Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Sunday, March 03, 2013, 16:34 (4293 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Inherent rules cover chemical reactions. If that is what you mean by 'intelligence' what intelligence made the rules?-Inherent rules also cover cellular behaviour once the new organ has established itself through the inventiveness of the cells that created it. You claim that an eternal creator made the rules, others claim that chance made the rules, and I'm suggesting a third possibility, which is that the chemicals themselves made the rules.
 
DAVID: After the Big Bang ALL energy was an amorphous plasma. Where is the intelligence?-Within the plasma, getting ready to form systems. Where is God?
 
DAVID: Cells are automated factories which can self-correct to some degree as Shapiro shows. So can the robots in the automated car factories, designed by engineers. But you want cells as automated factories to appear but never engineered? I can't imagine that just as you cannot imagine my God.-Again you are only considering cells AFTER innovations, whereas my focus is on innovation itself. We know innovations have taken place. I believe that humans invent robots on their own initiative, without your God programming them to do so. I am suggesting that cells also invent new organs on their own initiative, and only when the organ works do its cells become automated. As for the engineering of the cells themselves, we know the chemicals came together. Your version has a universal intelligence building a solar system one moment, and then playing with a microscopic collection of chemicals the next, presumably manipulating stars and molecules alike by means of telekinesis. Mine has low-level "intelligent" chemicals joining up experimentally, just as later on low-level "intelligent" cells themselves joined up experimentally. -Perhaps, though, your last sentence sums up the whole dilemma. You seem to be able to "imagine" an invisible, unknowable, never-beginning, self-aware, readymade "person like no other person", enigmatically "within and without" the universe it created, and yet you cannot imagine that the cells which we know exist, and which we know have combined to produce new functioning organs, might themselves be "intelligent". I don't regard the latter idea is anything more than a hypothesis, but I honestly don't see how you can find it more unimaginable than your own.-dhw: Similarly, unselfconscious first cause energy creates systems.
 
DAVID: As Tony point out, not without reasoning.-Agreed. Just as cells invent new organs through their own form of "intelligent" reasoning.-*******-dhw: In other words, first-cause energy is not a self-aware, readymade inventor who has been around forever and whose superintelligence is simply and inexplicably there, but it is possessed of low-level, unselfconscious "intelligence" which has evolved through the matter it creates...-DAVID: Here I violently disagree. Matter has nothing to do with creation of intelligence. First cause energy is intelligence and intelligence advances only through consciousness, as they are intertwined. My dog's intelligence is limited because his consciousness is so limited.-Don't get violent! You have misread my sentence. I did not write that matter created intelligence (although materialists will say that it did, and I'm not prepared to discount even that possibility, though I don't believe it). I wrote that first-cause, low-level, unselfconscious "intelligence" evolves through the matter it creates. "Intelligent" energy is within the matter, and as the matter evolves, so does the "intelligent" energy. Your dog's intelligence is limited compared to ours, and his brain has not evolved as ours has. The materialist hypothesis is that the physical brain develops the intelligence; the theist hypothesis is that the intelligence develops the physical brain; the dhw hypothesis is that both hypotheses are true, because the intelligence is the energy within the cells that make up the physical brain.-Please see also my response to Tony.