Consciousness; further review of current thought (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 07, 2016, 12:39 (3060 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE (NOT 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.” 
Dhw: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.
DAVID: 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. - I am not hoping, I am speculating. I offer a hypothesis, not a firm belief, but I share your view that some sort of mind is required to produce the biological complexities you have exhibited to me (not to mention the biological complexities that Darwin exhibited to me, which helped to turn me from atheism to agnosticism). The fact that some scientists believe in cellular intelligence lends scientific support to my hypothesis that all living organisms have “minds” (not to be equated with the human mind). The “reductive materialism of the research” is precisely what you object to when neurologists attempt to reduce human consciousness to the workings of neurons, but that is actually beside the point. For all we know, the brain may not be the only possible material source of intelligence/consciousness. We simply do not know the source, and we should therefore keep an open mind. But of course I acknowledge your right to abide by your firm commitment, not simply to design (which I can readily accept) but also to your 3.8-bilion-year-old computer programme/ad-hoc-dabbling hypothesis and to your scepticism concerning bacterial intelligence.