bio evolution, light, sound and aroma

I think perception does raise serious issues.Why are there properties in reality only available to consciousness? You can call these qualia if you like. Then there are mental properties like language and maths which do not have and independent existence from consciousness and then mental representation.What is pain without consciousness of it?Theories of perception rely on the notion of transduction where and signal is set up in the brain in response to a sense stimuli.But What is happening the brain is not the same as what initially hits the eye or ear and then this neuronal activity in the brain has to some how be seen or heard by the conscious self as a representation of reality.What is sound then? What does it represent? Why does it have the quality of experienced voluminous noise?Why does reality have any dispositions available to it let alone ones that can be deciphered in perception to be utilised for something?What would unperceived reality be like?

This seems like a facile theory to me. All you have to invoke is that a trait gives an advantage and neglect what is going on at other levels. A property had to emerge prior to it having an advantage.The advantage provided doesn't explain biochemically or any other way why the property emerged.So in reality you are explaining the benefit of a trait after it has emerged.The properties I have mentioned like pain are difficult because they are only found in the conscious sphere which means reality had an accessible property which is pain (the actual hard to mechanical or linguistically describe hurting/sore/hot feeling.)Whatever emerges through evolution has to be a prior disposition available in reality.If the physical, bio chemical nature of reality had no disposition for properties like perception or feathers et al then these properties couldn't emerge. So the proposed primordial soup is like a witches brew with all these hugely diverse biochemical, functional and mental properties available to emerge from it.Why would reality have the property of pain? Pain is useful to avoid limb damage but our genes can't know that, the same with other perceptual states and cognitions.

A piece of glass has the disposition to shatter whether it does or not.A disposition is a property that even though it may not emerge over a given time, or at all, has the ability to emerge none the less. It is an innate propertyBy creating so called "new" things we are really just uncovering dispositions reality has.If we can do something it means that reality allows for that thing to be done.This the concept of emergence rather than reduction. Emergent properties can't be reduced to a particle physics explanation but have their own properties.I look forward to a description of dreams modelled on quantum formulae. That would certainly be a reductive featThe postulated primordial soup couldn't be creative if it didn't have complex dispositions. Just like you are be unlikely to make a working heart from chocolate.

What do you mean by imperfection? Are you claiming beneficial mutations that allegedly create things like eyes, are imperfections?I would see the function eye as a step towards the perfection of vision from something primitive.However even a so called imperfection would have to be a disposition available.If I drop a sheet of metal on the ground it will not shatter because it doesn't have this disposition. Dropping a beautiful stained glass window on the ground will cause it to shatter and become imperfect but because it has a disposition.I don't see how new forms could emerge without prior dispositions just like stirring water for an hour would not do anything much but stirring an egg would.If there were laws in reality that prevented cells from existing they wouldn't exist. Things that exist such as dreams are clearly not rejected forms in reality. Anything that comes to exist is something that could exist something that "nature" (term used loosely) allows.For a true determinist to claim causal closure they should be able to predict emergent properties from an earlier stage of the universe/reality.

This element of competition seems totally unnecessary.A Polar bear would struggle to survive without a thick white coat. Are you suggesting that it needed to compete against yellow, purple and green bears?Something has to survive before it could be selected even if just for five minutes. The process of survival doesn't completely explain its existence.Different models of cars are more successful than others but they have to exist on the market before being rejected. Pain is a mental sensation. A qualitative experience it can occur without signs of bodily injury. There is no lawful reason why any bodily stimulation should come with a conscious experience. You would have to have an explanation as to why some kind of bodily activity would inevitably lead to felt/experienced mental sensations.If random mutation caused the emergence of conscious pain sensations then why? You would need an explanation of why a biochemical set up would lead to a mental emergent property and why that property was available in the structure of reality from a basic physics standpoint.

But you don't seem to fathom what this entails.You therefore cannot reduce everything in reality to some simple starting place because that deceptively simple first moment was brimming with potential and bizarre and plentiful dispositions. Like a witches brew.That raises the question of why would reality have these dispositions That would be an equally serious puzzle to anything despite having stretched the emergence of these properties out over billions of years. A bicycle is designed. If you found a bicycle in the jungle and were from a primitive society you would have trouble explaining its origin. Bikes and other artefacts exist because of creative mental processes and an accumulation of social-cultural-historical events.This is an interesting example of intelligent design. We have made mental deductions about how to make a useful vehicle to propel ourselves around.... and fulfil our goals. It is a case of our mental dispositions interacting with metals dispositions. Indeed metals flexibility for a wide range of uses in combination with other materials properties.If you were going to try and explain the origin of a human artefact scientifically it would be quite hard because you would have to take account of the mental, historical, necessities and social activity that causally led to its existence. You could not apply a crude theory of reverse engineering as appears to happen in evolution
scienceBack to the dispositions issue. Can you turn water to wine? If not why not? Is it because perchance water does not have the disposition to create wine no matter how long you leave it. Essential ingredients are missing.

