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

by dhw, Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 09:17 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: The fallacy in your argument is the extinct did leave descendants, the surviving species.

By definition, the surviving species did not go extinct!!! 696 species of dinosaur went extinct, 4 species of dinosaur did not go extinct. Those were the survivors! Now please tell us 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.

dhw: 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: that your all-powerful God is a messy and inefficient designer!

DAVID: But God's inefficient evolution did create us.

If God exists, of course his evolution produced us, and it also produced 99.9% of species that had nothing to do with us. Why can’t you believe that instead of being messy, clumsy and inefficient, he might actually have wanted the 99.9% of species that had no connection with us? For example, because he was interested in seeing what his invention (the intelligent cell) might produce in a free-for-all, though he could dabble if he felt like it, or he was interested in experimenting with new ideas. Again: why do you insist that despite his omnipotence and omniscience he kept producing species and ecosystems he didn’t want to produce?

Camouflage caterpillar

DAVID: Our thinking will remain opposite.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I still insist it.

Presumably because you cannot bear the thought that your theory of evolution might be wrong, even though it ridicules your God as being clumsy and inefficient.

Plants using heat

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

dhw: 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?

DAVID: All part of ecosystems that give us food.

Just like all the ecosystems that came and went for 3,000,000,000+ years before humans arrived on the scene. All created just for us!

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: In NDE's the consciousness appears to be separate from the brain.

Yes, but it retains its individual identity, and it usually links up with other individuals as opposed to linking up with some nebulous “property of the universe”. Meanwhile, perhaps you have answers to some of the questions I’ve asked?