Free Will: Excellent discussion (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 20:18 (3566 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 20:40


> dhw: You are seizing on the word “sentient”, but Shermer and the scientists I keep referring to apparently don't agree with you. Shermer has given us a list of adjectives to explain what he means: “By sentient I mean emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious, and therefore able to feel and to suffer.” Margulis, McClintock. Albrecht-Buehler and others also use terms like intelligent, cognitive, cooperative, communicative, decision-making to describe single-celled organisms. These do not “imply” automatism. They imply thought. Your insistence that “the responses are automatic without question” seems to me misleading.-I am not trying to be misleading. I absolutely consider my viewpoint correct.
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> dhw: Of course you are free to reject the findings of “my favourite authors” and those of all the specialists who put their names to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, but please don't make out that they don't regard consciousness as an attribute of sentience.-No, I understand that they have conflated the word sentient with some degree of consciousness. I simply don't accept it. -> dhw: There are different forms and degrees of intelligence and consciousness.-For me, not at the single cell level.
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> dhw: As for panpsychism, I remain hesitant to attribute any form of consciousness to inorganic materials, but it seems to me that the case for living organisms gets stronger by the day.-Remember, I'm with Sheldrake. There is species consciousness as part of universal consciousness. That is sort of a panpsychist approach.-To clarify my thinking I've gone back to Shapiro's book: Evolution. In part one he describes cellular sensing signaling and decision making. All of it is done by a series of molecular reactions which brings information back to the genome and then 
DNA sends back signals through molecular reactions to mediate the appropriate response. The information coded into the DNA is under total control of the process. The molecules themselves do not react automatically but they follow DNA instructions at all times. He never uses the word sentient. It is not in his index. This is why I constantly refer to the source of the DNA information. It cannot have developed by chance. Basically he is saying DNA is the sentient brain you are looking for, but it is a coded automatic system of information. It is an 'if, and ,or' computerized response system. He explains how E. coli finds food with molecular reactions. It reacts appropriate to what is presented to it. Your computer does not have an original thought and neither does an E coli. Get a copy of the book and see.