Hoops Has Turned Agnostic/Atheist

[_Hoops]

is this what you think I'm doing or are you referring to other people on the thread?

You. So far.

[_Morley]

I would answer that you can't have high intelligence without sentience, and high intelligence is clearly an evolutionary advantage.

I don't want to hijack the thread, but please make your argument for "high intelligence is clearly an evolutionary advantage."

And then, if you have time and energy, please elaborate on "you can't have high intelligence without sentience."

[_Hoops]

I would answer that you can't have high intelligence without sentience, and high intelligence is clearly an evolutionary advantage.

I don't want to hijack the thread, but please make your argument for "high intelligence is clearly an evolutionary advantage."

And then, if you have time and energy, please elaborate on "you can't have high intelligence without sentience."

Hijack away. Just make sure we land at The Louvre

[_Buffalo]

I would answer that you can't have high intelligence without sentience, and high intelligence is clearly an evolutionary advantage.

I don't want to hijack the thread, but please make your argument for "high intelligence is clearly an evolutionary advantage."

And then, if you have time and energy, please elaborate on "you can't have high intelligence without sentience."

As to the first part, I would think that was self evident. The most intelligent species on the planet (namely, us) is clearly the most successful. Intelligence allows organisms of otherwise inferior strength/speed/general dangerousness to outwit predators, find more food, and thrive.

As far as sentience/intelligence goes, sentience is the ability to feel, intelligence is the ability to reason. You can't reason unless you are aware that you're having experiences, you're aware of your own perceptions about them, and then you can draw conclusions.

That's not very detailed, but that's my quick wiki-fueled thought for now.

[_Blixa]

As an atheist who is also an artist, I find this thread somewhat amusing and more than a little sad.

Yep. And for the same reasons you do.

[_Buffalo]

Just thinking out loud. It occurs to me that for self-awareness to develop, you'd need to evolve the following:

Ability to collect sensory data (through eyes, ears, skin, tongue, etc)
Sufficient capacity in the brain for memory storage so that sensory data can be recalled later
Sufficient intelligence to recall sensory data and process it. Intelligence might start as physical problem solving (how can I manipulate this stick to get ants from the hollow log), and gradually develop into more abstract problem solving (I don't understand why water falls from the sky sometimes. Who could be responsible for this?).

What else would you need in order to be self-aware?

[_Hoops]

As an atheist who is also an artist, I find this thread somewhat amusing and more than a little sad.

Yep. And for the same reasons you do.

I had you in mind when I started all this mess. Any way you can tell us more? I really am interested in what you think. (While your brilliance shows through even in your short posts, a little exposition will let you really show off)

[_Dantana]

Just thinking out loud. It occurs to me that for self-awareness to develop, you'd need to evolve the following:

Ability to collect sensory data (through eyes, ears, skin, tongue, etc)
Sufficient capacity in the brain for memory storage so that sensory data can be recalled later
Sufficient intelligence to recall sensory data and process it. Intelligence might start as physical problem solving (how can I manipulate this stick to get ants from the hollow log), and gradually develop into more abstract problem solving (I don't understand why water falls from the sky sometimes. Who could be responsible for this?).

What else would you need in order to be self-aware?

But if intelligence and sentience has a relationship/ is in proportion with brain size, small brained creatures, crows, shouldn't pass a mirror test....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition (scroll to consciousness)

[_Buffalo]

Just thinking out loud. It occurs to me that for self-awareness to develop, you'd need to evolve the following:

Ability to collect sensory data (through eyes, ears, skin, tongue, etc)
Sufficient capacity in the brain for memory storage so that sensory data can be recalled later
Sufficient intelligence to recall sensory data and process it. Intelligence might start as physical problem solving (how can I manipulate this stick to get ants from the hollow log), and gradually develop into more abstract problem solving (I don't understand why water falls from the sky sometimes. Who could be responsible for this?).

What else would you need in order to be self-aware?

But if intelligence and sentience has a relationship/ is in proportion with brain size, small brained creatures, crows, shouldn't pass a mirror test....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition (scroll to consciousness)

I don't think I brought up brain size. We don't have the biggest brains, even for our body size. Interesting link, though!

[_Blixa]

Yep. And for the same reasons you do.

I had you in mind when I started all this mess. Any way you can tell us more? I really am interested in what you think.

While I don't think that art is an argument FOR god (which is sort of what your OP was implying), I do find that the human imagination is probably the closest thing to "the divine" that I recognize.

My disappointment was more with other posters' understanding of art as easily explainable or reducible to the visual and so on. To my mind, both art and science are 'laboratories' for asking questions about the world we live in and our experience of it, and in that sense are much closer than your OP suggested.