[From JohnS, responding to Ira's Posting]A rebuttal to “Who was Cain’s wife.”
Ira makes the same mistake Atheists, Secular Humanists and Agnostics and their ilk, do when they want to debate Religion vs. Science. He states: “…found what appears to be the official Christian answer. Adam and Eve were the first humans, Adam Created by God and Eve by God from Adam's rib. They bore many children (perhaps 33 sons and 23 daughters) over their 900-plus year lives. So, Cain married one of his sisters (or perhaps a niece).” He assumes that all Christians believe in the literal reading of the bible. Only a small minority of Christians so believe – the fundamentalist, creationists, those that purport intelligent design. The large majority of Christians interpret the bible more loosely. Even the pope has stated that evolution is an acceptable scientific view.
In my view, I believe the Bible consists of three or maybe four sources. A portion is God’s word, such as the ten commandments which I as a Christian must accept, although I don’t necessarily have to believe that God personally handed them to Moses, lore from the pre-history of the Jewish people, lore as the Jewish people moved from a belief in multiple gods to a belief in monotheism and possibly as a vehicle to bring the tribes of Israel together in a single religion.
We must also understand that the Old Testament was written at a time far different than today. That beyond providing the word of God, it provided an explanation for the creation of the universe and man’s place in language understandable to the people of the time, an explanation of the universe similar to that found in all religions. It also provided a basis for uniting the various tribes of Israel. It was not intended as a scientific text that could scientifically stand the test of time.
If we are to discuss the bible, we can do so as a religious text. We can try to determine God’s intent for man. We can also discuss it as a historical document to determine what we can learn of the early days of the Jewish people. We cannot discuss it as a scientific document pertinent today.
We can discuss Science vs. Religion from several aspects. I can say that I believe God created the universe, but can’t prove it. You can say the universe was created through some natural means but can’t prove it however, that doesn’t accomplish a lot. A more interesting discussion might be God’s place in the evolution of the universe. Did he or some natural cause simply start the universe going and then walk away or has he, as God, periodically interceded in the progress of evolution, as we believe that God created man? Is science God’s means for man understanding nature? If so, can we say that science is an expression of God’s design? That raises many interesting questions.
In the later portion of his posting, he discusses the evolution of man from apes. It is true that as a religious person I must try to reconcile God creating man with the evidence of evolution. I might argue that God as the creator of the universe created man through natural evolutionary steps. While this explanation might be acceptable, I find it a stretch rather, I would suggest that from time to time God has interceded in the flow of evolution and that He did so in the evolutionary transition from homo-erectus to homo-sapiens God interceded adding the characteristics that make us uniquely human – a giant evolutionary leap. The stories of Eden, Adam and Eve and their progeny are simply a Biblical attempt to explain the origins of man. As Ira said, most religions have similar stories.
A human secularist might argue that the leap from homo-erectus to homo sapiens even though a giant step was purely a natural event. I can’t accept that, the leap was too great and the time spans too short, a few thousand years. Evolution requires time, often long time spans and requires changing circumstances and stress which benefit a portion of a species allowing them to evolve into a new more advanced species. From my readings, I see no environmental or other natural stress occurring at the time of the transition which would justify the leap from homo-erectus to homo sapiens.
18 comments:
Thanks JohnS for your thoughtful views, but you haven't given me your answer to "Who was Cain's wife?" according to your views.
In my Topic I gave two different answers:
(1) Around 6000 years ago, Cain married his sister (or niece). This was based on a literal-believer Christian reply I found on the internet. It appears to me to be a serious analysis for those who believe the Bible is the literal word of the God who Created the world and all life in it around 6000 yrars ago. They conclude that Cain married his sister (or niece). It did not count as incest because that prohibition dates from the later Moses period.
