horizontal gene transfer: the real IM? (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 19, 2014, 17:56 (3413 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw (under Negative atheism?): And so I see rational cause for NOT believing one way or the other (God, chance). It was a conclusion I reached in my late teens (only later did I discover that Darwin himself was an agnostic), and although I feel I have learned a great deal since, what I have learned has so far not clarified any of these major issues.
DAVID: And I thought I was getting closer to convincing you! My teaching entries are quite clear.-Your teaching entries are wonderfully clear in relation to the complexities of life and lifestyles. It's your conclusions that are so murky, though you state them with great authority! -dhw: Inexplicable, causeless eternal consciousness is no more imaginable (and in my view no more likely) than inexplicable evolving consciousness. It's a matter of faith, not logic.
DAVID: It is a matter of logically realizing that only a competent planning consciousness can be the only first cause. First logic, then faith. An inexplicable evolving consciousness must be endowed with potentiality somehow to do what you profess to think might be possible. What makes your ideal IEC evolve? -Round and round we go. What makes your ideal first-cause energy conscious? You can't answer, except by stating authoritatively that first-cause energy has to be conscious. Maybe non-conscious first cause energy has been transmuting itself into matter for ever and ever, and at long last its billions of universes have spawned life by chance. You are fond of quoting mathematical odds against chance. Well, given eternity and an infinite number of universes, what are the odds? Is this a fantasy? You might ask yourself what your eternally conscious God might have been doing with himself for the eternity that preceded our time. Whatever may be the first cause, it must have the potential to create universes by the billion. No, I don't believe in chance. Nor do I believe in an uncaused conscious mind that creates and encompasses universes. But not believing is not the same as disbelieving.
 
dhw: Horizontal gene transfer is a clear example of what I have called intelligent cooperation between cells. No need for anthropomorphic committee meetings. I do not know where the intelligences came from initially, but they might be different aspects of a single intelligence (most panpsychist theories are theistic).
DAVID: You like panpsychism, or at least you use it as a starting point for your theories. Can it be you are entertaining a switch to theism?-I use it as an alternative to your God and to chance. Somewhere along the line, there has to be intelligence, but we just don't know where it begins. You say that somehow intelligence has always been there. Perhaps George will argue that somehow it evolved through life on earth, which began by chance. Most panpsychist theories are along the lines that particles of God somehow end up in all things, but mine is that somehow intelligence evolved through changing matter, which would result in billions of intelligences, not one. Hence evolution through cooperation between different forms (which I confess I find vastly more credible in the organic than in the inorganic world). But all of these “somehow” options remain open. I am exploring, not preaching.-dhw: My thanks go to you. After months of insisting that God had preplanned everything, and cells were mere automatons obeying his instructions (though perhaps with the ability to make minor adaptations of their own), you now appear to accept the possible autonomy of the inventive mechanism. I do not ask for more.
DAVID: But you push too far. Semi-autonomy is only as far as I will ever go.-Why “ever”? Why not stick to not knowing the extent of its autonomy, which leaves open the possibility that it extends far beyond minor adaptations? Don't close your mind.