You guys are arguing the wrong thing when discussing programming vs free thought.
Humans also display a great amount of programming where survival is concerned. Drinking water when thirsty, shaking when cold, fight or flight when threatened. That is stuff you are born with. Even newborn babies know to cry when hungry and smile when happy. The best bit of programming we have is that we learn things from our environment and can use it with choice.
As for darwin, there is no reason why a little robot with first class programming can’t be replaced with a little robot with better programming.
Mostly I agree with Doug, Darwin is dead when it comes to humans. We lost the ability to evolve when we conquered the environment and invented medicine. 1000 years from now, we will all be prone to develop lukemia, have asthma, and a host of other deseases that 100 years ago would have killed you before reproductive age. And being smart these days doesn’t exactly make you more likely to pass on your genes. The smart people are using condoms.
“Free will” is a great big thorny problem that I personally don’t think anyone has a really good answer for. I just want to concentrate a bit here on the question of humans having a quality which bees entirely lack. That quality could be “free will”, or it could be the ability to metabolize some nutrient or something.
My point is, however plants got the ability to photosynthesize, they have it and we don’t. There’s no need to postulate that humans photosynthesize, but on a very low level. We don’t photosynthesize at all. This is not to say that we don’t ultimately share a common ancestor with plants. But somewhere back there (just to make up a very simplified “Just So” tale), a single-celled organism divided in two. One daughter cell went on to engulf a photosynthesizing bacterium. The other did not. The plants are descended from the cell which learned to photosynthesize; we’re descended from the other cell. We do have a common ancestor with the plants, but we don’t photosynthesize to any degree at all–we are different from plants in kind, not degree when it comes to photosynthesis.
What I’m saying is that there was some flatworm or something that was the ancestor of bees and humans. It had neither the capability for flight nor the capacity for advanced cognitive processes (self-awareness, abstract reasoning and problem-solving abilities, however you want to define it). It was a biological robot which crawled around on the ground or swam through the water. Its descendants diverged into various lines. Some went on to become insects, and developed flight. They became flying biological robots, with very complex and elegant programming. Others became vertebrates, and ultimately a branch of them became mammals and primates, and some of them developed their abstract reasoning capabilities to a very high degree.
I don’t think dogs are robots either. But dogs and humans diverged much more recently than humans and bees.
As I said, I don’t know how “free will” evolved. It’s possibly that fairly high degrees of abstract problem-solving have evolved on this planet more than once. Many cephalopods (squids and octopuses) are reportedly quite bright when it comes to solving problems in novel situations. I had a college professor who opined that some cephalopods might be as smart as cats, and I don’t think cats are just biological robots. It’s quite possible that the last common ancestor of squids and cats was a biological robot, and that cephalopods and mammals have independently evolved those advanced problem-solving abilities, and maybe also some degree of self-awareness or “feelings”. The last common ancestor of bats and birds was a flightless creature. Bats and birds independently evolved the ability to fly.
Why? Flight is obviously advantageous enough that it’s evolved at least four times (insects, pterodactyls, birds, and bats), but obviously not every organism has evolved flight, and some organisms from the flying groups have lost the ability or drastically curtailed it (penguins or ants). Biological robots seem quite successful. It remains to be seen if self-awareness will be more successful in the long run than biological roboticism. There are also many, many ways to be successful. At any rate, there’s no reason to think self-awareness isn’t a recent innovation, just like land life is a recent innovation compared to living in the sea, or mammary glands are a recent innovation compared to leaving your eggs someplace to hatch on their own.
I don’t think bees have demonstrated the ability to learn in the way a dog or a chimpanzee or a human can learn. Human brains and ape brains and dog brains or cat brains all have anatomical structures in common which seem associated with emotion or some degree of self-awareness. Insect brains don’t really have the same structure as ours at all; even reptiles have brains which resemble our R-complex, but insects are far more distant from us than that. And single-celled organisms don’t have brains at all, just chemicals.
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*Originally posted by Tom Arctus *
** Conversely, if dogs don’t have souls then neither do humans. Now, for “souls,” read “consciousness.” **
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Why? A soul, in religion, survives body death and has life in eternity. Aquinas reasoned that only Man has a soul because only Man can think about God and eternity. Since Man can envision infinite items (God and eternity), his soul must be eternal. Animals, as far as we know, can not think about such matters.
