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

by dhw, Monday, December 07, 2015, 12:48 (3273 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: As for intelligence in cells we are back to the same issue, intelligent instructions for actions or actual intelligence. We cannot tell the difference from the outside of a bacteria. I am not a materialist as you know, and a firm dualist.
dhw: Except when it comes to bacteria, and then suddenly you are a firm materialist.
DAVID: I am a dualist at the consciousness level. "I think therefore I am".-Let us remember that consciousness is not the same as self-awareness. You accept that animals, with their lesser degree of consciousness (I prefer “intelligence”) may have souls. How about birds, reptiles, fish, insects, bacteria? How do you determine where the line is to be drawn?
 
dhw: Common descent did not begin with hominins. Common descent goes back to the first forms of life, and if they had not had the “drive to improvement”, there would have been no evolution.
DAVID: My limited-to-humans comment did not deny this.-But it ignored the point, which is that the drive to improvement did not begin with humans. When human-type attributes are seen in other life forms, some sceptics dismiss the observations as anthropomorphism, and I am pointing out that through common descent the process may well be the reverse: we inherited these characteristics - we did not invent them and therefore cannot kid ourselves that other organisms do not have them.
 
dhw: The presence of intelligence is shown by WHAT is communicated, not by HOW communication takes place.
DAVID: This bucks up against our usual difference. Intelligent instructions can control communication which appear to be intelligent information.-But whenever we discuss the subject, you emphasize the chemical nature of the communication, as if somehow that invalidated the possibility of thought. Your response in relation to plants was: ”Again you presume too much. Plants use gases and chemicals to communicate through their roots and through the air.” That is totally irrelevant to the claim that they may think.