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Detecting design or intent in nature
RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
(January 16, 2015 at 10:15 pm)IATIA Wrote:
(January 16, 2015 at 3:18 pm)Heywood Wrote: By intellect I mean an ability to navigate and/or act upon reality.
So you are saying that a paramecium possesses intellect.

If a paramecium can navigate and/or act upon reality then yes a paramecium has an intellect. It would be a very rudimentary intellect.
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RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
(January 16, 2015 at 11:20 pm)Heywood Wrote:
(January 16, 2015 at 10:15 pm)IATIA Wrote: So you are saying that a paramecium possesses intellect.

If a paramecium can navigate and/or act upon reality then yes a paramecium has an intellect. It would be a very rudimentary intellect.

So a body of water is intelligent? It can navigate hills, rocks and ditches to reach the ocean.
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RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
It acts on reality too. It makes me wet, damnit!

I think "intelligence" is not so easy to define.
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RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
Even if Heywood can successfully convince *himself* that he has justly invoked mind or "intellect" as an all-impenetrable essence of motion, he still has to explain how exactly it is he thinks he has advanced the discussion. We're still left to figure what intelligent change is and if and how it differs from the brute elements and their necessary productions by principles both at rest (unchanging) and perpetually resulting in beings ever-changing.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
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RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
Indeed. And as has been pointed out many times, anything humans do is a subset of the evolution of life on Earth as a whole.
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RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
(January 17, 2015 at 1:52 am)robvalue Wrote: It acts on reality too. It makes me wet, damnit!

Hey, stop teasing me like this!
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist.  This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair.  Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second.  That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
(January 17, 2015 at 1:07 am)Surgenator Wrote:
(January 16, 2015 at 11:20 pm)Heywood Wrote: If a paramecium can navigate and/or act upon reality then yes a paramecium has an intellect. It would be a very rudimentary intellect.

So a body of water is intelligent? It can navigate hills, rocks and ditches to reach the ocean.

Motion induced by gravity is not navigation.
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RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
(January 17, 2015 at 12:23 pm)Heywood Wrote:
(January 17, 2015 at 1:07 am)Surgenator Wrote: So a body of water is intelligent? It can navigate hills, rocks and ditches to reach the ocean.

Motion induced by gravity is not navigation.
It's moving due to an interaction with forces external to itself. Does an organism really do more than that?
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RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
(January 17, 2015 at 3:32 am)robvalue Wrote: Indeed. And as has been pointed out many times, anything humans do is a subset of the evolution of life on Earth as a whole.

Intellects can create evolutionary systems so how do you know evolution of life on earth is not a subset of intellect?

Why is it you don't observe spontaneous evolutionary systems come into existence except in situations where intellect is involved? If evolution is a just a natural consequence of the laws of physics we should see evolutionary systems come into existence just about everywhere. We do not so maybe your hypothesis is wrong.
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RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
(January 17, 2015 at 12:43 pm)Heywood Wrote: If evolution is a just a natural consequence of the laws of physics we should see evolutionary systems come into existence just about everywhere.
Where is "everywhere"?
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