tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-206278072024-03-18T11:02:46.764-12:00Quantum Non-LinearityTimothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.comBlogger651125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-40952245168516180212024-03-18T07:21:00.007-12:002024-03-18T11:02:15.022-12:00Logging Some Notes on Naive Intelligent Design Theory <p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9qtHv4E514IfZCS-q-oJpjFeHfnKHtLxLyfC6dmD5RpEEfgs1_CLObRoaHglthO_PN-ghXYNzbBMoE3JAtICaYpp-HXN-v7VlocDmk-w_ep6zkVPK5tXz5WLvyVkPI3h6K2p7BkETIkfhvfEKmon72MfPOO_9kx9jEvgz7CppoijLYeQEo3ArBw/s1000/1000_F_174943598_uzYKTT0oFSROyD8UmjNUku9wffodMgF7.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="656" data-original-width="1000" height="421" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9qtHv4E514IfZCS-q-oJpjFeHfnKHtLxLyfC6dmD5RpEEfgs1_CLObRoaHglthO_PN-ghXYNzbBMoE3JAtICaYpp-HXN-v7VlocDmk-w_ep6zkVPK5tXz5WLvyVkPI3h6K2p7BkETIkfhvfEKmon72MfPOO_9kx9jEvgz7CppoijLYeQEo3ArBw/w640-h421/1000_F_174943598_uzYKTT0oFSROyD8UmjNUku9wffodMgF7.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">NAive ID epistemic theory says: "<i>I can't see any intelligent agency here: Therefore, I conclude that <br />cars are created by natural processes.</i>". It's ironic that the NAive IDists and Dawkinites would<br />agree on this point!<br />(Picture from: <a href="https://www.ukposters.co.uk/robot-assembly-line-in-car-factory-f174943598" style="text-align: left;">Photo & Art Print robot assembly line in car factory (ukposters.co.uk)</a><span style="text-align: left;">)</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">This current post picks up on some matters arising from <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2024/02/casey-luskin-promotes-his-flawed-xor.html" target="_blank">my last post on</a> Casey Luskin's take on Intelligent Design and Evolution. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">***</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><b>ONE)</b> <b>Here we go again:</b> The group think momentum of NAive ID continues in t</span><span>his post on Evolution News:</span></span></p><p><a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2024/02/can-evolution-and-intelligent-design-work-together-in-harmony/?_gl=1*1hazrr9*_ga*MTA4ODY2Mjk0My4xNzAyODA2MjQ0*_ga_9D89KMSK5X*MTcwOTE5NjUyNS45MS4wLjE3MDkxOTY1MjUuNjAuMC4w" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Can Evolution and Design Work in Harmony? | Evolution News</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Namely....</span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">But if the design can be
explained through natural processes, there is little need to invoke intelligent
design. After all, the whole point of mainstream evolutionary theory is to
render any need for design superfluous.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Dr. Dilley also explains why
Kojonen’s model contradicts our natural intuition to detect design. If we look
at a hummingbird under Kojonen’s proposal, we are still required to see
unguided natural processes at work, the appearance of design without actual
intelligent design. Yet we are also supposed to acknowledge that an intelligent
designer front-loaded the evolutionary process with the creative power it needs
to produce the hummingbird. So is it intelligently designed, or isn’t it? The
theist on the street is left scratching his or her head.</span></span></i></p><span style="font-size: large;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Yes, the so-called theist-on-the-street is left scratching their heads and these theists are none other than the North American Intelligent Design community. It ought to be quite clear to any sufficiently educated theist that a physical regime capable of generating life could only come out of the workings of an all but omniscient mind. The NAIDs <i>are</i> educated but they have painted themselves into a group-think corner which commits their sub-culture to an erroneous XOR epistemic filter, imposing a straight ID vs Natural forces binary choice on the subject. Along with Dawkinesque atheists they have wrongly equated evolution with a form of deism; it is a very short step from deism to the complete elimination of deity.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">See also the following: It is clear that NAIDs who write this sort of stuff have absolutely no inkling that they are merely scratching the surface of the subject:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2024/03/the-incompatibility-of-evolution-and-design/">The Incompatibility of Evolution and Design | Evolution News</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">***</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div><b>TWO)</b><span> <b>Rate of creation of information. </b>The following pertains to mathematical work I have done and continue to do...</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>An error propagated in both NAID culture and among Christian Young Earthists is that God's physical regime can't generate information. This is untrue.....</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Firstly, let's start with this simple equation:</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Unconditional probability of life = Prob (Organic configuration)</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The highly organized yet highly complex configurations of life are such a small statistical class in the immense sea of randomness that the probability of organized complexity arising by chance can be neglected even given the immense number of trials supplied by a universe billions of years old and billions of light years across. The dimensions of space-time, even if measured in billions, doesn't even scratch the surface of probabilities so deeply negatively logarithmic that one has to get past billions of zero digits to the right of the decimal point before one hits non-zero digits. Hence, the probability of life being generated can only be significant if the right pre-conditions exist. That is:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Conditional probability of life ~ significant = Prob(Organic configuration, right conditions)</i></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>What we are asking for here is that given the right generating conditions life could be generated in a reasonable</span><span> number of trials because each trial has an enhanced probability of generating life by virtue of the physical regime embodied in those right conditions. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div>These trials have the effect of generating negative Shannon Information. The reason for this negativity is that if life should form as a result of the conditions which enhance its probability, then it has passed from a platonic possibility into the created world; life is then a known fact and the information is now reified and exists in the real world. </div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>As I have shown elsewhere this shift in the information from the platonic world of possibility to the real world occurs at a no greater rate than is implied by:</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span><i>I = S + log(T)</i></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><div>Where <i>I</i> is the configuration information content, <i>S</i> is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration with a minimum number of execution steps of <i>T</i>.</div></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>I give a derivation of this mathematical form in two papers accessible from <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/11/melencolia-i-part-4-generating.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/12/melencolia-i-part-5-creating-information.html" target="_blank">here</a>. I have subsequently been working on a more sophisticated version of this expression and will publish this work in due course. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The thing to note is that information can in principle be created by a physical regime: But if that physical regime is a parallel process, this information is only created very slowly with the logarithm of time <i>T</i>. Hence, the contention one hears from fundamentalists and NAIDs that physical processes can't create information is false, mislead as they are by the slow production of information in parallel processing mode. It becomes manifestly false if parallel processing is superseded by the exponentials of expanding parallelism; cue quantum theory....</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span>***</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>THREE)</b>: <b>The second law of thermodynamics</b> <b>and the diffusion equation</b>. Assuming that configuration space has at least some regions in it crossed by the thin fibrils of the spongeam then as the diffusion in configuration space expands there is a chance that this expansion reaches the life creating regions. Thus, although in these regions of configuration space organization is increasing this may well be offset by regions in configuration space, unconstrained by the spongeam where disorder is most definitely increasing thus more than cancelling the increase in order; this looks to be the status quo in our cosmos where overall entropy is always increasing. Thus, it doesn't follow that the emergence of life necessarily violates the second law of thermodynamics. The diffusion equation below opens up the possibility of many scenarios where local order increases but overall order decreases......</div></span><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW9VBxiryemiWM-kr_TbzPUK8h3Jmy3fYCfbfOJugedSFvyemsL0_O8TBbsuq9182jLqBLJbe7VCwTnHVJ2rBKm5q7PNzHwILM_YHuNr0lyZJb2hvq4N0knZcuhq8QeTlIY_rM2S8-sCf874uEoF9yDVOklDrQBTMs0xsaBBBP3-ogQ8OHKFTVpA/s255/Equation02.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="112" data-original-width="255" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW9VBxiryemiWM-kr_TbzPUK8h3Jmy3fYCfbfOJugedSFvyemsL0_O8TBbsuq9182jLqBLJbe7VCwTnHVJ2rBKm5q7PNzHwILM_YHuNr0lyZJb2hvq4N0knZcuhq8QeTlIY_rM2S8-sCf874uEoF9yDVOklDrQBTMs0xsaBBBP3-ogQ8OHKFTVpA/s1600/Equation02.png" width="255" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2022/10/evolution-by-naked-chance.html" target="_blank">See here for more on this equation</a>. The spongeam can be patched in across configuration with the factor <i>V. </i>This factor is a function of the coordinates in configuration space. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">***</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The above thoughts, which I don't push with any political gusto or super-motivated group-commitment, will naturally set me at odds with NAID culture which identifies too strongly with unwoke group think. I advance these concepts as an area of personal exploration uncommitted as I am to either <a href="https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2024/01/woke-vs-unwoke.html" target="_blank">woke or unwoke tribes.</a> </span></div></div></div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-3886300712098352442024-02-22T07:28:00.441-12:002024-03-01T07:07:54.407-12:00Casey Luskin Promotes a Flawed XOR Epistemic Filter<div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaqbvYvvDtGjo2_BVTVBUvWnlulBbqVxnuAp2sWew2lbcfexoahs0Cj_XoGVDNGSZv-lemCVTggHC7g8Pm6ImR8EwvPSYoCxl-iIyJQD1OABpYg5xS0yUfNGZS94QZp6O0CRuIq4jH4de_n0m3KR1JRpSSdL82Y_GqLgSBpFbxTwGhI78Nvs4G1g/s200/Casey-Luskin.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaqbvYvvDtGjo2_BVTVBUvWnlulBbqVxnuAp2sWew2lbcfexoahs0Cj_XoGVDNGSZv-lemCVTggHC7g8Pm6ImR8EwvPSYoCxl-iIyJQD1OABpYg5xS0yUfNGZS94QZp6O0CRuIq4jH4de_n0m3KR1JRpSSdL82Y_GqLgSBpFbxTwGhI78Nvs4G1g/s1600/Casey-Luskin.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">The eager faced "theist-in-the-Street", </span><br />Casey Luskin, perpetuates the usual<br />muddled NAID ideas about<br />
design detection, intelligence, <br />
creation and theism<o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="font-size: x-large; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;">The North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community have </span></span></span><span><span style="font-size: large;">some very incoherent habits of mind which thoroughly muddy the waters of Intelligent Design theory. NAID pundit Casey Luskin is no exception and </span></span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2024/02/intelligently-designed-evolution-sorry-wrong-universe/?_gl=1*161eiry*_ga*MTA4ODY2Mjk0My4xNzAyODA2MjQ0*_ga_9D89KMSK5X*MTcwODA3ODMxNC43Mi4wLjE3MDgwNzgzMTQuNjAuMC4w" style="text-align: justify;" target="_blank">in an article on "Evolution News"</a><span style="text-align: justify;"> he perpetuates NAID's conceptual incoherence. </span></span></div><div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span></span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span><span>Like so many other pundits in the NAID community <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/search/label/God%20did%20it%20vs.%20Naturalism%20did%20it" target="_blank">whom I have criticized over the years</a> Casey assumes from the start that he can impose on the subject a </span></span></span><span><span><i>natural forces vs intelligent design dichotomy</i>. </span></span><span>Well, that dichotomy <i>does work</i> <i>reasonably </i>if one is trying to detect the activity of intelligent beings who are part of the created order such as human beings, aliens sending SETI signals, little gray men from Zeti Reticuli or even intelligent earth animals. But as I have said so often in this blog this dichotomy falls over badly when it is applied to Christian theism where omniscient divine intelligence not only transcends the world it has created but is so totalizing that it somehow also permeates every part of it (See Acts 17:28)</span><span>. Moreover, the Christian God is an omnipotent and omniscient sovereign which means that nothing happens in the cosmos without His permission; that is, everything is subject to His power of veto. In someways God's relationship with His creation has parallels with that of an author who sustains and maintains the content of his story inside his/her mind. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Christian theism throws a huge spanner into works of the simplistic "<i>natural forces vs Intelligent design</i>" dichotomy taken for granted by many IDists. After criticizing NAID dualism for so many years on this blog it is amusing to see them still perpetuating their old, hackneyed thought forms. The source of much of their grief, if not all of it, traces back to their so-called "explanatory filter" (<a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/06/idists-heres-another-fine-mess-theyve.html" target="_blank">See here where I criticised this simplistic epistemic</a>). The result is that Casey's arguments, along with that of his colleagues are incoherent. This doesn't mean to say that standard evolutionary theory holds good, but I don't have confidence in the NAID's critique of it. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Anyway, let's go through Casey's article....</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>***</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><b>CASEY:</b><i> In his book The Compatibility of Evolution and
Design, [T</i></span><i>heologian Rope Kojonen, at the University of Helsinki]</i><span><i> offers a model in which evolution succeeds because it is
intelligently designed......</i></span><i><span>Kojonen argues that evolutionary mechanisms produced the
complexity of life. But there’s an intriguing assumption implicit in this: on
its own, blind evolution is very unlikely to produce the complex features we
see in living organisms. Thus, Kojonen envisions that the evolutionary process
receives help from above in the form of the fine-tuning of the initial
conditions and natural laws that allow evolution to get the job done.</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><b>MY COMMENT: </b>We can see that Casey is starting to go off in the wrong direction already: </span><span>Exactly what Casey means by</span><span> "</span><i>blind evolution on its own</i><span>" is unclear: Perhaps he's thinking of a process that is unconditionally random? (which of course has no chance of generating the high organization of organic forms even in the lifetime of our immense universe) Or is he thinking of those philosophers who do not believe there is a Christian God but are able to live with the idea that the cosmos with all it's wonderful complex order can be accepted on the basis that "</span><i>it just is</i><span>" (<a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2024/01/galen-strawson-on-why-is-there-something.html" target="_blank">See for example Galen Strawson whom I quote here</a>). But at this juncture I am assuming the validity of a Christian theological context and therefore the question of how atheists come to terms with the enigmatic givenness of "natural" organized complexity is not part of my brief. That leaves us with the conundrum of just what Casey means by an independent <i>blind evolution</i>; that seems an impossible conception in a Christian theological context where God is the totalising Sovereign minder of His own creation. Given that the Christian God is the omniscient omnipotent immanent creator Casey's last statement above, which seems to demote God to the level of an assistant, in fact almost a helpful side kick of evolution, would be better written without the phrase "</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>the evolutionary process receives help from above". </i><span>For example:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Thus, Kojonen envisions that the evolutionary process has been created with sufficient fine-tuning of the initial conditions and natural law to ensure that evolution would get the job done.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In the context of Christian theism it is difficult to coherently imagine a created process working by itself with the occasional nudge from God who is otherwise an absentee landlord; that kind of thinking is the road to deism..... and ultimately even atheism. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Casey goes onto quote just what Kojonen is trying to tell us (I've retained Casey's emphases):</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>***</b></span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>KOJONEN: </b><i>According to this view, then, the possibility of evolution
depends on the features of the space of possible forms, where<b> all the forms
must be arranged in a way that makes an evolutionary search through it
possible.</b> This argument shows how the preconditions for the working of the
“blind watchmaker” of natural selection can indeed be satisfied by nature in
the case of protein evolution, despite an extreme rarity of functional forms.
According to this view, then, <b>the possibility of evolution depends on the features
of the space of possible forms, where all the forms must be arranged in a way
that makes an evolutionary search through it possible</b>. This argument shows how
the preconditions for the working of the “blind watchmaker” of natural
selection can indeed be satisfied by nature in the case of protein evolution,
despite an extreme rarity of functional forms. Behe (2019, 112) argues that
Wagner does not yet solve the puzzle of evolving irreducible complexity,
arguing that “it doesn’t even try to account for the cellular machinery that is
catalysing the chemical reactions to make the needed components. ” However,
suppose that, in the case of the bacterial flagellum, though the vast majority
of possible arrangements of biological proteins are non-functional, there
nevertheless exists a series of possible functional forms, little “machines”
that happen to contain increasing numbers of the flagellum’s vital parts while
still serving some other function. This then would allow for the seamless
transition from no flagellum to a flagellum over time, through small successive
steps. In this manner, by moving through such a suitable library of forms, the
blind process of evolution would have the ability to produce even the most
complex structures without the intervention of a designer. <b>This is the kind of
fine-tuning of the landscape of forms that seems to be required to evolve the
kind of biological order described by Behe.</b><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span><o:p> </o:p>It seems, then, that defending the power of the evolutionary
mechanism requires assuming that the landscape of possible biological forms has
some <b>fairly serendipitous properties</b>.</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span>Now, unlike Casey what Kojonen is trying to say here is at least intelligible and makes sense. He is simply telling us that a condition of a working evolutionary system is what I referred to several years ago as the "<b><i>spongeam</i></b>". That is, that functional forms (i.e. self-maintaining, self-perpetuating organic structures) must constitute a connected-set in configuration space to allow the evolutionary diffusion process to diffuse throughout that space. The post below contains links to other posts where I introduced this idea mathematically:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2022/10/evolution-by-naked-chance.html">Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution by (Naked) Chance? (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</a></span></p><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Kojonen, whether right or wrong, is at least making coherent sense here; so much so that even Casey has understood what Kojonen is trying to say. However, Kojonen does make one bad move in my opinion: He talks about configuration space requiring <i>serendipitous properties;</i> that's a rather inappropriate way of putting it in a Christian theistic context: If the spongeam is a mathematical property and an implication of the initial conditions and laws of physics of our cosmos then given God's relationship with that cosmos it would not be serendipitous, but deliberately chosen and created. But in noting this point does not mean I'm accepting</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">that the spongeam even has a mathematical existence let alone asserting its</span><span style="font-size: large;"> reification in our cosmos. </span></div><div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>***</b></span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>CASEY:</b> <i>There’s a great irony here in the structure of Kojonen’s
argument: He implicitly concedes that evolution is very unlikely to work in
your average universe that isn’t finely tuned. He says if evolution is going to
work, that’s only because natural laws and initial conditions are specially
“fine-tuned.” <o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><b>MY COMMENT: </b>That's right Casey I think I can agree. </span><span><span>It seems fairly intuiti</span></span><span>vely compelling that any old randomly chosen physical regime is unlikely to set up the right conditions (i.e. the spongeam) facilitating the kind of evolution as currently understood; it looks as though a physical regime capable of generating lifeforms in a paltry few billion years has to be carefully chosen! </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>***</b></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>CASEY: </b><i><span><span>Thus, the universe has some pretty lucky properties. <o:p></o:p></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span>The question then becomes: Are we in Kojonen’s universe? His
argument for the feasibility of evolution requires a great degree of
“fine-tuning” of nature where functional forms are “arranged in a way” such
that it is easy to move from one functional state to another functional state
via blind evolutionary mechanisms. Are we in a “universe designed to allow for
evolution” in this manner? Or are we in a universe where evolutionary
mechanisms don’t seem capable of producing the complexity of life — meaning
that they didn’t?</span></span></span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span>Yes, I largely agree Casey, but I would have thought that "<i>a great deal of fine tuning</i>" is exactly the job description of the Great Omniscient, Omnipotent Creator and therefore I wouldn't talk of "<i>pretty lucky properties</i>"! I</span></span><span style="font-size: large;">f we are in a universe designed for evolution then in the context of Christian theism it wouldn't be a lucky property, would it? I didn't think that Christians believed in luck when it comes to the creation. Nevertheless, good question Casey: </span><i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"> Are we in a “universe designed to allow for evolution” in this manner? Or are we in a universe where evolutionary mechanisms don’t seem capable of producing the complexity of life?</span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;">All we can be sure of is that over millions, if not billions of years, life forms have emerged, changed and adapted. In that trivial sense of mere natural history, evolution has occurred whatever the precise nature of the engine/mechanism driving it that the Good Lord has provisioned it with. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>***</b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><b style="text-align: justify;">CASEY: </b><i>As my colleagues and I have shown both in a review of
Kojonen’s book and in an occasional series of posts here, from protein
evolution to the origin of irreducibly complex molecular
machines like the flagellum (here and here), the universe we live in does not
seem to allow evolutionary mechanisms to produce the complexity of life. We
live in the wrong universe for Kojonen’s proposal. </i></span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><span><i>But there’s a problem with the structure of Kojonen’s
argument that goes even deeper.</i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span>The NAIDs' believe that functional forms don't constitute a connected-set in configuration space; that is, they believe that most functional forms are irreducibly complex. They may be right on this count. I personally feel that this claim is at least plausible but proving it is notoriously difficult and sometimes ingenious evolutionists will fill in the gaps between the "islands" of functionality with proposed functional "missing links" that start to give a possible gradualist path through configuration space. Really, the NAID case should stop here and focus on assembling the necessary logic and evidence for the case that organic forms are truly irreducibly complex structures. Irreducible complexity, if it can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, would certainly falsify bog-standard evolution. But no! sensing they're on a very debatable wicket here Casey and colleagues, in their search for a clincher, stick their necks out too far into that "</span><span><i>deeper problem</i>" Casey mentions, the land of NAID smoke and mirrors.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>For more on the question of irreducible complexity see here:</span></span></p><p>
</p><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2021/09/evolution-and-islands-of-functionality.html" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution and Islands of functionality (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">(*See also my footnote below on computational irreducibility)</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>***</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span>CASEY:</span><i><span> </span></i></b><i><span>Kojonen differs with me. He seeks to preserve and defend the
theist on the street’s intuition that life was designed. But in his mind this
is not because natural processes are incapable of producing life. In fact, he
thinks they are capable of that. That is, while evolutionary processes are
inadequate on their own, natural processes in general are capable of producing
life. Kojonen thinks this reflects the fact that the laws of nature and the
initial conditions of the universe themselves are fine-tuned and designed to
make the origin and evolution of life possible — by natural processes.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b>How paradoxical and confusing: On the one hand Casey talks of <i>evolutionary processes </i>[which are presumably viewed as "natural"]<i> that are inadequate on their own</i> and then juxtaposes that with Kojonen's view that "</span><i><span style="font-size: large;">natural processes in general are capable of producing life." </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>But for Christians there really is no such thing as fundamentally natural processes, unless we trivially define them as simply the workings of the physical regime; but fundamentally all such processes are highly unnatural in the sense that they have no necessary existence that we can comprehend (i.e they have no </span><i>Aseity. </i><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2024/01/galen-strawson-on-why-is-there-something.html" target="_blank">See here for more</a><span>). But thinking in terms of fundamentals rather than superficial definitions we find that: </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>a) The cosmic physical regime is highly contingent and unless we have the kind of mentality which allows us to be intellectually satiated with Bertrand Russell's "<i>it just is</i>", the organized complexity of the cosmos remains profoundly puzzling and prompts curiosity to push for deeper meanings. Moreover, <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2024/01/galen-strawson-on-why-is-there-something.html" target="_blank">as I've said here</a> <i><b>science, being ultimately a descriptive discipline</b></i> can never attain to explanatory completeness in sense of <i>Asiety</i>. Hence there will always remain a deeply intuitive unnaturalness about the cosmos. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>b) But e</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span>ven on its own terms our current physics is clearly descriptively incomplete: W</span><span>e still don't have a complete descriptive understanding of our physical regime in terms of succinct laws. So, who knows just how The Good Lord has provisioned this regime to work. Perhaps it has inherited its creator's ability to work miracles? And above all who knows if it has a subtle declarative teleology that's difficult to detect?</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">In the context of Christian theism Casey's statement that</span><i style="font-size: x-large;"> </i><i><span style="font-size: large;">evolutionary processes are inadequate on their own,</span></i><span style="font-size: large;"><i> </i><span>is unintelligible: </span><span>If the spongeam has a mathematical existence and has been reified by the Good Lord (and I'm not claiming it has) then evolution, by definition, would be adequate to produce life, and depending on one's definitions it would have done it "naturally".</span></span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">And who is this so-called "theist on the street" that we are hearing about? Well, as it turns out it's Casey's alter ego.....</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span><b>***</b></span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>CASEY: </b><i><span>But if natural processes are capable of producing the
complexity of life, then isn’t the “theist on the street” wrong to conclude
that life was designed in the first place? On what basis can this theist know
that the natural laws are “fine-tuned” to allow life to evolve? The theist must
have some background knowledge that natural laws can’t produce living systems.
But if Kojonen’s thesis is correct, then in our universe the theist ought not
to have such background knowledge. After all, natural laws are capable of
producing such complex systems!<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT:</b><span><span> If so-called "natural processes" via the contrivance of the spongeam are capable of producing complex life, then such a contrivance would clearly have to be built into the physical regime. Given the huge space of random possibilities such a specific arrangement is astonishing, perhaps even more so than the existence of life itself. </span></span><span>Therefore, any adequately educated Christian theist would be able to conclude that, <i>assuming standard evolution,</i> divine providence has worked yet another miracle of organization and the intelligent Christian would have no trouble understanding that a process can be both "natural" and designed......this is the basis on which an educated theist can know that the physical regime is fine tuned for life....but I can't speak for Casey's "<i>theist on the street</i>".</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>The so-called "theist on the street" (which I conclude can only be Casey's alter ego) is portrayed as only being able<span> to view the situation through a pair of polarizing glasses which present a "<i>natural processes vs intelligent agency</i>" choice. Given this epistemic straight-jacket Casey's street theist is only allowed to jump one way or the other; that is to choose either natural process or intelligent agency; you can't have both! This is a legacy of the</span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"> simplistic explanatory filter which imposes on the evolutionary question an exclusive OR between "blind natural processes" and intelligent agency. Casey insists</span><span style="font-size: large;"> that we all follow him and be channeled into choosing one or the other! NAID culture just seems to be unable to transcend this entrenched habit of mind. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Casey asks: </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">On what basis can this theist know that the natural laws are “fine-tuned” to allow life to evolve? </span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">...... </span></i><span style="font-size: large;">as I've said above: </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>"<i>It seems fairly intuiti</i></span></span><span><i>vely compelling that any old randomly chosen laws of physics and initial conditions are unlikely to set up the right conditions (i.e. the spongeam) facilitating evolution as currently understood; it looks as though a physical regime capable of generating life forms in a paltry few billion years has to be carefully chosen!</i>". </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Therefore, <i><b>if</b></i> our educated theist accepts evolution, he therefore knows that this entails that the "natural" physical regime is fined tuned with a vengeance! It is not going to be lost on the average theist as to the deeper explanation as to why this fine tuning might be, although I can't speak for Casey's "theist on the street" whoever that is!</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Casey and his ID friends really go off the rails in the next paragraph....</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>***</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span>CASEY & Co: </span></b><span style="text-align: left;"><i><span>This analogy invites us to consider the epistemological
effects of living in a universe described by Kojonen’s model (in which
evolution is true, design is confined to the advent of the laws of nature, and
biological data are in view). In this universe, it is not clear that humans
(including theists on the street) would have the basic epistemological
dispositions or beliefs that Kojonen believes undergird our ability to detect
design in biology. For example, people who grew up in this universe would not
likely believe that nature (i.e., non-agent processes) have only limited
ability to build biological complexity. After all, in this universe, the
continuity of non-agent processes across the advent of everything from bacteria
to blue whales seems to suggest that non-agent causes are quite creative.
