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The argument that apes have never asked a question “is a classic example of overstatement,” said Heidi Lyn, a professor at the University of South Alabama’s Comparative Cognition and Communication Lab at the Department of Psychology and Marine Science.
“There is plenty of evidence of apes asking questions, although the structure may not look exactly like humans asking questions,” Lyn explained.
https://www.snopes.com/articles/467842/apes-questions-communicate/
If a chimpanzee looks its handler in the eyes and points to a banana, it may be interpreted that the ape is asking to have the banana. This, Hobaiter said, shows apes are capable of asking questions.
Obviously not in the spirit of the question. No curiosity, no attempt to learn about what’s going on around them. The article has no examples of real questions, so to me I’d say the meme rings true.
That’s crazy. You think monkeys aren’t curious about the world around them?
They just don’t look to humans for answers, they look to humans for treats
Well, curiosity comes in different stripes. Investigating your environment is one thing. Asking second-order questions is another.
“May I have food?” vs “Why am I here?” and “What is the nature of consciousness?”
“Why are we here?”
“One of life’s great mysteries isn’t it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a God, watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff? I don’t know man, but it keeps me up at night.”
“What? I mean why are we here, in this box canyon in the middle of nowhere?”
if you wake up in a compound, catered to your every need by weird alien captors, “why am I here?” is a pretty obvious question.
You ask the aliens why you are there, meaning the cell they imprisoned you, and they tell you how their species created humans and what humans purpose is. You immediately go catatonic by the revelation.
The information that “aliens created us for some particular purpose” is empirically interesting but normatively insignificant.