(2) Around 6000 years ago, humans evolved metaphoric language that allowed them a nuanced view of God. "Cain" is a fictional name given to a human of that period. Like others of that time, Cain married a woman from a neighboring tribe or a close relative. I'm not a literal believer in the Bible, nor of a God separate from the Universe. I accept the Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection as the best scientific explanation we have. As for the story of "Adam" and "Eve" and their children, I try to be charitable and grant that the Bible story has some truth value in that it puts fictional names to something that actually happened about 6000 years ago. "Adam" and "Eve" were the first humans who had evolved to the point where they were capable of metaphoric language and could therefore conceive of a a nuanced God. Their son "Cain" either married his sister/niece or a woman from a neighboring tribe.
You say "Ira makes the same mistake Atheists, Secular Humanists and Agnostics and their ilk, do when they want to debate Religion vs. Science. ... He assumes that all Christians believe in the literal reading of the bible. Only a small minority of Christians so believe ... The large majority of Christians interpret the bible more loosely. Even the pope has stated that evolution is an acceptable scientific view.".
I don't like being part of an "ilk" but, knowing you personally, I won't take it as an insult.
I conclude from a careful reading of your posting that you believe God may not have Created Earth and all life forms as they now exist around 6000 years ago. He may have utilized an evolutionary approach taking a much longer time. However, according to your view, He at least kicked evolution off, and, most likely, still intervenes from time to time.
In particular, God must have interevened in the leap from homo-erectus to homo-sapiens. You write: "... I see no environmental or other natural stress occurring at the time of the transition which would justify the leap from homo-erectus to homo sapiens."
Well, according to the ice core data, from about 130,000 to 100, 000 years ago, there was a drastic warming period (+10 ºC or +18 ºF) followed by a cooling period that roughly coincides with the scientific dating of the evolution of homo sapiens.
Also, according to "Figure 1>" of your Climate Warming posting, there was a similar period of drastic warming and cooling 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. That was immediately prior to the scientific dating of the human transistion from hunter-gathering to agriculture around 10,000 years ago. Agriculture lead to larger and, a few thousand years later, the evolution of metaphoric thinking.
BOTTOM LINE: According to your views, what part of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Able is literally true and which part figurative? And, who was Cain's wife?
Ira Glickstein
First Ira, I separated you from the “ilk”. I said your mistake was the same as made by the “ilk”. You are probably the last person I would so classify.
Now let me just answer your Bottomline.
Let me make the point that none of the following is a Christian view; it is no more nor less than my conjecture with no foundation, but you asked.
My premise is that God interceded in the evolution of mankind from homo-erectus to homo sapiens. My further premise is that the biblical story of Adam and Eve and their progeny is folk lore. So, if the story is folk lore what happened. I find it difficult to imagine that two specific individuals, homo erectus at the time, evolved into homo sapiens and from them the entire human race. I find it difficult whether through either God’s efforts on nature.
If we choose natural evolution it is reason to suppose and I believe consistent with current evolutionary thought, that elements of homo erectus, a tribe or whatever, were placed in conditions that evolution into humans was a natural step. Humanity sprang from this element. I also find it reasonable to suppose that God chose elements of homo erectus, a tribe or whatever and endowed them with human characteristics. There is no necessity to believe that the concept of family arose at the same time. It is more likely that as with animals, the dominant male spread his largess throughout the tribe and the offspring were cared for by the entire tribe. The concept of family probably arose with nomadic hunter gathering and the onset of agriculture. There was no specific Adam or specific Eve, or specific Cain so there was no Cain’s wife it is all folk lore.
My preference in believing God rather than natural evolution in the rise of humans is in the time frame. Even if we suppose that it took mankind 100,000 years to reach the stage we are at today, a mere drop in evolutionary time, it is difficult to suppose only natural causes. There are no other examples in nature.
OK, you believe that Adam and Eve and Cain and his wife are "folk lore". We agree on that much.
On the other hand, you believe that God, while He may have made use of something like evolution for some living things, in your words: "...God interceded in the evolution of mankind from homo-erectus to homo sapiens."
