cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, July 20, 2017, 11:40 (2681 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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”!

DAVID: You have again skipped over the continuum of intelligence point I make. The very first cells had to have intelligent information in order to function. That information cannot originate from a rocky inorganic Earth. The appearance of intelligent activity by bacteria or the cells of a multicellular organism must recognize that origin.

I hereby do solemnly declare that I recognize the fact that if cellular intelligence exists (it is a hypothesis), just like life itself it must have had an origin. I also hereby declare that nobody knows the origin of life or of cellular intelligence. And I also hereby declare that a god of some kind is one possible origin, that sheer chance is another possible origin, that some kind of panpsychic evolution is another possible origin, and that I can’t believe in any of these possible origins. And I finally hereby declare that my total ignorance of the origin of cellular intelligence (like that of life) does not mean that cellular intelligence (or life) does not exist.