Evolution of Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Thursday, March 28, 2013, 16:41 (4256 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: The problem I see with this idea of 'chunking' is uniformity. If there were multiple intelligence each doing their own thing, we would expect to see much more chaos and much less organization. Instead, what we see is beautifully orchestrated, exceedingly complex unity, harmony, and balance. Intelligence implies an ego of sorts. [...]. When everyone works towards their own individual goals, there can be no harmony. There had to be a single unifying purpose in order for the harmony and unity that we OBSERVE to have happened. -Dhw: That is the Darwinian concept of competition, which overlooks the Margulis one of cooperation. [...] As I see it, the universe, life and evolution are an ongoing mixture of chaos and organization, of harmony and discord, of creation and destruction. [...] humans and their fellow animals work together in communities, or fight and kill one another [...]; cells join together in a symbiotic relationship, or they reject one another to cause disease. "When everyone works towards their own individual goals, there can be no harmony" presupposes that individual goals can't coincide with harmony. Supposing Jack has cash and John has brains, together they can create a successful business. That, I suggest to you, is the cooperative principle that has enabled multiple intelligences to join together and create harmony. [...] There is no need at all for a single unified purpose, if by that you mean a universal intelligence binding everything together. Individual intelligences can bind themselves together, and create their own order. Indeed, the fact that the world is a mixture of order and disorder could even be taken as evidence against the concept of a single unifying purpose. (Both posts slightly edited for brevity.)
-DAVID: You miss the point that I see clearly. Life is meant to be experienced and filled with challenges. Living a life in the Garden of Eden is boring. How do you know if you lived your life well unless you were challenged to overcome obstacles. One should always be introspective, self-analytic and know whether you lived life up to your expectations. Low expectation lives are seen everywhere. I don't have to list the types. High expectation lives are like the folks who visit this website, seeking and striving to find the bigger meanings as to why we were given this extraordinary gift, life. Darwin's use of competition is right on!-No problem with your philosophy. Just a problem understanding what it has to do with my answer to Tony's claim that multiple intelligences will not produce harmony.-Tony:So let me get this right.. not only do living cells have intelligence, but inorganic material has intelligence in the form of energy, and they all work together(yet compete against each other) in such perfect balance that life is able to appear and even thrive. Not only that, those living organisms, imbued with the same energy based intelligence, compete and struggle against each other and yet still manage to keep a near perfect balance so that life can continue for who knows how long... Is that right? Because if your inanimate objects do not have the same energy based intelligence(not to mention the agency to be able to effect change), then none of that makes a bit of sense.-DAVID: I think you are directing the above comment to dhw.
 
I'm not sure which of us Tony is addressing. Tony, my post was a response to your argument that multiple intelligences would not produce harmony, which depended on a single unified purpose. The examples I've given you illustrate how multiple intelligences may COOPERATE to create harmony OR may COMPETE to create discord. They do not cooperate and compete at the same time! 
If you object to the hypothesis on the grounds that you do not believe inanimate matter can contain any sort of intelligent energy, I shan't argue ... though it seems no more unlikely to me than first-cause energy being aware eternally of itself, or developing awareness of itself. But that was not the subject of the post I was responding to. Perhaps, though, you were simply disagreeing with David's emphasis on Darwinian competition and disregard for Margulisian cooperation.