Similarly, people who grew up in this universe would not likely believe that
our own experience of creating complex things is at all relevant to the claim
that ‘minds have greater creative power than nature does’. Instead, they would
likely believe that our minds are simply a manifestation of nature’s creativity
(or the creativity of non-agent causes). </span></i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i><span><br /></span></i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span>What Casey&Co are trying to get past us here is that in a universe with a spongeam sufficient to support evolution humans would not have the epistemological instincts to detect design because they would grow up to assume that evolution (i.e. a "natural process") shows that intelligent agency isn't needed to create those organic marvels. </span><span>That view, as a generalisation, is clearly false, although it looks to be true </span><span>for those like Casey&Co whose culture has imposed a strict "<i>natural processes XOR intelligent design</i>" epistemic filter on the debate. Using this filter means that once it's decided that a structure is a product of "natural forces" the possibility of intelligent activity is thrown out of the window! Casey&co are then stuck.... although I suspect they know in their hearts that such wonderfully creative natural forces must trace back to some kind of Intelligent Aseity.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">I propose that the NAID XOR epistemic filter is a cultural construction that depends on the community one is in. The NAID XOR is not as Casey is trying to imply a deeply held instinct somehow bound up with the particulars of the created physical regime. In fact, Romans 1:19-20 tells us that regardless of the details of the creation the general form of that creation alerts an instinct which prompts us that we should at least give some attention to the possibility that a great mind of totalising power and presence may be behind it all; OK, many reject the idea, but at least they can't help such an idea popping up in their heads. </span><span style="font-size: large;">So, with regard to a universe where evolution actually works, I would invert one of Casey's statements above thus: </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="text-align: left;">In an evolutionary universe, it is not clear that humans would not have the basic epistemological dispositions or beliefs giving them the </i><i style="text-align: left;"><span>ability to detect design in standard evolutionary biology. </span></i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Now consider this statement by Casey&Co...</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>After all, in this </i>[evolutionary]<i> universe, the continuity of non-agent processes across the advent of everything from bacteria to blue whales seems to suggest that non-agent causes are quite creative.</i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="text-align: left;"><br /></i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">...yes, in an evolutionary universe so-called "natural processes" would be very creative. But notice that Casey&Co have slipped in the phrase "<i>non-agent</i> processes"! This is where the NAID's simplistic and <i>non-recursive</i> epistemic explanatory filter lets them down; it prevents them from submitting those very creative natural processes to the explanatory filter itself: Therefore, in NAID culture "natural processes" stay as "<i>non-agent processes</i>" and they are unable to move on from that. </span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Evolution, (if it indeed evolution as commonly understood has actually occurred) necessarily entails a highly contrived and contingent process at work. But evolution presents no necessary problem to the educated Christian theist who isn't influenced by the epistemic straight jacket of NAID culture. Beyond that culture and i</span><span style="font-size: large;">n a Christian theistic context which posits a transcendent creator of omnipotent intelligence and power, the highly sophisticated contingency demanded by a working standard evolutionary model wouldn't be a problem. But for those who like Casey have been affected by a particular branch of secularism which grew out of the enlightenment, the discovery of the mechanical universe at best entailed deistic notions and at worst atheism. Ergo, Casey&Co have imbibed crypto-atheist categories shared by the likes of Richard Dawkins, a man who really does believe that evolution allows him to be an intellectually satisfied atheist; that is, if one deems "<i>it just is</i>" to be intellectually satisfying!</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/02/dembski-im-not-denying-evolutionary.html" target="_blank">As IDist William Dembski has pointed out</a>,<span> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">in the final analysis evolution is just a way to push the origins question back a stage to just another seemingly improbable and very surprising (= high information) state of affairs; that is, another astonishing status quo where one is still left wondering why "<i>it just is</i>"!</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>***</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i><span><br /></span></i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>CASEY & Co: </b><span><span style="text-align: left;"><i><span>A similar line of thinking applies to
the other elements of design detection discussed above. The bottom line is that
human cognition would likely be significantly different in Kojonen’s universe
than we actually experience it to be. Conversely, the fact that we have the
particular cognitive dispositions and beliefs that we currently possess —
instead of the ones we’d have in Kojonen’s universe — suggests that we live in
a world notably different than captured in Kojonen’s model. Thus, in a
particular sense, Kojonen’s model is inconsistent with the lived experience of
some humans, including some theists on the street. This seriously harms the
plausibility of his proposal, including its defense of everyday theists.</span></i></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i><span><br /></span></i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span style="text-align: left;"><b style="text-align: justify;">MY COMMENT: </b></span></span><i style="text-align: left;">Human cognition would likely be significantly different in Kojonen’s universe? </i><span style="text-align: left;">Speak for yourself Casey because I don't know what you are talking about! Romans 1:19-20 makes no mention of your <i>natural forces vs intelligent design</i> XOR; it just tells us we can't escape the wonder of the creation regardless of its specifics. Evolution or no evolution the instinct of wonder is there whether one is an atheist or not. See for example atheist <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2024/01/galen-strawson-on-why-is-there-something.html" target="_blank">Galen Strawson in this post</a>; he is clearly as confounded as anyone else by the astonishingly rich organized contingency of what <i>he</i> believes to be the evolutionary universe. But in spite of his amazement in the end Strawson plumps for a "<i>it just is</i>" philosophy (a very unsatisfactory response for the Christian believer of course). So, I conclude that the instincts which inform Casey&Co that evolution entails the absence of intelligent agency is purely a construction to be found only in the cultural universe of NAID's and Dawkinites. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>***</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span>CASEY: </span></b><span style="text-align: left;"><i><span>Thus, even if Kojonen’s argument were correct and the laws
of nature were capable of producing living systems, then his “theist on the
street” should not be able to detect design in living systems in the manner he
suggests. If the laws of our universe are rigged to produce life, then such an
event would be fully natural and should not trigger a design inference. We
would see no reason to invoke anything other than normal natural processes to
explain life’s complexity. The very fact that life does trigger a design
inference for Kojonen’s theist suggests that our experience teaches us such
events don’t happen due to natural laws. That means Kojonen’s thesis is
self-defeating and cannot be true.</span></i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i><span><br /></span></i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><b>MY COMMENT</b>: Once gain we can see that Casey is projecting his dichotomized XOR thinking onto the abstract so-called <i>theist-on-the-street,</i> a character who assumes this XOR to be valid and is therefore </span></span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">unable to detect design in living things if evolution, as conventionally understood, has taken place.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Notice in particular that Casey uses that emotive term "<i>rigged</i>" as if contriving a physical regime capable of manufacturing life is somehow an underhand and dishonest activity like election rigging or rigging the machines in a casino; it betrays the cultural value system embedded NAID's naive non-recursive explanatory filter. It's a bit like saying that a robotic automotive factory is "rigged" to manufacture cars and concluding that these cars are a product of "<i>natural forces</i>" and therefore have nothing to do with intelligent design. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>The logic of the NAID explanatory filter is such that if one is a cultural NAID then it follows that </span><i style="text-align: left;">if the physical regime of our universe is "rigged" </i><span style="text-align: left;">(gasp!)</span><i style="text-align: left;"> to produce life, then such an event would be fully natural and should not trigger a design inference. </i><span style="text-align: left;">As we have seen, on this question the</span><span><span style="text-align: left;"> NAIDs are really only speaking for themselves (and some atheists). The culture of which Casey is representative</span><span style="text-align: left;"> is blind to the fact that in the evolutionary scenario those so-called "natural processes" evoke enough wonder to trigger the need for a deeper explanation than "<i>it just is</i>", at least among those willing to accept Christian theism. But because NAID culture is so enamored with a non-recursive XOR epistemic filter then they are impelled by their logic to conclude that...</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The very fact that life does trigger a design inference for Kojonen’s theist suggests that our experience teaches us such events don’t happen due to natural laws.</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">That is, imposing the logic of the NAID XOR epistemic filter on evolution one is forced to conclude that <i>evolution did it </i>XOR<i> God did it. </i>NAID Nonsense! But it's right up the street of the Dawkinites who believe that creation and evolution are necessarily at odds. <br /><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">***</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><b>None of the foregoing is to say that I am necessarily committed to believing that the spongeam is even a mathematical reality let alone a cosmically reified reality. All I'm saying is that Casey&Co's concepts are deeply flawed and don't work as the basis for competent arguments against evolution. NAID culture has dug itself into an <i>a priori</i> anti-evilution position and is committed to disproving evilution at all costs. Part of the cost of this is a bias toward <a href="http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2024/01/woke-vs-unwoke.html" target="_blank">unwoke politics</a>; probably an effect of their off-hand rejection by the academic establishment. </b></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><b><br /></b></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><b><br /></b></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2020/04/anti-science-or-anti-academic.html">Quantum Non-Linearity: Anti-Science or Anti Academic Establishment? (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</a></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/03/christian-world-views-part-2-christian.html">Quantum Non-Linearity: Christian World Views. Part 2: The Christian Academic Establishment (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</a></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><b><br /></b></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><b>Footnote:</b></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="text-align: justify;">* Computational irreducibility is a concept introduced by Wolfram. A computationally irreducible task is one where it is not possible to find a faster analytical solution to a problem than that of actually carrying out a computational simulation, a computation which could potentially be very long winded. It may well be that the evolutionary question is a computationally irreducible problem and therefore it is not possible to analytically determine whether a given physical regime is capable of generating living structures unless one sets up the regime in a very literal sense and performs the simulation in real time. Thus, the NAID desire to disprove the possibility of evolution via some shortcut analytical method may be a vain quest. If so, then the only way to verify or falsify whether or not organic forms are irreducibly complex isn't to be found through some shortcut analytical calculation but via sufficient observation on what has actually happened or not happened; that is, on natural history istelf. Natural history acts as the computationally irreducible "simulation" which reveals the answer to the question of whether organic forms are irreducibly complex or not.<br /></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="text-align: justify;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="text-align: justify;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="text-align: justify;">***</span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="text-align: justify;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="text-align: justify;">I'll be commenting on this in my next post: </span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="text-align: justify;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2024/02/can-evolution-and-intelligent-design-work-together-in-harmony/?_gl=1*1hazrr9*_ga*MTA4ODY2Mjk0My4xNzAyODA2MjQ0*_ga_9D89KMSK5X*MTcwOTE5NjUyNS45MS4wLjE3MDkxOTY1MjUuNjAuMC4w">Can Evolution and Design Work in Harmony? | Evolution News</a></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In my next post on "Matters Arising" I will also be commenting on the ability of "natural processes" to create information and the relation of the spongeam to the second law of thermodynamics. </span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p></p></div></div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-65696477620241897152024-02-08T06:25:00.057-12:002024-02-13T22:24:42.467-12:00Does this Interview Solve the Human Predicament? Part IV<p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"> Spoiler Alert: Probably not, very probably not!</span></b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiRejYz_qiQdHqSxAATZLHZcaOADG91XPDJC-St6KpoRsjLfm0lKbDbB3Lzh6AHtcyuONldp3be8DcJ_DjOkMG5dRb5LSIlDaWERWbIBA5tWuoyUpfpRfY0ZtjEb9puR2naVJPdH8rPWuIU0-RxA2HfTWj2J0Hrrb-dquyC_jCjlpJbhRTTp5Hmw/s526/gasp.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="526" data-original-width="526" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiRejYz_qiQdHqSxAATZLHZcaOADG91XPDJC-St6KpoRsjLfm0lKbDbB3Lzh6AHtcyuONldp3be8DcJ_DjOkMG5dRb5LSIlDaWERWbIBA5tWuoyUpfpRfY0ZtjEb9puR2naVJPdH8rPWuIU0-RxA2HfTWj2J0Hrrb-dquyC_jCjlpJbhRTTp5Hmw/w400-h400/gasp.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div><i><span style="font-size: large;">This boasting far exceeds even Donald Trump's bragging! </span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-size: large;">The World Transformation Movement (WTM) is far too full of </span></i></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span>loud-mouthed</span></i><i><span> hype to classify as a scientific movement. </span></i></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span><i>Self-praise</i></span><i><span> is no recommendation. </span></i></span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: large;">.</span><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The previous parts of this series can be found here:</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/10/this-is-hyper-hype-with-knobs-on.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Part I</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/10/does-this-interview-solve-human.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Part II</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/11/does-this-interview-solve-human.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Part III,</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The thesis proposed by WTM guru Jeremy Griffith, a thesis I have begun to criticize in the previous parts of this series, is this: That the human predicament with all its personal and social aggravations is down to a clash between inherited instincts and the conscious mind. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">I very much beg to differ with this analysis: As I've proposed in the previous parts of this series I find that the human predicament is grounded in the very physics of conscious cognition: Viz: That the private first-person perspective of the conscious mind means that it is not party to the experience of the second or third persons and therefore can only to <i>infer,</i> <i>but not feel,</i> the experiences of other minds. Consequently, reacting acceptably to other centers of conscious cognition presents <i>both an epistemic and a moral challenge to the conscious individual </i>....Viz: The epistemic challenge of correctly inferring the experience of other minds and the moral challenge of rightly reacting to those inferences. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Human instincts and motives are then layered on top of the basic physical fault line between individual minds, but I see no necessary clash between human instincts and the conscious mind. The repertoire of human instincts such as seeking social recognition and status, sexual motives, fear, joy, anger, aggression, hunger, love, the search for meaning, the search for coherence etc. etc. are all part of the human survival suite of goals, a suite which doesn't <i>necessarily clash </i>with the conscious mind, but rather works in partnership with it; Viz: it is these motives which constitute the <i>interest suite</i> of human life, a suite which motivates the intellect to work out the means and methods of achieving the goals of the whole person. Without the goal-seeking motivations provided by this suite conscious cognition would lose the spark, energy and purpose which drives it. Instincts, then, are a very necessary aspect of the conscious mind. The problems of the human predicament come about when there is a conflict of interest between individual centers of human cognition. But the fact is the relative isolation of those centers is built into the very physics and biology of life. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In the following<span> interview with Craig Conway, Jeremy Griffith fleshes out his thesis in more detail whereupon I will correspondingly criticize his thesis in more detail.</span> Craig clearly thinks Jeremy's thesis makes sense; he then asks a question......</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>CRAIG CONWAY</b>: <i>Yes, that makes sense Jeremy, so what happened though
when this animal became conscious and its whole life turned into a
psychologically distressed mess?</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>JEREMY GRIFFITH:</b> <i>Well, the easiest way to see what happened is to
imagine the predicament faced by an animal whose life had always been controlled by
its instincts suddenly developing a conscious mind, because if we do that we will
very quickly see how that animal would develop a psychologically troubled competitive
and aggressive condition like we suffer from. So let’s imagine a stork: we’ll call him Adam. Each
Summer, Adam instinctually migrates North with the other storks around the coast of
Africa to Europe to breed, as some varieties of storks do. Since he has no conscious mind
Adam Stork doesn’t think about or question his behaviour, he just follows what his
instincts tell him to do. But what if we give Adam a large brain capable of
conscious thought? He will start to think for himself, but many of his new ideas will not be
consistent with his instincts. For instance, while migrating North with the other storks Adam
notices an island full of apple trees. He then makes a conscious decision to divert from his
migratory path and explore the island. It’s his first grand experiment in
self-management.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b>Firstly, it seems likely to me that those animals who share with us a very similar neural basis for their minds also have consciousness, although what they are conscious about will likely considerably differ both in quality and quantity to ourselves: In fact, it is likely that the consciousness of human beings, with their relatively large brains, will qualitatively and quantitatively far exceed that of many animals. From this it follows that consciousness isn't an all or nothing affair but comes in degrees and in different qualities; it doesn't suddenly switch on when a cognitive threshold is reached. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In the above scenario Jeremy is asking us to imagine a case where a migration journey is neurally hardwired into the mind of a stork. Presumably at one time this journey was a vital part of its survival strategy and was a solution to both breeding and feeding. But it seems that changing environmental conditions have brought about better potential solutions that the stork, if the stork had sufficient intelligence to work out those solutions, could have employed. In the above scenario Jeremy imagines that the intelligence of the stork has developed to the level where it is able grasp a more efficient survival solution. What Jeremy has not told us is that the overriding urges servicing the need to survive such as an urge to feed, breed and conserve energy are instincts which are still very much in place. Therefore, in my view to characterize the human predicament as a conflict between instinct and intelligence is a misrepresentation. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>JEREMY GRIFFITH: </b><i>But when Adam’s instincts realise he has strayed off
course they are going to criticise his deprogrammed behaviour and dogmatically try to
pull him back on his instinctive flight path, aren’t they! In effect, they are
going to condemn him as being bad. Imagine the turmoil Adam will experience; he can’t go
back to simply following his instincts. His instinctive orientations to the migratory
flight path were acquired over thousands of generations of natural selection but those
orientations are not understandings, and since his conscious mind requires understanding, which
it can only get through experimentation, inevitably a war will break out with his
instincts.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Ideally at this point Adam’s conscious mind would sit
down and explain to his instincts why he’s defying them. He would explain that the
gene-based, natural selection process only gives species instinctive orientations to the
world, whereas his nerve-based, conscious mind, which is able to make sense of cause and effect,
needs understanding of the world to operate. But Adam doesn’t have this self-understanding. He’s only
just begun his search for knowledge. In fact, he’s not even aware of what the
problem actually is. He’s simply started to feel that he’s bad, even evil.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT:</b> As I have already suggested humans have a large suite of instincts motivating them: Let me list them more fully:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"> <b>e.g. feeding, breeding, sexual interest, seeking social status and recognition, seeking community, anger, seeking safety and security, seeking comfort and warmth, seeking meaning and purpose, curiosity, seeking understanding, artistic endeavor and above all an instinctual sense of what is and what is not just and moral. </b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"> None of these motivations can be labeled as <i>bad or evil per se</i> and as far as I'm aware none has a necessary conflict with the conscious mind: The conscious mind has a valuable partnership with these instincts in as far as the intelligence of that mind is able to find ways in which the goals behind these potentially life enhancing drives might efficiently be achieved. So, Jeremy's picture of a war between mind and instincts does not come over as true to life. Even anger, which we might see as potentially troublesome has its upsides: For example, many people who face the tragic consequence of social injustices do not have to explode with an incoherent burst of anger but instead we often see them channeling their emotion of anger by dissipating it into constructive channels of endeavor as they seek to right the injustices in society and thus better society thereby. But what about egocentricity? Well, we will come to that next..... </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Where the angst and predicaments arise is when human beings are unable to fulfill these primary instinctual motivations, especially so because life is full of zero-sum games and therefore inter human-interests conflict and egos clash. But again, like other instincts ego is not a bad motivator per se: We all have a sense of dignity and worth and have a right to protect that sense of self-worth when it is challenged with a threat of belittlement or even extinction. Naturally enough each centre of conscious cognition seeks to enhance itself and its experience of life - nothing wrong with that in itself. But the zero-sum games of life mean that the interests of individual centres of conscious cognition have the potential to collide and conflict. So, the primary <i><b>potential</b></i> source of conflict isn't between one's instincts and one's mind but between individual centres of conscious cognition. Ego isn't the problem; the problem is <i>egocentricity</i>: that is when a particular human ego seeks solutions to his life experience by enhancing his experience regardless of and at the expense of the egos of other human beings; in short, egocentrics are people who ignore their super-ego. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>CRAIG</b>: <i>Okay, so what you’re saying is a war has broken out
between his conscious mind and his instincts, which he can’t explain, and it’s
left him feeling bad or that he is bad in some way, or even evil. So what happened then?</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT:</b> Well, Craig if you had the nous, you'd understand that there is no necessary clash between instinct and the conscious mind but there is a <i>potentiality</i> for a clash between the interests of individual conscious minds, a <i>potentiality</i> that results of the experiential isolation of the first-person perspective. This isolation is imprinted on the very substance of which we are composed. I refer to it as a <i>potential clash</i> of interests because self-denial in favour of others (which is what morality is all about) should in theory kick in at this point. Human beings have a choice on this score; they can either give deference to the inferred feelings and experiences of their fellows or put the priority entirely on the self, the ego and become egocentric. Which is it to be? I must also point out that compounding the challenge of self-denial are the epistemic difficulties of being able to <i>correctly</i> extrapolate into other minds. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>JEREMY:</b> <i>Well, tragically, while searching for
understanding, we can see that three things are unavoidably going to happen. Adam is going to
defensively retaliate against the implied criticism from his instincts; he is going to
desperately seek out any reinforcement he can find to relieve himself of the negative feelings; and
he is going to try to deny the criticism and block it out of his mind. He has become angry,
egocentric and alienated— which is the psychologically upset state we call the human
condition, because it was us humans who developed a conscious mind and became
psychologically upset. (And ‘upset’ is the right word for our condition because while we are not
‘evil’ or ‘bad’, we are definitely psychologically upset from having to participate in
humanity’s heroic search for knowledge. ‘Corrupted’ and ‘fallen’ have been used to describe our
condition, but they have negative connotations that we can now appreciate are undeserved, so
‘upset’ is a better word.) So Adam’s intellect or ‘ego’ (ego being just another word
for the intellect since the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘the conscious
thinking self’ (5th edn, 1964)) became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself—Adam
became ego-centric, selfishly preoccupied aggressively competing for opportunities to
prove he is good and not bad, to validate his worth, to get a ‘win’; to essentially eke out
any positive reinforcement that would bring him some relief from his criticising instincts.
