Hi Interbane,How are you? It seems to me that pushing things back to proto-life and diminishing the information required doesn't explain how that information arose naturalistically.Interbane wrote:Yet, evolution is, at it's core, a naturalistic explanation for how information is created naturalistically.
Johnson says, he is happy to admit his ignorance of causes,but surely causes are the big question when it comes to origins of life and the Universe with it's Laws,matter,energy and anything else it contains.It seems to me his explanations are mechanistic,laws,functions, properties.
My appeal to codes like in D.N.A,( which he says I can't claim),are inferential and analogous.In Lennox's words "the only thing we know of capable of producing such codes are mind".No one is saying that human intelligence devised the D.N.A. code. The question remains what the alternative explanation might be.Appealing to mechanisms and laws,to me at least is unsatisfactory.A complex code indicates to me,a concept first.
While Berlinski's essay is old,I think, he still raises serious questions ,for the neo Darwinian hypothesis and it's application in areas of origins. The elephant in the graveyard, transforms itself into the ubiquitous metaphorical one found in all urban dwellings.The fossil record.
Johnson's computer simulated cheetah,suffers from the same fatal deficiences, Berlinski describes in his essay.
Finally the question of design and purpose or lack thereof. All is illusion.The material and immaterial world has neither.It has laws, properties and functions. Johnson's brain was neither purposed nor designed,it merely functions according to laws, properties.chemistry which he can explain better than I.Yet Johnson the man, Houdini like,escapes the vice like grip of the aforementioned material constraints to, plan, purpose and design. Isn't life strange?