Consciousness; research says insects have it (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 07, 2016, 12:22 (3060 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is possible it happened step by step. Some ants found aphids cooperative or easy to tame and bit by bit it developed into an instinct. - dhw: So do you believe the ants used their own intelligence and bit by bit learned from experience and experiment how to farm aphids, or do you believe God preprogrammed them 3.8 billion years ago or personally gave them instructions?DAVID: My statement above is quite clear. - The implication seems to be that they used their own intelligence to design this system, but I would be inclined to put aphid farming in the same category as ant raft-building, ant city-building, weaverbird nest-building, cuttlefish camouflage, spider silk-weaving and so on: all special skills that require complex thought (which would also entail using what has been learned from experience). And yet you always insist that such phenomena are too complex for the organisms themselves to design. Please help me. Ant farming = ant intelligence or God's instructions? - DAVID: I was referring to NDE research in which neurons seem not to be needed for consciousness to be active. I still consider brainless organisms to have automatic reactions.
dhw: I know you do. It is your fixed belief that I am questioning. If the enormous complexities of human consciousness can exist without neurons, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that much simpler forms of consciousness can exist without neurons. Do you or do you not accept the logic of this argument? - DAVID: Possibly logical. This is where my thought that universal consciousness exists as God comes to play. - Universal consciousness is a form of panpsychism, with different degrees of consciousness. I find that very feasible when applied to individual living organisms - i.e. all living organisms have a degree of consciousness (not to be confused with human self-awareness). It only gets messy when we try to equate all these different degrees of consciousness with a single being “in full control”.