Evolution of Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Monday, April 01, 2013, 19:43 (4036 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Dhw: As regards 'first intelligence', I look forward very much to hearing your own hypothesis as to how a single entity of mindless energy might have acquired it.-TONY: I would point you to Ken Perlin. Patterns often emerge from random noise and become self-sustaining in terms of organization. Once the pattern has emerged, there is information their to learn from. So there is no need for matter to have been created prior to intelligence or information.
 
Patterns emerging from randomness and becoming self-sustaining in terms of organization are precisely what materialists believe in. You could scarcely have found a better image to support their case. As far as our two hypotheses are concerned, you have energy becoming aware of random patterns within itself, and I have energy becoming aware of random patterns in the matter it creates and resides in. Each as likely/unlikely as the other?-Dhw: Design entails different elements combining into a functioning unit. 
TONY: Correction: Design entails combining different elements into a functioning unit.-I chose my words as carefully as you have chosen yours! I propose intelligent cells combining, and you propose God combining them.-TONY: What you described is straight Darwinian evolution.-Apart from random mutations (which I'd replace with "the intelligent genome") and gradualism (replaced with punctuated equilibrium), Darwinian evolution is fine with me. There is plenty of evidence that in all walks of life, complexity increases as a result of pooled resources and accumulated innovations (see below).
 
TONY: The engineer doesn't allow stuff to happen without pre-planning. Neither does he throw sticks in a pile and expect a house to appear. Rather, he studies his building materials intently, learning everything there is to know about them, and then uses that knowledge to put them together in an arrangement that suits the purpose he is trying to achieve. Information BEFORE implementation, not information FROM implementation.-Which of course presupposes a pre-planned project, as opposed to a process of evolution that progresses without any particular purpose ... but not randomly, as it is guided by intelligence and cooperation. Your own image of the orchestra was a good one: each instrument is the result of intelligent invention, and so step by step the orchestra has evolved from perhaps the first drum to the complex unit we know today. Mozart could not have written even one of his 41 symphonies if earlier intelligences had not invented violins, flutes, trumpets etc. That is how I see evolution ... not pre-planned, but building intelligently to ever greater complexity, as it combines individual inventions.
 
Dhw: You wrote: "The Genome is a chunk of code that reacts the way that it is programmed to react." Does this mean your God individually programmes cells, ants, wolves, citizens, flowers and bumble bees to cooperate? Or are you saying that he invented a mechanism which would enable them all to work out their own particular designs?-TONY: [...] he did both. He designed the base blueprint for each "kind" of creature, but allowed for variability within certain tolerances.-So do you think the flower and the bumblebee were preprogrammed to cooperate, or worked things out together for themselves?-DHW: The energy in my mind is acquiring information all the time by its interplay with matter and with other energies. That is why I am suggesting that a single, pure energy would have nothing to learn. Hence my questions.-TONY: Introspective. It could learn about it's own properties. Since waves comprise the foundation of nearly everything, I find that concept particularly fitting.-Its own properties would already have existed when it was mindless. Perhaps the eternal, mindless wanderings of the waves gradually made it conscious of its own mindless wanderings, or perhaps it had a shock through the far more complex and even dramatic changes in the matter it had mindlessly created.
 
DHW: All we know is that life has resulted from cooperation. Whether that was directed by a single "intelligence" outside matter or by individual "intelligences" inside matter is pure speculation.-TONY: I personally will disagree, and say that we know all life has resulted from unity, which is something that is extremely difficult to attribute to cooperation.-I have no difficulty whatsoever in attributing life to cooperation, since it owes its existence and continuation to the fusing of materials, whether by chance, by God's telekinetic handiwork, or by their own "intelligent" cooperation. My difficulty lies in attributing the cooperation to any one of them. I find our discussions are a great help in articulating all these equally unlikely hypotheses, even though the deeper we go, the more unfathomable the mystery seems to become!