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The Anthropic principle

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Naive materialism heh , the implication of that phrase is basically that the material universe is not to be used a guide to truth.

 

Mathematic 'laws' are not man made, that too is quite a mouthful. Isn't true that the symbol '2' stands for, corresponds to(whichever ) a perceivable quantity of things? So at base all mathematics is naive materialism, no? The whole of math is either true or not based on the idea of quantity(of things), from arithmetic to calculus or do some just not see it?

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Red Wanderer: if DNA is a linguistic code, used for communication, then there must be a sender and a receiver.  Who are they?

If RNA is the receiver, how does it interpret the message unless by chemical interaction?  Can it read binary?

 

As to your airplane scenario, I would explain everything relevant to that question to that child by referencing the entire rest of the world.  But you can't explain the entire universe without referencing the entire universe and forming a tautology. . . UNLESS you reference some other universe, instead.  (Heaven, perhaps?)

Please define DNA for me, without referencing it to anything else in the entire cosmos.  Until then, keep the taint of religion and your half-assed insults and the whole content your your idiocy to yourself.

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You don't need to be so hostile to others then. "Get the difference? No? Too bad." That's an example of hostile. Not good for a civil discussion. Not to suggest no one else is guilty of that, but pushing it further doesn't help. Also, I'm not sure where or how you got naive materialism out of Objectivism unless you didn't look into it all that carefully. Perhaps you're right that some posters here are naive materialists, but there isn't some "test" to take to qualify to post here. I actually disagree with Plasmatic on a lot, so it's not like one poster represents everyone.

 

As far as design is concerned, or code, I'm not sure what your point is. Code doesn't necessarily imply a purposeful developer. If you're suggesting instead that there is more order to reality than many people say, then I see no problem with that. I agree and know that DNA isn't "like" a code; it is a code. I really have no reason to presume codes are evidence of design. All that tells me is that codes work great. Information theory as a subfield of math with explanations of complex interactions between just anything, can say a lot about why and how a code could develop without something else interfering. I guess you could say ancient aliens designed Earth's life, but to me, it is considerably more *plausible* to think DNA as a code developed on its own based on how certain chemical interactions occur anyway.  If all you're saying is that life develops intelligently (i.e., changes itself as you said before), instead of just chaotically and randomly, but without an official "creator" (God, aliens, an ancient breed of hyperintelligent lizards, etc), then I agree with you. The main thing I'm curious about is what your point is, boiled down to one or two sentences, as best you can.

I guess what I'm asking is, tell me who made the code, or what you theorize. Otherwise, I'll just take it that you concede a specific creator with consciousness did not create the codes you are speaking of. Internal mechanisms of a self-contained system could plausibly develop a code without conscious intervention, external or internal.

 

"And, of course, had he taken that Objectivist approach"

The approach you suggested as Objectivist is just throwing out all possible scientific thought with some arbitrary assertion of one's own omniscience. Totally bad science. If there are possibilities to think that carbon is not a pre-condition of existence, it should be investigated. You may be right that some Objectivists develop a hive-mind mentality, but that isn't an argument about whether Objectivism is wrong about something.

 

 

>>>Code doesn't necessarily imply a purposeful developer.

 

Novels, mathematics, symphonic scores don't necessarily imply a purposeful developer?

 

All codes imply intelligence. For the developer, for the sender, and for the receiver. As I mentioned previously, it is foundational in coding theory that prior to any coded messages being encoded, transmitted, received, and decoded, there must be agreement between sender and receiver as to what the symbols mean. In the case of Morse Code, everyone reads a book, or takes a course, in which the same two alphabets (dots-dashes mapped onto English) are taught. There are, no doubt, many books and many course, but they are all traceable ultimately to Samuel Morse.

 

>>> If you're suggesting instead that there is more order to reality than many people say, then I see no problem with that. I agree and know that DNA isn't "like" a code; it is a code. I really have no reason to presume codes are evidence of design.

 

There are two main reasons codes are evidence of design: 1) We already know that humans create codes, and humans are intelligent designers; therefore, codes CAN be produced by human intelligence (and, presumably, any other kind of hypothetical intelligence, such as "extra-terrestrial"); 2) No other process we know of causes codes: deterministic mechanical processes governed by Newtonian or Laplacian laws do not create codes; quantum processes governed by statistical laws do not create codes.

 

Since neither deterministic nor stochastic processes has ever created a code — not in human experience — that leaves only one other kinds of cause: teleology (goal-seeking, purposefulness, intention, etc.).

 

There are actually good reasons rooted in fundamental information theory that require codes NOT to be physically determined, nor to be products of chance.

 

 

>>>All that tells me is that codes work great. 

 

Indeed they do! Language is a code. No communication among humans would be possible without it.

 

>>>Information theory as a subfield of math with explanations of complex interactions between just anything, can say a lot about why and how a code could develop without something else interfering.

 

There is nothing in information theory which implies or suggests that codes can "evolve" on their own without intelligent design.

 

1) Codes cannot "evolve" from strict mechanical laws (governed by classical physics) because then the decoded symbols would be 100% predictable prior to actually receiving them, just by knowing the general law that governs the code. And if the symbols are known with 100% certainty before even receiving and decoding them, then — by definition in information theory — they contain zero information. Strings of symbols only transmit information if the recipient is UNCERTAIN as to how the code string will manifest itself as he decodes it; and the MORE UNCERTAIN he is, the MORE INFORMATION he gets from the message (i.e., because "information" in information theory, is a measure of "surprise" or "uncertainty"; derived originally from a probability and expressed as a binary logarithm. The name of the final calculated number is called a "binary digit" or "bit". That's the unit information. Once more: a "bit" is simply a binary log number [log to the base-2] applied to the probability of something occurring. If something has a probability of 100%, i.e., "1", the binary log is "0", so that symbol string, by definition, is transmitting "0" bits of information.)

 

In sum: Codes cannot be created by mechanically deterministic causes, because then their OUTCOMES would always, at least in principle, be 100% knowable; in which case, they would always transmit "0" bits of information. In other words, they wouldn't be codes at all.

 

2) Codes cannot "evolve" from stochastic laws (governed by quantum physics and describe statistically) because that would lead to AMBIGUITY, which is the death of the code. To take an example from Morse Code, ambiguity would mean that, unbeknownst to the receiver of a coded message, the sender will randomly use the symbol "—" on Monday to mean "T", but on Tuesday "—" will mean "A", and on Wednesday will mean "Z", according to some children's alphabet blocks that the sender randomly tosses and lets fall to the floor. And he wouldn't just do that with the symbol "—" but with all the other dot/dash symbols in Morse Code. So, from the code-receiver's point of view, the mapping of a symbol to the "correct" letter now becomes an unknown. That's "code-ambiguity", and that's what would happen if stochastic events were the ultimate cause of a code's coming into being: it would have stochastic characteristics.

 

But codes do NOT have anything about the that is stochastic. Ah!!!! The MESSAGE it is sending might be stochastic, i.e., nonsense or gibberish. That's different. But the formal relations of the code itself — the mapping-relation between a symbol on the dot/dash side and a symbol on the English alphabet side — is strictly invariant.

 

And lest there be some confusion:

 

While "code-ambiguity" is disallowed in codes, "code-redundancy" is not only permitted but strongly urged!  As a hypothetical, "redundancy" in Morse Code might be a situation in which, prior to sending any messages, the sender and receiver have lunch and have the following discussion: "I'm going to use one of three different symbols to represent the letter "T", OK? Whether you receive "—", "— . . —", or ". . — . —", each one of these shall be decoded by you as "T".

