Intelligence (Origins)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Monday, March 04, 2013, 05:23 (4280 days ago) @ dhw

Dhw: But I do believe that at some time cells determined the need for a mechanism...
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> TONY: ..'determine the need' that is implying them making a reasoned judgement based on what could only be called an imaginative situation.[/i]
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> DHW: I would not call it an imaginative situation...the ability of cells to respond to the environment, either through adaptation or invention, to solve new problems or exploit new conditions.-Responses do not require anything, they can be purely chemical in nature, like mixing bleach and ammonia. Adaptations, you might even get away with by simple gene-transference through 'selection'. I.E. black butterflies do not get eaten and so reproduce more. To invent, solve, or exploit however are drastically different in kind. All three of these processes are creative in nature, and by their nature, imaginative. In other words, in order for any of those three processes to happen, the intelligence must perceive a situation that does not exist yet in order to plan for it pre-emptively. That is several orders of magnitude more complex than what your hypothesis allows for. --> DHW: I'd like to avoid "self-aware" for reasons already given, but I'd regard all this as tantamount to "a reasoned judgement", and the description I have given includes perceiving, learning, reasoning, making decisions...We know that cells do function, and that they do adapt. I am going one step further, and suggesting that these qualities also enable them to innovate.-You can not do any of these functions that you have described without being self-aware. That is the whole point. In order to do these things, you either must be a pre-programmed automaton with hard coded self-awareness, like a computer, or be innately self-aware. --> DHW: There must have been a "first" for everything. -Agreed. The question is to the nature of that 'first'. If I program a computer, the 'first' originates in me, the designer, and I apply it to the program. When the program runs, the first created 'instance' of the object I coded displays the behavior that it was programmed to display. Every object that comes after can build upon that, but again, ONLY if programmed to do so. Likewise, the program to build upon the first instances program would also have originated with me. ->DHW: I have no more idea about how it caught on than you have about where your God got his "intelligence" from. -See Below->DHW: Your question applies no matter what theory you have about innovations. Or do you believe that your God manufactured each innovation separately (= anti-evolution), and immediately made it instinctive in every individual creature he gave it to? Or that he preprogrammed the very first cells to pass on the blueprint for each innovation that led from single cells to us, again with each individual organism immediately adopting it as an instinct? -As many designers do now, I think that God most likely developed an emergent design, where a relatively small number of rules and constants allow for a near infinite variety, and then built layers of information into that. But that is purely speculation.
 
> DHW You don't have to convince me that there is a mystery here. That is at the heart of all our discussions! .. Theists think they have solved it by attributing life and innovations to an infinite, unknowable, self-aware, supreme intelligence which has always been there..-There is a fairly significant primary difference is that the concept of God or a UI supposes that it may have had a relative eternity in solitude in order to figure it out. No one knows what was going nor how long the time frame was before any sort of creative events began taking place.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.