Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 23, 2021, 16:49 (1150 days ago) @ dhw

Extreme extremophiles

DAVID: I differ in a nuance you avoid. God created life so it would always survive, so of course it adapts, but as above, I do not see adaptation as driving evolution.

dhw: ...Please tell us what other driving force you believe would motivate innovation.

God of course

How roots fight compacted soils

DAVID: How did the plant find this so-called remedy? Considering Darwinist 'fitness' theories, this is a mistake and a reduction in plant growth. It seems as if evolutionary mechanisms for adaptation didn't work. And from my viewpoint God didn't bother to fix it. Of course it is obvious slower growth prevented root tip damage as a sort of partial solution.

It seems as if one of the evolutionary mechanisms did work. Slower growth... Let’s just assume he designed what he wanted to design – the system that led to the great and ever changing bush of life. What could be more interesting?

Back to a human God who needs interestng events.

Transposons

DAVID: We know that transposons jump around, but not what controls the jumping. Chance or programmed?

dhw: I have read that the person who first discovered transposons was the Nobel-prize-winning Barbara McClintock. She was also a firm believer in cellular intelligence. Just thought it was worth mentioning.

I know her role.

Dualism

QUOTE: the identity of me does not consist in what happens to my body, but in what happens to my conscious life, and so I am who I am in virtue of what happens to my conscious life. Nothing that happens in my body entails or is entailed by what happens to my conscious life. So being me must consist in being a substance separate from my body.

QUOTE: my brain largely determines which properties my soul has at any time. Hence my childhood interactions with the world form my childhood brain which forms my childhood outlook on the world; and my old age interactions with the world form my old age brain, which in turn forms my old age outlook on the world.

dhw: It seems to me that if the brain largely determines the properties of the soul at any time, it is absurd to claim that “nothing in my body entails or is entailed by what happens to my conscious life”. Unless he thinks the brain is not part of the body....

The soul which uses the brain for information and expression is not part of the physical body

QUOTE: Epiphenomenalism, which I understand more precisely as the view that brain events cause conscious events, but conscious events never cause brain events, is self-defeating.

dhw: I don’t know what he means by “self-defeating”, but I would have assumed that if there is a soul, its thoughts will depend very largely on information delivered by the brain, and after processing the information, the soul will then use the brain to give material implementation to its conscious thoughts.

DAVID: I view the brain as a physical instrument the soul must use to form my immaterial conscious 'me'.

dhw: For once we agree on this description of dualism, following the process I have summarized above.