New Miscellany Parts 1 &:2: evolution, eco, intelligence. (General)

by dhw, Monday, April 28, 2025, 12:53 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: When a species goes extinct leaving behind a new species from it, that is evolution, not your discontinuous form.

dhw: So apparently, just before the brontosaurus died, it gave birth to a brand new species which was already equipped with all the changes necessary to survive the conditions that had just killed its mother. (Or, since birds are the only known descendants from dinosaurs, the brontosaurus gave birth to an egg.) What you cannot imagine is that a small number of species might have survived the new conditions, and these survivors went on to produce our ancestors. In other words: you believe our ancestors descended from the 99.9% of species that were wiped out, and not from the 0.1% of species that survived. And that is why, when I asked if you believed we and our food were descended directly from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived, you answered: “No. From the 0.1% surviving.” Please, please, please stop contradicting yourself!

DAVID: Your observations about single examples loses the real picture of a continuum.

The continuum is provided by the survivors, not by the species that cease to exist. You have completely ignored the absurdities (described above) of the theories you have proposed. If 99.9% of species have disappeared leaving no descendants, please tell me what constitutes the “real” continuum.

Zombification

DAVID: We are here running everything as proof of the theory.

dhw: We are here now, which apparently proves that for 3.X billion years, your God produced and culled millions of species and econiches for our benefit, although we were not here and they are no longer here either.

DAVID: You can't face the obvious: our exceptionality.

I accept our exceptionality. You can’t face the obvious: it makes no sense to claim that the millions of now extinct species and ecosystems that filled the 3+ billion years prior to our arrival, and had no connection with us and our food, were all specially designed and culled by your God to enable him to design us and our food. Your reasoning: your all-powerful God is a messy and inefficient designer.

Camouflage caterpillar

dhw: I’m beginning to wonder just what you mean by “designed”. […]

DAVID: Design means too complex for chance or your approach of tr1al and error involving basic survival as a result of it, doesn't work.

dhw: I accept that these strategies, like all our organs, are too complex for chance. In view of your acceptance that bacteria are autonomously intelligent, it seems self-evident to me that their response to our efforts to kill them must be a matter of trial and error, since so many of them die before they find the correct formula to outwit us. I suspect the same applies to other life forms and also strategies, but I am happy to accept the possibility that some strategies might work first time. I certainly find that more convincing than the alternative explanation I have bolded above.

DAVID: Our thinking will remain opposite.

We agree that the strategy is too complex for chance. You agree that bacteria have autonomous intelligence. I am happy to accept that such strategies might be the result of immediate success by design. What makes our thinking “opposite”? Only your insistence that your God couldn’t possibly have given other cells the same autonomy that he gave bacteria.

Plants using heat

DAVID: an amazing complexity of ways that plants arrange to have a sexual reproduction. Looks designed to me.

Looks like part of a great free-for-all to me, as plants – like all other organisms – work out their own ways to survive. The authors reckon the technique originated more than 300 million years ago. Don’t you find it difficult to see how this fits in with your theory that your God created everything for the benefit of us humans?

Mind and Cosmos

QUOTES: Intelligence may exist and evolve on its own, without emerging within living organisms.

“Eventually, I came to believe that intelligence is not a byproduct of the brain, but a fundamental property of the universe—a kind of informational ether that certain structures, like the brain or an AI model, can tap into.'”

DAVID: Nagel [Mind and Cosmos] saw the intelligence in the universe as does this fellow. This is a duplicate of NDE theories that consciousness is separate from the brain. The universal intelligence he refers to is easily seen as God.

NDEs involve the consciousness of individuals continuing to exist after the death of the brain. They are still themselves. This theory is a kind of parallel to panpsychism, which holds that all physical things have some form of consciousness. The idea that intelligence is an immaterial “ fundamental property of the universe” begs the question of whether the universe would exist if it wasn’t for all its materials. That is one of the great mysteries presented by the God theory: how could consciousness exist on its own without a source? And what would it be conscious of, if nothing else existed? And what is meant by “tapping into” a property outside the brain? Are all our thoughts contained in an outside something or the other, and our non-thinking brain somehow calls on the thoughts to enter it? All too vague for me, I’m afraid.