Teleology & evolution: Stephen Talbott's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 07, 2016, 13:19 (3091 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: “A rather odd urgency sounds through all this earnest insistence that, while organisms certainly look as if they possessed intelligent agency, we should not be so foolish as to be compelled by the evidence of our own eyes.”
I don't suppose you are too keen on this observation, after your fifty years of dogmatic insistence that cells only look as if they are intelligent.
DAVID: Just what do you think he means? He may mean our interpretation of actual intelligence may be fooling us, and they are intelligently designed. Remember he is neutrally debating natural materialism vs. ID-Since his whole argument is based on the intentionality of organisms,I think he means some people (like you) accept that organisms look as if they are intelligent but insist that they are not intelligent. I don't see any reference whatsoever to intelligent design in the above statement. In any case, the website you later refer to is quite explicit on the subject of design: “In fact, Talbott himself is uncomfortable with the idea of design and his worldview doesn't seem to include a God, either. "The word [design] has its legitimate uses," he writes, but "you will not find me speaking of design." “-dhw; If we bear in mind that organisms are communities of cells, it is clear that cell communities are continually cooperating (play together) to produce all the processes that accompany the colossal range of behaviour that goes to make up an organism's life. 
DAVID: It is easy to say they are purposely designed that way.-Talbott is arguing that cell communities (organisms) act intentionally. Whether their intelligence was designed or not is another matter.-dhw: If cell communities are not programmed, how do they take their decisions if not with their own intelligence? However, in partial defence of David's dogmatism, I would still suggest that once an organ like the liver or kidney has been invented, the cell communities perform their tasks more or less automatically, i.e. without “thought”, until they are confronted with problems
DAVID: Why 'acting intelligently' only after their invention? Intelligently designed processes can certainly act intelligently before and after.-I'm afraid I don't understand what you are getting at. I am suggesting that the cell communities themselves act intelligently when they invent the organ, but once the organ is functioning, they will continue to do the same thing over and over again (without “thought”) until problems arise, when they will again need to do some original “thinking”. This explains what you see as the apparently “automatic” behaviour of our organs.-QUOTE: “It brings forth this or that kind of growth with no need for the artifice of an alien hand arbitrarily intervening to arrange parts and causal relations this way or that.” 
dhw: I'd be interested to know just what he is referring to with his “alien hand”, but once an autonomous inventive mechanism is in place, by definition it won't need to be dabbled with. 
DAVID: He can certainly be referring to a designer. Remember his premise: evolution is a natural event or the result of ID.-I agree, and if we are right, this clearly means that evolution does not need any divine dabbling (i.e. the mechanism for evolution is autonomous). -dhw: Talbott has obviously encountered his own equivalent of a David Turell! The intelligence of organisms (i.e. cell communities) is not to be equated with human consciousness.
DAVID: Of course he knows my thinking. He sees it in the ID movement. And I agree with him. The apparent intelligence in cells or organs is the result of intelligent planning. It is not at our level of consciousness.-But he does not agree with you. His whole case is based on the argument that the intelligence is not “apparent” but real, and he is not interested in whether this real intelligence is the result of your God's intelligent planning. But he, you and I do agree that the intelligence of cell communities is not the same as human consciousness.-dhw: I can't find any indication of Talbott's beliefs on Google, but I suspect from his moderate, balanced, carefully reasoned tone that he is an agnostic! 
DAVID: He seems agnostic to me also. Bethell's review of Talbott is here and expresses the opinion that he is agnostic: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/03/its_life_all_th057251.html
Note this is from an ID site, very comfortable with Talbott.-There is no reason why an ID site should be uncomfortable with this view of evolution, as it still allows for your God to have created the autonomous inventive mechanism. Talbott is not discussing the existence of God but only the question of how evolution works. In my amateurish way, that is precisely what I have also been doing.