Intelligence (Origins)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 10:38 (4278 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: I'm a primate living in trees; suddenly there's a dramatic change in my particular part of the world, and all the trees disappear. Or I live in an endless ocean, and suddenly the water recedes and there is land to walk on, oxygen in the air. The former scenario DEMANDS an innovative response; the latter situation ALLOWS FOR an innovative response... Of course innovation is creative by definition, but in the evolutionary context, not pre-emptive.
> -Need I point out that in the first of these situations the critter in question gets exactly one chance to change or they completely die out of starvation? Or that the one in a (insert insanely astronomical number here) chance for that to occur would have to happen twice at the same time in order for a breeding pair to survive? That would mean that your cellular intelligence would have to be capable of immediate inventiveness in order to overcome the changes both in terms of internal physiology and psychological behaviors. -In the second example, there is no motivation for changing provided that water still exists, and this is exactly what we see in nature. Animals to not plop out of the sea onto land and start breathing air just because the water is a little low. What generally happens is that they reduce their population count to a level that their changed habitat can support. Nothing more, nothing less. -Neither one of these scenarios allows for any kind of experimentation, requiring that whatever adaptations/innovations occur MUST come into fruition fully formed and completely functional, or the result is death. That is one of the same issues that traditional Evolution faces. Any adaptation/innovation must be fully functional from conception onwards, or the animal dies. -
>DHW: In my earlier response I accepted your version of self-awareness "to a certain extent" and "in some limited form" (your terms), but emphasized the contrast with human self-awareness, which asks philosophical questions that I do not believe cells or our fellow animals to be capable of. I've said all along that I have a major problem of definition because I'm using an existing term ("intelligence") in a particular way ... but there is no other word to describe my concept. If I ascribe human-type self-awareness to first-cause intelligence, I might as well call it God. The whole point of my hypothesis is that first-cause "intelligence" has evolved in the same way as cells have evolved ... from relatively simple to extremely complex, the latter comprising our human level of self-awareness.
> -I do not think I have ever ascribed to God a 'human-type' awareness. His awareness is to ours what ours is to dirt's. I use human language, as pitiful as it is, to try and describe those characteristics, but it no more suitable than saying 'colorful' is to describing a sunset. --> TONY: 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.
> 
> DHW: Indeed. Exactly the same applies to the concept of an impersonal, low-level first-cause "intelligent" energy which has had an eternity to produce different combinations of matter.-Except that there is a very definite time limitation in the case of cellular intelligence.

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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.