Les Sleeth said:
I’ll start with this. Lighten up! I was teasing you, I hope you haven’t lost your sense of humor.
What made you think I had a sense of humor?
What I meant was that the popularity of applying emergent theory to consciousness is relatively recent.
To be fair, neuroscience has only existed for several decades. It isn't like there are past scientific models you can compare emergence to.
Physicalists study all the physical stuff happening and then proclaim that’s it, we figured it out! But they utterly ignore the advantages being part of a living system gives the physical processes. That is why when they want to prove their case, they have to do it with a living system, or using something that was once part of life (as with viruses or PCR). All that’s been proven is that physical process are thoroughly involved in a living system, and from that they ASSUME physicalness is causing all systemic aspects. I don’t buy for a second, with the evidence we have, that all there is to evolution is physcial processes and the physical environment. If I were an a priori physicalist, I might buy it.
Oh come now. Yes, for the most part, they have figured it out. It isn't like organic evolution can be spoken of outside the context of a living system. If you want to be skeptical about abiogenesis, I can accept that. The best most chemists can say is that we probably have an infinite universe combined with millions of years and even if the probability is extremely low, it was bound to happen at some point. I admit that isn't very satisfying. But once you have a living system, all you really need is random mutations, honed by natural selection. Now, as I outlined previously, many of the major environmental pressures that cause populations to evolve (it's important to remember this: organisms themselves do not evolve) are organic themselves. This is certainly a huge advantage to the process, but it is nothing mysterious and it is nothing non-physical.
I have no problem with postulating the existence of non-physical entities to explain phenomena that do not easily lend themselves to a physical explanation, but organic evolution is not such a phenomenon. The rate of change in base sequences, due to replication errors, crossing over, viral insertion, hybridization, and other such processes is more than enough to produce the variability that is required for evolution to occur. Once this variability is in place, selective pressures will move a given population in whatever direction it needs to move to remain in existence. The vast majority of mutations, as I have pointed out, are either neutral or even detrimental, until some selective pressure (that could not possibly have been forseen by an unintelligent, non-prognosticatory force) comes along and makes it advantageous. Take the famous example of the peppered moth. Until the industrial revolution, the few moths with more dark speckles has less chance of surviving. There was no way to tell that this would eventually become an advantage and be selected for as buildings and trees were darkened by soot.
I am simply trying to be parsimonious here. If you are going to posit the existence of a non-physical, directive force to evolution, you'll need to provide some good reason to believe that such a thing is necessary. An old philosophy professor of mine used an example of invisible goblins that help move the hands around a clock. He continued to point out that we couldn't prove they weren't there, but if we can explain the motion of the clock simply by detailing the way the different gears and circuits work, why postulate the existence of an additional force at work? Personal incredulity alone is not a sufficient reason. When evolution is so well explained using purely physical terminology, why insist that something more is at work there?
I don’t think you do understand my hypothesis because none of that is relevant to it. I will try to explain what I mean once more. Keep in mind that it was you who asked me to hypothesize about all this when I said up front I didn’t think this was the place for me to speculate. There isn’t enough room here for me to account for everything I need to make my case.
Anyway, I’ll start with an anology. If I were trying to teach you the concept of follow-through on a tennis swing, my lesson (not that you need one) would be to get you to feel the naturalness of follow-through. There was this guy, I think his name was Tim Galway, who wrote a best seller years ago called “The Inner Game of Tennis.” He said he could teach people who never had a racquet in their hand how to hit the ball effectively in an hour. The show “60 Minutes” took him up on the offer, and he did it! His approach was to have students learn to feel one’s way to the proper swing, and to do that ahead of breaking down a swing into minute detail.
All I can do here is repeat that this is not a good analogy. Hitting a tennis ball is an action that requires the coordinated effort of many bodily systems, all interacting with the nervous system, which is clearly in control. DNA replication, on the other hand, is a closed system. The only extent to which a holistic force could be holistic would be to encompass all of the machinery used, which is limited to a couple of enzymes and protein scaffolds, and of course, the strands themselves, all closed off within the nucleus of a cell. Heck, the DNA is curled up within chromatin right before and right after replication. It isn't even exposed to the internal environment of the nucleus itself for more than a split second.
The point is, there is no interaction between DNA replication and any other part of an organism, at any level. There is certainly no interaction with the CNS, which your hypothesis considers to be the seat of consciousness within the body. Another thing this analogy does not consider is that the expression of a mutation does not occur until a new organism develops. The base-substitutions or deletions themselves occur within germ cells, either sperm or ovum. In the case of an ovum, a given mutation might not be expressed until 30-40 years after the initial replication error. This is not akin to swinging a tennis racket.
You keep wanting to make the force detailed, but that is not what I, at least, have been saying. If you want to describe it as a detailed, computing, thinking, rational force, then that is your model, not mine. The progressive organizing force I envision is “whole,” it acts holistically, and it’s nature is to move things in the direction of organization (if you want to call that nature “purpose,” I am fine with that). I am making no other claims about it!
Forget the idea of "purpose." At this point, I just want some hint at how the expression of a given mutation can be pushed in any particular direction when the system within which the error occurs is a closed system and the error may not be expressed for several decades. Don't forget also that mutations due to replication errors are only a small part of how we get the variability necessary for evolution. Are crossing over, hybridization, aneuploidy, viral symbiosis, and mutation due to radiation also controlled by your evolutive force? It would need to control breeding habits, wind and water current patterns, viral infection vectors, and many other environmental and intraorganismic factors. It's really quite mind-boggling. I'm not asking for a complete detailed explanation of how this would be achieved; that would be virtually impossible. But when all you give is "holistically," heck, what does that even mean in this context? I understand what it means within the context of nervous/muscular actions (i.e. the analogies you have given), but that understanding does not extend to this particular context. As of right now, "holistic" is probably factually meaningless in this context.
Now, as far as an organism’s awareness affecting evolution, again you are bogged down in the minutia of bio-complexity.
Well, I understand your quandry here. You've proposed an entirely new force and there is no known mechanism by which it operates nor even any language associated with it. Your task is not easy. If you want an analogy from the world of biology, consider Gregor Mendel. When he proposed his model of heredity, he knew nothing whatsoever of meiosis or molecular genetics. In fact, he was very lucky to choose examples of discrete heredity that fit his model in his experiments. But to make this hypothesis meaningful in any way, you'll have to propose some testable means by which it operates. First, outline what needs to be explained. Then outline how your hypothesis explains it. Then outline what we would expect to find if your hypothesis is correct. This is not just minutia. This is what takes us beyond philosophy into science, and ultimately any theory of evolution must be scientific, whether or not it includes non-physical elements. I don't want caveats about the limitations of sense perception. We can't use our senses to detect an electron either, but we are still able to use it meaningfully in scientific models. As it is, we cannot detect the physical mechanism by which a mutation occurs. We just know that a certain base is selected; we don't know how, and yet we still build a model around this occurence.
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There were other links I provided but I think this site may reference most of those as well.
. . . would you mind posing a bit more challenging questions? Hey, I think it's very funny you made the "something more" crowd the skeptics. That might be a philosophical first! 
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a freaking nightmare a tragedy 
. blaspheme (oh yeah 
Plus, it was YOU who asked me to explain what I meant by a progressive force, yet in every case you switch the conversation to mechanisms of biology. If you want to have that conversation, then have it with someone who is looking to talk about that.
