hughfarey wrote:Kurieuo wrote:Can we increase our consciousness levels by perhaps tweaking some physical part within us? If you get the time, I'd love you to pick up a copy of Thomas Nagel's book, Mind and Cosmos and hear your thoughts thereafter.
I don't know the extent to which consciousness can increase in the future, but the future is not the past. Various 'levels of consciousness' have been observed in different animals. Recognising oneself in a mirror seems to indicate some degree of consciousness, as does recognising another person's point of view, being able to deceive others, and so on, all of which have been demonstrated in non-human animals. Gorillas, chimps and bonobos seem to exhibit quite high levels of consciousness, and I see no reason why human consciousness could not have emerged from the evolution of humans from earlier primates.
Yet, even gorillas and chimps pail in comparison to human consciousness.
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/
hughfarey wrote:K wrote:I'm sure you'll find it interesting, I just think it'll help with any discussion we have to understand better what is believed my end. Some things said, you see absurdity with God "tinkering", but then, I see such intervention ought to be expected. Especially considering God is personal, creative, the biggest Artist in world.
I have now read that blog entry, and found it interesting, to the extent that I'm not sure your version of progressive creation is not almost identical with my version of theistic evolution. If I may quote: "So God takes something pre-existing, adds to it and moulds some brand new life. So whereas Naturalists believe all the mechanisms to be natural,
I'd say a driving mechanism for new biological information and function is intervention.Something new being created from what already existed plus God's added input and tweaking." At a microscopic level, I think the difference between us may come down to single genetic mutations. We see a molecule of DNA minutely changing. An atheist considers this entirely random. A progressive creationist sees it as a direct intervention by God. A theistic evolutionist considers that although it is apparently random, it is the result of the structure of the maintenance and progression of the universe originally designed before the big bang. I would agree with you that there is a sense in which every change in every atom of the universe is a direct intervention by God, but disagree with you that any of these changes diverts from the rational pattern He established before time began.
If I may dig into the "greyness" that exists between us and our beliefs to clarify what are perhaps differences between your form of Theistic Evolution and my form of Progressive Creation. We would no doubt share many common thoughts
, but then there are I'm sure crucial differences.
First, by far the most common understanding of Theistic Evolution is that God seeded life in a very pluripotent manner, and from that seed life unfolded according to how God intended. 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. It tries to hang onto evolutionary to fit in with scientific consensus, yet it nonetheless rejects a Neo-Darwinian form where God isn't needed to guide the process. The latter, God isn't needed, not even to guide the process, is the form Neo-X believes in, and obviously Audie.
Now as for my own Progressive Creation believes, sure evolution can happen, we witness it with pesticide resistances and the like. We see natural selection happens, which is really more like an extinction mechanism that enables those which can adapt to their environments to survive (
or more the case, weeds out the "weaker" species that cannot adapt). We see random mutations, and science tries to apply an expected average mutation rate across life from start to finish. So I don't not believe there are some ingredients for change. 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).
Even in
intelligent selection (which is what Darwin reflected upon, and hence "natural" selection) there are limits with what breeders can breed. 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. And where there are enough similarities for breeding to occur, then there are other issues. For example, ligers (cross between a lion and tiger), selectively bred. If the mother isn't given a c-section and doesn't die during birth, often the offspring has birth defects, health issues, is infertile and dies young. 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.
So, you know, I'm quite open to natural mechanisms, but then I see many like natural selection acting upon random mutations exaggerated beyond [this person's] belief at being the main driving force (the drill!) with the development of distinct lifeforms. 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.
Your position is better, yet, your views, I'm sure Audie and many others in science would still find abhorrible. They might let you slide, so long as you don't fuss to much over the real problems you see in a purely natural and unguided mechanistic accounting of evolution. If you did, then they might challenge you as filling in gaps with God, rather than real science. Though I believe you are simply responded to real problem that exist that are irresolvable (i.e., new structured biological information).
So back to our views. Where we agree, is that God is still necessary. There are real challenges, in a purely natural accounting, that without God's intervention or perhaps superintendence, we both believe could not be overcome if the natural mechanisms in place were left to come up with everything on their own.
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. Though I'd concede that at the taxonomic tips we can have a variety of life based upon interbreeding and dominance of genes, even with mutation as a mechanism for a create a wider diversity of traits and the like within a species.
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.
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.
So the difference between Progressive Creation and your form of Theistic Evolution, is that for me, I see God as directly creating new and distinct lifeforms based upon previously existing frameworks, God does not use any real mechanism with which to bring about new and distinct lifeforms (except natural reproduction of course which is the method for life continuing).