 

There's nothing wrong with code-redundancy. In fact, it's usually designed into the code itself as a way of strengthening it.

 

In the case of the genetic code, this sort of code-redundancy is often misleadingly referred to as "wobble". But code-theory looks at it as a formal aspect of reinforcing the "robustness" of the code (i.e., making it less error prone). And needless to say, the building in of redundancy into a code is ANOTHER tell-tale sign of forward-looking, goal-seeking intelligent design. Neither Newtonian laws, nor quantum stochastic effects, build redundancy into a code. That would be like saying, "Yes, this apartment building evolved here by chance when a tornado came through a junkyard. We're very lucky. The tornado not only installed elevators by chance, but also randomly happened to install several fire-safety stairwells."

 

REDUNDANCY. It's a typical sign of intelligent forethought.

 

>>> I guess you could say ancient aliens designed Earth's life, 

 

From a purely logical and scientific point of view, I have no problem with that. Neither did Richard Dawkins, by the way. He admitted in Ben Stein's movie "Expelled" that he was perfectly willing to consider the hypothesis that human life was designed by intelligent aliens. He understood, of course, that this merely pushes back the explanation one step for an ULTIMATE explanation of where life came from; but his point was that it's not unreasonable to view biological systems as intelligently designed systems because they certainly LOOK like intelligently designed systems. He admitted that. What he brooks is any notion of a supernatural source of the design. So, like Objectivists, he his not just pushing Darwinism; he is really pushing atheism, and sees Darwinism as the "best in the field" hypothesis GIVEN ATHEISM.

 

And also, by the way, Sir Francis Crick, who co-discovered the code-structure of DNA with James Watson, claimed that the problem-solving distance between non-living chemicals and even the simplest self-replicating cell was far, far greater than the problem-solving distance between the simplest self-replicating cell and humans; so that, as far as he was concerned, life was engineered by intelligent aliens, for mysterious reasons of their own, after which they disappeared. People were divided as to whether he was joking or not, but he was especially aware of the problems in applying Darwinian-type thinking (random processes plus selection for survival advantage) to chemical evolution. You have to start accepting highly implausible mathematical miracles to makes things work out for you. And good scientists don't like mathematical miracles.

 

>>but to me, it is considerably more *plausible* to think DNA as a code developed on its own based on how certain chemical interactions occur anyway. 

 

But the word "plausible" can be quantified by comparing probabilities of one scenario to another, or at least by showing the utter improbability of one scenario, leaving open the possibility that some other scenario might offer a better — i.e., more plausible — explanation.

 

It's very easy to show, just using simply math, that there's not enough time in the universe since the Big Bang — let's say, about 14 billion years — to have plausibly created DNA or proteins or a complete cell, by means of random walks through a search space comprising nucleotides, ribose, and amino acids. The numbers you get are so fantastically small, that in order to make them more plausible, you would need much, much more time. Some Objectivists have understood this argument, so they in turn reject the Big Bang Theory. Big Bang might turn out to be wrong, but it IS the accepted theory right now, and it DOES have lots of compelling evidence in its favor, so it behooves Objectivists to at least start with that hypothesis, and to see how chemical evolution could have taken place within the given time-frame of 14 billion years. That works out, by the way, to about 10^17 seconds. That sounds like a lot, but it's not nearly enough to form DNA or even a simple protein by random trial-and-error attempts at different combinations, and then "selecting" only those combinations of sequences that work.

 

Finally, there's the stubborn chicken-and-egg conundrums that bedevil all of this. Most biochemists have claimed that DNA absolutely requires the rest of the surrounding cell in order to function correctly; the rest of the cell, of course, requires DNA to function correctly. So which came first? DNA? or the cell?  

 

Researchers thought they found a way out of the dilemma by discovering "ribozymes", a kind of RNA that can also act as a kind of enzyme (i.e., a protein), so they imagined everything originating from a so-called "RNA World." Unfortunately, that world exists nowhere except in their imaginations: there's no geological or geochemical evidence for it; the nucleotide "cytosine" doesn't seems to exist anywhere in nature except in the pre-existing cell, in the genome, in DNA and RNA (therefore, where did it come from?). Ribose — the backbone of the RNA strand — is very, very difficult to synthesize even in intelligently-designed controlled laboratory conditions; to imagine purely natural events concatenating at just the right time, at just the right temperature, with NO destructive counter-reactions occurring — frankly stretches the imagination, even of many biochemists.

 

I think the RNA world is a pipe-dream. And in any case, there's no actual physical evidence for it.

 

As far as I'm concerned, the cell and DNA appeared together, at the same time. When? How? I don't know. No one does.

 

By the way another problem that cannot be solved merely by mechanical or random means is the so-called "L/R Problem." "L/R" stands for "Left / Right", and it refers to the fact that all of the amino acids that are used by living organisms are "left-handed" (they spiral to the left when you look down their central axis), despite the fact "right-handed" variants of the same molecule appear in about equal number in nature, and despite the fact that natural processes which might produce amino acids, always produce them as mixtures of left and right; leading to the question: by what means did ONLY the left-hand forms of the amino acids get segregated from their right-hand forms, since chemically, they are identical. They only differ SPATIALLY, in terms of their clockwise or counterclockwise orientation.

 

And as if this weren't enough:

 

While the amino acids in living organisms are all left-handed, the molecules comprising the nucleotide "rungs" of DNA are all RIGHT-HANDED. 

 

So any naturalistic/materialistic theory of unguided non-intelligent evolution will have to provide a plausible mechanism or explanation of how blind nature can discriminate between left and right handed forms of molecules — since chemically they do the same things — and segregate only the left-handed forms of the amino acids for protein synthesis, and only the right-handed forms of the nucleotides in DNA for protein information storage in the form of a quaternary code expressed a three-rung codon.

 

I can very easily see an intelligence doing that, because it would be no more difficult than what humans do when we, e.g., segregate all the red cards from the black ones in a deck. Easy. But if you riffle the deck in front of a powerful fan, how plausible is it to believe that if you riffle it enough times and let the fan blow the cards randomly about the room, that eventually, the fan will blow all the red cards onto one side of the room, and all the black cards onto another side, and each kind of card will fall neatly into a pile? You really find that plausible? I don't. Most people wouldn't. Most mathematicians wouldn't.

 

Let's put it another way. Suppose you walked into a room that had a powerful fan. On the floor were two neatly stacked piles of cards from a deck: one pile was only red cards, the other, only black cards. There were no people for miles around, and the house had been uninhabited for many years. The doors were locked and the windows were boarded. Would you really think the cards got there by chance? Or would you think, "It's much more plausible that some rascal sneaked in somehow, segregated the cards into two neat piles, and disappeared." Wouldn't the assumption of a designing intelligence make more sense than the naturalistic one that it was a result of the random movements of air molecules driven by a rotating fan?

 

I think so. And I think most people would think so, too.

 

>>> If all you're saying is that life develops intelligently (i.e., changes itself as you said before), instead of just chaotically and randomly, but without an official "creator" (God, aliens, an ancient breed of hyperintelligent lizards, etc), then I agree with you. The main thing I'm curious about is what your point is, boiled down to one or two sentences, as best you can.

 

WHAT??? One or two sentences??? C'mon!!! That's unfair!

>>>I guess what I'm asking is, tell me who made the code, or what you theorize. 

 

I don't know who made the code. No one does. The point of ID is that we needn't know anything about the identity of a code-maker to make a general claim about codes, i.e., that they entail intelligence, purpose, intent, etc.

