Wound repair (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, April 20, 2015, 21:53 (3292 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Monday, April 20, 2015, 22:58

DAVID: From one of my favorite authors, Stephen Talbott:-http://www.netfuture.org/2012/May1012_184.html#2-It seems to me that Talbott is heading very precisely in the direction of organic panpsychism, and I would like to know how he ties it in with evolutionary innovation. You may interpret the article as a pointer to God, though if I remember rightly from our last discussion about his work, Talbott doesn't mention God anywhere. I have selected a few quotes to illustrate his opposition to your mechanistic view of organisms other than humans, right down to cellular level, but you will need to consider them in the light of the second part of this post. -QUOTE: “These [Goodall, Fabre, von Frisch, Portmann, Darwin] were explorers whose receptive minds were flexible instruments open to the mind-like, the meaningful, the striving, the expressive and purposeful, in other creatures.” -QUOTE: “...how does the story “hold together” at the level of molecules and cells, which certainly do not “know” what we know? And yet, quite obviously, in some objective sense the necessary knowledge is there in the organism. It knows. It gets the job done. 
Distinguishing this knowing from our own is an important task for the biologist4. There can be no thought of our sort of consciousness in the cell, or in the crab, lizard, mouse, or redwood. And yet there clearly is a form of knowledgeable behavior in the cell. [...].”-[I think this is a very important observation, in the light of the sceptic's refusal to accept terms like cognition, thought, decision-making, which we inevitably equate with our own thought systems. Some people simply cannot conceive that there might be other ways of autonomous thinking and communicating and planning and decision-making, and so they embrace the increasingly discredited mechanistic interpretation of organic behaviour.]-QUOTE: “We discover that our highest capacities — our thinking, our formulation of goals and plans, our strivings and passions, our sense of well-being and illness — are objectively imaged in our own biological organism right down to the molecular activity of our cells, as also in the cells of every other living creature. “Where molecular biology once taught us that life is more about the interplay of molecules than we might have previously imagined”, writes biologist and philosopher Lenny Moss, “molecular biology is now beginning to reveal the extent to which macromolecules, with their surprisingly flexible and adaptive complex behavior, turn out to be more life-like than we had previously imagined” (2011). -Now the relevant quotes from a different article:
•	Organisms Are Not Machines | Philosophy for Real Life - Bill Meacham 
 http://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=1171-QUOTE: “I cannot do justice to Talbott's article in this short summary. I urge you to read it yourself. The upshot is that organisms are not machines and it is a mistake to think of them as if they were. But if they are not machine-like, what are they? How do they function?
Talbott's account of organisms contains themes remarkably similar to the process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, which asserts that (a) process is better taken than substance as the most fundamental concept pertaining to all of reality and (b) everything has an aspect of mind as well as matter.”-QUOTE: “Organisms have mind, awareness of their surroundings, and intention, says Talbott. Life has “intrinsic inwardness.” All material phenomena have an “inner nature.” The “idea of the arrangement [of the parts is] actively at work in the parts themselves.”
We can certainly understand how an organism can have a mind, because we ourselves are organisms and we are each directly acquainted with our own mind. But what does it mean to say that the idea of the arrangement of the whole is at work in each of the parts? For this to be true, each of the parts must have the ability to entertain an idea, i.e., mind. [...] Talbott asserts that the binding together goes both ways, not just from part to whole, but from whole to part as well. The higher-level mental unity of the whole informs the mentality of each of the parts and gives direction to their growth and development.”-You could hardly have a clearer exposition of how intelligent cells cooperate to create an organ or organism that unifies their intelligences. I'm glad Talbott is one of your favourite authors.