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

by dhw, Wednesday, December 09, 2015, 13:32 (3271 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Anything with a brain may have a degree of consciousness. I have no problem with that.
dhw: Since it's a matter of degree, theoretically that should allow our weaverbird, egg-on-spider-laying wasp, monarch butterfly, ants and bees the possibility of doing their own thing, as opposed to being preprogrammed. You just don't think they're intelligent enough.-DAVID: No, I've agreed they might have an onboard inventive mechanism.-But you have never agreed that the mechanism might be autonomous. That is why you like to have your God “guiding” the weaverbird, the wasp and the monarch. If God does the guiding, the inventive mechanism is not inventive.-dhw: Bacteria communicate through chemicals. Plants also communicate through chemicals. Animals use chemicals. Even we use chemicals. How does this ‘invalidate' thought? I know you will never back down. I am only pointing out that you use an irrelevant argument to support your case. I sympathize with the need for scientific proof, but actually this is not MY thesis: it comes from some experts in the field who are convinced that they have the proof. But obviously not enough for you to open your mind just a tiny crack.
DAVID: It's funny but the ID scientists haven't cracked either.-I really don't know what this has to do with ID. The possibility of God designing cells as thinking beings and not automatons does not in any way run counter to ID. It only runs counter to the belief that your God predetermined the course of evolution in order to produce humans - and that is a totally philosophical, totally unscientific hypothesis.
 
Xxxxxxxxxxxx-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.
dhw: See above. Not rocks. All the non-living substances that eventually combined to make the first cells. 
DAVID: I'm with Bbella. Non-living substances could not make life without intelligence leading the way.-But BBella is not with you, as she does not view “intelligence” as a single, self-aware mind that created ATI. However, she and I are still discussing what is meant by “intelligence” in her concept of ATI. My panpsychist hypothesis that some kind of basic awareness evolved within non-living substances also has intelligence leading the way, but it is just as nebulous and far-fetched as your own, that supreme and sourceless self-aware intelligence has existed for ever.