Brain complexity: whole brain vision mechanisms (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, November 12, 2015, 21:24 (3299 days ago) @ BBella

DAVID: For me 'mixing mindless energy and matter' is a complete non-starter. The evolution we see appears to be a driven process, if convergence is accepted. What drives the 'mindless'? I see nothing except chance permutations, which become organized into 'mind'. Yes, we can dream of the impossible, but that doesn't make it logical.-I accept convergence, and suggest that it may be driven by different intelligent organisms seeking solutions to the same problems. They are not mindless. The great question then is where did THEIR minds come from? I can't answer. Your answer is that they came from another mind but we shouldn't ask where THAT came from, because THAT didn't come from anywhere: it just IS. You can dream of the impossible, but that doesn't make it logical.-BBELLA: For me, they are entangled and cannot be separated. Intelligence, for me is like glue that holds all that IS together. Take away intelligence and you have nothing, just free floating dry dust - if that! [...] It seems to me, without intelligence there would be nothing to cause anything to ever be. So intelligence had to have always been. Just not a one minded intelligence. Just intelligence.-Basically, this is an extreme form of panpsychism: that all things have some form of mental aspect (religious panpsychists would say their God is in everything). My hypothesis concerning the intelligent cell certainly puts intelligence into all living organisms, but you agreed that the stone thrown into the water was not intelligent. This is where I find myself having to make distinctions. For me, intelligence has to entail a degree of awareness, and while I have no difficulty attributing awareness to, say, bacteria, I can't make the leap to inorganic objects like stones. On a universal level, there is an order in our particular solar system which has created conditions suitable for life, but I can't imagine our sun or the stars having a mind. I don't know what sort of “order” there is in the billions of other solar systems that come and go - as ours will eventually. So is it all just energy and matter mindlessly coming and going, and in this endless process eventually and perhaps inevitably one particular combination struck lucky? How much awareness does your intelligent “glue” have? If it's aware enough deliberately to create a universe and life, you might as well call it God. 
 
Dhw: I find both hypotheses equally incredible, but one of them must be closer to the truth.
BBELLA: I find it too incredible to even imagine intelligence to have never been.
-If we think of the universe in terms of stones spreading ripples in water, and we include consciousness and deliberate action as attributes of intelligence, is it still incredible?