Biological complexity: managing cellular oxygen levels (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 11:53 (1859 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: The only consciousness I'll agree to for insects is that they are obviously aware of their environment and can react to it. Most of what they do is pure instinct as in monarchs metamorphosing and migrating and nothing more.

dhw: I’m happy with “most of what they do”. The same applies to all organisms, including ourselves – or do you consciously control every single process that takes place in your body? You simply refuse to accept that all the processes and decisions and variations and behaviours and strategies must have had an origin. If problems created by the environment have been solved in the past, the solutions will be passed on (in ALL forms of life, including our own). That is your “most of”. If they are new, then new solutions must be found - and that is where consciousness comes into play. All summed up in the bold at the start of this post, which you grudgingly accept and then try to brush aside..

DAVID: I'm glad you accept automatic instinct, whose origin is not understood.

dhw: Of course I accept automatic instinct. All organisms, including ourselves, function through automatic processes. That is your “most of what they do”. Now would you please accept that the rest of what they do, such as responding intelligently to new conditions, learning from experience, finding ways of combating existing dangers and passing solutions on to subsequent generations, are all evidence of consciousness.

DAVID: The usual answer, intelligent information provided by God. Weaverbird nest knots would challenge a boy scout.

Information is not intelligent. Intelligence is required to use information. Do you mean instructions? A 3.8-billion-year-old programme that the robot automatically switches on when new problems arise? Or do you mean that God popped down to earth to teach the weaverbird to tie its knots because weaverbird knots were “an absolute requirement for the evolutionary appearance of humans”? If organisms consciously observe and react to their environment, I suggest it makes more sense to have them consciously seek for solutions to new problems rather than switch off their consciousness and unconsciously switch on God’s programme, or hang around for him to hold a knot-tying lesson.

DAVID: (under “Ant intelligence”): Human traffic jams are the result of individual driver's decisions. The ants make group decisions as each individual makes the same move in coordination. I suspect a learned instinctual behavior based on standardized individual responses to stimuli, as shown in the bridge building study.

I’m glad you use the word “learned”, as opposed to preprogrammed or dabbled. How do you think the strategy first arose, and how do you think subsequent generations learned it? Don’t you think this is a prime example of the bolded statement with which I have begun this post?