Proving common descent (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 18, 2012, 20:49 (4389 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: For the record, my fourth option would be intelligent but unself-conscious energy creating the mechanism for intelligent but unself-conscious life and evolution, culminating in an ever more complex intelligence that eventually becomes aware of itself.-DAVID: Where does intelligence come from? Only an intelligent first cause. I don't know why that IFC isn't self-aware. You are splitting conscious and consciousness, and it seems to me only consciousness has the planning ability necessary to create the universe, life, us, etc., as reality today appears to make that point. Compare our productivity compared to apes.-I am splitting intelligence, consciousness and self-consciousness. If we accept common descent, we must accept that there was a direct line between our ape ancestors and us. The ancestors, in order to survive (just like apes now) needed to have intelligence and a degree of consciousness (e.g. of their surroundings and of what to do in order to survive in those surroundings), but you and I believe they did NOT have the self-consciousness we have. Therefore my "intelligent (but unself-conscious) cell" or your unknown (unself-conscious) mechanism within DNA enabled the intelligence and consciousness of existing creatures to intensify to self-consciousness. That is the analogy I am drawing: first-cause energy may have been intelligent (as Nature is), and through aeons of its intelligent material combinations has gradually increased intelligence to consciousness and then to self-consciousness. -What would this mean if it was true? It would remove the myths of religion, and yet at the same time obviate the necessity for faith in chance. It would also explain the apparent randomness of evolution, and the apparent impersonality of Nature. And here is another possibility, raised by NDEs: that once our material self reverts to the energy from which it originally sprang, perhaps our human attributes will bring new dimensions to that original energy. Who knows?