Animals that don’t have brains, as plants (which don’t) have no conscious. Plants trail the sun, but that’s not a conscious act. It’s all chemical-related. A creature with no brain has no consciousness: everything is chemical and electrical cause and effect.
Plants can perform photosynthesis, but the difference between that ability and man’s inability is copper instead of iron. Man has hemoglobin, which carries oxygen. Plants have copper in place of the hemoglobin, and that allows it to photosynthesize. So, is that a difference in kind or of degree?
I don’t think so. A shark will be on the trail of a fish that a fisherman has hooked. The fish is brought up on the boat. The shark senses electrical fields emanating from a swimmer and goes after the swimmer, since that indicates that there is a live animal there. This is all programmed. No free will.
ME Buckner, you overlooked one of the brightest species on this planet: the whale family. (I think that’s the cetacean family, but I’m not going to look it up.)
Thanks for the insightful comments. If I understand ME Buckner correctly, the contention is that flight evolved independently on multiple occasions (e.g. for bees, for birds, for butterflies) and so consciousness may have done the same. It seems to me this ducks the question of why flight or consciousness evolved, which is, I assume, because both confer an evolutionary advantage and/or allow the species with the capability to occupy a vacant niche, as it were, in the ecosystem.
My question then becomes why we should we think our particular brand of consciousness confers any advantage. Why should we have a rich interior experience of life when we might have been just as successful without one? Arguably we might be better off with the same set of behaviors, reactions, capabilities for higher reasoning etc. but without, say, emotions, an acute sense of pain or cold, or religious prejudices.
In other words, why isn’t our life, to paraphrase barbitu8, somethiing like this:
My argument would be that consciousness or at least some degree of self-awareness must be so basic to evolutionary success that it had to have evolved very early. It would be more like the ability to create and use energy from simple molecules or to exclude noxious substances from the interiors of cells than it would be like the ability to move through the air or grasp inanimate objects. That of course rubs against the grain of the high opinion we humans have of ourselves and our conscious abilities.
I don’t agree that humans have somehow evolved beyond the capacity to evolve, but even if we had I’d be glad of it. Evolutionary pressures, like the state of nature to which they belong, would only make life “nasty, brutish and short.”
Aquinas (and Descartes after him) conceived his otherwise convincing argument without knowledge of the theory of evolution. He also believed the sun, moon, planets and stars orbited the Earth.
I think this requires some clarification of definitions. What is consciousness, for instance? This is the second time you refer to sensing pain as part of consciousness, but that then requires clarifying what is pain?
Is pain the neurochemical signals? If so, then higher order animals certainly qualify, and it could be argued that worms and insects feel pain. What about amoebas? Plants? They have some sort of response to injury - is that pain?
Or is pain something else, activated in the processing of the signal? By that reasoning, we can certainly elimiate plants and one-celled animals, and probably debate about worms and insects, but surely animals have some processing of the sensations. So how is that consciousness?
I’m reminded of the old “If a tree falls in the forest” bit, if an animal gets injured but doesn’t have a brain, does it feel pain?
So what is consciousness? Is it awareness and response to external stimuli? Is it something more, having to do with awareness of consequences, considerations of “the grand scheme”?
And just how different are humans from other animals? Studies on dolphins and apes show a lot of similarities in thought processes, including (debated) ability to understand sentences and communicate. (Dolphin research uses a gesture language with its own syntax.)
I think biology recognizes that reaction to external stimuli was advantageous and therefore an early trait to develop, but I don’t think that most people call that consciousness. It is clearly a long developmental process tracing through evolution. The question is at what point does it become consciousness, and in what exact ways are we different from other animals, and why.
Pain receptors in the brain cause the sensation of pain. No brain, no pain. And, as you know, pain is a good thing. It tells us something is wrong. People born without the nerveways to feel pain are in constant fear of injuring themselves fatally.
I think, and this is debatable, that consciousness is the realization or the ability to understand the concept of “self.” A conscious person knows he is and knows other things exist other than himself. He is aware of himself. Awareness of the grand scheme is not part of consciousness. Response to external stimulii does not need a consciousness.
