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

by dhw, Thursday, December 10, 2015, 12:29 (3053 days ago) @ BBella

I think it's important to point out straight away that I have great difficulty with ALL the hypotheses on offer, including my own! That is why I am unable to believe any of them. I have switched the order of your comments, BBella, because this one is the key to our discussion: -Dhw: : 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? -BBELLA: 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.-We do not know the origin of life. The only life we know of is our own, and it must have had a beginning. (If its source was extraterrestrial beings, they must have had a beginning too, so that just shifts the problem.) We can join the materialist/atheist brigade and say that all the necessary substances joined together by chance, but neither you nor David nor I find that convincing. What are the (to me equally unconvincing) alternatives? We all agree they must entail some form of intelligence that does the combining. And that is where the three of us dive into different unknowns. David is quite clear: there is a single self-aware, planning, decision-making mind that has always been in existence and that consciously assembled the pieces with a specific purpose. You reject that concept, but the form of intelligence you envisage has none of those attributes. It seems to have no attributes at all. But whatever it is, you think it is present in everything that exists. This brings us to the following remarks:-BBELLA: 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.-(dhw: [My hypothesis] is no more nebulous than positing a sourceless eternal intelligence of whatever kind.) -BBELLA: 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. -Your hypothesis and mine actually converge, with one important exception. Matter and energy eternally forming new combinations and “eventually coming up with a living cell” is fine with me. It would also be fine with atheistic materialists, because eternity allows for an infinite number of combinations, and they would argue that intelligence is not needed. However, once we bring in intelligence, you and I diverge. Once again, I cannot separate it from awareness - even if it's only a smidgen. If we reject chance as the assembler of life's constituents, then the substances must have been deliberately assembled by some outside, CONSCIOUS intelligence (David's God) or a CONSCIOUS intelligence inside themselves. I can believe that the first cells had a degree of awareness that enabled them eventually to combine and evolve, but I struggle to accept the idea that lifeless matter - let alone ALL lifeless matter - has that same awareness, even a smidgen of it, and has been deliberately forming different combinations for ever and ever before “eventually coming up with a living cell”. Was that its aim all along, or do you think it was just messing about and happened to hit the jackpot?-These comments may seem irrelevant to you, because you reject the equation of intelligence with awareness, but as I keep saying, intelligence without such attributes has no meaning for me. Intelligence without awareness leaves the origin of life to chance. 
 
To redress the balance, I also struggle with the idea that non-living matter can “become” aware. I agree with your objections. And so, in true agnostic style, I offer possible explanations and believe none of them. More fool me, because one of them must be close to the truth!-BBELLA: ... if a substance is non-living, it may as well be a rock. What is the difference between a rock and non-living substance?-We only know that certain non-living substances mixed together in a particular way have given rise to life. All the substances individually are non-living. In that sense, you can say they are the same as a rock, but that does not mean that humans are descended from rocks! We are descended from those non-living substances that combined to make life.