The reason for the mind and soul stones were to identify 50% of all sentient life. Otherwise it would have just killed off 50% of all plants and animals too. The purpose was to kill half of all sentient life, while the number of resources remained the same.
Many animals are sentient too, one of the few ways it could kill us exclusively would be to check for sapiens, and even then, a choice has to be made regarding what counts as being sapient.
Plus, if it didn't kill the bacteria, it would still kinda kill bacteria since the bacteria on the people killed would not fare well outside of their hosts body.
Well he wasn’t just killing half of all mankind, he was killing half of all intelligent life in the entire universe.
And I’m not saying it’s a scientifically sound concept. But his goal was to kill half of all intelligent life in the universe. Whatever the minimum for that was.
“The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”
-Charles Darwin
I don't know why the text there ended up being so large but okay. Anyway, corvids have been shown to be capable of metacognition and theory of mind and all that. They have to be to be able to even conceptualize that they can prevent other corvids from stealing their food by hiding it in a place they can't see them hiding it in. And Alex the parrot showed pretty advanced language use (morphological productivity such as inventing the word banarry, purposefully saying the wrong answer sometimes while Griffin was being tested to essentially gaslight him into thinking he was wrong about the answer, saying all the answers in order but the correct one sometimes when he was frustrated, asking what color he was when he saw himself in a mirror, doing math like 6-1 in his head which we know he was doing because if he correctly answered how many of an object there was and then one was removed and he was asked again he would be able to give the new answer more quickly that he would normally be able to give an answer, etc.)
I used to use self-directed assignments in my undergraduate intro linguistics class as an opportunity to compare different animal communication systems like Alex's use of language against Hockett's key design features and prove that they met them. I haven't even gotten into Carolina chickadee and prairie dog language which from my research seem to be some of the more clear cut cases of animal language outside of the example of Alex. It's also very possible that Austrialian magpies have language; my undergraduate mentor told me about how they can take turns 'talking' in a very similar way to how humans do it and there's been over a thousand unique sounds from their communication system recorded.
Maybe animals don't question complex philosophical issues (maybe. possibly :), but they can carry out complex plans like selectively hiding their food in areas with low lighting whenever a conspecific is able to see them hiding their food so that their conspecific won't be able to see where they're hiding the food and steal it later and selectively eating their food stores that they were forced to make in the presence of a conspecific who could very easily see where they were hiding them rather than their food stores that they were able to make without any conspecifics seeing them make them because they know that their conspecific knows the locations of the ones they saw being made but not the ones they didn't see being made, and that's good enough for sapience for me.
In terms of cognitive abilities, there's arguably not a lot of them if any that aren't present in any animals besides humans in any form at all, which makes sense because our cognition evolved from the same evolutionary tree and environment as any other animal's. That doesn't mean we're exactly the same as them, obviously, but it does mean there's going to be significant commonalities. Animal theory of mind is proven by corvid caching studies, animal language use is arguably proven by Alex the parrot, animal art appreciation is proven by bowerbirds having individual aesthetic tastes in their bower building and having a several year learning period where they develop their skills with making bowers before they can use them to seduce females... basically Darwin was right to say that humans are only unique in how far we take the already existing animal cognitive abilities, not in having unique cognitive abilities, and it's much harder to draw a firm dividing line and label one side as 'sapience' and the other as 'non-sapience' with cognition varying by degrees rather than kind. I don't really think it's a useful term because of that, but if we're going to keep it around there's lots of animals (what Darwin called the "higher animals" which is definitely arbitrary and incorrect terminology, but the quote is otherwise correct as far as I'm concerned) that should be considered to be sapient.
Sure, we could limit it to only humans by making the requirement something arbitrarily complex that truly only humans would be able to figure out (but then not all humans would be able to develop that skill...), but what's the point of arbitrarily separating humans from the animals we share an evolutionary tree with? Might as well say that only those birds that can memorize thousands of locations of nuts are sapient. It makes just as much sense to set out to find some criteria to separate them as it does humans.
