Biological complexity: bacteria use electrical signals (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, March 14, 2016, 13:33 (3176 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I am fully convinced I have free will, philosophic debate aside. The plasticity of the brain is proof in the way it responds clearly and accurately to my use of it.-Dhw: I am fully aware of your being fully convinced of your opinions! But you have no way of proving that the interaction between your “self” and your brain has not been preprogrammed by the infinite chain of cause and effect ...- I am merely pointing out that your argument that nobody can tell the difference between autonomous and preprogrammed behaviour in cells can also be applied to your own behaviour.-DAVID: You are ignoring the by-play back and forth between my use of the brain and its plastic responses to my use and wishes. My brain never tells me to decide to do something. Nor did it dictate this answer to you.-Our subject here is not free will, but the impossibility of telling the difference between free and predetermined actions. An argument against human free will is that no one can escape the chain of cause and effect, and so all actions are predetermined by factors outside personal control. That is also your argument against cellular intelligence (i.e. all cellular actions are predetermined by an automatic cause-and-effect mechanism). You say “my” as if you knew what “you” consisted of. You don't. You believe you have some form of mind that is independent of your chemicals, but others will say the chemicals dictate to “you”. The latter is the argument you use about cells. You say yourself that it is impossible from the outside to judge which version is correct, and yet somehow, using the same arguments, you seem to know that humans are autonomous and cells are not.
 
dhw: You challenged my hypothesis of the intelligent cell as the driving force behind evolution and asked if there was any semblance of proof. I have returned the compliment. “There is no better explanation” is no answer. Of course there is no proof for either hypothesis, and so there is no point in your challenging mine when your own is subject to the same criticism.
DAVID: Logically the complex lifestyles shown in Nature's IQ cannot have been invented by existing organisms, which can be shown to respond automatically in an algorithm of pre-programmed choices.-What sort of “logic” is this? As with human activities, you can pinpoint all the chemical activities that accompany decisions, but you cannot pinpoint the source of the decisions themselves. Nobody knows the origin of all these complex activities. Nobody saw the first weaverbird construct the first weaverbird nest. Even with your own theory of a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for weaverbird nest-building, passed down with billions of other programmes through all the different organisms and environmental changes, the first one would still have been constructed by a weaverbird! How would you have known then whether it was preprogrammed or autonomously invented (see above)? You have admitted that your argument is based on incredulity, so please don't tell us that these complexities “cannot have been invented by existing organisms”. You simply cannot believe they were.