Afterlife: Pinker's skeptical thought (Endings)

by dhw, Thursday, June 11, 2020, 10:30 (1627 days ago) @ David Turell

Under "A PHYSICIST BELIEVES IN FREE WILL":
QUOTE: "As explained by Denis Noble and Raymond Noble in their paper for the journal Chaos in 2018, molecular randomness gives cellular mechanisms the option of choosing the outcomes they want, and discarding those they don’t."

dhw: I found his purely materialistic view generally difficult to reconcile with the concept of free will, but the above quote clearly proposes that cell communities make their own choices (one up for cellular intelligence), and if we were to expand that proposal to the thinking part of the materialist’s brain, then clearly we can argue that our own personal thinking cells make our choices our own!

DAVID: i remind that cell choices may be according to guiding instructions they contain.

If cells do not have the option to make their own choices but can only follow instructions, the materialist would have to reject the concept of free will.

dhw: Unfortunately, our fundamental difference is the NATURE of intelligent activity. You insist that each activity has been programmed or dabbled by your God, and the cells are automatons obeying his instructions, whereas I propose that cellular intelligence is autonomous.

DAVID: But you have no explanation for the origin of cellular intelligence.

dhw: I have always allowed for God as the designer. The subject under discussion is not the origin of cellular intelligence but WHETHER cells are intelligent or not.

DAVID: Or designed to react intelligently follwing guideline instructions

Yes, that is the “or not” part of my sentence. Let us remember that your “guideline instructions” = a divine 3.8-billion-year-old programme for every intelligent reaction, or a direct divine dabble.

dhw: All three “first causes” require blinkered faith if anyone is to believe in them.

DAVID: But one is the true first cause.

But nobody knows which it is. Hence the need for blinkered faith.

dhw: You missed the point. The article confirms what I told you would be the atheist approach.

DAVID: No I didn't. I simply objected to the assumptions in the quote, asking how do you get from here to there? Neither meteorite nor endogenous formation explains any of the process that made live life. The atheist approach is no approach at all, just hollow words.

Agreed. It is on a par with the explanation that the origin of life is an unknown, unknowable, hidden, immaterial being without a source who knows everything and can do anything and whom we can call God or Allah or Jehovah or anything we like.