Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 15, 2016, 11:57 (3026 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: That is the scenario I am proposing for all organisms: that they do their own thinking - not on anything like the scale of us humans, but within the parameters of their own particular nature. Not under instruction, but using their own autonomous intelligence (possibly God-given). I'm afraid this is nowhere near to your thinking.
DAVID: Once you say possibly 'God-given', it implies that these 'thinking' organisms can plan some advance that works. No hunt and peck, for that is chance, which you don't accept. I don't accept that lower organisms can do advanced planning.

We have had this discussion many times. I do NOT claim that organisms plan in advance. The whole hypothesis depends on them responding to new conditions and opportunities. Over and over again I have offered the example of water-based organisms suddenly being confronted by the emergence of land. Some venturesome cell communities (organisms) will then make the changes that you attribute to divine preprogramming 3.?? billion years beforehand or your God personally dabbling with their genome. Not chance, but an inventive response to a new environment. Yes, it is a hypothesis. No, no one has ever seen the innovations that have led from bacteria to humans. The mechanism is unknown. But the fact that some eminent scientists believe cells to be intelligent gives the hypothesis a degree of credibility, as does the known ability of some organisms to change themselves adaptively (though not innovatively), which cannot entail advance planning.-dhw: All we can do is look at the history and come up with hypotheses that might explain it. Your own hypothesis entails a dislocation between your anthropocentrism and God's personal planning of all the wonders. Mine offers an all-embracing explanation with room both for your God and even for special attention to humans.
DAVID: I don't view my approach as a dislocation. That is your interpretation of the evolution we see.-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. -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.
-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.