Free Will: Excellent discussion (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, February 20, 2015, 12:33 (3564 days ago) @ David Turell

Shapiro has stated categorically that bacteria are sentient beings. Shermer defines sentient as emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious and therefore able to feel and to suffer. My thanks to David for his detailed analysis of how bacteria respond. I shan't reproduce the quote in full, because the summary shows the crossed wires in this discussion: -DAVID: In summary, bacteria know what to do because they have been told what to do. There is no way that bacteria could have invented this information before the first primordial cells began. Hunt and peck would only lead to lifeless attempts. -As for bacterial autonomous invention, as you know, that must be done within bacterial DNA. I'm back to recognizing the original information in DNA, trying to answer the question about the source of that information and the further question of the source of added information for evolution to occur. Chance won't work. I'm back to God. You want a third way. If it is there it also must be God-given IMHO.
-There are different hypotheses to explain evolutionary innovation, but nobody knows the truth. Darwin opted for random mutations, whereas you favour divine preprogramming and/or dabbling. We have now spent long hours discussing the possibility that organisms are possessed of an autonomous inventive mechanism, and you have said that "some form of the IM may well be present. I have no problem with the concept". However, the hypothesis depends entirely on individual organisms having some kind of conscious intelligence that will enable them to change their own form, and you continue to challenge this part of the concept. The findings of Shapiro and many other experts in the field concerning the sentience of even the smallest organisms seem to me to provide a rational basis for it. (There is of course no direct evidence for ANY of the hypotheses.) The mechanism for evolutionary innovation is what I am hypothesizing about, and not the source. And so if you are now prepared to acknowledge that sentient organisms (as defined above) possessed of an autonomous inventive mechanism may be the key to solving the mystery of evolutionary innovation, I am of course happy to go along with the possibility that the source of that mechanism may be your God. What you call the “third way”, as an alternative to God and chance, is a different subject.