Natures wonders: seabirds, ants and viruses (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 21, 2020, 18:44 (1675 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: A non-answer. Does trial and error require intelligent analysis?

dhw: My point was that “birds try things out, learn from their mistakes, and eventually in this case come up with a highly intelligent solution.”

Still requires an intelligent analysis, which birds may not be able to perform. It may simply be "we're eating so we'll keep flying this pattern" into which they stumbled.

DAVID (under “Ant intelligence”): The information is monkey-see-monkey-do. Ants have eyes and join the others in an activity.

dhw: Which activity, since they are confronted with a choice, and why do they communicate with one another if they have nothing to “say”?

DAVID: They communicate to understand the activity required.

dhw: And obviously to decide which of these activities they would perform. Thank you. Communicating, understanding and deciding are characteristics most of us would associate with intelligence.

They simply see what others are doing and imitate. Not much for real intelligent thinking

DAVID: You still refuse to accept automatic activity from programmed information. Tell your kidneys they do not know what they are doing or why!

dhw: We are talking about ants and neurons, which reorganize themselves to meet changing requirements. Please answer my questions. (Kidneys do not reorganize themselves.)

They are organized for each specified task. Ant colonies do not reorganize. Just do what they have to do: automatically build bridges when needed,

xxx

DAVID: You have me at a disadvantage. I can't go back to a specific debate to see context, which you always leave out.

dhw: There is no other context. I have you at a disadvantage because you keep changing your mind when I probe.

It seems I constantly restate what you misinterpret.

DAVID: We've established God used viruses to guide evolution. We know viruses continue to evolve as we fight some of them. God must have allowed this degree of freedom. My impression, as before, is God allowed this to happen, and I cannot guess as to His reasons, but our big brain surely helps.

dhw: Good. You now have your God allowing things to happen instead of exercising full control - your usual mantra.

Why do you insist my God must be absolutely inflexible/rigid in everything He does?

dhw: I don’t know how this fits in with your statement that he directly designed the viruses, and I don’t know how “I cannot guess” fits in with your statement that he did so in order to test us. Your views appear to change day by day.

I've not changed. You've made your usual stretches. God must have allowed viruses to mutate on their own, which is what we see, or as you suggest, He might be driving the changes. So we come back to debating about God's personality. I suspect He is nicer than that.

dhw: My point was to show how close you are coming to the concept of your God creating a spectacle for himself to watch with interest:

dhw: I don’t have a problem with your God deliberately creating “errors” – your word, not mine - in order to see how we cope. He may also have set problems for other life forms with lesser brains to solve […] I agree with you: a cushy, problem-free existence of puppets on strings would be deadly boring for us, and also deadly boring for a watching puppet-maker even before we arrived on the scene.

All depends on your clear view of God.