the whereu dilemma

Originally posted by wafflehead ↑

Hi Rappa.

Hit and miss is once again one of these relative terms. There are evolutionary dead-ends but in their environmental circumstance it was still a viable modification to evolve into some now nonexistent niche. The vast interaction of all creatures great and small still probably required these now non-extant lines of evolution.

In the big picture evolution is linear. Evolution will only cease when the universe no longer exists.

Of course the eye evolved. Not only is this without question but even today we have examples of just about every stage of this evolution, from light sensitive jelly fish to creatures with primitive first stage lenses.

My point is not with evolution. It is beyond question, there are no aspects of the physiology of humans that can not be explained by evolution.

However, life is not a phenomena of non-life and a father bacteria did not take his son on his knee and say, son we have a big job in front of us. We are going to evolve into dinosaurs and then we are going to get wiped out and eventually turn into humans, son are you with me. High five. Oh, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. 3 billion years and we can high five.

Why would a replicating RNA or some such creature after a billion years become a bacteria. And why would a bacteria bother to evolve into evermore complex organisms without any possible gain, because the end result is to pass on a gene? In an unconscious universe, who gives a sheet? Seems like a lot of work to go from nothing to nothing.

You have to create a narrative that explains how an event started some 13.5 billion years ago that evolved into the universe we see today, was seeded with life that ended up as a sentient being after billions of years of evolution had terra-formed an earth for it full of coal and hydrocarbons and agricultural soil and on and on.

Even the fact that there was a start to the universe is a clear indication that something disrupted a state that we can only imagine was eternal. And then this disruption did the most astounding thing, it formed a universe and habitable zones and produced life. All this without the benefit of a single conscious moment.

I don't think so.

The big nothing got everything right over and over and over again without consciousness, without forethought, without any will, desire or empathy.

I don't think so.

If you can get the religious imagery out of your head I think it helps to clear the way to see that it is utter impossible for such perfection to be the outcome of unconsciousness. There is a conscious universe and if you can get this information out of the hands of the fundamentalists it is as clear and evident as any scientific fact.

I just don't have enough imagination to believe that nothing allowed everything to evolve and produce a sentient being to rise up and gaze back on billions of years of modification and to ponder its existence.

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Waffle, I accept your argument that there would seem to be a need for a source of consciousness to get the ball rolling.

But, we then get back to the problem-- where did the conscious motivation force or energy come from in the first place?

This becomes a circular argument and I feel science deals with it well enough when it says, we cannot yet answer such questions, but there is no need to create a source of consciousness such as a god of sorts to do our work.

We will work with the evidence at hand and the theories will change and evolve as our understandings improve.

One day you may be proven right or wrong, but that is science based on evidence and your premise about the need for consciousness sounds like faith to me.