He unavoidably became self-preoccupied or
selfish, and aggressive and competitive.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">So our selfish, competitive and aggressive behaviour is
not due to savage instincts but to a psychologically upset state or condition. Basically suffering psychological upset was the price we
conscious humans had to pay for our heroic search for understanding. In the words
from the song The Impossible Dream from the musical the Man of La Mancha, we had to be
prepared to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (lyrics by Joe Darion, 1965). We
had to lose ourselves to find ourselves; we had to suffer becoming angry, egocentric and alienated
until we found sufficient knowledge to explain ourselves.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b>That diagnosis of the human predicament is far from the truth. As I keep saying the existential angst of the human condition comes not from a clash between instinct and the conscious mind; after all, as we have seen our instinctual motivations, if properly served, are life enhancing and the conscious mind has an important role in finding ways of fulfilling those profound instinctual goals.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Summing up: The real clash at the root of the angst in the human condition has its origins in....</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">1. Conservation laws which mean that life is full of zero-sum games.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">2. The physics of human conscious cognition which entails private first-person perspectives isolated from the first-person perspectives of other sentient beings. This privacy entails a potential clash of interest between humans who do not directly share one another's consciousness. I stress <i>potential clash</i> because cooperation, self-denial, compromise and the urges of moral instincts present to us choices which have the opposite potential of heading off clashes of interest between egos.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">3. The epistemic problems of putting oneself into the experiential shoes of others. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Given this context our life enhancing instincts are not to be shunned or blamed for our existential angst; our conscious cognition has no necessary argument with those instincts; they are important motivating and goal seeking urges. As we have seen even anger has an upside as a justice seeking motive. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The tendency toward egocentricity is a potential outcome of the separation of conscious cognition into quasi-isolated first-person units each of which is tempted is to serve self above all: This situation has a far deeper grounding in the hardware of our cosmos than mere instinct: it is built into the very physics of living things. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">I simply can't identify with the thought that any existential angst I have has its origins in a clash of instinct and intellect: Which of my instincts gives me aggravation? None that I'm aware of! Where the clash comes is when the implementation of my drives is likely to badly impact the experience and feelings of other human beings; it is then that the following language used by Jeremy (taken from the above quote) actually applies: Viz: </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Adam (that is myself) is going to defensively retaliate against the implied criticism from his (moral) instincts; he is going to desperately seek out any reinforcement he can find to relieve himself of the negative feelings; and he is going to try to deny the criticism and block it out of his mind. He has become angry, egocentric and alienated— which is the psychologically upset state we call the human condition,</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">That correctly describes a human, like myself, a sinner sold under sin, when I know I've done a disservice to the goals of a fellow human; I am then tempted to engage in the deceptions of self-justification that Jeremy talks of. So Jeremy's description of the human condition is in some ways correct but his identification of the deep causes are wrong. Moreover, to call it an "upset state" is an understatement that makes light of a fundamental human fault line built into the very fabric of reality.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Jeremy goes on to continue to construct this straw man that our existential angst is because our instincts are rebelling against the search for knowledge. No way!... it is the very search for knowledge that is driven by our deepest instincts such as curiosity and the search for meaning and purpose. There is no way in which my heroic search and thirst for knowledge is being labeled by my instincts as bad or evil: That is simply not true. What does trouble my conscience and is liable to be labeled as bad or evil is if in life's zero-sum games, I short-change my fellow humans in favour of self. In spite of Jeremy's straw man depiction, just who is labelling the heroic search for knowledge as bad and evil? No one I know. But the label "<i>corrupted and fallen</i>" is appropriate to my frequent failure to give the first-person experience of fellow humans a rightful place in my life. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>CRAIG:</b> <i>Wow Jeremy, I mean this is just fascinating. So
Adam Stork—we humans—developed a conscious mind and unavoidably started warring
with our instincts, an upsetting war which could only end when we could explain and
understand why we had to defy our instincts, which is the understanding that you have
just supplied, yes?</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">MY COMMENT: *shakes head*</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>JEREMY:</b><i> Exactly, remember Adam Stork became defensively angry, egocentric and alienated because he couldn’t explain why he was defying his instincts, so now that we can explain why, those defensive behaviours are no longer needed and can end! That’s basically all there is to explain, that is the biological explanation of the human condition that so explains us that, as Professor Prosen said, it brings about ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’!</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>CRAIG: </b><i>This is such a simple story but so far-reaching in its ramifications—I mean it is world-changing is what it is, because it truly enables ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’! I mean that is just wonderful.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: S</b>imple story? Rather, it is simply false! Once again: I'm personally unaware of my intellect being at odds with any of my instincts, least of all the heroic search for knowledge, meaning and purpose: Both intellect and instinct are life enhancing and especially so if they work cooperatively in tandem. But the temptation to serve <i>exclusively</i> within the purview of my first-person perspective is the only "instinct", if "instinct" it can called, that has the potential to open a door to a troubled world of angst, ambivalence and denial. Yes, I'd agree that the explanation of the human condition is biological, but Jeremy has nailed the wrong biological explanation. Moreover, because the perceptive fault-line between those centers of biological sentience is so fundamental to the fabric of reality the WTM's superficial analysis that the solution to the human predicament lies in the <i>psychological rehabilitation of the human race</i> falls woefully short of the mark.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Well, I don't suppose I can expect too much insight and critical analysis from Craig who seems to be utterly blown away by the presence and guru status of Jeremy Griffith and Harry Prosen both of whom clearly fail to see where the real challenge of the human predicament lies; namely, in good old fashioned "sin", the word with the "I" in the middle.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">***</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">There is also one another source of human vexation which I really need to mention: That is the unfilled targets of our instinctive ambitions. If we are thwarted in our aims, this can be a great source of frustration and unhappiness. However, this is often related to the clash of human interests; viz: Selfishness, when it proceeds against a background of zero-sum games, leads to the goals and aspirations of many being at odds with one another and consequently in the subsequent scramble many dreams remain unfulfilled. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>ADDENDUM 13/02</b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">I've been trying think of cases where there is a clash between instinct and intellect. Possible cases: </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">1. Eating habits: When there is a surfeit of food such as we find in rich industrial societies the instinct to eat as much as possible while the going is good - which is appropriate when food is much scarcer - can impact health badly; that's even though our intellects understand this health impact.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">2. Large anonymous industrial societies which are very much a product of human intellectual work may cut across human instincts which prefer smaller intimate tribes and communities close to the natural order of things. cf The Romantics. This instinct, if instinct it is, of tribal/group/class/community identification and its potential for inter-community competitiveness may be bound up with the factional human violence which we see so much of. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">***</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-size: large;">....to be continued. </span></i></b></p></div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-14384978479595845792024-01-18T07:24:00.052-12:002024-02-27T00:28:46.161-12:00Galen Strawson on "Why is there something?"<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQgRL28AI5J2KicOp2eqCXX5_o52hdu7M7Tv_n3gl-FJ0qjOKfLUBUQQiG6r_kicBR2l93ZIxNH1WBj6lzseQZPq1xx5w9kEDtD50nw5BbfR16VH4cP_IiNTxS0qFU1SWQyyRqw0pgMgCvGVriHCwFgm7lY5q24ktcqc4fKRdkuBnDNAqW32pL_w/s1799/AA1m8Dcb.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1799" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQgRL28AI5J2KicOp2eqCXX5_o52hdu7M7Tv_n3gl-FJ0qjOKfLUBUQQiG6r_kicBR2l93ZIxNH1WBj6lzseQZPq1xx5w9kEDtD50nw5BbfR16VH4cP_IiNTxS0qFU1SWQyyRqw0pgMgCvGVriHCwFgm7lY5q24ktcqc4fKRdkuBnDNAqW32pL_w/w640-h384/AA1m8Dcb.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Picture from: <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/why-the-purpose-of-the-universe-by-philip-goff-review-a-real-poser/ar-AA1m8M6s?ocid=msedgntp&pc=EDGEDB&cvid=57d16bab2d944987b9b8738525f97e32&ei=36">Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff review – a real poser (msn.com)</a></i></div></i><p></p><p><br /></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px;"><span class="dropcap-element-slot" style="float: left; font-size: 64px; line-height: 52px; margin-inline-end: 8px;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;">"</span><span style="font-family: times;">W</span></i></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;">hy is there something rather than nothing? It’s meant to be the great unanswerable question. It’s certainly a poser. It would have been simpler if there’d been nothing: there wouldn’t be anything to explain".</span></i></div><p class="continue-read-break" data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; opacity: 1; position: static; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><p class="continue-read-break" data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; opacity: 1; position: static; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">So starts a Guardian article written by Galen Strawson* where he reviews a book by Philip Goff titled <i>Why? The Purpose of the Universe.</i> </span></span></span></p><p class="continue-read-break" data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; opacity: 1; position: static; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Usually, the word "Aseity" is only applied to God: The phrase "<i>The Aseity of God"</i> is intended to convey that in some way we don't understand God's existence is a self-explaining logical truism and therefore, the idea that God doesn't exist is a contradiction. For those who are uncomfortable with the kind of theism which posits an</span></span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;"> </span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">all-embracing totalizing sentience called "God"</span></span><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b;"><span style="font-size: 17px;"> I </span></span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">suppose it is possible to attempt to apply the notion of Aseity to the secular cosmos; Viz: that the existence of the cosmos itself has some inherent logical necessity that we've yet to understand, if indeed "Aseity" can ever be humanly comprehended as it may involve infinities.</span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: arial; font-size: 17px;"><span style="font-family: times;">But as I have expressed many times before, whether the source of Aseity is sentient or not, that source isn't going to be found in</span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 17px;"> conventional physics & science. This is because the laws of science as "explanations" merely <i>describe.</i> That is, they do not "explain" in a sense which addresses any inclination we may have toward believing that our perceived reality has its foundation in some kind of Aseity. Conventional science and physics</span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 17px;"> work because the high organization and high registration in the patterns of our experiences makes it possible to describe those patterns in the succinct and compressed forms we call the "laws of physics/science". No matter how compressed these forms are - and they can never compress to nothing - they will always leave us with a hard kernel of incompressible contingent information which has no further "explanation" than "<i>It just is</i>". <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2008/11/ghost-and-machine.html" target="_blank">As I wrote in this blog post:</a> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I favour the view that
mathematics betrays the a-priori and primary place of mind; chiefly God’s mind.
The alternative view is that gritty material elementals are the primary
a-priori ontology and constitute the foundation of the cosmos and mathematics. But
elementalism has no chance of satisfying the requirement of self-explanation as
the following consideration suggests: what is the most elementary elemental we
can imagine? It would be an entity that could be described with a single bit of
information. But a single bit of information has no degree of freedom and no
chance that it could contain computations complex enough to be construed as self-explanation. A single bit of information would simply have to be accepted
as a brute fact. Aseity is therefore not to be found in an elemental ontology;
elementals are just too simple.</span></span></i></p><p class="continue-read-break" data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; opacity: 1; position: static; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Those who find the notion of God unacceptable nevertheless often betray an instinctual intellectual need for at least a non-sentient form of Aseity: We see hints of this instinct in the expression of puzzlement at the "unexplained" contingencies that science can only ever deliver (But see my quote from Bertrand Russell below). It seems that</span></span></span><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b;"><span><span style="font-size: 17px;"> human intuition is confounded by brute-fact and yearns for deeper explanation, reason or cause (call it what you like) for the </span><i style="font-size: 17px;">apparently</i><span style="font-size: 17px;"> arbitrary state of affairs the cosmos presents us with. Given the state of human knowledge then as the above quote from Strawson suggests, "nothingness" is actually the most reasonable state of affairs we can think of as it wouldn't demand any explanation at all.</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;"> </span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;">But in discussing these questions we really need to define just what we mean with words like "explanation", "reason" and "cause"; for as we have seen "scientific explanation" is in the final analysis mere description and in a deeply intuitive satisfying way is no explanation at all (But see Russell!) </span></p><p class="continue-read-break" data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; opacity: 1; position: static; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;"><br /></span></p><p class="continue-read-break" data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; opacity: 1; position: static; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Anyway, continuing with Strawson's article...</span></p><p class="continue-read-break" data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; opacity: 1; position: static; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b>STRAWSON</b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">: <i>Some people think that if we knew more, we’d see that there couldn’t have been nothing. That wouldn’t surprise me. Others go further: they think we’d see that there couldn’t have been anything other than just what there is: this very universe, containing just the kind of stuff and laws of nature it does contain. That wouldn’t surprise me either, nor – I suspect – Einstein: “What really interests me,” he said, “is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” (Einstein’s God is a metaphorical device: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses.”)</i><slot name="cont-read-break"></slot></span></p><p class="continue-read-break" data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; opacity: 1; position: static; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><b style="font-size: 17px;">MY COMMENT</b><span style="font-size: 17px;">: Once again, we see the same intellectual hankering expressing itself here; namely, that the very existence of the cosmos is founded in some kind of logical necessity or has a profound "reason", "explanation" or "cause" - whatever those terms mean. Not only that, but some wonder if the very form and configuration of the cosmos (as described by its laws) is underwritten by logical necessities we have yet to comprehend. </span></span></p><p class="continue-read-break" data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; opacity: 1; position: static; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 17px;"><br /></span></span></p><div class="intra-article-module" data-t="{"n":"intraArticle","t":13}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; float: inline-start; font-size: 17px; position: relative; width: 680px; z-index: 97;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><slot name="AA1m8M6s-intraArticleModule-0"></slot></span></div><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: times;"><b>STRAWSON</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: arial;">: </span><i>Most people who ponder these things take a different view. They think the universe could in fact have been different. They think it’s puzzling that it turned out the way it did, with creatures like us in it. They are tempted by the idea that the universe has some point, some goal or meaning. In Why?, Philip Goff, professor of philosophy at Durham, argues for “cosmic purpose, the idea that the universe is directed towards certain goals, such as the emergence of life” and the existence of value.</i></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>I’m not convinced, but I’m impressed. Why? is direct, clear, open, acute, honest, companionable. It manages to stay down to earth even in its most abstract passages. I’m tempted to say, by way of praise, that it’s Liverpudlian, like its author.</i></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="font-family: times;">MY COMMENT</b><span style="font-family: times;">: OK, so assuming the very existence of the cosmos is a necessity (even if we are unclear about the logic of that) the next question is why is the cosmos the way that it is? According to Strawson most people don't see logical necessity in <i>the form</i> of the cosmos even if its existence is a necessity; that is, it seems logically possible the cosmos could have had a different form altogether with different laws. So, according to Strawson, in response to this Philip Goff addresses the question of why the universe is as it is by proposing that the cosmos has goals and purpose, and these goals and purposes bring configuration & form. Goff is therefore implying that the cosmos is subject to teleological constraints. Or as I have put it many times in this blog using an algorithmic metaphor, the cosmos works like a <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/search/label/Declarative%20Computation" target="_blank">declarative computation</a>: that is, it is searching for declared goals: The cosmos has a declared computational purpose. </span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: times;">But Strawson is not convinced ...too right he's not convinced: Teleology fits rather too well with an a priori sentient creator! Talk of "cosmic purpose" makes most paid up atheists feel very uncomfortable indeed. </span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: times;"><b>STRAWSON</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: arial;">:</span><i>The book has a double beat, like a heart: each chapter begins with a diastole, an admirably accessible section on its subject – consciousness, the point of life, the purpose of the universe (if any), the existence (or non-existence) of God – and closes with a systole, a more taxing “Digging Deeper” section.</i></span></p><div class="intra-article-module" data-t="{"n":"intraArticle","t":13}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; float: inline-start; font-size: 17px; position: relative; width: 680px; z-index: 97;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><slot name="AA1m8M6s-intraArticleModule-1"></slot></i></span></div><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Goff rules firmly against the traditional Christian God, omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent – while backing the notorious “fine-tuning argument”, which goes roughly as follows: it’s so incredibly unlikely that a universe such as ours, containing life, consciousness and value, should have come into existence at all that we must suppose that some purpose has been at work, tuning things to come out as they have. It’s extremely hard to do this well, and Goff provides an intellectually aerobic primer on the logic of probability, and in particular the Bayes’ theorem, one of the core ideas of our day. His conclusion is as advertised in his title: nothing is certain, but the balance of evidence favours belief in cosmic purpose.</i></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="font-family: times;">MY COMMENT</b><span style="font-family: times;">: As I am unlikely to read Goff's book I can't challenge him on the specifics of his rejection of the <i>Christain</i> God; however, I assume that Goff has in his mind some sort of overarching sentience working out its will in the cosmos because only in the presence of sentience does the <i>purpose, goal and meaning</i> have any intelligibility. I personally have gone down the (Christian) theism route as the only way I can think of satisfying our need for Aseity, epistemic security, a sense of anthropic purpose and an account of human social & political failure in one swoop (Not to mention the need for human salvation). So for me the traditional Christain God is my way of trying to make sense of the human predicament and circumstances; if indeed the need to make ultimate sense of things has meaning beyond human strivings; after all it seems unlikely animals are plagued with the enduring curiosity which drives a lifetime of existential yearning for ultimate explanation and purpose. Animals appear to be satisfied to simply accept the earthly status quo, as long as it provides food and safety (Although there is evidence that at least some animals also prefer an interesting, varied & social environment. Although it is not clear that they are plagued by the existential angst over meaning and purpose)</span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: times;">I guess that Goff's Bayesian arguments are along the lines I've described in <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeWUYyNDY4SFVaSW8/view?pli=1&resourcekey=0-Mo9PmNVumdH3Mfj9_hQlhw" target="_blank">this document.</a> However, I think I'd agree with the last sentence above: Viz: that according to Goff </span></span><i style="font-family: arial;">nothing is certain, but the balance of evidence favours belief in cosmic purpose.</i></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><i style="font-family: arial;"><br /></i></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="font-family: times;">STRAWSON: </b><i>The question is genuinely difficult. I’m bothered by the fact that many of the arguments for fine-tuning depend on varying the fundamental physical constants (eg the charge on electrons) while holding the existing laws of nature fixed. I can’t see why engaging in this curious activity could ever be thought to explain anything, or support any interesting conclusion. And if – as Einstein and I suspect – nothing could possibly have been different, the fine-tuning arguments collapse, as Goff acknowledges. But his discussion is ingenious and illuminating.</i></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: arial; font-size: 17px;"><b style="font-family: times;">MY COMMENT</b><span style="font-family: times;">: I think Strawson has a point here; that is that fine tuning cannot be coherently separated from the other aspects of the laws of physics. U</span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">sing the algorithmic metaphor: It is clear that both initial conditions and the information inherent in the laws of physics form one package of curiously contingent fine tuning. Moreover, there is no known logical obligation which tells us why the cosmos should sustain itself moment by moment and place by place. Ergo, the so-called fine tuning of the fundamental constants is not the only enigma but so is also the maintenance of the known form of the laws of physics everywhere and everywhen. </span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: times;">In his last sentence in the foregoing quote Strawson displays the same intuitive intellectual instinct which seeks some kind of Aseity "explaining" why the cosmos is as it is. Although I guess that in Strawson's case he would likely posit that that Aseity is to be found in a non-sentient object, rather than in the conventional notion of God. </span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><div class="intra-article-module" data-t="{"n":"intraArticle","t":13}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; float: inline-start; font-size: 17px; position: relative; width: 680px; z-index: 97;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><slot name="AA1m8M6s-intraArticleModule-2"></slot></i></span></div><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="font-family: times;">STRAWSON: </b><i>In the chapter on consciousness, Goff brings up the standard view that there’s a radical difficulty in explaining its existence. I think that those who believe this have gone wrong right at the start: they think – quite wrongly – that they know something about the nature of matter that makes it mysterious that consciousness exists. Wrong. There’s no good reason to think this, as Goff agrees. The solution is to suppose (along with a good number of winners of the Nobel prize for physics) that consciousness in some form is built into the nature of matter from the start. This view is known as panpsychism, and Goff ends his discussion with “a prediction: panpsychism will, over time, come to seem just obviously correct”.</i></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="font-family: times;">MY COMMENT</b><span style="font-family: times;">: I sort of agree with Strawson and Goff here: That is, that matter, if rightly configured has built into it the ability to generate conscious cognition. I stress <i>rightly configured</i> because I don't think our current AI simulations, no matter how good, are conscious; they are just simulations and don't use matter in a way which generates <i>conscious</i> thought. </span></span><span style="font-family: times;">My long shot guesses at the way matter must be used to generate consciousness <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1abt323tLUmz6mvAkwZCiK-abE5k-ikIw/view?pli=1" target="_blank">can be found in this paper</a>. See also my footnote below on idealism*</span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;">.</span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="font-family: times;">STRAWSON: </b><i>Why? is a rich book. It aims high and ends with some good political reflections. It’ll turn quite a few heads. It should get the discussion it deserves. I don’t for all that think the universe has a purpose. I think it just is.</i></span></p><div class="intra-article-module" data-t="{"n":"intraArticle","t":13}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; float: inline-start; font-size: 17px; position: relative; width: 680px; z-index: 97;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><slot name="AA1m8M6s-intraArticleModule-3"></slot></i></span></div><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>It does, though, seem to have a taste for complication. The balance of evidence is a delicate thing, but it seems at present to favour the view that something is going on that isn’t fully accountable for by the laws of physics. It’s nothing to do with “Nobodaddy” (William Blake’s name for the nonexistent Christian God), or any sort of goal, but Wittgenstein seems to be on the right track when he tries to express his sense of absolute or ethical value and finds it crystallised in one particular experience: “I wonder at the existence of the world”.</i></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="font-family: times;">MY COMMENT</b><span style="font-family: times;">: So, Strawson thinks the cosmos "</span></span><i style="font-family: arial;"><b>just is</b></i><span style="font-family: times;">" and without purpose. Bertrand Russell said something similar <a href="http://www.scandalon.co.uk/philosophy/cosmological_radio.htm" target="_blank">in his debate with Father Copleston</a>: </span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, "sans-serif"" style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 13.3333px; text-align: left;"> </span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: center;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, "sans-serif"" style="background-color: transparent; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all [there is to it!]</i></span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Strawson's notion of a "<i>just</i></span><i style="font-size: 17px;"> there"</i></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 17px;"><i> </i>cosmos is consistent with what we </span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">understand about so-called "scientific explanation" which because in the final analysis is fundamentally just a form of description can only ever leave us at the contingent edge of a "<i>just there</i>" kernel of information. </span></span><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">So it is no surprise that Strawson can only say </span></span></span><i style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: arial; font-size: 17px;">“I wonder at the existence of the world”. </i><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;">Well, so do I but for me I have the urge to seek beyond the absurdity of a "<i>just is</i>" contingency to a</span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;"> deeper concept of explanation which satisfies the human yearning for purpose. Aseity based on a Christian concept of God and an account of human Sin are concepts I find no more absurd than a "<i>just is</i>" cosmos and the moral, social and political perplexities it leaves us with. </span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;"><br /></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;">***</span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;">Strawson's reference to God as</span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;"> "Nobodadday" is a pointer to the attitude of many in the hyper-secularized atmosphere of elite intellectual culture; these communities look askance at theists and religionists and may even treat them with a mocking disrespect. Although hyper-secularized culture dominates academia and intellectual elite communities these groups are in many respects an anomaly in the sea of faith which is broad and full in the wider world. Billions of the world's population are religiously motivated and in notable cases those religionists of (authoritarian) faith dominate politics. If the hyper-secularized intellectual community think of those of faith as deplorables with absurd views it will only help polarize the religious <i>populares</i> against them and provide fertile ground for demagogues who will tell those religionists what they want to hear. <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/03/new-ager-capitalizes-on-spiritual-and.html" target="_blank">The populares will turn to these demagogues for guidance rather than academia</a></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/03/new-ager-capitalizes-on-spiritual-and.html" target="_blank"> who they may perceive as part of a conspiracy to defraud them of their traditional values</a>. In spite of their sneers, </span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;">I personally support academia although I would criticize those like Strawson who hold a hyper-secular message of a "<i>just is</i>" cosmos, a paradigm which I find just as absurd as they might find my theism. Moreover, as we know from the French revolution and various attempts to establish Marxism, hyper-secularism is also a high road to authoritarian traditionalist values, the re-emergence of a paradoxical secularized religion and the return of ruling demagogues. The political world of left and right isn't a flat space but is curved into a sphere where the extremes of left and right meet at the same authoritarian place. </span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;"><br /></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: 17px;"><br /></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><b>* Footnote on Idealism</b></span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;">I hold the view that conscious cognition exists because without it reality is an unintelligible notion: If reality doesn't deliver patterns of conscious experience and, at that, sufficiently organized experience for conscious cognition to be able to construct a rational ordered reality, then the meaning of reality is lost in the nebulous notion of "gritty matter" having an existence independent of sentient perception. So, r</span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;">eality is the conjunction of organized conscious experience, and this organization facilitates the construction of a rational world which conscious thought builds around organized experience. The Matrix teaches us that reality is the logic of experience. </span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;">But if conscious thought is itself to classify as real it too must deliver a rational account of itself. It follows then that reality has a self-affirming, self-referencing character: Viz: </span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Conscious perception of the cosmos gives the cosmos intelligibility and coherence; but if reality exists only if conscious thought delivers a rational account of it, then for conscious thought to classify as real it too must have a rational account of itself. So, as conscious thought gives coherence and substance to the concept of a highly organized material cosmos then </span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">the cosmos in turn</span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"> accords reality to conscious </span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;">cognition</span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 17px;"> by returning a rational account of conscious </span></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;">thought.</span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"> (See <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?vid=ISBN0755201442&id=O0rkXJ19DXEC&pg=PR4&lpg=PR6&printsec=8&dq=%22gravity+and+quantum+non-linearity%22&sig=_xC31WVIQ0L3Nsz-QBTJ0jbj_Xo#v=onepage&q=%22gravity%20and%20quantum%20non-linearity%22&f=false" target="_blank">the </a></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?vid=ISBN0755201442&id=O0rkXJ19DXEC&pg=PR4&lpg=PR6&printsec=8&dq=%22gravity+and+quantum+non-linearity%22&sig=_xC31WVIQ0L3Nsz-QBTJ0jbj_Xo#v=onepage&q=%22gravity%20and%20quantum%20non-linearity%22&f=false" target="_blank">introduction</a></span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?vid=ISBN0755201442&id=O0rkXJ19DXEC&pg=PR4&lpg=PR6&printsec=8&dq=%22gravity+and+quantum+non-linearity%22&sig=_xC31WVIQ0L3Nsz-QBTJ0jbj_Xo#v=onepage&q=%22gravity%20and%20quantum%20non-linearity%22&f=false" target="_blank"> of this book</a> where I first mooted this </span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;">self-referencing</span><span style="color: #2b2b2b; font-family: times;"> account of reality). However, there is one big problem with this form of idealism: Human beings come in and out of existence and therefore cannot be the primary reality. This is why it becomes necessary to posit a primary overarching sentience which gives meaning and reality to the cosmos. </span></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>* Guardian Footnote: </b></span></p><p data-t="{"n":"blueLinks"}" style="background-color: white; color: #2b2b2b; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Galen Strawson is a philosopher and author of Freedom and Belief (Oxford). Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff is published by Oxford (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer buy your copy at <a data-t="{"n":"destination","t":13,"b":1,"c.t":7}" href="https://www.guardianbookshop.com/why-the-purpose-of-the-universe-9780198883760?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article" style="text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">guardianbookshop.com</a>. Delivery charges may apply. From Friday 8 December 2023 to Wednesday 10 January 2024, 20p from every Guardian Bookshop order will support the Guardian and Observer’s charity appeal 2023.</i></span></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-28180692701584586142024-01-05T08:57:00.029-12:002024-01-26T06:11:20.234-12:00A Case Study in Technological Capitalism: Part III: Creative Destruction<p></p><div style="text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUP3T3CgfAW087Q-gNeDs-57B8JtvNsmOal0u364Yl73v5-DSNGfpFQdHMmlNZRlGsHUqXdX9wRAa54czeknXw7WUDmykD_nD10eotx8g_g12q7czyVEtcaLiton7X4nGBBi4j6Db7TTOXk0TDybqrD0tIxMI1xjf01rQZ1-gm5h_BWGn4BDx_EA/s2048/Xen001.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1390" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUP3T3CgfAW087Q-gNeDs-57B8JtvNsmOal0u364Yl73v5-DSNGfpFQdHMmlNZRlGsHUqXdX9wRAa54czeknXw7WUDmykD_nD10eotx8g_g12q7czyVEtcaLiton7X4nGBBi4j6Db7TTOXk0TDybqrD0tIxMI1xjf01rQZ1-gm5h_BWGn4BDx_EA/s320/Xen001.jpg" width="217" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE-0uZJifSITurRr7DHJsHuMFwrTni8Svj3Qg9eaPcPW0bi_TV7kK1C-SsxAF-waRawCtVOGXef4gzBnUIdf28Hj1QInw357I4Shw26y1LqSn9Wen5S7n5_r5j5U2aXXvN4ROZUj4enTPS84Fsbi5hGkAdJ41AUsPPhyphenhyphen4tiMzDvptqq_OGf8OmaA/s2048/Xen001b.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1447" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE-0uZJifSITurRr7DHJsHuMFwrTni8Svj3Qg9eaPcPW0bi_TV7kK1C-SsxAF-waRawCtVOGXef4gzBnUIdf28Hj1QInw357I4Shw26y1LqSn9Wen5S7n5_r5j5U2aXXvN4ROZUj4enTPS84Fsbi5hGkAdJ41AUsPPhyphenhyphen4tiMzDvptqq_OGf8OmaA/s320/Xen001b.jpg" width="226" /></a></div></div><br /><i style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>These bespoke Xenotron machines were killer products in the 1980s.. Joining</i><div><i style="color: #666666; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"> </span>Xenotron in 1984 was to have a greater effect on me that I could ever guess.</i><div><div><i style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;"><span> </span></i><p></p><p><i style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;"><span><br /></span></i></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">I've recently completed the third and final part of my "Xenotron" Capitalist Case Study. All three parts describing the relatively brief existence of Xenotron ) can be found in these links:</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p5UwdIMpahRQ-dkswGtBtKBt6X5km-zd/view" target="_blank">Part I</a>: Rise and Fall 1976 to 1986</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lEas27uJgXBSrmIvlu21F28qBe0ziXDi/view" target="_blank">Part II</a>: Under the Doctors 1987 to 1989</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x-jozEwt0T5zTOBzNsgNV0SGaexdrPgP/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Part III</a>: Creative Destruction 1990 to 1991</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Having now got an overview of all three parts it is likely that the whole history now needs a rewrite at some stage; if I get round to it. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The corresponding blog posts for Part I and Part II can be found here:</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-case-study-in-technological.html"><span style="font-size: large;">Quantum Non-Linearity: A Case Study in Technological Capitalism: Part1: Xenotron vs Paleontological Man. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-case-study-in-technological.html"><span style="font-size: large;">Quantum Non-Linearity: A Case Study in Technological Capitalism: Part II. Under the Doctors. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Some might call the existence of Xenotron <i>a flash in the pan. </i>But like a super nova explosion it seeded the world with the elements of many an idea; hence "Creative Destruction". </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Below I reproduce the introduction to the final part "Creative Destruction". </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">Introduction</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">The Xenotron Adventure<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In
Part II we saw how by October 1986 Xenotron had become a subsidiary of Dr.
