Comment by jijijijij

There is this popular video of a crow repeatedly riding down a snow covered roof on a piece of plastic, basically snowboarding. Seemingly just for fun/play.

For me, it's hard to imagine how such behavior could be expressed without the pure conscious experience of abstract joy and anticipation thereof. It's not the sort of play, which may prepare a young animal for the specific challenges of their species (e.g. hunting, or fighting). I don't think you could snowboard on a piece of bark or something. Maybe ice, but not repeatedly by dragging it up the hill again. It's an activity greatly inspired by man-made, light and smooth materials, novelties considering evolutionary timescales. May even be inspired by observing humans...

I think it's all there, but the question about degree of ability vs. qualitative difference may be moot. I mean, trivially there is a continuous evolutionary lineage of "feature progression", unless we would expect our extend of consciousness being down to "a single gene". But it's also moot, because evolutionary specialization may as well be as fundamental a difference as the existence of a whole new organ. E.g. the energy economics of a bird are restricted by gravity. We wouldn't see central nervous systems without the evolutionary legacy of predation -> movement -> directionality -> sensory concentration at the front. And we simply cannot relate to solitary animals (who just don't care about love and friendship)... Abilities are somewhat locked-in by niche and physics constraints.

I think the fundamental difference between humans and animals, is the degree of freedom we progressively gained over the environment, life, death and reproduction. Of course we are governed by the wider idea of evolution like all matter, but in the sense of classical theory we don't really have a specific niche, except "doing whatever with our big, expensive brain". I mean, we're at a point where we play meta-evolution in the laboratory. This freedom may have brought extended universality into cognition. Energy economics, omnivorous diet, bipedal walking, hands with freely movable thumbs, language, useful lifespan, ... I think the sum of all these make the difference. In some way, I think we are like we are, exactly because we are like that. Getting here wasn't guided by plans and abstractions.

If it's a concert of all the things in our past and present, we may never find a simpler line between us and the crow, yet we are fundamentally different.