BookTalk.org

i love how gleefully he siezes on these definition "GOTCHA" s.

Robert Wrote:

The point of citing Laplace, who was responsible for the clockwork universe theory of universal determinism, is to indicate that we cannot really have a coherent ethical theory that is not based on sound epistemology, ie that if we base our views on convenient imagination about divine entities then as Voltaire said, our belief in absurdities will permit atrocities. Ant's view of Laplace as an idiot is based on ant's bullying of anyone who questions ant's irrational supernatural fantasies.

The clockwork hypothesis was retired long ago, Robert. Either you know it and wont accept it as retired or you are attempting to defend Laplace where no defense of him is required.
I never said Laplace was an idiot. I said that particular statement attributed to Laplace is idiotic. And it is, because in order for something to be a SCIENTIFIC hypothesis, it must be testable, observable to a minimal degree at the very least, and subject to falsifiability. GOD is not able to be tested in ANY fashion. Hence, we could not even begin to work at our "God Hypothesis," Robert.
You're being silly with this, Robert. Stop tickling yourself pink in front of us.


Robert wrote:

The hypothesis is that a unified intelligent entity created our universe

.

As stated, that hypothesis can NOT be tested.
Are you saying it can?
Lay it on the table for all of us to see here.
Your sentence, judged by the strictest standards of empiricism is nothing more than accidental poetry on your part.
Again, I declare that you are are a very inconsistent, double standard scientist, Robert.
You are a scientist, are you not?

Robert wrote:

No, that is why it is probably untrue. It is unethical to promote belief in ideas that appear to conflict with all observation.

I'm lost here, Robert. I thought you first claimed this was a scientific hypothesis. Now you seem to be saying it's not.
This seems like too blatant of a contradiction, so which is it, Robert?


Robert wrote:

Again, ant displays ignorance of simple scientific logic. It is a basic axiom of science that if something did happen then it was possible. Impossible things don't happen. Only possible things occur.

Okay, I'm ignorant. I knew that before I met you here.

This is an interesting comment: Only possible things occur.
Many possible things do NOT occur as well, Robert. Did that make them impossible as a result?


Robert wrote:

Our solar system contains the necessary conditions for the evolution of life. Therefore, since intelligence exists within our solar system, the alternatives are that intelligence evolved here

,

That is a silly truism. It is devoid of any useful content. It was a waste of space.

Robert wrote:

Since it was possible, it is meaningful in some sense to suggest the purpose of the earth was to become intelligent, in Aristotle's sense of a final cause. Even though every acorn does not become an oak tree, that is the telos it contains within it. So too, intelligence is the flowering glory of our planet. Let us hope intelligent life is not a beautiful swan song and prelude to extinction.

Meh.., okay.

I really can't figure you out sometimes, Robert. That's why I like you.

Interbane wrote:

My point is, we don't need to address abiogenesis in order to conclude that information spontaneously generates.

What evidence indicated information spontaneously generated?

Tell me ant, are you denying that abiogenesis happened?

I do not need to deny anything here.
abiogensis is a very ambitious explanatory attempt based on no single "standard model" to explain the origin of life. Under the umbrella of "abiogenesis" multiple hypothesis presented have numerous difficulties, one of which is the difficulty determining environmental conditions billions of years ago and the crucial stability necessary to MAINTAIN a "life" developing process.

And as I've stated before here, there are evidential boundaries and explanatory ambitious that conflict. I'm not "willing to conclude" anything related to multiple scientific hypotheses. That would be dumb of me. And it's dumb of you to push for any conclusion here.

The conditions are all there for abiogenesis to have happened.

Actually the conditions needed relate directly to the environment that life began in.
The question "what is life" is still on the table as well.
Semantical information the biggest question here. How such information was able to continue the necessary sequences to develop into "life" is itself a deep mystery. It would seem that orchestration of some sort would be a necessity. Particularly when noise theory states that it is near impossible to get information from noise. I'm no expert here, but I am intellectually cautious enough not to spout off any conclusions at this point. Science itself is not willing to do that with Origins. On the other hand, You on this message board are. I think you are silly for it.

What evidence indicated information spontaneously generated?

Do the math. The zettabyte figure was for all the DNA info in every cell.

