Different in degree or kind: Sapiens begin brain use (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 24, 2016, 12:58 (2952 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I manage my consciousness through the instrument of my brain, which receives consciousness for me to mold as myself. My brain is material managing a non-material consciousness.

“I” = your self. But if your brain “manages the consciousness, shapes its knowledge and experiences and sense of self”, it is the brain that fashions your self! It should be the other way round if you believe in a disembodied self (your “soul”): your immaterial soul should manage your brain, which would then be the material instrument that implements the soul’s instructions.

dhw; Any idea WHY your God would provide all these wrong choices, then? And what other guidelines can you think of?
DAVID: Not wrong, but inadequate for the stress.

So your God provides choices to solve every single problem for the next 3.7 billion years, and those that are inadequate for a particular problem are not wrong. That'll be a nice consolation for those who have to say goodbye.

It doesn’t matter to me whether you call these choices patterns, pathways, programmes, or guidelines - they all amount to the same thing: a flexible code which can be adapted to or can exploit changing environmental conditions. The ultimate questions are how the code came into existence, and how organisms use it.

DAVID: I have read articles on alternative programs for change built into DNA with patterns that allow for mutations to more easily jump the gaps. Here is my previous entry:
Thursday, April 21, 2016, 01:52 (186 days ago) @ David Turell
This article takes from Andreas Wagner's work to show that evolution has amazing biochemical patterns to follow…

Wagner thinks life itself and the evolutionary mechanism were the result of a “happy accident” and “innovative solutions to selective pressures… are there for the taking when the circumstances compel it.” As you say, all “natural”, whereas you see every innovative solution as the result of planning. We both disagreed with Wagner, so I don’t know why you have brought him up again. If I wear my theist’s hat, our own disagreement is over how organisms use the flexible code (elsewhere you called it variable), and I see cellular intelligence as a more likely answer than an almost infinite number of innovative solutions packed by your God into the first cells to be handed down through billions of years for organisms to take a lucky dip when the time and conditions are right.