What makes life vital (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 04, 2015, 09:43 (3552 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Yes I take a reductionist viewpoint here. I claim that one can follow the biochemistry of receiving stimuli and one can follow the biochemistry of the bacterial reactions. -Agreed.-DAVID: What is not seen is the action of the information in the genome controlling this dance of molecules. Is that information in the form of mentation, as you and your Darwin scientists imply or is it implanted and automatic? This is the major difference between the ID view of biology and the Darwin view. Darwinists avoid the issue like the plague. -The major issue between us is whether or not organisms think for themselves. If a Darwinist scientist argues that they think for themselves, as my “favourite scientists” do, what issue are they avoiding? Please don't say they are avoiding the issue of where the ability to think came from. On this subject, you are debating with me and not with them, and I leave open the option that your God created the mechanism for mentation. See below.
 
dhw: In my view these terms are NOT metaphors. There is absolutely no need for scientists to describe bacteria as conscious, sentient etc. if that is not what they mean.
DAVID: Yes there is as I have explained above. To avoid the issue of where did the information in the genome codes come from. If your favorite scientists ignore the issue of information, they protect Darwinism from a huge problem, the origin of the information.-The same old escape route. Once more, there are TWO issues: 1) Do organisms think for themselves? (This underlies my hypothesis concerning an autonomous inventive mechanism that drives evolution.) 2) If they do think for themselves, what is the source of the mechanism? You persist in conflating the two issues. Autonomous intelligence does not in any way preclude the existence of God - if it did, no human would believe in God! For some reason you think my Darwin background prevents me from seeing the issue of the origin, although again and again I have emphasized my neutrality on it. Perhaps in turn you are running scared of the possibility that other organisms think for themselves because it might impinge on your belief that God controlled the whole of the evolutionary process so that it would lead to humans. Once again, the blinkering effect of anthropocentrism.
 
DAVID: One cannot tell from the outside of a bacterium whether it acts intelligently or whether it is run by intelligent information given to it. That is our difference. -Our difference is that you insist they do not act intelligently. I insist that we must keep an open mind, although the more I read, the more inclined I am to believe that other organisms, including bacteria, DO think for themselves. But I remain as neutral as ever on the source of the thinking mechanism. -DAVID: Only those two possibilities exist. I view my kidney cells automaticity equal to the bacterial cell's automaticity. We multicellular types come from single cells in evolution. What changed the single cell in the transition? The multiple cells took on different cooperative functions, no more than that, and represent a shift in the content of the managing information for different cells. This is my different view of evolution from yours.
 
No difference whatsoever. The difference lies in our view of how this cooperation and innovation (= a shift in the content of the information) might have happened: for you, divine preprogramming or dabbling; for atheists through random mutations; in my alternative, through the individual intelligences (source unknown) of cells/cell communities themselves.