Different in degree or kind: Egnor's take (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, October 17, 2016, 14:51 (2740 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Yes. I think early bacterial life came with most abilities on board.
dhw: I must say I prefer “abilities” to programmes. The ability to solve countless problems (= intelligence) must indeed have been there from the start.

DAVID: Parallel pathways are the 'abilities' I have in mind as responses to stimuli or problems. Are you really agreeing to pre-planning?

dhw: Pathways are not abilities. Pathways are choices. Intelligence is the cognitive ability to choose or even invent pathways.

In the antibiotic experiment, the drug blocks a pathway, but like any algorithm the surviving bacteria simply and automatically shift to pathway 2. There may be a pathway 3 to shift to next.

dhw: As regards pre-planning, God (if he exists) would certainly have been the inventor of cellular intelligence (if it exists), and it is perfectly logical to assume that he would have had a reason for inventing it. The higgledy-piggledy history of evolution suggests that he would have planned for the history of evolution to be higgledy-piggledy through the autonomous intelligence he invented! (But he may have occasionally dabbled, which might explain the extra degrees of human consciousness.) That is the theistic “pre-planning” that I would extrapolate logically from all the evidence available to us.

And I point to the need for a balance of nature to supply the food energy for life to persist.

DAVID: By 'talk to each other' I meant molecular signaling stimuli. They have to communicate in some way for the swaps to occur.

dhw: Precisely. Molecular signalling is their way of communicating. They have to be aware of their differences, communicate what they are each aware of, and reach agreement to do the swap. A great example of intelligent behaviour.

All done automatically with set molecular reactions.

dhw: Yes of course he does (if he exists). But since your interpretation of his reasons is so palpably illogical, and since the alternative I offer is so much more logical, why discount mine?

Illogical to you, just as yours are to mine.