You are probably in the majority, since according to a recent Gallup Poll only 39% of Americans believe in Darwinian evolution.
However, I have a problem with some of that logic. If a human designs and builds a clock, it could run for a long time without the need for intercession. However, since no human creation is perfect, the clock would eventually need further tinkering and repair.
God, on the other hand, for those of you who believe in Him, is perfect. Therefore, He could have set up a perfect process of Evolution and Natural Selection (He is Omnipotent - can do anything), that would work everywhere in the Universe (He is Omnipresent - everywhere), and would unfold exactly as intended (He is Omniscient - all knowing).
Why did He put an evolutionary process in place that requires further tinkering by God to get it right? Why did He not Create everything at once as a literal reading of the Bible clearly claims?
There is also the problem of Who Created God? The official answer I believe is "God is Eternal, He has always Existed." That seems a "cop-out" to me. It seems easier for me to believe that the Laws of Nature have always existed as has the process of Evolution and Natural Selection.
As for 100,000 years being too short a time for homo sapiens to have evolved from homo erectus, you do not seem to take into account hominid evolution from our common ancestor with the chimps. If we assume that common ancestor was more-or-less like a chimp, Evolution and Natural Selection had some 5 million years to work its magic. Archeological finds indicate that hominid brains continually grew from chimp-size to human-size over these 5 million years. While human brains have not grown much larger over the last 100,000 years, there is evidence the fine structures have continued to evolve and are still doing so.
Ira Glickstein
Here is a thought stimulated by JohnS and Ira. The difference between Theism and Deism is whether God “intervenes” in “human time” or not. Many ancient theologians as well as many modern physicists, beginning with Einstein, take a dim view (or at least a skeptical view) of the human brain’s concept of time.
St. Augustine (354-430)
The world was made with time and not in time.
Boethius (~480~524)
Since God hath always an eternal and present state, His knowledge, surpassing time's notions, remaineth in the simplicity of his presence and, comprehending the infinite of what is past and to come, considereth all things as though they were in the act of being accomplished.
Meister Eckhart (~1260-1327)
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.
In other words, an argument over Theism vs. Deism suggests only an attempt to justify a narrow-minded image of God.
Let me answer your last comment first. I was not clear. What I meant to say was even 100,000 years, if it was that long, after the first human evolved until today is too short an evolutionary time span for man to advance to where mankind is today, exploring distant planets, going to the moon, designing computers etc.
You said, “God, on the other hand, for those of you who believe in Him, is perfect. Therefore, He could have set up a perfect process of Evolution and Natural Selection (He is Omnipotent - can do anything), that would work everywhere in the Universe (He is Omnipresent - everywhere), and would unfold exactly as intended (He is Omniscient - all knowing). Why did He put an evolutionary process in place that requires further tinkering by God to get it right? Why did He not create everything at once as a literal reading of the Bible clearly claims?” You also asked, Who Created God.
Except for the point on evolution, these questions are theological and vary from our discussion on the evolution of man; I don’t think we should discuss them here – although they would be interesting at another time. Let’s limit this discussion to evolution. Note my comments are my conjectures not fact or even theorems. I am trying to examine, if there is a God, how he interfaces with science. Why did he choose for evolution to function as it does? As you said he could have chosen a perfect process, but he did not. We can’t know why, He does. If He set up a less than perfect process, He may have intended to intervene with the process. He may have waited until evolution progressed to a certain point before interjecting human characteristics into the mix. I find this view preferable than leaving it to nature.
There could be a natural evolutionary explanation. Once our brains evolved human characteristics, humans branched from purely physical evolution to intellectual evolution, which moved faster.
A note to Howard Pattee,
You said, “Here is a thought stimulated by JohnS and Ira. The difference between Theism and Deism is whether God “intervenes” in “human time” or not. Many ancient theologians as well as many modern physicists, beginning with Einstein, take a dim view (or at least a skeptical view) of the human brain’s concept of time.”
