without blinking.
But here's where it gets interesting. Cats consistently fail what's called the A-not-B task. You hide a treat in location A a few times, the cat finds it. Then you hide it in location B while the cat watches. Dogs will go to B. Cats keep going back to A.
They trust the pattern over their own eyes. That's almost philosophical. It's like the cat is saying, "The universe has been consistent up to this point, and I'm betting it stays that way, despite what my lying eyes are telling me.
That's one interpretation. The Kyoto researchers called it a lack of means-end reasoning. The cat knows the object exists, but doesn't form the causal chain — the object is in B, therefore I should go to B. Instead, the learned motor routine overrides the visual information. It's a specific cognitive failure mode that tells us something about how the cat brain is wired. It prioritizes habit over real-time updating in a way that dogs don't.
My cousin's cat opens doors. Like, actual lever-handle doors. It jumps up, hangs on the handle, and swings until the latch gives. That sure looks like means-end reasoning to me.
Of course it does. And that's the tension. Individual cats do remarkable things. But in controlled experiments, they underperform dogs on several cognitive measures. The twenty twenty-four Budapest study on dog episodic memory found dogs can recall specific past events after twenty-four hours. They remember what you did and where you did it, even when they weren't expecting to be tested. The experimenters had dogs watch a person perform an irrelevant action, then tested them the next day to see if they could recall the details.
Dogs have episodic memory, cats fail the A-not-B task. Case closed, dogs win? I can hear the dog people celebrating already.
Because the question is, what are we measuring? The Kyoto study was designed around primate-style cognition. A cat's evolutionary pressures were completely different. A solitary ambush predator doesn't need the same social cognition as a pack hunter. The cat might be thinking in ways the test doesn't capture. It's like judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
This is the problem with the whole enterprise. We design a test that measures human-like reasoning, then act surprised when the animal that spent fifty million years evolving to be a perfect solo hunter doesn't score well. The cat isn't failing at being a dog. It's succeeding at being a cat.
Yet, when you watch feral cats in Jerusalem, you see behaviors that scream intelligence. They navigate traffic. They remember which shopkeepers put out food and at what time. They coordinate — not in the formal pack structure of dogs, but in complex territorial negotiations. Mother cats teach their kittens which humans are safe and which ones throw rocks. That's cultural transmission. That's not instinct. That's learned information passing from one generation to the next.
I've watched a feral cat near the Machane Yehuda market wait for a specific traffic light pattern before crossing Agrippas Street. Same pattern, same gap in the cars. It's not just running across blindly. It's reading the rhythm of the intersection.
That's learned behavior. And the question is, where's the line between learned behavior and genuine cognition? Is the cat reasoning about traffic flow, or has it simply associated a specific sensory cue with safety through repetition? And here's the uncomfortable follow-up — if the outcome is functionally identical, does the distinction matter?
If the cat crosses the street safely every time, does it matter whether it "understands" traffic or just has an ironclad association?
It matters for how we think about the cat's inner life. An association is a mechanism. Understanding implies a mind. But from the outside, they look exactly the same. And that's the core problem with all of this. We're trying to infer internal states from external behaviors, and the mapping is not one-to-one.
Which brings us to a much harder question. What about animals with dramatically simpler nervous systems? You mentioned goldfish.
The goldfish thing makes me angry, because the three-second memory myth is one of the most durable pieces of nonsense in popular culture. It's been repeated so often that people accept it as fact without ever questioning it.
It's a meme that became received wisdom. I've heard it in movies, in conversation, in advertising. "You've got the memory of a goldfish." Everyone thinks it's true.
It's completely false. The twenty twenty-three University of Oxford study demonstrated goldfish can learn to navigate mazes, recognize individual human faces, and retain memories for at least five months. That's longer than I remember some of my medical school classmates.
To be fair, you're a sloth. Your memory might not be the benchmark.
I walked into that. But the point stands. Goldfish in the Oxford study were trained to press a lever at a specific time of day for food. They learned the schedule and stopped pressing the lever when the food window closed. When researchers reintroduced the lever after five months with no training, the fish remembered. They didn't just retain a vague association — they remembered the specific time window. That's not just memory. That's time-interval learning, which is a cognitively demanding task.
They also recognize faces?
With about eighty-five percent accuracy after training. They can distinguish between individual human faces, even when the people are wearing similar clothing. That's not pattern-matching on obvious cues like hair color or glasses. That's fine-grained visual discrimination. They're extracting the specific geometry of individual human faces from a noisy visual environment.
The goldfish in your dentist's waiting room knows who you are. It sees you walk in and goes, "Oh, it's that guy again.
