Biological complexity: how the cell proteasome works (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, May 08, 2017, 13:50 (2756 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This is where the design argument steps in. The biology of the living cell is too complex for anything but design to be the source of the result. The interdigitation of all the interlocking organelles each doing their own thing yet cooperating with the other parts requires design, and a designer. I see no way around this argument. We can argue who is the designer, but not the necessity for design.

dhw: Why “who”? You are immediately jumping to the conclusion that the source of the design is an individual conscious “person”. […]

DAVID: The 'who' is to get around the discussion of imagining God.

Then “what” and “it” would be far more appropriate.

DAVID: The key issue is the unimaginable complexity of life and the requirement for a designing mind to produce it. Your panpsychist alternative is a bottom up alternative which parenthetically sneaks in the 'conscious universe' concept, every rock has consciousness, which really is a version of my thought that a universal consciousness exists, God.

Most panpsychist theories are indeed theistic. However, mine is not, and these are very different concepts. Yours is an inexplicable single, eternal mind which is the source of everything, and knows and plans everything in advance – a “person like no other person”. Mine is countless individual consciousnesses (rudimentary) that inexplicably arise in some (not necessarily all) materials which over the course of time combine their limited intelligences to create increasingly complex forms of intelligent matter – just as bacteria, ants etc. form communities whose intelligence far exceeds that of each individual. Two totally different, inexplicable forms of consciousness which, to my mind and for different reasons, are equally unbelievable.