What makes life vital (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 07, 2015, 20:22 (3337 days ago) @ dhw


> Dhw:... but it takes consciousness to perceive, name, analyse and use it. You are trying to restrict the term “information” to instructions, so that you can ask who gave the instructions (answer: God). But information does not consist only of instructions.-True enough, but I'm trying to point out two types of information: descriptive and instructive. DNA has both but only the instructive runs life.-> dhw: An atheist can say that all the information needed for life was contained in unconscious materials which luckily assembled themselves into a life-giving form, and that, through time and experience, evolved its own increasingly complex "instructional information" - a hypothesis no less miraculous than that of a universal, eternal, self-aware, unified form of energy inexplicably possessed of all the “instructional information” needed to create life and the universe. You see the improbability of the one and refuse to see that of the other.-I don't care what atheists can conjure up as an excuse for life. Only mentation can create the instructions. You constantly refuse to allow for that as the prime consideration, and try to balance your agnosticism by bringing up chance. 
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> dhw; But if you insist that “instructional information” requires a mind, then the instructional cooperation, communication and decision-making carried out by bacteria show that they have “minds”! You can't have it both ways.-Yes I can. No one can distinguish, from the outside of bacteria, between automatism run by complete instructions or some type of mental process without neurons to process it. There is no avoiding that observation. You know what side I take
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> DAVID: Much of our body works in a materialistic way. I've described that with my reference to the kidney and liver. My response is graded by the complexity of the evolutionary ladder. Bacteria do not think. Cambrian animals had a degree of mentation, primates more so, and humans a huge jump beyond. Progressive complexity of the nervous system and of brains.
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> dhw: Agreed, apart from your dogmatic refusal to acknowledge the possibility that bacteria do think. But if you attribute thought to progressive material complexity, what happened to your dualism?-I'm not avoiding dualism at all. It takes neuronal complexity to allow consciousness to emerge as the brain acts as a receiver.