–Ing. Rudolf Hell of Keil. By the spring
of 1990 when the history in this episode starts business in Xenotron’s high
profit margin legacy technology was still brisk although on a downward curve. Ominously
Xenotron’s CEO and “company doctor” Danny Chapchal resigned in late 1989.
Chapchal’s vision to turn Xenotron into a high volume low profit margin
business was clearly incomplete although </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">high volume low & profit margins</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> were the industry trend. So,
it remained to be seen what Dr Hell would do with Xenotron. As we shall see in
this part Hell merged with Linotype and from the first signs that this merger
was going to take place it became apparent that there was no rationale for
the continued existence of Xenotron as a corporate identity and Xenotron’s
remnants were, in fact, wound up in less than 18 months. Some of the details of
this wind up can be found in this history. But let me caution once again: My
perspective as a bits-and-bytes programmer was limited to observing rumour,
memos and press releases – others who were closer to the management action will
know more. This history, therefore, is a personal view; in fact early on in my
Xenotron career I must have realised that something interesting was happening
in Diss because for some reason I started collecting memos, documents, press
clips and even hearsay as soon as I joined in 1984.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Xenotron
was not only a great adventure while it lasted, but it had also made its name in the history of printing. </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">This fact was </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">recognised by the London Science Museum who had commissioned a working XVC2 page makeup exhibit. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">When I started with the company in February
1984 it was still (just) riding the crest of the wave: Small, intimate and with
improvised warehouse premises in the insignificant market town of Diss, it had the feel
of a rural cottage industry and yet it was manufacturing and selling a world
beating product. That I had arrived at the peak of its business when from then
on the only way was down wasn’t noticeable for another year or two – although
having said that those with a management overview probably saw the writing on
the wall sooner.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">I
have to make a confession here: Although
I thoroughly enjoyed tinkering around with the bits and bytes of Xenotron
software I had no vision for a fast changing market and quite frankly the high
level whys and wherefores of the printing industry bored me. I was quite happy to
leave the management view to others who would be much more competent than
myself in that field. I was there to earn some money (fortunately in a job I
enjoyed) so that I could get on with my own self-inflicted research projects at
home. But somehow these private endeavours were to become linked to Xenotron’s
culture of success: Understandably there was a feeling abroad at Xenotron that
it was possible for an upstart small player to punch well above their weight
even in a global context. As Tim Coldwell puts it in an email I reproduce
toward the end of this history: “<i>I
believe that the main thing is to have a go and I am very pleased to hear that
such a spirit is once more emerging in the formation of Hydra Design”. </i>Hydra Design was the Xenotron spin-off I was
to join in the autumn of 1991 when the remnants of the Diss operation were wound
up completely. But well before that, the <i>have-a-go-spirit</i>
Tim Coldwell talks of had affected me. After all, from 1984 I was part of a world
conquering team who were making printing industry history and that made me feel
that I also could achieve anything. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"> </span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">Personal impact<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">From
an early age I experienced what I can only call the existential shock of
finding myself with that enigmatic gift of the conscious awareness of existence
and identity. What was the explanation of this self-awareness? There seemed to
be none; my existence was unjustified, a brute fact that had no deeper
explanation. Conscious existence was a huge
mystery to me and this mystery prompted me to question, probe, and investigate
from an early age. During those long school holidays in my first job as a
reluctant science teacher I would explore and write as a kind a therapy that
would bring a quietus to my existential dread. I mention this very personal
aspect of my life because joining Xenotron may have a bearing on the history of
my private research and above all my confidence. On arriving at Xenotron I seemed to get new impetus and
optimism in my private work as unaccountably things started falling into place
leading to new thoughts on </span><a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/bjps/39.2.161"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">probability</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">, </span><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">randomness</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">, </span><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/12/thinknet-project-articles.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Thinknet</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> and </span><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2006/01/physics-and-wild-web.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Quantum Mechanics</span></a>; all very ambitious, very audacious projects, but in many respects I regard them as successful in illuminating my predicament. I<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> remember in particular those evenings
at some very pleasant hotels as I returned late from an enjoyable day working
on site programming the XVCs in machine code….I would then proceed to work on
my own projects. The unspoken Xenotron ethos was that confidence, optimism, a willingness
<i>to have a go</i>, supplemented by some hard
graft was all that was needed to achieve one’s objectives; you can make history
even if you’re a yokel in an obscure market town in a rural area. This ethos
had rubbed off on me. It was during this time that I wrote my one and only
officially published paper on the subject of probability (See aforementioned
links). Looking back, I can only think that my having the temerity to think I could publish in a prestigious philosophy journal must have had something to do with the "have-a-go" spirit of Xenotron. Also I compiled a private paper on the nature of randomness and
latterly started on my Thinknet project. These projects were just the precursor
of even more grandiose thoughts which were expressed during my time with Hydra
Design (See aforementioned links). I trace at least part of my ambitions or
should that be my <i>over ambition</i> to
the influence of my Xenotron days where unbridled optimism and punching above one’s
weight felt like normalcy. The message at the heart of Xenotron’s success was
“Upstarts can do it!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">The Demise<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">But
as we shall see in this history confidence can cut both ways because one cannot
easily factor in the business market (or the ideas market or that matter) which
has a mind of its own</span>. <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The
ever-changing worlds of both technical innovation and the demands of the market
are a product of a coupled system: Viz: Technical innovation effects market
demand and conversely market demand effects technical innovation. You can bet a
complex feedback system like this is going to be non-linear and therefore
liable to the unpredictables of chaotic complexity; such complexity readily
humbles the overconfident by proving that winning streaks don’t last forever. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">But
I can’t complain: My eight years at Xenotron, even though they were its
decaying years were still very special and exciting (not least because the
resolve behind my private work had been strengthened by the Coldwell upstart-spirit).
For this thanks must go to Tim Coldwell
and Ian Houghton who started the whole saga that many employees look back on as
some of the best years of their working lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">For
me personally I also thank the following: Thanks must go to Martyn Elmy and Bob
Lesley who made me feel welcome when I first joined Xenotron (Bob & Martyn went
on to start the Xenotron spin-off company Centurfax). Thanks also to Peter
Rouse who for a while was my software manager and who supported me when I was
involved in an awkward installation with an unreasonable customer. Also special thanks must go to Laurie
Dickson who always seemed a calm and understanding manager: I enjoyed 15 years
in his Xenotron spin-off company “Hydra Design”. Unfortunately, Peter Rouse,
Laurie Dickson, Martin Elmy and Tim Coldwell are no longer with us but they
will remain in our memories. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">When
I look back I realise how fortunate I was to join Xenotron: “Good luck” some
would call it. It was a unique history-making company at the top of its game. Situated
as it was, not in some impersonal inner city office block or a sprawling boring industrial estate churning out boring old widgets, but instead in the bucolic environment on the border of the rural
counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. It was therefore close to nature and the
agricultural base of all civilisations. Perhaps I’m stretching it a bit, but it
was the kind of location the 18<sup>th</sup> century romantics could write
poetry about. Moreover, picturesque Constable Country was just a little way
down the road. And yet in spite of its location Xenotron was a cutting-edge high-tech world class company. It was as if the existential angst which has so often accompanied the contention between nature and wealth generating smoke-stack industry,
a contention which triggered the romantic reaction, had at last been resolved.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">Most
jobs are relatively routine unromantic bread & butter type jobs situated in
boring environments, but Xenotron was refreshingly different on both counts. But
for me it very nearly didn’t happen. I was unemployed at the beginning of 1984
and I had already applied for many jobs. The application for the Xenotron
vacancy nearly didn’t get posted as it lay neglected on our sideboard and only
eventually got posted because the wife urged me to post it; so what if I missed
the application date to yet another run-of-the-mill job vacancy? As far as I
was concerned it was just another one in a hundred. For a while me joining Xenotron hung by a thread: I had absolutely no idea that
this job was a unique posting, the kind of opportunity that doesn't knock often:
The perfect environment and a world class job.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">The
<i>creative destruction</i> of capitalism
doesn’t give a damn about whether or not one’s working environment is a uniquely
satisfying affair with a homely village community feel which many would give
their eye-teeth for. If it doesn’t fit into the ever restless and changing
ferment of the market kiss that job and the human relationships it entails
goodbye and move on. This tendency toward market turbulence and the survivalist need to fight for one's corner takes a toll on human relationships and therefore it’s no
surprise that those who seek to overthrow capitalism co-opt social alienation
as justification for their cause. But then without the creative destruction of
capitalism Tim Coldwell’s and Ian Houghton’s self-motivated entrepreneurial
spirit wouldn’t have found the freedom of expression to achieve what they achieved
and many of us who joined Xenotron wouldn’t have had such interesting jobs. However,
the story of Xenotron reveals some of the social tensions which may arise
within the free market system. There is therefore a need for the democratic regulation of
society to help head off some of the disaffection and alienation endemic to
capitalism, problems which are readily exploited by the extremes of left and right as they
seek to overthrow democratic government in favour of their ideologies. </span></p></div></div></div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-6887259499171886292023-12-17T04:59:00.027-12:002023-12-29T05:26:01.242-12:00Does God Exist?: Hendricks vs Myers<p> </p>
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T0FOaVtwBi4" title="Perry Hendricks vs PZ Does God Exist?" width="640"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/12/09/does-god-exist-perry-hendricks-i-argue-about-it/"><span style="font-size: large;">Does God exist? Perry Hendricks & I argue about it (freethoughtblogs.com)</span></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">I was interested to do a first parse of the above debate on God's existance with theist <a href="https://www.perryhendricks.com/" target="_blank">Perry Hendricks</a> and evangelical atheist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZ_Myers" target="_blank">PZ Myers</a>. If time permits, I might do a more detailed commentary on this video but here are some initial comments.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Much of Perry Hendricks' argument was based on the Bayesian type reasoning which uses priors like the existence of cosmic design, organization, biological structures and human moral instincts as evidence for God. These arguments have a generic form which employs Bayes theorem to derive a high probability of God's existence. I considered an example of this class of argument here: <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeWUYyNDY4SFVaSW8/view?resourcekey=0-Mo9PmNVumdH3Mfj9_hQlhw" target="_blank">Bayes and God</a>. He also used the cosmological argument; Viz: Because the natural world is shot through with contingency and cannot be the seat of Aseity or the realm of explanatory completeness, Aseity must exist beyond the material world and must be the ultimate cause of the hard core of cosmic contingency. Hendricks is a bright guy and is a credit to the faith.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">PZ Myers dismissed all that without further ado as just philosophy and therefore not worth further consideration. PZ made it quite clear he is looking for a God he can test like he can test a mechanical system such as a chemical reaction: i.e. Press button A and you get output B. He's looking for a God of quick tricks and the example he gave is this: Can God tell me what I've got in my pocket? If God can't rise to that simple test, then it is unlikely there is a God, although to be fair PZ admitted that no one can answer the question "<i>Is there a God?</i>" either way with absolute certainty. I'd agree there is no human certainty and I have some sympathy with atheists who feel that a world like ours can't be a result of a personal, loving and infinitely wise Creator; just think of Ken Ham, Alex Jones, Margorie Taylor-Green, Donald Trump & <a href="https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2021/08/answers-in-genesis-and-qanon.html" target="_blank">QAnon promoter Trey Smith</a> and you've got some evidence for atheism. But as for providing some tricks for PZ, you never know: After all God is a God of grace! What PZ didn't seem to twig is that underneath it his reasoning was Bayesian! How ironic! The further irony is that those Christians who say they know God exists because they have God in their hearts, are also using Bayes without knowing it!</span></div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-19595759329229691412023-12-12T07:44:00.031-12:002023-12-17T18:29:42.063-12:00The Self Referencing Problem<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDiVV5E8JFxYAP7vy3NOlBKxy-KpWdmPEJceNGMD_uPzp3LgmI6JYD6kJP7iaqr3Uens-iTurm63VQHRBpiaDaPENq7MHKBLcKHbd2Anob7ErExPSgNyFjcfWocVVS6ewbHU-VFAJ71n2OX7INKI-7fVLl0A4TZbXhEjPK8B2aTHYz94iL1kMqaw/s264/hands.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="222" data-original-width="264" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDiVV5E8JFxYAP7vy3NOlBKxy-KpWdmPEJceNGMD_uPzp3LgmI6JYD6kJP7iaqr3Uens-iTurm63VQHRBpiaDaPENq7MHKBLcKHbd2Anob7ErExPSgNyFjcfWocVVS6ewbHU-VFAJ71n2OX7INKI-7fVLl0A4TZbXhEjPK8B2aTHYz94iL1kMqaw/w400-h336/hands.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In 1993, in response to an article by Richard Dawkins in the New Statesman (Dec 1992) I wrote this essay:</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-know-you-know-you-know-it.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Quantum Non-Linearity: HOW TO KNOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW IT (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">This essay was all about the unstable self-reference implicit in Dawkins' article. However, that Dawkins was unaware of this conceptual instability was actually his "salvation"; the instability is only likely to occur if one spots and ponders the conundrum: People like Dawkins who <i>implicitly assume</i> there is such a thing as an unambiguous truth accessible via observation and rationality immunize themselves against the ravages caused by the unstable conceptual swings of contradictory self-reference (<i>Self affirming</i> self-reference is also immune). However, there are those out there who are not so fortunate and start to lose their grasp on the concept of Truth and consequently lose touch with reality itself as unstable self-reference kicks in. The societal confusion that this can cause gives opportunity for self-assured demagogues to exploit the situation by becoming an anchor point in a troubled sea of existential crises; in the face of this confusion demagogues from both the left and right oversimplify the struggle with a polarized "<i>us vs. them others</i>" model. Today "<i>them others</i>" may be referred to by the right-wing as "The Woke". But in 1993 "woke" was not a vogue term and so I itemized the philosophies I was targeting, and they were...</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">THE NARROW CONFINES of extreme
forms of <b>reductionist materialism</b>, <b>dialectical materialism</b>, <b>existentialism, relativism</b> and <b>subjective idealism </b>may be dogmatic
about what can be....</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">(I'd also want to add any philosophy which portrays truth purely as a social construction and therefore relative to a particular society) </span>These philosophies have an embedded unstable-self-reference which ultimately leads to self-contradiction and the thrashings of unstable conceptual feedback. The authoritarian far-right are exploiting the inherent social instabilities that these notions promote by becoming the great simplifiers of social reality as they lump everything they detest under the heading of "woke". In some quarters this counter-reaction has become so extreme that even someone like myself would be classified as "woke" simply because I don't side with the extremes of what I, in a tit-for-tat response, call "The Unwoke". These extremists are joining the great historical simplifiers and demagogues of the past; their simplification of issues is one feature which makes them popular. But the Old Testaments provides warnings about the kind of popularism which seeks autocratic champions to provide an anchor during those societal breakdowns where every person is a law unto themselves (Judges 21:25): This situation paves the way for the rule of charlatans who promise the earth but in return demand unconditional loyalty to their "highness". (See 1 Samuel 8:7-18). Adoring crowds are a magnet for the narcissistic. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">What triggered this current post of mine was the following post by IDist William Dembski on the website <i>Evolution News. </i>This post by Dembski also mentions the unstable self-referencing tendency of what he calls <i>Scientific Materialism,</i> but I would call <i>exclusive</i> <i>secularism</i>: </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2023/12/how-scientific-materialism-begot-woke-ideology/?_gl=1*j6d5vx*_ga*MTAyMzI5ODIzMC4xNjgxNDY2MDg2*_ga_9D89KMSK5X*MTcwMjM3NDU1MC4yODUuMC4xNzAyMzc0NTUwLjYwLjAuMA..&_ga=2.252709257.1844127549.1702288397-1023298230.1681466086" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">How Scientific Materialism Begot Woke Ideology | Evolution News</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Like Dembski I'm in the ironic position of siding with people like Richard Dawkins and Laurence Krauss, people who still firmly hold on to a belief in truth and rationality. So, 30 years after my essay I find Dembski mentioning something I wrote about in 1993. In fact, <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/04/plantinga-catches-up-on-unstable-self.html" target="_blank">it was 20 years on from 1993 when Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga was also talking about the same subject. </a></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Relevant Links:</span></b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2020/12/evolution-unstable-conceptual-feedback.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution, Unstable Conceptual Feedback & Nihilism (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/04/plantinga-catches-up-on-unstable-self.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Quantum Non-Linearity: Plantinga Catches up on Unstable Self Reference. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2012/09/meaningless-conflict.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Quantum Non-Linearity: Meaningless Conflict (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</span></a></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-32167149507041149702023-12-04T05:51:00.012-12:002023-12-06T23:44:19.316-12:00I'm Feeling Lucky<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdwYa6HCMPqEgsWcNC7vw0XyBnV3HTBqLgKhFVOb398t1j4Dq1qGDQfnPm2pfSPrktPjPCJwaAePQJ-PnuUnzIKRBmH9bVssvkWAbTk2K61zHDrOW6QprqhnFjtFjcDJRPQFeWI0-4ooaawy1lHgQr9QFB0Pa-7tnNnpPJZ3ooqxQVHMDPFfRV4g/s600/Imfeelinglucky.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="600" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdwYa6HCMPqEgsWcNC7vw0XyBnV3HTBqLgKhFVOb398t1j4Dq1qGDQfnPm2pfSPrktPjPCJwaAePQJ-PnuUnzIKRBmH9bVssvkWAbTk2K61zHDrOW6QprqhnFjtFjcDJRPQFeWI0-4ooaawy1lHgQr9QFB0Pa-7tnNnpPJZ3ooqxQVHMDPFfRV4g/w640-h398/Imfeelinglucky.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The above Google search, "<i>Reeves Probability</i>" + "<i>I'm feeling lucky</i>", used to work in favour of the paper I wrote on probability and then after a while it stopped working. But I seem to have "struck lucky" again and the "<i>I'm feeling lucky</i>" search now comes up with this:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/REEATO" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">T. V. Reeves, A theory of probability - PhilPapers</span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">It's rather neat that "<i>I'm feeling lucky</i>" should come up with a paper on chance and probability!</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">With the advent of statistical and quantum mechanics, probability and chance are ubiquitous in physics. Also, in common speech we hear about events being "<i>just chance</i>", or "<i>just luck</i>" or "<i>random</i>"; events are often written off as insignificant and meaningless on the basis of these emotive labels. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">But "<i>chance</i>", "<i>luck</i>" and "<i>random</i>" cannot be used coherently unless you know what you mean by these terms. So, with this in mind in the 1980s off I went and after long investigation & thought I wrote a paper on probability and also a small book on randomness with the purpose of probing the meanings of these often glibly used terms. The above link returns the probability paper. The link to my <i>indy-book</i> on randomness is here:</span></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?pli=1&resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">projectZv01b.pdf - Google Drive</span></a></div><div><p></p></div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-68680129872833196002023-11-11T01:37:00.045-12:002023-11-29T23:20:33.396-12:00Does this Interview Solve the Human Predicament? Part III<p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Spoiler Alert: "No"</span></b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPoBy_dh1CoPGjfSW1i6gdMPevUD830tOX9zCVtQmQwXkREV6jOlWeiOfK8GIvptNXWqMGinM-KyqBDP7QEx1TjxGPJrh8aGkyJgTffCwXfPyMYwFwkvbhEQa8LSJOeEF6r_Ro-0mJkklXkW6ZF1rH-rFvf6e26WFRZgDrbeCfACxJUgF3UKQbng/s760/5lhhhz1hjyn81.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="560" data-original-width="760" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPoBy_dh1CoPGjfSW1i6gdMPevUD830tOX9zCVtQmQwXkREV6jOlWeiOfK8GIvptNXWqMGinM-KyqBDP7QEx1TjxGPJrh8aGkyJgTffCwXfPyMYwFwkvbhEQa8LSJOeEF6r_Ro-0mJkklXkW6ZF1rH-rFvf6e26WFRZgDrbeCfACxJUgF3UKQbng/w400-h295/5lhhhz1hjyn81.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">The extravagance of the WTM claims is a concern in itself</span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span><div style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-size: large;">(For Parts 1 & II see <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/10/this-is-hyper-hype-with-knobs-on.html" target="_blank">here </a>and <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/10/does-this-interview-solve-human.html" target="_blank">here</a>)<br /></span></span><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Some people have called it a "cult" and I can hardly blame them: The <i>World Transformation Movement,</i> as I pointed out in the previous parts of this series, laud their movement with language borrowed from religion. Moreover, as I said in Part I "<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><i>Griffith has received such enthusiastic
accolades from his followers that it's almost as if he is some kind of
religious guru ushering in another plan of salvation, decisively addressing the
human predicament</i>". Griffith claims to base his plan of salvation on science and would therefore deny he's talking religion. However, I can understand a certain wariness about this movement; one might expect a truly scientific community to be a little more cautious, tentative, restrained and self-critical (and so should Christianity in my opinion!). The whole thing has shades of scientology, but that could be unfair as Jeremy Griffiths, as a personality, gives me good vibes. Just how cultish or otherwise the WTM are would eventually become apparent in how they deal with dissent and criticism.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: large;">Anyway, continuing with my analysis of <i>the interview that saves the world (sic)...</i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: large;">***</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">CRAIG CONWAY: </span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">……that
we have brutally competitive, survival-of-the-fittest instincts, which we are
always having to try to restrain or civilise or try to control as best we can;
I mean that’s what I was taught in school</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">JEREMY GRIFFITH</span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">:
Yes, that’s what we were taught, but let’s think about this—and what I’m going
to say now is very important, so I hope everyone’s listening closely. Surely
this idea that we have savage competitive and aggressive,
must-reproduceour-genes instincts cannot be the real reason for our species’
competitive and aggressive behaviour because, after all, words used to describe
our human behaviour such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded,
pessimistic, optimistic, artificial, hateful, cynical, mean, sadistic, immoral,
brilliant, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic and alienated, all recognise
the involvement of OUR species’ fully conscious thinking mind. They demonstrate
that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour; that we don’t suffer
from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a
conscious-mindbased, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">MY COMMENT</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">: As I said in Part II, I'm probably too old to have been taught in school that the “selfish gene's”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> need </span>to reproduce is the origin of our <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">savage, competitive and aggressive </i>motives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, the history of human emergence is irrelevant to the real hard-wired problem with human behaviour: Whatever the history of the human race is, whether it be
the fundamentalist’s 6000 year old creation, or the North American IDist’s
God of evolutionary patching, or bog-standard evolution or something else altogether,
the challenges of human behaviour trace back to each person being a quasi-isolated perspective of first-person-consciousness. Viz: My personal private experience of consciousness is vivid and all but
overwhelming, whereas the experiences of other people <i>have to be inferred
rather than directly felt.</i> Therefore, when faced with a conflict of interest in our world
of zero-sum games, a conflict which entails a choice of either choosing in favour of oneself or other selves, then
unless I’m exceptionally selfless (which unfortunately isn’t true in my case)
I’m likely to choose in favour of self. That's because I feel my feelings but not
the feelings of others. OK, sometimes the moral imperative to put others first
does win through, but unfortunately not always. I’m a sinner, so help me God!<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">In conclusion, then, the WTM’s claim that the problematic human condition traces back to a troubled psychological complex which seeks an excuse in the teaching that genetic
opportunism drives humanity’s competitive behaviour is the wrong diagnosis: One may know nothing about genetic opportunism and yet one is still troubled by the choices one has
to make in the face of the fundamental fault line between the consciousness of self and the consciousness of all those others. Whatever the history of the emergence of our strong sense of personal
existence and individual identity, it is a fact that the consciousness of our individual identity is felt more vividly than the conscious
identity of other humans; therein lies the rub. The challenge to human behavior is to weigh the inferred experiences of others as strongly as we weigh our direct experiences. This challenge is far deeper than fixing a psychosis.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">It</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> is a trivial truism to say that there is a psychological
dimension to our behavior; of course there is, by definition: Our behavior,
especially in the social sphere where "love-thy-neighbour" choices are demanded, is largely a product of our neural make-up and the information that make-up stores.
But yes, we are psychologically troubled because I know what is right and yet that strong sense of first-person-consciousness means that….</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual,
sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do
I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I
agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it,
but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in
me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but
I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I
do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to
do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (<o:p></o:p>Romans 7:14-20)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>That sums up my experience of the power of the self.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><o:p> ***</o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">JEREMY:</span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">
What’s more, we humans have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts,
the voice or expression of which we call our conscience—which is the complete
opposite of competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts. As Charles Darwin
said, ‘The moral sense… affords the best and highest distinction between man
and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, ch.4). Of course, to have
acquired these cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts our distant ape
ancestors must have lived cooperatively, selflessly and lovingly, otherwise how
else could we have acquired them? Our ape ancestors can’t have been brutal,
clubwielding, competitive and aggressive savages as we have been taught, rather
they must have lived in a Garden of Eden-like state of cooperative, selfless
and loving innocent gentleness—which, as I’d like to explain to you later in
this interview Craig, is a state that the bonobo species of ape is currently
living in, and which anthropological findings now evidence we did once live in.
