RE: Do Humans Have Compulsary Will? Which best describes your take on 'will'?
June 7, 2015 at 5:57 pm
(June 7, 2015 at 9:14 am)IATIA Wrote:(June 6, 2015 at 10:43 pm)bennyboy Wrote: The presumed difference is that a one-celled animal doesn't have the ability to imagine.
Can bats "imagine"? Can birds "imagine"? Can cats "imagine"? Can dogs "imagine"? Can apes "imagine"? Where do you draw the line?
I think this thread has repeatedly come down to a single issue: psychology vs. psychogony, by which I mean the relative quality of different kinds of minds vs. the existence of mind at all. My contention is that there is a minimal system which can be said to have mind, and that any simpler system cannot be said to have mind. I've defined "mind" as the ability to sustain a subjective perspective-- and either something has that capacity or it does not.
The same goes for imagination. I'd define imagination as the capacity to experience recalled information, and either an organism can or cannot recall some information and re-experience it in some form. All the animals you mentioned definitely seem to meet that definition; for example, they all (as far as I know) have the capacity to dream.
As for ants, that is a very interesting case indeed. In the case of a single organism's brain, the mind seems to arise from the coordination of many parts. The same applies to ants-- they are highly coordinated parts-- so I do wonder if an ant colony actually has a literal "hive mind," i.e. that it really is a single organism with many parts rather than just a community of individual members.
