Evolution of Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Saturday, March 30, 2013, 19:00 (4254 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: My whole argument goes back to your response to my disagreement with chunking original intelligence into separate intelligences.
 
DHW (referring to David's earlier post): That is the Darwinian concept of competition, which overlooks the Margulis one of cooperation. As I see it, life and evolution are an ongoing mixture of chaos and organization, of harmony and discord, of creation and destruction. Stars come and go, just as species have come and gone; humans and their fellow animals work together in communities, or fight and kill one another (humans more so than other animals!); cells join together in a symbiotic relationship, or they reject one another to cause disease. ... 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. Meanwhile, Bob and Bill either ignore each other or fight, in which case multiple intelligences will lead to nothing happening, mutual destruction, or the survival of the fittest ... which is another way in which unity can be established! 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. (I have changed your bold to my own.)-I shan't reproduce the early part of your response, as I have no problem with it, and I've agreed from the outset that the original prime mover was energy.-TONY: You see competition between species, I see a self-righting system that maintains not only homeostasis, but also encourages personal growth. Not only do the living organisms play a part in this, but also the inorganic, as any changes in the inorganic composition or structure of the Universe at any scale would obliterate life. It is not random competition, but a carefully orchestrated balancing act infinitely more difficult than anything mankind has ever achieved. Orchestrated, concerted effort implies singular purpose. 
How you manage to know all of this(because I have told you nothing new) and still think for a second that randomness and competition could have come even remotely close to making this work is beyond my imagining.-It is beyond my own imagining that you could have read the passage you have quoted, and thought for one second that it means randomness and competition have produced the universe and life! It begins with criticism of David's Darwinian post for overlooking the concept of COOPERATION. It goes on to explain in detail how COOPERATION produces harmony, and competition may produce discord, and I challenge you to find any mention of randomness. The whole point of this alternative hypothesis is that I find both chance and a god equally unlikely as "creators" of the universe and life. The quest for a third way is not "willful disbelief", but an attempt to find a scenario that dispenses with two unlikely hypotheses.
 
Unlike David's, your version of God allows for the possibility that the original energy was mindless. How do you think mindless energy might have acquired intelligence, consciousness, information, ideas, purpose? I've pointed out that being aware requires something to be aware of. Why would pure energy become aware of pure energy? We know that matter exists, energy forms matter, and matter always changes. So this is something energy might have become aware of: the changing matter it has formed and in which it is embedded. An analogy: the genome is "aware" of the changes in the matter around it and reacts accordingly (or if it doesn't, the organism perishes). Every chunk of matter may therefore contain its own energy and so gather its own information. You seem to think that individualized intelligence of any kind automatically means destructive egotism, and you "wilfully" ignore the principle of COOPERATION. I showed in my examples that it's even possible for egotism to lead to cooperation between entities if that is in the interest of all parties, as we see so often in Nature. We ALSO see competition, but that is not what creates functioning bodies. Your own body is a huge mass of cooperating cells ... and in my hypothesis that is the result of multiple "intelligences" that have evolved from multiple chunks of matter. And so instead of a single entity for some unknown reason developing a colossally brilliant mind of its own, we have chunks of energy in chunks of matter gradually evolving their own "intelligence" which increases in complexity as they merge with one another. I do not have a problem if you find it unlikely, but you should not claim that it's based on randomness or competition, when the key is "INTELLIGENCE" and COOPERATION. In return, perhaps you will now offer me your own hypothesis as to how a single, universal entity of mindless energy might have acquired its own intelligence.