Mental Evolution and Psi

In my view the origin of design especially intricate irreducibly complex design inherently requires conscious intelligence of a high order.

The Darwinian mechanism won't work in the first place because the chance of getting both in one mutant is vanishingly small. 

The science doesn't agree with you, information theory firmly establishes that simple processes can make complex structures, as long as they can incorporate feedback from the environment.  Information objects in the environment, like memes or affordances, are merged by mind in new information objects constructed with subjective intents and opinions.  The outcomes of physics, as experienced, can be organized in mind of the agent at an instinctual and subconscious level.  The mental work done is the basis of responses, adaptations and smart behavior.  

Is the first bridge that humanity used from blueprints and a bill of materials; or did a tree fall across a stream?  This tree bridge was an affordance and can be turned to purpose by any living thing, because there is a probability for USE.  The logical structure of a crossing a bridge is fixed as an information object.  It connects by spanning a gap with to agent's need.  The Golden Gate is reductive to this fundamental construction.  Purpose and intent are not in physics or materials science data.  They are the root activity of decision theory.  And a key to understanding how mental actions piece together adaptive behavior.

Decision Theory: the mathematical study of strategies for optimal decision-making between options involving risks or expectations of gain or loss depending on the outcome. 

 
In terms of people and bacteria - there is a huge gap in complexity of biological sense tools.  However, when simulated as information flow, there is no difference in their intention to eat in the computational abstraction.  It starts with a signal, detection of food, a state of desire and a logical behavioral output.  This can become a programmable algorithm.

Understanding the affordance of a tree across a stream as a logical configuration, this can be applied to information processing by bacteria and eating.  Starting with the bacteria's intent in wanting energy from the environment, it is like any other evolving agent adding discoverable benefits through trial and error.  Fulfilling intents goes all the way down as subconscious activity.  The immense number of experiences of nature intertwine, until you get the British Baking Show, wine sommeliers and gourmet pizza with truffles.  This is the way reduction works.  Piece by piece you can map simple root intention as driving complex behavior.

Behe looked at chemical organization in living things and said this was not made randomly.  It is now coming out of the politics into established science.  Leslie Orgel, Edwin Schrodinger and others were on this decades before him.  There is structured information to be measured and through the data pattern measurements, past adaptations can be understood.  Information science will kill monism long-term.

You still conflate the ACTUAL ideas of the person Charlie D. with neoDarwinism.  The idea of mind, as the root cause of the complexity of both body and behavior, is a killer to a "random walk" in evolution.  Intention to eat is a root cause of osmotic cell walls and animal mouths.  It is at the root of - well roots of plants -  in exactly the same way.  The intent to move is an informational root cause of a flagellum.  Nature finds a way, utilizing the ingredients available, from motivation.  Darwin believed that mind was part of natural selection.  Dawkins did not.

Denis Noble debated Dawkins and crushed him publicly.  It was a tide-turning event.  neoDarwinism is dying out in objective science.  Hear much from Dawkins since?  

Denis Noble -  Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University. One of the pioneers of Systems Biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. Over 350 articles in academic journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, Journal of Physiology

 
".... all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproved. Moreover, they have been disproved in ways that raise the tantalizing prospect of a totally new synthesis..."  D. Noble

https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/books?&page=10

Here is a protege of D. Noble with a new title on the book list.  I have not read it, yet.

 Wetware: A computer in every living cell

Author: Dennis Bray

How does a single-cell creature, such as an amoeba, lead such a sophisticated life? How does it hunt living prey, respond to lights, sounds, and smells, and display complex sequences of movements without the benefit of a nervous system? This book offers a startling and original answer.
In clear, jargon-free language, Dennis Bray taps the findings of the new discipline of systems biology to show that the internal chemistry of living cells is a form of computation. Cells are built out of molecular circuits that perform logical operations, as electronic devices do, but with unique properties. Bray argues that the computational juice of cells provides the basis of all the distinctive properties of living systems: it allows organisms to embody in their internal structure an image of the world, and this accounts for their adaptability, responsiveness, and intelligence.
In Wetware, Bray offers imaginative, wide-ranging and perceptive critiques of robotics and complexity theory, as well as many entertaining and telling anecdotes. For the general reader, the practicing scientist, and all others with an interest in the nature of life, the book is an exciting portal to some of biology’s latest discoveries and ideas.

  bolding mine

The science doesn't agree with you, information theory firmly establishes that simple processes can make complex structures, as long as they can incorporate feedback from the environment.  Information objects in the environment, like memes or affordances, are merged by mind in new information objects constructed with subjective intents and opinions.  The outcomes of physics, as experienced, can be organized in mind of the agent at an instinctual and subconscious level.  The mental work done is the basis of responses, adaptations and smart behavior.  

Is the first bridge that humanity used from blueprints and a bill of materials; or did a tree fall across a stream?  This tree bridge was an affordance and can be turned to purpose by any living thing, because there is a probability for USE.  The logical structure of a crossing a bridge is fixed as an information object.  It connects by spanning a gap with to agent's need.  The Golden Gate is reductive to this fundamental construction.  Purpose and intent are not in physics or materials science data.  They are the root activity of decision theory.  And a key to understanding how mental actions piece together adaptive behavior.

 
In terms of people and bacteria - there is a huge gap in complexity of biological sense tools.  However, when simulated as information flow, there is no difference in their intention to eat in the computational abstraction.  It starts with a signal, detection of food, a state of desire and a logical behavioral output.  This can become a programmable algorithm.

Understanding the affordance of a tree across a stream as a logical configuration, this can be applied to information processing by bacteria and eating.  Starting with the bacteria's intent in wanting energy from the environment, it is like any other evolving agent adding discoverable benefits through trial and error.  Fulfilling intents goes all the way down as subconscious activity.  The immense number of experiences of nature intertwine, until you get the British Baking Show, wine sommeliers and gourmet pizza with truffles.  This is the way reduction works.  Piece by piece you can map simple root intention as driving complex behavior.

