[MD] Quality Conversations

[David M]

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 <davidint at blueyonder.co.uk> 
> 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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