Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Friday, March 01, 2013, 18:25 (4064 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: And our ignorance allows me to speculate on alternatives to materialistic chance and to theistic belief in an eternal super-intelligence. [...] If you can believe in a readymade superintelligence, why can't you believe in an evolving lesser intelligence?-DAVID: I can't believe in your proposed infantile form of what seems to be "baby intelligence" which then grows to something more complex. We do see this with our human babies which have to grow to be self-aware as their brains mature. But tht is planned maturization. I can only know my complete intelligence and can only accept, for the creation of the universe and life, a mind of vaster capacity than mine. IMHO only such a mind could have created our reality from nothing. Does your baby intelligence grow by chance or by purpose?-My hypothetical first-cause "baby intelligence" grows by unplanned, experimental evolution, just as complexity grows from the invention of new organs by my hypothetical unselfconscious "intelligent cell/genome". Neither by chance, nor by some overriding purpose.-I know you don't/can't believe in anything but an eternal, readymade superintelligence, and I respect your faith. However, your reason for rejecting this alternative hypothesis is puzzling. You believe that evolution took place, and so you believe that every multicellular organism represents a process by which something more complex has grown from something simpler. You also believe that the mind is a form of energy that can exist independently of the body. If energy transmutes itself into matter, and matter can evolve, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that the "mind-energy" (intelligence) that formed and is contained within the matter might also evolve. Furthermore, you insist that the evolution of intelligence can only be "planned", and yet you also insist that a self-aware, infinitely clever intelligence was NOT planned, but has simply existed forever. I really can't see that such a scenario is any more believable than one in which a simpler, unselfconscious intelligence (that of inorganic chemicals followed by that of organic cells) evolved into our own self-aware cleverness.
 
Your original response to this was that cells are automatons, to which I responded that they only become automatons after each innovation ... by which I mean that instead of Darwin's random mutations, the cells themselves initiate the new combination, and when it works they automatically stick to it. In the context of the origin of life, once the chemicals had found the combination that worked, they also automatically stuck to it. Your hypothetical version has an unknown, unknowable, readymade, self-aware "person like no other person" making the laws that govern the way chemicals combine to create life and evolution. My hypothetical version has "intelligent", unselfconscious energy making the "intelligent" unselfconscious chemicals which have made the same laws. Neither God nor chance.