Biological complexity: managing cellular oxygen levels (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, October 20, 2019, 10:20 (1862 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: This means that organisms are aware of existing dangers, learn from experience, find ways of combating the dangers they know exist, and these ways are passed on by cellular memory to subsequent generations. No crystal ball necessary.

DAVID: your bold is a possible just-so story. It requires conceptualization, so I don't know if it fully explains the insects' instinctual behavior.

dhw: So at least you now think that the above is possible. That’s progress. Thank you. I accept the cavil that we don’t know if it “fully explains” their behaviour, since nobody has yet found a “full” explanation of how consciousness and speciation work at any level.

DAVID: Not knowing the source of consciousness does't answer the issue of possible precognition of future events.

dhw: There is no precognition of future events, as I keep trying to explain.

DAVID: How do the insects know the future of their larvae, if they do not watch in the future?

dhw: I keep repeating that I cannot give you an explanation for how each and every natural wonder originated, but it is perfectly possible that the method was invented when Mr and Mrs Insect noticed that their larvae were being killed off, and so they devised a method to ensure their survival, and when the method succeeded, it was passed on to subsequent generations, and then they didn’t have to watch any more. In your desperation to have your God anticipating the future on behalf of all the organisms he designed before designing the only organism he wanted to design, you persist in focusing on one out of millions of strategies, and trying to wriggle out of the sheer common sense of the bold at the start of this post.

DAVID: I agreed above, your theory is a possibility, if they watched and the quit watching when the problem was solved. But we cannot know if they watched in the beginning, because we do not know if they can conceptualize a solution like we would with our abilities. I think you hope for special insects with some degree of our consciousness. I still doubt it.

I don’t hope for anything. You asked me for a possible explanation, and I gave you one. I don’t know why you refer to “special insects with some degree of our consciousness”. Insects were here long before us, and I do not regard consciousness as the exclusive property of H. sapiens. What I have described in bold is consciousness, but it is not “conceptualization” in the sense of abstract planning for the future. They don’t need a crystal ball to know that they are confronted by a present danger and must find a means of combating it if they are to survive.