Simon Conway Morris on animal intelligence (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, January 16, 2017, 12:44 (2656 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: "Are we really so special? If so, what it is it, exactly, that makes us special?”
dhw: What makes us so special is an enhanced awareness which other organisms do not have. In my view, all our differences spring from that one source.
DAVID: It is not just awareness, but the ability to think about observations and use reason to develop solutions to life's problems.

You may perhaps disagree, but I have no doubt that our fellow animals observe, think about their observations, and use reason to solve the problems they encounter in life. However, that appears to be the limit of their mental powers. So far as we know, they do not ask why or how they got here, etc. – you don’t need me to expand on the vast range of our thought. I would argue that the extent of an organism’s mental powers (and I would add language), depends on and grows from what it is aware of. Our own enhanced awareness and self-awareness even extends to the unknown and the possibilities that arise from it.

QUOTE: "This lies at the core of the Fermi Paradox (or better called the Great Silence)—the puzzle of why we haven’t seen any spacefaring aliens. How often is the intelligence gap bridged on other planets?
dhw: Pure and pointless speculation. There is no puzzle – simply a collection of open questions. Is there life on other planets? If so, might it have evolved or remained at, say, bacterial level? If it has evolved, into what forms might it have evolved? The current answer to all three questions is that we do not know. Anything is possible, including nothing.
DAVID: I view it as a time problem and a distance problem. The nearest star is just 4 light years away but most stars are so much further away. When did they start signaling, if at all? We started radio broadcasts about 100 years ago. Time enough for aliens to pick up our signals? Only with close stars.

But why assume that there is/isn’t life elsewhere, that if there is, it has/hasn’t evolved beyond the primitive, let alone that it has/hasn’t evolved into self-aware beings, let alone that it has/hasn’t evolved into beings even more advanced than ourselves? Until we find “alien” life, this is all pure and pointless speculation.

David’s comment: The brain became bigger and more complex. That is true. How about recognizing that God did it on this planet and nowhere else?
dhw: I don’t know if the complexification of the brain triggered the enhanced awareness or resulted from it.
David: Not a chicken and egg problem. To me we are given a big brain and learn to use it. In our ancestor fossils, brains jump from one size to another with no itty-bitty steps.

What part of “we” decides and learns to use it?