New Miscellany 1 & 2: humanizing, intell., first cause etc. (General)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 11, 2025, 22:34 (1 day, 19 hours, 8 min. ago) @ dhw

Humanization

dhw: You said yourself that he must enjoy creating or he would not do it, and interest in his own creations does not imply entertainment. Would you describe a parent’s interest in their child’s activities as “entertainment”? But who knows? Your God might be a sadist! You've already made him look like an inefficient fool.

Not answered.

You forget God is not like any human parent.

dhw: Your God knows only one goal – to design us plus food – and his goal for doing so may be his very human desire for recognition and worship. Nowhere in the Bible will you find a God who inefficiently designs and culls 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to his only goal, or a God who deliberately designs murderous viruses because they do more good than harm or – alternatively – has no control over the murderous viruses he inadvertently created. And besides, who says the biblical God is the real God? The God of the OT demands worship, murders those who don’t worship him, and orders the Jews to do the same. Is that your God?

Current interpretation has softened that view to remind us of the relatively savage times in which it was written.

Bacterial antibiotic resistance

dhw: Thank you. You now accept that as well as bacteria, plants and animals (= cell communities) are possessed of “intelligent awareness”. I have always allowed for your God as its designer. Why do you exclude the opossum?

DAVID: His instinctual reaction requires a conceptual beginning from a capable brain.

dhw: The beginning is a first-hand observation, and of course the conclusion drawn from that observation requires a capable brain. But according to you, the opossum sees the wolf walk away, but God has to descend from heaven and explain to him that he might imitate the dead opossum one day, and then maybe the wolf will walk away. Daft!

You have imagined your brain in Otto the opossum.

Under Milky Way not hitting Andromeda

dhw: Why would there always have been a superintelligent mind that had no source?

DAVID: Back to a necessary first cause.

Correct: either a sourceless conscious mind, or a sourceless mixture of matter and energy.

That mixture can think, design? Poppycock.

Importance of ELAV

QUOTE: Given that proteins similar to ELAV are conserved from flies to humans, these findings strongly suggest a similar mechanism governs circRNA production also in the human brain.

dhw; As with astrocytes, here we have further evidence of how much the brains of fruit flies and other organisms have in common with human brains, as well as the intricate communications that take place between the different parts of the brain as they process and use information in determining their own and our behaviour.

Because we evolved from them.