Consciousness; further review of current thought (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, July 06, 2016, 18:26 (3061 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: "To Conway Morris, to me, and to many others, it is striking how often evolution has produced the same solutions to the same problems in the same habitats with presumably the same selective pressures, starting with very different raw material.” 
> 
> It is not evolution that produces solutions. It is individual living organisms. And for you, all these different living organisms must have been preprogrammed in the first cells 3.8 billion years ago or personally ”helped” by God to find the same solution, although his purpose was to produce homo sapiens. How much simpler it is to hypothesize that individual intelligences (perhaps designed by God) might spontaneously work out the same solutions to the same problems as and when they arise. - Same answer. You are hoping that individual committees of cells can produce the biologic complexities I have exhibited to you, and I am firm in my commitment that only a planning mind can create the saltations you admit occur. You hope is certainly simple, but not supported by the biochemistry which is found in the reductive materialism of the research, the only way to find how cells work.