Immunity: detecting dangerous bacteria (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, November 23, 2017, 13:49 (2558 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You have always acknowledged that our fellow animals have a degree of autonomous conscious intelligence, though it’s nothing like as developed as ours. Bearing this in mind, please tell me what attributes an organism must have for you to acknowledge that it has a degree of autonomous conscious intelligence.

DAVID: Any animal with a brain.

dhw: Ah well, in the light of your avowed beliefs, you’ll be in for a pretty dumb afterlife.

DAVID: Afterlife is pure consciousness, no brain involved, but you forgot that about my ideas.

I didn’t forget it at all – it was the whole point of my comment! One moment you believe autonomous intelligence is impossible without a brain, and the next you tell us that autonomous intelligence does not depend on the brain. Look at two of your statements in the last couple of days:
“The new brain had an advanced ability for thought...” “The smaller brain does not have the ability to have the concept…” (which means only the larger brain has the ability to have the concept). And on this thread the only way an organism can be autonomously intelligent is for it to have a brain. All these statements mean that autonomous intelligence is not possible without a brain. But this apparently is your “shorthand” because “it is understood the brain is the instrument for the soul”. So it’s the soul that does the thinking, in which case autonomous intelligence (as confirmed by your belief in an afterlife) does NOT depend on the brain! You can’t have it both ways. If autonomous intelligence does NOT depend on the brain, you cannot then argue that only an organism with a brain can have autonomous intelligence!