But here's where we need to be careful. Recognition and memory are not the same as consciousness. A security camera recognizes faces. A database stores memories. The hard question — and I mean the hard question — is whether there's something it's like to be that goldfish. Whether the face recognition is accompanied by any kind of subjective experience, any internal feeling of familiarity or recognition.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel's question. What is it like to be a bat?
Nagel's nineteen seventy-four paper. And the answer is, we can't know from the outside. But the evidence for complex information processing in animals keeps pushing further down the phylogenetic tree. Every time we think we've found the floor, someone discovers a new basement.
Let's go further down. Creatures most people would happily exterminate without a second thought.
This is where the science gets unsettling. The twenty twenty-four University of Tokyo study on cockroach collective decision-making is remarkable. Groups of about fifty cockroaches were placed in environments with multiple shelter options. They used quorum sensing — individuals probe options, and when enough individuals have selected a particular shelter, the rest follow. They reach consensus in under three minutes. It's not random. It's not just following the crowd blindly. It's a structured decision-making process that requires individuals to assess options and integrate information from the group.
Quorum sensing sounds like a corporate board meeting, not intelligence. It sounds like an algorithm running on fifty tiny biological machines.
That's the skeptical view. It could be entirely mechanical — individual cockroaches responding to chemical signals, a biological algorithm with no awareness. Just input-output, like a thermostat. But the twenty twenty-three paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology on bed bug learning complicates that picture. Bed bugs exposed to pesticide-treated surfaces once will actively avoid those surfaces afterward. They modify their behavior based on a single aversive experience. And here's the kicker — they can retain this avoidance for up to two weeks, which for a bed bug is a significant portion of its adult lifespan.
If a bed bug survives a pesticide encounter, it essentially learns "don't go there" and remembers that lesson for the equivalent of years in human terms?
Now, does the bed bug know it's avoiding poison? Is there a little bed bug thought that says "that surface was bad, I should go the other way"? Or is it just a biological machine running a program, a simple association stored in a minimal neural circuit?
This is the question that divides the field.
The twenty twenty-four New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was signed by over forty neuroscientists and philosophers, including Christof Koch and David Chalmers. It asserts there is, quote, strong evidence for conscious experience in insects and fish. Not just mammals. Not just birds. Insects and fish.
Christof Koch is a big name. He was Francis Crick's collaborator on the neural correlates of consciousness. He's spent decades looking for the physical basis of subjective experience in the brain. If he's signing on to insect consciousness, that's not nothing.
And the declaration is a direct challenge to the older view, the twenty twelve Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which was signed by Stephen Hawking and others but only extended the claim to mammals and birds. The New York Declaration says, no, the evidence now supports pushing that boundary much further. The neural architectures are different, but the functional capacities — learning, memory, decision-making, even something that looks like emotional states — show up in creatures we used to dismiss as mindless automatons.
It's not unanimous. There are serious critics.
Anil Seth from the University of Cambridge has been a prominent critic. He argues consciousness may require specific neural architectures — a thalamocortical system, for instance — that insects simply don't have. His twenty twenty-three critique basically says, information processing is not the same as experience. A thermostat processes information. Nobody thinks a thermostat is conscious. You can build a machine that does everything a cockroach does without adding consciousness to the equation. So why assume the cockroach has it?
Though I've met some unusually responsive thermostats.
The point is, we don't have a settled theory of what consciousness requires. We don't even have a settled definition. So arguing about whether a cockroach is conscious becomes a proxy war over much deeper philosophical questions. Are you a functionalist who thinks consciousness is about what a system does? Or are you a biological chauvinist who thinks it matters what the system is made of? The cockroach debate is really a debate about the nature of mind itself, projected onto a tiny brown insect.
This is the cognition cliff hypothesis you mentioned. The idea that there's a neurological threshold below which sentience is impossible.
The question is whether that cliff exists at all, or whether consciousness is a continuum. Maybe a cockroach has a flicker of experience — not self-awareness, not reflection, not anything you'd call a thought. A dim sensation of the world. A faint valence of good and bad. The most minimal possible version of what it feels like to be something.
The dimmer switch versus the on-off switch. And if the dimmer switch model is right, then we're not asking "is it conscious or not?" We're asking "how much, and in what way?
If the dimmer switch model is right, then we have ethical problems. If a cockroach has even a minimal form of experience, what does that mean for how we treat them? For pest control? For the millions of insects we kill without a second thought?
I'm not ready to open a cockroach sanctuary. But I take the point. The ethical landscape shifts if these creatures aren't just biological robots.