 

 

>>>Otherwise, I'll just take it that you concede a specific creator with consciousness did not create the codes you are speaking of. Internal mechanisms of a self-contained system could plausibly develop a code without conscious intervention, external or internal.

 

Unwarranted conclusion. You can't jump from "Tell me the identity of the code-maker" to "And if you don't, I'll conclude that you accept the idea that codes don't require a creator."

 

Claiming that something requires a creator "in general", and knowing the identity of the creator "in detail" are obviously two different issues. And I don't concede that one necessitates the other.

 

[PS: Did I stay within that one-or-two sentence constraint you mentioned above?]

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Oh, and wanderer?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703559004575256470152341984.html

 

What's that word again?  Um. . . CHAIR?  No.  GENETIC ENTROPY.

 

You aren't worth my time.

 

 

>>>Oh, and wanderer?

http://online.wsj.co...0152341984.html

 

The Craig Venter article is old news. But thanks for bringing up something that fully agrees with ID and not with unguided Darwinian evolution. Obviously, his cell was a product of intelligent design: his own, and his lab assistants' (as well as the contribution of those who designed his lab equipment specifically for his kind of work).

 

Now all we have to do is find out who or what performed the same sort of intelligently guided processes billions of years ago before there was a Venter and before there were lab assistants, because a similar process obviously must have occurred.

 

Your thinking goes like this: "If Craig Venter and his team could intelligently design a cell today, it follows that an unintelligently-designed cell COULD have come about billions of years ago, if conditions back then fortuitously mimicked conditions in Venter's laboratory."

 

Obviously not. That's like saying "I can produce a Mercedes-Benz automobile by means of an intelligently guided process on my production line; therefore, it follows that a Mercedes-Benz automobile COULD have come about by random means billions of years ago IF conditions fortuitously arranged themselves to mimic conditions in a modern production line." Clearly that's absurd. Mercedes-Benz are far, far less complex than living organisms, so if they could have come about by means of Darwinian evolution, then we would find them buried in rock in archeological digs, just as we find more complex things like fossils of biological organisms. Conversely, if you grant that a fairly non-complex entity like a Mercedes could not evolve into existence by Darwinian means (i.e., that its appearance in reality REQUIRES intelligence, intent, rationality, forethought, by means of a production line), then it's equally absurd to assume that something far more complex — like a cell — could evolve by Darwinian means.

 

Show me the million-year-old fossils of Mercedes-Benz cars, buried in deep rock strata, and I'll concede your point.

 

Until then, the only thing I'll concede is that you seem not to really grasp any of these issues.

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I wonder what Red would say to an Oist who 1). Rejects the church of the Big Bang and instead holds that there has always been a multiplicity if bounded particulars interacting dynamically 2).Has no problem with the idea that life has always been around and wonders why anyone not assuming a beginning of existence-motion would insist there must be a beginning to life in its most basic forms. 3). Has absolutly no problem with being a materialist of the kind that allows for the possibility of consciousness-life to have emerge from matter- non life???

Edited by Plasmatic
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All codes imply intelligence. For the developer, for the sender, and for the receiver.



I'm saying DNA has a code that does not imply intelligent creators. You can't use morse code as an analogy to the *development* of a code when you know from the start that morse code has an intelligent creator. If anything, I can say DNA was created by non-intelligent creators, that is, primitive not-quite-cell entities without any intent except to the degree of complex chemical reactions. I don't doubt life can be created, but your reasoning that life on earth *originates* from some creator is all kinds of weak. Yes, life CAN be created. ...Okay?

2) No other process we know of causes codes: deterministic mechanical processes governed by Newtonian or Laplacian laws do not create codes; quantum processes governed by statistical laws do not create codes.



A failure of creativity isn't evidence. Also, teleology doesn't have to mean intelligence. Teleology applies to plants. Plants aren't intelligent. Why can't there be "non-intelligent" design? For example, even an ecosystem has a degree of design. Bees make hives, ants make tunnels, birds make nests. You don't need aliens or anything like that. Can't a code be developed by non-intelligent processes?
 
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I wonder what Red would say to an Oist who 1). Rejects the church of the Big Bang and instead holds that there has always been a multiplicity if bounded particulars interacting dynamically 2).Has no problem with the idea that life has always been around and wonders why anyone not assuming a beginning of existence-motion would insist there must be a beginning to life in its most basic forms. 3). Has absolutly no problem with being a materialist of the kind that allows for the possibility of consciousness-life to have emerge from matter- non life???

 

 

>>>I wonder what Red would say to an Oist who 1). Rejects the church of the Big Bang and instead holds that there has always been a multiplicity if bounded particulars interacting dynamically 

 

Based on what evidence?

 

And how interesting that you arbitrarily grant the possibility that time might be infinite, but not space. Why one and not the other? Why not both? Why not neither?

 

In any case, it won't help your argument for a purely materialist unguided appearance of life. Because even if there were "infinite" time, you STILL have the undeniable fact of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to contend with: things don't build UP and lower their own entropy over time; and guess what? The more time you have on hand, the more the 2nd Law would take hold, and the higher the entropy we would expect to see. If the universe has ALREADY been around "forever", why isn't it ALREADY in a state of entropic "heat death" as predicted by the 2nd Law as the "end state" of the universe?

 

Additionally, I think a good case can be made that the existence of the 2nd Law itself — very often referred to as "Time's Arrow" — indicates that time, indeed, DOES have an "arrow", which means it BEGAN at some point t=0 and is moving toward some point t=n.

 

Most scientists accept the Big Bang theory, not as the only explanation, but to date, the best explanation of cosmogenesis. 

 

 

>>>2).Has no problem with the idea that life has always been around and wonders why anyone not assuming a beginning of existence-motion would insist there must be a beginning to life in its most basic forms. 

 

Are you saying that life has always been around? Fine. I thought you were saying that non-living chemicals tried various combinations over a long period of time and finally, accidentally, hit upon the right one that led to something that had lower entropy than its constituents and spontaneously permitted both reproduction and some sort of coded storage of its own hereditary information. So you are DENYING that now? Fine. There are some Darwin-doubters — Fred Hoyle, to name one — who did, in fact, believe that; i.e., in Hoyle's view, you cannot trace life back to lifeless beginnings; Pasteur was right, life only comes from other life, therefore, life has been here forever just as matter and energy have been here forever.

 

So that throws out abiogenesis as a non-problem by definition. You still have problems explaining how NEW information came into existence in the genome so as to endow the proto-biont with new body plans or some new ability or characteristic.

 

 

>>>3). Has absolutly no problem with being a materialist of the kind that allows for the possibility of consciousness-life to have emerge from matter- non life??? 

 

 

I also have no problem if someone actually wants to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. So if you want to express your feelings by believing that something non-material like mind can emerge from the material, go right ahead. Don't let the fact that it's inherently absurd stop you.

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Red said :

" Based on what evidence? "

Way too much to pollute this thread... Both philosophical and specific reasons. I can PM if your really that interested.

" And how interesting that you arbitrarily grant the possibility that time might be infinite, but not space. Why one and not the other? Why not both? Why not neither?"

Why do you have to keep assuming stuff? I do not grant any such thing because time is not a mind independent existent. Time is a function of cognitive measurement of motion in relation to a consciousness. Without minds there is just stuff moving. Space pressuposes entities and you cant get entities from nothing. (nor a singular thing)

Have to answer the rest later.