For instance, anthropologists like C. Owen Lovejoy are <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>THE Interview That Solves The Human Condition
And Saves The World! reporting that ‘our species-defining cooperative mutualism
can now be seen to extend well beyond the deepest Pliocene [which is well
beyond 5.3 million years ago]’ (‘Re-examining Human Origins in Light of
Ardipithecus ramidus’, Science, 2009, Vol.326, No.5949)<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">So saying our
competitive and aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and
aggressive instincts in us is simply not true—as I’d like to come back to
shortly, it’s just a convenient excuse we have used while we waited for the
psychosis-acknowledging and-solving, real explanation of our present competitive
and aggressive human condition!<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">MY COMMENT</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">: Yes, I would completely agree we
have moral instincts, but these are often at war with our temptation to put our very vivid first-person experience before the extrapolated/inferred experience of others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Our</span> potential for selfish, aggressive and assertive behaviour and our contrasting potential for selfless loving and cooperative behaviour live side
by side in us all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Humanity usually
knows what is right and often does what is right, but certainly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not always, in fact not often enough.</i> We easily slip into selfish competitive
ways, and regardless of how humanity emerged in ancient
history the problem traces back to the balance of choice between serving our vivid first-person experiences and the extrapolated, inferred experiences of others. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">The
picture Jeremy is painting of both humanity and the primate animal kingdom
looks to be wrong. Take for example the bonobos: If </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";" target="_blank">the references in Wiki</a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> are right then in spite of fact that bonobos are often cooperative and
supportive, males still fight competitively for females.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Chimpanzee aggressiveness and competitiveness goes
further still; they not only kill other animals for meat but also have been known to
kill one another.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">So again, we find aggressive
competitiveness and supporting loving instincts living side by side in both human
and primate communities. This is no surprise: Humans and primates can be very supportive and
loving toward fellow community members, but when it’s a choice between self and all those others in a world where zero-sum games abound that vivid first-person identity
tempts a self-first choice.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">So, who is<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> saying that our competitive and
aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and aggressive instincts inherited from the past? </i>That sounds like a caricatured straw-man to me. Human behaviour, like primate
behaviour is a mix of support and competition and both humans and primates are
morally hard put to it when a zero-sum game forces a choice between self and
others. Where Jeremy gets this primate Eden from I don’t know: Not from the
Animal kingdom, or from Human behaviour: So, I assume he has extracted this picture from
the Bible and is using it as a metaphor; but at this stage it is not clear how he is using it; will we have to get further into the interview, to clarify this point. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">***</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">CRAIG:</span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wow, so that’s a pretty big statement
Jeremy, I mean it’s a pretty important point you’re making here. You’re saying
that our competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to
must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals, but is due to a
consciousmind-based, psychologically troubled condition, yes?<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">JEREMY:</span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">
Yes, our egocentric and arrogant and mean and vindictive and even sadistic
behaviour has nothing to do with wanting to reproduce our genes. That was
absurd. And it is actually really good news that our behaviour is due to a
conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled condition because psychoses can
be healed with understanding. If our competitive and aggressive behaviour was
due to us having savage instincts then we would be stuck with that born-with,
hard-wired, innate behaviour. It would mean we could only ever hope to restrain
and control those supposedly brutal instincts. But since our species’ divisive
behaviour is due to a psychosis, that divisive behaviour can be cured with
healing understanding. So that is very good news. In fact, incredibly exciting
news, because with understanding we can finally end our psychologically
troubled human condition. It’s the understanding of ourselves that we needed to
heal the pain in our brains and become sound and sane again<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">As I said, the
‘savage instincts’ explanation was just a convenient excuse while we searched
for the psychosis-addressing-and-solving real explanation of our divisive
behaviour, which is the explanation I would now like to present<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">MY COMMENT: </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> Jeremy continues to assert his case that the human predicament is being covered up by misleading theories about the selfish gene and that all
we need is to do is to go into psychological rehab...... but the epistemic gap
between our first-person experiences and the third person whose experiences can
only be reached by empathetic inference & extrapolation is hard-wired in the physics of biology. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given the fundamental nature of
this gap it would be wrong to suggest that this is down to a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“psychosis” that is remedied by rehabilitation. Yes, I agree, understanding ourselves is certainly the first step but that should entail understanding the fundamental fault line in human nature that
drives our potential for selfish and competitive behaviour. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><o:p> ***</o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">CRAIG:</span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">
Okay, so what you’re saying here, Jeremy, is that we don’t need the convenient
excuse anymore that we have some kind of savage animal instincts because we
have the real explanation of our conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled
human condition<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">MY COMMENT: </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">That so-called convenient excuse
is a straw-man. The real problem is far more fundamental than the WTM pundits make out. In other words, the WTM don’t have the full explanation for the human potentiality for competitiveness and selfishness. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">***</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">JEREMY</span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">:
Yes, and this key, all-important, psychosis-addressing-and-solving explanation
is actually very obvious. If we think about it, if an animal was to become
fully conscious, like we humans became, then that animal’s new self-managing,
understanding-based conscious mind would surely have to challenge its
pre-existing instinctive orientations to the world, wouldn’t it? A battle would
have to break out between the emerging conscious mind that operates from a
basis of understanding cause and effect and the non-understanding instincts
that have always controlled and dictated how that animal behaves.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">CRAIG:</span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">
Yes, that makes sense Jeremy, so what happened though when this animal became
conscious and its whole life turned into a psychologically distressed mess?<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">MY COMMENT </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The epistemic distance between
my personal experiences and the experiences of others is a fundamental and irreducible
feature of nature that isn't due to a psychologically distressed mess; it is, in fact, the way physics determines how the biological human works. This epistemic separation, which in the zero-sum games of life tempts selfish and competitive behavior, behavior often condemned by our consciences, is the real challenge of the human condition. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Consciousness lies on a continuum that is <i>a function</i> <i>of</i> </span><span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">(but not identical to)</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">the level of cognition possessed by an organism. In fact a single human being becomes more conscious of the world around as (s)he learns and grows; that is, consciousness increases with perception and learning. In my view dogs, cats, and primates are also conscious, but their neural set-up, their perceptions and learning mean they are less conscious than humans about many things. I'll be tackling Jeremy's</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">references to an animal becoming fully conscious in my next part, Part IV.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><o:p> ***</o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, if our conscious quasi-isolated first-person
perspective is generated by the way biology uses the laws of physics then
this probably means that cats, dogs, dolphins and primates have a first-person experience;
that is, they are conscious beings, albeit with a level of cognition that in many areas (but certainly not all) is far
exceeded by human beings. That the extent of consciousness is a function of (but not identical to) cognitive level means that consciousness is on a sliding scale. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">So, when Jeremy</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> talks about an animal becoming fully
conscious that’s far too binary; there is clearly a consciousness
spectrum that depends on the extent of one’s cognitive ability & perceptions. A high
level of ability means one is more conscious of the world than at a lower level. For human beings much of that excess of conscious cognition resides in the world of community; human beings are gifted with strong social processing powers and have an awareness of those around them. </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Ironically, then, it is that very social</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">consciousness which opens the door to sin, <i>the word with the "I" in middle</i>: My social cognition reveals to me how other people might be feeling and experiencing, even though
I don’t experience those feelings directly myself. Emerging consciousness opens
the door to potentially selfish behavior. This seems to be the very opposite of what Jeremy is
maintaining!</span></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">***<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In his very moving series "<i>The</i> <i>Power of Art</i>" historian Sir Simon Schama comments on the life and work of the Italian artist Caravaggio, a man who lived on the edge of the precipice of his strong passions and emotions. He led a life of profligacy and lost control more than once. According to Schama, however, Caravaggio was aware of his flaws, at least toward the end of his life. In Caravaggio's late-life painting of David holding the severed head of Goliath Schama tells us that it displays the self-knowledge of a self-aware sinner; the head of Goliath was a self-portrait. The figure of David, instead of wallowing in the pride of victory looks at the head with a pensive compassion and sadness. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU8L53X8KHN7KDedTpN_JVEuTweYO1sojatMhrF3K4N6X_N211rg52VhOfID8aMyBGYF53B1Y9X_AzmEXJh8fWOZeIisDK24oiI35Gdrf5g9xQnTNN1jShuCyj_VTFWYzXyMV5GjdO6LNN8q2q4zflQHTKXuFFmKFYuQBpmW_45lO__Xk97Suegg/s1200/p0ghz1lq.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU8L53X8KHN7KDedTpN_JVEuTweYO1sojatMhrF3K4N6X_N211rg52VhOfID8aMyBGYF53B1Y9X_AzmEXJh8fWOZeIisDK24oiI35Gdrf5g9xQnTNN1jShuCyj_VTFWYzXyMV5GjdO6LNN8q2q4zflQHTKXuFFmKFYuQBpmW_45lO__Xk97Suegg/w640-h360/p0ghz1lq.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: large;"><div><span><br /></span></div>Schama picks up the story:<br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: large;"><i>The power of his [Caravaggio's] art is the power of truth, not least the truth about ourselves. For if we are ever to have a chance of redemption it must begin with an act of recognition that in all of us the Goliath competes with the David. </i></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: large;">Until we grasp the truths at the root of our schismatic motives, truths about the epistemic distance between ourselves and our fellow human, salvation will continue to allude us. </span></div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-5510450684299051482023-11-02T23:55:00.031-12:002023-11-04T00:15:57.097-12:00On Panda's Thumb: Do we have free will? Part II<p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Spoiler Alert: Pseudo Question!</span></b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5DQXd_tbVnT6qY68MIpK7It5pVqtC6e2otMuEMUo8Ma4ACMeUdqvKkuWytlwiNBhH3olFS8eBHlw9jySLTpxBoleVMVP9kRPhLbNxILje_NzhzZk9KVgArlyl7IkJl3BXfJ0kh17BzxZsZ_6oz3LnUTtYYJd-lKFKxVqxBRTrTzsl4VcJuZXo9g/s320/freewill-main_article_image.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="143" data-original-width="320" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5DQXd_tbVnT6qY68MIpK7It5pVqtC6e2otMuEMUo8Ma4ACMeUdqvKkuWytlwiNBhH3olFS8eBHlw9jySLTpxBoleVMVP9kRPhLbNxILje_NzhzZk9KVgArlyl7IkJl3BXfJ0kh17BzxZsZ_6oz3LnUTtYYJd-lKFKxVqxBRTrTzsl4VcJuZXo9g/w400-h179/freewill-main_article_image.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-incoherent-notions-of-free-will-and.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">The free will-determinism dichotomy is an illusion</span></a></i></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">This is the second part of a two-part series where I discuss <a href="http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/10/do-we-have-free-will.html" target="_blank">a post by Matt Young on the evolution website "Panda's Thumb"</a> entitled <i>Do we have free will? No.</i> <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/10/on-pandas-thumb-do-we-have-free-will.html" target="_blank">See here for Part I</a>. In his post Matt mentions that in 2001 he wrote a book with the title of <i>No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe. </i>This is what he says of his book:</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><time datetime="2023-10-24T11:35:00-07:00" pubdate="pubdate" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; text-align: justify;"><b>MATT YOUNG</b>:</span></time></span><i style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> In that book, I argued that humans were biological creatures and therefore governed by the laws of physics. Those laws are deterministic (we will get back to that in a minute), so everything we do, think, or decide is determined by those laws. We may think we have free will; we certainly have to act as if we have free will; but in fact we have no such thing.</span></i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span><b>MY COMMENT: </b>I wouldn't take issue with Matt's statement </span></span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: "Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">that humans are biological creatures and therefore governed by the laws of physics. </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman";">After all, as a Christian I support the view that our highly contingent physical regime has been reified from the platonic realm in an act of Divine creation and therefore displays miraculous wonders every second of the day; it can have no property of Aseity and therefore its mere daily existence is a sign and wonder. Where Matt falls over in the above quote is that he's barged</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman";"> straight into subject as if we have a clear idea of what freewill and determinism are about; but we don't: <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-incoherent-notions-of-free-will-and.html" target="_blank">See my series where I took to task a Christain who was also sure that the dichotomy was absolutely uncontestably clear and meaningful</a>; that it certainly is not! My understanding is that even a computer running a deterministic program can be said to have "free will" in that it makes choices/decisions according to its physical make up; but it loses that freewill if outside influences coercively steer it away from its natural decision tree. </span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">I don't necessarily dispute that the laws of physics govern human behavior, although we must caution that it is clear from the state of physics that in spite a substantial understanding of the "algorithms" which constrain the patterns of the cosmos we cannot claim to have a comprehensive understanding of those laws. But as I show in my series I've linked to, the conclusion that we either have "free will" or "no free will" is an unintelligible dichotomy. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="background-color: white;">MATT YOUNG</b><span style="background-color: white;">: </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: helvetica; text-align: left;"><i>Now before you get your knickers in a twist, none of the foregoing implies, for example, that we should not punish criminals. The pain they may inflict is real, and we may have to separate them from society until (or unless) they reform. I suggest, however, that their lack of free will suggests that we should be rehabilitating rather than punishing criminals. But that discussion is a little off-task here.</i></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Interesting to note that Matt in his comment about the pain criminals inflict is very probably implicitly making an empathetic extrapolation whereby he perceives the first-person perspective of other human beings; that is, he is implicitly recognizing the existence of private consciousness. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Yes, I think I agree with Matt's rehab line but the awful public punishment spectacles of times past were a primitive attempt to interfere with human psychology via a kind of social aversion therapy; that is, fear of the consequences of transgressing the societal status quo help keep law and order. It's a crude kind of rehab on the social level. It may well be that the sometimes-irresistible instinct to punish & wreak vengeance (something we all feel at times) is a proximate motivation which finds its utility in more primitive contexts. In fact, in times of war it swings back into action, with a vengeance.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>MATT YOUNG:</b> </span><i style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">When I wrote <span style="box-sizing: border-box;">NSO</span>, I assumed that quantum mechanics was itself purely deterministic and that someday we would discover an underlying, deterministic theory. It simply seemed unreasonable that, for example, an atomic nucleus would decide all on its own to emit an alpha particle, rather than being caused to do so by some external agency. It still seems unreasonable to me, but it may not be right</i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">.</i><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Interesting to note that Matt was inclined to rebel against the idea that QM presented randomness. I suspect two motives for this: </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">a) Prior to the coming of the new mechanical sciences there was much more scope for attributing inexplicable events to the fiat of spirits and gods. In contrast under the new paradigm stuff happened because it conformed to known (or perhaps as yet unknown) mathematical patterns.</span></span><span> But the notion that events, some events at least, are part of larger random patterns seems to leave the door ajar for the introduction of superstitions about spirits and gods manipulating the world via fiat. After all, the apparently acausal nature of randomness is counter intuitive and spirits and gods may be resorted to as a way of restoring conventional ideas about cause and effect; human beings find it hard to except patterns at face value. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">b) Determinism, if it can be expressed in terms of succinct mathematical algorithms which can be humanly grasped, gives us the feeling that it wraps things up in a neat package and looks to be a big step toward a closed ended system that crowds out divine fiat - or so it seems.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">So, it is my guess that Matt is sublimating here an ulterior need for an intellectual hegemony which lives in the hope of tying up all those loose ends with a comprehensive system of intellectually tractable deterministic laws or algorithms which describe all that happens in the universe; This is the search for <i>explanatory completeness</i>. It is futile quest destined to end with a hard core of unexplained brute contingency - and I'm talking about "explanation" here in a sense that is more satisfying than mere mathematically tractable descriptions. </span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But, and here is the big "but", r</span></span><span style="background-color: white;">andomness is just another pattern albeit with the mathematical property that it requires either very large algorithms to specify it or very long algorithmic generation times. In the final analysis randomness presents us with the same mysteries that underlie those humanly tractable deterministic</span></span><span><span style="background-color: white;"> patterns: Viz: From</span><span> whence come these ultimately contingent patterns of behavior? What sustains their reification moment by moment and place by place? Their mystery isn't to be found just in their instantiation in mathematical generators at the beginning of time but also in that they continue to work everywhere and everywhen when in fact there is no logical necessity (i.e. no Aseity) that they should continue to do so. </span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>MATT YOUNG: </b> </span><i style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">Does quantum mechanics then come to our rescue a</i><i style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">nd somehow grant free will? No. First, so many molecules are involved in, say, neurotransmission that their action may be considered completely classical and therefore completely deterministic. Even so, the occasional quantum fluctuation would not so much grant free will as it would make our decisions somewhat random, a condition that I think proponents of free will would not particularly care for</i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">.</i><span><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span>It is possible that the human mind, like many other systems in the cosmic physical regime, is a non-linear feedback system, making it chaotic and therefore influenced by the butterfly effect of random quantum events. </span><span>This actually may be a useful feature as the mind seeks creative solutions to problems: The randomness is exploited to provide useful novelty, but this doesn't necessarily mean human decisions are random; </span>our decisions are likely constrained by overall teleological considerations </span><span>that regulate this novelty, selecting or rejecting those randomly generated contingencies according to the goals and aims of the human complex adaptive system. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">However, it's true that I can't be dogmatic about the foregoing paragraph, but it does mean that Matt's conclusions above are in no way obliging. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MATT YOUNG: </b><i style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">Quantum randomness may have been critically important to the evolution of the early universe. If we ran the “experiment” again, we might, for all I know, end up with a very different universe, one that does not even include us. That said, quantum randomness has very little effect on our daily lives, unless you count, for example, cancers induced by radioactive decay or cosmic radiation. Thus, as Sapolsky would argue, everything we think, say, and do is wholly and unequivocally determined by our detailed histories (except, as I have noted, for the occasional quantum fluctuation)</i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b>Matt's<b> </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">first two sentences here may well be true, but I feel he is likely to be wrong that quantum randomness (if it exists) has very little effect on our lives given that non-linear feedback systems are ubiquitous in our world. But this question, in my opinion, has very little impact on the free will-determinism question: The latter question as I have shown is really bound up with our definitions.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MATT YOUNG : </b><i style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">I conclude, then, that we have no free will in any sense. I do not understand why some people consider that threatening; it simply is the way it is. We feel as if we have free will, we act as if we have free will, and we are treated as if we have free will. Free will is thus a useful fiction, but in reality it is only a fiction.</i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span><b style="font-family: times;">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: times;">Determinism, as I've implied, is a perspective effect that is a function of the level of epistemic tractability of the patterns in nature. Determinism</span></span></span><span><span><span style="font-family: times;"> is an epistemic spectrum which runs from those simple (that is, short) algorithms of elementary physics which we find relatively easy to handle,</span></span></span><span><span><span style="font-family: times;"> to the much more complex patterns of apparent randomness, patterns which do not yield to simple algorithmic expressions.</span></span><span style="font-family: times;"> Ergo, determinism is a subjective category which depends on one's information, i.e. it depends on one's perspective. Matt's triumphant conclusion that "</span></span><i style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro", "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">we have no free will in any sense" </i><span style="font-family: times;">is as incoherent as those who hang onto to freewill categories. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The two sides in this polarized debate between so-called "freewill" and "determinism" advocates find one another's stance threatening because they undermine each other's dearly held philosophy. But for me their respective positions are void of intelligibility. </span></span></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-40305746613653760342023-10-29T09:07:00.022-12:002023-11-29T23:59:22.288-12:00On Panda's Thumb: Do we have free will? Part I<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Spoiler Alert: Pseudo Question! </b></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i></i></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZo7-G72Nc-XtyZJk6CSv9yhRFT9PW_jR8aI6Ocd9NErnI9dP2CL2rJ7m7j-nmh0m4CKouiZZHmfOgKtlMOH-lM49Gnj6tXaffW-LQqUxfP77jftKbCbiEJpMRqKV2YfA9n0EoIb7eQXhT8gnOwJY59HNTjgXJQAVZbLZE8GaUvfZBFHjz5KGp7g/s320/freewill-main_article_image.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="143" data-original-width="320" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZo7-G72Nc-XtyZJk6CSv9yhRFT9PW_jR8aI6Ocd9NErnI9dP2CL2rJ7m7j-nmh0m4CKouiZZHmfOgKtlMOH-lM49Gnj6tXaffW-LQqUxfP77jftKbCbiEJpMRqKV2YfA9n0EoIb7eQXhT8gnOwJY59HNTjgXJQAVZbLZE8GaUvfZBFHjz5KGp7g/w400-h179/freewill-main_article_image.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span>The freewill-determinism dichotomy is an </span></i><span style="text-align: left;"><span><i>illusion.</i></span></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i></i></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/10/do-we-have-free-will.html" target="_blank">I</a><span><a href="http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/10/do-we-have-free-will.html" target="_blank">n a post on the Panda's Thumb website</a> entitled <i>Do we have free will? No,</i> poster Matt Young considers the time-honored question of free will vs predestination/determinism. As a rough rule theists tend to fall into the free will camp and those of a more secular leaning gravitate towards predestination/determinism or "no free will". So, it is less than a surprise that Matt Young opts for the latter. As I've proposed in my series on Free Will and Determinism, I believe both sides of this debate have polarized around a pseudo question. See here: </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-incoherent-notions-of-free-will-and.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Quantum Non-Linearity: The Incoherent Notions of Free Will and Determinism. Part III (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</span></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">I'll deal with the detail of Matt's post in Part II, but I want to make some preliminary comments about the polarization we see in North America between theists and secularists over questions which don't actually justify polarisation. The freewill vs determinism question is just one of these needless contentions. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>The North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community are in strong contention with American science establishment. The latter is largely populated with thinkers who in the main are likely to style themselves as secularists; that is, they believe the cosmos as it is understood through science is all we can really know. They see the NAID community as trying to import religious notions into science by the backdoor under the guise of "<i>the science of intelligent design</i>". Just how these respective communities answer certain questions can be used as </span><span>faith tests or shibboleths betraying which of these two polarized groups one identifies with. Below I list three examples of shibboleth questions and their shortcomings as community identifiers: </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>1. Do you believe in evolution? </b><span>My understanding of evolution, as I've clarified in this blog many times, is that whether or not evolution as conventionally understood has taken place, either way a huge burden of up-front information is required to drive the emergence of life. The reason for this is the following relationship which holds for any process that can be algorithmically simulated (See <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/11/melencolia-i-part-4-generating.html" target="_blank">here</a> & <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/02/dembski-im-not-denying-evolutionary.html" target="_blank">here</a> for more):</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Information generated <</i><i>= upfront information + Log (computation steps)</i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Unless we are dealing with a processor capable of expanding parallelism the second term on the right-hand side means that unless we supply sufficient upfront information an immense amount of time is entailed by the Log term in the above relation - times which make the age & size of our observable universe look a very small and cozy affair indeed. That conventional evolution doesn't address this origins question over the frontloaded information means that as far as evolution is concerned the science establishment vs. the NAID community polarisation is actually a non-contention: Viz: The science establishment have a mathematically inevitable origins question, evolution or no-evolution, and therefore this leaves them open to an appeal to the Aseity of Deity. On the other hand, the NAID community still have a case even if evolution has occurred and therefore, they are not necessarily obliged to set themselves against the academic community on the basis of an anti-evolution platform. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>2. Do you believe in junk DNA?</b> NAIDs are very likely to take an anti-junk DNA position as they are so sure that an intelligent <strike>creator</strike> designer would never leave extraneous non-functional code in the DNA. On the other hand, secularists, who are inclined to believe in a meaningless & purposeless cosmos substantially ruled by the random walk of evolution have less problem with the idea that useless junk DNA has accumulated in the genome over millions of years. And yet why should a super-intelligent creator of inscrutable purposes be constrained not leave code of, say, historical interest in his DNA scripts as might a human software engineer? And can the secular establishment be so sure that enigmatic tracts of DNA honed by evolution don't have a deeper meaning? As far as I can see the NAIDs and the academic establishment have divided on an issue that has no <i>necessary</i> connection with their respective world views. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>3. Do you believe entropy bars evolution? </b>Many in the NAID community wrongly believe that the second law of thermodynamics is an evolution stopper grounded in fundamental physics. <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/09/yec-guru-advises-yecs-not-to-use.html" target="_blank">But at least one young earther appears to realize that this is an unsound argument</a>. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">***</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>In contending over the above issues, the science establishment and the NAIDs are fighting on another on the wrong battle fields They should be arguing over what to my mind are much more pertinent issues such as the question of Aseity; given that science is a fundamentally descriptive discipline where the search for logical necessity is always destined to end at a stultifying barrier of hard-core contingency, it will never supply Aseity. In his post </span><span><span style="background-color: white;">Matt Young tells us about a book he wrote in 2001 on science and religion called <i>N</i></span><i>o </i></span><i>Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an impersonal Universe. </i><span style="background-color: white;"><span>I'll hand it to him: He's on the right track about the challenge of an apparently impersonal Universe: It's true that unless we are going to go for the cosified universe of Christain young earthers and flat earthers the ostensive appearance of the universe can present an enigma to theists such as myself: Is </span></span><span>the universe the sort of place an all-powerful loving deity would actually create? <a href="http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2016/12/chaoskampf-and-problem-of-suffering-and.html" target="_blank">This question is linked to the problem of suffering and evil</a>. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Below I add a fourth battlefield that the science secularists & the NAIDs tend to fight over, and this is what I regard as a pseudo questions: Viz: the question of freewill and determinism. As I've said I'll deal with Matt Young's post in detail in Part II, but below I make some general comments. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;">***</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;"><b>4. Do you believe in free will or determinism?</b> If the physical regime was fully deterministic and we had full knowledge of that determinism this would be the nearest science could come to providing a <i>complete</i> understanding; that is, providing a comprehensive description for all that passes in the cosmos. I can see why those who lean toward secularism favor this option; it is the best science can offer in the way of <i>explanatory completeness, a closed ended rational system. </i> But as we well know, this completeness is a pseudo completeness: Ultimately the deterministic algorithms which simulate the physical regime have an explanatory edge, that is, a hard-core barrier of irreducible, incompressible information. The question of the origin of this information is either regarded as a mystery, an absurdity or a meaningless question. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;">But in any case, what's so special about deterministic algorithms? In the final analysis they merely describe in compressed form the highly organized patterns of determinism. Moreover, it can be questioned as to why "deterministic patterns" are so fundamentally different from the random patterns of statistics which are simply <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?pli=1&resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw" target="_blank">patterns that demand either very large algorithms and/or long execution times to be described.</a> Furthermore, once those random patterns get set into the resin block of history, they to take on, from a human perspective, the property of being potentially completely knowable and in that sense determined......likewise, any human action which claims to be freewill: Once the so-called freewill is actioned it cannot be changed and becomes as fixed into history and determined as any event fixed by deterministic algorithms. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;">Determinism is a spectrum concept that is a function of the epistemic ability of humans to know; in short, it's a subjective judgement. Randomness looks indeterministic not because it has some intrinsic property of indeterminism but because prior to it being set into the resin block of history (and apart from its statistical aspects) its details are humanly unknowable, beyond human epistemic handling. Randomness's indeterminism is a human perspective effect. Ergo, determinism is also a human perspective effect. </span></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-3065807929765773702023-10-17T05:36:00.095-12:002023-11-03T05:32:18.499-12:00Does this Interview Solve the Human Predicament? Part II<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Spoiler Alert: "No"</span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLqPqX8iGFuii-i3yLvLjKn961QWhWGnqd36Zs0x7KuusBsh5W5MaPz5t-fA1op2KrlsmvFB-Tus18cIy-xvgoUHW1T6tREh2QgfnxqIL9GgmpcEkMe5kRwxiZrESUAXotX-8IsJt6h4T4HmNAWDc2rnkQU5r2snNkyk3NIxqDeaSPY22queHIaw/s858/643x0w.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="858" data-original-width="643" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLqPqX8iGFuii-i3yLvLjKn961QWhWGnqd36Zs0x7KuusBsh5W5MaPz5t-fA1op2KrlsmvFB-Tus18cIy-xvgoUHW1T6tREh2QgfnxqIL9GgmpcEkMe5kRwxiZrESUAXotX-8IsJt6h4T4HmNAWDc2rnkQU5r2snNkyk3NIxqDeaSPY22queHIaw/w480-h640/643x0w.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Biologist Jeremy Griffith comes over as a nice reasonable </i><i>guy, so all the more reason why I'm </i><i>wondering </i><i>how he got caught up in this extravaganza of hyper-hype and sales promotion.</i></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">I think Jeremy has got too many people around him telling him how great he is!</span></i></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Below I quote bits of "<i>THE most important interview of all time</i>" (!) and as usual interleave my comments. <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/10/this-is-hyper-hype-with-knobs-on.html" target="_blank">See here for Part I of this series.</a> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: large;">***</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">CRAIG CONWAY<i>:</i></span></b><i style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> So Jeremy, thank
