Species consciousness and instinct. (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, October 25, 2013, 17:08 (4047 days ago) @ David Turell

Despite your claim that you don't try to read God's mind, you insist that he created life and evolution to end up with human beings. If this is so, every innovation from toes to nose, from thighs to eyes, from hips to lips must have been preprogrammed. And yet God "didn't design everything. He gave living organisms the ability to respond with unique answers." And "God gave them the ability to sense information and some degree of epigenetic decision making..." So all the different noses, eyes and hips that preceded our own were...designed or not designed by God? You have said repeatedly that divine preprogramming is the only explanation for innovations, and all cell communities are automatons, and yet there is room for individual decision-making. The confusion is all too evident in our next exchangeAVID: My thought is that cells use intelligent information, which removes the implication that cells themselves are intelligent. An analogy is we go to the library or Google to find intelligent information to use.-dhw: An excellent analogy, except that information has no intelligence of its own. Intelligent beings like you (and sometimes me) go to the library to find information, and we then (hopefully!) use it intelligently. Your focus is always on the information, whereas mine is on the USE of the information.-DAVID: You misunderstand the concept. The information the cells have is also the information of how to use the stimuli they receive to respond. There are responses based on the type and intensity of stimuli. They have all the information they need to proceed.-Information of how to use information = instructions. If you have a million situations, you need a million sets of instructions. Are cells (cell communities) compelled to follow specific instructions, or do they have information that enables them to make their own choices? If they are compelled, they are preprogrammed automatons. If they can make their own decisions, i.e. can make their own judgement about what information to use and how to use it, they are not automatons, which means they have intelligence of their own.
 
Dhw: Life is indeed a continuous process, and so information gathering also has to be a continuous process. ....Automatons can only take preprogrammed decisions.-DAVID: Exactly as explained above. Cells have read/write computer programs. That is why the ID love Shapiro. They all agree, and why Larry Moran hates him, he is such a threat.-I don't care who loves or hates whom. I just want to clarify your basic premises. Do you believe God preprogrammed the first cells to produce all the innovations that have led from eukaryotes to us humans? If so, did God preprogramme all the pre-human variations on these innovations (leading to the billions of different species), or did the cell communities have the ability to take their own decisions?