New Miscellany 2: brain, evolution, intelligence (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, April 06, 2025, 17:50 (2 days ago) @ dhw

The human brain

DAVID: Good designers anticipate future use. God has a crystal ball.

dhw: You are the one who keeps calling your God “inefficient” (evolution) and “incompetent” (theodicy), and although you have no choice but to agree that all changes to the brain take place as RESPONSES to new requirements, you insist that our later complexities were all “prepared” thousands of years before they were required.'

DAVID: A designer designs for future uses.

dhw: Add this to your statement “Much simpler with God as designer”, and you could hardly come up with a better argument for your God’s possible design of the autonomous mechanisms which have enabled cells to evolve into a vast variety of life forms, and have enabled brain cells in particular to complexify. (You have agreed that your God does NOT assert control or intervene when we humans think our complex thoughts and invent our complex machines). One invention produces all the rest. Much simpler than the designer constantly having to perform new operations and issue new instructions every time there’s a change in the weather, not to mention his apparently having to design and cull 99 out of 100 species irrelevaht to his one and only purpose.

Back to second hand design, a wasteful way to proceed.

Cellular intelligence

DAVID: See today's entry on bacterial action with ameba's at a molecular level, no thought involved.

Bacterial immunity

dhw: You seem to think the amoeba is deliberately helping the bacterium to kill it! You have acknowledged again and again that bacteria work out their own means of survival (they have the “freedom of action or free will” to create evil), and this article simply explains how they do it. Our own efforts to kill bacteria also entail molecular activity, but you think ours is directed by our intelligence and theirs is not, although you agree that it is.

DAVID: Where does the article show thought processing?

dhw: Where does it show your God’s instructions? Do you or do you not agree that the molecular activity described here must follow on from processing of information, communication and decision-making? Why do you assume that bacteria, which elsewhere in your posts have “freedom of action or free will”, can think for themselves when they kill us, but can’t do so when they kill an amoeba?

The act of poisoning us or killing bacteria is all automatic.

dhw: I presented a list of your other absurd self-contradictions, but since they have nearly all been repeated in these two posts, there’s not much point in going over them again here. You summed it all up when you described your beliefs as “schizophrenic” and admitted that you “first choose a God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.” What follows is sheer confusion.

I am not confused about my God.