Evolution without accidents and also no intelligence?

It's a bit weird that in your post it looks like I wrote that stuff.

Sorry about that, I find it hard to find a quick way to avoid such confusion.

David

Gravity was seen as "occult" at one time, and "Decoherence" seems more like merely observing that somehow the oddities of QM don't usually pass all the way up to our classical existence. I think with Cosmic Fine Tuning and possibly with ID these attempts at avoiding the potential influence of Mind in the workings of the Universe have reached a limit. The Simulation Hypothesis itself is a kind of admission.

Maybe gravity is more occult than we think. I have never liked the GR solution (not just because the maths is too hard for me) because I don't think warping the coordinate space is a valid concept unless you have a coordinate that is mapped to something for convenience - like rubber - then curvilinear tensors do make sense.

As for decoherence, well all the experiments with entangled particles are surely telling us that given the right physical system, these long-range QM effects DO matter.

Yes, the simulation hypothesis is just a way of side-stepping the whole issue.

As I have said before, I feel Shapiro and his colleagues are playing a game - disproving materialism while remaining inside a materialistic framework.

I wonder if any of them come here and post under a pseudonym!

David

Shapiro:

"Evolution by stress-activated natural genetic engineering is currently the best way we have to address the origins of the complex systems which ID advocates claim neo-Darwinism cannot explain. ....... The fact that the new science of evolution includes organismal cognition and biological agency in originating adaptive novelties is the best counter we have to the criticisms of those like Michael Behe who claim that the origins of astonishingly sophisticated organic adaptations require supernatural intervention."

Shapiro doesn't show how "cell intelligence" is anything but relatively simple computational mechanisms going on in the biology of cells, and certainly doesn't show how any combination of these computational processes can amount to conscious agency, which is one of the essential ingredients of conscious designing intelligence.

As has been shown, and has been formulated in the "Hard Problem" of consciousness, computation of any level of complexity is ultimately a mechanical process, and computational processing of algorithms is the only thing that computers can do. So accordingly, since consciousness is fundamentally nonalgorithmic and noncomputational, computers can never become conscious.

By the same reasoning, cells and cellular computational "intelligence" can never become conscious to any degree.

Because of the complexity, irreducible complexity, and the innovation and ingenuity of the designs, the designing force behind evolution quite evidently must have the conscious qualities of agency, thought, foresight, imagination, visualization, ingenuity and more, qualities that no "cellular organismal computational cognition" can exhibit. Unless agency, creativity, innovation, foresight, visualization, etc. can be shown to be exhibited by computers. I guess we're going to have to wait a very long time for this, probably forever. 

I invite "new wave" evolutionary biologists such as Shapiro to show how even the relatively simple but still irreducibly complex bacterial flagellum design (containing multiple interdependent interreacting parts and subsystems, plus the essential reproduction subsystem) much less vastly more complex biological systems like the blood clotting system for instance, came about from "cell intelligence". This explication needs to be in enough detail to trace out the origin of the key parts and subsystems of the flagellum like the "hook", the propeller, the bearing assembly, the motor, the sensors and associated response logic, etc. etc.

There simply is no substitute for hypothesizing some sort of conscious highly intelligent being(s) or agent(s) as the designing agency of evolution.

Sorry about that, I find it hard to find a quick way to avoid such confusion.

David

No worries just wanted to make it clear it was Shapiro's words not mine.

My response to that is that once you abandon RM+NS as a materialistic explanation for life on Earth, you really have to have a viable alternative that really addresses the problem in materialistic terms if you want to exclude the woo-woo that is encroaching ever closer here.

I mean " Evolution by stress-activated natural genetic engineering" sounds great until you remember that engineering - genetic or otherwise - is done by (surprise, surprise) human engineers! As far as I can see, there simply isn't any materialistic alternative explanation!

David

Not sure what "woo-woo" you see encroaching.

I have surely throw out materialism many decades ago.  Engineering not so much.  One of the first engineers of bridges was a beaver, long before a human was put to the task.  Engineering is all about gradual evolution of concepts and knowledge whose foundation subsumes every breakthrough.  Discovery of an ambient tree across a stream is a complete carrier of the mutual information needed for the engineering project.  There is real "stuff" to be observed, discovered, tested and understood.   Are beavers in tech colleges or is natural information processing a simple answer?

Not sure what "woo-woo" you see encroaching.

I have surely throw out materialism many decades ago.  Engineering not so much.  One of the first engineers of bridges was a beaver, long before a human was put to the task.  Engineering is all about gradual evolution of concepts and knowledge whose foundation subsumes every breakthrough.  Discovery of an ambient tree across a stream is a complete carrier of the mutual information needed for the engineering project.  There is real "stuff" to be observed, discovered, tested and understood.   Are beavers in tech colleges or is natural information processing a simple answer?

Stephen,

I don't mind calling a beaver an engineer, the important thing is that it is a conscious animal!

I think you are a bit muddled as to what you believe because Shapiro muddles what he is saying to avoid the obvious - thinking entities have to be involved in evolution!

