Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, January 02, 2016, 18:11 (3036 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
dhw: 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. 
David: I have not reported major animal adjustments as you state.-No, because nobody has yet found a satisfactory explanation for the major innovations that have driven evolution. That is why I have suggested autonomous intelligence as an alternative hypothesis (not an assumption, not a fact, not even a belief) to your divine 3.8-billion-year computer programme and/or dabbling, and have pointed out that the natural wonders and adaptations you have reported offer us evidence that organisms are capable of autonomous thought.
 
DAVID: As an example, the Reznick guppies changed size, but the species stayed the same. These are epigenetic adaptations, nothing more. You are overstating problem solving. Clever corvids use tools, but are still crows. So do chimps, and they remain chimps. These animals have a minor degree of consciousness for these events to happen.-Same again. We do not know how innovations and hence speciation took place. Nor can we say with any certainty that the “minor degree of consciousness” is incapable of creating the first weaverbird nest and then improving it until it reaches its final form. Ditto all other innovations throughout the history of evolution. If we had observable proof, it would be a fact not a hypothesis.
 
dhw: 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.
DAVID: I am not in knots, as the authors of "Nature's IQ" point out. -I am pleased to hear that you have some support for your hypothesis that your God “coded DNA for all of evolution from the beginning of life” and humans were “the goal”. Do the authors also explain why the weaverbird's nest was so important to God?-dhw: “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.

DAVID: When the dinosaurs were wiped out, the balance of nature kept going and, mirabile dictu, little mammals, who had been hanging around developed into all the mammals we have today, including us. Nature's balance shifted but stayed balanced. Only humans have tend to unbalance it by interfering with its automatic adjustments.-When the dinosaurs died out, other organisms flourished. If the human race dies out, other organisms will flourish. All you are saying is that life on Earth goes on. Whatever survives, survives. Until eventually life on Earth will cease, so what is this "balance for everyone"?