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I'm saying DNA has a code that does not imply intelligent creators. You can't use morse code as an analogy to the *development* of a code when you know from the start that morse code has an intelligent creator. If anything, I can say DNA was created by non-intelligent creators, that is, primitive not-quite-cell entities without any intent except to the degree of complex chemical reactions. I don't doubt life can be created, but your reasoning that life on earth *originates* from some creator is all kinds of weak. Yes, life CAN be created. ...Okay?

A failure of creativity isn't evidence. Also, teleology doesn't have to mean intelligence. Teleology applies to plants. Plants aren't intelligent. Why can't there be "non-intelligent" design? For example, even an ecosystem has a degree of design. Bees make hives, ants make tunnels, birds make nests. You don't need aliens or anything like that. Can't a code be developed by non-intelligent processes?

 

 

>>>I'm saying DNA has a code that does not imply intelligent creators.

 

Then you're admitting that "Atlas Shrugged" and "Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto" could, in principle, have appeared without the existence of Ayn or Sergei. Absurd.

 

>>>You can't use morse code as an analogy to the *development* of a code when you know from the start that morse code has an intelligent creator.

 

Not so. We already do that with natural languages, which are nothing but codes. No one knows who "invented" proto-Indo-European, or Sanskrit, or Greek, or Latin, or Anglo-Saxon. Yet they are all codes. 

 

>>>If anything, I can say DNA was created by non-intelligent creators, that is, primitive not-quite-cell entities without any intent except to the degree of complex chemical reactions.

 

Well, no, you cannot say that, because the functioning of DNA as an information storage hard-drive for hereditary information and maintenance information in the form of a computer algorithm, such as "START: Find amino acid X, then Y, then B, then K, then Q, then R, then R, then A, then STOP. SNIP HERE:" None of this has anything whatsoever to do with "complex chemistry"; these are linguistic instructions — algorithmic STEPS — for the construction of certain molecules. I've already stressed several times that there is NO chemical interaction between the DNA and the amino acids. 

 

Once more: the logical relation between DNA and amino acids in protein synthesis is identical to the logical relation between inked letters on paper from a typewriter ribbon and the intelligible sentence "'Who is John Galt?" The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face."

 

When these letters appear in black ink on a piece of paper, are you saying that the MEANING of the sentence, which derives from the SEQUENCE of the letters, is ultimately a function of the chemistry of ink? Or of ink's complex interaction with the chemistry of paper? No? Isn't it simply the case that the chemistry of ink and paper are important only as a way of transmitting the sequence of letters in a more-or-less permanent material form so that the sequence can be decoded — that is, read — by a receiver of the sequence? Yes, that's obviously the case. And so, too, is it the case with DNA and amino acids. The relationship requires "complex chemistry" only insofar as DNA first transcribes to RNA on a single strand, which then wiggles, snake-like, out of the nucleus and into the cytoplasm, and then wends its way to the ribosome, etc. But this has nothing to do with the SEQUENCE of nucleotides on the DNA helix (logically the same kind of thing as the SEQUENCE of letters on a page) and its eventual decoding by the ribosome as an instruction to find certain amino acids and construct proteins. (And as I posted earlier several times, DNA actually does a lot more than merely instruct the ribosome to build protein, and its beginning to appear that 100% of the DNA molecule has function, though researchers do not yet understand what all the functions are.)

 

So I'm afraid that you don't really grasp what a code is. A code is not a material thing, thought it usually requires matter for storage and transmission. But the storage medium and the transmission medium are NOT the code. When you type "—", and a reader decodes that by typing "T", the inked "—" and "T" are not the code. The code is the non-material, mental assignment that the originator of the code first established, "Let '—' mean 'T'." Codes are mental mappings between two sets of symbols. They have nothing to do with physics or chemistry, even though they might require complex physics and chemistry to preserve themselves.

 

Additionally, as I pointed out in an earlier post, even the complex chemistry part of DNA or RNA cannot be solved without making highly implausible assumptions. RNA requires cytosine as one of its nucleotides. Where does cytosine come from? I don't know. Know one does. It's not in the Earth. It's not in asteroids. It's not at the bottom of the ocean in heat vents. It's only in pre-existing RNA and DNA. Now, it turns out that cytosine can be synthesized, but only with large quantities of concentrated urea in very implausible, unlikely kinds of environments and reactions that conflict with the scenario established by the RNA World theorists.

 

What about ribose, the sugar backbone of RNA and DNA? It can be synthesized with a great deal of human intelligent intervention by means of formaldehyde, but that would be highly implausible occurring in unguided natured because at every step of the synthesis there are many "degrees of freedom" that a reaction could take; there's no reason that it would take just the right steps to create formaldehyde in order to synthesize ribose. In an already existing cell, it's easy: DNA stores the sequence information to create a protein called an enzyme; and the enzyme has a special mechanical shape that fits precisely with just those molecules needed to construct the sugar ribose. No problem!

 

No problem, because the process of ribose construction is PRE-PROGRAMMED as a set of instructions along DNA. See? That's what a real "code" can do, as opposed to futzing around with "complex chemistry", chance, and having constantly to fight an uphill battle against the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which dictates that left to their own, molecules always move over time from arrangements of lower probability to arrangement of higher probability, i.e., everything falls apart and decays over time, even collections of molecules.

 

I don't doubt life can be created, but your reasoning that life on earth *originates* from some creator is all kinds of weak. Yes, life CAN be created. ...Okay?

 

I have no doubt life can be created by means of coded instructions that tell the complex chemistry not only what to do, but equally important, what NOT to do. I also have no doubt that this sort of discrimination — "do this, but DON'T do that" — is NOT a feature that is inherent in matter or energy, but is a typical feature of intelligence: i.e., "discriminated awareness of multiple choice-paths." As I mentioned previously, codes cannot be produced by deterministic mechanical laws because then they couldn't perform their typical function of transmitting information (and I explained why, as well). So determinism as a source of a code is out. I also mentioned that chance cannot create codes because at best it would lead to code-ambiguity. So chance is out.

 

If both determinism and chance are out, that leaves only one other option for the source of a code. Can you think of any others?

 

>>>A failure of creativity isn't evidence.

 

Of course it is. It isn't "proof-positive" — perhaps nothing is. But, yes, it is evidence. And it's not a "failure of creativity." Science deals with 2 kinds of causes: determinism and chance. Neither of them can explain where codes come from. Either throw out the idea that DNA is a code (and it's a bit too late for that), or expand science to include teleology and design.

 

 

>>>Also, teleology doesn't have to mean intelligence. Teleology applies to plants. Plants aren't intelligent.

 

All living things are teleological, not just plants.  And products of intelligent design — like computer programs — are teleological, too. Plants are teleological only because they grow and change according to a pre-existing biological computer program that comprises their physical makeup. By that standard, animals (including man) are teleological, right? Isn't a human embryo teleological? It grows and changes, not according to a Darwinian process of trial and error and lucky selection, but according to a strict genetic set of instructions: divide here; divide again; produce this kind of protein; put it here; produce that protein; put it there; etc. And it obviously grows and changes TOWARD a specified, pre-programmed goal. So not only are plants teleological, but all living things are.

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>>>Also, teleology doesn't have to mean intelligence. Teleology applies to plants. Plants aren't intelligent.

 

 So not only are plants teleological, but all living things are.

My point exactly - if the development of a code is teleological, can't a non-intelligent process produce a code? There are flaws to Darwinian evolution, trial and error alone doesn't explain the development of new species and all that. Modern research shows that processes like epigenesis are important, where "randomness isn't how evolution happens in entirety.

