More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by David Turell @, Saturday, November 12, 2022, 16:21 (502 days ago) @ dhw

Toxoplasma

dhw: You agree that the dead ends were only designed for the life forms that did not lead to us, so how can they possibly have been “required” for the fulfilment of his one only goal to design us and our food? […]

DAVID: Answered innumerable times. As now the dead ends are the ecosystems of food supply required then. Please try to remember all life needs a food supply, always!

dhw: That is what I keep telling you! The dead-end food was for then, not for now! If your God deliberately designed countless life forms and food supplies that had no connection with us and our food supplies, how can they have been “required” for us?

DAVID: Your reply means you think all evolution is in disconnected eras. What is old in the past became us. Stop dicing and slicing as your dodge.

dhw: SOME of what was past became us, and the rest did not. It is the rest that you cannot explain. Nothing to do with “eras” (though you love the dicing and splicing into Ediacaran and Cambrian) but everything to do with your illogical theory that the dead ends were necessary for us and our food, although they were only necessary for the life forms that existed at the time.

Which makes my point!! Evolution is a continuum and everyone must eat along the way. Now what has survived makes up the giant system of ecosystems that must be here to feed us now.


Octopus brain

DAVID: New species can only come from new DNA changes in germ cells for egg and sperm.

dhw: I’m not arguing here, but still struggling to understand. In the case of a new organ, if stem cells “develop into different cell types, which in turn give rise to different tissues and organs” (which surely leads to speciation), what changes first: the stem cells or the germ cells?

Germ cells carry the codes in DNA to make a new species. Those codes will form the stem cells to make new style organs. Gern cells first, stem cells second.


Pete the opossum

DAVID: The conceptualization in the first tale assumes Pete's brain can work at that advanced level. No way.

dhw: In my tale, Pete saw a predator turn its nose up at a dead opossum and walk away. When Pete found himself in danger, he remembered the incident, pretended to be dead, and it worked. This apparently = “advanced conceptualization”, and so instead, apparently God must have programmed the strategy 3.8 billion years ago, or included it in Pete’s DNA when he designed him, or popped in at the moment of danger to perform the necessary operation. And all because without Pete’s survival, we wouldn’t have had enough to eat. Or maybe your non-human God felt sorry for Pete in his non-human way, and decided to save him, just as you believe your non-human God would be non-humanly kind enough to save us from an asteroid.

The fact that you easily understand the playing opossum concept doesn't mean it is a tiny concept readily available to Pete's brain.


QUOTE: We cannot explain “all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.”

dhw: Nor can we explain the products of the brain in terms of biology!

QUOTE: "Given Pessoa’s wink at a processual view of life, one wonders whether his postreductionism also calls for a post materialist neuroscience….”

dhw: Precisely – back we go to materialism versus dualism. In brief, until we can find an explanation for consciousness, we are stuck. (I myself am emphatically not on the side of those who believe there is no such thing as consciousness.)

I'm with you


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