Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Saturday, March 02, 2013, 08:51 (4282 days ago) @ David Turell

I'm proposing a hypothesis that evolution is driven by an unselfconscious but inventive form of "intelligence" within living cells, and that life itself may have come about through a similar "intelligence" inherent in the chemicals that combined to create it.
 
DAVID: Where did the intelligence in 'your energy' come from? There must intelligence in a first cause as a necessary given.
 
Energy is my first cause, as it is yours, but I'm proposing that its "intelligence" is of the same unconscious yet potentially creative sort as that of the cell. And so if you ask me where it came from, I can only give you the same answer you give me when I ask where your self-aware, planning, purposeful intelligence came from. It has always been there.-DAVID: If at first there was amorphous disorganized energy, how does anything develop from that point? [...] So how does the energy advance?-Was there ever an "at first"? What preceded the Big Bang (assuming it happened)? But even if it was a beginning, you yourself believe the energy was not amorphous and disorganized. The resultant matter gradually formed patterns, but instead of a super, self-aware intelligence consciously and purposefully making them, I'm suggesting they were made by an unselfconscious intelligence within the materials themselves, in exactly the same way as later, unselfconscious cells formulated new combinations to drive evolution. Energy advances ... in the cosmos and on Earth ... through new combinations of the materials it creates and within which it resides.
 
DAVID: I cannot believe your scenario, unless I accept the idea that in an unguided evolution of energy proceeded by chance to a more organized state. Our self-awareness is very organized energy.-Unguided, yes, but not by chance. The "intelligent cell/genome", which I thought we had agreed on, is the obvious example. A change in the environment (e.g. a massive increase in oxygen) may allow for new forms of life. "Intelligent" mechanisms within the cells of existing creatures then produce new combinations (organs) that can exploit the new environment. The production of these organs is not guided, but it is not by chance. (Your latest post under "James Shapiro" seems to be following precisely this line of thought.) If they work, the new combination will be perpetuated, and the cells will once more act like automatons. Similarly, unselfconscious first cause energy creates systems. There may be billions of them that don't work, and they will not survive. However, when a system does work, it survives, and the chemicals then act like automatons to preserve it. The whole process is one of "intelligent" but unselfconscious experimentation followed by success followed by a mixture of stabilization (our solar system, the mechanisms that give us life) and evolution (the ability of living cells to form new combinations). Not guided by a god within and without, not the product of countless giant strokes of luck, but the result of endless experiments through which each success leads to greater complexity, culminating (as we see it) in a form of intelligence that has become aware of itself.