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My point exactly - if the development of a code is teleological, can't a non-intelligent process produce a code? There are flaws to Darwinian evolution, trial and error alone doesn't explain the development of new species and all that. Modern research shows that processes like epigenesis are important, where "randomness isn't how evolution happens in entirety.

 

>>>can't a non-intelligent process produce a code?

 

Well, I tried to explain why the two pillars of Darwinian theory — chance and determinism — cannot produce a code, so at least that removes Darwinism from consideration. If determinism can't produce codes, and if chance cant' produce codes, what else is there? Additionally, every effect with which we have experience seems to be traceable back to one of those three kinds of causes: strict determinism, chance, and design. I can't think of another kind of cause that can lead to something we recognize as an "effect"? Can you?

 

But in a purely formal sense, you're right. I certainly cannot prove (at this point) that chance, determinism, and intelligence are the only three kinds of causes; they are, however, the only three humans know about.

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Well, I tried to explain why the two pillars of Darwinian theory — chance and determinism — cannot produce a code, so at least that removes Darwinism from consideration. If determinism can't produce codes, and if chance cant' produce codes, what else is there? Additionally, every effect with which we have experience seems to be traceable back to one of those three kinds of causes: strict determinism, chance, and design. I can't think of another kind of cause that can lead to something we recognize as an "effect"? Can you?

Not really. I'm just questioning *intelligent* design. Design doesn't have to be intelligent at all. Bees make/design hives. Bees are not intelligent. Goal-oriented behavior is not necessarily dependent upon intelligence. At the very least, some borderline chemical/life material without DNA may have had a primitive sense of goal oriented-behavior on a small enough scale to only require a simplistic communication, thus a code in DNA and DNA itself arising over time in growing complexity.

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The genetic watermark signatures was a nice touch.

Meanwhile, The Da Vinci Code continues to be a mystery to some.

Could you elaborate?

Red Wanderer said that materialists were asserting that life can arise from nonlife (correctly) and demanded proof.  I know I had read about such a thing, somewhere; someone had taken soap (because it has one hydrophilic end and one hydrophobic one, just like organic lipids) and created artificial cells from them, or at least they were trying to.  But I read this years ago and couldn't find anything about it online, so I didn't mention it and ended up just throwing out the Ventner article.  (slightly off-topic but not worth fixing)

But there is a great article about the concept, itself:

http://www.livescience.com/10531-life-began-research-suggests-simple-approach.html

 

And as it so happens, while life from nonlife might seem counterintuitive, in 1953 a pair of scientists named Miller and Urey successfully synthesized amino acids from inorganic protein by applying an electric shock.  (It's ALIVE!!!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

 

And this is just really cool.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/science/in-a-first-an-entire-organism-is-simulated-by-software.html?_r=0

Edited by Harrison Danneskjold
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>>>I'm saying DNA has a code that does not imply intelligent creators.

 

Then you're admitting that "Atlas Shrugged" and "Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto" could, in principle, have appeared without the existence of Ayn or Sergei. Absurd.

We've already been over this.  A tornado in a junkyard could assemble a Dell computer; it's vanishingly improbable but it's not impossible.

 

 

>>>A failure of creativity isn't evidence.

 

Of course it is. It isn't "proof-positive" — perhaps nothing is. But, yes, it is evidence. And it's not a "failure of creativity." Science deals with 2 kinds of causes: determinism and chance. Neither of them can explain where codes come from. Either throw out the idea that DNA is a code (and it's a bit too late for that), or expand science to include teleology and design.

Teleology and design are synonymous, aren't they?  And chance isn't a form of causality; it's an error of knowledge.

Imagine a pair of dice; the embodiment of chance.  If you know their weight, center of gravity (distribution of mass), initial positions and initial velocities then you already know where they'll land.  That's not prescience; it's science.

And teleology is a form of determinism.

Let's imagine that Dell computer, again.  Why is it there?  Let's say you made it.  Why?  Because you decided to.  How did you decide?  Synapses fired in your brain, which is a physical mechanism.  Teleology is determinism.

Don't get me wrong, your self-aware mind exists; but existence is physics.

 

So you provide four, or perhaps three forms of causality, and demand that science recognize one.  I, the naïve materialist, would provide two forms of causality, corresponding to determinism and chance: that which I know already and that which I'll find out.

>>>Also, teleology doesn't have to mean intelligence. Teleology applies to plants. Plants aren't intelligent.

 

All living things are teleological, not just plants.  And products of intelligent design — like computer programs — are teleological, too. Plants are teleological only because they grow and change according to a pre-existing biological computer program that comprises their physical makeup. By that standard, animals (including man) are teleological, right? Isn't a human embryo teleological? It grows and changes, not according to a Darwinian process of trial and error and lucky selection, but according to a strict genetic set of instructions: divide here; divide again; produce this kind of protein; put it here; produce that protein; put it there; etc. And it obviously grows and changes TOWARD a specified, pre-programmed goal. So not only are plants teleological, but all living things are.

Who on Earth (pun intended) would dispute that an embryo changes towards a purposeful goal?  That's nearly self-evident.

And if one were to treat different stages of the same organism as distinct entities then fine; evolution only applies to one of them: during the act of sex.  The deterministic and random elements, which are identical, apply to only one question: who is having sex?  Specifically: who is alive to do so, who is their mate and why?

If evolution is a purpose-driven pursuit (which is inaccurate but close enough) then the goal is sex and the reason for the goal is that reproduction isn't automatic (randomness) but those who reproduce create offspring who also reproduce, while those who do not do not (determinism).  This process produces self-replicating mechanisms (biology) which 'desire' to reproduce as a logically necessary consequence of that.

I place 'desire' in quotes because, while certain animals certainly do desire sex, I very much doubt that sea-sponges and pollenated flowers are capable of orgasm.  Desire is possible only to brains and goals are possible only to conscious brains, such as ourselves.

 

My point exactly - if the development of a code is teleological, can't a non-intelligent process produce a code? There are flaws to Darwinian evolution, trial and error alone doesn't explain the development of new species and all that. Modern research shows that processes like epigenesis are important, where "randomness isn't how evolution happens in entirety.

New species develop when the members of two subspecies (breeds of animal, strains of plant or race of human) stop interbreeding long enough for their independent mutations accumulate to PREVENT them from ever interbreeding again.  This is why a donkey, while it so closely resembles a horse, is part of a different species; they give birth to mules which are automatically sterile from birth.

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Red Wanderer, I would like to define some epistemology.

If you can find a biblical reference to DNA, or a section of DNA which references the bible, I'll grant you some small measure of plausibility.

 

What conceivable pattern could anyone ever find in nature which you would consider to be a code but not created by a mind?

I could give you codes upon codes upon codes if you would define the criteria for me.  But I suspect that any code I present to you will be interpreted as the signature of some grand design, no matter what I say, which would make rational discourse impossible.

 

So please, if you would like to continue this discussion as adults (myself included) define what a non-intelligent code would look like.

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We've already been over this.  A tornado in a junkyard could assemble a Dell computer; it's vanishingly improbable but it's not impossible.

That's pretty absurd as far as claims though. Actually, it's a great example of an arbitrary claim. What reason could there be to suppose a tornado could possibly make a computer? You can't just say it's possible in an effort to deny what Wanderer is saying. In principle, you are saying a stochastic process can do *anything*. Much of evolution is utterly implausible with only stochastic processes. Do you know about epigenesis? That is not exactly stochastic, but it's pretty close to teleology, and it is not deterministic. Evolution is not purpose-driven if you leave it to a stochastic process, and I think that's the point Wanderer is making. Although, saying it must be *intelligent* design is equal to saying a tornado can make a computer (which I'll call stochastic design). Both are arbitrary assertions until there is a reason to believe either. So, I suggest a non-intelligent design...