But if we go with the minimum, the 1.5Gb, then the total information between my example and our DNA is 1,500,000,000 minus 8. So, pretty much still 1.5 Gb of information has spontaneously generated over time through the process of evolution. Every bit of information that is generated by evolution has been spontaneous, by the mechanism I described. I would say this includes whatever formed during abiogenesis, but since that has been a sticking point for you, I subtracted it.

Semantical information the biggest question here. How such information was able to continue the necessary sequences to develop into "life" is itself a deep mystery.

Semantic information did not arise until much later, around the time consciousness arose. When we speak of genes as containing structural information, that type of information is causal information.

What I've been trying to get across is that there isn't any "deep mystery" regarding how causal information was spontaneously generated. Abiogenesis is not a deep mystery. It is a shallow mystery. The ingredients likely existed on ancient Earth, and the mechanisms are not only possible but plausible. That is not a zero-sum amount of information ant. It is pertinent, and applicable, and although it's not enough for a definitive conclusion, it IS enough for us to be confident that naturalistic abiogenesis happened.

And it's dumb of you to push for any conclusion here.

I gave you my reasoning above. We know life exists, which is powerful evidence. We know that existing explanations for countless phenomena are all naturalistic. Why should the obvious conclusion not be drawn from those premises? Please enlighten me.

Hi Ant, just reverting back to the original article "Exploring life's origins" and in particular the proto-cell, I've been trying to understand and make sense of these things.Being neither biologist or biochemist I'm a bit slow in these areas. Something did strike me though, and if I've got this wrong I'm happy to be corrected.

I followed the links to the Robert Shapiro essay where he says this."Today,sophisticated double layered cell-membranes,made of chemicals classified as lipids,separate living cells from their environment." Presumably protectively.
In the proto-cell, fatty acids,theoretically play this role. The simple R.N.A. happily finding in this substance some suitabable garb,and the right environment for it.
Here's the thing though.With today's sophisticated membranes,presumably these membranes are made from the D.N.A. instructions.Therefore,at some point in the mutational pinball/lottery these chemicals/materials generated the INFORMATION for this D.I.Y.achievement.If one asks whether primitive cells knew they needed this, the answer is obvious,yet they must have created the specific information first in order to do this.Am I right here?
This to me,if correct, is symptomatic of the problem with the whole neo-Darwinian approach to things.Everything is goalless yet the results are spectacular. D.N.A. was too complex so we got the R.N.A.world,it's too complex so we get the proto-cell.Desperate measures are required so we get the solution,of Fatty acid.These membranes are necessary for successful cell life and exist informationally where we see this.At proto-cell level they would not exist, so happenstance solutions are invoked to solve the problem artificially.In my view, there's something contrived about this.
No doubt many will reply, that's just what happened, in tiny steps over zillions of years etc.Yet again the winning number came up eventually.But, it accidentally created specified information, to create it's own sophisticated membranes?Information already exists even at the proto level and of course at all levels.Why not sufficient information at the earliest origins, for complex life.
?
Here's an article on some "Problems with the natural chemical origin of life" It is an I.D. website but if anyone is interested here's the link. http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/sh ... php/id/838 Thanks for that original article.I don't really fully understand this stuff well, so if I've got this wrong, let me know.

ant wrote:The clockwork hypothesis was retired long ago, Robert. Either you know it and wont accept it as retired or you are attempting to defend Laplace where no defense of him is required.

No, the clockwork idea has not been retired. Quantum physics shows that science cannot predict the future, but not that any acausal events are possible, which would be needed to refute determinism.

Meandering along as usual, the reason Laplace has come up here is that ant said “Science itself is not in the business of hypothesizing the existence/non existence of a God.” Laplace, one of the most famous scientists in history, indicated that the existence of God has no place in scientific astronomy. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Sim ... ace#Quotes

Now admittedly, ant has a fair point that saying the hypothesis of God is not needed is not the same thing as advancing the hypothesis that God does not exist. However, Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics, to which Napoleon objected, sought to explain everything, and rightly if discreetly observed that primitive psychological mythical projections are distinctly unhelpful in finding out anything true. The practical reality is that science since Descartes is atheist in practice, with references to a God just polite diplomacy aimed at getting the inquisition off their back.

ant wrote:I never said Laplace was an idiot. I said that particular statement attributed to Laplace is idiotic.

