A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Three (Identity)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 23, 2018, 21:56 (2164 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Excellent summary of your thinking. There should not be life in an inorganic universe but it appeared in all its complexity. And your final puzzle as to why there is intelligence can have only one answer. Intelligence preexisted the appearance of the Big Bang.

dhw: Thank you, but as always I’d be interested to hear your response to my thinking. Do you regard life and consciousness to be the work of a divine scientist or a divine magician? When you quite rightly emphasize the complexity of design, do you think it has nothing to do with the ultimate products, which are life and consciousness, and these have to be magically “breathed into” the lifeless materials instead of being produced by the application of science to those materials?

DAVID: The complexity of the biochemistry of life creates life as an emergent property. But the cleverness of the design of all the biochemical interlocking reactions requires a designer. In other words, except for human consciousness and conscious animals, if all those organic molecules are formed and come together life will appear from the combination, but can never come by chance formulation. Being conscious may arise from the brain but may arise from universal consciousness, based on the Jewish tradition that animals have their special kind of soul. Human consciousness, being so unusual it must be at a quantum level and part of universal consciousness, i.e., part of God's consciousness.

dhw: My Part Three was specifically written for theists like yourself, so you needn’t bother with chance. The question I asked was whether you thought your God used magic or science to create life and consciousness. You have given a straight answer concerning life: it “emerges” from the biochemistry. You acknowledge that the same may be true of consciousness. I don’t understand your reasoning after that. As you never tire of telling us, the human brain has many similarities to the animal brain, but has certain significant differences, so why shouldn’t that mean that human and animal forms of consciousness have both emerged, like life, from the manner in which your God has assembled the materials? Any flaws in the logic?

That is pure materialism and logical from that standpoint. Life and living matter are pure materialism. Consciousness is not material in any way as I stated above, and is related to the conscious universe or part of universal consciousness.