Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, January 09, 2016, 13:24 (3241 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: According to you, nature will still be balanced if there is nothing left but bacteria. So why all the fuss about Australians and foreign animals “messing up” the balance? You will still have your balance if the foreign animals eat up all the native animals, including the Australians. 
DAVID: No, the 'natural' balance of nature is the point. Balance of nature to supply food, if undisturbed, is necessary for life to continue. Nature will naturally balance if left to have its own natural adjustments.-Whaddayamean ”NO”? Your criterion for balance of nature is that there is enough food for life to continue. Are you now saying it doesn't count if Australians change the balance? OK, then, if a comet wipes out all life except bacteria, there will still be life, so according to you there will still be balance of nature. Another non-argument, which started out as an attempt to justify your anthropocentrism but then lost its way.-dhw: I don't think even Darwin would deny that we are vastly more intelligent than our fellow animals. However, do you truly believe that the “difference in kind” (it's your phrase, not mine) between chimps and humans is greater than that between elephants, ants, sparrows and gudgeon?
DAVID: I am absolutely convinced that we humans are different in kind, not degree, chimps included with all other animals.-I know you are. But that doesn't answer my question. ALL species (broad sense, as illustrated above) are “different in kind”, so what is your point?-DAVID: I assume God used an evolutionary process to finally produce humans. The only way the whole process could survive is if a balance of nature provided a food source for the various stages of life to survive as evolution proceeded. -I expect we'd all agree that if life had been wiped out before the arrival of humans, there would have been no humans. There would have been no weaverbird's nest either. That doesn't explain why your God had to design the nest.
[...] 
DAVID: Already explained. The food chain is the same as the balance of nature, as the bush of life. Someone is eating weaver birds who is eaten by someone else. The weird nest is actually beside this point of discussion.-The weird nest would indeed be beside the point if you didn't keep insisting that only your God could have designed it. But like human consciousness, its complexities were not “required”, and were not part of “the food chain that leads up through the balance of nature to the human consumption of foods”, and in any case “human existence has nothing to do with the balance of nature.” If you can't explain why the nest was so important that God had to design it, maybe he DIDN'T, but the weaverbird did. And the same with all the other weird wonders extinct and extant in a free-for-all that provides a simple explanation for the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution. But for some reason, you'd rather not consider a free-for-all (even if set in motion by your God).