Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 01, 2016, 15:38 (3037 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I don't know why you insist on ”planning”. Adaptation is not planned. Why can't improvements take place without prior planning? An organism can have an idea and if it works, it is retained. You seem to exclude trial and success from your evolutionary thinking.
DAVID: How do minimally conscious organisms like a weaver bird have an idea and try it out? Do we see animals doing that now? All bird nests are static and the same for each species as far as we know.-We see it all the time, in the way animals, birds, insects solve problems, adjust to new environments, work out strategies. Every time they do this (and you have offered us hundreds of examples down through the years), you are forced to comment on the ingenuity of your God's thinking, because you don't believe these organisms have the intelligence to work things out for themselves. That is why you keep tying yourself in knots trying to reconcile God's special designs for birds and spiders and wasps and jellyfish with the higgledy-piggledy bush and your anthropocentric vision of evolution. -dhw: This is what I find so confusing. If God personally designed the weaverbird's nest, it is clearly absurd to say that humans were “THE goal”, unless you think God personally designed all of nature's wonders in his sleep, or they were all geared to THE goal. The balance of nature “for everyone” is also clearly absurd, because 99% of species have disappeared, so the balance of nature didn't work for “everyone”, did it? 
DAVID: More than likely God guided the weaver. As for the balance, as organisms disappear, the balance always adjusts and is present.-“Guided” can only involve specific implanted instructions or personal tuition, which makes the weaverbird as worthy of your God's attentions as us humans. Unless...as above. Each extinction runs counter to your idea that the balance of nature is “for everyone”. It‘s obviously not for the organisms that go extinct. So who is the “everyone” that the ever changing balance is “for”? If you say it's for humans, I shall have to ask you again how the weaverbird's nest balances nature for our sake, and when you then complain that I want a detailed explanation for everything, I shall have to point out that I am simply challenging your own explanation for the complexities of the nest, in the context of your explanation for the whole of evolution.