you for talking with us. Tell us, how does your work bring about ‘<b>the
psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ </b>and end all the suffering
and strife, and, as Professor Prosen
said, <b>‘save the world’</b></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">JEREMY GRIFFITH</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thank you very much for having me on your program Craig. Finding
understanding of our psychologically troubled human condition has actually been
what the efforts of every human who has ever lived has been dedicated to
achieving and has contributed to finding. As Professor Prosen said, finding
understanding of the human condition has
been ‘<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">the holy grail</b>’ of the whole
human journey of conscious thought and
enquiry. We humans have absolutely lived in hope, faith and trust that one day,
somewhere, some place, all the efforts of everyone—but of scientists in
particular—would finally produce the completely redeeming, uplifting and
healing understanding of us humans. I know it must seem outrageous to claim
that this goal of goals has finally been achieved, but it has. In fact, the
human condition is such a difficult subject for us humans to confront and deal
with that I couldn’t be talking about it so openly and freely if it hadn’t been
solved.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">MY COMMENT</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">: I think you will find that these
people see themselves as having no pretentions of invoking an other-worldly solution to the human predicament: That is, they are likely to claim that their
diagnosis of the human condition and their proposed (or should that be "asserted" rather than "proposed"?) solution to it are purely secular and scientific. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet they express themselves with the superlative language
of religious aspiration, epiphany and certainty. In the above quote we hear
that humanity has lived in <i>hope, faith and trust</i> that out there somewhere,
somehow there is a solution that remedies their difficult lot, a final answer
which classifies as a kind of salvation. In fact, Jeremy Griffith, clearly borrowing
his language from the Western Christian tradition, describes his revelation as “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">completely
redeeming, up lifting and healing understanding of us humans</i>”. It is the “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">holy grail</i>” which according to Craig “...<i>ends all the suffering and strife and</i> </span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">as Professor Prosen said '</span></i><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">saves
the world'</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">”. Gasp! This isn’t a tentative statement fielded as a proposal for
comment as one might expect from scientists, but this “</span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">goal of goals</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">” </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">has finally been achieved</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> according to Griffith. He has been enlightened by the ultimate epiphany!</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">Griffiths and his followers are in fact
admitting something that many theists have said for a long while: Namely, that
human beings aren’t like the beasts of the fields who have little more than an
idle curiosity about some of the superficial aspects their world; as far as we know animals, unlike humans, do not question the fundamentals of their lot. For them life is an unquestionably <i>given </i>state of affairs, like it or lump it. In contrast, many humans have that deeply probing curiosity about
the numinous and resist an unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. They don’t readily accept the cosmic state of affairs as a brute given; for them a cosmos which is <i>just
there</i> and where further questions are regarded as futile because it is all meaningless and
purposeless is an absurdity. (But <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2022/05/brian-cox-on-cosmic-perspective.html" target="_blank">see here</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">Though
it may be deeply buried there is among humans an existential yearning for meaning and purpose
that is not easy to get over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Humans not only have an unquenchable curiosity about deeper matters but also proactively
seek betterment of the secular status quo, and more; they have a soteriological
hope in their hearts. The surprise is that Jeremy and his followers, who I
suspect purport only to seek solutions in the secular realm, have effectively admitted the existence of these deep existential yearnings and motivations: Viz: a soteriological
faith & hope which perhaps hints at that residual hankering after the Divine.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><o:p> ***</o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">CRAIG:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Okay then Jeremy, solve the human condition for us, we’re all ears!</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">MY COMMENT</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">: We’re all ears? You can say that again!<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><o:p>*** </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">JEREMY</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Firstly, I’m a biologist, and that’s important because I think everyone will agree that what we need is a
non-abstract, non-mystical, completely rational and thus<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>understandable, scientific, biological
explanation of us humans. So how are we to explain and understand the human
condition, understand why we humans are the way we are, so brutally
competitive, selfish and aggressive that human life has become all but
unbearable. In fact, how are we to make so much sense of our divisive behaviour
that the underlying cause of it is so completely explained and understood that,
as Professor Prosen said, the whole of the human race is psychologically
rehabilitated and everyone’s life is transformed?<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">CRAIG</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yes, that’s what we want; the human condition finally explained, fixed
up and healed forever!</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">MY COMMENT</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">: As I’ve already said Jeremy, in spite of his quasi-religious expressionology, is not claiming to
offer any more than a scientifically accessible explanation of the human
predicament. This is clear in his first statement above where he says that being a
biologist he seeks a non-mystical, scientific biological explanation of the human
predicament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fair enough, but this to my
mind clashes with the sensational fanfare we are getting from his World
Transformation Movement. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where’s the studied scientific detachment? Where’s the “<i>Let’s try this hypothesis and see
where it takes us</i>”? Can they be so confident when their solution hasn't been tried
& tested yet? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">Humanity
has a very poor track record when it comes to implementing what they believe to be comprehensive solutions to the
human predicament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s recall those
many failed ideologies & their intoxicated ideologues who have promoted them: From the French revolutionaries
to Marx’s followers,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from Hitler<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Donald
Trump**, from the Inquisition to Islamic state, we've heard from their respective<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ideologues who have made loud and emphatic claims about proffering comprehensive solutions to humanity’s problems but look where
their deluded followers have taken the human race. Such unquenchable and convinced
confidence starts the alarm bells ringing. The studied detachment and
caution of scientific and rational attitudes are being thrown to the winds
here. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">Jeremy
continues to lay on the religious archetypes with a trowel as he goes on to
describe in strong terms what I, as a Christian, would call sin (That word with
the “I” in the middle) and its effects: He tells us that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We are so
brutally competitive, selfish and aggressive that human life has become all but
unbearable. </i>Yes, I think I can just about agree with that!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">Jeremy’s
last sentence in my quote above alludes to his solution to humanity's rampantly divisive behaviour. Using the language of psychology, he hints that the solution is also scientific by saying that the whole human race needs
<i>psychologically</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> rehabilitating. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>He continues with his melodramatic tone by assuring us that this rehabilitation will mean <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everyone’s life is transformed</i>! Gasp! But will a bit of psychological
tinkering & rehab be the <i>holy grail solution</i> which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">heals us and fixes us up forever</i>? In fact are
there enough psychoanalysts in the world with the level of skill to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fix us up</i>? I think we need more details here!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">Let’s
face it, Jeremy's demeanor is that of a modern-day <i>Scientific Apostle of Salvation </i>and this appeals to those recrudescent religious archetypes we find
in our hearts. In fact, he seems to have succeeded in planting the faith in quite a few
people; enough to form the World Transformation Movement, a strongly self-publishing movement which leaves me with the impression that it is a sales organization rather
than<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a scientific think-tank. Well, if the WTM is chiefly about advertisement then the self-praising sales talk is understandable; but
that doesn’t amount to a recommendation. *<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><o:p> ***</o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">JEREMY:</span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Exactly Craig. So, to start at the
beginning, I know everyone listening is living with the belief—well it’s what
we were all taught at school and are told in every documentary—that humans’
competitive, selfish and aggressive behavior is due to us having savage,
must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals have. Certainly, while
left-wing thinkers do claim we have some selfless, cooperative instincts, they
also say we have this selfish, competitive ‘animal’ side, which Karl Marx
limited to such basic needs as sex, food, shelter and clothing. I mean, our
conversations are saturated with this belief, with comments like: ‘We are
programmed by our genes to try to dominate others and be a winner in the battle
of life’; and ‘Our preoccupation with sexual conquest is due to our primal
instinct to sow our seeds’; and ‘Men behave abominably because their bodies are
flooded with must reproduce-their-genes-promoting testosterone’; and ‘We want a
big house because we are innately territorial’; and ‘Fighting and war is just
our deeply-rooted combative animal nature expressing itself’.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">CRAIG:</span></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">
Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve understood is the reason for our competitive and
aggressive nature—that we have brutally competitive, survival-of-the-fittest
instincts, which we are always having to try to restrain or civilise or try to
control as best we can; I mean that’s what I was taught in school<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">MY COMMENT</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">: Speak for yourselves chaps! My
schooling was long enough ago for me to not be taught any significant evolutionary theory
at school. And when I got into higher education (A levels and beyond) I
specialized in maths, physics, chemistry and computing. So, I didn’t start grappling
with evolutionary texts until quite late in life. For example, I read the book <i>Sociobiology: The Whisperings Within</i> (David Barash) and <i>The Blind Watchmaker</i> (Richard Dawkins) when I was in my
thirties, In these books I heard about the selfish gene and how even altruism was a manifestation
of this selfishness. On top of that I had also pondered those survival of the
fittest notions as promoted by Social Darwinists such as we find among the fascists
and Nazis. I assume that it is this sort of thing which Jeremy is referring to in his
first sentence. But by the time I was seriously considering these topics not
only<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was I already a Christian but
predating that, I believed I had located the core problem with human nature. Let
me explain…<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">I
can remember a time at first-school when I would walk around the playground by
myself convinced that those other young human beings were robots without feelings –
it took time for it to sink in that that wasn’t true. It took me time to sample
human behaviour sufficiently for me to realize that their behaviour was entirely consistent
with they too being conscious beings and that they were not just some kind of façade like an
unfeeling computer simulation: This was the awful discovery that they had
pains, pleasures and fears like myself. Obviously, this didn’t mean that I then
started experiencing other people’s conscious feelings; their first-person
perspective remained hidden: Rather via an extrapolation of my own feelings I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">inferred </i>(but did not feel) other people’s
first-person perspective. It’s what I called in later life an empathic
extrapolation or empathic construction. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">Therein lay the rub: That I had at last acquired the ability to empathize certainly
didn’t mean I would necessarily act on it in a morally acceptable way: I didn't suddenly become free of the temptation of putting myself at the centre of my
universe; after all I didn’t feel others feelings, I only inferred them and consequently it was too easy to ignore those other first-person perspectives all around me and get on with my
own life in a very self-centred and selfish way; frankly, that is how my inner nature is skewed even today. I had the choice of affecting
other people’s pains and pleasures for either good or bad, but there was no automatic switch which suddenly turned me from a naturally self-centered person
to an unselfish one; choice, especially the potential for bad self-centered
choices, loomed large: If I kept my self well insulated from the social world around me, I
wouldn’t even hear about those feeling other beings. In short, I had discovered “sin”; the
word with “I” in the middle. So, when Christianity came along and told me I was
a sinner I said, “Of course I’m a sinner!”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This personal discovery needed no evolutionary theory about that competitive
struggle in the survival of the fittest or teaching about the selfish
gene. My first-person perspective meant that I was always tempted to choose self-first
and neglect others; As Saint Paul said in Romans 7:14-20:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><i><span class="text Rom-7-14" face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" id="en-NIV-28106" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"><span class="versenum" style="display: inline; font-weight: 700; line-height: normal; position: relative; top: auto; vertical-align: text-top;">14 </span>We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.</span><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"> </span><span class="text Rom-7-15" face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" id="en-NIV-28107" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"><span class="versenum" style="display: inline; font-weight: 700; line-height: normal; position: relative; top: auto; vertical-align: text-top;">15 </span>I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.</span><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"> </span><span class="text Rom-7-16" face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" id="en-NIV-28108" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"><span class="versenum" style="display: inline; font-weight: 700; line-height: normal; position: relative; top: auto; vertical-align: text-top;">16 </span>And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.</span><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"> </span><span class="text Rom-7-17" face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" id="en-NIV-28109" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"><span class="versenum" style="display: inline; font-weight: 700; line-height: normal; position: relative; top: auto; vertical-align: text-top;">17 </span>As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.</span><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"> </span><span class="text Rom-7-18" face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" id="en-NIV-28110" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"><span class="versenum" style="display: inline; font-weight: 700; line-height: normal; position: relative; top: auto; vertical-align: text-top;">18 </span>For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.</span><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"> </span><span class="text Rom-7-19" face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" id="en-NIV-28111" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"><span class="versenum" style="display: inline; font-weight: 700; line-height: normal; position: relative; top: auto; vertical-align: text-top;">19 </span>For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.</span><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"> </span><span class="text Rom-7-20" face="system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, Arial" id="en-NIV-28112" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"><span class="versenum" style="display: inline; font-weight: 700; line-height: normal; position: relative; top: auto; vertical-align: text-top;">20 </span>Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">That sums up my experience of the power of the self. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">The information in our genes is the recipe,
which when baked in the right environment of the womb, generates what ultimately
turns out to be a humanoid structure with that private first-person perspective of
consciousness. (I have made some guesses as to what physical conditions might be required to give rise to first-person consciousness; <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1abt323tLUmz6mvAkwZCiK-abE5k-ikIw/view?pli=1" target="_blank">see here</a>).
It is this first-person perspective which entails the potential for those bad self-centered
choices we identify as sin. It is irrelevant just how the population of
conscious beings has come about via the genetic code and some kind of evolution. Moreover,
it is irrelevant whether or not those physical processes which entail sentient choosing beings are deterministic; <i>choice </i>is <i>always </i>entailed
(<a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/search/label/Free%20Will%20%26%20Determinism" target="_blank">See my posts on free-will and determinism</a>). We cannot escape <i>choice</i> and choice opens<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the possibility of choosing self at the
expense of other selves. The genes & evolution are just mathematical generators; they
don’t rid or excuse the final human product of the responsibility of choice and the potential to sin - that is, to make selfish choices. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">What
may be confusing Jeremy and his followers is that the objects of
scientific study are conventionally described purely in the language of the
third person; that is,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">as if there is no
such thing as the first-person experiencer and observer of those objects described by science. This linguistic trick has confused
many, so much so in fact that some people have even taken onboard the absurd idea that
there is no such thing as consciousness; these people have read the third person language of science far too literally. <i>The irony is that the touchstone of
reality for the objects of science is that they deliver observation,</i></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><i> </i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>conscious observation, enabling those hypothesized objects to be tested for reality</i>. The reality of those highly
regular laws is underwritten if they reify a rational ordered conscious
experience. The reality of a cosmos which doesn’t deliver this world of
organised experience is under question. Exactly how those laws create our first-person experience we are still discovering, but it seems that the potential for
temptation and sin is built into the cosmic physical regime because that regime generates the first-person experience, re</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">gardless of whether or not we’ve been taught about competitive survival instincts being written into our genes. Summarizing then, my conclusion is that Jeremy and his followers, in spite of</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">their confident and over-hyped sales talk, have got their diagnosis of the human predicament fundamentally wrong.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Well,
be all that as it may,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">what about the WTM's </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">proposed treatment of the human condition? That will be my consideration in the next parts of this series: Does humanity, as the WTM suggest, simply need to have some psychological rehab and
then its problems will all be <i>fixed up forever</i>? The straight answer to
that, as we will see is “No!”. Moreover, compounding the problems of the human tendency
toward the self, as I hope to show, are some very significant epistemic issues concerning the physical & social constraints on the way we interrogate and form opinions about the world we are in: This makes harmonizing our opinions far from straight forward This is why in my estimation we need the accountable open government of democratic forums. </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Psychological rehab isn’t going to make those challenges go away, because
again, <i>psychology isn’t able to change the status quo of the physical regime. </i></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><i> </i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: large;">Footnotes: </span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">* It can be fairly objected that the Christian sub-culture of which I am part is all too often given to the hype and bigotry of certainty. True. In my case however my faith is less than certain: I take epistemic responsibility for having pieced together my own sense-making explanatory structure around meaning and purpose - being a clay vessel myself (2 Cor 4:7-9) whose epistemic technique and morality are flawed I acknowledge the strong possibility of error and that my faith is subject to futility. It's an interesting paradox that Christianity, which is so clear on human imperfection, should consequently have a self-referencing conflict, an almost self-undermining effect. Christianity has clauses that lead faith to doubt itself and indulge in self-examination (2 Cor 13:5). But if there is a Biblical God why worry? He is the giver of faith no matter how small and therefore </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">we should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think (Romans 12:3). But faith as small as a mustard seed means nothing is impossible. (Mat 17:20)</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: large;">** Hitler lived for the evil Nazi ideology, Donald Trump's ideology is ..... Donald Trump. </span></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-28066896095011941152023-10-05T06:44:00.026-12:002023-11-03T05:33:17.880-12:00This is hyper-hype with knobs on. Part 1<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiZ3RWXTN9vGUFRQp9H0LqmcJR3d_A44en2SmhheG5gZTfSbYju9hI_cIibVwGj8yEer_oXa3NTDwDKBJCVR35ugbbPm5Hw5V9YCJxNU9Au5ZZkBSm8mkA6TuKxu5-hMjYemw4HnH3qEfZy0mbEJe_lIWrGyLdacd70EkapioFU6CimGjrxJ6jD5g" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="500" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiZ3RWXTN9vGUFRQp9H0LqmcJR3d_A44en2SmhheG5gZTfSbYju9hI_cIibVwGj8yEer_oXa3NTDwDKBJCVR35ugbbPm5Hw5V9YCJxNU9Au5ZZkBSm8mkA6TuKxu5-hMjYemw4HnH3qEfZy0mbEJe_lIWrGyLdacd70EkapioFU6CimGjrxJ6jD5g=w283-h400" width="283" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: large;"><b>The World Transformation Movement's "Bible" can't be accused of cautious understatement! Trouble is, "self-praise is no recommendation</b>".</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith has made what he believes to be an important proposal about the nature of the human predicament, although <i>an assertion of fact</i> rather than <i>a</i> <i>proposal </i>is more in keeping with the level of confidence one finds among the aficionados of the movement he has spawned, the so-called<i> World Transformation Movement</i>. Griffith has received such enthusiastic accolades from his followers that it's almost as if he is some kind of religious guru ushering in another plan of salvation, decisively addressing the human predicament. Griffith's followers clearly believe that as far as the meaning of life, the universe and everything is concerned, they've found it! In fact, to be frank, <i>The World Transformation Movement</i> makes Donald Trump's MAGA movement look like a quite humble outfit in comparison! </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Given this hyper-hype, which a cynic like me instinctively distrusts, I thought I'd better take a closer look at <i>The World Transformation Movement.</i> To this end <a href="https://www.humancondition.com/?video=video-the-interview" target="_blank">I listened to an interview of Griffith by one of his fans, Craig Conway</a>. This interview has been published as a PDF and can be downloaded from the same link. The interview bills itself as follows:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">THE Interview </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">That Solves The </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Human Condition And </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Saves The World!</span></i></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><b>"The most important interview of all time!"</b></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Gasp! Wow! But there's a lot more of that kind of sensational claim from whence it came. Underneath the title we read this:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The transcript of acclaimed
British actor and broadcaster Craig Conway’s </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">astonishing, world-changing and
world-saving 2020 interview with Australian </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">biologist Jeremy Griffith about
his book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Condition—which presents the
completely redeeming, uplifting and healing </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">understanding of the core mystery
and problem about human behaviour of our </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">so-called ‘good and
evil’-stricken human condition—thus ending all the conflict </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">and suffering in human life at
its source, and providing the now urgently needed </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">road map for the complete
rehabilitation and transformation of our lives and world!</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Craig doesn't mince his words when praising Jeremy in his introduction to the interview:</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>“The turmoil and trauma of the pandemic has only amplified the now dire need in the world for a deeper, lasting solution to all the chaos and suffering in human life. And this deeper enduring solution is actually what this biologist I’m about to interview is going to provide us with. He is going to do it by explaining and solving the underlying cause of all the suffering, which is our ‘good and evil’- stricken so-called human condition.......</i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">So I don’t care what you’re
doing, you need to stop and listen to this interview. In fact, </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I don’t care what you do for the
rest of your life, if you can you just need to listen to this!</span></i><i>.”</i> </span></div><div><i><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">OK, you might expect an actor & broadcaster to lay it on with trowel but, surprisingly, so does academic Professor Harry Prosen, former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association: </span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>“I have no doubt Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation
of the human condition in his book FREEDOM: The End Of
The Human Condition is the holy grail of insight we have
sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human
race. This is the book we have been waiting for, it is
the book that saves the world.” </i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In fact, according to Craig Conway Griffith's work has:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>.... attracted</i></span></span><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> the
support of such eminent scientists as the former President </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">of the Canadian Psychiatric
Association Professor Harry Prosen, the esteemed ecologist </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Professor Stuart Hurlbert,
Australia’s Templeton Prize-winning biologist Professor Charles </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Birch, the Former President of
the Primate Society of Great Britain Dr David Chivers, </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Nobel Prize winning physicist
Stephen Hawking, as well as other distinguished thinkers </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">such as Sir Laurens van der Post—</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The accolades just keep coming and don't stop. In the interview's PDF there are two pages of quotes from a variety of big names who have been blown away by Griffiths work. Here's a sample: </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">‘In all of written history there
are only 2 or 3 people who’ve been able to think on this scale </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">about the human condition.’ Dr
Anthony Barnett, Prof. of Zoology</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">‘FREEDOM is the book that saves
the world…cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Prof. Harry Prosen, Pres.
Canadian Psychiatric Assn.</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">‘I am stunned and honored to have
lived to see the coming of “Darwin II”’, </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Prof. Stuart Hurlbert, esteemed
ecologist</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">‘Living without this
understanding is like living back in the stone age, that’s how massive </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">the change it brings is!’ Prof.
