Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, May 10, 2013, 18:19 (4014 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: 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.-DAVID: 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.-I don't know how you got this impression. Since life began with single cell organisms, every development had to be through cells combining in a new way, and every innovation had to take place within an existing organism. Of course each one had to be integrated with whatever was already there! If your God didn't "reach in" and manipulate the cells for every single new organ, then what you and I have agreed to call "the intelligent genome" did it through cooperation. Whether God invented this mechanism or it fashioned itself through a panpsychist inner intelligence, how else could it work? -dhw: Different forms of intelligent energy may be able to communicate and cooperate.-DAVID: The operative word is "may'. 'May not' is just as valid if not more so.-You have given us plenty of examples of species doing just that (through symbiosis), in both plant and animal kingdoms, so the question is not WHETHER they do, but HOW MUCH contact there is between them.
 
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.-DAVID: Evolution looks a lot more organized to me with a central drive toward more complexity.-That is because you believe in a God with a purpose. The drive towards complexity is clear, no matter whether the inventive intelligence was created from without (by your God) or evolved from within (panpsychist version). The only difference lies in your belief that evolution itself was designed to create humans.
 
DAVID: A bush has a main source at its center, and then many many branches. Panpsychism does not appear to.-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.-DAVID: We see two different bushes.-Both bushes grow from the first forms of life. We see the same history of life, the same array of species extinct and extant. The bush is the same. It's the interpretation of the higgledy-piggledy shape that is different!