Trilobite eyes (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, March 28, 2013, 17:10 (4259 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: I don't understand how a controlled event [your description of common descent] leads to open-ended experimentation. The huge forest-like bush suggests the exact opposite of a controlled event.-DAVID: The controls are the built-in epigenetic mechanisms which allow life to be adaptive and inventive.
 
Open-ended experimentation by definition allows the mechanisms to do whatever they like, so the human "end" can't be planned.-dhw: The second is how the intelligence got into the genome. Your hypothesis is that an intelligent mind (God) put it there, and I am suggesting the intelligence evolved from within (see Talbott). The third issue is: if there is a God, what is the source of HIS intelligence? -DAVID: I don't see how underlying intelligence 'evolves'. [...] Intelligence must have self-awareness and retrospection to do the underlying planning we see in the universe and in life. You are still insisting on something that appears amorphous to me. And finally, First Cause (God) is a retrospective end point. His intelligence is a necessary part of the concept.-YOU see underlying planning. Others see evolution as an ad hoc process. Intelligence evolves by gathering more and more information. You think God may have always had all the intelligence there can possibly be, while Tony allows for the possibility that intelligence evolved, since first-cause energy may originally have been without any. I'm not "insisting" on anything, but suggesting that intelligence evolving within changing matter is no more amorphous than intelligence simply being there independently of matter, or evolving independently of matter.-dhw: We shall probably never get to the bottom of how matter acquired intelligence, but if we accept the theory that this universe began 13.8 billion years ago (though I don't trust such figures), and life goes back say 3.8 billion years (ditto my mistrust), who can say that doesn't give time for a rudimentary intelligence to awaken, experiment and evolve in the manner I have described? -DAVID: I can't accept that concept at all. Matter is not intelligent. -I am suggesting that the energy within the matter is intelligent. (That would explain psychic experiences.)-DAVID: You are really proposing bits of intelligence gradually associating by chance contrivance, however those bits arose. Where is the organized thinking and planning in your concept?-Your starting point is always planning, as if somehow that were a given. It's not. I'm suggesting that when cells combined to form new multicellular organisms, they acted not as automatons but through their own form of intelligence, and not by chance (see Talbott). The complexity of the intelligence would have grown with the increasingly complex merging of materials ... NOT planned but, like evolution itself, through what you have called "open-ended experimentation". -dhw: In other words, he did not pre-programme "by-products" like flycatchers, trilobites, dinosaurs, dodos or duck-billed platypuses, but sat back watching while the intelligent genome produced its own inventions...-DAVID: A good synopsis of my view of evolution.-dhw: What is clear from the above is that humans were not planned either.-DAVID: The material I have read about human development makes it look 'favored'. [...] Here my scenario implies a desired result.-dhw: Neither 'favored' nor 'a desired result' means 'planned.' [...] If it doesn't make sense, why not consider an alternative that does?-DAVID: Let me try again. There is strong evidence that there was a special push toward humans. The early vertebral changes toward truly upright posture, the striking skeletal changes, the birth of the big brain problem, and the giant brain itself. None of it from necessity when we compare the existing primates, in stasis to us, not in stasis, until perhaps now.
From yesterday: DNA is a common denominator, but I theorize that it contains pre-planned codes we haven't found yet. -OK, you theorize that it was all pre-planned, and I theorize that it evolved without a plan. No doubt many innovations were not "from necessity", and maybe evolution itself was not necessary, since bacteria have survived to this day. But when conditions allowed, the intelligent genome produced its own inventions ... all part of the "open-ended experimentation" that characterizes the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution. Every innovation you list can just as easily have been the product of the intelligent genome ... whether invented by God or not - without a divine "push". After 3.8 billion years of evolution, the energy within changing materials could have learned all it needed to know for its increasingly complicated experiments.
 
DAVID: No question God planned US, but only He knows why he used the method He did.-But the poor old flycatcher, dodo, dinosaur etc. were just by-products. I'm not saying your hypothesis is wrong. I remain agnostic. But no matter how emphatically you phrase your beliefs, there are plenty of folk much brighter and more learned than me who disagree with you, and so I'm afraid you really cannot claim that there is "no question God planned us." There are lots and lots of questions.