Aliens creating life, or tornadoes creating computers, neither really makes sense. So, the only way I think to make sense of the origin of life as we know it is with something based on some real justification. Viruses are on the border of life and non-life, so it is plausible that there is purposeful behavior in even barely-alive stuff. Borderline case, to be sure. But life just "appearing" is a stretch.

Links for your convenience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenesis_%28biology%29

 

And chance isn't a form of causality; it's an error of knowledge.

No. Chance is best construed as making a conclusion with uncertainty present. It is near impossible to ever figure out for sure how a dice will land. Thus, probability. There is no error of knowledge here.

 

And teleology is a form of determinism.

Huh? So, volition, as a form of teleology, is a form of determinism?

 

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Could you elaborate?

In the thread "Biologist Replicate Key Evolutionary Step", have links and excerpts that I have found of interest and related to the topic. Post 7 is when I started adding links when I run across them and touches on the underlying premise for selecting the articles. Of the three links you provided, the first two I would consider relevent, the third I would have looked over and probably would not have included. Actual experimentation and observation vs. a program that models our interpretations. Models may serve as a tool for generating inquiries, playing what if's according to current algorhythms, but reality, and not a computer output, should govern our epistemological needs.

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In the thread "Biologist Replicate Key Evolutionary Step", have links and excerpts that I have found of interest and related to the topic. Post 7 is when I started adding links when I run across them and touches on the underlying premise for selecting the articles. Of the three links you provided, the first two I would consider relevent, the third I would have looked over and probably would not have included. Actual experimentation and observation vs. a program that models our interpretations. Models may serve as a tool for generating inquiries, playing what if's according to current algorhythms, but reality, and not a computer output, should govern our epistemological needs.

Thank you.  =]  I look forward to reading it.

And yeah; I don't put much stock in computer models either and it really isn't relevant.  I just thought it was cool; thus worth sharing.

No. Chance is best construed as making a conclusion with uncertainty present. It is near impossible to ever figure out for sure how a dice will land. Thus, probability. There is no error of knowledge here.

Yes, 'error' was erroneous because human beings aren't omniscient, which makes probability necessary so long as man is man.  But I dispute whether we should consider it an inherent property of nature or simply a property of 'this topic at this moment'.  (to not know with certainty isn't error; it's human)

I think that if you knew A, B, C, D and E (like the dice toss scenario) you would already know the 'random' element, R.  If it's virtually impossible to ever really know ABCDE with any sort of accuracy, well, tough; that doesn't make it actually impossible.  (to not know with certainty is human; to assert that there is no way anybody could ever accurately know it strikes me as a mental surrender)

That's pretty absurd as far as claims though. Actually, it's a great example of an arbitrary claim. What reason could there be to suppose a tornado could possibly make a computer?

The scenario should be considered possible because it wouldn't contradict anything else in the entirety of all I know?  (I could successfully integrate it?)

I confess; I'm not familiar with Peikoff's position on arbitrary assertions.  It doesn't seem arbitrary to me but I don't explicitly know the criteria; I'll respond to that section once I've remedied that.

(See?  That which I know-that which I will know)

Huh? So, volition, as a form of teleology, is a form of determinism?

Alright, I'm still pretty fuzzy on the official Objectivist definition of volition (something about a choice to focus being similar to the "choice" to wake up. . . which doesn't seem quite right, but I haven't gotten around to researching yet) but this is what I mean:

 

Free will is self-control, which is control of your own mind.  Control is a relationship between someone and something, in which someone is able to alter something at will, to suit his desires; control requiring knowledge of the controlled-thing.

If your teeth chatter from cold, you can't control it; it's beyond your volition.  (mostly; you get the idea)  If you once had a traumatic childhood experience involving a heavy metal band, and to this day their songs make you tense and edgy, that's involuntary as well (associative connection; some animals' form of cognition).  But if you realize that girls like it when you get edgy (hypothetically) and then decide to start your own heavy-metal band, or something similar, et cetera; that's a conceptual connection, which is within your volitional capacity and which is a direct result of man's introspective capacity (and directly results in the popular ideas about self-control)

"Man is a being of self-made soul."  Now, as determinism.

Input, as sensations, enters your brain where the entire content of your mind filters it into perceptions which then cause a decision (the ones you don't have to think about; pizza or hamburgers for dinner?  drive in the correct lane or not?)  and then you carry that decision out.  The bit you control is the entire content of your own mind, which dictates how you'll perceive reality and which decisions will be "obvious" in the future.  And the bit you can control, your own ideas; you alter, revise and rearrange them according to your prior knowledge and current mental mechanism.  Ultimately, your mind is a deterministic process.

But this isn't an affirmation of fate, destiny or any such thing; your own voluntary decisions, which are deterministic, are yours alone to make.

"Volition isn't an escape from causality; it's another form of causality."  [i paraphrase]

That's my take on it; that's what I meant by that. (teleology is determinism)

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Red Wanderer, I would like to define some epistemology.

If you can find a biblical reference to DNA, or a section of DNA which references the bible, I'll grant you some small measure of plausibility.

 

What conceivable pattern could anyone ever find in nature which you would consider to be a code but not created by a mind?

I could give you codes upon codes upon codes if you would define the criteria for me.  But I suspect that any code I present to you will be interpreted as the signature of some grand design, no matter what I say, which would make rational discourse impossible.

 

So please, if you would like to continue this discussion as adults (myself included) define what a non-intelligent code would look like.

 

 

 

>>>We've already been over this.  

 

But you didn't learn anything the first time around. Now I'll have to repeat myself.

 

 

>>>A tornado in a junkyard could assemble a Dell computer; 

 

No, it could not. I'll whisper the reason:

 

IT WOULD VIOLATE THE 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. UNDER NATURAL CONDITIONS, THINGS ALWAYS MOVE FROM ARRANGEMENTS OF LOWER PROBABILITY TO ARRANGEMENTS OF HIGHER PROBABILITY: FROM VERTICALLY STRAIGHT BRICK WALLS (A LOW PROBABILITY ARRANGEMENT FOR WATER AND CLAY MOLECULES TO ASSUME) TO ONE OF MANY DIFFERENT PILES OF RUBBLE (A HIGH PROBABILITY ARRANGEMENT FOR WATER AND CLAY MOLECULES TO ASSUME). SEE? SINCE THERE ARE MORE POSSIBLE ARRANGEMENTS OF PILES OF RUBBLE THAN THERE ARE VERTICALLY STRAIGHT BRICK WALLS, THE PILES OF RUBBLE WILL NEVER BECOME A VERTICALLY STRAIGHT BRICK WALL NATURALLY — AND THAT INCLUDES UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF VIOLENT RANDOM FORCES LIKE TORNADOES.

 

It would take a force that can easily overcome the 2nd law by being able to choose, i.e., discriminate, amongst different arrangements, and to intentionally avoid those arrangements that look like piles of rubble. Can you guess what that force is? It isn't a hurricane and it isn't a tornado. No, it isn't a flood, either.

 

I'll tell you since you've been so tolerant and polite. It's INTELLIGENCE.

 

In sum: You are wrong. It is not physically possible for a tornado to assemble a Dell computer by traveling through a junk yard.

 

>>>it's vanishingly improbable but it's not impossible.