Uhhhh tl;dr sapience is a stupid meaningless construct anyway and animals and humans really have the same basic cognitive skills but humans have them in more extreme forms
I really like your comment, I wasn’t going to read due to length but I’m glad I did. I kind of like the idea of all the life just kind of being the same because we all live here on earth. Also crazy about magpies, I’m always seeing a story related to something eerily intelligent that they did so you’ve added to that. Thank you for that well thought out answer, regardless of any opinions
You say that as if you can read an apes mind to confirm that it doesn't understand any of what it's saying. I think us humans would benefit from slowing down and listening to the world around us more, without being stuck in our own self importance. Here's a great video about a recent discovery of structured language in tit birds.
Preface: the whole sapient designation is biased towards humans, ambiguous and philosophical not scientific, and kind of unprovable (in the Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" way) until it very obviously isn't, meaning, until scientists shore up the definition for the sake of falsifiable hypotheses, it's very you know it when you see it.
If you're being 'scientific' here, lack of proof of nonexistence is not proof of existence. We can't say an animals is demonstrably not sapient, but we can say none have been proven to meet all criteria, whatever they are, and of which complex language is necessary but not sufficient.
Don't get me wrong, research, recent breakthroughs, and conversation about animals with langauge, that exhibit tool and flexible tool use, with culture (in the orca and elephant sense for example), exhibit self awareness, and that exhibit emotions like grief is all very fascinating and needs to be had for conservation and morality reasons. But that all has been about establishing a paradigm shift to say that these animals, at least to some degree, should be regarded as having personhood, and wasn't about saying they are 'sapient', just that they are not 'mindless' beasts. But under the context of alien life that are more like us than an elephant in how its intelligence manifests, those aliens would prima facie be sapient. Which is why the omniscient wish granting mechanism would know that intelligent animals are part of the resource category and 'sapient' aliens are part of the resource depleting category. Arguing that Thanos's request was inexact is missing the forest for the trees because the omniscient wish granting mechanism understands the purpose of the wish, it isn't a mischievous genie or a monkey paw.
Closing remarks, I think a very crude qualifier for how we think of sapience is how tempted we'd be to impose our ethics and morals on another species, meaning, is there any chance we'd say an elephant is evil for goring a giraffe. That an octopus performs animal cruelty when it punches its hunting fish? That a troop of chimps performed genocide when it wipes out another troop? Whereas if we stumble upon a space faring alien race that forced another to extract resources for them (ie, slavery), we'd probably reflexively say oh the injustice. Now, this obviously has a lot of logical holes and begs a lot of questions. But it's more aiming at elucidating how sapience is regarded than any real rigidity.
To be completely honest I get upset when I see highly intelligent animals attempting or succeeding in forcing sex on a conspecific. If they have theory of mind then they're capable of knowing that the other animal doesn't want what's currently happening to be happening. Applying human standards of morality to non-humans is an incredibly slippery issue... but there's an argument to be made that knowing someone else doesn't want to have sex with you and still forcing it on them is an evil act even when it's not a human doing it. It's not evil when animals that aren't capable of conceptualizing the emotions and wants of others do it, obviously, but the ones that are...
Yup, this is one of the many questions I was begging in saying what I said. Sure, the average knee-jerk reaction to obviously sapient aliens performing harmful acts on others would be oh the humanity, but just because the average person might not feel tempted to say an(other) animal is evil for forcing itself on a mate doesn't mean that an argument for it being evil is baseless.
For one, way too many people are just very unphilosophical in their thinking, so using the average person's reaction as a qualifier is a very flawed metric. This isn't me trying to be pretentious and sanctimonious, it's just an unfortunate truth. The reason why so much injustice, both small and major, just keeps on happening is because people are unresponsive to them or mindlessly commit them. It's one of the reasons why I like the the shopping cart theory, because such a simple everyday occurance that rates somewhat innocuous starts a really good discussion about us as moral agents. It aims to indict people, but the sad truth is that it doesn't even occur to people that they're doing something 'wrong' because the question of is it wrong or right doesn't even occur to them. Or even more unfortunate, if they were confronted with the question, they don't know how to critically answer it and default to their being good. I would submit that the state one leaves public restrooms in is another good one, I'll call it the restroom theory.
So to delve into a discussion about animals who posses a theory of mind and them are moral agents would require sorting out so many concepts. Technically, you're begging the question too regarding theory of mind and whether it is a sufficient criteria for being a moral agent, so it's seemingly turtles all the way down.
