New Miscellany 1 &:2: evol, intelligence, consciousness (General)

by dhw, Thursday, May 15, 2025, 08:00 (7 days ago) @ David Turell

The smelly hoatzin

DAVID: All ecosystems form the fabric of life on Earth. They are all closely integrated, and all are necessary to maintain this fabric. You are seemingly blind to this principle.

dhw: What is the “fabric” of life? Life’s history is one of ever changing ecosystems with ever changing forms of life, and this vague generalization of yours simply ignores your absurd theory that your omnipotent God inefficiently designed every single econiche and species for the sole purpose of creating us humans and our food, and 99.9% of them were NOT necessary, so he culled them. According to you, even the surviving hoatzin is one of your God’s “necessary”mistakes!

DAVID: I never said hoatzin was/is a mistake.

You described it as “a best example of an inefficient, cumbersome evolutionary system”. Since you blame God for the system, and the hoatzin is an example of his inefficiency, I can’t see how it can be seen as anything other than a mistake. But if the hoatzin is “necessary” for the existence of us humans, then I can’t see why you would call it an example of inefficiency. One way or another, you are contradicting yourself.

Immune responses

DAVID: The cells run on a God design. Yes, God is responsible for success and failure as discussed in our Theodicy thread.

dhw: More obfuscation. A “God design” could just as easily be autonomous cellular intelligence as a 3.8-billion-year old book of instructions. Your belief in a God who is omniscient and omnipotent but also so inefficient that he designs failures is a blatant self-contradiction.

DAVID: You recognize design but refuse to believe a designer can exist. Talk about self-contradictions.

Why do you continue to present such silly distortions of my approach? 90% of our discussions concern the possible purposes, methods and nature of a possible designer God, and in the context of cellular intelligence, I always point out that it may have been designed by your God. Atheists refuse to believe that a designer can exist. Agnostics keep an open mind.

Animal minds: Insect tool use

QUOTE: "An insect that harvests and modifies plant resin to snare its prey adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests we may be underestimating the cunning of invertebrate animals.”

DAVID: what is now instinct appears to have developed by conceptualization of a tool's use, the author's assumption. On the other hand, trial and error was a possible method of development. Just as we have tested crows to show they use thinking, we must test the insects in the same way to achieve the same level of certainty. Insect thought would not surprise me.

dhw: Don’t you realize that even trial and error requires conscious thought? How else would an organism know what to try and what fails or succeeds?

Not answered.

dhw: And if insect thought wouldn’t surprise you, why do you categorically reject the possibility that our friends the possum and the weaverbird might also be capable of thinking for themselves?

DAVID: But not as conceptually as knots in nests or playing possum

So the insect needs no help in designing the complexities of the resin trap, but God has to teach the possum that when it saw the wolf walk away from the dead possum, pretending to be dead might be a good strategy to get the wolf to walk away. Sorry, but I really can’t follow this hierarchy of “conceptuality”.

Mind and cosmos

DAVID: Discussing at the level of NDE's consciousness can be detached from a non-functioning brain and yet function, as if consciousness is a separate entity the brain receives. Clear?

dhw: But our discussion is not confined to NDEs! What you have described was already clear. You are once again dodging the issue of the ORIGIN of consciousness, as above. You say “we use God’s consciousness structure to form our own” and we only provide a receiver. I don’t understand what you mean, and propose instead that your God imbued our cells with autonomous consciousness, which seems to me to be crystal clear. But I fear that you are simply dodging this because you prefer to ridicule your God’s inefficiency rather than accept that our cells might be intelligent.

DAVID: I am not dodging. NDE's explain more about consciousness than all your theorizing. What is cellular consciousness? A part of your wish for cellular brilliance that doesn't exist.

I don't wish for anything. I examine the arguments. NDEs imply that our consciousness lives on even when our brain is dead. They appear to confirm the concept of dualism. But even if there is no known physical explanation, this still doesn’t tell us the SOURCE of consciousness. I simply don’t understand what you mean by “We use God’s consciousness to form our own”. What part of “us” reaches out to grab a blob and manipulate it to the shape we want? The sentence makes no sense to me. But God imbues our cells with consciousness. i.e. has invented cellular consciousness, makes perfect sense. Whether it does or doesn’t live on after death is a different issue.