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

by BBella , Thursday, December 10, 2015, 06:01 (3050 days ago) @ dhw

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.[..]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. -Just imagine you are observing two inorganic substances floating in space waiting for them to "combine". You would be waiting forever! You would never see them suddenly become aware of each other - unless, there was at least a smidgen of intelligence present to process the situation. That seems to me to just be common sense.->(It's no more nebulous than positing a sourceless eternal intelligence of whatever kind.) -I think it much more nebulous that two different floating pieces of dead matter ( how did they become different in the first place?) suddenly become "aware" of each other, shared some dust, mated, and gave birth to a living cell - than an eternal intelligent presence within all that is, always at work combining energy and matter eventually coming up with a living cell - and the rest is history. ->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? -I believe there has always been eternal intelligence, matter and energy, though I can't imagine how long life as we know it has been around.
 
> 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.-At this point, if a substance is non-living, it may as well be a rock. What is the difference between a rock and non-living substance?