"Why should our ability to comprehend the universe be the yardstick by which we measure ourselves?"
The movie Avatar (obviously on my mind because I recently saw it) tries to bring the audience around to the opposite conclusion. The movie makes clear that the humans better comprehend the universe (star ships, ability to create bodies to control remotely, etc.) but then unequivocally roots for the aliens who demonstrate no interest at all in the scientific method.
Which I guess is a long winded way of saying, the ability to comprehend the universe is certainly not accepted as the most important yardstick of worth by all your fellow human beings.
If you want to go back to Kant (my grasp is a bit shaky but it will do), the reason we care about conscious beings over non-conscious beings/things is because they are the source of the "good will" and produce value in the world. The world is dark and valueless without thinking being to grant value to the valueless. If dolphins are conscious, then they too are sources of the "good will" and are deserving of treatment befitting of it.
However, Kant's philosophy leads to some strange places if you push it too far (like all philosophies). I think humans innately combine a mix of Utilitarianism with Kantianism to come up with intuitive judgements - which is a pretty obvious and useless statement, but if we take it at face value it means that when we are confronted with extrema, we would do well to consider both sides of the coin.
The movie Avatar (obviously on my mind because I recently saw it) tries to bring the audience around to the opposite conclusion. The movie makes clear that the humans better comprehend the universe (star ships, ability to create bodies to control remotely, etc.) but then unequivocally roots for the aliens who demonstrate no interest at all in the scientific method.
Which I guess is a long winded way of saying, the ability to comprehend the universe is certainly not accepted as the most important yardstick of worth by all your fellow human beings.