Biological complexity: feedback loops are vital (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, September 22, 2019, 10:51 (1890 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The proposal is that bacteria process information from their environment, presumably with what would be their equivalent of a brain. I don’t have time to research all the experiments and observations made by McClintock, Margulis, James Shapiro, Albrecht Bühler or all the other scientists who support the theory that bacteria are intelligent, but earlier you admitted that they are in a majority.

DAVID: Newer concepts come from a minority (Thomas Kuhn). Yes bacteria process information from their environment but decision making for responses requires the use of internal information at their disposal. Where did that information come from? Your favorite scientists cannot tell you.

Or to put it a different way, decision-making requires the use of intelligence. Where did that intelligence come from? Maybe from your God. Nobody knows. Materialists believe intelligence comes from the brain, which is a mass of individual cells. In that case bacterial intelligence would come from the bacterial equivalent of a brain within a cell.

DAVID: Bacteria cannot and do not think, much as you want them to, as a way of avoiding God.

dhw: Yes, you totally reject the autonomously intelligent 50, although many scientists accept it, and for the hundredth time, this is NOT a way of avoiding God, because in hundreds of posts I keep reiterating that your God may be the inventor of cellular intelligence.But it is certainly a way of avoiding a particular theory about God's motives and methods which we humans, yourself included, find illogical.

DAVID: I find nothing illogical in my theories. Pretending that I do is silly. It dos not advance our discussion.

Your theory is that your God’s only purpose was to design H. sapiens, but he decided to wait 3.X billion years before starting to evolve (= specially design) all the different hominids and homos that led to his goal, and therefore had to evolve (= specially design) billions of life forms to keep life going. And you say to me: “Haven’t you realized by now, I have no idea why God chose to evolve humans over time.” I suggest that if you have no idea why God would choose this way of achieving his goal, you do not find it logical. Indeed, you even go so far as to say that God’s logic must be different from human logic!