There is clearly a stimulus/response mechanism that, for example, jerks one’s hand away from a hot stove even before one realizes that one’s hand is hot. But after such an experience one’s hand still hurts. Why? Wouldn’t it be better for us if we had the stimulus/response mechanism, and the learning mechanism that helps prevent us from putting our hands on hot stoves in the future, without the “owie?” If not, then the “owie” must be part of what makes us better able to survive than other animals that may not get “owies” – as barbitu8 points out.
Getting “owies” and other such conscious interior experiences exclusive of autonomous reflexes is what I’ll call “consciousness” for now.
The argument “no brain, no pain” again suggests that “owies” and such are merely side effects of having a complicated enough neural network; in other words, that it might be possible to be a zombie, in every way resembling a normal human being but without any of what I’m calling consciousness.
I thought the last common ancestor of the Chordates and the Arthropods was some kind of bilaterally-symmetrical coelomate (which isn’t actually a “flatworm”). I dunno what kind of nervous system the ur-coelomate had; maybe a longitudinal nerve cord of some kind?
Hmmm… Looks like the details of the diagram have been fleshed out a bit since my day (not surprising, considering how much rethinking there has been among the very vertebrates). When I was a lad, the split roughly corresponding to that between modern protostomes and deuterostomes included everything above coelenterates.
The “Tree of Life” is a really cool website and good for tracking the latest thinking on this sort of stuff. Of course there’s a lot of controversy about many of these issues, which they seem pretty up front about.
Modern humans are the end result of evolutionary processes.
Humans are conscious (at least I am, I’m not so sure about the rest of you but I’ll concede the point for now).
It’s reasonable to assume that consciousness and its elements, however defined, confers an evolutionary advantage and that at least some nonhuman animals possess consciousness that differs from ours in degree rather than in kind.
Discounting the “soul” argument, there doesn’t seem to be a clear line of separation with respect to consciousness between humans and nonhuman animals or between one nonhuman animal species and another. I likewise challenge the assumption that behavior that may seem to an observer to be “mechanical” or “programmed” cannot be conscious and/or learned.
I draw the conclusion that consciousness, as a trait that confers evolutionary advantage, may well have been selected for at a very early time, closer to cell walls and ATP utilization than opposable thumbs and linguistic ability.
Well, it might be. But there are ways to test for learned as opposed to programmed behavior. Can the organism change its behavior in response to novel situations? Can it learn new things?
See, this is where I don’t follow you. Bipedalism is something which all humans, who are the end-products of an evolutionary process, normally share. It presumably confers some evolutionary advantage on humans. Australopithecines were evidently bipedal, and our nearest living relatives at least occasionally exhibit bipedalism. But bipedalism isn’t something primordial, like cell walls or ATP utilization; it has recently (within the last few million years) evolved within the hominid family of primates. I don’t see any reason to suppose that consciousness is something as primordial as ATP, as opposed to something which evolved relatively recently. We know that humans are conscious, because they talk about it all the time. Since chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas can learn fairly sophisticated language skills, we have good reason to suspect a fundamental similarity there, too. Looking at other fairly large-brained mammals, like dogs and cats, we see that they a) do exhibit a capacity for learning and b) they have similar anatomical structures in their brains to humans. With bees we don’t seem to see either of those two conditions: they don’t, as far as I know, exhibit any capacity for learning or learned language use (as opposed to hard-coded communications to signal the other bees where the nectar is) and they don’t have brains which are anatomically similar to ours.
And consider the fact that some insects are demonstrably not equipped with anything like consciousness, such as three-step behaviors where, if Step 1 is undone by the experimenter while the insect is performing Step 2, it will, a hundred times, or a thousand, unnecessarily repeat Step 2 after necessarily repeating Step 1, rather than skipping ahead to Step 3.
Bees do learn, and their lives depend on it. They can do complex geometry, too. However, the only thing they can learn from one another is simply the acquisition of new information, NOT learning a new behavior. In other words, no culture, which is something that appears to require self-awareness (because to be self-aware implies you can recognize other individuals in a proper context). No evidence for self-awareness, thus no evidence for “consciousness”.