Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I contemplate a bird. In fact it is a photo of a bird, many times larger than life, hanging on the wall of a café. I’ve never had a chance to scrutinize a bird so carefully before. After I finish admiring its beauty, I turn my attention to its claws, which are pointed and hard, its beak, which is open in a cry, its eyes, which are empty of pity or warmth. I think: this creature is intensely alien to me. It is not a cute little bird, a sweet little bird, look at the pretty little bird. It is not a bird in a children’s book. And it comes to me that I have never understood an animal this way before. That whether in a zoo, on a farm, in my yard — still more with a photo or video clip of the kind that are forever being passed around online — my response to animals has always been to anthropomorphize them, to project my subjectivity onto them, to slobber over them with my emotions, with my needs. To place them in relation to myself. And it comes to me as well that to refrain from doing so, to let the bird, the goat, the possum be exactly what it is, in itself and for itself, without reference to me, to accept it in its otherness, would be to treat it with profound respect. I am talking with a former professor of mine. She is telling me that she believes that part of our job as teachers of undergraduates is to help our students, as she puts it, “instrumentalize” the things they learn from us — instrumentalize them, she means, for the sake of social change. I’m skeptical. What do academics know about instrumentalizing anything? More to the point,