Abstract

For centuries, scientific and philosophical inquiry has treated human cognition as a categorical exception — a bright line dividing “mind” from mere mechanism. Yet mounting evidence from animal behaviour, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence challenges this binary. From gorillas who sign to parrots who reason and language models that infer intent, the continuity between life and thought has become increasingly difficult to deny. This paper proposes a unifying hypothesis: that cognition is a substrate-independent process of adaptive sense-making — the ability of any system, biological or synthetic, to model its environment and act upon it in pursuit of goals. By re-examining key cases in animal cognition and emergent AI, we argue that anthropomorphism is backwards: rather than over-ascribing human-like qualities to non-humans, science has systematically under-recognised shared cognitive dynamics. A framework of cognitive continuity better accounts for observed phenomena, aligns ethical reasoning with empirical reality, and suggests new experimental paths, including AI–animal communication interfaces. The challenge is not to prove others “think like us,” but to understand how thinking itself transcends us.