Cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 09, 2022, 10:28 (988 days ago) @ David Turell

Immune system

DAVID: Every organism has an immune system or there would be no life. Your tortured view gives your god a weird uncontrolled outlook or lack of purpose.

dhw: Of course every organism has an immune system, and every organism is under threat from other cells/cell communities that threaten it. If you think your God created the cells which attack and the cells which defend, why is it weird to assume that he wanted the conflict? Back to theodicy: what do you think was his purpose in creating what you have called “the constant war to survive by eating”?

DAVID: It is not purpose, it is the result of the life from He started which requires the constant intake of energy. That there are bad bugs has been discussed as the result of 'bad' bugs just being in the wrong place.

I’d have thought your all-knowing, all-powerful, all-purposeful God would only create what he wanted to create. Are you now saying the “constant war to survive by eating” was NOT part of his plan?

dhw: If your all-powerful God gives instructions which don’t work, or he tries unsuccessfully to solve problems and so leaves it to us to achieve what he can’t achieve, don’t you think you’re kind of belittling him?

DAVID: His system does the best it can do. All discussed before.

Wonderful. You now have his system working independently of him and doing its best. Out goes total control, and in comes a free-for-all.

DAVID: You constantly belittle, I never do while constantly having to defend Him from your complaints about Him. He has done a marvelous job getting us into this reality, and all you can do is complain.

They are NOT complaints about him! They are complaints about the illogicality of your theories! I love and marvel at life just as much as you do, but I offer different (theistic) explanations for the history of life as we know it.

DAVID: When I ask about what your god might do, I find is is unsure of himself, experiments and set up entertainment that he can enjoy. That is no sort of supposed god I can be interested in knowing or recognizing.

I know you’re not interested in any theory different from your own, and therefore try to denigrate alternatives by using derogatory language. The concept of a God who enjoys creating, is interested in his own creations (your guesses as well as mine), maybe likes to experiment and to open himself up to new ideas, seems to me to be perfectly feasible and not at all belittling.

Cells
DAVID: Too long to edit, a bottom-up blind acceptance of intelligence:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-evolution-hacked-its-way-to-intelligence-from-the-bottom-up?...

DAVID: Read if you wish. It simply accepts intelligence because it is there.

Thank you for the present and for your integrity in reproducing an article that supports a concept you detest. I don’t know why you call it “blind”, as the authors are respectively a professor of biology and a professor of biological sciences and neuroscience, which suggests to me that their studies would at least have matched your own. Yes, they accept that it is there. And you don’t.

Evolution of consciousness

QUOTE: They argue that minds of a sort have existed since the first archaea colonized the planet, billions of years ago.

Another boost for the theory of cellular intelligence, but either the reviewer or the authors then seem to get into a muddle.

QUOTE: They state that insects have no consciousness, when there is good reason to suppose that bees, at least, have many of the mental attributes associated with consciousness, such as foresight and the ability to imagine. Even bacteria are not the simple automata portrayed here; other researchers describe bacterial behaviours in the language of cognition.

If minds have existed since the first archaea, why would the authors deny the existence of insect and bacteria minds? Something has gone wrong here, or have I misread it?

QUOTE: "The narrative is enjoyable and illuminating, but bbbit is flawed by a failure to separate fact from speculation. (DAVID’s bold)

Yes, that is often the fault with all parties in these discussions.

DAVID: Seeing something that seems to act intelligently doesn't mean it is intrinsically intelligent in and of itself. It may dimply be following instructions it has been given. Thermostats and robots are just that, looking as if they take intelligent actions and we understand how they do it by following built-in designed algorithms. So can cells and simple one-celled animals. To assume actual intelligence exists is a very thin analysis.

Artificial intelligence is just that. And natural intelligence is natural intelligence, but you want to make it into artificial intelligence by having your God insert algorithms into living material. Why not follow through the analogy: humans use their natural intelligence to create artificial intelligence, just as your God may have used his natural intelligence to create our natural intelligence, as well as the natural intelligence of the cells of which all life forms are composed?