Recovering our natural experience takes argument, today, because we’ve all been poisoned by two generations of lunatic public education theory, distilled from four hundred years of philosophic bafflegab. We all still have our more-or-less orderly natural experience, shared among friends and fellow citizens, sufficient to keep us all alive. But we’ve lost a lot of the vocabulary for clearly expressing a lot of reality’s (singular) built-in rationality. And without the words, we can’t think clearly, so we often do stupid things.

For example: somebody says, in all fervor, “animals are people, too,” and we know that’s not quite right, but we don’t know how to say so. We don’t have the words. We know intuitively that “it ain’t so,” but we can’t think when we don’t have the words. Words matter.

In this case, the words we’re now missing are higher and lower. Human beings are higher than animals, and animals are lower than human beings. This does not mean that animals aren’t wonderful and worthy of respect. They are. But it means that human beings really are more wonderful and even worthier of respect. Unless we know how to speak and think in terms of higher and lower, we can’t really appreciate just how amazing and worthy of respect are even animals, plants and even rocks.

Let’s begin from the beginning. Plants are higher than rocks. Animals are higher than plants. Humans are higher than animals. These distinctions aren’t just a matter of perspective. They’re objective reality.  Here’s the formula: P is higher than Q, if P is or does everything Q is or does, but Q cannot be or do everything P is or does. So now watch how this works.

        Rocks have two basic qualities: volume (or extension) and weight (or mass). So they have only two tricks. Push them, and they resist. Drop them and they fall. Two tricks. This does not dis rocks – or matter in general. The fundamental characters of extension and mass – like solids, liquids and gases – are worth hours of contemplation, mysterious and more mysterious, the more we learn. The strangeness of the compound H2O (water), the only compound that expands from the liquid to solid state, inspires awe. We can meditate on the fact that most physical constants (like pi, e, G or Mo) are irrational numbers. Matter is simply amazing. The point is: plant life is even more amazing.

Plants have everything rocks have – extension and weight – but more. They have two tricks that rocks don’t have. They have an organic power and reproductive power. They take non-plant matter (air, water and minerals) and organize it into plant. They then take little bits of themselves, launch them into the big world, and create another example of themselves. Plants generate little plants. They replicate their kind.

These vegetative powers are even more amazing than mass and extension. The Earth’s 16 trillion trees (plus the grasslands and ocean algae) absorb atmospheric CO2, and they turn gas, water and sunshine into wood. Amazing. Carrots create carrot from gas. This organic growth – life – is negative entropy, reversing the “down-hill” flow of energy that otherwise rules the entire universe. Sure, crystals will grow in a salt solution, but they’re still losing energy, not gaining it. Living organisms concentrate energy instead of dissipating it, and they generate others just like themselves. We can’t call them “energy factories,” because factories don’t grow themselves and replicate themselves.

What does it mean to say plants are higher than rocks? They’re made of matter and obey all of matter’s physical laws, but life has tricks of its own, organic and reproductive, from its peculiar organization of carbon molecules. If all you had was simple matter, you’d never predict that these little stacks of matter might do that. Scientists can measure how well different plants concentrate solar energy, but their biological laws aren’t reducible to the simpler (but not simple) laws of matter-in-motion. Plants are higher than rocks.

Next: Animals are higher than plants, because they have everything plants have – extension, mass, organic growth and reproduction – but also two additional powers: sensation and locomotion (movement). It’s a good thing these powers usually go together, because sensation without movement is useless, and movement without sensation, self-destructive (like blind elk, running off a cliff). These two extra powers mean that animals must be unified in a way that plants aren’t. They must have something we might call a “central nervous system,” joining their sensitive and locomotive powers.

All of the plant’s powers are structural, tropisms, built into the relative position of their cells, pulling them into the earth (geotropism) or up to the sun (phototropism). You can cut a branch from a tree, stick it in dirt, and it sprouts new roots downward and new twigs upward. You can’t cut a leg from a cat and grow a new cat – and don’t try. An animal’s powers aren’t simply structural (though its individual cells have that too), but taken as a whole, informational and instinctual. Plant cells react only to what affects the surface of the cell. An animal senses though space (extension!) and moves through space. As a unified organism, it may have a brooding instinct for nesting, a hunting instinct chasing prey, a territorial instinct, or a migratory instinct, in response to the seasons.

