Clever Corvids: using tools (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, September 07, 2015, 19:51 (3365 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Throughout this discussion I have asked only that you consider it possible that innovations are not preprogrammed/dabbled but are created by the independent intelligence of cell communities. If you now consider it to be one of the “probabilities”, I can hardly ask for more. Thank you.
DAVID: I don't know where you've been, but this has always been my position. Invention under limits or guidelines.-I know where I've been. I've been bogged down in your hypothesis of God programming the first cells with all the innovations and complex nests and lifestyles for the last 3.8 billion years, or alternatively intervening, because not even the poor old weaverbird was capable of designing its own nest. So this is great. Now we can agree that it is not just possible but even probable that organisms have their own inventive intelligence, subject only to the restrictions imposed by their own nature and that of the environment. (And God may have invented the inventive intelligence.) 
 
dhw: These researchers' equation of cellular behaviour with animal behaviour confirms the findings of Shapiro and Co that cells, just like ourselves and our fellow animals, process and share information, communicate it to one another, and cooperate in order to take decisions and solve problems. The chemical signals are the equivalent of the chemical processes without which we ourselves cannot perform all the activities that precede and accompany the transformation of thought into action. In other words, the chemical signals do not explain how we or they arrive at our decisions. Could it be that since you gave your lecture, science has discovered more than just the chemical signals?-DAVID: No. Once again many cellular responses are almost instantaneous and automatic based on receipt of chemical signals. You are over-interpreting in order to support your hypothesis of what is literally pan-psychism.-It is not those “many cellular responses” that are in dispute. It's the rest of the process. What these researchers have drawn attention to is “individual cells sharing their experience and information to perform a team function” - a process common “from animal species to the level of the cell”. That is not an over-interpretation. They are the words used by the researchers. Animals, including humans, share experiences and information in order to make decisions and solve problems. So do cells, according to these researchers. If that denotes intelligence in us, it denotes intelligence in cells. But this observation does not go quite as far as the panpsychist hypothesis, which extends beyond organic life. The hypothesis we are dealing with here relates only to the intelligence of living organisms and its possible (or even probable) influence on the course of evolution, which you have now agreed to, as above.