Nobody's saying you should. But the precautionary principle — the idea that we should assume consciousness in more animals until proven otherwise — is gaining traction. And it has practical implications for animal welfare law, for pest control methods, for how we design experiments. If there's even a ten percent chance that insects have some form of experience, the calculus on how we kill them changes. Or at least, it should change.
Let's bring this back to something closer to home. Or closer to the co-host chair, anyway. What about sloths?
I was wondering when you'd get there.
Daniel specifically asked. And you have to have thoughts about this. It's your species. You can't plead objectivity here.
It is my species. And I've followed this research closely, partly out of curiosity and partly out of... I don't know, something more personal. There's a study from twenty twenty-two, from the Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica, on three-toed sloth problem-solving. They tested whether sloths could learn to navigate novel arboreal pathways — detours around obstacles in the canopy. The setup was simple: place a food reward on the other side of a barrier that requires the sloth to take a path it wouldn't normally take.
Seven out of ten sloths solved the novel detour task within eight to twelve trials. The researchers ran a parallel study with capuchin monkeys. Nine out of ten capuchins solved it within twelve trials.
So sloths are roughly in the same ballpark as capuchin monkeys on this task?
On this specific task, yes. Now, I'm not claiming sloths are as smart as capuchins overall. Capuchins are remarkable — they use tools, they have complex social hierarchies, they're considered among the most intelligent New World monkeys. But on this measure, sloths are not the dim-witted tree ornaments people assume they are. They can solve a spatial problem at a success rate that's statistically indistinguishable from a monkey that everyone agrees is intelligent.
The lazy-stupid stereotype. "Sloth" is literally a synonym for laziness in English. It's baked into the language.
Which drives me absolutely up the wall. Slowness is not stupidity. Slowness is a metabolic strategy. Three-toed sloths have the slowest digestion rate of any mammal — it can take up to a month to process a single leaf. That constrains everything. You can't burn energy on rapid problem-solving when your entire physiology is built around conservation. It's not that the brain can't solve the problem. It's that the body can't afford to rush.
It's the high-wire act of slowness. Every calorie counts.
Every movement is calculated because every movement is expensive. But that doesn't mean the brain isn't working. The twenty twenty-four paper in Animal Behaviour on sloth social cognition found something that surprised researchers. Sloths produce at least fifteen distinct call types. And they respond differently to familiar versus unfamiliar vocalizations. They recognize individual calls from other sloths they know.
If a sloth hears a call from a relative, versus a stranger, the response is different?
They're more likely to respond, more likely to approach, more likely to produce affiliative calls in return. That's social recognition. It's not just stimulus-response. It's a discriminated social landscape. The sloth isn't just hearing a noise. It's hearing a specific individual and adjusting its behavior based on its relationship with that individual.
Which implies a kind of social memory. A map of relationships. Who's family, who's a rival, who's a potential mate.
That's the thing that gets me. People look at a sloth hanging upside down, moving at the speed of continental drift, and they see vacancy. They see an animal that barely seems alive. But there's a social world happening. Slow, quiet, barely perceptible to us — but real. Mothers and infants have distinct contact calls. Males have territorial vocalizations. There are alarm calls that differ depending on the type of threat. It's a whole acoustic society happening at a frequency and pace that most humans never notice.
Does this change how you think about yourself?
It does, actually. And I've been sitting with that. When I read the twenty twenty-two Sloth Sanctuary study, I had this moment of... I don't know what to call it. The researchers were describing cognitive capacities in my species that I'd always assumed were there but couldn't prove. And here was proof, or something close to it.
That's not just intellectual. That's emotional.
Of course it is. I spent years as a pediatrician, diagnosing and treating human children, navigating human institutions, speaking human languages. And somewhere in the back of my mind, there was always this quiet question — am I an anomaly? A sloth who somehow ended up in a human-shaped life? Or is there more going on in sloth minds than anyone has bothered to measure? And if there is, what does that mean about me? Am I less alone than I thought?
The answer seems to be the latter.
The answer is that sloths are capable of problem-solving, social recognition, vocal discrimination, spatial learning. We're not dolphins. We're not crows. But we're not blank either. And that means something to me. It means I'm not a freak of nature. I'm just... an unusual expression of capacities that are latent in my species. That's a very different way to think about myself.
It means something about the whole framing of animal intelligence. We've been talking about a ladder — humans at the top, then apes, then dolphins, then dogs, and so on down to the allegedly mindless insects. But what if it's not a ladder at all?
What if it's a web.
