Biological complexity: how we smell odors (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 01:39 (3098 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: I don't have a problem when you agree - as you frequently do - that there is a 50/50 chance that you are wrong. Under “Denton” you have acknowledged that “lesser” organisms are able to recognize beneficial relationships, and again you agree that nobody knows the extent to which individual cells (bacteria) can think.-The implication of the way you have stated my position is wrong. No one knows if cells think. But that is a concept I totally reject. They cannot think, but are programmed to look as if they can. Thru God's agency.-> DAVID: If one believes, as I do in cause and effect, there must be a first cause.
> -> 
> dhw: Once more, I also believe in cause and effect, but that does not mean the first cause has to be a conscious mind. I can ask how “pure energy” could always have been conscious (and what was there for it to be conscious of)-Itself-> dhw:and you can ask how an unconscious first cause acquired consciousness. Impossible to answer. The term is a philosophical dead end.- You can have your first cause and I can have mine. At least my thinking type can explain the complexity of reality.