Natures wonders: making spider silk (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, August 11, 2014, 23:16 (3755 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The question is whether this hidden genetic code contains instructions for all the innovations and Nature's Wonders (which you call evidence of “intricate planning”) preprogrammed - and hence surely predictable - by your God into the first living cells, or it contains the sentience, cognition, communicative skills, inventiveness and intelligence that have enabled cell communities to devise their own unpredictable innovations, as autonomous agents and not automata.-DAVID: I would remind you that your "extremely brilliant cell theory", which can plan all the complexity and coordination seen in advanced life in the Cambrian, started as musing whether panpsychism could imply these 'wonder cells' and therefore they could sit around the table and discuss the miraculous advances. Panpsychism is an extention of thought that God is in everything. In a way similar to my univerasl intelligence and species consciousness thoughts.-You needn't remind me, since I have devoted several posts to precisely this point. Any attempt to anthropomorphize cells by sitting them round a table is, of course, as unworthy as any attempt to depict God as a bearded old man. Shame on you. The similarity to your panentheism is, however, very important. If you can believe your “universal intelligence” is in all things, you can hardly reject out of hand the hypothesis that all things are intelligent, as is clear from your next remark:
 
DAVID: I'll grant you, if God is actually within everything and everyone, then your cells could work, using all the wisdom God can impart. Will you put God in there?-My hypothesis is an alternative, not a belief: God may or may not exist, God may or may not be in there, and God may or may not have invented the autonomously intelligent cell, if it exists as such. But your comment admits the possibility of cells doing their own unpreprogrammed, undabbled-with inventing, provided we say that their form of intelligence is part of God's intelligence, and by God you mean a single universal mind. Well, now that you've made this concession, try it the other way round. Cells and even particles have their own individual, autonomous forms of intelligence, and they combine to create more and more complex forms of intelligence, so that by a process of emergence through billions and billions of years, the particles of the universe and the cells of living organisms have evolved to their present state of complexity. Some people believe these billions of combined intelligences are all one, and they call it “God”.