RNA IS an information storage system for living things. It carries patterns for numerous purposes including matching with protein sequences which is indeed for recognition. And it is a product of a learning process we call evolution. I think you have a prejudicial bias for the word “intelligence” which is only acknowledging it for some examples of life and not for others. With computer algorithms beating us at all of our own strategy games I put to you that intelligence doesn’t require anywhere near as much as was previous supposed. All it really consists of is the ability to follow a set of rules.
And I do not see any reason for such a bias with the word “consciousness” either for awareness of its environment and self-awareness of its own condition for self-maintenance are basic to the process of life in general. This is not to say that all forms of life are equally conscious, aware, intentional, and intelligent. Not hardly. All of this is not only highly quantitative but consists of a great number of different abilities which we are lumping together in a few words. And we can not only see different examples of these abilities in other organisms, but we can see an absence of various abilities in human beings who have suffered damage due to a number of different causes.
Explanation is both a rather subjective thing as well as bit complicated. People look for different kinds of explanations and thus what the scientist looks for to enable them to predict the results of experimental procedures is not the what other people look for in things like religion.
People can refuse this because we have concrete example of how this can indeed happen as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking.
Thus I agree with your conclusions while I disagree with your arguments. Surely you must know that just because a claim is true doesn’t mean an argument for that claim is correct. My reasons for believe are different and a bit complicated and some of them strongly conflict with the reasons that other people have for belief. I see a necessity for choices of faith in life and suspect that in the arguments people make they end up replacing their faith in the things they argue for with a faith in the things they argue with.
Obviously I disagree with this argument. It seems to me in the light of our recent experiences with AI, that intelligence is nowhere near as special or as singular as has been supposed – and both of these suppositions have contributed to thinking of it in a magical way when in reality it can be broken down into a vast collection of much more simple things.
Because that is what the evidence shows, and I don’t need unsound arguments to prop up my belief in these things – for they make them weaker rather than stronger.
I certainly believe so.
I have heard this sort of nonsense before many many times… the basis of everything physical is matter… is energy… is mathematical or… the basis of human history is conflict… is economics… Give me a break already. All of these are simply ways of looking at these things and they may even be very very helpful in understanding them… but spare me the ideological rhetoric that tries to cram all of reality into these different shaped holes.
And I say rubbish to your rubbish which is fundamentally self-contradictory. Information is information and it can be represented in a variety of mediums. Just because we can intellectually abstract the information from particular examples doesn’t mean it exists in magical way apart from the particulars. Our intellectual abstraction is just another PHYSICAL medium for the information.
Well that is a fundamental disagreement with Christianity and there is no way to reconcile what you are saying here with the Bible. In this you wander in a direction which I see no purpose in going.
??? But that is exactly what Paul said (perhaps you need to read 1 Cor 15 again)… well except the word he uses is imperishable (this immortality stuff is more pagan Gnostic Greek philosophy… because of 1 Timothy 6:16 only God is immortal, this doesn’t really work with Christianity).
I put things in a bit different terms that these to say that the spiritual is product of its own nature and choices and not effected by external forces. Thus it can die from its own self-destructive choices and thus is not necessarily immortal, and thus requires a resurrection (renewal of life by shedding the self-destructive habits of sin) in order to be imperishable.
That is a rather empty threat which does nothing for me. I see more value in the atheist approach which sees righteousness as its own reward. Thus I would argue that righteousness is the essence of eternal life and the only oblivion is the “path of darkness” itself.