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

by dhw, Tuesday, December 08, 2015, 21:16 (3271 days ago) @ BBella

BBELLA: 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.
DHW: 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). 
BBELLA: A rock or any "thing" that IS, is in the process of cooperating being what it IS or it would be no thing. I don't think I would call that life force. But I do understand where you are coming from with the common view of intelligence. [Later in the same post]: To me, intelligence is intelligence. Intelligence can show itself in different forms (rock or human), but it's still intelligence at work.-Of course I accept that something is not no-thing, but if intelligence does not have the attributes I have listed, I don't see what the word adds to the fact of things existing. You might as well call it the xyz present in ATI. Matt may be able to help us: is there a word in any eastern philosophy that denotes a form of ”intelligence” in all things, without carrying the attributes listed above? 
 
dhw: 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. 
BBELLA: Intelligence evolved from unintelligent matter? Is that not saying a human evolved from a rock?-Definitely not! We don't know what life is, but all living things are a composition of non-living matter combined in a certain way. Somehow it's the combination that gives rise to life. A materialist might argue that a certain combination also gives rise to thought and consciousness: a process of “emergence”, which makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. What I am referring to are the substances that eventually combined to make the first living cell, and these may at some point have become aware of other substances around them. (It's no more nebulous than positing a sourceless eternal intelligence of whatever kind.) Perhaps it would help if we distinguished life from non-life. I know you think earthly life may have been started by extraterrestrial beings, but they must also have had a source, so what is your own hypothesis about how life itself began - or do you think there have been living material beings throughout eternity? 
 
Dhw: 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”.
BBELLA: It would seem to me that no matter how many different kinds of rocks (and how did they become different kinds in the first place) joined together for eternity, rocks could not create an intelligent human unless there was already intelligence at work in the process - from the beginning (?), always.-See above. Not rocks. All the non-living substances that eventually combined to make the first cells.