The biochemistry of cell adhesion and communication (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 22, 2015, 18:49 (3258 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Would you say that all the cooperative decisions made by ants were preprogrammed in the first cells? By wolves? By humans? Somewhere along the line, there has to be autonomy of thought. If God did not preprogramme every single communal, communicative decision made by humans/wolves/ants/bacteria, they must have the means of making their own decisions. You will accept that for humans and wolves, perhaps hesitate over ants, but you are absolutely certain that your God preprogrammed every single bacterial response to every single situation that bacteria have faced since the year dot.-I think consciousness is required for the decision-making you describe. Therefore, bacteria and cells don't autonomously decide. We don't know if ants could be conscious, but they have brains. So possibly their instincts have a degree of autonomous variability.-> dhw: My alternative is that cells cooperated to work out what they needed to do in order to filter waste, just as leaf-cutting ants cooperated to work out their own complex way to dispose of their waste, with particular ants taking on their very specialized roles. Only when cell/ant communities are faced with new problems does this cooperation require departure from the automatic role. Then decisions are made, and that is when cellular/ant intelligence is no longer automatic.-You are back to committees of cells working out roles. This requires experimentation in itty-bitty steps with no evidence of it in evolution.
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> dhw: But "my" experts keep telling me that bacteria are cognitive, sentient beings and not automatons. If we accept the term “artificial intelligence” for computers, I am asking what attributes in addition to Shapiro's list would in your eyes distinguish automatons from autonomous beings.-Your same old approach. Computers do what they are told to do.