More Denton: Reply to Tony (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, August 14, 2015, 17:18 (3389 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Tony: The issue with autonomous intelligence is still the generation of new information, as opposed to working within pre-defined limitations. If I saw concrete evidence of invention on the part of a cell, I would lend the autonomous cellular intelligence theory more credence.-I am not asking you to lend it credence, but simply to remain open-minded. Just like David's theory of a 3.8-billion-year programme or divine dabbling, and your own theory of separate creation, and the materialist theory of spontaneous generation, there is no concrete evidence. If there were, we could dispense with all the other hypotheses.-DAVID: The obvious issue is the analysis of a new experience. Take the dinosaurs and the meteorite. Could they analyze what to try next? No, they didn't have the capacity. On the other hand, advanced animals like wolves can figure out some changes in hunting skills and strategies and pass them down. At the single cell level, no way. They don't analyze, they can only respond in limited ways.-Dinosaurs did not have the “capacity” to adapt to changed conditions after the meteorite. Some other organisms did. What is this “capacity”? According to you, it is a computer programme inserted by God into the first living cells to be passed down to their descendants. So what happened? Some inherited the survival programme and some didn't? Sheer luck, or God predetermining which organisms would survive and which would not? You can't even say if he organized Chicxulub or left it to chance (all part of your woolly concept of “guided” evolution). In my hypothesis, devised to explain the higgledy-piggledy history of life on Earth, the dinosaur cell communities did not have the form/degree of “intelligence” (perhaps designed initially by God) that would enable them to cope with the chance-changed environment. Who needs preprogramming and dabbling? Either the particular “cellular intelligence” can work things out, or it can't.-You acknowledge autonomous intelligence in wolves figuring out their own strategies, but ants apparently can't, and bacteria can't either. Their strategies have to be preprogrammed. All organisms can only respond in “limited ways” - a wolf can't suddenly decide to fly. But within the limitations of their own nature, even you can't tell if they are using a form of intelligence, and yet somehow you know the wolf does and the ant and the bacterium don't. -TONY: Yes, but how could they analyze environmental detail? Say, temperature and salinity. Chances are, they would die before they could make the necessary adjustments, because the adjustments would have to be made in response to the environmental change within the organism while it is experiencing it.-That is why we have extinctions, though some are gradual, for instance as resources run out. Survival depends on the ability of the cell communities that make up the organism to come up with a solution to the problem. This applies whether you believe in evolution or in separate creation or in chance: the mechanism for finding a solution has to be there - one of a billion programmes handed down from the beginning of life, God personally intervening, programmes to be handed down by the prototypes? Or perhaps the result of autonomous intelligences succeeding or not succeeding in finding a solution? We don't know, and so you rightly - in my view - opt not to give a definitive answer. But some of us may have a sneaky feeling that certain answers are more likely than others!