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

by dhw, Thursday, December 17, 2015, 19:25 (3045 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I hope that is a fair summary, and the answer to the question asked by this thread is going to be the key to future progress on the subject. Just how intelligent are the organisms from which we are all descended?-DAVID: Very fair review of my thoughts. You know my thoughts about intelligence and consciousness. Humans are different in kind, not degree. Of course there is a degree of intelligence in the organisms that preceded us in evolution, and of course it increases regularly as evolution reaches the primate level. We've covered all this before.-We have, but my hypothesis that evolution is driven by an autonomously inventive intelligence depends on a different sort of intelligence from ours. You constantly emphasize that we are different in kind, but what you cannot contemplate is that other organisms may have one form of intelligence that is actually superior to our own. And yet you constantly alert us to the fact that cell communities can do things we can't even begin to match with our consciousness, and we need all our human type of intelligence just to unravel the way they work. With every natural wonder, we ask, ”How do they do it? How do they know?” Your answer is always that they don't do it and they don't know. Your God has preprogrammed them or instructed them personally. Mine is that maybe your God gave them the means to work it out for themselves. But you cannot contemplate this possibility because of your fixation on human consciousness as the be-all and end-all of your God's purpose.