As regards not fracturing a self conscious thought, that’s like saying you either see or you don’t - there’s no half way point. Which there clearly is.
No, I don’t think that’s a fair analogy. Can you describe what an almost or semi-self-conscious thought would look or feel like? Right now, I am both aware of myself and aware that I am aware of myself. As far as I can conceive, anything less than that is just not self-awareness, even if I’m on the cusp of it. I appreciate the analogy, but you’re going to have to demonstrate why it works, especially since our fundamental disagreement lies in whether human thought and consciousness is special or different from the rest of our evolutionary makeup. Your analogy doesn’t disprove my position, it just contradicts it.
You can take a line from Man all the way down to bacteria and there is a gradual decrease in the ability to make rational decisions. It’s not as if at some point it doesn’t exist and then all of a sudden it does. There was no 2001 moment, which is what you need for your explanation to make any sense at all.
Again, consider your own lineage. Are you really suggesting that at one particular point one of your ancestors had no ability at all for rational thought and then the next generation did?
In answering the question, that depends, as I’ve said before, on whether or not your definition of “rational thought” includes the calculations our computers and robots make. In a sense, even they have “rational thought.” If this is what you mean, then I agree with you that its emergence into the world took place gradually without any eureka moment. I’ve already acknowledged that I mislabeled what I was talking about by calling it strictly “rational thought” and I thought I had endeavores to provide a clearer definition, but you have remained silent on it so far.
I’ve made this point before but it is worth repeating. What you appear to believe is that the natural processes that brought us to this point were ordained by God. I have no problem with that. But you are selling God short in that you cannot believe that He could organise matters so that we would develop an ability for rational thought as part of those processes.
No, I don’t think so. I’m not selling God short on anything. Not anymore than if I were to boldly declare that, no, God cannot create a rock too heavy for Him to lift, because that is a flat contradiction. Even God can’t perform self-contradictions, and that is no limitation on His power.
In a similar way, I am proposing that self-conscious, rational thought, such as the kind that we experience, cannot take its existence solely from irrational, non-conscious matter no matter how it arranges itself through evolution. Our brains can facilitate self-conscious rational thought, but they do not and cannot generate it on their own. I have attempted to provide a proof for why it would be a self-contradiction for pure matter to do this, but you have not addressed it. This is not a question of how such consciousness developed in our evolutionary timeline. It cannot be answered by showing how our brains developed or even how our thoughts evolved from simple to complex. The fact that you are still trying to answer it in this way makes me think you stil misunderstand the substance of my point. Scientific observation does not have the ability to answer these questions. I am inviting you to engage in philosophy with me, which is necessary to do before we even approach the beginning of science.
You are saying that we got to a particular point and then stalled. We came so far but then…no further. Whatever He had set in motion could not take us to where we are now. So He had to step in a second time and adjust a few settings. Fiddle with the dials. Readjust a couple of levers. And then…ah, yes, now we’re looking good. Now all of a sudden the monkey picks up a bone and realises he can beat someone to death with it. No more poking insects with a stick. He’s going to use that stick as the first step in developing lasers and interplanetary travel and nuclear fusion.
No, nature didn’t “stall” under my model. It goes on as it always does. This is an understandably common misconception about belief in miracles/the supernatural/the metaphysical. To use some religious language, even if God did not put “the divine spark” in us, our brains would still have developed to look and behave similar to how they do now. We probably would’ve even been capable of a lot of the same things. But we can create and program things to look and behave and “make decisions” in similar ways that we do, but such machinations are not conscious in anyway. They are not aware of what they are thinking or doing anymore than the flower you mentioned turning to the sun. I propose that, without the supernatural, we would be similar to them, just more complex.
You may as well swap your crucifix for an obelisk.
No analogy is perfect, and no consciousness would have been required for the ape to learn about weapons. I mentioned that merely to show how, even in gradual evolution, you can still have distinct milestones.
