Innovation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, May 09, 2013, 20:14 (4015 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: My impression is that your panpsychist intelligent energy does not have an organized centre. My universal consciousness does. Am I wrong?
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> You are right. We must be careful here, because there are so many different forms of panpsychism. The form I'm proposing dispenses with a centre. Every different organism has its own intelligence. The scenario begins with non-conscious energy, and this develops consciousness within the different forms of matter it has unconsciously created ... Some of these cooperate to form bigger, more complex units. Our bodies are one vast mass of cooperating units, each one with its own (limited) intelligence, forming a combined entity which has its own overall intelligence.... but the manner in which everything has combined creates a different overall entity with its own overall intelligent energy. -Your scenario sounds as if you have organs taking off on their own, only to later cooperate and create an organism. It can't work in the undirected formations you describe. Take a liver for example: the bile ducts and the blood vessels are cell types of their own. The blood vesels are an organ system all their own. I can see how the liver instructs the bile ducts to grow in the right places but blood vessels are their own master. Very wooly thinking on your part.-> 
> dhw: Different forms of intelligent energy may be able to communicate and cooperate.-The operative word is "may'. 'May not' is just as valid if not more so.-> dhw: Evolution therefore progresses in accordance with how these intelligences respond to environmental conditions, either adapting or innovating through cooperation. Hence the bush, which grows as and when these intelligences come up with their innovations. Neither by chance nor by central organization.-Evolution looks a lot more organized to me with a central drive toward more complexity.
 
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> DAVID: A bush has a main source at its center, and then many many branches. Panpsychism does not appear to.
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> dhw: We have been using the bush image to denote the higgledy-piggledy shape of evolution ... branching out in different directions with its vast array of organisms. In both scenarios, the main source is therefore the first forms of life from which all the branches have sprung. What we don't know is how the first seeds came into being.-We see two different bushes.