Hi meekerdb IMHO nature contains life and life is intelligence. There may be random forces, and no dojubt natural selection plays a role, but I can't help but keep thinking that the intelligence of nature is a big part of guiding evolution. If life is intelligent, one can hardly avoid the phnomenon of guided evolution.
BTW Saint Augustine believed that nature was full of "seeds" of intelligence. Roger Clough, [email protected] 8/31/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-30, 23:04:16 Subject: Re: No Chinese Room Necessary On 8/30/2012 6:23 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:00:12 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/30/2012 5:39 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, August 30, 2012 8:19:32 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: If morals didn't exist, why would we choose to invent them? What possible purpose could be served by some additional qualitative layer of experience on top of the perfectly efficient and simple execution of neurochemical scripts? Don't you see that the proposed usefulness of such a thing is only conceivable in hindsight - after the fact of its existence? We didn't invent them. They evolved. Evolution has no foresight, it's random. Randomness is not omnipotence. It doesn't matter how many words I write here, they will never evolve into something that writes by itself. Exactly. Randomness is more likely to kludge up an adaptation than create an efficient design from scratch. Your words don't evolve because they don't move around and recombine randomly - except in your head. Are you suggesting that if I add a randomizer that the words being spit out will eventually learn to become an author? That would be necessary but not sufficient. You'd need an editor (or natural selection) to find something coherent. Are you an Intelligent Design creationist? Of course not. Then why can't you accept that living systems are not designed, don't 'need' be they way they are, are just formed by random variation and natural selection. It takes advantage of what is available. Feeling sick at your stomach after eating rotten food is a good adaptation to teach you not eat stuff like that again. No, it isn't a possible adaptation at all. There would not be any such thing as 'feeling' or 'sick' - only memory locations and branching tree algorithms. This is what I am saying, feeling makes no sense as a possibility unless you are looking back on it in hindsight after the fact. Sure, to you it seems like nausea is a good adaptation, but that's naive realism. You assume nausea is possible because you have experienced it. That's not an assumption - that's empiricism. An assumption would be that a brain can't instantiate feelings. Ok, then you know nausea is possible because you have experienced it. That doesn't change the fact that nausea has no business being possible in a universe driven only by bottom up evolution. IT'S RANDOM! Having business assumes a goal, foresight. You would have to use evolution to explain the possibility of feeling in the first place, and it cannot. So what feeling would work to guide you not harm a child? - how about that 'sick at your stomach' feeling. That implies that T-cells need a feeling to guide them not to kill friendly cells. No it doesn't. T-cells are not social animals who need to care for their young. T-cells are social organisms who need to care for the other cells of the body. What's the difference? For one the T-cells don't have young. Their 'feelings' are simple and don't need to rise to level of being expressible or to be resolved with conflicting feelings. You are again asking why some biological system 'needs' to be the way it is, as though there is a designer who can explain his choice. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
