We are not nearly as determined by our genes as once thought.

...it's like suggesting that Paley's watch, rather than either being made by a watchmaker combined with the creativity of several generations of earlier intelligent human inventors, or even formed by the blind purposeless Darwinian RM + NS process mechanism (where the organizing information is supposed to ultimately come from the environment via natural selection), instead simply appeared spontaneously out of nothing by some sort of self-organizing process of the constituent elementary particles of the various elements in the final watch.

Again, I think these classical analogies are just approximations... and inaccurate...

I really don't have a dog in this fight... because I really don't think the argument matters... it doesn't get me any closer to understanding things...

So this is perhaps a little off target, but, I thought I would just drop this in... Adrian Thompson had been evolving hardware circuits using evolutionary algorithms that take full advantage of the properties of materials since the mid 90's. It really doesn't matter whether they know the properties of the materials they are using to evolve the circuit, or not, because whatever is available, nature just takes full advantage of them, and we get left with not understanding how or why these circuits work. But they do. Only the designs cannot be transferred, as they are completely unique to the hardware.

The last appearance/publication that I could find of Adrian (who I suspect may emerge as a modern day Turing in the fullness of time), was a transatlantic video-link appearance at a Department of Defense sponsored conference in the USA for evolutionary hardware in the early 2000's, which confirmed that he had moved on with his research, and was now manipulating tiny things to evolve circuits, such as rotating molecules (and even smaller things) to build evolving hardware.

When you read Adrians papers, they are astonishing (well they are to me) it seems that things probably add-up and are ordered nicely at some really fundamental level (deeper than fields), and it's the hardware that needs to adapt to the fields. And not the other way round as we do today, where we try to force the fields to do what we want, by forcing them to conform using fixed hardware...

How we manufacture and design circuits, run our societies, control our gardens by forcing nature to conform, all using laws and rules, seem to be related... and it looks to me that this will to control and conform, is almost like a sickness, and will eventually have to change... and it may start with whatever finally emerges in the fullness of time, from the fruits of Adrians research into evolving hardware. I have little doubt it's coming... and soon.

Here's a 21 year old article about Adrian's early work...

CREATURES FROM PRIMORDIAL SILICON

Let Darwinism loose in an electronics lab and just watch what it
creates. A lean, mean machine that nobody understands.  Clive Davidson
reports

"GO!" barks the researcher into the microphone. The oscilloscope in
front of him displays a steady green line across the top of its
screen. "Stop!" he says and the line immediately drops to the bottom.

Between the microphone and the oscilloscope is an electronic circuit
that discriminates between the two words. It puts out 5 volts when it
hears "go" and cuts off the signal when it hears "stop".

It is unremarkable that a microprocessor can perform such a
task - except in this case. Even though the circuit consists of only a
small number of basic components, the researcher, Adrian Thompson,
does not know how it works. He can't ask the designer because there
wasn't one. Instead, the circuit evolved from a "primordial soup" of
silicon components guided by the principles of genetic variation and
survival of the fittest.

Thompson's work is not aimless tinkering. His brand of evolution
managed to construct a working circuit with fewer than one-tenth of
the components that a human designer would have used. His
experiments - which began four years ago and earned him his PhD -are
already making waves....

Link to a scraped version of the full article below:
http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=73

I do certainly agree with this - and that this is all that we can learn scientifically about consciousness, this is the extent to which science and engineering can penetrate it.

I think the term consciousness is like the term, running.  Running is an activity that draws on multiple sources of input and coordinates these separate sources to have a process where feet, legs and hips project an organism in the direction sighted by the eyes.

Science can measure the various streams of information and energy sources that work with the leverage of the body.  It can't directly measure "running".   Observation can only have benchmarks that are output from running, such as a change in location at various speeds.  The experience of running is something entirely else, from the science measurements of activity that contributes to running. 

Is running part of consciousness, because when we run we experience runningness?  It gets confusing when an "amalgam" of processes is unified as an abstraction.  For me, the underlying variable that is at the heart of the matter is understanding - not consciousness.  I am "selling" understanding as a direct mental activity that effects real-world probabilities.

I am aware that this is not mainstream.  If you are conscious - it is measured only subjectively.  If you understand a relationship - this can be modeled as an informational program.  A simulation of consciousness points in a thousand vectors.  A simulation of a specific understanding shows how there is a real-world change in probability from a change in negentropy from mental work.

Let me say a little something about ID.  I appreciate Mike Behe's observation of design in the bio-chemical structures of living things.  However, the argument extended by ID is out of date.

The RM & NS -- which was The IDEA for Evo for so long --- has died.  (Some on both sides seem to not grasp the sea change that has emerged in the last twenty years).  ID tried to knock down random-walk design, saying an answer came from outside natural systems.  The reason being -- get this now -- the premise of casual closure of physics eliminating other routes for design to happen naturally via mind.  The argument to verify ID was to try say that it since design couldn't come from special physical events, well it must be......  

The premise of Materialism dissolves away in the face of Informational Realism, where Information Science finds other methods for living designs. Bioinformatics can model some of the process steps well and is seeking more.

The case, now, is we know RM does not create new information.  We are now uncovering how living things communicate, with their own heredity communication systems "toolkit" and bring functional cybernetic information into their future genomes.  

Hence both Materialistic and ID views are both are overrun and wholehearted sacked.  We are left to update bio-evolutionary theory now that we know that there are Lamarckian "leaks" of information objects from generation to generation.  Mental Evolution, as Charles Darwin and George Romanes, promoted is an essential part of the story.

Evolution is all about adaptation in both mental and physical environments.  It is the opposite of a story about determinism.