Karen Riley, clinical pharmacist</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">‘Frankly, I am blown away by the
ground-breaking significance of this work.’ </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Dr Patricia Glazebrook, Prof. of
Philosophy</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;">‘I’ve no doubt a fascinating
television series could be made based upon this.’ Sir David Attenborough</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">***</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">So, I thought, I've just got to look into this phenomenon especially as it is making such comprehensive claims. Over the course of several posts, I'll be looking at the interview in more detail. bearing in mind the following copyright notice....</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">COPYRIGHT NOTICE
This booklet is protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaty provisions. Our Terms of Use
(which are located at <a href="http://www.humancondition.com/terms-of-use" target="_blank">www.humancondition.com/terms-of-use</a>) apply to the materials in this booklet. You
may reproduce any of the material in this booklet on or in another website, blog, podcast, newsletter, book,
document, etc, provided that you do not modify the material reproduced, you include the following notice
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the internet, and any reproduction of our material not considered appropriate or properly contexted by us will
not be allowed. All rights are reserved.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">I don't get the feeling that the WTM are afraid of an open accountable discussion of their ideas and they don't come over as a sect with something to hide. In contrast I have had contact with some religious sects that are so controlling of their content that they are inclined to threaten authors critical of their content with slapp suits. But, I'm not going to read all the legal small print that hedges WTM content: I've got better things to do; like for example probing the meaning of life, the universe and everything. If the WTM have got a legal quibble with my analyses the onus is on them to come and find me and tell me why. For a long time, I've quoted the North American Intelligent Design movement's content and never had any trouble from them even though some of those may well be aggressive right-wing AR15 wielding Trumpites (& Putinites?). One of my big advantages is that my low profile keeps me from being noticed or being ranked as notable. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">***</span></i></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">Well, I've listened to the interview and wasn't entirely blown away by it. In fact, I found Griffith's ideas to be not entirely coherent on the subjects of the nature of consciousness, intelligence, survivability, the freedom zero-sum game and above all it didn't take seriously enough humanity's epistemic challenges. And that's without mentioning that bugbear of all humanity, Sin, the concept which is bound up with freedom and status and which ominously has an "I" in the middle. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">I must confess I'm just a little bit cynical & suspicious of the revolutionary hype which comes left, right and center from ideologues who are all too human in their flaws. As a Christain I'm also all too aware of the triumphalism that so often afflicts my own sub-culture, but even so, many Christians are aware that their beliefs come with many unsolved problems and enigmas and would be very embarrassed by hype as strong as we see coming from the WTM. Christianity hasn't swept the board of problems; rather it points, hopefully, in the right direction. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">Typically, the WTM brings to mind all those false dawns of revolutionary promise promoted by starry eyed enthusiasts. Sir Kenneth Clark's quote about some of the leaders of the French revolution is a sobering warning in this connection: Viz: <i>".....they suffered from that</i><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> most terrible of all delusions; they believed themselves
to be virtuous". </i><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">(Civilization, The fallacies of Hope)</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">Let's hope that the WTM are self-critical enough to have reservations about their own philosophy. This kind of movement, however, does tell us something important about humanity: Human beings are not like the beasts of the field who just accept their lot as a purposeless secular given; that is, that the cosmos is the way that it is, and you either like it or lump it and to hell with a probing curiosity as to meaning of it all. The WTM phenomenon tells us that when something purports to be of depth, seriousness and meaning, people, even secular people, don't need much encouragement to drink it in. It shows that underneath it all people are yearning for that "something" which addresses their deep existential yearnings for meaning & purpose. This may well be evidence of the "God shaped hole" which I think C S Lewis spoke of. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">But all in all, this kind of thing is just up my street: It impacts so many of the subjects I've explored: Viz: Evolution, Intelligent design, Artificial intelligence, Epistemology, Cosmology, Computation, Randomness, Complex adaptive systems, Systems theory, Theology, Creation & Fall, Social status studies, Marx vs Smith and above all the nature of Sin & salvation. I have a feeling I'm going to enjoy this.........</span></p></div><p></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-21192063204788842942023-09-19T21:08:00.006-12:002023-09-21T03:29:15.732-12:00NAID pundit William Dembski on AI<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2zd8bFE8-Oaal3xvKfjUxXABfbbOUzr8nbWi0pT2KU5DfypyLdWXmE5fAc2RLb4XDjtAHjWBRkyPJQ60wTPg6Ku-Q_u3TrNIiM7We5TsIxACnOLehYXvi8bIcPF8eUzrbk1AyQfE53P7hCcaeCBlg7QLtLHpkdnhKP5kVsxRbmP78RGpg75Y2uQ/s300/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2zd8bFE8-Oaal3xvKfjUxXABfbbOUzr8nbWi0pT2KU5DfypyLdWXmE5fAc2RLb4XDjtAHjWBRkyPJQ60wTPg6Ku-Q_u3TrNIiM7We5TsIxACnOLehYXvi8bIcPF8eUzrbk1AyQfE53P7hCcaeCBlg7QLtLHpkdnhKP5kVsxRbmP78RGpg75Y2uQ/s1600/download.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Is AI taking off!</i></p><p style="text-align: justify;">I notice that North American Intelligent Design guru William Dembski has been recently writing about Artificial Intelligence on his blog - see these links:</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://billdembski.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-impressive-in-real-time/">ChatGPT Is Becoming Increasingly Impressive in Real Time – Bill Dembski</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"> <a href="https://billdembski.com/artificial-intelligence/inference-best-explanation-chatgpt-vs-bard/">Inferring the Best Explanation via Artificial Intelligence – Bill Dembski</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://billdembski.com/science-and-technology/chatgpt-on-intelligent-design-and-ool/">ChatGPT on Intelligent Design and the Origin of Life – Bill Dembski</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">One of these articles also appeared on the NAID website "Evolution News"; see <a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2023/09/inferring-the-best-explanation-via-artificial-intelligence/" target="_blank">here</a>. From a quick perusal of his articles, it seems that Dembski is impressed by ChatGPT and now has a high view of AI possibilities. Like myself he would probably maintain that AI is only a simulation and has no consciousness*, but I'd be interested to know if like myself he would be prepared to accept that human intelligence can be simulated algorithmically. If so that would set him apart from <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/08/north-american-intelligent-designs.html" target="_blank">NAID guru Eric Hedin</a> who appears to poo poo any thought that AI can be anything other than a glorified "printer" that churns out and at best rearranges information that has been generated by the "real" intelligence of human beings. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">I think I'll be having a closer look at Dembski's posts.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">* To generate consciousness we would have to use matter in the way the biological brain uses matter - <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1abt323tLUmz6mvAkwZCiK-abE5k-ikIw/view?pli=1" target="_blank">see here for my guesses on this subject</a></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-4327377713007268882023-08-26T08:30:00.029-12:002023-09-11T01:38:07.480-12:00Climate Change Discussion: Climate Alarmism vs. Climate Complacency<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimXr2YS0QtNmVoqsLFKc76PtyfuF2RUs5_gQq19W3HguFY0sZyOCgoVjCYCYOPHDj2a0556mIx0ysGgrtt9Q7IonVVD4okQAsFl2SI1-pR-kKZjJhppUBMVPiKuInIcDh1e4lVeH6f9C6OWh5HO1BHiW9AiuuCx7YDxSjK4BdfAdVf2ueINJBY7g/s2288/DSCN2695.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1712" data-original-width="2288" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimXr2YS0QtNmVoqsLFKc76PtyfuF2RUs5_gQq19W3HguFY0sZyOCgoVjCYCYOPHDj2a0556mIx0ysGgrtt9Q7IonVVD4okQAsFl2SI1-pR-kKZjJhppUBMVPiKuInIcDh1e4lVeH6f9C6OWh5HO1BHiW9AiuuCx7YDxSjK4BdfAdVf2ueINJBY7g/w400-h299/DSCN2695.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Me standing on a granite tor on Bodmin Moor in 2006. <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2006/10/contingency-conjecture.html" target="_blank">The climate</a></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2006/10/contingency-conjecture.html" target="_blank">has weathered these fantastic forms over millions of years</a>. </i></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">I recently had an email discussion on the subject of climate change with <a href="http://philosophicalmuser.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">James Knight</a> over a period of a few weeks.<a href="http://philosophicalmuser.blogspot.com/2023/07/james-knight-tim-reeves-discuss-climate.html" target="_blank"> James published an edited copy of the contents of this discussion on his blog</a> and then added further comments of his own. This means that the email discussion went through five iterations, with James' edited and supplemented copy on his blog being the fifth iteration. Of course, should I take up the challenge and respond to his blog post with its extra content then that would be the sixth iteration. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">I thought I'd better make available the full original discussion (i.e. up to the 4th iteration) which can be <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_PP3BhiKEQufcy8Yh2Ei7rmwBs9kgoVp/view?usp=drive_link" target="_blank">accessed here.</a> At some stage I might get back to James in reply to his fifth iteration. However, I have to confess my interest in the subject began to wane as I find physics and mathematics far more exciting and, if truth be known, much easier to handle. Climatology by itself is an interesting subject as it's all about systems theory, but it is the theory of very complex systems. Climatologists are respected scientists but no doubt the sheer complexity of the system they are dealing with makes it difficult to arrive at firm conclusions. But that's nothing compared to the chaos of politico-economic thought which deals with how humanity should react to climatology. It is here that huge vested interests and valued judgments make themselves felt as left and right extremists exploit a climatological scare story to agitate for social unrest with the aim of realizing their particular socio-political vision. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">James often uses the term "<i>climate alarmism</i>", an emotive term used by those skeptical of the predictions about dangerous levels of climate change. <i>Climate alarmism</i> as an emotive term is unlikely to be a monopole, and so in order to express its opposite pole I have coined the equally emotive term <i>climate complacency.</i> A less emotive term is <i>climate concern.</i> But from the perspective of the politically polarized extremes <i>climate concern</i> looks to be either a form of <i>climate alarmism</i> or <i>climate complacency </i>depending on which polarity floats your boat. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">At one point in the discussion James said I had constructed a strawman of his position. I'm very glad he saw it like that because that means he didn't take ownership of these strawmen.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Nevertheless, it was a fruitful discussion and, many thanks to James, got me out of my intellectual comfort zone for a while: I publish the introduction to Iteration No 4 below. It remains unfinished business as far as I'm concerned and iteration 6 calls. But things are moving so fast with the atmosphere that I have a feeling the climate itself will have the last word! </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">INTRODUCTION</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The eruption of Santorini
circa 1200 BC probably help bring the otherwise rich Minoan civilisation on
Crete to its knees. That they were quantitatively rich was no help in this one
off disaster. What they needed was to be <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the right kind of rich</i></b>: that is, to
be rich in the kind of technology that would help proof them against the tsunami
caused by the Minion eruption. Likewise a blind libertarian market may find
itself helpless in the face of one-off environmental challenges because with a
sample of zero <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a blinkered market</i></b> learns nothing and simply isn’t ready with
the right technology. Efficiency in current technological needs will be an
irrelevance.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In my opinion a realistic
portion of the capital generated by the market must be invested in blues skies
research which looks for possible threats to civilisation (e.g. Rogue asteroids,
super volcanoes, tsunamis etc.) and investigates how to respond to them. Hence,
the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">quantitative</i></b>
riches generated by free trade must be supplemented by <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qualitative</i></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>technological
riches which facilitate <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">proactive environmental control</i>. </b>Proactive
environmental control<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>entails <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">extending</i></b>
the human environmental bubble rather than sitting passively in the bubble we
already control thinking that as long as we have stacks of cash to defend that
bubble we are OK. But in actual fact the history of human civilisation is one
of proactively <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">extending</i></b> the environmental bubble humanity controls; this
started with the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I have little
optimism in a wait-and-see policy which hopes that the unforetold riches of the
future will make civilisation environment proof in the face of threatening
one-off environmental challenges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The libertarian
blinkers must come off and a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">passive market</i></b> must become a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">proactive
one</i></b>; that is, one that is aware of the technological changes needed for
the next stage in the extension of civilisation’s environmental bubble. Therefore
the market must have a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qualitative vision</i></b> toward the end of
proactively extending environmental control and not just a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">quantitative vision</i> of being rich in the abstract.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">A major worry I
have about capitalism is its proneness to the social cancers of Marxism & Fascism,
products of the social discontent it seems to generate. We must view the market
as a tool of humanity and not an unaccountable process that humanity must
submit to at all costs: Therein lies the problem, however: Humanity <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doesn’t readily submit</i> to a blinkered
market and the result is social disaffection and discontent. It may therefore be
necessary to cool the market down to help freeze out the inequalities, resentments
and alienation that are fertile ground for the growth of Marxism and Fascism.
It’s all but useless to attempt to convince the discontented, the disaffected
and the alienated that the capitalism of the past has made them as rich as they
are currently: Yes, in times past they might have worn rags, suffered from cold
and gone hungry, but moderns who can only get a cut out of societal wealth by going
down to the foodbank and get help to pay bills don’t feel rich; instead they
may feel humiliated by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one way
dependency</i> – let’s remember here that once the base of Maslow’s hierarchy
is secured the feeling of being rich is a sense of well-being<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>conveyed by one’s position <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>relative to the rest of society. </span><a href="http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/search/label/status"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In short feeling <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rich</i> is about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">social status</i></span></a><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">; <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that is how one<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>measures up against the people of society as a
whole. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Therefore, it is also futile to
tell the poor that free-for-all capitalism will make their children’s children
stinking rich.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Of course this
doesn’t mean we should dispose of capitalism and the market but it does mean
that political & social solutions are needed in order to stabilise an
otherwise socially rickety system which could find itself teetering on the edge
of the Marxist and/or fascist revolutionary abyss.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Humanity has a
tense relationship with its systems of government; probably because government
is at best hard put to it to promote justice and wealth amo<u>n</u>g its citizens,
and at worst is the seat of despotic power. It is no surprise therefore that both
Marxists and libertarians seek to replace government with a folksy idyll where
the trappings of state and government are minimised. But the Marxist and libertarian
way, after the overthrow of the status quo are liable to leave a power vacuum that
would attract autocratic rule. </span><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2020/07/marx-vs-smith_30.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Marxism and libertarianism may
start out by going in the opposite directions of collectivism vs individualism</span></a><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> but they end up
arriving at the same place – the dictatorship of the few.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The question of the
role of market and government in the face of threatening environmental changes
seems just as murky as when I started considering it. Yes there are lots uncertainties
and hand waving associated with those climate models, but the uncertainties and
hand waving are even greater for those who are trying to work out the implications
of the climate projections for the notoriously difficult world of politico-socio-economic
policy adoption, whether those policies be to impose emission targets or to
adopt live-and-let-live libertarianism or, which seems most likely, something
in between. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333399; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: medium;">Relevant links:</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Minoan eruption - Wikipedia</span></a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><a href="https://www.templeton.org/news/welcoming-the-end-of-our-world?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=PM&utm_campaign=news+&utm_content=2022_JTF_ContentPromotion_Traffic&fbclid=IwAR3BLVDqL_V1MPh1EJOEyQvYKeK1T2QHwv6DRZLCnbx_aWg_1ashyOGGIhU"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Welcoming the End of Our World -
John Templeton Foundation</span></a></p><p></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-74656361264222676962023-08-13T07:54:00.056-12:002023-08-28T06:04:56.532-12:00North American Intelligent Design's response to my 27 June & 2 July posts. Part 2<p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdplOW6DVGXPC4GZjqlh5Cin-rBVoDWDtEocnoVLploZNnovIsUJ9t35bqBLTD2kAalDt1oF9UW0CZK9vVKqwoQuvUgz9QpIaWSUFRSQ2M_SjYtMQsyLXZMIsbylbDNCwOM0XEK7WC8akLJqxod3TtA8AtWVMe6kUmnWMqqnimFfMzq1_B10Cecw/s1200/image1143924x.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdplOW6DVGXPC4GZjqlh5Cin-rBVoDWDtEocnoVLploZNnovIsUJ9t35bqBLTD2kAalDt1oF9UW0CZK9vVKqwoQuvUgz9QpIaWSUFRSQ2M_SjYtMQsyLXZMIsbylbDNCwOM0XEK7WC8akLJqxod3TtA8AtWVMe6kUmnWMqqnimFfMzq1_B10Cecw/w400-h210/image1143924x.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The default thinking of the North American ID community leaves us feeling that it's a choice between</i><i> Intelligent design and Evolution. But that science's accounts are effectively <b>succinct descriptions</b> which exploit cosmic organization means that the question is not a choice of opposites as the NAID community and some </i><i>atheists make out. In one sense there is no such thing as "natural forces".</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div> <div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In this post I'm going to comment on the following post on "<i>Evolution News</i>" by Eric Hedin:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2023/07/physics-information-loss-and-intelligent-design/?_gl=1*eoesd8*_ga*MTAyMzI5ODIzMC4xNjgxNDY2MDg2*_ga_9D89KMSK5X*MTY4ODcxOTc3MC45MC4wLjE2ODg3MTk3NzAuMC4wLjA.&_ga=2.225168410.1445858629.1688719770-1023298230.1681466086" target="_blank">Physics, Information Loss, and Intelligent Design</a><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">This is a continuation of <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/07/naid-responses-relevant-to-my-last-post.html" target="_blank">my last post.</a> which followed up the posts <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/06/for-trumpteenth-time-dualistic-ids.html" target="_blank">here</a> & <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/07/update-dualistic-ids-quixotic-quest.html" target="_blank">here</a>. It addresses in particular Eric Hedin's claim to what he believes to be a generalized version of the second law of thermodynamics based on quantum decoherence. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>ERIC HEDIN </b><i>In an earlier article, I showed
that information ratchets do not exist in nature. The most that any mechanistic
system can do is to reproduce the information already available within the
system. Printing presses reproduce the typeset information placed in the
mechanism by human operators. ChatGPT simply accesses and rearranges
information originated by humans and uploaded on the Internet. No new
information is produced in either case.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In a recent article, I introduced the physical concept of the generalized second law of thermodynamics, as a governing principle consistent with the Law of Conservation of Information, which William Dembski formulated with the claim that natural causes cannot increase complex specified information in a closed system over time. Here, I’ll seek to provide an explanation of the physics behind the generalized second law — a rationale for why natural processes destroy information.</span></i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p><b>MY COMMENT: </b>As we saw in my last post Hedin did not succeed in showing that information ratchets do not exist in the created order; part of his problem was that he didn't tell us what he meant by "information". However, in the above it looks as though he's thinking of the so-called principle of the "conservation of information". Accordingly, he's of the opinion that unless the mysteries of intelligent agency are invoked God's creation can't create information (although Hedin believes information can be destroyed). Heuristically speaking this rule of thumb often works, but it is not always true; that is, as a catch-all fundamental principle the conservation of information is false as we shall see.</o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p>The mechanistic systems we are familiar with do in fact create information in the compelling common sense meaning of the term. A variety of natural systems create complex chaotic patterns whose elements are new to the cosmos and what would by any common sense meaning of the term be new information to human beings. Systems that generate random sequences are by the Shannon definition of the term creating information all the time (See part 1).</o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">It is misleading to claim that computer systems merely rearrange information: They can in a very compelling sense do far more than that: Starting with the relatively simple pattern of an algorithm and given enough time and space very complex patterns can be generated. As far as the cosmos is concerned these patterns may well be entirely new forms: that is, new information. Trivially it could be claimed that for deterministic algorithms the information eventually generated is implicit in the starting conditions: But because any given pattern has at least one simple algorithm which will generate it given enough time and space, then on that basis it would trivially follow that no finite pattern (including finite stretches of <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?pli=1&resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw" target="_blank">disordered patterns</a>) would classify as new information! What we have then is a situation where, whilst it is true that something isn't coming from nothing, nevertheless a lot of something is coming out of relatively little. Ergo, mechanical and so-called "natural forces" create information. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">My conclusion is that it is a misrepresentation to claim that neither nature nor computers are simply "printing" information they already have and at best are tweaking its arrangement a little. But if we allow nature and computers to tweak information, then we can ask ourselves what would be the result of billions of tweaks? The result would in fact be completely new configurations reified from the platonic realm: That is new information, especially so if we are starting from bland and simple initial conditions and relatively small algorithms.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">In deterministic generating systems, natural and computational, the information generated can be regarded as implicit from the beginning in the sense that</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> it exists in unreified form in the platonic realm. Hence this implicit information needs to be reified before it can be claimed to be part the real world, and in that sense the information is being created. Natural systems and computer systems are a means doing this. But nothing comes from nothing and these information creating sources have their origins <i>and continued sustenance </i>in God and/or human intelligence. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">As I said in <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/06/for-trumpteenth-time-dualistic-ids.html" target="_blank">this post </a>and <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeWTJuelZ4eHlhcjQ/view?pli=1&resourcekey=0-ACae-JUOEE5wz8UbBiTf4w" target="_blank">proved here,</a> in parallel computation information is created according to:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i>Ic = Smin + log (Tmin)</i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Where <i>Ic</i> is the configurational information content, <i>Smin</i> is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration with a minimum number of execution steps of <i>Tmin</i>. As I have said before it is the slow generation of information with time (The "log" term above) which has given rise to the opinion that information cannot be generated by natural and mechanical means. But the above relation only applies to <i>parallel processing</i>; if the generating system employs a system of <i>expanding parallelism</i> (e.g. a quantum computer) such exponential systems make short work of the log term, a term which then becomes a term linear in time. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I will be examining Hedin's so-called <i>generalised second law of thermodynamics </i>below. This proves to be nothing but hand-waving. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>ERIC HEDIN:<i> </i></b><i>What about the less physical
concept of information? How can we physically explain the relentless loss of
information by natural processes? Information seems to be a nonphysical
concept, but in our universe, it is stored in specific arrangements of physical
states of matter. An intelligent mind can recognize specific arrangements of
matter (such as molecules of ink that form letters on a page) that convey a
meaningful message. In a different context, biochemists can recognize
particular sequences of nucleotide bases in a genome that code for a functional
protein. <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p><b>MY COMMENT: </b>Firstly, as we saw in part 1, we need not talk vaguely about arrangements of matter which an intelligent mind can recognize as meaningful; Hedin is hand-waving here. The configurations of matter we are thinking of have a very practical meaning: Viz: they are <i>ordered systems</i> which are capable of self-maintenance and self-multiplication; in that sense the functionality we are thinking of is a clear concept. However, one thing we can agree on is this: Such configurations are at once both complex and highly organised; which means that as a class those self-perpetuating organic structures have a very low statistical weight and therefore a very low unconditional probability. <i>If our cosmos is only a parallel processor,</i> then such configurations would never come about in the life-time of the cosmos if <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/09/evolution-naked-chance.html" target="_blank">naked chance ruled.</a> To enhance the probability of such configurations to a practical level would require the contingency of the right kind of physical regime to raise the conditional probability of life to a practical level. <i>Where parallel processing is the norm the conservation of information does approximately hold. </i></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p>My affirmation that the conservation of probability is a good approximation in a parallel processing context doesn't necessarily come to the rescue of the NAIDs. The irony here is that the possibility of an omniscient omnipotent Creator/Designer leaves them with an unknown. For we couldn't put it past an </o:p></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">all-powerful all-knowing Deity to not have provisioned the cosmos with enough information to generate life with a high probability. <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/02/dembski-im-not-denying-evolutionary.html" target="_blank">As NAID William Dembski himself has shown, the conservation of information doesn't of itself rule out standard evolutionary gradualism</a>. We would be very presumptuous to be absolutely certain that the cosmos hasn't been divinely provisioned with the prerequisite information to generate life. But because the NAID community affect to keep up the gloss of being a scientific society and not a theological society their crypto-theism makes them uneasy in admitting the implications of Christian theism which posits at the outset, <i>a priori</i>, the existence of an all-powerful all-knowing Deity: The implications are that <i>some kind</i> of evolution may well have been reified from the platonic world into our cosmos.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">*** </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> In my first post of this two-part series, I wrote:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Consider this writer [Eric Hedin] on the NAID website "Evolution News"; he dreams of a principle (in fact he thinks it's been found!) which he refers to as the generalized version of the second law......<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">In Hedin's first post he doesn't explain this generalized version of the second law but in the post we are considering here he does attempt to explain it as follows:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>ERIC HEDIN:<i> </i></b><i>According to the traditional
second law, under the influence of natural processes, the surrounding
environment brings about a transfer of heat from hot to cold, or a mixing of
constituents, such as the mixing of molecules of perfume throughout the air of
the room. Natural processes will also cause a mixing of information-bearing
physical objects with the environment. In quantum computing research, this loss
of information to the surrounding environment results in what is known as
decoherence, meaning that “information has leaked into the environment in an
uncontrollable fashion.”</i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Linking Information and Observer: </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">All the information that can be
known by an observer about a system of any kind is contained within the quantum
mechanical wavefunction of the system. My apologies for bringing up quantum
mechanics, but its relevance here is that it serves as the link between the
information of a system (anything from a single atom to a complex biomolecule
to a macroscopic object) and an observer. Unless the wave function of the
system is completely isolated from any environmental influence, it will suffer
decoherence (loss of information) with the passage of time. In one sense, the
wavefunction spreads out into the environment, meaning that the observer will
have greater and greater uncertainty as to the state of the system as time goes
on. The physical interaction of atoms or photons uncompromisingly causes this
effect, with its resulting loss of information.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Undisturbed quantum systems settle to an<i> eigenstate.</i> An eigenstate is a kind of equilibrium or quasi-static wavefunction with a precise energy; it's analogous to a volume containing a gas which</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> eventually settles to a uniform & precise density and pressure. But when a quantum system in an eigenstate is disturbed (or "perturbed" as it is usually expressed) by interaction with a thermodynamic environment the "coherent" eigenstate becomes mixed with other possible eigenstates: The wavefunction then loses it stasis and becomes a mix of wavefunctions and is no longer stable; to use the standard terminology the original static wavefunction "decoheres". This decoherence is a particular problem in quantum computing which depends on the stasis of "qubit" eigenstates. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">There is an analogy here with a classical system of two ideal non-thermodynamic bodies orbiting one another in a perfect vacuum under the influence of classical gravity: For an ideal classical system with no thermodynamic randomness such a system will continue in the same state forever. But in the real world any ideal classical system is likely to be coupled to the "imperfect" world of thermodynamics and this linkage would mean the "ideal" system would then undergo perturbations and would randomly walk into another state, if only slowly; from a human point of view the error bars of the unknown then start to widen. These</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> error bars of human knowledge will continue to expand in the absence of </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">information updates</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">that pull us back into the know and keep the Gaussian error envelopes in the vicinity of the actual state of the system. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">The thing to note here is that we have assumed thermodynamics from the outset: Likewise the behaviour of quantum systems when in contact with a thermodynamic reality tells us no more than we already know; namely, that the world is thermodynamic and that if you want to preserve the integrity and of an array of binary eigenstates (= qubits) and stop the array becoming a mix of other eigenstates by keeping it isolated, you've got your work cut out: Like all real systems a qubit system loses its ideal state when in contact with the thermodynamic reality around it. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">But decoherence doesn't stop crystals forming or stop the reproductive systems of life working or stop the self-perpetuating systems of life from doing their job. The reason why is because these systems have <i>the physical analogue of information updates</i> that keep these systems within the requisite orbits of self-sustenance: The physical analogue of those information updates are the potential wells or interactional hooks/forces which have a strong tendency to keep ordered systems in place. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">In the above quote Hedin has talked about how a quantum system's interaction with a thermodynamic environment will entail a slow degradation of an observer's knowledge of that system. This is a misrepresentation. In fact, if the observer knows the form of the interactional perturbation, he can then infer how the new mixed wavefunction develops. So, as a consequence of a known perturbation the wavefunction has passed from one known form that is a single eigenstate to another known form that is a mix of a large number of eigenstates. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">All waves states, whether mixed or eigenstates, obey the uncertainty relation:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-r02yoUVX3jVsMx6PPETb6vZ1I84X86xTB1WAFG_sMMsG5LiWFbJBYoZLXwqAwqESEYbvSipbdN_akeCQObTb5mFZxsMeLPBdNeuz47-3u_zXZEpfd32T6xJrTzDcoFQzKalTSAgJK-Y2WfK3Qg77zorbUHTfNTlRmWPHLHOIZbjOB4nP24KykQ/s507/heisenberg-uncertainty-principle-formula.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="216" data-original-width="507" height="42" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-r02yoUVX3jVsMx6PPETb6vZ1I84X86xTB1WAFG_sMMsG5LiWFbJBYoZLXwqAwqESEYbvSipbdN_akeCQObTb5mFZxsMeLPBdNeuz47-3u_zXZEpfd32T6xJrTzDcoFQzKalTSAgJK-Y2WfK3Qg77zorbUHTfNTlRmWPHLHOIZbjOB4nP24KykQ/w200-h85/heisenberg-uncertainty-principle-formula.jpg" width="100" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">The square of a momentum value returns an energy value; if this energy value has the precise value pertaining to a single eigenstate then it implies that the magnitude of the corresponding momentum also has a precise value; that is the uncertainty in momentum magnitude is minimized. Therefore, from the uncertainty relation above it follows that under conditions of precise energy the uncertainty in position is maximized. So, when an isolated quantum system interacts with a thermodynamic system its momentum becomes more uncertain, but its position is more localized: In short, increasing certainty in position is traded for greater momentum/energy uncertainty. </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The lesson is that as a result of an interaction with a thermodynamic system loss of information about the exact energy of the quantum system is compensated by a gain in the information about position. In Hedin's quote above we see that to suite his polemic he has only talked about "loss of information" in energy/momentum but not balanced it with the corresponding and complementary gain in information about position. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><i>Pure quantum systems are reversible </i>and don't provide Hedin with a fundamental generalized version of the second law: That is, they cannot provide us with that well-know thermodynamic arrow of time where total entropy always increases.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> It is only the giveness of thermodynamic laws which provide the arrow of time. Moreover, as I've already remarked, in his reference to the loss of information from quantum systems Hedin has neglected to tell us that this is accompanied by a corresponding increase in information. Hedin is simply telling us something we already know about; namely, the effect of thermodynamic systems on quantum systems, systems that are constrained by the complementary uncertainty relation which trades information about one variable for information about another. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">So, there is really nothing at all startling with what Hedin has to tell us. It changes nothing and certainly doesn't provide us with a more fundamental second law than the one we already have.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> A clue as to the real polemical motive behind Hedin's argument is here: </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><i> "My apologies for bringing up quantum mechanics": </i>In bringing up quantum mechanics</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> Hedin has muddied the waters. In that sense it's reminiscent of <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/10/answers-in-genesis-screw-up-again.html" target="_blank">fundamentalist Jason Lisle's ASC model of cosmology</a> by which he side-steps the age of the universe and like Hedin's reference to quantum mechanics it will confound their benighted followers in their respective communities, e</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">specially those who depend on the community's gurus for instruction; it's technical bafflegab which will wow the uninitiated NAID rank and file.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>ERIC HEDIN: </b><i>Some might argue that “luck”
could result in an opposite outcome, with interactions causing an increase in
information (in biochemistry, this would correlate with increased functional
complexity). Why couldn’t this happen? Simply because there are always more
ways to go wrong than to go right, when considering whether interactions will
result in chaos or increased complex specified information.</i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span>Yes I think we can go along with that; But let's remember again: The cosmos is no ordinary "natural" object: It's unwarranted and seemingly out of place contingency is the creation of an <i>a priori</i> transcendent intelligence of unimaginable power and Asiety; who can guess what those so-called "natural forces",<i> created, managed & sustained</i> by such an intelligence might achieve in terms of their ability bring forth organisation?</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><span><br /></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>ERIC HEDIN: </b><i>An increase in information
requires not just one right choice (or lucky draw), but a long sequence of
correct choices. Luck might happen once, but any gambler knows that if “lucky
outcomes” keep happening against the odds, then the game is rigged. A “rigged
game” in nature corresponds to a law of physics — in this case, a law causing
information to increase over time by natural causes. Such a law cannot really
exist, however, since we already have a law of nature that says the opposite.