Behe looked at chemical organization in living things and said this was not made randomly.  It is now coming out of the politics into established science.  Leslie Orgel, Edwin Schrodinger and others were on this decades before him.  There is structured information to be measured and through the data pattern measurements, past adaptations can be understood.  Information science will kill monism long-term.

You still conflate the ACTUAL ideas of the person Charlie D. with neoDarwinism.  The idea of mind, as the root cause of the complexity of both body and behavior, is a killer to a "random walk" in evolution.  Intention to eat is a root cause of osmotic cell walls and animal mouths.  It is at the root of - well roots of plants -  in exactly the same way.  The intent to move is an informational root cause of a flagellum.  Nature finds a way, utilizing the ingredients available, from motivation.  Darwin believed that mind was part of natural selection.  Dawkins did not.

Denis Noble debated Dawkins and crushed him publicly.  It was a tide-turning event.  neoDarwinism is dying out in objective science.  Hear much from Dawkins since?  

Consider  a famous example of irreducible complexity in biology:

The sensory and motor mechanism of the E. coli bacterium. This consists first of a number of receptors, which initially detect the concentrations of a variety of chemicals. Secondary components extract information from these sensors that in turn is used as input to a gradient sensing mechanism. This output is processed to determine if the bacterium needs to move towards food or away from toxicity and in what direction. The output of this mechanism is used to drive a set of constant torque proton-powered reversible rotary motors, which transfer their energy through a microscopic drive train and rotate a helical flagellum propeller from 30,000 to 100,000 rpm. This highly integrated system allows the bacterium to migrate at the rate of approximately ten body lengths per second. This system contains very many finely-fitting components like like a motor, drive train, hub, socket, bearing, and whip-like propeller. In addition to this there is a separate complex and highly integrated developmental mechanism and system that first assembles the flagellum system.

Are we supposed to believe that this intricate machine and its separate developmental system somehow came about through a basically simple very many-step developmental process where a relatively primitive organism sensed a long series of simple needs, to progressively build up the final intricate, complex and (most importantly) irreducibly complex system of systems? In your words, where each step consists of "...a signal, detection of food, (then) a state of desire and a logical behavioral output...". 

Unfortunately, the irreducible complexity of this system precludes it ever having been evolved even in this semi-intelligent way, where there is still (like with Darwinistic processes) no overall goal or purpose (to achieve the final result, held in some sort of mind).

Example: Where is the foresight required to somehow sense that (after for instance having already developed the sensor subsystem), it is necessary to develop the motor? A simple sensing of the need for food and whether a single mutational change will go in the direction of assembling the ATP proton-powered motor will not suffice, since just part of the motor has no functionality. But more importantly, your simple mechanism can't possibly look ahead (with foresight) to know that the motor is necessary at all, and how the motor is constructed. And this step doesn't get any food or go away from toxicity. Only the final result of the design and assembly process will. In fact at any stage of this process coming up with that single part or even subsystem will not achieve any functionality. The process somehow has to have the foresight that this step and every particular required step is necessary to build the final system. That means having the blueprint or information equivalent of the final goal in mind.   

Your proposed hypothesis brings to mind what seems comparable to me: proposing that because you can swim the length of a swimming pool, then sooner or later you can train yourself to swim the Atlantic to England. It doesn't work that way.

Are we supposed to believe that this intricate machine and its separate developmental system somehow came about through a basically simple very many-step developmental process where a relatively primitive organism sensed a long series of simple needs, to progressively build up the final intricate, complex and (most importantly) irreducibly complex system of systems? In your words, where each step consists of "...a signal, detection of food, (then) a state of desire and a logical behavioral output...". 

Yes.  I would qualify the detection step.  Detection of physical objects occurs thru the 5 senses, as implied by the prime survival example - food.  But it would also include the detection of affordances as ambient information objects.  Detection of actionable information, which is correlated to inner survival strategies, is exactly what is meant by an affordance.  The faculty of understanding  is root cause of detecting existing, affordances as substantive real-world probabilities.

 Unfortunately, the irreducible complexity of this system precludes it ever having been evolved even in this semi-intelligent way, where there is still (like with Darwinistic processes) no overall goal or purpose (to achieve the final result, held in some sort of mind). 

 Scholars have usually given Darwin's theory a neo-Darwinian interpretation. A more careful examination of the language of Darwin's notebooks and the language of the Origin of Species indicates that he reconstructed nature with a definite purpose: the final goal of man as a moral creature. In the aftermath of the Origin, Darwin, however, became more circumspect. 

https://www.pnas.org/content/106/Supplement_1/10056

I don't believe that Charlie d would agree with your assignment of how his process worked.  

Neo-Darwinism does exclude a teleological goal from a supernatural source.  In general, three possible answers to the question: 

1. No final end goal, (target state) so no teleology, 
   
2. Teleonomic goals  are observed, so teleology still has a pathway
   
3. The leap to a Teleological source - so there so teleology.
   

2. can work with Science.

 Your proposed hypothesis brings to mind what seems comparable to me: proposing that because you can swim the length of a swimming pool, then sooner or later you can train yourself to swim the Atlantic to England. It doesn't work that way.

I continue to argue for the methodology where physical objects and transformations are analyzed as a separate track from informational objects and transformations.  

Swimming is physical, but there is large scale constraint for accumulated knowledge and leverage.  A successful adaptive response to the environment (as an information object, enabled by constant feedback), can gain from communication and information exchange over generations and millions of subject.  The physical object of a swimmers body can develop amazing form and power.  However, an information object and the coded functions it can construct organically, lead to adaptation.