Different creatures brilliant in different ways, optimized for different problems, none of which are less real for being unlike ours.
The twenty twenty-three paper in Nature on what they called the cognitive ripple effect gets at exactly this. Human intelligence may be unique in its combinatorial capacity — language, abstract reasoning, cumulative culture, the ability to combine concepts in essentially infinite ways. That's real. That's distinctive. But the individual components — tool use, social learning, episodic memory, causal reasoning — appear across the animal kingdom in scattered, partial forms. It's not that we invented these things from scratch. We just assembled them in a particular configuration.
We assembled the full Lego set. But other species have their own piles of bricks. And some of those piles are surprisingly large.
A New Caledonian crow can solve a multi-step tool problem that requires planning several moves ahead. An octopus can recognize individual human faces and hold grudges — there's a famous case of an octopus at an aquarium who would squirt water at one specific researcher who had handled it roughly, while leaving everyone else alone. A parrot can learn hundreds of words and use them in context, not just mimicry but actual referential use. These aren't just tricks. These are fragments of what we call intelligence, distributed across branches of the evolutionary tree that split from ours hundreds of millions of years ago.
Which raises a question that makes some people deeply uncomfortable. If intelligence is distributed like this, what's so special about being human?
I think the honest answer is that we don't fully know. The human exceptionalism debate has been running for centuries, and it keeps getting revised as we discover new capacities in other animals. Every time we draw a line — only humans use tools, only humans have language, only humans have culture — something crosses it.
Chimpanzees use tools. Dolphins have signature whistles that function like names. Orcas have distinct cultural traditions in hunting techniques that vary by pod — some pods specialize in hunting seals, others in hunting fish, and these techniques are passed down through generations. That's culture by any reasonable definition.
The goalposts keep moving. And I think some of that movement is legitimate — human language is different in kind from animal communication systems in ways that matter. The recursive syntax, the infinite combinatorial capacity, the ability to talk about abstractions and hypotheticals and things that don't exist. But some of it is just us protecting our special status. We want to be unique. We want there to be a bright line between us and everything else.
The theological and philosophical stakes are high. If humans aren't uniquely ensouled, uniquely conscious, uniquely moral...
Then a lot of our ethical frameworks need rethinking. Not just about animals, but about ourselves. What does it mean to be human if being human isn't the only way to be a thinking, feeling being? If consciousness is a spectrum and we're just one point on it, what justifies the enormous ethical weight we give to human interests over all others?
This is where the feral cats of Jerusalem come back in. You mentioned the Hebrew University study earlier.
There's a planned large-scale study on feral cat cognition in urban environments, led by Hebrew University, expected to publish results in twenty twenty-seven. They're looking at exactly the kinds of behaviors you've observed — traffic navigation, human recognition, social coordination across colonies. The idea is to study cognition not in a lab, but in the ecological context where it actually operates. Don't bring the cat to the puzzle box. Bring the puzzle to the alley.
That's long overdue. Lab studies strip out the environment the intelligence evolved to handle. It's like testing a fish's climbing ability.
A cat in a puzzle box is like a human taking an IQ test in a language they barely speak. The test measures something, but it might not be what you think it's measuring. It might be measuring stress response, or motivation, or how well the animal can guess what the human experimenter wants. The Hebrew University study is trying to measure cat cognition in the context of actual cat lives — alleys, dumpsters, human interactions, territorial disputes. What does intelligence look like when it's allowed to be cat-shaped?
Given that Jerusalem has one of the densest feral cat populations in the Middle East, it's the perfect natural laboratory. You've got thousands of cats living in close proximity to humans, navigating a complex urban environment, forming social structures that nobody designed.
We're sitting in a city that's essentially a giant ongoing experiment in feline social cognition. Every alley is generating data. Every cat colony is a little society solving collective problems. And we're only now starting to pay attention.
Let's get practical. For the listener at home, what does all this mean? The three-second goldfish memory is false. Cockroaches do collective decision-making. Sloths solve detour problems. Feral cats navigate complex urban environments with what looks like genuine intelligence.
The actionable takeaway, and I want to be careful not to be preachy here, is that the animals around you — pets, pests, the wildlife in your neighborhood — almost certainly have more going on internally than pop culture gives them credit for. The goldfish in your kid's bedroom isn't a swimming ornament. It's a creature that can recognize faces and remember experiences for months. The pigeon on your windowsill isn't a flying rat. It's a bird that can navigate by magnetic fields, recognize individual human faces, and pass cognitive tests that require abstract categorization.
The cockroach you're about to step on might — might — have some dim flicker of experience. Not self-awareness in the human sense. Not hopes and dreams. A minimal sense of "this is good" or "this is bad.
