Different in degree or kind: An essay captures Adler (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 22, 2015, 12:48 (3075 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: What you present is all correct. It is the interpretation that is wrong. A computer does read/write automatically. So can the cell and does. This is why the ID folks adopted Shapiro, much to his discomfort.-dhw: There I was, thinking you thought you'd found something in Shapiro that contradicted his explicit statements about cellular intelligence, but all the time it was just you disagreeing with him yet again! So why on earth did you ask for my interpretation of his computer image in the first place?-DAVID: I brought up the computer image because Shapiro is telling us that the genome acts like a computer. Computers work automatically. The inference is that the genome of each cell works automatically, and does.-So Shapiro tells us explicitly and repeatedly that the cell is a sentient, cognitive, decision-making being, but because he uses an image taken from computerspeak, he really means that the cell is an automaton. Some people act like gods. That doesn't mean they are gods.