I am unaware of modern physicist’s skeptical view of the brain’s concept of time. I would like to know more.
Here is a popular treatment about time with several links.
As JohnS mentions, I don't think ancient religious texts should be compared with modern physics. Both are mysterious in their own way.
Howard
Sorry, my link takes you to the page 3 of the article. Be sure to read the "full article."
Howard
Howard, I read the full article you linked to and I am no further along than before I read it.
Of course, I understand the analogy that the temperature in this room is a bulk property that statistically tells us the average velocity of air molecules.
OK, say time is like temperature and it tells us some bulk property of the 3D Universe. I don't know how to think about that because temperature is something we can control and it goes in both directions, hotter and colder. Time, on the other hand, appears mostly beyond our control and only goes in one direction, towards the future. (I say "mostly" because we do "slow time down" when we accelerate to a higher speed. Theoretically we could stop time if we accelerate to the speed of light.)
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How does the physics of time affect JohnS's issues with the scientifically accepted time line of evolution?
Either Evolution and Natural Selection in the neo-Darwinian sense is a correct description of the variety of life forms or it is not. Either the last common ancestor of homo sapiens and chimps lived around 5 million years ago or not. Either the record of hominid evolution from common ancestor to present day is approximately true or not.
So far as I know, life on Earth has not accelerated anywhere near the speed of light over the past 3.5 billion years, so relativistic effects would not have an appreciable effect on the approximate time line of evolution.
Either there is a God external to the physical Universe who knows and cares and intervenes from time to time or the the physical Universe is all there is and it unfolds in accordance with the Laws of Nature. Sure, an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient God could have Created the Universe and all life 6000 years ago along with a phony fossil record to make it look like billions of years. But, why? He could have Created an evolving Universe billions of years ago as a hobby he could tinker with - are we God's Science Project?
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On a more positive note, I agree with Spinoza that the Universal Substance has lots of aspects or dimensions. We mere humans are capable of sensing only the aspects of extension (space, time, material, "body") and thought (spirit, immaterial "mind"). To us, mind and body appear to be very different things, and we cannot even apprehend any of the other aspects of the Universal Substance.
I'm with Einstein that the Universe has many dimensions and that the four dimensions of space-time we can apprehend are all the same even though, to us, time appears very different than the three-dimensions of space.
Our brains, like those of all animals, are limited to just those capabilities we need for survival and reproduction. We may never know the ultimate answers to these questions unless and until evolution requires it.
Ira Glickstein
Ira,
You finally have come up with a statement I can disagree with!
First you ask, “How does the physics of time affect JohnS's issues with the scientifically accepted time line of evolution?”
Then you state a typical C-mind dichotomy, “Either Evolution and Natural Selection in the neo-Darwinian sense is a correct description of the variety of life forms or it is not.” No scientific theory is either correct or incorrect. Historically, all scientific theories have proved to be erroneous or incomplete and physicists all agree that our present models are incomplete. We have no good model of how life began, and many gaps in our knowledge of evolution and development.
But, the main purposes of my comments were twofold. The first was to suggest that religious thinking and scientific thinking are different domains, as Stephen Gould argued in Rocks of Ages. (MRI shows faith and reason light up different regions of the brain.)
The second purpose was to suggest that Boethius’s and Eckhart’s concepts of time, as well as the physicists’ models can stretch the imagination beyond the “common sense” beliefs you both have about both matter and God. (Mathematics is an essential language to grasp physicists’ ideas.)
The ultimate nature of space-time and matter remains an ineffable mystery to the physicist (Why is there something rather than nothing?) Theologians also find the nature of God an ineffable mystery. Faith and reason treat these mysteries differently.
My own feeling is that intelligent design is bad religion. I mean it sounds like it is trying to give faith a scientific basis.
Howard
Thanks Howard for engaging in this interchange and finding a statement of mine to disagree with.
