Intelligence (Origins)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 03, 2013, 18:32 (4069 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: You don't have to convince me that there is a mystery here. That is at the heart of all our discussions! Materialists think they have solved the mystery by attributing life itself to chance and, likewise, innovations to random mutations. Theists think they have solved it by attributing life and innovations to an infinite, unknowable, self-aware, supreme intelligence which has always been there, is capable of whatever they want it to be capable of, and has whatever qualities they want it to have. I am suggesting a process whereby life and innovations are the material products of first-cause, low-level "intelligent" energy, which is incorporated within and evolves with these materials as it brings them together in increasingly complex combinations.-You are trying for a third way like Nagel. I wish I could give you a short course in the histology of the liver. Its architcture is more complex than that of a 30 storey building. It cell types are as varied as the parts of the building, but one big difference is that the liver is also in a chemical business of making and destroying chemicals all by itself. Buildings have an architect. So does the liver. The individual cells could not have held a congress over a few billion years and decided how to organize themselves. Not without guidance. It takes more than individual intelligence at a low level. I think your analogy fails. Nagel never got this far in fantasy.-As far as evolution is concerned, liver-equivalents appear de novo in the Cambrian, suddenly, not bit by bit as cells would do negotiating among themselves. Your cell congress will not work. It does not answer the fossil record, as Gould noted. All new species appear de novo, fully formed and functional. There are no tiny steps in the fossil record. -Nagel was wise to stop where he did, since a third way is not apparent from the materialist viewpoint. Which is why there is a philosphical path to panentheism with a dolop of panpsychism.