Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 29, 2015, 00:15 (3253 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I thought this had covered your comment. You see the finished product, so why would you also have seen trial and error? Once the nest existed, there may have been modifications, but all initial ”problems” required solutions by the original builders.-Again, you are denying the initial complexity of the nest. Generations of birds would have had dabbled with design to get the knots just right. That is trial and error. Was that type of nest so important that they had to keep pursuing it? . No bird brain could have planned it from the beginning.-> dhw: I would have been shatteringly surprised if they had found that animal/bird/ insect/bacterial intelligence was on the same track as that of humans.
> DAVID: Wow! You've just said humans are different in kind! 
> 
> dhw: I have said all along that you should stop equating animal/bird/insect/bacterial intelligence with human intelligence. I would not expect a parrot to think like a human or a tiger or an ant or a bacterium. In that sense, they are ALL “different in kind”, which might be a definition of phyla. But they all use similar methods to achieve similar ends: e.g. perception, processing information, communication, decision-making - the purposes being to survive, to reproduce, to make optimum use of the environment, to improve.... -Yes they do, to a much lesser degree. Our consciousness is so far superior and different in kind, n o degree.
> 
> dhw: I would say all organisms need is information both internal and external, plus the intelligence with which to interpret and use it.-Exactly correct.