I agree that religious (faith-based) thinking and scientific (evidence-based) thinking are different. But they do intersect with interesting and useful results.
Some religious desire to show their beliefs and holy texts are, in fact, literally true (or mostly so, accounting for the way they had to be formulated to be accessible to people of a couple thousand years age).
A good thing about the Intelligent Design proponents is they accept that, after God Created the first biological cells, He set up the Evolution and Natural Selection process and let it run (though He reserves the right to tinker from time to time). That gets the religious to study and think about natural biological processes. Perhaps they will see the light of the scientific method once they engage in our domain.
Nearly all scientists believe the scientific method is capable of gaining real, true knowledge of the Universe and Laws of Nature (in other words, scientists have faith in human reason, despite all the evidence to the contrary). Perhaps engaging the religious will reveal the folly of pure human reason and lead them to question some firmly held beliefs about the scientific process (such as failures of peer review).
You rightly say "No scientific theory is either correct or incorrect." But, to me as an engineer (and a C-mind) I need "good enough" true knowledge to make products and services that work well enough for people to want to buy (and formulate public policies consistent with at least the approximate truth).
For these purposes, knowledge does not have to be exact. Newtonian physics is fine for nearly all mechanical design, despite its errors in the light of relativity and QM. The ice core data does not have to be exact to the second or even the decade or century to disprove the assertion at the heart of current public policy that rising CO2 caused rising temperatures in the past.
Despite what you call the "ineffable mystery" of time to the physicists and the Nature of God to the religious, we do have to make public policy decisions and design products and services in the here and now. That requires good approximations that work.
Getting back to JohnS and his (to me) strange mixing of evolution and a Creator God, it does not matter if the common chimp/human ancestor lived 5M years ago (or 10M or 3M) or if hominids with human-sized brains originated 100K years ago (or 200K or 50K). The only thing that matters is the approximate sequence and time line of evolution. I think that time line is approximately right. JohnS thinks it is too short and therefore the Creator God must have intervened, at least in setting things up and for the last step in the evolution of homo sapiens from the other hominids.
Ira Glickstein
Ira,
We almost agree. I also have your practical view. All I’m saying is that is not enough. You say, “as an engineer (and a C-mind) I need ‘good enough’ true knowledge to make products and services that work well enough for people to want to buy.”
You also need an L-mind. Your religious views are not motivated by selling products, and you did not get a PhD to sell more products.
For L-minded scientists curiosity is motivating, not selling. Very few great scientific discoveries were made with a view toward selling products. Almost nothing of physics, including relativity, quantum theory and cosmology would exist with that attitude.
All our modern electronic devices depend on quantum theory and work well enough to sell, but that is of little concern to physicists who are still trying to understand quantum behavior, which remains a great mystery. And I agree, this mystery affects my religious views.
Howard
Howard you wrote that I "... did not get a PhD to sell more products." Don't tell that to IBM who gave me time off with pay and covered my tuition (and part of your salary as one of my Profs and Chairman of my PhD committee :^). IBM did this because they thought it would help me conceive and engineer better selling systems products. In retirement my PhD has paid off again as I earn money teaching system engineering online for U. Maryland.
Like L-minded scientists I am also motivated by curiosity. You write that the great mystery of quantum behavior affects your religious views. How? I know you are a physicist with great interest in biological systems, but in all our years together I have only slight inklings of your spiritual beliefs.
I've been quite open about my religious views (attending Reform Jewish services regularly without any literal belief in our holy texts, sympathetic to the Pantheistic beliefs of Spinoza and Einstein, wanting to believe in a Gaia-like Consciousness of the Universe, ...) Perhaps you could share yours with us, either as a Comment or as a new Topic.
Ira Glickstein
Ira,
I really have to say that I don’t believe you when you attribute the motivation for your studying hierarchy spans to pleasing IBM and planning for your retirement. I think you were motivated by the mysteries of the problem itself. If I’m wrong, then your scholarly curiosity certainly fooled me!
