Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, May 16, 2013, 17:53 (4008 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I'm trying to demonstrate to you that the difference between us does not lie in our view of the process of evolution itself, but in our views on the possible source of the innovative mechanism, and in your anthropocentric teleology. No matter what may be the origin of the intelligent cell/genome/DNA, you have no objections when I suggest that evolution works through the instructions given by this inner intelligence to the cells, which cooperate to form new organs and their connections. ......You accept this so long as it fits in with your divine teleology, which is the massive assumption that underlies your own religious interpretation of evolution.-DAVID: I don't view my interpretation of evolution as religious. That is your interpretation of me! I think my conclusions are scientific. I started as an agnostic. Yes, I accepted religion's God because I can find no other representation of first cause that exists in human thought. but most religions are rather empty.-Then I will gladly drop the word religious. You accept the above scenario so long as it fits in with your divine teleology, which is your non-religious belief that your God directed the course of evolution towards the end product of humans. Without your non-religious divine teleology, there would be no need for your God to dabble. Evolution would simply run the course it has run through the process described above.-dhw: However, I have no problem with your argument that the mechanism itself is too complex to have come about by chance or by the gradual evolution of intelligence from within matter. Both hypotheses demand as much faith as your own.-DAVID: Here is generally full agreement from me, but how matter invents intelligence is way beyond faith. It is a pipe dream.-And a misrepresentation of my hypothesis. I'll try to explain it again. We agree that the First Cause is energy. Your personal pipe dream is that energy has SOMEHOW always been conscious of itself and able to plan, create and manipulate matter at will. "How" is of no interest to you. My alternative pipe dream is that energy unconsciously transmuted itself into matter, and since matter is always changing, the energy within it SOMEHOW became aware of change. (After all, what is the use of awareness if there is nothing to be aware of?) From this primitive awareness there developed ever greater awareness, whereby unconscious transmutation of energy into matter gradually became conscious manipulation of matter by the energy within it. So matter did not INVENT intelligence; intelligence evolved in the energy within matter. Now suddenly "how" is so important that you reject the hypothesis. I see both hypotheses as equally difficult to believe, but at least the second dispenses with all the headaches associated with divine teleology and unknown degrees of divine preprogramming and dabbling. Once there is intelligence within matter, it directs its own operations. (This could also be true if your God had invented the intelligent genome.)-dhw: If I believed in chance, or in my panpsychist hypothesis, and if you then asked me how it could possibly work, I could say to you I don't know or care how chance managed to put everything together, but it did. Or I don't know how non-conscious energy acquired consciousness, or how the intelligent genome acquired its intelligence, but it did. "We are back to the leap of faith." However, once we take any of these leaps, my account of how innovations work makes sense whatever the source, and you have no objections to it. Isn't this a breakthrough?-DAVID: No breakthrough. I see a process in evolution that requires guidance. I cannot see intelligence inventing itself. There is necessarily a first cause. Therefore I must believe in theistic evolution.-We have long since agreed that there is a first cause: yours is conscious, whereas my alternative is not. You cannot see intelligence inventing itself, and yet you can see intelligence that was never invented. I can't see either, but my panpsychist version does not invent itself, as I have explained above.-DAVID: Because species appear de novo, genetics provides adaptation but NOT speciation.-I have answered this separately. As regards the "bush of life", how do you know it would not have had the same shape, whether God dabbled, or a panpsychist or God-invented intelligent genome did its own thing?