Evidence for pattern development; mulling (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, December 04, 2014, 18:04 (3432 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Convergence tells us that organisms come up with the same answers. Your preprogramming hypothesis is no more logical than the argument that the same problems will elicit the same solutions from intelligent beings, and it is the potential intelligence (the IM) that has been present from the beginnings of lifeDAVID: You want your intelligent beings to be way more competent than they obviously aren't. An IM is programmed guidance.-This is the dogmatism that makes your reasoning so hard to follow. On Tuesday you wrote: “...an epigenetic IM exists, its limits for invention are unknown”, but on Wednesday its limits for invention are “obviously” known. -dhw: The issue between us here is not the existence of God or the range of his abilities, but the possible autonomy of the IM, which seems to me a simpler and more convincing explanation of the higgledy-piggledy bush than your God preprogramming the first cells with every innovation and complex lifestyle from bacteria to humans.
DAVID: You keep ignoring my stepwise programming concept as helped by Tony. I think the bush is because of a semi-autonomous IM.-Your stepwise programme is presumably from bacteria to humans. You have told us that 99% of the species in between are extinct. Either God planned them or he didn't. If he didn't, their IM was autonomous. If he did, why were they all necessary for the production of humans? Might they not have been part of an unfolding, unpredictable spectacle designed to relieve God's boredom, or part of an experiment to see where an autonomous mechanism might lead, or part of a project to create a self-aware being like himself, requiring experimentation along the way? All these hypotheses would provide a logical theistic explanation for the higgledy-piggledy bush, with its variety and its comings and goings, but I guess you know God better than I do.
 
dhw: My point is that if humans were preprogrammed, he would also have had to preprogramme all environmental changes (to get the right environment and to prevent catastrophe), or to dabble, or to rely on luck, all of which hypotheses you now seem to reject.
DAVID: You want too much exactitude about God. He managed to program our universe in a way that we arrived. Did he have to adjust the environment so we would appear? Again probably not. Might something unforeseen happen? Possibly. These are unanswerable sidetracks.-They are certainly unanswerable, but they are sidetracks from what? This whole quest is for the truth about how we got here. Since humans could not exist without a suitable environment, the problem of environmental change is fundamental to your anthropocentric hypothesis, which may be wrong. The higgledy-piggledy bush does not support it. Disasters like Chicxulub do not support it. Mass extinctions do not support it. In each case you have to grub around for vague ways of justifying your huge leap from the fact that we are here to the assumption that we were meant to be here from the very beginning.
 
DAVID: You want a very robust IM, as it reduces the need for a powerful God, and helps your agnosticism. I equate very competent early programming of evolution with a stronger evidence for God.-I don't WANT anything. I admit my ignorance, and therefore leave my options open. Might it be that you want a weak IM because a strong one would undermine your argument for anthropocentric evolution preprogrammed from the very beginning? Your starting point is your fixed belief. Mine is an attempt to find a convincing explanation for the higgledy-piggledy course of evolution, whether God started it all off or not. But you are right: the concept of an autonomous IM, just like evolution itself, fits in both with theism and with atheism. However, I don't see that as a reason for rejecting it.