Hi Ian
Sure there seems no sense in suggesting there is a planner,designer,
engineer behind life's
amazing forms. Yet despite the insights of current evolutiopnary mechanisms
that no
doubt have a role, I am still struck by life's active striving powers, the
power to take
a single cell with some DNA coding and mix it with environmental resources
to make
something as impressive as a human body. This is an amazing feat of
construction
and a very active one. What I wonder is in the activity of these complex RNA
and other molecules is there room for something like knowledge and
intelligence.
Of course DNA is a form of information, and it has a use. Used by RNA to
construct proteins. Do cells and RNA have an interest in their work/actions?
Do cells make choices? Not agentively like brains, but in the sense that
they
have different possible processes they can adopt, different resources they
can use
(over their earth history, over their evolutionary life)? Do cells and RNA
actualise
their possibilities with some form of discretion? I have no idea, I just
wonder.
I wonder how animate RNA and cells are? They are of course living. What is
it
to be living? Is living the activity of reducing excess possibilities to a
small number
of actualities? I know Darwinism suggests that variety (ie actualised
possibilities)
are reduced in number by selection. But if all possibilities could be tried
out as
actual, tested by reality and removed why would there be any need for living
or conscious things? I'd suggest that a living thing is alive precisely
because it
has unrealised possibilities that it does actively explore, where living
action is the ability
to opt, to handle events that are open, full of possibilities, but where not
all
possibilties can be tried out, where the option/possibility that seems to
offer the
higher quality future is taken. Then again, how can we exclude such
possibilities
from so-called inanimate processes? This is not to imagine that there is
some
power that can alter natural processes that we know from current observation
and experiment. Rather it is to ask why the processes we observe are as they
are?
Why dom these processes exist? What options have been taken to reach them?
What possibilties set aside? In the end this question leads to the one about
how
we got this particular cosmos and how it was able to work so well to produce
the possibilties that allow life like us, galaxies like ours, suns like
ours, atoms
like these. Is the particularity of this cosmos a random walk through the
field
of all possible worlds or is it an active journey with many fellow
travellers at many levels,
moving out together as a whole but also as separate beings, through the
time-space of
all possible worlds, looking for the best quality futures available at each
point of opting.
Such is the e-venting of our cosmos I wonder.
David M
As you know DM, I'm comfortable with downward (as well as upward)
causation, and there are no doubt neo-Darwinian mechanisms we don't
yet really know about ... (pure) Darwinism was just one species in the
evolution of evolution ...
The problem becomes when we see the downward causation as directed by
an "agent" (an "engineer") All I'm really saying is that the agent we
see is metaphorical, and the effects really "emergent", from causes
(two-way both).
Ian
On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 11:06 AM, David M <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Engineering is a metaphor in
evolution, but there is no engineer involved. Biological genes may
"engineer" brains, but they do not engineer intelligence - they
engineer biological pattersns more or less capable of supporting
intelligence. (I repeat my caveat, naturally.)
Hi Ian
I see no reason to imagine that there is a grand designer in
evolution, although it depends on how interconnected and conscious all
things are, but we cannot currently get a clear idea about this. More
interestingly I wonder how
able life itself is able to engineer its own bodies. Darwinism
assumes no feedback loop from active life to what it passes
on to the next generation in bodily form and behaviour.
But is this correct? Do bodies have more capacity
to alter genes and their switches than is usually assumed.
Some people seem to be exploring this possibility.
The negative feedback loop that natural de-selection, as it
should be called, offers is very limited and makes life's
evolution out of the slime very unlikely, of course we are
here, but is the Darwinian orthodoxy enough? We should
keep asking.
Of course, Sheldrake suggests another possible mechanism.
David M
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