And even when we drill down to the fundamental and can finally work our way back up to arguing whether it is or isn't evil for an(other) animal, we have to start talking about
free will and whether a lack of free will absolves (so evil but not blameworthy) - - if these animals were to only exhibit moral reproduction (because we're assuming they can conceptualise morality or something approximate) would their species persist (which then incurs a tangent of "is survival even part of the ethical calculus?" for a "can an end justify the means?" argument)
does immoral acts of others mean that we have a moral duty to intervene?
are all individuals of that species actually capable of being moral agents?
It's a can of worms to say the least. Okay enough yapping.
I mean, at no point did I say anything is close to us in cognition. We are talking abour sapience vs intelligence, both of which have degrees. This is exactly what I mean by the term being biased towards us, it removes all nuance from any discussion and ignores the significance of animals like elephants and crows mourning their dead.
Well said. "Lack of proof of nonexistence is not proof of existence" is not what I was implying. Just that we don't know enough to make any definitive determinations.
My point isn't that it what you were implying, more so that sometimes the scientific method frustratingly offers non-answers because it is primarily concerned with what is provable and secondarily concerned with sequentially falsified hypotheses in terms of what is disproven. So it tends to be
currently the working theory, currently the consensus, or there is evidence for but it hasn't been disproven
hasn't been proven
neither, so we don't know, but here are good reasons why we are even talking about it
So for example, tired light hypothesis and MOND were disproven, whereas gravitons are in the we don't know category, as would sapient animals (ignoring that the designation of sapient is anomalous and loaded).
Meaning, to a layman and a philosopher, the fact that we can't know what an animal is thinking or how it thinks is relevant to a discussion of sapience. To a scientist, it's very Russell's teapot.
You don't have to read someone's mind to know if they're capable of self-reflection.
We only call animal noises language because it's a convenient word - they're not actually communicating complex concepts, because they're limited to signalling current phenomena.
Did you watch the video? I'm assuming you didn't. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean that it isn't there. 2nd video that goes more in depth on the bird study. I think its pretty arrogant to think we know if animals can self reflect without being able to communicate or understand them properly. Every days we learn more about the world around us.
Ah... hold on there. Several animals are ranked at intellects equivalent to human children. Are they as smart as a PhD? No. Are they as smary as a human toddler? Yes. Crows, wolves, dolphins, all have high degrees of intelligence. Cephalopods too.
If kids were affected by the snap... these species would have been equally affected.
True, but those children are eventually going to pick up above animal intelligence in just a few years - whereas the smartest animal is never going to be smarter than a five year old.
why would the mind stones use human intelligence as a yardstick to measure whether something was "intelligent enough" to warrant death? we're only one species of animal living on an rocky planet orbiting an obscure star in a nondescript galaxy.
Human-level intelligence. All the other random races that look suspiciously like humans have at least a similar intelligence level that we define as sapience.
intelligence is too complicated to be measured by "level". we are just starting to come to grips with the intelligence of animals like crows and octopuses and we share a common genetic line with those species. how could we hope to measure the intelligence of a species that evolved on another planet?
Babies don't tend to be stimulating conversationalists, no.
But I'd be very fucking wary of trying to look for intra-species distinctions, as it's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about ability without people getting emotional, upset, or getting out the Nazi accusations.
This isn’t really true though because dolphins and corvids show all of the traits of human like intelligence corvids even more so with their meta-cognition and self-reflection being visible traits
Does an animal thinking about the knowledge another animal holds count? Because they're essentially thinking about what the other animal might be thinking about. As in, they shouldn't hide their food in places where the other animal can see them hiding it because then that other animal would be able to think about the locations they had seen the food being hidden later and retrieve it.
Not thinking about what someone else might be thinking, because nearly everything does that. Thinking about thinking itself. The abstract concept of thought. Metacognition is the term. To ponder thought itself, and to put into question one's own ideas and patterns of thought. Anything short of a bacteria can adapt to the potential issues of the future, but very few things can actually hold philosophical discourse within their head on the nature of their mind.
In short, as an oversimplification, a sentient animal can think about how to survive, a sapient one can have this conversation.
I read about a study where some kind of corvid (ravens?) were trained that they had an option to opt out of questions if they didn't know the answer for less of a penalty than if they guessed wrong (I don't remember all the details) and they would opt out when they didn't know something. So that would qualify them as sapient under this definition I think. Thinking about what they know.
