Proof of ID (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 26, 2013, 15:20 (3985 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Another diversion along a well-worn track! Of course intelligence is not consciousness, especially when you try to equate consciousness with self-awareness and introspection. (None of the "intelligent cell" scientists claim that cells are self-aware.) Throughout this correspondence, I have repeatedly explained that by intelligence I mean the ABILITY to perceive, process data, communicate, cooperate, make decisions etc., as bacteria and ants do.-All of this can be accomplished automatically. All weaver birds make exactly the same nest, just as each species of spider, who are web builders, use the same design. What ants and bacteria are doing are not complex. The problem is we cannot fully understand or explain instinct.-> dhw: It is clear even from your concession that this form of information gives them the ability to perceive and process data, communicate, cooperate, make decisions etc. And that, according to conventional definitions, makes them intelligent. By all means argue, if you wish, that their ABILITY to do the above is God's creation, but please recognize the fact that automatons do not have what you yourself called "an inventive intelligence".-I repeat: if an organism uses intelligent information to seek food, to avoid a predator, to reproduce, which roughly all a bacterium can do, those very simple processes can be accomplished automatically . The ant hill looks complex but so do fractals, which may well be used to describe the result of ant work. Each worker ant has his set job, which when integrated with the other set jobs builds the hill. 
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> dhw: You have left out the preceding clause: "...you have no way of knowing whether cells and cell communities have their own form of 'emergent' intelligence." Of course biochemical reactions are all biochemistry, but we are talking about intelligence, and if that can "emerge" from human biochemistry, or ... as you claim ... mix with the added ingredient of "quantum energy", why should the same not apply to cells, bacteria, ants? An alternative, of course, is to argue (as some folk do) that humans are automatons.-There is no way you can equate any aspect of total human behaviour or couscious intelligence with ants behaviour or ? degree of consciousness. I've explained my view of ant work above.
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> dhw: My argument is not against design as such but against your continued insistence that cells are automatons, and that right from the start God preprogrammed the billions of innovations (or dabbled) leading from single cell to humans.-You keep twisting my argument. I don't think God pre-designed every nuance of adqancement to higher commplexity. Original life with its double code was given the ability to create some degree of variation, which then fits beloved Darwin's idea of natural selection, just as he saw breeders do with their animals, a form of intelligent design.