cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 08:34 (2683 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: And it is my view that the origin of life is a gift. All of this discussion has to be seamless, although you delight in excluding origin of life. The only reason bacteria can do some adaptions is that they were created to have that ability. They did not develop it on their own.

dhw: I have never ignored the origin of life, but neither you nor I nor anyone else knows it, which is why I constantly repeat that cellular intelligence may have been invented by your God. You simply refuse to consider the possibility that a (perhaps God-given) cellular intelligence might exist, because of your “large organisms chauvinism” (Shapiro).

DAVID: What you have ignored is the necessary continuity from origin of life to the existing organisms we study. If cells are intelligent, where did the original intelligence in the first cells come from? You quietly drop in a suggestion about 'God-given', but after that the only other possibility is a rocky earth somehow invented living matter and gave it intelligence at the same time. You think God is a fairy tale, I think your hypothesis is all fairy tale.

How can you say I ignore it when I offer the possibility that God is the originator? (No, I do not think God is a fairy tale. I am an agnostic, not an atheist.) The other two possibilities are sheer chance or the panpsychist hypothesis I have spent so much time describing, but none of these hypotheses are sufficiently convincing for me to believe in them, which is one reason why I remain an agnostic. The problem of origin does not in any way justify your refusal to accept the possibility of cellular intelligence, but it does provide a convenient diversion from your “large organisms chauvinism”!