Cell response to electric field (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, April 07, 2013, 17:45 (4249 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The difference, as I keep stressing, lies first and foremost in innovation. ............Once the innovation functions, the cells will preserve it, and act like automatons, although even then they may have to take their own decisions. The ability to use information and create something new with it is the kind of "intelligence" I mean here.-DAVID: That is not intelligence as I define it. The genome has intelligent information, gleaned from an originating intelligence. It uses that information in the code automatically, unless it is stimulated to use an epigenetic mechanism, which it triggers to go into an automatic response changing the organism to some beneficial degree. This does not create new species, just variation.-The section you have omitted is the section which deals with innovation! I gave sex, legs, livers, eyes, wings etc. as examples. Innovation is what leads to new species. The second phase of preservation (with variations or adaptations) is what you are commenting on. Let me repeat: you can either attribute innovations "to random mutations, to your God creating or preprogramming each one separately, or to an inbuilt mechanism which comes up with its own inventions. That is what we agreed to call "the intelligent genome"." If you do not agree that "the ability to use information and create something NEW with it" is a kind of intelligence, perhaps you could give me your own definition.-dhw: And so I'm prepared to consider an equally vague "panpsychist" hypothesis. You rightly oppose that with all the arguments used to oppose your own God theory ... where did the information, the awareness, the inventiveness come from? Define it, explain it. I can't, any more than you can define or explain your hidden God. But that doesn't mean I should exclude it.-DAVID: I don't have to explain God. He is a necessary being, a first cause, and you have agreed there must be a first cause.-Yes, and I wrote that the first cause "can just as easily be applied to mindless, evolving energy as to an eternal mind." If you don't have to explain the eternal mind you call God, I don't have to explain how first-cause mindless energy may have evolved into life and consciousness. It's simply a "necessary" process. -dhw: Meanwhile, what is our own "intelligence"? Materialists will tell you it's dependent on the cells and the chemical and electrical "modalities". They may be right. -You quoted this, but ignored what followed. Since you believe in an afterlife and in God, and both entail a form of intelligence that does not depend on material cells, why do you so firmly reject the idea of intelligent energy within material cells? -dhw: I haven't read Nagel's book, so I don't know if he has an answer.DAVID: The immediate need is that you read Nagel. He has very cogent arguments, but no answer, since he won't accept a first cause, as he is not Aristotelian ( a word?) in his philosophic thought basis. Take his arguments and observations and add first cause, and it all fits together. The philosopher Ed Feser, who uses Aristotle, has no problem. Read Feser also.-Nagel's arguments against materialism can hardly be more persuasive than your own, and I have long ago accepted these. No answer is no answer. That needn't stop me from proposing an answer, and obviously reading Nagel is not going to help me anyway! I assume Feser's arguments are also similar to your own, and I have my work cut out keeping up with you!