Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, July 04, 2021, 15:14 (1029 days ago) @ dhw

Big brain evolution

DAVID: You miss the obvious point that damaged brain cells will not receive or use consciousness properly.

dhw: So if the brain cells of a normally placid man become diseased, are you telling us that the placid conscious "soul" tells him not to beat his wife, but the cells have a mind of their own, misread the received message and decide otherwise? Ugh, I wonder what his "soul" is thinking all this time! I’m defending the case for materialism because as usual you only see one side of the argument.

All of us are fully aware as in schizophrenia, neurons are sick and misinterpret consciousness thought. You cannot excape dualism.

Neutron star black hole merge

dhw: You refuse to consider enjoyment of creation and interest in an ever changing bush of life as his possible purpose, and you refuse to consider the possibility that autonomous beings might be more interesting than a puppet show in which he pulls all the strings. Your refusal, however, does not make such a God directionless or purposeless.

DAVID: No. it makes Him very human, not God-like with his very human-like intentions.

dhw: Thank you for withdrawing your silly argument that my proposal makes him directionless and purposeless. No thanks for your assumption that God is not God-like unless he conforms to your own humanized concept of him, as summarized yesterday:

dhw: You object to my "humanizing" him because some of my humanizations conflict with your own, though you can find no fault in the logic which explains those parts of your theories which you can't explain.[/i]

DAVID: Your humanized God has logical intentions.

dhw: Correct. This in my view makes my humanized God considerably more believable than yours, which leaves you with no idea how to explain your interpretation of his intentions and means of fulfilling them.

One of your problems is you want explanations God's actions, and they are all judgement calls based on one's analysis of God's personality.

Ant raft movements

DAVID: […] You still miss the point of my answers to your questions re' ants. Each individual ant has a limited program of action and it is those actions that create the swarms and the bridges. Stated by studies' authors!

Stated by the authors:
QUOTE: Alone, a fire ant is nothing spectacular. But lump them together, and the insects behave with what is called swarm intelligence; individuals work as a team, obeying simple rules to give rise to far more complex collective behavior.

dhw: Even your authors call it “swarm intelligence”, which covers their behaviour after the strategy has been invented. I am simply proposing that “swarm intelligence” devised the simple rules in the first place, when ants were first confronted with the problem of the gap. Now please answer my questions.

'Swarm intelligence' is the author's name for the result. The cause remains a result of individual specific actions.

Heme
dhw: I have already agreed that the complexity of living designs requires a designing mind or minds, but I distinguish between the origin of life and the process of evolution. I propose that the latter is carried out by intelligent cells (designing minds), but their origin remains a mystery. I understand why they and their possible intelligence are so complex that they can inspire faith in the existence of the designing mind you call God, and I have no objections to the argument itself. […]

DAVID: You must split origin of life from evolution to avoid God. Darwin did the same. They are a continuum.

dhw: How can it possibly be “to avoid God”, when I am proposing that the originator of the cellular intelligence might have been God? As for the agnostic Darwin, he could see “no good reason why the views given in this book should shock the religious feelings of any one” (On the Origin of Species…). Please stop pretending that a theistic alternative to your version of evolution and God makes the proposer an atheist.

You never answered my complaint. Continuum or not?