David

As has been shown, and has been formulated in the "Hard Problem" of consciousness, computation of any level of complexity is ultimately a mechanical process, and computational processing of algorithms is the only thing that computers can do. So accordingly, since consciousness is fundamentally nonalgorithmic and noncomputational, computers can never become conscious.

There simply is no substitute for hypothesizing some sort of conscious highly intelligent being(s) or agent(s) as the designing agency of evolution.

First, speaking for myself and not Shapiro, a scientific exploration of cognitive development in evolution in no way contradicts a hypothesis of an divine mind who is a designer.  The term is asymptotic and these vectors of outside design as original source vs ongoing empirical use of information by biological entities are not in conflict!  at all.  They follow, one to the other, logically.

Do see fresh publication in biology from Dawkins et all, who is left behind.  The Third Way scholars challenged them and is winning continuously against the neoDarwinian claim you think you refute with metaphysical claims.  You seem to claim that Shapiro's empirical evidence of agency and cognitive processes - including free-will - is bad for PSI???

Stephen,

I don't mind calling a beaver an engineer, the important thing is that it is a conscious animal!

I think you are a bit muddled as to what you believe because Shapiro muddles what he is saying to avoid the obvious - thinking entities have to be involved in evolution!

David

Where is the consciousness line for you?  Are chickens conscious?  Are paramecia?   Shapiro specifically says cognitive (thinking) processes have outcomes on evolution, just as did Charles Darwin and George Romanes.  Darwin observed it studying instincts.  

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/mental-evolution-in-animals/78D5893C115A437DAEFDCB3572B40E4F

I live near Beaver College - but they changed the name to Arcadia, trying to escape old jokes.

Maybe gravity is more occult than we think. I have never liked the GR solution (not just because the maths is too hard for me) because I don't think warping the coordinate space is a valid concept unless you have a coordinate that is mapped to something for convenience - like rubber - then curvilinear tensors do make sense.

As for decoherence, well all the experiments with entangled particles are surely telling us that given the right physical system, these long-range QM effects DO matter.

Yes, the simulation hypothesis is just a way of side-stepping the whole issue.

As I have said before, I feel Shapiro and his colleagues are playing a game - disproving materialism while remaining inside a materialistic framework.

I wonder if any of them come here and post under a pseudonym!

David

I agree on gravity - IMO simply saying something is a "field" and then claiming it's not "occult"...this is lacking as a real explanation.

Even regarding [f]orces Feyman noted the circularity of attempts to define what a "force" actually is.

And of course the Laws of Physics existing in some weird way that gets a pass from many Physicalists on the Interaction Problem is hardly explanatory.

QM, with Relativity a close related second, probably takes the cake on attempting to explain away clues that the Physicalist position is quite questionable.

I see Science not so much disproving "supernatural" explanations but rather using varied terms ("field", "decoherence", "space-time curvature") to hide the sense that reality is quite strange even before considering Psi & Survival let alone the "Deep Weird"...

First, speaking for myself and not Shapiro, a scientific exploration of cognitive development in evolution in no way contradicts a hypothesis of an divine mind who is a designer.  The term is asymptotic and these vectors of outside design as original source vs ongoing empirical use of information by biological entities are not in conflict!  at all.  They follow, one to the other, logically.

Do see fresh publication in biology from Dawkins et all, who is left behind.  The Third Way scholars challenged them and is winning continuously against the neoDarwinian claim you think you refute with metaphysical claims.  You seem to claim that Shapiro's empirical evidence of agency and cognitive processes - including free-will - is bad for PSI???

My hypothesis for the conscious intelligent agent behind evolution is not the Divine Mind, but many advanced spiritual beings (souls or spirits). In fact, psychic channeler Ron Scolastico's Guides' messages on this seem to me to meet the requirements and evidence exactly. This teaching was that there are different groups of these spiritual beings each group specializing in and focusing their interest on the different types of organisms and their development. These beings are of very high intelligence, have the power to intervene in evolution, but are not infallible, not omniscient, not omnipotent.

This model seems well to fit the actual record of life's development. It is as if the different groups have different personalities, compete with each other (as for instance predator/prey relationships and competitions in the wild, or the development of parasite/host arrangements), and also value aesthetic qualities like beauty, developing different "styles". These beings don't seem to be concerned about suffering, given the prevalence of that in the natural world. 

The empirical use of information by biological entities  (the various nonconscious deterministic mechanisms of "cellular intelligence" referred to by Shapiro) seem to me to be far short of the conscious employment of thought, imagination, inventiveness, ingenuity, foresight and visualization, which are what we have found to be essential in the design process for humans and presumably for any designer.

One acid test would be the challenge to show how these "cellular intelligence" mechanisms could have developed the irreducibly complex bacterial flagellum. These nonconscious mechanisms would have to be able to imagine, visualize, see possible flaws and tradeoffs, have foresight, ingeniously invent new solutions, and so on. I don't think these nonconscious cellular data processing mechanisms have anything like those capabilities, any more than our deterministically operating algorithm processing computers have these qualities of consciousness.