Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, January 16, 2016, 18:10 (3234 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ...the fact that some eminent scientists believe cells to be intelligent gives the hypothesis [that organisms work out their own evolutionary changes] a degree of credibility, as does the known ability of some organisms to change themselves adaptively (though not innovatively), which cannot entail advance planning.
DAVID: You are proposing stepwise epigenetic adaptations. This is not fish to land animals which is discussed in your opening sentence. Fish to land requires planning.-I explicitly referred to adaptation to illustrate the fact that organisms must have a mechanism enabling them to change themselves without prior planning. Nobody knows how innovations took place, but I doubt if there is a consensus among evolutionary scientists that the only possible methods are divine preprogramming and divine dabbling. I am offering an alternative to these and to random mutations.-dhw: Acccording to you, your God's purpose was to produce humans, but he specifically preprogrammed or personally gave instructions for the building of the weaverbird's nest and you do not know what that has to do with the production of humans. (Remember “human existence has nothing to do with the balance of nature.”) That is the dislocation. 
DAVID: I don't know how many times I must repeat: Human existence is the result of God's direction of evolution to produce them. Balance of nature ensures the food supply so evolution can progress. The human relationship to balance is indirect, not direct which is the intent of my quote you use. I should have been more clear.-I know you think God directed evolution in order to produce humans, and of course if there had not been food to sustain all the life forms and lifestyles during the 3.7? thousand million years before humans appeared, humans would not have appeared. But you have acknowledged many times that you don't know why God personally designed all the weird wonders. It is this gap that I am trying to fill. However, please see below.
 
dhw: I seem to remember you occasionally granting the possibility that God is neither all-powerful nor all-knowing, and that he may be capable of learning from experience, or “becoming”, as in process theology.
DAVID: That is true, but doesn't change my view that his ultimate goal was humans.

dhw: It doesn't have to. That would be the scenario in which God didn't know how to achieve his ultimate goal but learnt as he went along, with a few million experiments before he hit on the magic formula. Or he gave organisms a free evolutionary hand and later hit on the idea of humans and did a dabble.
DAVID: You don't like my assigning a goal to God's intentions, but you dabble with all sorts of God=driven scenarios to get to my goal. I don't feel it is necessary to do that. My balance of nature approach is enough for me.-Ever since humans became aware of God or invented him, they have tried to understand his thinking. Our discussions are part of a long tradition, but of course if you are satisfied that your scenario answers all the questions I have raised, we should move on.