In the past I have discussed some of my religious beliefs with you. I have not shared them on the blog because they are essentially the same as yours (except for some ritual differences between Jews and Christians). In fact, since I think of Jesus as a great radical L-minded Rabbi and not literally the Son of God, and since I agree with Spinoza and Einstein, maybe I should call myself a closet Jew!
Here is Einstein’s famous statement about his religion that I fully agree with:
“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.
“It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
“I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.”
I might add that the mysteries about cosmology and quantum theory have only gotten more awesome since Einstein’s times.
Howard, like most things human there were many motivations. Certainly IBM's motivation was to improve the engineering of systems by supporting post-grad education of employees. My motivations included: recognition within IBM, scholarly curiosity, the possibility "lessons learned" by biological systems could teach engineers how to make better computer systems, and the mysteries of hierarchy theory and complexity.
As you know, part of my work at IBM was writing proposals and giving presentations to promote new business and also teaching an internal IBM course on System Engineering. My plan for retirement included teaching at the University level and I knew a PhD was the key to that. (And, two of our daughters already had their PhDs so I had to keep up :^)
Our spiritual beliefs line up with those of Spinoza and Einstein, but do you share any of my speculations about a Gaia-like Consciousness of the Biosphere?
Moses, acording to legend, saw the back of God's Head, while Spinoza and Einstein were deeply religious in that they saw into a bit of God's Brain. And, Einstein was "wrong" when he said "An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension,..." Einstein does survive, reborn in the minds of scientists and philosophers and thinkers who live well beyond his physical time on Earth.
Ira Glickstein
Ira asks, “Do you share any of my speculations about a Gaia-like Consciousness of the Biosphere?”
I have no idea of what you mean by “consciousness” or how you could recognize it in the context of the Earth.
Of course I believe in the Earth as Gaia the way Lynn Margulis defines it in
Gaia Is a Tough Bitch, but not the way Lovelock thinks of it.
Howard, thanks for your link to Gaia Is a Tough Bitch, by Lynn Margulis.
I read it through and, of course, agree that eukaryoic cells are the product of the invasion of large prokaryotics by smaller ones that turned into a symbiotic arrangement. How could it be otherwise? What alternatives did her critics suggest? On the other hand, I did not see in her writings an explanation of the origin of the nuclear DNA that characterizes eukaryotic cells.
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I once asked our colleague David Wilson (Binghamton U. Bio. Dept.) about Gaia and his objection was that an organism needs to be in an ecology of competing organisms and the Earth is alone, so it can't be an organism. His critique was well taken so I modified my understanding to imagine a Gaia in each pond ecology, each geographical neighborhood, each tribe, corporation, school of thought, political party, city, state, nation, language group, trading partners, allied nations, and so on. These interlocking and interdependent and inter-competing and inter-cooperating organisms (Gaia) are the organs of the Earth, communicating (I hope) in a language and at a level we cannot perceive or understand, but working together in their confused politico-economic-warfare way, for the ultimate benefit of the survival of the Earth (not necessarily of humans, however). They do so, in my imagination at least, for the selfish reason that if the Earth goes poof - there go they too!
I know that I am conscious. I also know that my consciousness is the result of biological cells -neurons- -billions of them- exchanging electrical and chemical signals. The result is a kind of unified set of actions and plans and strategies -the Conscious Gaia that is me- to keep me alive and prosperous. I speak and understand English, but none of the neurons or groups of neurons -even those causing me to type this comment- understand English or symbiogenesis or Gaia theories. Yet, ... yet, together they do understand!
Why could not the millions of plants and animals of a pond ecology that has survived and reproduced itself for many generations, and invaded and competed with invaders from other nearby ponds also have developed a Gaia of sorts, with some kind of consciouness none of the animals or plants understands but that all, together somehow produce?
