Summations Only

In the quoted sentence, you mention life. But the topic title seems to apply to all of nature.Are you only talking about nature as intelligent? Or are you saying that rocks, tides, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc are intelligent. You need to be clear about that.Most of your posts in this thread seem to be about cells. What's the point of attaching the label "intelligent" to what they do? Surely the goal of science should be to find out what they do, rather than to find excuses to attach ill defined terminology. Yes, he does. But Shapiro isn't all that clear on what he means by "intelligence". In my opinion, some of what Shapiro says is a tad overstated.

Then I think you have reduced the word "intelligence" to meaninglessness. So this thread really isn't about anything at all.

I agree with part of what 1.61803 says -- particularly with what he says in Message 125, but I don't agree with everything he posted.Your problem remains, that you have failed to give a clear enough meaning for "intelligence" and without that the discussion is too unfocussed.

I couldn't work that out either. You seemed to mostly disagree.The place where I disagree with you, is your use of "emergence". I don't mind saying something emerged, but I take that as meaning that more explanation is required. It wasn't clear to me how you were intending that reference to emergence to be taken.

Look at some of what we consider intelligent:

• We have squandered the fossil fuel reserves that we have discovered;
• we have acidified the ocean and damaged fisheries;
• we have destroyed forests;
• we have allowed the human population to rise to a level that will be difficult to sustain without further damage to our habitat;
• we have put men on the moon (which does not do anything to help feed the population).

My point is that what we consider intelligence is very much a social/cultural adaptation. What we consider to be intelligent looks intelligent from inside our culture, but if you try to examine what it looks like from outside our culture then maybe it isn't so intelligent after all. Do we even know this? As far as I can tell, most of what we know about human mental states comes from philosophy rather than from science. And what about other intensely social species such as prairie dogs, naked mole rats, social ants? Can we be sure that they don't have complex mental states?

The OP's idea of what constitutes intelligence is quite confused, as has come out through the discussion. Unfortunately, that greatly reduced the value of this discussion.The OP mentions James Shapiro, who does have some untraditional ideas. But at least Shapiro is a little clearer on what he means by "intelligence".