Trilobite eyes (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, March 22, 2013, 12:34 (4056 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My intelligent genome is not your intelligent genome. My genome has underlying information and intelligent application of that information, planned to be that way. It cannot have arisen by chance. Your 'intelligence' has no characteristics of anything recognizable as a conscious planning mind. My term amorphous fits it perfectly, and I have no idea of what you are trying to maintain as a reasonable theory.-There is no difference between your intelligent genome and mine. They both have underlying information and intelligent application of that information. The difference between the two concepts lies in how the genome acquired the information and the ability to apply it. In your version, the genome is an automaton programmed by God to adapt and innovate "when it has to". In my version it is not an automaton, but is able to make its own decisions. (Your post under "fly traps" seems to imply that your God pre-programmed the intelligent genome to make its own decisions. I'll discuss this in my response on that thread.)-You seem to assume that unlike humans and ... to a smaller degree - our fellow animals, other forms of life have no independent intelligence of their own. And yet when individual fish, insects, bacteria innovate, in your own words "the genome KNOWS HOW to advance complexity when it has to". I agree, and I regard knowing how to do something as a form of intelligence. Scientists are constantly discovering that other forms communicate. How can anyone possibly know that these communications are preprogrammed and not linked to independent thought? When single cells first merged to create the multicellularity which sparked evolution, how can anyone possibly know that this was not through their own creative thinking, as opposed to pre-programming?
 
In the same way (though this is where my own scepticism tends to harden), the chemicals that combined to create the first self-replicating molecules may also have had their own way of thinking and communicating. Every innovation is a departure from automatic behaviour, and only when a successful formula has been found will the chemicals and cells behave like automatons, which is why we only see them as such. I've rightly been told that my inability to imagine a universal intelligence does not mean a universal intelligence doesn't exist. The same argument has to apply to our inability to imagine "intelligent" chemicals and cells.
 
The whole idea ... particularly as regards "intelligent" chemicals ... may seem fantastic (I neither believe nor disbelieve it), but is it any more fantastic than that of chance assembling the elements for life and evolution? Or than that of an amorphous (good word) unknowable eternal universal self-aware super-intelligence that came from nowhere, deliberately keeps itself concealed, and resides "within and without" the universe, designing black holes, red giants, milky ways, elephants, flycatching sundews and viruses? As I put it to Tony, if you can believe in an undesigned super-intelligence, why can't you believe in an undesigned lesser intelligence that has evolved? But I'm not inviting you to do so. It's only a hypothesis, and I'm still on my fence, looking for company!