Biological complexity: protozoa sans mitochondria (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, May 29, 2016, 13:34 (3100 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If your dcm is autonomous, it is exactly the same as mine, except that you give it a different motivation: it wants to be more complex for the sake of complexity, whereas mine becomes more complex because it wants to survive and/or improve.
DAVID: 'Wanting' is very anthropomorphic, isn't it? 
dhw: Why is ‘wanting' anthropomorphic? Other organisms don't speak English, but that doesn't mean they don't understand the experience of survival, danger, hunger, pain - or even improvement.
DAVID: Come on, talk with an ape and ask him what improvement is. Of course they know fear, etc., and try to actively survive. All animals cling to life. But they don't 'want'.
dhw: They know fear, try to survive, cling to life, but they don't want to live? This is simply quibbling over language. Mickey Monkey wants Minnie Monkey's banana, so tries to grab it. Find me another word for ‘want' to describe Mickey's motivation.
-DAVID: You know darn well I was referring to conceptual wanting, not immediate objective wanting a banana.
 
I would suggest that apes, like other organisms, want to live, to eat, to avoid pain, just as Mickey wants the banana, but I would go further and suggest that nest-building, use of tools, development of strategies are all evidence of conceptual thinking arising from the desire for (= “wanting”) improvement. This may extend to exploring the potential of new environmental conditions.-DAVID: Complexity explains the bush better than any other approach I know.dhw; Well, I must say I prefer it to your 3.8-billion-year plan plus occasional dabbling. An autonomous inventive mechanism explains the bush better than any other approach I know, but if you prefer to call it an autonomous complexification mechanism, that's fine with me. We'll just stick to our different views on the methods of and motivation for the autonomous mechanism.
DAVID: Well, I've said I am looking at expanding my concept of complexification, and your point is helping. Complexification just for the sake of it does explain the weird bush of life.-So does targeted complexification. But my emphasis all along has been on the autonomy of the mechanism, and “complexification” versus “survival/improvement” is peripheral. You cannot have a “free complexity mechanism” that allows the bush to “spread as it wishes” without the organisms themselves being able to invent. If their complexifications result in new functioning organs, I'd have thought you would be the last person to say “what a stroke of luck!” since complexity has always been your main argument against Darwin's randomness. The inventiveness of the mechanism requires intelligence. And so, if you are expanding your concept of complexification, perhaps you could expand it to the point at which your God has endowed organisms with the intelligence to do their own inventing.