Biological complexity: bacteria use electrical signals (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 15, 2016, 13:59 (2957 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: Our subject here is not free will, but the impossibility of telling the difference between free and predetermined actions......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.-DAVID: I think your discussion is apples and oranges with single cells and brains light-years apart. Single cells are not multicellular organisms. Our brains are most complex organs every to appear and create phenomena that we still can't explain. My brain and I interact in the plasticity we have discovered. Since my brain and I interact beneficially, a point you ignore in your discussion, I see a cooperative brain, not a dictatorial one. Note the philosophy of no free will antedated the discovery of plasticity. -I know what you think and see, and at no time have I or any of the scientists we both refer to ever equated cellular intelligence with the human brain. Cells don't even have brains, but these particular experts believe they have the ability to think for themselves, regardless of our brain plasticity. You don't agree, and you keep telling us that what appears to be autonomous behaviour is actually automatic behaviour, and nobody can tell the difference from the outside. I am merely pointing out that determinists can use the same argument about human free will.
 
dhw: 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.
DAVID: With good reason. Their brains are too simple to be so inventive.-Man is so sure of his dominion
That he states as fact his mere opinion.
(New Taunton proverb)