Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, January 10, 2016, 09:23 (3241 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ... 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.
DAVID: Your confusion surprises me. If we are back to bacteria, evolution will start all over again with nature in balance, as it was 3.6+ billion years ago.-The reason you first came up with this notion was to explain why God had to design all of nature's wonders: namely, to produce and/or feed humans, because humans were God's purpose. But now that you have told us that “human existence has nothing to do with the balance of nature”, I am at a complete loss as to why we are discussing the balance of nature anyway! All we are left with is that God designed the weaverbird's nest, the parasitic wasp and jellyfish, and every other natural wonder so that life could continue, except for those organisms for which life could not continue.-DAVID: I am absolutely convinced that we humans are different in kind, not degree, chimps included with all other animals.
dhw: 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: All advances in evolution created differences in degree until humans, who because of their vast advance in consciousness are truly different in kind. That is Adler's point.-Ah, so the elephant and the sparrow are only different in degree, and humans and chimps are “truly” different in kind, though you believe they both descended from a common anthropoid ancestor. The only way you can possibly defend this stance is to say that the definition of “kind” is the degree of consciousness. And since humans have a degree of consciousness that is a “vast advance” on that of other organisms, they are different in degree AND kind. Sorry, but when I compare the elephant and the sparrow, I see far more “true” differences than those between humans and chimps. Please explain again why the distinction matters so much to you.
 
dhw: 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: I don't know when the weaver's nest appeared; could be before any hominins. The theory is the nest is too complex for the birds to do it alone so God helped.-I know that is your theory. And I really can't believe your God would go to so much trouble without any reason. We agree that the nest is 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 don't know why God had to “help” (private tuition, presumably), might that not be because he didn't?-dhw: 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).
DAVID: Simply because I think God ran the process of evolution. See my today's article on the control of mitotic spindles. Darwinian chance could not do that.-Chance is not an issue between us, so you needn't keep flogging it in discussions with me. Your hypothesis now seems to be that God wanted to create humans, so he designed lots of organisms (99% of which died out) that did lots of weird and wonderful things - all designed by him - so that life could go on through a balance in nature, though that had nothing to do with humans. Then he...what?...did something or the other to produce humans (his real purpose), who are “truly different in kind” although they actually descended from earlier anthropoids. But even if they all died and nothing was left except bacteria, we would still have a balance in nature. I hope you can see that there is no logical pattern in this collection of non sequiturs, but perhaps you will correct it so that it makes sense. Otherwise, I suggest you might as well tell us that whatever happens, happens because that's how God wants it to happen, and we don't understand why.