Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, November 15, 2013, 20:02 (3808 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: There are two different points at issue here: 1) How does evolution work? 2) How did it all begin?
 
DAVID: 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? -They are both issues, but I can understand why you are so reluctant to discuss how evolution works. With your God stuffing the first few cells with billions of programmes for innovations, adaptations, lifestyles and strategies, dabbling (= separate creation not evolution), aiming for humans but deliberately preprogramming or creating countless other unique forms, offering multiple choices to organisms that can't take their own decisions....Much safer to ask about beginnings. Once again: three equally unbelievable hypotheses: 1) God, 2) chance, 3) my panpsychist hypothesis.-DAVID: 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.-Most forms of panpsychism are theistic, but you've obviously forgotten my atheist alternative. Instead of inexplicably conscious first cause energy, we have non-conscious energy which throughout eternity has transformed itself into matter, and as matter has gone on changing, the energy within it has inexplicably become conscious of change. That consciousness has evolved within the materials it initially gave rise to, and it has continued to evolve through cooperation. No single overall consciousness, but only an infinite number of individual consciousnesses contained within matter, though possibly surviving the disintegration of that matter.
 
Why do I keep bringing up chance? Because you keep asking how it all began, and you keep forgetting that I find the three hypotheses equally unbelievable.-dhw: 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!-DAVID: 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.-You always try to equate consciousness with self-consciousness. I don't see how it is possible for animals, birds, insects to cope with life unless they are AWARE (conscious) of their environment and of means to cope with it. And so organisms cannot act intelligently without a degree of consciousness (which does not mean self-consciousness). As for our brain, we don't know how it works. The 100 billion neurons don't solve the mystery. You even believe that consciousness/intelligence can survive without those neurons! -DAVID: 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.-Information is useless unless there is an intelligence that knows how to use it. We are all built of cells, which you say are automatons, and we all have coded DNA. If our independent human intelligence "emerges" from the interactive cooperation of automaton cells, then intelligence may have "emerged" in all forms of life, reaching back to the very formation of DNA. And if intelligence is energy, other organisms may have it too (after all, you believe in animal souls).
 
DAVID (under "Cell sensing"): Need I note that genes are just big biochemical molecules. Sensing is done biochemically. The word 'sensing', implying neurological activity, should not ever carry that implication.-In that context, our own sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing ("sensing") are all automatic processes which provide information. That is stage one. Stage two is the conscious (but not necessarily self-conscious) use of that information.