Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Monday, March 04, 2013, 12:45 (4280 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Buildings have an architect. So does the liver. The individual cells could not have held a congress over a few billion years and decided how to organize themselves. Not without guidance. [...]As far as evolution is concerned, liver-equivalents appear de novo in the Cambrian, suddenly, not bit by bit as cells would do negotiating among themselves. Your cell congress will not work. It does not answer the fossil record, as Gould noted. All new species appear de novo, fully formed and functional. There are no tiny steps in the fossil record.-Who said anything about billions of years? Who said anything about livers appearing bit by bit? Of course there are no tiny steps in the fossil record. A non-functioning liver is not going to be fossilized! I have no idea how long it took for livers to be formed, and nor have you. We only know of the finished product. It took your God as long as he took, and it took my cells as long as they took. (But it's worth noting that the first 20-million-year phase of the Cambrian, in which most of these innovations appeared, would cover a million 20-year generations. Time enough for God or the cells to work it out.)
 
BBELLA: Then exactly what is the answer to how the above appeared "de novo", in your book? Intervention?
 
DAVID: There are three choices: Darwin's chance production; some form of intervention, either with coding in the DNA from the beginning, or episodic intervention to change the DNA as time passed; or what dhw is proposing to get around the problems each of the other choices present. -Agreed.-DAVID: Nagel could not find an answer, nor can dhw, as they will not accept the probability (as I see it) of a greater power.-So your reason for rejecting my hypothesis is that I do not accept your hypothesis! Meanwhile, BBELLA has pointed out the importance of interconnectedness.
 
DAVID: I am not forgetting the interconnectedness. But that does not mean that meaningful information is readily available or usable in biologic material. If that were the case evolution would not have been so sluggish and episodic. It would have flowed smoothly from single cell to us.-May I suggest that if there was a God whose purpose was to create humans, "evolution would not have been so sluggish and episodic. It would have flowed smoothly from single cell to us." The higgledy-piggledy progress of evolution clearly supports ad hoc invention (as in my hypothesis) rather than preplanning (as in yours).
 
BBELLA: Energy (the malleable fabric from which all that is springs) retains all information always, making all information readily available and limitless for new cellular creations.-DAVID: The interconnectedness you have thought about is at the consciousness level (as I see it), which means it is at a very complex biologic level reequiring brains like ours. Evolution proceeded without human consciousness, therefore I think there is a universal consciousness using the network of, or providing the prior interconnectedness.-This is one reason why I prefer "intelligence" to "consciousness", because you equate the latter with a self-aware God (UI). Why must the interconnectedness be at this level? The information is there to be used by whatever form of intelligence, low or high, can use it. Each cellular community can build on the work of preceding cellular communities. My hypothesis does not need a universal, self-aware intelligence to direct operations.