Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Sunday, March 17, 2013, 18:58 (4267 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.-DAVID: Since we agree there has to be a first cause, there must be a first cause for intelligent information. Only chance or design can do the creating of this information. A chance creation of information? From what? It is an oxymoron. Designing coherent information requires an intelligence. That is not an oxymoronic statement. Incoherent information? We are back to chance. By necessity an intelligent mind has always existed. Ask Aristotle.-What is "intelligent information"? A chunk of rock contains a bookful of information, but it takes an intelligent mind to extract it and systematize it. That doesn't mean the rock was designed and created by an intelligent mind. Even in your own hypothesis, where do you draw the line: did God design every rock? Every mountain? Every star? Every black hole? Every constellation? Information is the facts we humans extract from whatever exists, but the only intelligence we know of is that of ourselves and, to a lesser degree, that of our fellow animals. The first cause MAY have been the self-aware, creative energy you call God; it MAY have been a totally mindless energy forever transmuting itself into different combinations of matter, some of which chanced to form working systems; it MAY have been a form of energy with a degree of "intelligence" through which eventually it created matter capable of evolving into greater intelligence. None of these hypotheses is true "by necessity" ... they are all equally riddled with uncertainties, although each of them could have produced the information which our intelligent minds extrapolate from the resultant materials. No point in asking Aristotle. He didn't know any more than we do.-I was delighted to see the latest review of Nagel, for which many thanks:-http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heretic_707692.html?page=1-QUOTE: "The positive mission Nagel undertakes in Mind and Cosmos is to outline, cautiously, a possible Third Way between theism and materialism, given that the first is unacceptable—emotionally, if not intellectually—and the second is untenable. Perhaps matter itself has a bias toward producing conscious creatures. Nature in that case would be "teleological"—not random, not fully subject to chance, but tending toward a particular end. Our mental life would be accounted for—phew!—without reference to God."-It would seem that he really is looking for a third way along the lines of my "panpsychist" hypothesis. But I prefer my nebulous "intelligence" to his nebulous "teleology"!-Thanks also for the article on apoptosisAVID: Means a cell death process. Cells are programmed to die and this aspect of life is an important story in evolution:-http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-a-shapiro/important-work-on-cell-co_b_2871689.html-QUOTE: "Although we now have a great deal of information about the complex biochemical events involved in executing programmed cell death, the nature of the existential decision-making process remains mysterious. How cells make these signal-influenced choices is a major focus of contemporary, 21st Century research."-Once again, we have instances of a form of "intelligence" we do not understand. Cells like ants like crows like dogs like humans have their own means of communicating and of taking decisions. Applied to energy transmuted into matter, this innate "intelligence" is Nagel's "third way".