Re: What is special about humans?

I think answering your question hinges upon the intent of the word "comprehensible". In AS, Rosen argues that Natural Law is plausibly true based on our observations about evolution of organisms generally:

"Now we have already argued that the function of the mind, in biological terms, is to act as a transducer between percepts and specific actions, mediated by the organism's effector mechanisms. It is clear that these actions, and thus the models of the external world which give rise to them, are directly subject to natural selection. An organism which acts inappropriately, or in a maladaptive manner, will clearly not survive long. The very fact of our survival as organisms subject to natural selection thus leads us to suspect that the mechanisms of the mind for organizing percepts (i.e. for establishing relation between percepts) must have some degree of correspondence with objective relations existing between qualities in the external world which is, after all, the agency through which selection mechanisms themselves operate. This type of argument from selection, while obviously not a proof (and equally obviously, hardly an argument from first principles), makes it at least plausible that [a] relations between perceived qualities exist in the external world, and [b] that such relations, too, can be discovered by the mind."[p. 46, ital orig, bold added]

So, one could say, in a similar manner, that organisms generally "comprehend" their surroundings, otherwise they would not survive, evolutionarily speaking.

But on the other hand, "comprehensible" also usually connotes a quality requiring consciousness, which in turn is typically regarded as an emergent quality.

In the former interpretation, the answer would be something like your #1, and in the latter, like your #2. I think that often these two get confounded such that we might be speaking of degrees of comprehensibilty in the first sense, but end up speaking of this there then entailing things like "degrees of consciousness".

That's my 2 cents, anyway.

In thinking about "Natural Law" I came to wonder about what key factors set humans aside from other animals to make the universe comprehensible to them. Two possibilities come to mind:

1) Nothing. The difference is merely quantitative. That is, human circle of understanding is larger than that of a dog, which in turn is larger than that of a worm and so on in an unbroken continuum. For example, we have General Relativity as a model of Natural phenomenon we call gravity, while the dog has a model that if it catches a spherical object and brings it to this creature, the creature will give it a sugar cube that it enjoys. In other words, humans are a better anticipatory system but only in degree, not in kind.

2) Human mind represents a new kind of emergence different in the universe's hierarchy of structure. If so, what are the factors that made this emergence possible. The only one I could think of is language.

Any opinions on this?