Biological complexity: homeostasis (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Thursday, October 25, 2018, 00:47 (2010 days ago) @ dhw

By Odin's hoary beard....sometimes the conversations here are enough to drive me to distraction.

It's pretty darn simple, all three of us seem to agree that blind chance doesn't really stand a chance. Yay! Which means that, unless otherwise necessary, we don't really have to keep kicking that dead horse.

That leaves purposeful design, from SOME source or another. DHW favors panpsychism, where each organism has some form of undetected(undetectable) degree of extreme intelligence, foresight, and community that allows it to dictate its own design. Or, at least, that is how it comes across. As an agnostic, getting him to commit to something is damn difficult which, by nature, makes conversations frustrating. No biggie.

David and I both agree with a theistic approach, but we differ in our speculations about the unknowable. Fair enough. We CAN'T know. Yay! We can stop kicking that dead horse too. We can still talk about it, but the constant commentary about what we can't know does not seem very productive. After all, it should be understood at that point that, if no evidence can be had, whatever we are discussing is a matter of belief or, hopefully, faith based on reason.

DHW and David both seem to flavor some form of evolution, though, I can't really see how except in the most vague sense of the term: everything changes over time, oh, and somehow common descent works even though every bit of evidence suggest strongly that it doesn't actually work.

Some topics are continuously trivialized in terms of importance, which I find both peculiar and frustrating. David links a great many articles about complexity, and yet, that complexity is delved into very little except to kick the aforementioned dead horses.

So lets take one box and label it "Things we think we understand", another labeled "Things we don't understand", and a third called "Things we can't understand". The things we do understand, let's just leave them be for a bit, unless the things we don't understand cause conflict with our supposed understanding of the things we think we understand. We can also ignore that which we can't understand, except for the occasional review just to see if new information has shed any new light.

That means we can focus on that which it is possible to understand, but which we do not understand yet. Then try to find a road map to get from ignorance to understanding. Given that we all seem to agree that 'random chance' is right out, we can examine each individual organism under a lens of 'individual purpose', or 'environmental role' if the word purpose makes your eyes twitch. And just in case you aren't sure there is one, just ask the basic question of "What would the host environment be like if <insert organism> did not exist and reproduce, or consume, produce, and/or convert materials?"

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.