Thank you for the clarification – non-idiot scientist says idiotic things. Okay. The supposedly “idiotic” comment by Laplace was that astronomy had no need of God. So in antworld science does need God, and it is idiotic to say science doesn’t need to fantasise about a creator being. Non-idiot science would need God hypothesis, following ant logic. Except no science ever does make any use of supernatural imaginary beings, so ant is engaging again in what we might rudely call posterior analytics.

ant wrote: for something to be a SCIENTIFIC hypothesis, it must be testable, observable to a minimal degree at the very least, and subject to falsifiability. GOD is not able to be tested in ANY fashion. Hence, we could not even begin to work at our "God Hypothesis,".

There are good hypotheses and bad ones. God is a bad one. Looking at Wikipedia, we find a scientific hypothesis is a suggested solution based on the evidence. Considering God, we have the evidence of the Bible, which claims that God split seas, inflicted plagues, brought people back from the dead, rained manna from heaven, and did all manner of other impossible things before breakfast to intervene miraculously on our planet.

God is a suggested solution to why the Bible makes all these claims. Sadly, the God hypothesis is particularly weak, since the alternative hypothesis of human fantasy is far stronger. It is like how phlogiston or epicycles were scientific hypotheses, but were discarded as obsolete when more accurate hypotheses came along.

But then of course we can shrink down to the ant God, for whom there is no evidence, testability or observation. Great God, that one.

ant wrote: you are are a very inconsistent, double standard scientist, Robert. You are a scientist, are you not?

The God hypothesis should simply be held to the same standards as any other claim. If there is no evidence or reason to believe it, park it as irrelevant, especially if there is a better explanation (psychological projection). My Masters Degree was on the philosophy of science, which is why I am interested in how observation intersects with metaphysics in psychology.

ant wrote: I thought you first claimed [God] was a scientific hypothesis. Now you seem to be saying it's not.

God ranks with epicycles, the idea that planets do elaborate pirouettes. Both are scientific hypotheses, but both are obsolete, since modern knowledge is not helped by considering them as true.

ant wrote: This is an interesting comment: Only possible things occur. Many possible things do NOT occur as well, Robert. Did that make them impossible as a result?

Going back to your favourite idiot Laplace, he argued that celestial mechanics assumes the universe is deterministic, so by definition anything that does not occur cannot occur. This is the model from Spinoza of God as Nature. We simply cannot on principle know if it is true or not, since we don’t know if our free decisions are physically caused.

ant wrote: Robert wrote:

Our solar system contains the necessary conditions for the evolution of life. Therefore, since intelligence exists within our solar system, the alternatives are that intelligence evolved here

,
That is a silly truism. It is devoid of any useful content. It was a waste of space.

No, it was an answer to your question ’The data indicates that potential for intelligence existed within the disk?” As you point out, your question is answered by a truism. That says more about your question than about the answer to it.

This to me,if correct, is the problem with the whole neo-Darwinian approach to things.Everything is goalless yet the results are spectacular. D.N.A. was too complex so we got the R.N.A.world,it's too complex so we get the proto-cell.

Flann, did you read my post on how evolution is an explanation for how information spontaneously generates?

The reason I ask is that you bring up a great question. At some point, there was a transition from the membrane forming autonomously to forming via causation through DNA.

I'm not sure if there are hypotheses that address this transition, so I'll speculate. Feel free to argue with any of my points.

A simple replicant chain of polymers wouldn't have the information for it's "shell" initially. The lipids would adhere to some of the offspring replicants randomly(via their covalent attraction), but not all. It would be the same mechanism by which the original replicant gained it's shell. The ratio between shelled and non-shelled polymers would depend on how many lipids were available in the prebiotic soup. I would guess that at first, the ratio was heavily skewed in favor of lipids, since they there had been no life until that point to make use of them, the lipids would have accumulated over millennia as they were formed.

