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

by dhw, Monday, December 07, 2015, 12:42 (3273 days ago) @ BBella

QUOTE: “Some current philosophers have reasoned away the problem by positing that rocks have minds too.”-BBELLA: For now, we believe the lowly rock is just a mere, lifeless, extra hard bundle of dirt. Just as we once believed (certain races of) humans, animals, plants, etc were unintelligent. Possibly, with patience and "open-mindedness" we may one day find, just as Rumi said many years ago (paraphrasing), intelligence is just asleep in the rocks.-Once again, there is a problem of definition here, because I think of intelligence in terms of awareness, sentience, processing and communicating information, cooperating, taking decisions etc. (not the sort of “life force” you have outlined earlier). However, the possibility that “my” form of intelligence evolved in inorganic matter is central to the hypothesis that life is the product of such individual intelligences cooperating. There is a passage in David's latest post under “Genome complexity” that is very striking: “But the ribosome itself has changed over time. Its history shows how simple molecules joined forces to invent biology...” What is later called the “mind-boggling” complexity would then be the result of 3.8 thousand million years of intelligences “joining forces”.
 
DHW: What follows is a defence of panpsychism, though the philosopher Jim Holt does not say so here. Many panpsychists are theists, and believe everything began with intelligence, but we have also discussed the hypothesis that everything began with mindless energy and matter, and intelligence evolved from their interaction.

BBELLA: And don't forget the hypothesis that intelligence, energy and matter always existed together with no beginning.-Again, we are probably talking of a different form of “intelligence”.