I'm happy to settle for quantitative uniqueness: various animals may be able to do each of these things a little bit, but we do all of them at once, in an almost organised fashion, to a far greater extent.
Unless you seriously think that some other mammal would have been just as capable as Homo sapiens of building up a technological civilisation given the motivation and/or resources and without requiring any further evolution from its current state, I think this is still quibbling at my wording. Interesting quibbling though it is :-)
There's no question in my mind that humans do all these things to a greater extent than other animals, and I'm very dubious that other animals could equal human thought given the appropriate motivation (though I'm not sure what such motivation would be). And I'm certainly just quibbling with your wording to an extent. My serious point is that we shouldn't assume we're unique without due consideration of what being unique actually would mean.
(though I'm not sure what such motivation would be)
I mostly mentioned motivation there in order to pre-emptively rule out the Douglas Adams dolphin argument: in case anyone tried to argue that some other species was more intelligent than us because they didn't build up a technological civilisation, or that they were intelligent enough to do what they wanted to get done and that was all that was important. The key test is whether they could have done what we did if they'd wanted to; if it were shown that they could have and they deliberately chose not to, then I'd concede the point.
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Unless you seriously think that some other mammal would have been just as capable as Homo sapiens of building up a technological civilisation given the motivation and/or resources and without requiring any further evolution from its current state, I think this is still quibbling at my wording. Interesting quibbling though it is :-)
There's no question in my mind that humans do all these things to a greater extent than other animals, and I'm very dubious that other animals could equal human thought given the appropriate motivation (though I'm not sure what such motivation would be). And I'm certainly just quibbling with your wording to an extent. My serious point is that we shouldn't assume we're unique without due consideration of what being unique actually would mean.
I mostly mentioned motivation there in order to pre-emptively rule out the Douglas Adams dolphin argument: in case anyone tried to argue that some other species was more intelligent than us because they didn't build up a technological civilisation, or that they were intelligent enough to do what they wanted to get done and that was all that was important. The key test is whether they could have done what we did if they'd wanted to; if it were shown that they could have and they deliberately chose not to, then I'd concede the point.