Animal behaviors can be categorized and even quantified. We can measure a grizzly bear’s range or an arctic tern’s migration. But the laws of animal behavior can’t be reduced to the physical laws of matter-in-motion or organic laws of growth. They’re a whole new rank of being, a higher level. They process and respond to information in a way that plants can’t. You can please an animal, but you can’t please a plant.

You may ask, if we’re talking “higher and lower,” what’s the “yardstick” measuring this? But talking about a common yardstick supposed these are differences in degree. They’re not. They’re differences in kind or rank. There is no common yardstick. Trying to reduce the laws of animal behavior to matter-in-motion is like taking acoustic sensors to a symphony, and trying to measure harmony and melody in the sound energy.

Now: Human beings are higher than animals, because we have everything that animals have – volume, weight, organic growth, reproduction, sensation and movement – but we also have speech, giving us two powers animals don’t have: reason and choice. We call the union of these new powers our minds or souls. And it’s really weird that so many people today try to deny this most obvious fact.

Some animal lovers passionately deny any difference in rank between animals and humans, afraid we’ll treat them like trash. But that’s self-defeating. If we’re simply speechless animals, we’ll treat gazelles like lions do, because we’re not responsible for them. Animals are amazing, but we can care for them, only if we’re more amazing: if we’re capable of being responsible. For that, we need minds.

Some scientists deny we have minds, because they believe that our reason speech is simply animal grunting and barking, reducible to physiological instincts. So what’s the natural experience and evidence that we really have minds? We need to show that the “laws of mind” really are different and not reducible to animal behavior.

So now remember this basic experience: here we are, six years old, trying to learn to multiply. “We just don’t get it.” So we repeat: “two times two is four, two times three is six…” Then the three-times table: “three times two is six…” Then we make a whole table, with one-to-10 across the top and one-to-10 down the left side, and fill in the squares where each of these numbers intersect. We do it and do it, without really understanding what we’re doing. Then suddenly something goes “click.” Suddenly “we get it.” We see what we’re talking about; we see the truth of these number relations.

Now, the point is: when we “get it,” it’s not about us. It’s about the numbers. Whether we get it wrong or right has nothing to do with how our brains function, getting there. The brain might run on electrical circuits, hydraulic pumps, or gears and pulleys, and that’s completely irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of what we’re thinking, because the truth is “out there,” not “in here.” The multiplication table, Pythagoras’ Theorem, square roots or trigonometry are true – necessarily, universally and eternally – whether we learned it or not. They were true when our ancestors lived in caves. Over centuries, speech allowed us to learn the truths or ideas “out there.” The little “clicks,” when we learn truth are moments when our minds suddenly get “in synch” with a whole cosmos of ideas.

With animals, “it’s all about them.” When a circus horse stomps out “one plus one” – “stomp… stomp… stomp-stomp…” the horse isn’t seeing numbers “out there.” It’s been trained in a reflex that gets the apple. It hasn’t really learned; it’s been trained. It’s all about the apple, not the numbers. Sure, we have our cravings, and often, “it’s all about us,” but we really live, day in and day out, in a cosmos of ideas, not apples. Numbers are the simplest part of this whole cosmos of ideas like goodness, beauty, truth, friendship, honor, courage – ideas we all share and in which we all live together.

We’ll need to say a lot more about this mind later, and there are arguments against it. British philosopher G.E. Moore went so far as to say, “It is entirely possible that there is no entity which deserves to be called ‘my mind’.” And if Moore was prepared to say that, who are we to disagree? But here we’re talking just about the basic human experience of “mind,” however anybody explains it. In our experience, humans are higher than animals. This “higher and lower” is a fundamental framework of natural experience.

There are many situations where higher and lower come in handy. One variation is the distinction, “urgent versus important,” as in: “Plumbing is urgent, but music is important.” Another is, “noble and ignoble” as in, “Protecting the weak is perilous, but running away, ignoble.” Another benefit is recognizing, “The corruption of the best is the worst.” A dog may be bad and bite its master, but only humans can be evil, knowingly inflicting misery for the hell of it.

Now, to establish the plausibility of the terms “higher and lower,” we used practically undeniable differences in rank that really are differences in kind, where there is no common measure. What about differences in rank within a kind,  that have a common “yardstick”?  Faster, smarter, stronger, more disciplined, more experienced…?  Arguably, these differences in rank really are among our most basic natural experiences, and these will require a whole new discussion.