What makes life vital (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, March 09, 2015, 09:57 (3326 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I would like to highlight what Tony says, because it is so important: “It is not that they can't explain the machinery, it's that they can't explain the spark.” And I would apply that both to life and to thought, with emphasis on the fact that scientists can explain the machinery by which organisms operate, but they cannot explain the cognitive, decision-making, communicative skills of those organisms, ranging from the simplest to the most complex.
DAVID: I fully understand the point. That is why I said life is a continuum. Once it appeared with all of its magical properties it has continued to make life in different forms. The 'spark', as were the instructions (information), were given in a miraculous beginning. As long as life can maintain itself by reproducing itself it will continue. If that continuum is stopped, it will take another miracle to start it again. This is why I am a believer.-I expect most believers and non-believers would agree with every word of this. Life will go on until it stops, and it is indeed a miracle, whatever may have been its source: God, chance, panpsychist evolution. But you don't seem to have fully understood my own point that science can explain the machinery by which thought is transmuted into action, but it cannot explain thought. That is why your attempts to automatize cells by describing their machinery seem to me to “miss the mark”.-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.-DAVID: 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.
-I should have written “a hypothesis no more miraculous”, not “no less”. It is not THE prime consideration but one of the prime considerations. You don't care about the illogicality of the argument that life and thought can only be created by a mind, but the mind that created them did not have to be created. You try to balance your theism by closing your eyes to the fact that belief in chance and belief in God BOTH run counter to reason. That is why we use the word “faith”.
 
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.
DAVID: 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. -Materialists can argue that the same applies to humans, but you athletically leap over that fence when you come to it. If other organisms behave as if they are intelligent, and many researchers tell us they are, why insist they are not? Why not keep an open mind?-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.
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?-DAVID: I'm not avoiding dualism at all. It takes neuronal complexity to allow consciousness to emerge as the brain acts as a receiver.-When people say consciousness “emerges”, they usually mean that it is produced by the interplay between the neurons. If consciousness exists independently and the brain is a receiver and not a transmitter, the progressive complexity of the nervous system and of brains is the RESULT of increasingly complex consciousness, not the producer. Is that what you mean?