Cell response to electric field (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 06, 2013, 20:08 (4048 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:you will hardly expect me to know how the intelligent cell/genome gets its millions of molecules to act, react and interact.-The answer is my previous paragraph, edited and adopted:-> David: They are stimulated by various modalities including chemical and electrical. They are built to automatically respond. The planning for this activity is coded into DNA, RNA and the rest of the genome. [/i][...] Unfortunately for your position, molecules are built to react, not have any type of 'mental' charcteristic. They are simply a form of cog wheel. -> 
> dhw: The difference, as I keep stressing, lies first and foremost in innovation. ............Once the innovation functions, the cells will preserve it, and act like automatons, although even then they may have to take their own decisions. The ability to use information and create something new with it is the kind of "intelligence" I mean here.-That is not intelligence as I define it. The genome has intelligent information, gleaned from an originating intelligence. It uses that information in the code automatically, unless it is stimulated to use an epigenetic mechanism, which it triggers to go into an automatic response changing the organism to some beneficial degree. This does not create new species, just variation.-> dhw: And so I'm prepared to consider an equally vague "panpsychist" hypothesis. You rightly oppose that with all the arguments used to oppose your own God theory ... where did the information, the awareness, the inventiveness come from? Define it, explain it. I can't, any more than you can define or explain your hidden God. But that doesn't mean I should exclude it.-I don't have to explain God. He is a necessary being, a first cause, and you have agreed there must be a first cause.
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> dhw: Meanwhile, what is our own "intelligence"? Materialists will tell you it's dependent on the cells and the chemical and electrical "modalities". They may be right. > 
> DAVID: Nagel simply defines the problem, and gives no answer, and you are imitating him.
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> dhw: I haven't read Nagel's book, so I don't know if he has an answer.-The immediate need is that you read Nagel. He has very cogent arguments, but no answer, since he won't accept a first cause, as he is not Aristotelian ( a word?) in his philosophic thought basis. Take his arguments and observations and add first cause, and it all fits together. The philosopher Ed Feser, who uses Aristotle, has no problem. Read Feser also.