Kurieuo wrote:Here is an article that gets into the issue I'm trying to highlight, but I often struggle to explain it in a manner that others understand. This page, on an peer-reviewed journal website, describes problems that arise with consciousness and varying levels, it goes into a quite broad covering:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/
The main 'problem' with the evolution of consciousness, as I see it, is that it is such a subjective experience that we find it very difficult to detach ourselves from a wholly subjective approach to discovering it in others. We are prepared to accept that other people are conscious, as we share so much in common, but not that a dog, a mouse, or a chair might be conscious, simply because they are different creatures, not because we actually know. Really, the only way we can detect consciousness is by its effects: for all I know my cat or my computer might be plotting to overthrow the world or compose a beautiful poem, but unless I have some way of detecting that, I cannot consider them conscious. To experiment with consciousness, then, we cannot begin with "I think this, and a rabbit doesn't, so a rabbit isn't conscious", as we don't know what a rabbit thinks. Instead we have to begin with "How do I recognise consciousness?" We have begun with things like recognising oneself as different from others, empathising with others' experiences, expressing emotions, communicating ideas about the past and the future, making jokes, and so on, none of which is a definitive marker for consciousness, but, given enough criteria, might define an organism (not necessarily a living organism), whose behaviour is indistinguishable from that of a conscious organism. There is a discussion among the developers of robots about whether a robot could ever be conscious. One side says that however lifelike a robot's behaviour, it could never be conscious because a robot isn't a human. The other says that if a robot was ever created whose behaviour was indistinguishable from a human, then to all intents and purposes it must be considered as conscious. The famous Turing test was designed to highlight the dilemma. Seen on that way, it would be interesting to know what you thought was qualitatively different between the consciousness of higher primates and ourselves.
Then another form of Theism that embraces an evolutionary origins, is that God seeded life, but then was involved in the process ensuring an natural hurdles e.g., the accumulation of information, stable reproduction rather than extinction and the like were overcome. My feeling is that the latter belief is a type of God of the gaps.
Quite so, but that's not what I think. The words "but then was involved" imply that the original plan could result in things going 'wrong' which had to be corrected. I don't think the original plan was that imperfect. Another odd analogy that occurred to me is that of someone producing an animated film by drawing a series of pictures. Each picture is an entirely logical continuation of the story from the previous sequence, and, if thought about in sufficient detail from the start, does not require any new picture to contain any unpredictable element. The pictures cannot draw themselves, of course, and there is no reason why the artist could not suddenly introduce an elephant in the garden in a single picture, if that's what he wanted. But my experience of the show so far suggests that he hasn't, but followed the plan which was in his mind from the very beginning.
To to use an analogy to describe the limited of natural selection acting upon random mutations, I can use my hand to push a screw into wood a little, enough for it to stay there, but I need something more like my drill to firmly screw it all the way in (I've been hanging a number of doors lately).
Is evolution your hand, and God the drill? But God created the screw, the hand, and the wood. By my analogy he designed the wood so that the hand could manage the job by itself...
Even in intelligent selection (which is what Darwin reflected upon, and hence "natural" selection) there are limits with what breeders can breed.
We don't know that. We know what has, and has not, been achieved, but not what could be, or will be achieved, given enough time.
Boundaries if you will in nature, between species. While species are hard to define, we know there are limits to the point that you can just mix two different species together.
This is a common enough belief, but is based on ignorance, not evidence. As I say, we know what we have achieved, and not achieved, but that is insufficient for us to say that the evolution of species is impossible. (And you ought to avoid the ACB-ism of the idea of "mixing species together," which is evolutionarily meaningless)
Natural selection would surely weed such out, and we're talking about the tips of evolutionary trees. With evolution, we would be hope the best of both worlds (Lion/Tiger) would form a better super-species of sorts than is better adapted to survive however such isn't the case.
Well obviously not. it is no argument to say that because lions and tigers "ought" to have interbred, but haven't, that therefore natural selection doesn't work. Evolution is not about species "mixing together" but about species diverging. Lions and tigers shared a common ancestor not so many millions of years ago, the populations of which diverged according to their environment to the extent that eventually they were reproductively isolated.
It'd take much faith for me to believe in a purely mechanistic solution for the diversity of life that we see, where there was previously or even starting with algae.
Ah, well, that's where I see God as being much cleverer than you give him credit for...
Your position is better, yet, your views, I'm sure Audie and many others in science would still find abhorrible.
I think not. They might disagree philosophically, but my views are as scientifically sound as the most atheistic evolutionist. There is a point, beyond the big bang, at which the atheist has to say "I don't know", an ignorance which I fill by calling it God. Between me, Audie and Richard Dawkins we could attempt to derive some understanding of this entity.
Where we disagree, is that you don't believe in God's direct creation of a new species or even genus or family taxonomic levels. Right? You believe that God superintends over natural processes to develop new distinct forms of life, rather than directly creating many new distinct forms of life from scratch as I believe.
I think that's correct. So can I explore exactly what you think the direct creation of a new species might involve. Say the kiwi, to bring back an earlier example. Currently, there are insufficient fossils for me to "prove" the evolution of the kiwi, so let me, for the sake of argument, follow a creationist point of view. Do you think that a small group of adult kiwis were instantaneously planted on the virgin soil of New Zealand? (Presumably more than one, for breeding purposes, and more than two, to maintain sufficient genetic diversity). Or were there some non-kiwi mothers who laid eggs containing the DNA of true kiwis, which, when hatched, were sufficiently similar to their mothers to be cared for, but not sufficiently similar to interbreed with their mothers, or their non-kiwi cousins. (Presumably, being slightly better adapted to their environment than the non-kiwis, they eventually out competed them, resulting in the extinction of the previous species.) Or perhaps you have other ideas?
Yet, I believe God, while he models modern humans upon hominids who have had many thousands of years to adapt and develop resistances against certain sicknesses and the like (as they adapted within a changing environment), God merely adopted such as a template with which to create us as a brand new creation.
Again, how exactly do you thing he might have gone about it? In the case of humans there are a number of pre-human fossils suggesting that the new humans replaced them, rather than suddenly filling a whole new ecological niche.
Consider we have discovered a biological code exists, DNA. So I draw similarities with how programmers work, which seems reasonable to me since we are dealing with code. Coders start with a programming language, and languages often come with a set of pre-defined functions that programmers can make use of to develop applications or the like. "Frameworks" are often developed based upon best coding practices and they includes new templates and methods for doing things. These frameworks can really make the task of coding something much easier and the code is more solid and resilient against "bugs" and "attacks" from hackers (see a similarity here with ERVs?). Looking back to how God created, it's not so much that God needed an easier way, but certainly seems more efficient of God nonetheless to adopt a "framework" and "template" when coding his own new "programs" (different life forms). We know the language God used, AGC and T, and would love to re-engineer it. But then, you know, where evolutionary science sees an ancestor between human and chimps, such an ancestor may have simply been a template God used to model both humans and chimps upon when creating each as distinct, brand new species.
Yes, good. God may indeed have done that: taken a variety of genes from an appropriate model, then reassembled them, with one or two additions of his own, to derive the new species. Except that in our case, our genes are so similar to those of the higher primates that there was no need to disassemble and reassemble; all that was needed was the few little tweaks. So how, do you suppose, he went about that? Manually? Or maybe by the judicious targeting of cosmic rays?
