Re: Intelligent Design vs. Darwin

[James N Rose <***>]

Judith,

replying in reverse ..

well, maybe death angst isn't the impetus I think it
might be, but for a long time I resisted the notion that 
'wars' are the elephant in the tea-cozy when in comes
to technological innovation.  Passive peaceful (read:
"self satisfied") cultures rarely advance technically;
stress instigates responce and humans' search for meaning
likely comes from 'mental competence .. under stress'.


Given your v-ger story, let me amend my contention
to embrace your example:  cessation of being is an
unavoidable state that is (typically) beyond an individual's
control. Alternately, coming-into-being is totally and completely
beyond a being's control.

Juxtapose this with the operant reality that sustenence
of life-existence relies significantly with an entity's
competence to -be- in control if its own destiny and security.

Mind is an evaluation-system, in that light, constantly and
unendingly coping with the energy and information and situations
it resides within and as part of.  Chemical responsively or
mind reactively .. continuation of weighted satisfaction ..
with persistence-of-being being the implicit endeavored goal,
induces behaviors that seek that end.

(I won't go into obvious negative-result situations, like moths
to a flame, etc., but they too can be evaluated with a positive
impetus factor as driver.)

So, I still extend the contention that cognitive recognition
of having or not full-life-competency (having to do with 
whether or not we as individuals or collectives can ultimately
and unerringly control our own existence(s)) .. is a major
driver into the hunger to understand what does or might have
such high power/control.

If a life form were infinitely competent, it would never 
encounter sufficient stress that it would give over any 
quantity of its activity time to seek comprehensions
that wouldn't impact its functionings in any way, any how,
anyway.  Nothing is gained but such an achieved understanding.
Immortality couldn't be 'improved', and never disqualified.


As to RR and Aristotle, your dad was a skilled fortunate,
able to dispassionately identify performance essences,
even and especially in embellishing on efficient cause. 

I'm coping with a similar trans-analysis of Godel,
who's ideas have the same potential of off-tracking
human thinking.

Long ago I wrote that if an incorporal being visited
this universe and found it inhabited by one and only one 
atom, that the dynamics and relationships extant in a single
atom would be sufficient to project and extrapolate from,
the whole possibility of all of a known filled saturated
density populated and inhabited universe such as we actually have.

All qualia and potentials could be extended and derived 
from a sublimb analysis of a single atom.

I termed the information content of such an atom (or even
better -- a primordial primordial mote of spacetimematterenergy)
as "the ultimte informationload carrier"; because it essentially
would harbor all real information -and- all potential information,
including yet-to-'exist' ... "emerged information". 

All of a universe .. not in a morph-crafted quantum soup .. where
the whole of a universe would reside simply in full content ..
'over there' on the other side of the magic curtain, but here,
resident in a mote of potential, hyper coded into infinitessimality,
able to eventually 'become'   because the nature of the mote includes/
included  just such potential   derivitive and arisable from its 
actioning structure.

Efficient cause seems to envolve or evo-volve with patterned
regularity, with improving informational competencies and
performabilities.  So such a wonderment -could- be comprehended
as 'intelligent design'; or, it could be comprehended neutrally,
as a "self emersive" universe. Existentially self inventive and
explorative; engaged in self trans-evolution, its efficient causes
arising in the instance of their appearances and not before.

The interplay of likelihoods against preclusions .. with emergents
being .. whatever results the situation(s) allow.  And once we have
emergents, the system scurries to validate its own products.

;-)


write ya later ...  going to make m'self some survival-dinner,
now that I gave the list my first hour at home.  :-)

bye!,    Jamie