Different in degree or kind: An essay captures Adler (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, November 14, 2015, 14:12 (3086 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: In Adler's book he made very sharp distinctions between human mental capacities, how immaterial they are, compared to the feeble mental attempts by animals.-http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/11/the_fundamental_2100661.html-QUOTE: "Regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of the evolutionary argument that humans are descended from apes, the differences between humans and apes are so profound as to render the view that humans are apes abject nonsense.”-Before commenting, I'd like to include the introductory passage which you did not quote:
QUOTE: “Marks accepts the theory of common ancestry, and believes that we are descended from apes. He points out that evolutionary relationships are not the same thing as identities. Descent from apes does not mean we are apes. Taxonomy is not the same thing as identity.”-Agreed. Belief in common ancestry ultimately means we are all descended from single-celled organisms, but that doesn't mean we are bacteria. I am certainly not going to dispute the enormous gulf between our intellect and that of an orang-utan or of any other organism. However, hidden in this account is an assumption which is absolutely wide open to dispute and ultimately leads to far more questions than it answers:
 
QUOTE: "A human being is material and immaterial -- a composite being. We have material bodies, and our perceptions and imaginations and appetites are material powers, instantiated in our brains. But our intellect -- our ability to think abstractly -- is a wholly immaterial power, and our will that acts in accordance with our intellect is an immaterial power. Our intellect and our will depend on matter for their ordinary function, in the sense that they depend upon perception and imagination and memory, but they are not themselves made of matter. It is in our ability to think abstractly that we differ from apes. It is a radical difference -- an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference.”-I agree again about abstract thinking, but what grounds does he have for claiming that our intellect and will are wholly immaterial? Has he magically stumbled upon the source of consciousness? Strangely, he includes imagination among the material attributes. The imagination is as “abstract” a faculty as the will and the intellect, so why can't abstract reasoning also be a "material power"? I'm not saying it is - I'm saying nobody knows the source. But this article treats dualism as a fact, and it is not.-What, then, is the point of it? Let us all agree that we are humans and not apes. But do we therefore have an immaterial identity whereas apes do not? Is this hypothetical immaterial identity meant to direct us towards some special process of creation that is independent of the evolution the author believes in? Or towards some future that apes cannot aspire to (e.g. an afterlife, which presumably depends on an immaterial identity)? Perhaps I am doing the author an injustice, but belief in dualism is usually connected to some kind of religious agenda, and if so we should hear it together with all its unproven and unprovable assumptions. In the meantime, and in the absence of any explanation for any degree of consciousness - human or otherwise - I would argue that our mental superiority denotes absolutely nothing except that we are mentally superior.