 

Wrong on both counts. It is both physically impossible (because of a 2nd law entropy violation) and probabilistically impossible.

 

The problem here is you don't know anything about probability and how people actually work with it — population geneticists, for example.  You mistakenly believe that if an event has a mathematical probability of anything above "0", it is therefore, in some degree, "possible", even if highly improbable. That's completely incorrect. An event does NOT have to be at exactly "0" to have an effective probability of "0" to occur.

 

The way a statistician, or population geneticist, works is by first defining a "threshold" value: any value above the threshold value, the statistician is willing to grant that chance might, in principle, be the causal agent; but any value below the threshold value — an area called "the area of rejection" — the statistician omits chance as a causal possibility BY DEFINITION, and will therefore seek some other explanation for the event in question. If he cannot find a plausible explanation, he rests content with "I DON'T KNOW" until such time as a plausible explanation can be found. But he never says, "Oh, well, it must be chance because the calculated probability was not exactly zero." As long as the calculated probability is below that threshold value and in the area of rejection, it is zero BY DEFINITION.

 

>>>And chance isn't a form of causality; it's an error of knowledge.

 

No, that's completely wrong. In arrangements of entities and systems, causes for certain events that only have statistical descriptions (i.e., because they are random) can never ultimately be replaced with deterministic non-statistical descriptions, even as our knowledge grows. Statistical laws are not "stand-ins" for "better, deterministic" laws when we have more knowledge. Statistical laws ARE actual, real laws, and they describe actual real causes. See Karl Popper's explanation of a thought-experiment by the quantum physicist Alfred Landé called "Landé Blade."

 

Secondly, many empirical deterministic laws that are non-statistical in form are actually averages of lots of other data that could be more precisely expressed as a statistical laws. The main reasons for expressing a statistical law as a straightforward deterministic one are simplicity and convenience. The strict deterministic expression, therefore, is actually masking, or hiding, the fact that the law is merely an averaging, or "smoothing out", of lots of phenomena that cluster around the mean.

 

Your 19th-century Victorian naive materialist idea that the universe is ultimately run by strict determinism that can be expressed mathematically in terms of non-statistical functions is wrong; wrong mathematically, wrong scientifically, and wrong philosophically.

 

>>>Imagine a pair of dice; the embodiment of chance.  If you know their weight, center of gravity (distribution of mass), initial positions and initial velocities then you already know where they'll land. 

 

Dice, per se, are not the "embodiment of chance." It's the ROLL of the dice that is the embodiment of chance. The roll requires a statistical description, which is why, ultimately, the result is passed along to the dice. Same applies to coin tosses: the coin is not the embodiment of chance — if you leave it alone, it'll sit on the table and do nothing forever, with a probability of "1". It is the TOSS (and spin) that is the embodiment of chance. Since that requires a statistical description, it gets passed on to the coin as it lands heads or tails.

 

See why I accuse Objectivists of 19th century naive Victorian materialist metaphysics? They haven't progressed beyond about 1870 in their thinking.

 

>>>And teleology is a form of determinism.

 

Really? OK. Then based on initial conditions, and a general law, you can predict with close to 100% accuracy precisely what letter of the alphabet I'm going to begin an email tomorrow morning, right? Because that's what a true deterministic law entails. That's why a physicist can tell you where a projectile will be tomorrow morning if he knows the initial conditions pertaining to the projectile, and the general law governing projectiles. He can also "retrodict", i.e., he can tell you where the projectile was yesterday (or a million years ago) if he knows the initial conditions today, and the general law governing such projectiles. This is how modern astronomers know when solar eclipses occurred even many thousands of years ago.

 

So go ahead. Make a prediction now about what I intend to do tomorrow morning in typing out a new email, since (by your lights) teleology is a form of determinism.

 

[i think what you meant to say was that teleology is a form of CAUSALITY, which is certainly true; teleology causes effects. But it is not a form of determinism.]

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>>>A tornado in a junkyard could assemble a Dell computer; 

 

No, it could not. I'll whisper the reason:

 

IT WOULD VIOLATE THE 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. UNDER NATURAL CONDITIONS, THINGS ALWAYS MOVE FROM ARRANGEMENTS OF LOWER PROBABILITY TO ARRANGEMENTS OF HIGHER PROBABILITY: FROM VERTICALLY STRAIGHT BRICK WALLS (A LOW PROBABILITY ARRANGEMENT FOR WATER AND CLAY MOLECULES TO ASSUME) TO ONE OF MANY DIFFERENT PILES OF RUBBLE (A HIGH PROBABILITY ARRANGEMENT FOR WATER AND CLAY MOLECULES TO ASSUME). SEE? SINCE THERE ARE MORE POSSIBLE ARRANGEMENTS OF PILES OF RUBBLE THAN THERE ARE VERTICALLY STRAIGHT BRICK WALLS, THE PILES OF RUBBLE WILL NEVER BECOME A VERTICALLY STRAIGHT BRICK WALL NATURALLY — AND THAT INCLUDES UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF VIOLENT RANDOM FORCES LIKE TORNADOES.

 

It would take a force that can easily overcome the 2nd law by being able to choose, i.e., discriminate, amongst different arrangements, and to intentionally avoid those arrangements that look like piles of rubble. Can you guess what that force is? It isn't a hurricane and it isn't a tornado. No, it isn't a flood, either.

 

I'll tell you since you've been so tolerant and polite. It's INTELLIGENCE.

 

In sum: You are wrong. It is not physically possible for a tornado to assemble a Dell computer by traveling through a junk yard.

"It is not physically possible for a tornado to assemble a Dell computer by traveling through a junk yard."

So any pattern found in nature, any pattern at all, must be the product of an intelligence?

 

What is an intelligence?

 

 >>>it's vanishingly improbable but it's not impossible.

 

Wrong on both counts. It is both physically impossible (because of a 2nd law entropy violation) and probabilistically impossible.

 

The problem here is you don't know anything about probability and how people actually work with it — population geneticists, for example.  You mistakenly believe that if an event has a mathematical probability of anything above "0", it is therefore, in some degree, "possible", even if highly improbable. That's completely incorrect. An event does NOT have to be at exactly "0" to have an effective probability of "0" to occur.

An "effective probability of zero" would be identical to "basically zero" which is the same as "vanishingly improbable".  Not impossible.

 

>>>And chance isn't a form of causality; it's an error of knowledge.

 

No, that's completely wrong. In arrangements of entities and systems, causes for certain events that only have statistical descriptions (i.e., because they are random) can never ultimately be replaced with deterministic non-statistical descriptions, even as our knowledge grows. Statistical laws are not "stand-ins" for "better, deterministic" laws when we have more knowledge. Statistical laws ARE actual, real laws, and they describe actual real causes. See Karl Popper's explanation of a thought-experiment by the quantum physicist Alfred Landé called "Landé Blade."

Alright; Quantum Physics.

 

According to Quantum Physics (the double-slit experiment, the Heisenberg principle, et cetera) particles are actually waves of probability, which do not become particles until part of the probability-wave interacts with something else, causing the whole thing to collapse into a single spot smaller than the Plank length.

Basically, at the most fundamental level of the universe, everything is random.  Everything, always, until something interacts with anything else.  (Quantum foam)

So, logically, anything could happen.  Nothing is ever set in stone; gravity could decide not to work at any time.  It only appears stable to beings as massive as ourselves (as compared to subatomic particles) because of the law of large numbers.

But any particle physicist will tell you with a straight face that, if you walk into a wall one million times consecutively, at least once you'll phase right through it.  The laws of physics are actually more what you'd call guidelines.

