Miscellaneous (General)

by dhw, Friday, November 15, 2024, 13:27 (6 days ago) @ David Turell

Immunity system complexity (C elegans, and also the brain’s fractal organization)

dhw: Do you believe that 3.8 billion years ago, your God designed every response to every threat that C elegans would ever face from all invading bacteria for the rest of C elegans’ history? Ditto for all other bacterial threats to all other species. Or is it possible that he designed a mechanism by which C elegans and all other species might try to work out their own means of countering bacterial threats? (I say “try”, because we should not forget the many cases of failure, which of course would highlight the inadequacy of your omniscient God’s instructions.)

DAVID: An omniscient God knows all future needs. That is where your God fails.

Firstly, it is only your guess that your God is “omniscient”, and you contradict this yourself when you inform us that he didn’t know how to correct all the errors in his system and relied on us to provide the corrections. Secondly, please answer my bolded questions.

A theoretical God

DAVID: Stop blaming God for choosing to evolve us.

dhw: I am not blaming God for any such thing! I am blaming you for coming up with a theory that you agree makes no sense. If God exists, he chose to “evolve” ALL species, and YOU call him imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient for designing and having to cull 99.9% of them.

DAVID: I remind the readers God chose to evolve us for His own unknown reasons and its cumbersomeness makes me critical.

No need to repeat what I have just said! You have just criticised me for blaming God, which I have not done (I blame you), and now you repeat your criticism (= blame) of your God when you should be criticising the “cumbersomeness” of your theory!

Theoretical origin of life: Space is filled with organics

QUOTE: The Rosetta mission and others have shown just how ubiquitous organic molecules are in space, too.

dhw: I must confess I don’t understand what this “discovery” is meant to prove. If organic molecules are not living organisms, we are still back where we started as regards the origin of life. Or is this an indirect reference to some kind of panpsychism?

DAVID: No, all it means, as stated, is life was predestined.

I don’t understand that either. If anything, it means that with all the ingredients of life flying around in space, it was inevitable that one fine day they would meet and produce life. One up for atheism. But if you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient God, why all the rigmarole of billions of bits and pieces floating around for billions of years?

Introducing the brain: consciousness as ephaptic fields

QUOTES: "These effects, resulting from the electric fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings, may play a leading role in our mind’s workings.”

"This single paper could take the field of ephaptic field science from the fringes of neuroscience to the forefront. Its findings regarding the speed and pervasiveness of ephaptic field effects may presage a fundamentally new understanding of how cognition and consciousness work." (David's bold)

DAVID: the bold just above expresses my feelings. It is an impressive suggestion. I must admit it comfortably fits my underlying dualism, as a field theory not fully tied to serial synaptic connections but fitting into fields.

I don’t understand how a process that depends in the first instance on neurons can fit your dualism. We should also note that these experiments were carried out on mice – and earlier on rabbits and cats. Do you regard this as evidence that mice, rabbits and cats have souls that will live on after they die?