Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 28, 2021, 11:20 (1095 days ago) @ David Turell

Homo luzonensis
DAVID: My God is allegorical, so any statement about His personal attributes means similar to at the human level. His personality, in my concept of it, is diametrically opposite yours.

dhw: 1) What did I misinterpret in your theory that your God only wanted sapiens and therefore designed thousands of life forms etc. that had no connection with sapiens? 2) If your God is allegorical, it means he is a symbol. What does he symbolize? 3) Do please tell us which of your concepts of his personality are opposite to mine, but please don't use negatives.

DAVID: My God is fully purposeful, knows exactly what He is doing and never deviates from his goals.

Questions 1 and 2 not answered. Amazingly, your concept of his personality fits in perfectly with one of the versions I have offered: his goal/purpose was to create an ever changing bush of life, he knew exactly what he was doing when he created the mechanisms for the free-for-all, and he has never deviated from it (though he might occasionally dabble).

Carbon cycle bacterial contribution
dhw: Since you believe he is always in control, do you think he deliberately created these bacteria to exacerbate the damage he knew we would cause to our planet? > Are you saying that “global warming” is not happening, the icebergs are not melting, and our governments and large numbers of our scientists are following a false trail?

DAVID: The bacteria simply help our Earth's carbon cycle, and the Earth is now warming since the ice ages. I'm with the folks not worried about the current warming.

Well, good for you. I guess it helps both of us that we are old and highly unlikely to see the full effects of global warming! My fear is that if they are unchecked, our grandchildren will look back on Covid-19 as a mere blip by comparison.

Introducing the brain: all human brains don't react the same

dhw: You have just agreed that we are not exceptional in being individually different, and now you want to plug exceptionalism! But yes, intellectually we are indeed exceptional. This does not upset Darwin’s theory in the least, since you also believe in common descent. Unexpected by whom?

DAVID: Darwin's survival theory cannot explain us. Apes survived without our brains.

Of course it can explain us. A vast proportion of our inventions, conventions, institutions and lifestyles have arisen out of improvements to our chances of survival. Apes and all the other extant life forms have survived without our brains because they don’t need our brains to survive. How does that invalidate Darwin’s theory?

Genes driving towards sapiens
DAVID: […] The major finding fits what we already knew from archaeology, modern sapiens evolution was on a fast unnatural evolutionary drive. God may have inserted a fast-driving coded process or may have pushed it Himself.

dhw: The “fast-driving coded process” of complexification (with minor expansion) in modern sapiens – which you have agreed works autonomously – is what I call cellular intelligence. What else could it be if it works autonomously?

DAVID: We do not know how speciation occurs. I say God does it.

You were talking about modern sapiens’ evolution, and you have agreed that our brains work autonomously – i.e. God does not think our thoughts for us, and does not pop in to complexify our networks or expand our hippocampus. So what mechanism can you think of that might enable our brain cells to work autonomously if it is not cellular intelligence?