 

If so, then nothing is predetermined; the future is completely up in the air.

 

Einstein's theory of Relativity, among other things, states that time and space are relative to the speed of the observer.  Everything is always moving at the speed of light, when you add its speed through space to its speed through time (which is why time dilates as a starship approaches lightspeed).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_special_relativity

Part of this means that there are several ways in which someone who had enough time, money and technology could actually look into the future.

http://www.youtube.com/movie/paycheck

 

But apply this to Quantum Mechanics. . . What future?  That's a logical contradiction.

One of them must be wrong; it's either Relativity or Quantum Mechanics.  Bear in mind that the latter was founded on the basis of the former.

So, while many brilliant minds have made astronomical advances in the field, I think it prudent to take QM with a grain of salt.  Call me a throwback to Victorian England; I'm partial to Newton.

 

>>>Imagine a pair of dice; the embodiment of chance.  If you know their weight, center of gravity (distribution of mass), initial positions and initial velocities then you already know where they'll land. 

 

Dice, per se, are not the "embodiment of chance." It's the ROLL of the dice that is the embodiment of chance. The roll requires a statistical description, which is why, ultimately, the result is passed along to the dice. Same applies to coin tosses: the coin is not the embodiment of chance — if you leave it alone, it'll sit on the table and do nothing forever, with a probability of "1". It is the TOSS (and spin) that is the embodiment of chance. Since that requires a statistical description, it gets passed on to the coin as it lands heads or tails.

 

See why I accuse Objectivists of 19th century naive Victorian materialist metaphysics? They haven't progressed beyond about 1870 in their thinking.

Yes, the ROLL of the dice is the embodiment of chance.  Conceded.

Try building a rocket, let alone launching one, with statistical descriptions.  "Yes, we're 76% sure that it won't explode and 99.9% sure it actually exists."

 

And I am a naïve materialist.  We've established this and agree, here.  Actually, I would be proud to be categorized with the minds of the Renaissance.

>>>And teleology is a form of determinism.

 

Really? OK. Then based on initial conditions, and a general law, you can predict with close to 100% accuracy precisely what letter of the alphabet I'm going to begin an email tomorrow morning, right? Because that's what a true deterministic law entails. That's why a physicist can tell you where a projectile will be tomorrow morning if he knows the initial conditions pertaining to the projectile, and the general law governing projectiles. He can also "retrodict", i.e., he can tell you where the projectile was yesterday (or a million years ago) if he knows the initial conditions today, and the general law governing such projectiles. This is how modern astronomers know when solar eclipses occurred even many thousands of years ago.

 

So go ahead. Make a prediction now about what I intend to do tomorrow morning in typing out a new email, since (by your lights) teleology is a form of determinism.

 

[i think what you meant to say was that teleology is a form of CAUSALITY, which is certainly true; teleology causes effects. But it is not a form of determinism.]

No, sir; I won't predict it with close to 100% accuracy; I'll tell you exactly that 100% correctly.

You just tell me the initial conditions for the trajectory of your mind.

 

You tell me your thoughts, your ideas, your memories; you tell me about every moment of every day you've lived since your earliest memories, up to reading this very sentence, and I'll tell you far more than who you'll email tomorrow and what you'll say.

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You still haven't explained what pattern in nature could exist without being the product of a mind.  If you consider it to be a logical contradiction in terms then it's a moot point and the discussion is an excersize in futility.

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@ Mormon Church:

 

>>So any pattern found in nature, any pattern at all, must be the product of an intelligence?

 

Not quite. Intelligence is obviously able to create patterns, but things that are products of intelligence can (and often do) go beyond mere pattern-making and into the non-material area called "meaning." Furthermore, things can have meaning even without any pattern.  

 

 

Concepts, as expressed by written words, are not mere patterns. Does the word "C H A I R" look like the material object it codes for? No. Could a tide, or a storm, or a tornado, have produced marks in the sand that look like "C" then "H" then "A" then "I" then "R"? Let's suppose it could. So what? By themselves, the marks mean nothing. But when an intelligent designer, such as a human, comes along and using his intelligence, mentally assigns those five scratches to the physical object he has experience with (even if only in his imagination as something he intends to invent), then he is inventing a code. The code is in the assignment of the scratches to a meaning that is not part of the scratches themselves. So even if a tide or a tornado accidentally created those scratches, it had nothing to do with causing the human to assign meaning to it.

 

Tornadoes don't create codes. Only intelligent designers do.

 

>>>An "effective probability of zero" would be identical to "basically zero" which is the same as "vanishingly improbable".  Not impossible.

 

No, "impossible" need not mean "numerically zero probability." "Impossible" means "below the threshold probability that defines the area of rejection."

 

(LOL! I can just see you working security in a casino. Some guy walks in and wins repeatedly at roulette, blackjack, craps, and the slot machines, and beats the house for an entire month at odds of 1-in-10^50. When the owners demand to know why you didn't stop the guy from cheating, you reply, "Just because the odds were 10^50 to one that he beat the house for a month straight, that doesn't prove he cheated. After all, the probability "1/10^50", while very improbable, is not exactly zero! It's not actually impossible. The owners, of course, will sack you for being an insolent buffoon and incompetent. They're right to do so.

 

>>>Try building a rocket, let alone launching one, with statistical descriptions.  "Yes, we're 76% sure that it won't explode and 99.9% sure it actually exists."

 

It's done all the time. The engineering is within certain statistical tolerances. Nothing is 100% exact, especially in rocket science (or in any other applied science).

 

You've never studied physics or engineering, I see. Pity. (Hint: you won't learn any science, math, or engineering, by rereading Atlas Shrugged. It's not in there.)

 

>>>And I am a naïve materialist.  We've established this and agree, here.  Actually, I would be proud to be categorized with the minds of the Renaissance.

 

Except naive materialism had little to do with the Renaissance. It's associated with the Victorian era, from 1837 to 1901. Also, if you're a naive materialist, it means you believe your consciousness is ultimately composed of physical entities such as atoms, or perhaps even smaller, more fundamental particles. How can small material particles be "proud"? Is "pride" a certain energy-state of those particles, for example, or perhaps a certain spatial arrangement? Is "truth" a certain PATTERN or spatial arrangement of those material particles?

 

>>>You tell me your thoughts, your ideas, your memories; you tell me about every moment of every day you've lived since your earliest memories, up to reading this very sentence, and I'll tell you far more than who you'll email tomorrow and what you'll say.

 

You already have it.  It's all there in my previous posts. There is nothing else. Everything I wrote previously constitutes my initial conditions. You already have the general law (I assume). Just put it all together and tell me the first letter of my first post this coming Monday. And while you're at it, my clever Mormon, calculate what the last letter of my last email was 10 years ago. Ten years isn't such a long time. It's nothing for an astrophysicist to calculate the position of a planet or comet ten years ago, so you should be able to do the same with a teleological entity such as a mind. Impress us with your intellectual prowess.

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@ Mormon Church:

>>>Try building a rocket, let alone launching one, with statistical descriptions.  "Yes, we're 76% sure that it won't explode and 99.9% sure it actually exists."

 

It's done all the time. The engineering is within certain statistical tolerances. Nothing is 100% exact, especially in rocket science (or in any other applied science).

You've never studied physics or engineering, I see. Pity. (Hint: you won't learn any science, math, or engineering, by rereading Atlas Shrugged. It's not in there.)

I was trying to be civil with you.

Edited by Harrison Danneskjold
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