Introducing James Barham (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, August 17, 2015, 14:17 (3385 days ago)

He is a philosopher of science mentioned in my last book. In this first essay he introduced and discusses the intelligent agency of life:-http://jamesabarham.com/my-blog/33-seeing-past-darwin-i-The official explanation of the nature of living things---and therefore of human beings---that we've all been led to believe in for the past 60 or 70 years turns out to be dead wrong in some essential respects.-What have we been so wrong about? It's complicated, but in a phrase, it's this:-The machine metaphor was a mistake---organisms are not machines, they are intelligent agents.-What does that mean? That's what's hard to explain in a brief compass, but here's one way of putting it:-We are finally beginning to realize, on the basis of irrefutable empirical evidence, as well as more careful analysis of Darwinian theory itself, that purposeful action in living things is an objectively real phenomenon that is presupposed, not explained, by the theory of natural selection.-What do I mean by purpose?-Purpose is the idea that something happens, not because it must tout court, according to physical law, but rather because it must conditionally, in order for something else to happen. This ubiquitous property lies at the heart of living systems, and it's what makes them so puzzling, from a physical point of view.-*****-This way of thinking proposed to solve the problem of purpose by denying it was real. Living systems were just accidental conglomerations of parts that happened by pure chance to work together as a functioning whole. And all the changes that organisms have undergone during the process of evolution---ditto.-In other words, nothing in organisms happens so that the whole organism may live. Rather, stuff happens, and organisms just happen to live as a result.-A pretty nifty theory, that---if it made sense.-The trouble is, it never made any sense. For one thing, it meant that all purpose is an illusion, even in ourselves, which is absurd. We know that is not true from the direct evidence of our own experience.-So, one important difficulty with the theory of natural selection is that it contradicts everything we understand about how we ourselves work.-But that is only the beginning of the trouble with Darwinism. An even bigger shortcoming of the theory is that it simply took all the hardest parts of the problem of purpose as given.- How did those incredibly complicated systems imbued with purpose through and through, which we call "cells," come to be in the first place? Nobody has a clue.-***-Finally, we now know that living systems are autonomous agents, capable of highly flexible intelligent behavior. For example, even the simplest, single-celled organisms, such as bacteria, are able to adjust themselves to altered circumstances in a purposeful way. And they can do this even if the circumstances are unlike any ever encountered by their ancestors during their evolutionary history.-How are systems physically capable of this sort of intelligent, adaptive behavior? Again, all the Darwinist has to say is: Intelligent agency would be a great thing to have from the point of view of natural selection, therefore natural selection will see to it that it comes into existence.-In summary, for the Darwinian explanatory framework to make sense, we have to suppress all the toughest questions about living things and simply take their adaptive capacity, their robustness, and their very existence for granted. Then---and only then---does natural selection make sense.-But in that case, we are just assuming that organisms are intelligent agents. We are not explaining how there can be such a thing as intelligent agents.