Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 26, 2013, 15:35 (3773 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: Once again you are scuttling off to hide behind the flexible term "information". Let us say, then, that God gave cells the internal information that enables them to gather information from outside, process it, communicate with one another, make decisions and implement their decisions. These latter abilities are what I understand by intelligence, and by that definition, cells are intelligent.-Please remember, for bacteria these attributes of intelligence are for very simple processes. They are using intelligently supplied information. In a kidney cell, it is not cooperating with its neighbor. They both are set to judge the level of sodium to leave behind or send off to the bladder. But it takes millions of individual cells doing their own thing to make an intelligently designed kidney. All cells operate from information. thre is no way around that statement.
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> dhw: We have long since agreed that humans were not "necessary" and indeed nothing was "necessary" once bacteria appeared on earth. There is no reason to suppose that the trilobite, the Venus flytrap, the raft-making fire-ant, or Tyrannosaurus Rex were "necessary" either. The fact that so many organisms have survived on Earth so much longer than us hardly makes us into an "obvious thrust", let alone something that was preprogrammed right from the very first cells.-The big philosophic "BUT" is still if we cannot invoke necessity, why did life appear and why did it arrive at humans? Agnosticism cannot explain that issue, nor seems to want to. I feel I have a reasonable explanation. All you have is chance. In equating chance against a supernatural source, which is the entire battle in a fews words, I've chosen the latter because it is the better explanation, since some of the steps taken are truly miraculous, and the whole process reeks of teleology.