Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Saturday, March 16, 2013, 12:04 (4268 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

In our discussions on the origin of the universe and life, I've tried to extend the conventional Chance/Design "first cause" hypotheses through a version of panpsychism, whereby energy/matter has varying degrees of intelligence, as evinced by the varying degrees of intelligence we perceive in plant and animal life.-DHW: I shan't reproduce the rest of your post, which deals largely with game design, because interesting though it is, I can't see that it favours one hypothesis over another. -TONY: Because it requires a designer. Someone to design the rules carefully and ensure that they are balanced. That takes foresight, and does not happen by chance. -We know that games were designed by humans, but that does not prove that the guiding principles of physics or biochemistry were deliberately designed by an unknowable, inexplicable, indefinable super-intelligence that came from nowhere. It can be and frequently is argued that the guiding principles are simply a natural way for materials to behave, whether that has come about by chance or through an innate, unselfconscious intelligence. None of these three hypotheses have any scientific backing, and all are equally dependent on faith.-DHW: My problem with the passage quoted at the start of this post is your use of "developed..." and "then...", which suggests tinkering around. That is why I've tried to pin down the process implied by your God hypothesis: "Do you believe that God pre-programmed the very first cells to pass the blueprint for sex/liver/brain down through countless generations of individual organisms and different species, or that every innovation was the result of his stepping in and fiddling with the genes?" I do hope you will find time to answer, as this is the question I'm really concerned with.-TONY: There is no doubt that it was done in stages. How much tinkering was done in between those stages is anyone's guess, but even the Bible acknowledges that humans were among the last new species, which corresponds with what we know from the archaeological record.-We are certainly not going to argue over stages (I believe evolution happened), or over the late arrival of humans. David believes humans were God's original purpose, and were therefore pre-planned. He believes that "God did not plop in livers", but "the genome found a way to do it", which I take to mean that what we have called "the intelligent genome" invented the liver. In other words, the liver was not built into the preprogramming of the very first cells, but its invention depended on the "intelligence" of the genome and the needs imposed or the opportunities offered by the Cambrian environment. Perhaps, though, you believe that your tinkering God did "plop in livers" ... hence my question about preprogramming and intervention. I don't know how far your beliefs coincide with David's. We may apply the principle of interaction between the inventive genome and the environment to every single innovation that led from bacteria to humans. For me, this represents a major argument against David's anthropocentric view of evolution. (For more details, do please read my response to him, 12 March at 12.29.) Of course one can and should ask where the genome's inventive "intelligence" sprang from, just as one can and should ask where God's inventive intelligence sprang from, but that takes us back to our three equally faith-dependent "first cause" hypotheses.