You would then have some replicants with shells, and some without. The ones without would be vulnerable, therefore less likely to survive. In the population pool of replicants with a shell, the environment was then ripe for a mutation that enabled(positively influenced) the formation of a shell. I'd think that as a stepping stone, the first mutations to lean in this direction wouldn't "cause" the shell to form, but would instead have made it more likely. With increased likelihood of shell formation, the offspring replicants would have greater survivability and would flourish. Over time, the enabling mechanism would be replaced by a mechanism that is more reliable. This step could happen if there were a few "enabling" mutations that together made shell formation compulsory - a necessary consequence from the combined mutations.

That is a contrived explanation. All of our explanations are contrived. Language is contrived. The key is to contrive(hypothesize) enough that we can select between our contrivances, and in the process get closer to the truth of what happened. We eliminate most contrivances, and make progress on the ones that are supported by evidence. This is the nature of the scientific process.

Here is a quote from the ID website:

"If naturalistic theories are not bearing fruit for science, perhaps we feel justified looking outside the reigning paradigm for an answer to the origin of life."

If by 'not bearing fruit', the author meant there is no progress being made, then he is wrong. There is progress being made in understanding how life could have spontaneously arose. New evidence and new models pop up year after year. Issues such as those contained in the ID webpage are refined and resolved, one at a time, incrementally but relentlessly.

I think developing models for abiogenesis will be one of the most difficult tasks for science of all time. That doesn't mean it's unsolvable. The "issues" on the ID webpage are a fraction of the literature on prebiotic mechanisms. Imagine taking a college course on this stuff. It's intimidating, a mountain of complex information. But for all that, the way the interaction of this prebiotic matter actually works is exponentially more complex than our current understanding. The numbers involved are insanely large. The timescales are insanely large. Understanding will take a long time, but we are making progress.

I've often thought that there are a large number of possible 'replicants'. Our polymer dna and acid messengers is the only existing mechanism(that we know of). But I doubt it's the only possible one. Perhaps there were many forms of replicants that were born from the prebiotic soup, but the existing mechanism had proven more sustainable and robust, so it displaced the others into extinction.


Thanks for continuing the discussion. You too ant.

It's also important to note that if we have several different methods by which abiogenesis could have happened, but we don't know if any of them are the real reason, already this means god is not needed to get the ball rolling.

It means it's possible without violating what we know of the laws of physics. It means that you don't need a magical intervention.

To phrase another way. If you come across a drawing of a perfect circle on a chalk board and you want to explain how it was made you could do several things.

To venture a guess, you get two peices of wood, fix them together at an angle so they don't bend, then tape a peice of chalk to the end. Plant one end and swing the other with the chalk around in a circle on the board creating a perfect circle.

Just like that you've demonstrated how someone COULD draw a circle. If all you are trying to prove is that it could have been drawn by a person, and not by a machine for instance, then you've proven it's possible. Even though the original drawing wasn't made with a compass, but by using a ruler to measure out the same distance from the center and drawing a point in all locations.

So you haven't discovered the way that was ultimately used, but you have determined that ways exist!

With abiogenesis hypotheses, we are generating ways that COULD have happened and trying to determine if any of them were really the ones that were used.

We are a ways off from pinning that down, but we are already well on the path of explaining ways it COULD have naturally happened... which means already that there's no need to include a god.

Hi Interbane, Thanks for your thoughts on how the membrane might have come into being.I don't understand these things enough to say too much.
Evolutionists think these things are plausible and that they know how abiogenesis could have occurred. The thing that struck me about the membranes was the simple fact that they are a necessary part of the cell.Evolutionary thinking seems forced to go to some proto-cell,unusual in being without a natural membrane.You could say,cells,even proto-cells should have them. I suppose I am focussing on the idea of intent.
Evolution says things just happen, through laws,random mutations etc. I very much doubt that there was a proto-cell but for the sake of illustration used it, to show a way of thinking.This is that,the deficient protocells in their theorised journeys to writing the information for their missing membranes, show an apparent intent from somewhere to rectify a problem.Living cells don't have this problem.The idea of complex early life seems ruled out on ideological grounds.It must be naturalistic.No divine foot in the door, thinking.

We've been down this road before.I just don't buy the theory.I'm afraid, I agree with Berlinski on the issues of blind forces,without foresight,memory or planning abilities etc etc.I don't think mindless chemicals and matter could accidentally write informational instructions to design their membranes. Or, that design is an illusion and so on.No doubt the debate will go on.