| | Jordan,
...But computer can count, so under your test, they would be rational. The test doesn't define the ability to count as rationality, all of rationality and nothing but, it merely claims that rationality is a requirement for completing the test.
That neither you or a stone can fly doesn't prove that you should be a stone, failing the test does not prove lack of rationality.
A computer is an inanimate object, created by rationality to perform a specific task - counting - it will not 'know' what counting is, or what to do with it - it is it's programmed reaction. Birds will need to transcend their programmed reaction to obtain this ability, they will need some form of rationality, if they fail the test they may still be rational, just not proven by this test.
I do though hold that man is an animal like most others, we have more complex reactions but i don't think it fair to say that we react in wildly different ways to the same stimuli just as i don't find it fair to say that animals always react with similar responses to same stimuli.
An animal i have had a chance to observe, would be my cat at home... it would often sleep in my bed, and want to leave sometime during the night, it would need me to open the door. It started by going to the door meowing, if that did't work it would walk across my piano, on the keys, if still no result it would go to the door moving its paws across the metal slats of the venetian blinds - no claws just the paw - a terrible noise, and it would normally get my attention, one night when even this failed, it placed its front legs on the edge of my bed and ever so gently nibbled my nose - no pain involved except that of waking up to the foul odor of cats breath. It had learned that it needed my attention to get the door open, it had learned that noise was a good way, it found that when noise failed it could resort to other means. Not that this particular cat was exceptional, but i think it showed rational thought on some level... abstraction.
At the same time, it was claimed that birds always build the same type of nest, while humans clearly don't... don't we? Don't we use the materials at hand to build very similar houses - more complex than birds nests, and with greater variety sure - we are more complex - but amazingly unique i would not call our dwellings. And for birds... when at the local hospital last, on the balcony outside my window was a bird that had build its nest of steel 'sticks' - those used to reinforce brick walls, and bind inner walls to outer walls.... it was the material it could find at the site - the nest was made of nothing but that.
If we look for animal cognition while accepting one result only, be it that they are rational or not, it is futile to search any further, as we already know that our result will be what we have decided it to be.
That a gorilla can't be the king of france is silly - the gorilla will need to be seen in gorilla world, and humans in human world - that a gorilla wont become the king of france - let us pretend france a monarchy for a moment - is just as obvious as the fact that you won't become king or alpha male of a mountain with different groups of silverbacks.
If we look at the great diversity of life on our little globe, we see that many living entities, however different we may appear, have an awful lot in common, two eyes, two ears, a nose, feet and hands, hearts, lungs, livers, brains ... that humans should be the only animal capable of forming abstract concepts i would find highly unlikely, that we don't have the mental capacity to prove what goes on in the brains of other animals, may in fact say more about us than it does them.
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