You are ignoring all other pertinent factors.I don't see why the replication factor has to be perfect? In reality it takes place within a complex environmental interaction. So if you abstract away from all the other detail you will see simply a seemingly faulty replication completely divorced from context which seems highly ecologically invalid.The result of these replication "differences" is to create new unique emergent properties.If I mix three chemicals together but accidentally knock a fourth chemical into the mix and the resultant substance is incidentally a cure for cancer, the fact that the incident was accidental does not take anything away from the fact that this mixture of chemicals has the disposition to cure cancer. The emergent property is still suprisingThe description people are using here is loaded to try and exorcise anything that requires non mechanical entities.I find it suspicious that the language to describe evolution is supposed to dampen any claims of meaningful properties. It is like trying to describe a painting be mentioning individual dots of paint but ignoring the "gestalt." (the thing as a whole)It seems implicitly fuelled by atheism and the desire not to give a creator type thing any credit for any process in creating organisms. But if reality has prior dispositions then that is a role for a creator. And you can't use the evolution model to explain why something exists in the first place only how it might work on a pre-existing universe of surprising amazing dispositions such as consciousness.

[qs]Let's say you're using a photocopier to make copies of an image. You put the picture in, hit the button, and a copy of that image comes out. Now, let's say that the copying process is imperfect: the copy machine occasionally adds a blob of black toner in the picture that it wasn't supposed to.Now you put an image in the copier, hit the button, and out comes a copy of the image with a big black spot on it. That original image did not have to have the disposition for a big black spot on it in order for the imperfect copying process to introduce it[./qs[]I am not referring to dispositions in one isolated entity. I am talking about dispositions in the whole not in unrealistically isolated individuals.The disposition of something on its own is different then its disposition in a context interacting with other things in its environs.I have the disposition to get cut and bleed if I rub my finger on a knife blade. However that disposition won't manifest if I am locked naked in a padded cell. That is the issue in my prior post of decontextualising evolution from its context

A disposition isn't isolated from context "the rest of reality" however you choose to define that is the context.That is what I was referring to in relation to a dot of paint versus the whole painting. It is a false reduction. The whole of reality could be the mind of a deity or magic ether stuff or an artificial simulation etc.The dispositions are that available rules from activity allowable within that sphere.

Pain is an experience in subjective personal consciousness. That is its only form. The correlation with nerve activity is not explanatory. There is an explanatory gap as with all conscious experience. The point is that reality contains phenomena only found in consciousness. What kind of objective existence could pain have?If someone is under anaesthetic they don't experience pain.Its existence is not explained by its value in some circumstances.You are failing to explain why reality has such phenomena available and available only to consciousness.It is hard to imagine what reality would be like without being seen through consciousness with the addition of mental attributes or qualia.The lawful explanation for the emergence of vision etc would be one of explaining why biochemistry or physics can develop conscious perceptual visual properties not what the evolutionary benefit of vision is which is not a causal explanation.Edited by AndrewPD, : No reason given.

I can't see the Polar bear having to compete against anything.How long could a brown bear survive in the Arctic without camouflage?What The Polar bear needs is a thick white coat which its genes have to magic up via mutations. Its genes apparently being unconscious and hence unaware of the harsh environment they are in. But still they come up with the goods.Voila!

To truly and honestly understand the causal origin of cars we would have to understand the mental states of of Henry Ford that were involved in him designing the thing and which motivated his actions causally.These kind of mental state type entities seem to be inexplicably ruled out in evolution with the assumption of blind unintelligent mechanical processes. But because humans intelligently and mindfully create and design numerous things I see no reason to characterise the rest of reality as mindless and unintelligent which seems to be an unwarranted bias.Indeed a theory of consciousness becoming increasing popular among materialists is Panpsychism which posits that consciousness is another layer intrinsic to reality.It is easy to retrospectively strip a process of any intelligence.

We have plenty of evidence of them.Have you not had thoughts, dreams, imaginations and ideas?The human experience is of mental entities. Consciousness is our only knowledge that a reality exists. As Thomas Nagel puts it "objectivity is the view from nowhere."We don't see thoughts and experiences by looking at the brain that doesn't mean they don't exist.You notion of evidence appears to be if I can't see it doesn't exist. A very visual led false dichotomy.

I am talking about explaining something that has already happened and already exists in a deliberate manner that avoids invoking intelligence, purposefulness and a wide range of other possibilities and characteristics. Or making an unprovable assumption about the qualitative nature of the process.It is as I have been saying before a loaded narrative being created to paint a particular picture for what ever I would suggest Freudian-esque reason.

I have studied perception at university and I know how neurons work and about transduction, retinotopic and tonotopic mapping among other things.The correlations of experiences with brain regions are not explanatory they don't have a causal explanation.A signal from the external word is transduced and then a signal is set up in the brain. In the case of mapping they try and preserve features of the initial sense data. There is no explanation of how that leads to a qualitative conscious subjective experience. That is where the explanatory gap is.I think the mapping efforts are naive. They are trying to preserve the structure of what is presumed to be in the conscious percept.But conscious states are highly complex and not easily dissected into "atoms" of experience. And this view of perception is criticised by theorists who embrace embodied cognition which has far less emphasis on consciousness being in the brain as mental representations rather than it being an interactive process with external stimuli.There are also interesting cases where a person was paralysed by a medication before surgery but they could still feel pain so were operated on whilst consciousness. The surgeon couldn't discern they were still conscious as they were unable to give behavioural or verbal reports of their subjective (and excruciating conscious states.)The mind brain relationship is not transparent and uncontroversial.