The burden of proof is shifting. The twenty twenty-four New York Declaration represents a real change in the scientific consensus. Not a settled conclusion, but a shift in where the default assumption lies. The precautionary principle says: assume consciousness is possible in more animals until we have good reason to think otherwise. Not the other way around. For most of scientific history, the default was "animals are machines, prove they're not." Now the default is starting to flip.
Which has implications for everything from pest control to factory farming to how we design zoos. If you assume the animal might have an inner life, you design differently.
I don't want to leave people with guilt. That's not the point. The point is curiosity. The world is more full of minds than we thought. That's not a burden. That's a gift.
Next time you see a feral cat in Jerusalem, watch how it solves problems. Which route it takes across the street. Which humans it approaches and which it avoids. How it communicates with other cats in its colony. That's intelligence. It's just not the human kind. And it's happening all around us, all the time, largely unnoticed.
If you find yourself waiting at a bus stop next to a cat that's also waiting for something, consider the possibility that you're both doing roughly the same thing — navigating a world you didn't build, using the cognitive tools you were born with, trying to get through the day safely.
The cat might be better at it.
In some ways, almost certainly. The cat isn't distracted by existential questions about the nature of cat consciousness. The cat is just being a cat, successfully, in a city that wasn't designed for cats.
Where does this leave the big question? The sentience threshold. The cognition cliff. Is there a line beneath which consciousness is impossible?
I don't think we know. And I don't think we're close to knowing. The hard problem of consciousness — why physical processes in a brain produce subjective experience at all — is unsolved even for humans. We can't explain why the electrical activity in your skull feels like something from the inside. Until we solve that, we're speculating about every other species. We're making inferences from behavior and neural structure, but we don't have a theory that tells us what to look for.
We're making educated guesses about the inner lives of creatures whose experience might be radically alien to ours.
A bat experiences the world through echolocation — a sensory modality we can describe but never feel. An octopus has a distributed nervous system with most of its neurons in its arms. What would it be like to think with your limbs? To have your sense of self distributed across eight semi-autonomous appendages? We can't even imagine it properly. Our imagination is bounded by our own neurology.
A bed bug?
If they have experience at all, it's probably so minimal, so foreign, so unlike our own that the word consciousness barely applies. But barely is not the same as not at all. And that's the vertigo. We're trying to draw a line, but we don't know where the line should go, or even if lines make sense for this kind of question.
This is the vertigo at the bottom of the question. We're trying to measure something we can't define, in creatures whose experience we can't imagine, using tools designed by and for human minds. It's almost absurd. And yet we keep asking.
Yet, I think the effort is worthwhile. Not because we'll get a definitive answer — we probably won't, not in our lifetimes — but because the act of asking changes how we see the world. It makes the animals around us more visible. The cockroach under the fridge becomes a mystery instead of just a pest.
The sloth in the mirror becomes... a little less alone.
That's a good place to land.
Before we wrap, I want to flag something. The Hebrew University feral cat cognition study is expected to publish in twenty twenty-seven. That's going to be a major data point in this conversation. Urban ecology, animal cognition, and the question of how wild animals adapt their intelligence to human environments — all converging on the alleyways of Jerusalem. It's the kind of study that could reshape how we think about the animals we live alongside.
We'll be watching for that. And presumably, so will several thousand feral cats, who already know the results.
They've known for years. They're just waiting for us to catch up.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the seventeen eighties, a French missionary traveling through the Namib Desert recorded in his journal that the local Nama people fermented cheese inside hollowed-out ostrich eggs, burying them in sand for up to six months — and that the resulting cheese was described as tasting like, quote, a lion's breath after eating honey, end quote.
...right. I have so many questions about how they know what a lion's breath after eating honey tastes like. That implies someone got close enough to a lion's mouth to make the comparison, which seems like a story in itself.
Maybe the lion was a cheese critic.
Here's the open question we're left with. If we can't even agree on what consciousness is in humans — if the hard problem remains hard — how do we measure it in animals whose inner worlds might be nothing like ours?
Maybe the answer is humility. Maybe intelligence isn't a ladder with humans at the top. Maybe it's a web. Different creatures, brilliant in ways we can't even perceive. And that's humbling. It means we're not the pinnacle of anything. We're just one node in a vast network of minds, most of which we barely understand.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review — it helps other curious listeners find the show. We'll be back next week with Episode Two Hundred Two: The Ethics of Insect Farming — Do Crickets Have Feelings? That one's going to be uncomfortable in the best way.
See you then.
