Bacterial Intelligence? (General)

by dhw, Sunday, January 25, 2015, 20:41 (3588 days ago) @ David Turell

Pamela Lyon: Microbiologists use words like 'memory', 'decision making' you know they even talk about bacteria 'talking' to one another. Now press an individual microbiologist, they might say it's just a manner of speaking. But others find it very, very useful to describe behaviour in these terms.-DAVID: Those terms make is easy to understand, because that is the way we react and we think and it is chemistry in action, controlled by intelligent information in the DNA of the bacteria. You and I differ on the source of the information.-The question here is whether bacteria are or are not “intelligent”. Under “Panpsychism” I have listed attributes that seem to me (and the participants in this discussion) to denote that they are. It may be controversial, but Shapiro calls for open-mindedness, and at the same time says categorically that bacteria are self-aware, which you have accepted.
 
Jeffry Stock: Intelligence is about taking information in the environment and making decisions that are advantageous to the organism. 
DAVID: We are seeing the participants discuss the intelligent handling of enormous amounts of information through bacterial genome controls, which per force, must contain huge amounts of intelligent information to do the interpretations.-And my point is that the intelligent handling of enormous amounts of information by living organisms denotes intelligence, not automatism.
 
Jeffry Stock: Most of the major universities in the United States at Harvard, at Yale, at Berkeley, at Princeton have really begun to delve into these organisms as models for understanding cognition without all the trappings that come with our human-centric view of intelligence...... People have a lot of problems imagining that bacteria have intelligence, that you know germs are thinking, cognizant, sentient organisms. 
DAVID: I have always viewed bacteria as intelligently designed. Please consider the origin of life and recognize that the first cells had to be close to this level of complexity. This is one of the major reasons I believe in God. The information involved in a bacteria running its life is beyond belief. That information cannot have been developed by chance or any unguided process.-Over and over again I have emphasized that I am trying to understand how evolution works. I have conceded that life and the mechanism for invention and autonomous decision-making may or may not have been designed by your God. That is not the focus here. I am offering a view of evolution occurring through the autonomy of organisms as opposed to preplanning, dabbling and random mutations. For further discussion, please see my post under “Panpsychism”.