What makes life vital (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, March 06, 2015, 23:04 (3549 days ago) @ dhw


> DAVID: Exactly. At issue is the source of that information. Information is not material. It is concepts and instructions.
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> dhw: Information is also data which may be contained within material but need not have been consciously created. It is analysis and use of data that requires some form of consciousness.-Your statement appears to be a pipe dream. What data are you trying to describe? We can look at a stone and describe it and we have created data in the description. A crystal has organized data in the form of the shape of its lattice work, but that data supplies only a simple information of the structure of the crystal. I am talking about instructional information which DNA supplies. Horse of a very different color. Please describe the 'data' you are referring to.
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> dhw: If the first cause is energy endlessly transmuting itself into matter, whether consciously (theistic) or unconsciously (atheistic), information will also constantly be appearing de novo.
> DAVID: You are playing the something-from-nothing game. 
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> dhw: No I'm not. I think you are confusing de novo with ex nihilo. I am following the process whereby every innovation (de novo) has a cause, and the first cause is eternal energy producing new matter. You subscribe to the same first cause, but insist that it is self-aware.-I'm not confused. I fully believe in a first cause, nothing ex nihilo, because nothing can come from nothing.
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> dhw; You might as well say that it is very unreasonable if not totally impossible for the amorphous energy you call God to have been possessed of all the complex information required to create the complex information resulting from the big bang (if it ever happened). There is no consistency in the argument that energy cannot produce information, and therefore energy must already have had all the information all the time.-I will emphatically declare energy by itself cannot produce instructional information. Only a mind can. Life requires instructions.-> DAVID: Intelligence had to come into being before anything else. From your viewpoint, it came from no where. I'll stick with cause and effect....
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> Another dogmatic statement that has no justification. From my viewpoint intelligence MIGHT have preceded the formation of our material universe (I am an agnostic), and it might have evolved from the interaction between mindless energy and matter.-Mindless energy and matter cannot produce instructional information. Yes, dogmatic, and supported by many philosophers. 
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> As always you seize on the biological processes, which apply equally to ourselves. There are chemical processes at work when we are attracted to food, when we use energy to move, when we swallow and when we digest. But like ourselves, bacteria communicate, cooperate, take decisions. All these activities require chemical processes that are directed by mental processes, but when it comes to non-human organisms you focus exclusively on the chemicals.-Yes, because they cannot think.
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> dhw: You have done the same with your latest post, which concludes with the quote: “...such processes are not controlled by magical powers but by the interaction of biochemistry and mechanical forces.” Materialists would say exactly the same about our own behaviour, and then you would be up in arms..... The strange thing is that you are not a materialist, and yet you insist on accepting materialism for some organisms, reject it for humans, and hum and haw when it comes to some of our fellow animals.-Much of our body works in a materialistic way. I've described that with my reference to the kidney and liver. My response is graded by the complexity of the evolutionary ladder. Bacteria do not think. Cambrian animals had a degree of mentation, primates more so, and humans a huge jump beyond. Progressive complexity of the nervous system and of brains.