Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, November 14, 2013, 19:05 (4027 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The first cooperation occurred when single cells merged to form multicellular organisms. Experts in the field have noted the way bacteria form communities, so that is not exactly science fiction. We know that all organs and organisms consist of cellular communities that cooperate.-DAVID: Agreed. What we are arguing is that we do not know whether, with the passage of time, the cells learned on their own to cooperate or were made to cooperate by an injected force or an external force. I am convinced it is one of the two latter options. What is your option, since your intelligent cells seem to arrive out of nowhere?-A good and accurate summary. I am well aware of how convinced you are. Yes, cells and intelligence arrived out of nowhere. Life began, and nobody knows its origin. We have discussed three options: God, chance, panpsychist evolution.
 
Dhw: As evolution has proceeded, so cooperating communities have diverged. The more complex the community, the greater the degree of cooperation necessary. ..... I will now restore the crucial lines which you unfortunately omitted from my paragraph above: if social animals (among which I am happy to include ants) hadn't "felt pain and fear, cherished and trained their offspring, shared with one another, learned from mistakes, planned for the future etc., they wouldn't have survived." -DAVID: That is the most anthropomorphic rendition I've ever heard. Ants are divided into queens, workers, soldiers, etc. by instinct. We have no idea how that developed, but I don't see the queen patting a baby ant on the head and saying, "be a good little soldier". They automatically enter their roles.-You agree that "we have no idea how that developed", just as we have no idea how any innovation occurred, but you refuse to consider the possibility that it developed through the intelligence of the organisms that started it. Yes, ants slot into their roles. So do we, though we now have infinitely more of them. You talk later of the hunter-gatherers. Were they automatons? Just like us, ants have adapted their lifestyle to almost every environment on earth, creating different habitats, exploiting different resources etc. They have developed communal methods for nurturing their young, they have their own educational system ... even one-to-one tuition ... they build cities, they farm, they have formed symbiotic relationships with other organisms, they plan military strategies. All of this had to begin somewhere. Your explanation is that God preprogrammed it all into the first cells, along with billions of other innovations and lifestyles, or occasionally dabbled (so did he push the big ant into the mantis' jaws?) because ants are automatons and can't think for themselves. I'm suggesting that ants worked out their own (highly successful) social systems, and they did so over a hundred million years before us. In what way is that anthropomorphic?
 
dhw: I am not saying all organisms and societies feel or act in the same way, but I am saying the ground rules have been inherited. In our case, directly from our primate ancestors, in the case of the ants I presume directly from their wasp ancestors, but in all cases organisms build on what came before them, right back to the first communities. Do you really believe that humans invented even the brief list I've offered above?-DAVID: Having read books on hunter-gatherers and quoted that material in my last book, evolutionary psychologists definitely describe how humans had to invent their societal rules. It was ape-eat-ape before hominin groups began to form with some degree of cooperation and a developing morality.-Ants and other social animals had to do the same. Each society has to invent its own methods of survival, but the ground rules are always the same: self-protection, acquiring food, bringing up the young, cooperating with one another etc. However, according to you God had to preprogramme all our predecessors, and only homo sapiens started from scratch and invented architecture, cooperation, education etc. all by himself. It's a marvel that all our primate ancestors and all their ancestors didn't gobble each other up before we were able to branch off. Incidentally, it's still ape-eat-ape, or hadn't you noticed that just like ants, humans go to war with one another? The "tribal instinct" is yet another trait that we have inherited, though as in most other facets of social life, we have carried it to extremes.