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Of all the comments in the linked paper, the one by Lee Smolin struck home with me:
"Lynn Margulis has been for many years one of my scientific heroes ... Three aspects of her vision — the importance of symbiosis in evolution, the Gaia hypothesis, and the view that the whole living world is an elaboration of microbial life — are, I believe, extremely important for understanding the relationship of the living world to the physical world at large...
"One thing I can't understand is the animosity among the different evolutionary theorists, such as Lynn Margulis, Richard Dawkins, and others. The idea that the world has evolved by variation and selection is, as far as I can tell, completely consistent with both the idea that symbiosis is a major mechanism of evolution and the idea that the whole biosphere functions as a single organism with mechanisms of self-regulation of climate and various cycles. It seems to me that rather than being contradictory, both aspects must be necessary. The living world must be a single self-organized entity to have come to exist at all, and the only way such complexity and astounding novelty can arise is by random variation and natural selection. ... biologists seem to be endlessly arguing about the scale on which natural selection operates. Does it operate on the ecosystem, on the species, on the individual, on the gene? ... evolution must be taking place simultaneously on a large varieties of scales..."
Ira Glickstein
Ira, I understand your analogy, but I don't find it helping my concepts of consciousness or ecosystem.
For over 50 years now, Bob Rosen and I have promoted Smolin’s point that scientific models require many hierarchical levels; but scientists still will prefer their own specialized level, and then will criticize scientists working at other levels.
The problem is real because different hierarchical levels do require different models that may appear incompatible.
Physics has the classic cases of reversible (time-symmetric, deterministic) laws at the classical microscopic level and irreversible (stochastic) laws at the thermodynamic level. These laws and their observables are logically incompatible. Physicists used to argue about this, but they now recognize the necessity of both models.
To me, consciousness and ecosystems are separated by many levels. Thinking of the Earth as an integrated ecosystem using the language and observables of ecology allows me to imagine a testable scientific model. The time scale for communication in ecosystems is from weeks to years, and covers thousands of miles.
Consciousness, by contrast, is a cognitive concept that has not even been objectively defined. We do know that the time scale for brain communication is in milliseconds and covers distances of centimeters. Computers beat this speed by orders of magnitude, but haven’t reached the density of connections. That is, we don’t agree on where it begins in evolution, how to measure it, or whether it potentially exists in computers. Unlike ecosystems there is no consensus on a scientific model of consciousness.
My conclusion is that whether or not ecosystems, or even insects, are conscious is not yet a scientific question, but only a question of your analytic definition of consciousness. To me, generalizing the definition of consciousness to ecosystems only makes the scientific problem of consciousness worse. On the other hand, it is good for science fiction writers.
Howard
Howard, one of your great scientific contributions is the dichotomy of time-dependent (physics of material stuff) and time-independent (symbols of immaterial stuff). Consciousness, it seems to me, would fall into the latter, time-independent category.
If an ecology (or a university or country, ...) has something like consciousness, it would only have to work at the time scales necessary to promote the interests of that organization/organism. For a local ecology or the biomass of the earth, that might be decades or centuries.
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My concept of consciousness has shifted around over the years I have known you. I used to think a thermostatically-controlled heating system has some, infinitesimally minute level of consciousness. It senses the temperature, compares it to what is desired, and, if necessary turns on the heat. Nowadays my computer thermostat has six periods of the day with different hot and cold limits and it controls both air conditioning and heating.
As humans we both agree we have real consciousness. So, between the thermostatically-controlled heating system and us, where would you draw the dividing line for consciousness?
Perhaps JohnS would draw it at the homo sapiens level (I don't want to speak for JohnS, but he made the point that God intervened in the step from early hominids to homo sapiens, and that is where He could have installed consciousness and a soul, etc.)
Absent a Tinkerer God, where do you place the line for real consciousness? At first bacterial life? At first multi-cell plant and animals? At mammals? Primates? Where - and what is the test?
Ira Glickstein
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