>Secondly, you seem to suggest that it is ludicrous to
>think that personality and intelligence be derived from the
>impersonal and unintelligent. It is not clear to me why it should
>be thought ludicrous. Vinegar is not bubbly. Bicarbonate of Soda
>is not bubbly. Yet when you put them together, you get bubbles.
>It is not clear to me that you could not obtain intelligence from
>unintelligent subcomponents.
I suspect you mean the Vinegar and Bicarb of Soda analogy to
be "a bit like" what happens when we combine atoms to form
a brain (ie when we get intelligence from non-intelligent matter).
However, it fails at one very important point - the gas formed
by the reaction of Vinegar and Bicarb of Soda introduces nothing
new to the situation. That is, it can be explained as a chemical
reaction - a recombination of the components which were
present in the Vinegar and Bicarb of Soda all along. The
problem with the analogy, then, is that to be acceptable, one
would have to assume that the atoms which make up the brain
already contain the building blocks of intelligence. Whether
such an assumption is warranted is, I think, the very question
under consideration between materialists and non-materialists.
Thus, the analogy fails because it assumes the very point in
question - that intelligence "is just" a result of combination of
non-intelligent things. Worse still, for the materialist, I cannot
think of any analogy which would demonstrate the formation
of intelligent behaviour from non-intellegent matter (actually
the one analogy I can think of is the combination of non-
living matter to form living, but that seems open to exactly
the same charge of question begging)
You will notice, of course, that this doesn't *prove* anything
WRT intelligence - ie the fact that I think all analogies on the
subject are non-conclusive, doesn't mean that the materialists
are wrong - simply that I can't see how they are able to give
a meaningful analogy for same.
In Him
Murray (Muzz) Hogg
muzhogg@ozemail.com.au