[UA] Cultures in animals

[holycrow at mindspring.com]

>ObUA: If animals can develop culture, what's to stop them from >ascending?

Well, the quickref response is "They lack souls."  They're just an organization of cells without the significant free will that makes your life and mine so loopy and interesting.

A more thoughtful response would be that they lack consciousness.  They have no real concept of self as an individual.  If you don't have that, you can't make the macrocosmic self/universe metaphor which (as Ken Hite tells us) is the key to the whole mystic shebang.

To put it more simply, a dog can be a good dog or a bad dog, but you don't talk of a dog being ethical or unethical.  They lack the grasp of abstractions.

-G.

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