Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Sunday, April 04, 2021, 11:10 (1119 days ago) @ David Turell

Introducing the brain
DAVID: I can tell the difference in a half-second of time. Touching a hot pan or a pinprick. Watching the phlebotomist take blood, instantaneous pain.

dhw: What is your point? And what was Egnor’s point?

DAVID: The soul in action.

Which presupposes the existence of a soul. Please explain why, without the existence of the soul, it is impossible for a person to believe that he feels the prick immediately even though in fact it has taken half a second for the sensation to travel from fingertip to brain.

Tectonics and environment
DAVID: Still confusion: sensory information is not instructional information. Both exist. Sensory is passive, while instructional describes actions to be taken.

dhw:I understand perfectly that you want to jump on the “information” bandwagon, which at one time led you to create a thread with the absurd title: “Information as the source of life”! I think that in the end you grudgingly acknowledged that you thought God and not information was the source of life.

DAVID: Only God can be the source of the information is DNA code.

That means that God is the source of information in the DNA code. How does that make the information into the source of life? You might as well say that the instructions enclosed with your bottle of medicine are the source of your medicine.

Nasty butterflies
DAVID: I'm only describing the war for eating.

dhw: But you are suggesting that the war is a free-for-all. So do you think your God preprogrammed/dabbled all the methods of obtaining food (and avoiding becoming food), or did he give life forms the means of working their methods out for themselves in a “purposeful free-for-all”?

DAVID: We both know organisms can make simple adaptations in answer for the war they wage.

It’s never been clear to me where you draw the line between your God’s total control and lack of control. He can’t control the errors that occur in his system of life, he deliberately gives up control in allowing free will, he doesn’t control brain complexification but absolutely has to control brain expansion, and now he has given up control to allow caterpillars to eat one another, but he absolutely has to control the possum’s strategy of playing dead. And to add to the confusion, deliberately giving up control makes him “human”, but maintaining total control (although sometimes not maintaining control) does not make him “human”. Same problem repeated under “Chixculub”. You simply want to pick and choose which human attributes he may or may not have, and you can’t even find any consistency in your own concept of total control.

Genome complexity
DAVID: Innate Intelligence or intelligent design? Design is obvious.

dhw: These do not have to be alternatives. Your God could have designed the innate intelligence.

DAVID: So you are back to accepting design.

I have always accepted the possibility that there is a God who designed cellular intelligence. I am an agnostic.