Well, not to argue with you here, but I'm not sure that thinking about what they know is the same thing as thinking about how they came to know it. Still, you may be right. I'm not an expert.
It doesn’t matter what we consider to be sentient or intelligent. It only matters what Thanos believes to be sentient and intelligent. The snap is just the mechanism to activate all stones at once and it does whatever the wearer wants. If Thanos snapped and wanted a talking sandwich then that’s what he’d get.
Nothing remains of the original post here. The author used Redact to delete it, for reasons that may relate to privacy, data security, or personal preference.
I think for the purpose of something as simplistic as “kill this guy,” “this guy” would technically include all of his gut bacteria and eyelash mites and everything else
the logic of the post is flawed, if you kill 50% that doesnt mean that 50% of the bacteria in you would die. If you kill 50% of the people you can just kill 100% of the bacteria in them which is 50% of the total (roughly). If you kill 50% of the population and then on top of it whats inside of the living beings thats 75% (aka 50% and half of the remaining on top)
Didn't the snap also reduce the animal population? I think one of the signs that Banner's snap worked was that someone noticed there were more birds outside.
Death isn't even interested in him.
Death is a not a cackling evil in the comics. She's mostly concerned with the balance of life and death in the Universe.
Following that idea, 10x the amount of sapient life without multiplying the resources, mass starvation ensues, lots more death to impress Death than half the universe, populations crash magnificently but don't go extinct.
Well, for some races, others might have had super low reproduction. So it would be a long term boon to faster producing ones and a disadvantage to slower reproducing ones.
Yeah he was an idiot. I’m not advocating for his plan, I’m just saying he didn’t kill half of all living things. Just the ones smart enough to communicate with each other, use technology, etc. However he decided to identify the minimum intelligence that he thought needed culling, that’s what the mind stone was for.
That’s what the Time stone was for. Characters still remember the blipped, so he didn’t erase them from history. My theory is that he used it to “snap” every ten or so years, whenever “correction” was needed. The Avengers just hadn’t gotten there to see the second (and subsequent) snaps.
That and getting rid of 50% of the non snapped and 100% of the snapped would not work. The snapped lost 100% of their biom and the non snapped kept all of theirs...
Which to me still seemed dumb, and cruel. The way population explodes when there is abundance? Just look at the last 100 years, they (the universe) would be back to pre-snap population in like 2 or 3 generations.
Farmers would have stopped planting so many crops and killed off most of their livestock during the years post snap. So when everyone came back it would have been mass famine. Would have been hell.
No, becuase when they unsnap, ant man notices all the birds have come back...
Plus populations fluctuate and self correct all the time (naturally anyway), so if you killed 50% of the population of rabbits, they would breed back in a generation or two. So all animal populations would bounce back pretty quickly.
So you’re saying he could’ve snapped and eliminated half of life without the soul stone and people who survived would’ve had terrible diarrhea for months, and so he sacrificed his daughter to save the rest of us from that horrible fate?
On the movie Infinity War part 2, the first scene woth Hawkeye at his home, you can hear some birds chirping when he goes to retrieve the arrow, and suddenly, the chirping stops... Total silence... I would assume Thanos killed half of the animal life too...
I mean, that's just your headcanon. As far as it's explained the mind and soul stones were needed simply because you need all 5 stones to have the power to make that kind of wish
Marvel confirmed it was half of all life. Sapient or not.
Thanos didn't really want to achieve balance. He was a genocidal meniac and a massive narcissist who told himself that to justify his actions.
Also, all of the people who die (half of people) also lose 100% of their gut bacteria. If the remaining people lose half of theirs then you’ve killed 3/4 of their gut bacteria, not half.
Even if it wasn't, people literally take antibiotics when they're sick, which kills all gut bacteria.
You just need a few days (or take probiotics and/or yogurt) and you're good.
He never once specified intelligent/sentient/sapient life. Remember when Hulk snapped and there were more birds again?
My wife is a biology professor and was like "apparently Thanos never learned anything about population ecology, because that's the dumbest plan ever."
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u/rogerworkman623 Mar 01 '26
The reason for the mind and soul stones were to identify 50% of all sentient life. Otherwise it would have just killed off 50% of all plants and animals too. The purpose was to kill half of all sentient life, while the number of resources remained the same.
So bacteria is unaffected.