A new synthesis: Four dimensions of Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, December 12, 2015, 15:15 (3050 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I agree that the one-toed horse is a modification, and it does not require the inventive intelligence we see in the whale series.... but I wouldn't call a 3.8-billion-year old computer programme for every evolutionary innovation simple either.
DAVID: Remember I don't know either whether the program exists. It is just one of several possibilities if God guides evolution.-The only other possibilities you have come up with so far are dabbling or a watered-down version of my autonomous inventive mechanism which is neither autonomous nor inventive.-DAVID: But that hypothesis leaves out a drive for humans; they then are an accident of chance, a la Gould.
dhw: Of course it leaves out a drive for humans. That is the issue we are debating: your belief that your God geared evolution to the production of humans...... All three explain the higgledy-piggledy bush, and even 1) is designed by the mechanism, but humans are not your God's purpose.-DAVID: You are a great playwright, but your imagination of God's purposes does not look at the results of evolution. Have you every answered the question, why are there humans at all? Never required by nature when they showed up. Everyone else was doing fine.-I have answered it a thousand times: nothing beyond bacteria was “required by Nature”, but dinosaurs, the weaverbird and the duckbilled platypus all showed up. I have indeed looked at the results of evolution, and I see an extraordinary variety of life, and I learn that 99% of the variety has died, and none of this fits in with what you call an “arrow of purpose”. Even you have admitted you don't know how your God “guided” evolution, and your 3.8-billion-year computer programme may not even exist. The trouble is, “your imagination of God's purposes does not look at the results of evolution.” Your imagination does not look beyond humans, and so you refuse to consider other explanations. You have even left out two hypotheses (2 and 3) in which humans did have a special place, but perhaps you can't bear the thought of your God not knowing everything right from the start. -dhw: Random mutations within God's mechanism are just another example of divine design without humans as the purpose of every phase.
DAVID: See Noble's lecture. NO random mutations.-I do not believe in random mutations either. But some people do. I have simply listed all the far-fetched options, including your 3.8-billion-year computer programme for all innovations, lifestyles etc., which I don't believe either. -dhw: ...Since the only intelligence we know is associated with materials, the claim that “first cause” is intelligent is no more credible than the claim that intelligence can arise “de novo” through a particular combination of materials. Of course it's far-fetched.
DAVID: What is farfetched is assuming that 'somehow' consciousness can arise from non-living inorganic material. See Haisch's lecture. -You are repeating my own acknowledgement that it is far-fetched. What you cannot see is that your own concept of an eternal sourceless know-it-all intelligence is equally far-fetched. That is why you need faith to believe in it.-I listened to Haisch's lecture, in which he claims repeatedly that consciousness creates reality and reality depends on consciousness (sometimes substituting observation for consciousness). Then at long last someone asks him if there is no reality on a lifeless planet, and he has to scrabble around for a non-answer. Then a girl says there's a crowd of people with a rock in the middle, so does he mean the rock disappears when nobody is looking at it, or when they all go away, and he says he ”wouldn't go that far” and ”there is a mystery here.” I would say the mystery is the weirdness of the quantum world, but that doesn't make it any more real than the world we inhabit. We had the same discussion with Ruth Kastner. We all know that conscious perception is subjective, but that does not mean there is no such thing as objective reality, and from a stubbed toe to a rocket on the moon, we have as much evidence as we are ever likely to get that there are realities outside ourselves which do not disappear when we are not looking.