Cell Memories (Identity)

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 19:18 (4058 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: I'm sorry, but first of all, I don't see how you can be conscious without having consciousness. Secondly, all you have been saying up until now is that ant automaton cells can't make ants intelligent/conscious, because cells and ants are automatons, but human brain automaton cells can make humans intelligent/conscious, only we don't know how.-'Secondly' is exactly my thought. 'Firstly', consciousness is not the same as conscious. Two different levels completely, as I have explained in an earlier post today. All animals with a brain are conscious. Their slight degree of consciousness is nothing like ours. Only we have consciousness at the level of self-aware abstract thought that is proper for planning for the future development of whatever.-> 
> dhw: So can humans. (Not too well, in my case!) You persist in ignoring the examples which show ants' "analytically developed intelligence for planning purposes". Some ants build underground cities to house millions of inhabitants: these nests have precisely regulated ventilation shafts, defence against intruders, chambers for brood rearing, food storage, even farming facilities. Are you telling me that your God preprogrammed the first living organisms to produce ants, and the first ants inherited a programme for automatic nest-building? What about the mantis? Did God also preprogramme the first organisms to produce ants which when attacked by a mantis would have one large individual sacrifice itself by getting into the mantis's jaws to block them while the rest climbed aboard and bit off its head? Was each of these ants preprogrammed to deal with every imaginable type of attack? And ants are just one of the billions of species whose behavioural patterns your God must have preprogrammed into those first few cells. And this, you say, is a belief based on your knowledge of biochemistry.-I spent a whole chapter on animal instincts. All automatic, if you remember. I don't know how it is biochemically coded. I never tried to answer that question, because there is no answer known to us at this time. We may never know. That does not mean I am wrong in my theories.