Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, November 15, 2013, 01:52 (4027 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: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.-Ah, then it is settled. Nowhere and nohow and nowhy are all stopping points in human thought? But I guess you are willing to be satisfied with that stopping point
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> dhw; 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.-Is the presence of intelligence a given? Where did it come from, how did it arise?-> dhw: Yes, ants slot into their roles. So do we, though we now have infinitely more of them. 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. .... 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?-Because I have the impression that your description requires mental decisions on the part of ant committees. Do you propose ant thought?
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> 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?-Simply, yes. Early humanoids developed their olwn societal rules.
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> dhw; 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. -Yes, we did not inherit ant societal rules. Humans invented tsir own rules-> dhw;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. ... 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. -No, I suspect we have some built-in stuff also at basic moral levels, in parent child relationships, in monogamy, etc.