Animal Minds (Animals)

by dhw, Sunday, June 26, 2011, 16:40 (4898 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I do not agree that the basic animal instincts are a tiny portion of what we humans are. [...] Can you honestly claim that sex, family life, social relationships, education, home, the need for food, protection against climate, other species and our own species are "tiny" matters? -DAVID: The paragraph above anthropomorphizes animals. Yes, they worry about food to eat, shelter against enemies and storms. But 'family'. My dog just tried to have sex with his Mother the other day. Animals worry about education, social relationships and other human concerns. No! We do have their basic instincts, but they are very basic in us. Our lives are much more involved. Food and shelter are easy today for us. Not for the hunter-gatherers, but we are way beyond that due to our huge brain and its capacities.-Mammals depend on family relationships (especially mother-child) for their survival, social animals depend on social relationships for their survival, the young have to be trained. This is not anthropomorphization. Food and shelter are easy for those humans who have it, but there are millions who do not. If you did not have them, would your huge brain be more concerned with Beethoven and Shakespeare, or with food and shelter? Yes, our lives are much more involved, but that should not blind us to the enormous role played by our own animal instincts, or to the common ground that we have with other animals. This, incidentally, includes the ability to communicate with one another. In your response to Matt you assume that dog sounds (and presumably all other animal "languages") have no meaning. How do you know?-DAVID: There is no reason we developed as we have in our cognitive ability. Chimps and other apes have survived in evolution without those extra abilities for six million years since we split off. Why should our line have progressed as we have? It was not required as an adaptation to the pressures of survival. We have gone way beyond survival. If we accept the idea that threatened survival drives the adaptations of evolution, then why US? There is no good reason under Darwinian concepts. Or any other theories for that matter. I'll agree that we differ in degree, but it is such a huge degree, and not a required degree, that I must conclude that we are different in kind.-This is where our lines of thought begin to converge, and I agree with much of what you say, but I see no point in pursuing the quibble that differing to a huge degree = differing in kind. Your argument that human consciousness was not required as an adaptation to the pressures of survival can be applied to every creature that has evolved from earlier forms of life, since these have themselves survived. So it's not just a question of why consciousness, but also why sex, why vision, why flight? Why the dodo, why the tyrannosaurus rex? We're going back over old ground here, but the questions have not been answered satisfactorily. Tony (balance-maintained) has speculated that every single innovation and extinction was necessary for the ultimate emergence of humans, which fits in with your theory that God had it all planned from the beginning. But one might just as well speculate that every innovation and extinction was part of the random inventiveness of the original mechanisms. Hence, as with our own human inventions, some survive and some don't. Evolution itself was not NECESSARY for life in its original forms to go on, and so the real cornerstone of evolution has to be innovation. The explanations for this unsolved mystery can be divided into three scenarios:-1) A UI created the mechanism of evolution and programmed its outcome. (Where did the UI come from? Why so many dead ends if it had planned everything from the start?)-2) A UI created the mechanism of evolution and left it to do its own thing, perhaps occasionally intervening. (Where did the UI come from?)-3) Sheer chance created the mechanism of evolution, which then did its own thing. (Requires quasi-religious faith in the creative genius of chance as opposed to religious faith in a UI.)-All three fit in with the process of evolution as we know it, and all three require faith in the unknowable and unprovable. Only 1) automatically gives a goal to evolution and a privileged position to humans; only 2) and 3) offer what to my mind is a convincing explanation of evolution's higgledy-piggledy bush; 2) and 3) require some form of innate intelligence within the materials that create innovations. Of course, David, I agree with you that our very ability to formulate such theories shows the huge intellectual gap between us and our fellow animals, but I really cannot see that this creates a case for 1) being any more or less likely than 2) or 3).