Trilobite eyes (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 30, 2013, 19:31 (4257 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: Convergence is even harder to explain in common evolution or your intelligent genome theory. Two independent intelligences arriving to the same precise solution to a given problem without contact between them is extremely unlikely, verging on impossible.
 
There's a useful summary with examples on Wikipedia, under "Convergence evolution". This is the reference, but I can't get it to work! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_evolution-TONY: See, the problem with your intelligent genome is that it presupposes evolution from a common ancestor is true. There simply is no evidence of that beyond speculation based on observations that could mean something else entirely."
 
dhw: [...] I understand your point of view. But when I apply it to your God hypothesis, you seem to find it difficult to grasp (even labelling it "willful disbelief"). I wonder why.-TONY: I labeled it willful disbelief because that is what it is.-After all this time you clearly have no idea why I cannot share your speculative and irrational faith. I'll keep trying, Tony. We agnostics are very patient. See my response to David below, for yet another summary.
 
TONY: You have untold complexity all around you working in exquisite harmony, complexity of the type that we have NEVER seen appearing spontaneously without the intervention of an intelligence, and yet you insist that it happened. Whether you apply that random chance at the start of the universe or the start of life is irrelevant because you are starting at the basis of random chance instead of purposeful intelligence.-I have answered this under "Evolution of Intelligence", and must protest that you are totally misrepresenting my whole 'panpsychist' hypothesis, which from the very start I have painstakingly, patiently, heroically, clearly explained DISPENSES WITH BOTH GOD AND RANDOM CHANCE, both of which I find equally unlikely. Reject it by all means, but do not misrepresent it. Meanwhile, if the complexities of our minds could not appear without the intervention of an intelligence, how did a mind infinitely more complex than our own manage to appear without the intervention of an intelligence?
 
TONY: Humanity continues to invent new theories that completely ignore the reality of what they see because the thought of something that immense, that powerful scares them stupid and makes them feel weak and ineffectual.-According to you and David, God hides himself. I'm not alone in thinking that maybe we can't see him 'cos he ain't there! The reality I see is a breathtaking range of life, beauty, order, cooperation, love....of death, suffering, disorder etc. If there is a God, perhaps that's what he wants, and of course you can't have good without bad. On the other hand, the whole wonderful mixture might have come about through multiple "intelligences" following their own nice or nasty agendas, or it might all be one gigantic accident. Your assumption that people don't accept your own self-confessed irrationalism (faith being irrational by definition) because they feel scared and weak says rather more about your view of human nature than it does about the case for God.-Dhw: No doubt many innovations were not "from necessity", and maybe evolution itself was not necessary, since bacteria have survived to this day.-TONY: Which innovations, in particular, were not a necessity?-Since bacteria have survived, maybe all. But I'm suggesting there may be two possible causes of innovation: one the need for survival (linked more to adaptation), and the other the result of the genome inventing something new because a changed environment allows for further experimentation. Freddy ("Mr Conventional") Fish can go on swimming in the sea, but the sudden appearance of an island might encourage Fergus ("Watch-Me-Daddy") Fish to try his luck on land, though he doesn't have to. And behold, there were lungs and legs...-TONY: Life can not come from non-life without the not insignificant requirement of initial information and energy.-No disagreement from me. It fits in very nicely with my "panpsychist" hypothesis.-DAVID: [dhw] has told us he cannot imagine a God as first cause, even though he accepts the first cause as reasonable.-I've never opposed the concept of a first cause. What seems unreasonable, and therefore unimaginable to me, is the concept of first-cause energy being a single, super-colossal, eternally and fully self-aware, undesigned mind inexplicably possessing all the information there could possibly be, whereas our puny minds require a designer. That seems as unlikely to me as mindless first-cause energy hitting on a magic formula to create a functioning solar system and the mechanisms of life and evolution. If you can believe in either of those hypotheses, you might just as well believe in my 'panpsychist' proposal. Is it any more unreasonable than yours?