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I don't know if it's quite so much of an imagined difference, as a glorified one. I think, no matter what, that there is a difference in all things, whether we have the knowledge to discern said difference is another matter entirely.

Other than that, I think it's a little bold to assert that we are any different than a chair, or a worm, or a window, or the entire universe. I've always had a thought that we, on our tiny planet, circling around our tiny sun, might not have it right at all.

With an odd twist, I'll go ahead and remind anybody who has seen it, of the 1st Men in Black movie. In that movie, our universe was in a marble, being played with by aliens. That's more or less the way I think of things. I'm not convinced that we are no more than mere mitochondria and fatty cells (dependent on our energy output razz ) in a being, which would be unimaginably gigantic to us, but crawling around being squished by angry kids on a tiny world surrounding a tiny sun.

In that case, I don't think the chair is really any different than us, in fact, it just might serve a higher purpose than we do. We have no way of telling whether or not these things have a valid thought process, and are just tied down by physical rules, we have ways to monitor what we think is thought and life, but we don't really KNOW. We tend to develop a cocky attitude about such things, because we think we get it, but you won't find a single person who can actually own up to knowing everything. And even if the chair doesn't have a valid thought process, or force we call life, who's to say it doesn't have something more satisfying going on? This whole life thing might not be how things other than us were intended to be. I know it's a pretty abstract string of thought...but that's how things are in my head XD

On the subject of the difference between a human and a chair I have to agree that there is not a lot difference when you break it down. I am also reminded of an argument that was made by the late George Carlin. He asked the question " Name 5 ways where better and chickens?" After a pause he observed that no one could do it, but he commented that you don't hear about any chickens coming home from work and beating the crap out of his hen, or about a chicken hooking up a guys genitals up to a car battery. And so he reflects that compared to humans chickens are decent people. So I have to come to the conclusion that compared to a chair or a chicken we humans are not only not superior but in fact lesser than them. I say this because humans are the only thing in our existence that enslaves, kills for pleasure, destroy and format our environment beyond recovery, the list goes on and on. You have to wonder is human existence a mistake? Where we created with our destructive nature in mind?

I guess I would answer your questions with 'yes and no'. Of course at some level we will naturally be very similar to any other physical object - the point being, we are only similar to that object at some level. It's all a matter of perspective. For example:



Sure, that is one very valid perspective - we are tiny, insignificant creatures in comparison to the vastness of space, limited or otherwise. But we're also amazing inventors: we've begun exploring space, we can make people live longer, we can travel the world, and make vanilla milkshake. There aren't any other animals that can attest to that. Sure, maybe animals or objects /might/ be serving some higher purpose that we just cannot comprehend - but if it's beyond our comprehension, why bother including it in the paradigm by which we live our lives? There's an /infinite/ number of other incomprehensible notions that we leave out, like meteors crashing into the earth, solipsistic thought and so on.

We get cocky simply because we get results. It's something we should be proud of.