Animal Minds; how much can we learn about them? (Animals)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 05, 2015, 00:40 (3275 days ago) @ David Turell

Animal minds are a mystery to us, just as I know my consciousness, but I only can presume yours:-http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/12/what_can_we_hop101361.html-"Consciousness (a mind) perceives and acts on information. But there are at least two -- more basic and probably unconscious qualities -- that distinguish life from non-life, and seem to act by processing information: self-preservation and adaptability.-***-"But why do life forms struggle so hard to remain alive when the option of simply dying -- ceasing to be a life form at all, and rejoining the chemical seas -- is readily available, and eventually inevitable?-"Naturalist explanations don't turn out to be much help with any of this. Polymath Christoph Adami, interviewed in Quanta Magazine, sees life itself as "self-perpetuating information strings," and defines information as "the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance."-***-"Taking a slightly different tack, theoretical biologist Kalevi Kull, author of Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life Is the Action of Signs, asks whether life is a form of signaling. Perhaps so, but signaling places us in the world of purpose, not random events.-"Communication begins far below the level of the whole life form. One can hardly talk about the genome now, it seems, without an understanding of its complex grammar, "more complex than that of even the most intricately constructed spoken languages in the world" according to Karolinska researchers:-
"Their analysis reveals that the grammar of the genetic code is much more complex than that of even the most complex human languages. Instead of simply joining two words together by deleting a space, the individual words that are joined together in compound DNA words are altered, leading to a large number of completely new words. -***-"So can we determine accurately whether life forms are conscious? Brainless jellyfish, for example, are now thought to act with purpose when fishing.-"Are the jellyfish conscious of that purpose? That would amount to having a mind without a brain. But the actual relationship between mind and brain is not -- as we shall see -- as straightforward as was once supposed. For one thing, there does not seem to be a "tree of intelligence," in the sense of a completely consistent correlation between size/type of brain and observed intelligence. -***-"Cave then tells us that:
... all around us, every day, we see a very natural kind of freedom -- one that is completely compatible with determinism. It is the kind that living things need to pursue their goals in a world that continually presents them with multiple possibilities. -"Obviously, if "free will" is completely compatible with determinism (and Darwinism, he tells us, accounts for that) then free will as we traditionally understand it doesn't exist and can't be measured in any life form. So why claim it does, and can?-"Cave's thesis about free will differs significantly from the observation above that jellyfish pursue fish with intent: The intentional behavior of jellyfish is observed; we simply don't know if they know their own intentions. Cave, by contrast, wants to account for human as well as animal intentions as entirely determined while appearing free -- in order to support a fully naturalist perspective.-***-"We humans have a sense of "self" that goes well beyond a drive to continue to exist. But to what extent do other life forms have this sense? Recent decades of research on apes and monkeys can give us some sense of the territory we are entering."-Comment: A series to be continued. Different in degree or kind?