Convoluted human evolution: Tattersall's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 23, 2016, 13:55 (3197 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: But your IM is just an alternative for God, just as supernatural as God is.
dhw: The IM is absolutely NOT an alternative to God. The IM is an alternative to random mutations, your 3.8 billion-year-divine computer programme, and your divine dabbling. It is a hypothetical explanation of how evolution works, and it leaves open the question of its origin.
DAVID: If the IM explains evolution it requires the ability to plan. It requires a planning mind either as the inventor of the IM or the guider of the IM as you constantly remind us. - I have restored the two initial comments above (in bold), since that was the point under discussion. Your second sentence returns to the origin of the IM, which I have always left open, and then reverts to your own insistence that it requires a guide, whereas I claim it is autonomous (although God can always do a dabble if he feels like it, as suggested in the scenarios of my Denton post on 20 February). We have discussed the “ability” to plan before. Briefly, the IM or “brain” of the cell community would cooperate with other “brains” to respond to the demands of or opportunities offered by the environment - as with adaptation, which is a response and is not preplanned. If your God is as powerful as you believe, it should not be beyond his ability to create a mechanism that can work out innovations (with any necessary planning)as well as adaptations.
 
dhw: As always, I agree with you that the complexity of living forms requires mentation, but once again we must distinguish between the IM and the maker of the IM. As we have discussed ad nauseam, there are some distinguished biologists who inform us that cells are capable of mentation.
DAVID: And as I have replied ad nauseam, automatic cell functions can look just like mentation.
 
I am only explaining that there is scientific backing for the argument that cells are capable of mentation, which means there is scientific backing for my proposal even if you do not accept it. - dhw: That is the basis of my IM hypothesis to explain how evolution works. And so the question then has to be: what made the cell with its IM? Your answer is a single, universal mind (a “magical” God); the atheist answer is chance. I have offered a panpsychist variation, in which materials “magically” acquire sufficient awareness to work together. This may perhaps tie in with BBella's posts regarding Sheldrake's “morphogenic resonance”.
DAVID: You keep scrambling for alternatives. Sheldrake is only pointing out fields: human species consciousness, morphic phenotypic fields which come as part and parcel of the evolutionary process. He never says these do not come from God.

I was following up BBella's revealing comment about “drawing different aspects of information within the field “what Is” together to create the next level of “what Is”, which fits in with my pansychist hypothesis. Most panpsychist theories are actually tied in with some sort of God, but I have suggested one that is not. However, I have acknowledged that it is no more credible (or incredible) than your own God theory or the chance theory of the atheists.