Information Complication (General)

by dhw, Friday, November 20, 2015, 21:18 (3289 days ago) @ BBella

I am going to telescope some of the exchanges here in order to avoid too much repetition and to try and keep the arguments clearer.-Dhw: I see self awareness as the most advanced form of awareness, but a degree of awareness is integral to my concept of intelligence....I do not see existence as “being” intelligence - it is only being...
BBELLA: Yes, this is where we differ. I cannot envision any existence without intelligence. Not meaning the intelligence you envision (awareness) but a kind of intelligence that can be present in ATI. As I mentioned before, a rock is a rock, it is not no-thing. Since it is a rock and not no-thing, to me, that constitutes the presence of intelligence - intelligence at work, busy, in the process of being a rock. Over time, the rock will become something else, just as ATI does as well. ATI is THE process of intelligence busy creating WHAT IS.-I see intelligence as varying in degrees from our own down to that of, say, bacteria, but you seem to be saying that the intelligence of ATI is uniform - just the quality of being, which is shared by all things. The website you have referred us to appears to do the same:
http://www.epicenterofchiropractic.com/Philosophy.html-1 “There is a universal intelligence in all matter, continuously giving to it all its properties and actions, thus maintaining it in existence, and giving this intelligence its expression.” This is panpsychism, and some would call the universal intelligence God, an eternally conscious being that created the mechanisms for life. But that is not your concept. Instead “the mechanism that processes information and runs life and ATI” is intelligence. For me, without a definition, the word becomes as meaningless as “information” when applied indiscriminately. Information runs life. Intelligence runs life. Energy runs life. God runs life. In one of his posts, David even had life running life. As I see it, we might just as well say an indescribable something runs life, and it will have the same meaning.-Dhw: You and I are two separate intelligences, but I do not think the sun is aware of its environment, takes decisions etc. 
BBELLA: My limited intelligence does completely agree with you for what we can see and know... -This is the conventional concept of “intelligence” that we can define in terms of awareness, learning, reasoning etc., and with my own limited intelligence it is the form that I understand!
 
Dhw: What we're really asking is how did ALL THAT IS arise out of ALL THAT WAS? But we don't know ALL THAT WAS, and we don't even know ALL THAT IS.
BBELLA: As I see it, ATW and ATI is the same thing. Intelligence at work. Everything that was is now everything that is. Everything that will be, will be created from everything that now is. It is all a constant process by intelligent re-creation or recreation (lol) of matter & energy. ATI is never static and is always changing what IS. This is the work of intelligence.-I agree that everything that is came from everything that was, but as I see it, ATW and ATI are not the same thing at all, since “ATI is never static and is always changing what IS”. If something changes, it is not the same, and the great mystery of life is a prime example. At one time there was no life on earth. Now there's you and me. Perhaps this is the result of intelligent (deliberate, conscious, cognitive) design by David's God. But I can't bracket us together with a lump of rock in the middle of nowhere as if that too required the same intelligence or evinced the same intelligence as us.
 
Dhw: Matter in my view can therefore exist without intelligence.-This is where you refer us to the website, and I would like to pick out two entries which illustrate the difficulty I have with the terminology and the logic:-8 “The function of intelligence is to create force to make order out of chaos. (Chaos is the disordered state of uniformed matter and infinite space supposed in some cosmogonic views to have existed before the ordered universe.)”-“Supposed” leaves it open. So if there was no chaos, did intelligence exist without a function? If there was chaos, does this mean that matter (I don't understand “uniformed”) existed without intelligence? That contradicts everything you have said about the oneness of ALL THAT IS/WAS.
 
14 “Force is manifested by motion in matter, all matter has motion, therefore there is universal life in all matter.” -Who says that motion is synonymous with life? I know it is impossible to define life, but in every discourse most of us would agree that a dog has life and a lump of rock does not. It's the same as with intelligence. A live, intelligent rock presents enormous problems of comprehension for me, and the concept of ALL THAT IS does not solve them. This may well be due to my lack of intelligence (conventional form), but perhaps you can shine a bit more light into my darkness?