Free Will: Excellent discussion (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, February 19, 2015, 18:03 (3347 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Your insistence that “the responses are automatic without question” seems to me misleading.
DAVID: I am not trying to be misleading. I absolutely consider my viewpoint correct.-Sorry, that was not meant as an accusation! You missed out my explanation: “Many of our own responses are automatic, but this does not preclude the existence of a mechanism that is NOT automatic - i.e. that deliberately processes the information automatically collected by the senses or their equivalent.” You focus on physical processes, but as with human thought, the physical manifestations are all we can observe. We don't know how they cause or link up with thought.-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.
DAVID: No, I understand that they have conflated the word sentient with some degree of consciousness. I simply don't accept it. -Fair enough, but I hope you will understand that for a layman like myself it is impossible to accept your word against theirs.-dhw: There are different forms and degrees of intelligence and consciousness.
DAVID: For me, not at the single cell level.-It doesn't matter much for the big picture of how evolution may have worked. As we agreed before, evolution proper began with multicellularity, and if you accept that multicellular organisms are sentient, emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious, intelligent, cognitive, cooperative, communicative, decision-making beings, you are well on the way to accepting the possibility of an autonomous inventive mechanism.-DAVID: 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. [...] 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.
 
All living beings try to react appropriately (= adapt) to what is presented to them, or they won't survive. Nobody knows, though, how innovation works. The E. coli's intelligent response to its surroundings may give us a clue: the mechanism for adaptation might, under certain conditions and through certain individuals have engineered innovation. (If we accept common descent, innovation must always take place within existing individuals.) See above for the problem of observing thought. -On the subject of single-celled organisms and sentience, please read the following statements by Shapiro:-•	Bacteria are small but not stupid:-http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.371.1320&rep=rep1&type=pdf-QUOTE: “40 years experience as a bacterial geneticist have taught me that bacteria possess many cognitive, computational and evolutionary capabilities unimaginable in the first six decades of the 20th Century. Analysis of cellular processes such as metabolism, regulation of protein synthesis, and DNA repair established that bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus. [...] Examination of colony development and organization led me to appreciate how extensive multicellular collaboration is among the majority of bacterial species. Contemporary research in many laboratories on cell-cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis show that bacteria utilize sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of “higher” plants and animals to meet their own needs. This remarkable series of observations requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognize that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.” [My bold]-
Quote: “My own view is that we are witnessing a major paradigm shift in the life sciences in the sense that Kuhn (1962) described that process. [...] Informatics rather than mechanics is now the key to explaining cell biology and cell activities. Bacteria are full participants in this paradigm shift, and the recognition of sophisticated information processing capacities in prokaryotic cells represents another step away from the anthropocentric view of the universe that dominated pre-scientific thinking. Not only are we no longer at the physical center of the universe; our status as the only sentient beings on the planet is dissolving as we learn more about how smart even the smallest living cells can be. [My bold]-You may recall that in the discussion under “Bacterial Intelligence”, although he found the question hard to answer, he concluded: “...if that isn't self awareness I don't know what is.” And if that isn't an argument for autonomous intelligence, I don't know what is.