Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell @, Friday, November 15, 2013, 02:17 (3787 days ago) @ dhw


> DAVID: Not a non sequitor. That is exactly my point you are avoiding. Explain to me where the intelligence comes from. 
> 
> dhw;There are two different points at issue here: 1) How does evolution work? 2) How did it all begin? We don't like Darwin's random mutations and gradualism. You think your God crammed the very first cells with programmes for umpteen billion innovations, adaptations, strategies and lifestyles, and those he didn't preprogramme were the result of his dabbling. I'm proposing that cell communities pool their intelligences, and natural selection decides which innovations will survive. Where the intelligence comes from is point 2) ... three hypotheses: a) God, b) chance, c) panpsychist evolution.-You have it bass ackwards. How evolution works has nothing to do with the primary question. Number 2 is the issue. How did it all begin? Your panpsychist evolution implies a pan-consciousness at the very beginning. Is it your eternal first cause? Why do you keep bringing up chance ("we don't like random mutations")? We've agreed it doesn't work that way. God and panpsychism are left, sounding like two peas in the same pod.-
> 
> dhw: Same three hypotheses, each as nebulous as the other. I'm particularly puzzled, though, by your belief in first cause energy BEING intelligent, and your rejection of the possibility that it might BECOME intelligent.-Tell me how a first cause starts off as stupid and becomes intelligent. What does it study? Or how?-
> 
> dhw: Nobody knows how human intelligence arises. Nobody knows how cellular intelligence arises. The intelligence of ants appears to emerge from the cooperating community of individual ants. Human intelligence appears to emerge from the cooperating community of individual brain cells. Maybe cellular intelligence also emerges from cooperating communities of individual cells. You can't explain human, let alone divine intelligence, and yet you want me to explain cellular intelligence!-That is a strange set of statements. We know how intelligence arises. We don't know about consciousness. We know that some animals have remarkable degrees of intelligence but not self-aware consciousness. We know we developed an enormous brain. With its 100 billion neurons, and trillions of synapsees it is a giant computer far beyond the ones we have invented. It is true we don't know why that brain appeared, since it is not neccessary in ape life, unless we invoke a cause like God. And as I have told you, a point you are unwilling to accept, intelligent cells run on intelligent information in their coded DNA. Which ends up as a kind of circular arrangement. We only know of codes developed by intelligence. Do you know of a code by chance? I don't.


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