Cell response to electric field (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 09, 2013, 16:16 (4045 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My beliefs are entirely scientific. I know organic chemistry and I know that molecules are automatons responding to external electro-chemical signals of various types. [...] At this micro level the processes are automatic. And this is why the appearance of consciousness is so confusing. How do automatic neuronal processes create thought? We don't know and that is not a cop out. We simply do not know.-But as I keep repeating, and as you keep ignoring, you believe in free will, which is in direct contradiction to automatic neuronal processes, you believe in a God whose intelligence does NOT depend on automatic neuronal processes, and you believe in an afterlife in which human intelligence will NOT depend on automatic neuronal processes. And yet you insist that unlike your free will, your God, and your soul, the genome is an automaton, because automatic neuronal processes CREATE intelligence though we don't know how! And your beliefs are entirely scientific. (Incidentally, I wish you'd stop moleculing when our subject is the hypothetical "intelligence" that GOVERNS the genome's million molecules.) Barbara McClintock, the Nobel-Prizewinning geneticist, who also knew a thing or two about organic chemistry, said that "a goal for the future would be to determine the extent of knowledge the cell has of itself, and how it utilizes this knowledge in a 'thoughtful' manner when challenged." You quoted this and added: "Subsequent research has shown how far-seeing she was." You also quoted Talbott, who rubbished the idea of random "automatisms" as "the ultimate explanatory root of all genetic variations leading to evolutionary change." (I take this to be a reference to INNOVATION ... see below.) If these two scientists, whose writings you have recommended, are at the very least open to the idea that cells are NOT automatons and may have some sort of awareness, thoughtfulness, logos (but I prefer the vaguer term "intelligence"), can you at least understand why I greet your authoritative statements with a degree of scepticism?
 
DAVID: I also know that the cell is governed by an intelligence given to it in the code of the genome. The code has built in responses to environmental threats or alterations. Unless your definition of 'cell intelligence' recognizes the genome's gift and recognizes the automaticity of the cell responses, your statement implies that the cell can think and analyze at a conscious level.-You persuaded me to change "the intelligent cell" to "the intelligent genome" (though McClintock refers to the cell), so if the genome governs the cell through its "coded" intelligence, doesn't that mean the genome is "intelligent", and that the cell contains an "intelligent!" mechanism, which by extension would allow us to call the cell "intelligent"?-Think, analyse, conscious ... these words immediately make us anthropomorphize the cell, which I don't want to do despite McClintock's terminology. That's why I prefer the vaguer term "intelligence". You have given us countless examples of how flora and fauna have invented complex methods of hunting, building, navigating, surviving, cooperating. There must always have been a first time. Similarly with every innovation that has led from bacteria to humans, there must always have been a first time. Automatic responses simply do not account for those "first times". Automatic responses occur when the new "code" has been established. Unless your God pre-programmed or individually created every single innovation, what alternative can there be to a mechanism that does its own inventing, i.e. the "intelligent genome"? It's time for a straight answer.
 
Let me help you by quoting a scientist and thinker whom both of us admire and respect. When we were discussing how a non-flycatching sundew turned into a flycatching sundew ("Natures wonders: fly traps, 21 March at 14.56), you enthusiastically assured me that "God did not have to fiddle. The genome did it all by itself, it was so smart given the information God implanted into DNA in the beginning." On 22 March at 15.16, in response to your statement that "God's purpose was to produce inventive life", I wrote: "He left the course of evolution in the "hands" of his intelligent invention ... apparently preprogrammed to experiment and take its own decisions (much like us humans, then!)." You responded; "A good synopsis of my view of evolution." You even had your God "sitting back watching all of this and proud of his invention."
 
And so, when you have rejected chance and God's preprogramming or separate creation of every single innovation in the history of life, you will I'm sure acknowledge that there is no alternative to a mechanism that does its own inventing, and that any living thing that can experiment, take its own decisions, and invent something totally new must have some form of "intelligence", as opposed to being an automaton. If you then claim that such a complex, inventive, "intelligent" mechanism must be the product of design and not chance, I for one won't kick up a fuss, though we shall continue to have fun disputing the source of the design.