Life is Nature too.  
As One is the single truth .=

I won't critique such a mind as Thomas Hobbes---I just never found his ideas all that original or helpful. Earlier comments /opinions regarding such giants as Friedrich N. and Soren K. were similarly situated in my limited consciousness. (And, no, I do not spell so well, but, this handicap does not limit thought---thank genetics!) Acting together has always, and in many (if not all) ways, been a human inadequacy-as seeming interminable warfare illustrates. Ants, termites, and honeybees lead purposeful, albeit, short lives. Individually, they don't even know what they are doing. The beauty of their life and purpose is complexity in simplicity. They are genetically wired to the ages-old reasons for their being. And, accordingly, their lack of individual consciousness is advantage, rather than hindrance. Humans have agendas that extend beyond simple purpose(s). Acting together only works when it suits a locally collaborative purpose and agenda. There is a book by someone named Brian McClaren I plan to research. It involves Jesus, Moses, The Budda (or is that Buddah?) and Mohammed (or is that Muhammad?) and why they crossed the road. Didn't know they did. Hopefully, Mr. McClaren (spelling?) will tell me. Maybe the crossing had something to do with my notion of historionic effect...
Oh---and why is it that the word overarching has become so, uh, trende largesse? Never noticed  it before maybe ten or eleven years ago... just curious; hi to Ken. love to Laura, health and prosperity to all.
Neuman.

Ah Neuman, you bring up the issue of animal consciousness, addressed in the show. AC has always been alluded to as something differentiated from Human Consciousness, as a way of pointing out how the simplicity of animal behavior is so unlike the complexity of human thought-motivated behavior.
Philosophy concerns itself with two types of questions not addressed by other disciplines: 1. unanswerable questions (such as, is there anything other than my consciousness), and 2. 50/50 questions (like, which came first, the radio or the radio station).  We can all talk about HC (though, authoritatively, only our own); but we can say nothing about AC.  We are making wholly speculative assumptions about AC by looking at animal behavior and extrapolating along all kinds of speculative lines, to consciousness. And while this may sound like a type 1 philosophical question, the doing of philosophy means doing rational thinking about thought, and we have neither the "rational" capability to understand animal thought, nor can we even describe AC as "thought."  Anthropomorphisizing about AC is not "rational." You can say ants are doing communal work, but calling the work "intentional," or "planned," or, even worse, "the expression of shared social goals," is beneath us as rationalists.  We just don't know one thing about what and how an animal is thinking.
mirugai

Hmm.. Human society has long since been finished with its Honeymoon stage. 'Complicated' and 'cerebral' is, in principle, just part of how we can figure out the reasons why we often do not so naturally get along any more.
But, is it possible to be mal-motivated such that we end up over-analyzing our potential disharmonies, and therein draw mistaken conclusions as to what constitutes entirely justified solutions?
 

An entirely justified solution:
E Pluribus Unum
One
=

=

Disaster is a driver to get people to act together - need is a push but the more pressure exerted at the moment the easier it is to get cooperation. Love hate and fear are also very big players on the group.

Fred - Philosophers should reject the idea that because two animals are genetically related (or better, similar) that there is any relationship or coincidence of consciousness. Genetics only relates info on cell structures, despite the claims of the new pop-science (TED favorite) neuroscience. Philosophers and poets and comedians are the only professionals qualified to debate consciousness.
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
When someone tells me how smart a crow, or a dolphin, or an ant, or FGS, their dog or cat, is; or if someone reminds me how close the DNA of a human is to the earthworm, I say ?Please let me know when your cat requests an encrypted email with its lost PIN number (sic) enclosed.?
I saw a group of framed lithographs (of Ceylon sights) on the walls of a beautiful guesthouse in the highlands of (now) Sri Lanka. They were so remarkable that I took photos of them with my iphone, and close-up photos of the information at the bottom of each image. When I got home to San Francisco, I googled what I took to be the name of the artist, and in the Wiki entry I saw the name of the book containing the lithographs.
I asked a friend who is expert at finding books online, to try to find any copies of the book for sale, and she found one copy (only one) in the possession of an antiquarian bookseller in Germany.
I emailed the bookseller, and we set up payment in euros with my credit card, through PayPal, and now the book is on its way to me by UPS.
This was written at 3 AM in San Francisco while watching Federer and Murray play in the quarters of the Australian Open, live on TV. I had been awakened by a cellphone call from my wife who is travelling in Burma, and was watching the same tennis match at exactly the same time.
Fred, how close can your seal or your bear come to this? Think how enormous the distance in consciousness must be, based on the only indications of consciousness we have, behavior (not speculation).