Biological complexity: managing cellular oxygen levels (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 24, 2019, 18:59 (1857 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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: Yes "Intelligent information" is instructional information which can be used directly and automatically to solve problems, by organisms that cannot conceptualize. I fully believe God helped the weaverbirds. See my entry on self-awareness and who can conceptualize solutions.

dhw: See my response to that entry on the Dennett thread. I realize that you fully believe your God preprogrammed the weaverbird’s nest 3.8 billion years ago, or popped in to give the bird a course in knot-tying, and that this was an indispensable factor in his preparations for the design of H. sapiens, which was his one and only purpose. I remain sceptical.

Of course you do.

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.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: But it is based on expecting rote behavior by programmed ants, as previously shown.

dhw: You have never shown that the first ants to solve problems of traffic jams and gaps to be bridged were preprogrammed to do so 3.8 billion years ago in the first cells. Once a problem has been solved, the solution will be passed on, but it takes intelligence to solve the problem in the first place.

The finding in bridges was that each ant was programmed to do his own individual standardized response. Intelligence involves conceptualizing a solution. In this case according to the article:

"What they saw surprised them: when density increases, ant flows (1) swell and then become constant, whereas human traffic, above a certain density threshold, slows to zero flow and causes a jam (2). Ants, on the other hand, accelerate until a maximum flow or capacity on the path is reached. When traffic becomes too dense and causes too many collisions between ants, they change tactics, preferring to avoid time-consuming collisions instead of continuing to accelerate. Similarly, researchers noted that at excessively high density levels, ants refrain from joining the flow of traffic and wait for it to thin out instead."

Individual ants work in unison as programmed, while humans act individually. No conceptualization required.