Different in degree or kind: big brain evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 21, 2016, 18:07 (2682 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: … Afterlife is static, nothing changes, no new experiences other than greeting NDE's.
dhw: The patients make all kinds of claims, involving new people, new emotions, a different world, being given information they did not have beforehand. I’m not trying to make a case either way. I’m merely pointing out that if nothing can be added, there is no afterlife for the individual. There is only death. And that is not what those patients reported.
DAVID: The NDE folks are shown heaven in some cases. The NDE only see dead folks they know. The NDE'ers feel emotion because they re not yet dead. Do you think there are tea parties or any other activities in heaven?

Seeing heaven, meeting dead people they knew in life, and feeling emotions during and because of the experience (recalled later when they have been resuscitated) all constitute new information. But perhaps I have totally misunderstood your beliefs. I thought you believed in an afterlife in which you retained your identity. If there is no new information of any kind (including the fact that you are still you after the death of your body), you may as well be dead. Please explain your beliefs, and tell us why you use NDEs as evidence for them.

Dhw: Cells/bacteria had to have the capacity for change, which means plasticity. You think your God programmed them with every solution to every problem for 3.8 billion years and onwards, and I suggest that, if he exists, he gave them the intelligence to work out their own solutions. Plasticity is required for both hypotheses.
DAVID: Plasticity is not required if bacteria have all the alternative pathways they need for any crisis from the beginning, which I think they do have.

How can a cell alter its own structure, or have its structure altered by preprogramming, without having a structure that can be altered (which is what I understand by “plasticity”)?

dhw: If, as you insist, your God’s purpose was to produce sapiens, did all these other pre-sapiens/pre-whales “freewheel” their way into existence, independently of your God? Or did he specially create each one of them in order to…do what? Balance nature, i.e. keep life going until sapiens arrived? As if he couldn’t have specially created sapiens/whales in the first place?
DAVID: It is a simple concept. An inborn drive to complexity moderated by God. I can't be more specific than that since we do not understand speciation.

A freewheeling inborn drive that is only “moderated” by God (as opposed to being tightly controlled) offers plenty of scope for an autonomous inventive mechanism to do its work. This is a promising concession. It’s true that we don’t understand how speciation takes place, but here we are discussing your God’s purpose, which you insist was the production of homo sapiens. So perhaps you could just tell us if you think pre-homos and pre-whales “freewheeled” into existence or were specially created by your God, and if it’s the latter, why you think he specially created pre-homos and pre-whales if he only wanted to produce sapiens.