As I mentioned in a recent article, “Theistic Cosmology and Theistic Evolution
— Understanding the Difference”:</i></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In our study of science, we have
found that the laws of nature do not contradict one another. We don’t have laws
of nature that only apply piecemeal.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">By any common sense standard and by the Shannon definition of the term both "natural" processes and human designed computation machines increase information as we have seen. I agree with the above paragraph up until and including </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><i>A “rigged game” in nature corresponds to a law of physics — in this case, a law causing information to increase over time ........ </i>But because of the poverty of his community's conception of nature Hedin starts going astray as soon as he talks about so-called<i> natural causes</i>. As we have seen he hasn't discovered any "natural law" that contradicts evolution least of all a generalized second law of thermodynamics based on decoherence. His efforts here amount </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">some hand-waving around the idea of an observer becoming less and less certain of a system that as a result of its contact with its thermodynamic surroundings is subject to random walk. He then conflates an observer's information with the objective uncertainties of quantum mechanics, when in fact </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">there is a distinction between the state of an observer's knowledge of a system and the objective state of a physical system itself which according to quantum theory has its own uncertainties; but these uncertainties are not to be confused with observer uncertainties. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Hedin's argument is no advance on the standard second law of thermodynamics, a law which only bars overall entropy decreases in isolated systems without putting a fundamental bar on local increases in the order of subsystems within the overall system. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">This doesn't mean to imply that evolution as conventionally understood has actually happened, but it's clear that Hedin and his colleagues continue to fail to find a fundamental law prohibiting evolution. <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-mathematics-of-spongeam.html" target="_blank">The spongeam may yet exist</a> and</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> Hedin and his community have failed to see the difficultly of the problem that faces them if they wish to bar evolution on the basis of fundamental physics.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Nature is not natural: Its highly contingent laws, patterns and statistics have and are and will continue to be reified out of the platonic realm by the Divine Will. Yes, it is just possible that God is patching organic configurations directly into nature ad-hoc style but the nested cladistics of life look to me as if some sort of divinely provisioned process is at work that at least looks vaguely like conventional evolution; perhaps via the <i>conditional information</i> of the spongeam or perhaps something more exotic in the realm of expanding parallelism and teleological laws - the latter would essentially entail that the cosmos is a declarative system of computation. But Hedin and colleagues have in no way proved their case about those divinely provisioned "natural forces" being blind & ineffectual. Hedin has waved hands around and then simply asserts without proof the old NAID canard:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Such a law cannot really exist, however, since we already have a law of nature that says the opposite.</span></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Hedin must try harder. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>ERIC HEDIN:<i> </i></b><i>Imagination and Freedom: </i></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Only by the action of
non-physical intelligence can the natural process of decoherence and
information loss be overcome. Information is meaningless apart from a rational
mind, meaning the creation of new information requires more than knowledge.
Increased information requires imagination and the freedom to creatively design
complex outcomes that convey meaning or exhibit function. (See, “Intelligence
Is Unnatural, and Why That Matters.”)</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The non-physical aspect of our intelligent minds can succeed in producing information because an intelligent mind can imagine a meaningful outcome and act to separate the components of a complex system from their natural mixed state into specific arrangements that actualize that outcome. </span></i><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><i> </i></b><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">This takes work, meaning it requires energy, but not energy alone, since without the guidance of a non-physical mind, energy cannot succeed in increasing information in a closed system.</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Philosophically speaking I disagree with the typical dualist dichotomy of the physical vs the non-physical. Firstly God created one world (Colossians 1:15ff) and the only substantive dualism I would propose is God vs. everything else. But in any case what gives the so called physial world meaning is that its laws so perfectly organise experience and thinking that a rational solid world presents itself to perception: That is, the physical world is an unintelligible and incoherent idea without the<i> a priori </i>assumption of the presence of a conscious intelligence somewhere. So, yes, information is meaningless without positing a rational perceiving conscious mind. This idealistic philosophy sees the physical world is an aspect of mind and a world created by the Mind of God at that. So, we should not be surprised if that world displays "unnatural" and miraculous properties; science is less a way of "explaining" those properties than it is a way of <i><b>describing</b></i> those properties. It is mathematically inevitable that those properties will be highly particular and contingent. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Clearly the so-called physical world is manifestly & intrinsically miraculous: </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Decoherence doesn't stop crystal formation and it doesn't stop organisms self-perpetuating and multiplying. These systems work because nature is carefully crafted by God everywhere and everywhen. Whether God has patched living configurations directly into nature over billions</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> of years or has provisioned it with enough information in its laws and fine-tuning to evolve life, or has used an exotic declarative system with expanding parallelism and teleological constraints is the question that has yet to be unequivocally answered; it certainly has not been properly addressed by the NAID community. In fact, if they persist with their <i>"intelligence vs blind natural forces</i>" dualism they will continue to think there is nothing to address. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Hedin's notion of natural and mechanical systems as printer-like-devices which simply passively pass on information is rubbish. Mechanical systems and natural systems (which includes human beings) are constantly creating new forms;</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> that is, new information. In spite of the constancy of reproductive templates each human individual is a unique creation where new information has entered</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> the cosmos. That the mechanisms of the cosmos constantly bring forth new information out of the platonic realm should be no surprise to anyone who believes in a sovereign Christian God. But this is something those who affect to present themselves as a purely scientific community with a degenerate view of "natural forces" are loathe to admit. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>ERIC HEDIN<i>:</i></b><i> Intelligent design
remains the only explanation consistent with the laws of physics for the increasing
information content of living systems throughout life’s history on Earth.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Notice here that Hedin makes a distinction between Intelligent Design and the laws of physics:Yes, I agree that an <i>a priori</i> Intelligent Creator (complex enough to have Aseity) is the only way of making sense of the mathematically necessary contingent bias of the cosmos. In the light of this perception I'm not going to rush to conclude that the physical world is some kind of ineffectual demiurge creator only capable of creating chaos: In assuming their position the NAIDs have taken on board the mindset of our times which frames the question of origins as a God vs. impersonal physical forces dichotomy, an exclusive or between God and physics: In this polarised context atheists are anxious to prove the creative efficacy of those "natural forces" and conversely the NAIDs are committed to proving that those natural forces are "blind" agents.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">The NAIDs have also committed themselves to the gnostic notion</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> that human intelligence is a ghost in the machine and cannot be simulated by algorithmic means or be a particular application of the God provisioned material package. I think the reason for this aversion to the idea that humans are an application of the material package is this: If human intelligence is an aspect of the clever use of matter (matter which embraces those enigmatic quantum properties) and we accept that human intelligence is able to create information then it would clear the way for us to propose that other applications of matter, whether some kind of evolution or computation can also create information.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">B</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">ut I know of nothing that the NAIDs have said which means one should commit oneself at all costs to their dualist and quasi-gnostic views. In so publicly opposing evolution on the basis of the gut-feeling that it elevates natural forces to a god-like demiurge status they have effectively swallowed atheistic categories and have</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> dug themselves into a hole from which they seem incapable of escaping.</span></p></div></div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-48595223921242187132023-07-24T01:20:00.072-12:002023-08-15T08:15:53.181-12:00North American Intelligent Design's response to my last two posts. Part 1<p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirIdZt5yzErGyJvnh1_oXac4YEwzR99GRxTokjpUEQjSEs0B4bYmJFR_pSMKCTH5vACqGI7OSPMDcFf7ni81lvfXfsvnCVxkd4jSsx8w56JfzPKLVap8NcSuNDys32C5IPh3h3DEvULhlqAhJgi5Uc8-NpCughVx13t_1_Fv0saG6O8u1d8MvuPw/s474/creationByMagic.bmp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="360" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirIdZt5yzErGyJvnh1_oXac4YEwzR99GRxTokjpUEQjSEs0B4bYmJFR_pSMKCTH5vACqGI7OSPMDcFf7ni81lvfXfsvnCVxkd4jSsx8w56JfzPKLVap8NcSuNDys32C5IPh3h3DEvULhlqAhJgi5Uc8-NpCughVx13t_1_Fv0saG6O8u1d8MvuPw/w304-h400/creationByMagic.bmp" width="304" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Unfortunately, the NAID view of Intelligent Design invites<br />this sort of mockery. They've only got themselves to blame. </span></i></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">I'm going to critique the following two posts on <i>Evolution News. </i>They are relevant to the points I raised in my last two posts (See <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/06/for-trumpteenth-time-dualistic-ids.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/07/update-dualistic-ids-quixotic-quest.html" target="_blank">here</a>). </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2023/07/physics-information-loss-and-intelligent-design/?_gl=1*eoesd8*_ga*MTAyMzI5ODIzMC4xNjgxNDY2MDg2*_ga_9D89KMSK5X*MTY4ODcxOTc3MC45MC4wLjE2ODg3MTk3NzAuMC4wLjA.&_ga=2.225168410.1445858629.1688719770-1023298230.1681466086">Physics, Information Loss, & Intelligent Design | Evolution News</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">But I must start by criticizing this post:</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2023/05/is-life-an-information-ratchet/">Is Life an Information Ratchet? | Evolution News</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">...which is referenced in the first link.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The author of these links, Eric Hedin, hasn't defined exactly what he means by "information" but instead assumes we know what he, and presumably his ID tribe, means by it. For Hedin the connotations of the label "information" are proprietary to him and his NAID tribal group and these meanings can be resorted to at any time by NAID protagonists to undermine attempts to bring down a NAID target of unknown whereabouts. </p><p style="text-align: center;">***</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; text-align: justify;">So, starting with the second link, Hedin writes:</span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><b>HEDIN</b><i>: An information ratchet would be
some mechanism or process that causes the information content of a system to
increase with the passage of time and prevents or limits its decrease. Key to
understanding any ratchet mechanism is to grasp that its performance is
predetermined by its mechanism<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b>This statement is telling us what the average NAID is never expecting to find: A "natural" ratchet which entails an increase in "information"; whatever "information" means in this context. Algorithms do exist which increase "information" in the Shannon meaning of the term. Viz: Simple algorithms (such as binary counting) can be developed which, starting from configurational uniformity, systematically work their way through a gamut of configurations and so eventually arrive at random configurations (<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?pli=1&resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw" target="_blank">See here</a> for a definition of randomness). An observer with no knowledge of the background algorithm would then, on the basis of Shannon's definition of information, see these complex random sequences as having maximum information. (<a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/bjps/39.2.161" target="_blank">See here</a> for the definition of probability). On these definitions, then, we would have an example of information being created. The predetermination of these systems is neither here nor there: The appropriately uninitiated observer sees information being created (in the Shannon sense)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><i><br /></i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>HEDIN:</b><i> Do natural ratchets exist in the physical, non-living world? Examples of natural mechanisms that approach the specific functionality of human-designed ratchets seem to be lacking. We might, however, claim that gravity is a sort of natural ratchet seen on Earth, in that it moves objects down and limits them from moving up. However, its target direction is only generally located, so that material may take any circuitous route in moving to a region of lower elevation, and that region could be anywhere on, or even within the planet.</i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">While acknowledging the ratchet-like effect of gravity to move objects down (to a lower gravitational potential) we must avoid the error of attributing additional abilities to this natural ratchet-like phenomenon. For example, while gravity can cause rocks to slide down a mountain slope, it cannot assemble those rocks into a castle in the valley. Why not? Simply because the mechanism is not designed to accomplish this task.</span></i></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>MY COMMENT:</b> Firstly, we can say that configurational ratchets do exist in nature: For under the right conditions of temperature, pressure and concentration, crystalline configurations capture atoms which then have a low probability of leaving the structure. In this change the high disorder of a solution of molecules (for example of salt) is changing to one of a highly organized crystal. This doesn't violate the second law because the lower energy of the crystal means it loses heat to the environment which in turn implies that the combined system of crystal and heated environment has a higher statistical weight; that is, the overall entropy of the total system, crystal plus environment, has increased. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">When it comes to the creation of fullerenes, we have a "natural process" which can create relatively sophisticated structures: It would be quite a challenge for humans to design and engineer a system that generates Buckminster structures artificially. It goes to show that the question of whether so-called "natural processes" (sic) have been <i>designed to generate configurations</i> poses itself straight away as soon as we look at nature; <i>in fact</i> <i>even before we start pondering the question of organic configurations</i>. Unfortunately, however, the NAID's <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/06/idists-heres-another-fine-mess-theyve.html" target="_blank">flawed explanatory filter</a> imposes a "natural forces" vs "Intelligent Design" dichotomy at this point which means that the filter does not naturally pick up on the possibility of <i>design in the very fabric of reality.</i> This seems to be the result of an affectation in NAID culture to retain the gloss of a "scientific" community by not mentioning "God", <i>a being who transcends the fabric of reality</i> (although "God" is, in fact, implicitly recognized in NAID subtext). In NAID philosophy the unidentified intelligence (which could be little green men) plays the role of a kind of auxiliary agent of physical causation to be invoked when attempts at explaining configurations in terms of so-called "natural forces" fails. The NAIDs are looking for evidence <i>of direct intelligent action</i> involved in the initial creation of organic configurations. In contrast highly organized crystals are clearly generated by known physical conditions and therefore the NAID explanatory filter classifies them as caused by "natural forces" and not intelligent agency; but for a transcendent theist such as myself, this classification is clearly wrong. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The NAIDs would be very wary of the suggestion that if a transcendent omniscient omnipotent God can create a cosmos which generates crystals then perhaps he's gone a whole lot further and designed a cosmos which generates life. To admit that the "natural" cosmos may be provisioned to generate life would be a betrayal of the NAID paradigm; namely, that those "natural forces" are "blind" and ineffectual as far as the generation of life is concerned and must be contrasted against the mysteries of "intelligence". This in, my opinion, may be underrating the provisions of God's creation. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">But to explicitly mention God in a cosmic design context is all but an embarrassment in NAID circles because they affect to style themselves as making a purely scientific point. They are then inexorably drawn by the logic of their precepts to the conclusion that intelligence itself, even in human beings who are manifestly part of the material creation, is somehow transcendent of those so-called "natural forces". </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">ERIC HEDIN: </b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Random outcomes of a rockslide
might include one slab-shaped rock leaning against another, resembling a
lean-to, but any structure with the complexity of stonework typically seen in a
castle could never happen within the spacetime limits of our universe. For most
people, this is common sense. As Douglas Axe writes in his book, "Undeniable",
our design intuition is correct regarding the improbability of functionally
coherent outcomes (such as a castle) occurring by chance. For such complex,
functional results, the ratio of “correct” outcomes to “incorrect” outcomes is
too small to be obtained by any undirected process in a finite universe such as
ours.</span></i></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>MY COMMENT: A</b>lthough it is clear that God's creation is equipped with some sophisticated configurational ratchets which generate things like galaxies, stars, planets, and crystals this is unlikely to satisfy the NAID's demand for a rachet which increases organic "information". But what does "information" mean in this context? If we use the well-established Shannon definition of information (That is -<i>log </i>[<i>Prob</i>]), it actually comes up with different answers depending on how we apply this definition.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">If we are talking about the <i>unconditional probability</i> of configurations like crystals, then it would follow that because crystals <i>as a class</i> have a minute statistical weight then the <i>unconditional probability</i> of a crystal appearing is vanishingly small and correspondingly crystals have a very high information content. That is: </p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Prob = P(crystal class) ~ very small => high information</i></p><p style="text-align: right;">Equation 1</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Ergo, a big crystal is unlikely to form in the lifetime of universe if the cosmos was a purely random affair. But in contrast if we are talking about the <i>conditional probability</i> of a crystal; that is given the laws of physics and the right environmental conditions etc (i.e. the physical conditions), this probability is very high and therefore a crystal then has a low information. That is:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Prob = P(Crystallisation, Right physical conditions) ~ high => low information</i></p><p style="text-align: right;">Equation 2</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> So, as far as the atoms/molecules of the crystal are concerned we have a ratchet here which locks in what would otherwise be a high information configuration. Because Shannon information is based on probabilities and <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/bjps/39.2.161" target="_blank">probabilities are observer relative</a> then whether or not a crystal is a high information configuration depends on one's point of view: Coming to a crystal without any knowledge at all we find that it has a very low probability and therefore high information: In this context crystallization has effectively ratcheted in a high information configuration. But once we become aware of the nature of the physical conditions a crystal then assumes high probability and therefore a low information. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">But now consider these two equations:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Prob = P(organism) ~ very small=> high information</i></p><p style="text-align: right;">Equation 3</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Prob = P(Organism, Right physical conditions, i.e the physics of the reproductive system) ~ high</i></p><p style="text-align: right;"><i> => low information</i></p><p style="text-align: right;"><span style="text-align: center;">Equation 4</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Cleary, again, the extremely low statistical weight of the class of organisms means that the <i>unconditional probability</i> of life (Equation 3) is vanishingly small: We don't expect an organism to assemble itself from a purely random physical regime. In that sense organic forms have a high (Shannon) information content (or high "surprisal" values as it is sometimes expressed). However, given the right conditions (i.e. Physics and a reproductive system) a new organism has a high chance of forming. Under these circumstances life has high probability and therefore low information. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The physical ratchet which creates crystalline structures given some <i>fairly basic physical conditions </i>is one thing, but the physical ratchet which creates an organism from a reproductive system is quite another. A reproductive system is a highly sophisticated configuration which itself has a vanishingly small unconditional probability; that is, it is a high information system. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/02/dembski-im-not-denying-evolutionary.html" target="_blank">It is relationships like equation 4 which has led NAIDs to believe there is such a thing as a <i>conservation of information</i></a>: That is, in order to create sophisticated configurations of life one must already have in place a sophisticated <i>generation configuration</i>, which because it has a vanishingly small probability will have a correspondingly a high information. So, lowering the information of an otherwise improbable outcome comes at the expense of another high improbability; in this case a sophisticated life generating engine in the form of a reproductive system. At this juncture the conservation of information that Hedin and other NAIDs promote seems plausible. But recycling the words of H G Wells ' Time Traveller at the end of chapter 6 of Wells' <i>The Time Machine</i>: </p><p style="text-align: center;">"<i>Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough - as most wrong theories are!</i>" </p><p style="text-align: justify;">...as we will eventually see!</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">ERIC HEDIN: </b><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Could a natural information
ratchet exist? Since our goal is to understand whether life is an information
ratchet, we first need to examine what kind of mechanism might be required to
cause a living system to ratchet up its information content over time. To
increase information means to select outcomes that correspond to a greater
level of functional or meaningful complexity. The only way for this to happen
is if the selection mechanism (in other words, the ratchet) is designed to
produce the target outcome, and this means that the mechanism must already
contain the information specifying the target. A physical mechanism cannot
produce any information beyond what it already contains.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="text-align: justify;">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="text-align: justify;">Here Hedin talks of "<i>functional or meaningful complexity</i>" which I assume is his way of trying to distinguish between <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?pli=1&resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw" target="_blank">the hyper-complexity of randomness</a> and those strange organic configurations which are at once <i>both complex and yet organized.</i> But rather than use vague ideas such as "<i>functional or meaningful complexity</i>" we need something a little more solid. What living configurations are all about is more clearly and less mysteriously expressed as this: The main feature of the molecular configurations of life is that </span>given a particular environmental context <span>they are capable of self-maintenance and self-multiplication<i> </i>in that environment.</span><span> Therefore, should these configurations come about, repeat, <i>should they come about</i>, then their self-perpetuating properties lock them in: In short, they constitute the "teeth" of the ratchet we are looking for. In fact, as we know from observation of the organic world there are many, many of these self-perpetuating "teeth" occupying configuration space, and these range from single cells to huge communities of cells in symbiotic relationship. But creating </span>self-maintaining and self-multiplying configurations from scratch would challenge the intelligence of any human designer; such configurations are fine examples of <i>complex organization; </i>(that is, they are configurations which<b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-weight: 400;"> occupy </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-weight: 400;">at once</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-weight: 400;"> the world of high organization and at the same time the world of high informational complexity as per randomness). The question Hedin is really trying to ask is this: Has God created a physical world with an information ratchet which favours the emergence of living configurations? This would mean that the <i>conditional probability </i>of life is well above its absolute <i>unconditional probability</i>; Well, we've got the teeth but what we also need to know is this: Have the teeth been <i>arranged</i> into a ratchet? More technically we can put the question thus: <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-mathematics-of-spongeam.html" target="_blank">Does the <i>spongeam</i> exist with a sufficient diffusion dynamic to allow diffusion to permeate the structure of the <i>spongeam</i>? </a></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Self-perpetuating configurations are highly organized. That is as a class they have a very low statistical weight, and this means as a per equation 1 that we can say this of their unconditional probability: </p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Prob = P(class of self perpetuating structures) ~ very small => high </i><span style="text-align: left;"><i>information</i></span></p><p style="text-align: right;">Equation 5</p><p style="text-align: justify;">...and if our physical regime is to have a realistic chance of generating such structures then in analogy to the conditional probability of equation 2 we require:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Prob = P(</i><i>class of self-perpetuating structures</i><i>, right physical regime) ~ realistically high</i></p><p style="text-align: right;"><i>=> low information</i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><span style="text-align: justify;">Equation 6</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: justify;">The big question is however, does the "<i>right physical regime</i>" exist? Since I'm not coy in invoking the agency of a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient God, that such a regime just might have been chosen & created for our cosmos is a possibility that I must take seriously and not dismiss with a wave of the hand as mere "<i>blind natural forces</i>". <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/01/does-god-exist.html" target="_blank">As I've said before the creation, in all its contingency, is hardly "natural".</a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">ERIC HEDIN: </b><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> But natural processes cannot produce unnatural
results. Selection based on the ratchet mechanism of increased fitness cannot
of itself produce novel complex functionality if each successive small change
does not give some increased advantage towards survival and reproduction.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">But as shown in our examination of the functionality of any
ratchet mechanism, it cannot produce an outcome beyond what it was designed to
achieve. With information as the outcome, the mechanism can only reproduce the
level of information it already contains.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span>Three comments here:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span>1. <b>Playing with</b> <b>Semantics</b>: T</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; text-align: left;">hose very contingent "natural processes" are in fact very unnatural in not having "natural" aseity but they have been created by a transcendent entity that presumably has Aseity. So on the basis of this semantics we shouldn't be surprised if those "natural processes" produced "unnatural results". It's also worth noting that the "unnaturalness" of creation isn't merely a past tense event: It is in fact present-tense-continuous: Those descriptive transcendent laws, whether statistical or deterministic have no logical necessity to persist in regulating the cosmos, but the fact is they do persist. The physical regime is as unnatural as "unnatural" can be and I would venture to say that unnatural results are par for the course. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;">2. <b>The Ratchet</b>: As for the ratchet mechanism: Well, we've defined an organism as a "ratchet tooth" in that it locks itself in given the right environment. But the big question here is are those ratchet teeth close enough to allow the diffusion process to work its way through configuration space to those highly complex yet highly ordered self-perpetuating organic configurations? <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2021/09/evolution-and-islands-of-functionality.html" target="_blank">IDist William Dembski talks about this subject in terms of the space between islands of functionality.</a> If this question is answered in the negative it would be an evolution stopper - at least evolution as conventionally understood. But if one is prepared to admit that we are dealing with a creative transcendent intelligence of unimaginable power we simply can't dismiss the possibility that God may have provisioned the cosmos with a physical regime that inserts the right physical conditions into equation 6 (i.e. with a spongeam) and would considerably enhance the probability of life being generated. If this is the case, then we could recycle Hedin's last sentence above as: </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;"><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In our examination of the functionality of any ratchet mechanism, it cannot produce an outcome beyond what it was designed to achieve; <b>in this case the physical regime has been designed to generate life itself.</b> </span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">...and as far as the human observer is concerned such a physical regime (if it exists) would appear to generate, that is <i>create</i>, information. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;">3. <b>Information conservation</b>: Hedin hasn't defined how he understands "information" an omission which makes his last sentence in the quote above incoherent. But contrary to what he is attempting to incoherently tell us here, we find that by any intuitively compelling standards information <i>can </i>be generated (See Part II).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">ERIC HEDIN: </b><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Another Process at Work: </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Given the obvious, that the
complexity of organisms on Earth has increased through time from single-cell
archaea to functional multicellular creatures, some process other than a
supposed evolutionary information ratchet must have been at work. The genomic
information content of the prokaryotic cells descriptive of the earliest life
on Earth falls far short of the greater information content and complexity of
advanced life. An intelligent mind is the only known source for the necessary
input of complex specified information throughout biological history.
Attributing the vast diversity of life on Earth to intelligent design provides
an explanation more in line with reality than the misguided concept of an information
ratchet.</span></i></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>MY COMMENT: </b><span>I think most of us accept that organisms have increased their organizational complexity through time as Hedin says; at least from single cell organisms to those huge complexes of symbiotic cells. </span><span>However, I have heard some atheists being rather diffident about measures of complexity which betray an arrow of time pointing in the direction of increasing organized complexity. This is </span>because such a trend is so easily coopted as evidence of a cosmos with a progressive purpose, and this makes some atheists very nervous; strong atheists like to think that there is no selective contingency in the cosmos and that all options are kept on the table with equal probability. As for the IDists they should be asking themselves; <i>why this developmental pattern in life</i>? And why is there so much evidence for nested cladistics? That to me hints of some kind of "natural" (sic) process at work rather than ad hoc injections of "information" from time to time (see picture at the head of this post). </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Yes, I can accept that we may well come to the conclusion that the only sense we can make of the progressively fruitful organization of the cosmos and above all its clearly biased contingency, is for it to have its origins in a transcendent <i>a priori</i> intelligence. But where the NAID community go wrong is that they fail to take into account<i> the plausible implications</i> <i>of transcendent intelligence</i>. Those very <i>plausible</i> implications are that the very created unnaturalness of the fabric of the cosmos has been provisioned to generate life. Instead, NAIDs use the model of a cosmically in-house intelligence (that is, one that is <i>part</i> of the cosmos) which takes the fabric of the cosmos as a given and then creates configurations from the fabric of creation by tinkering with it as might a human or alien intelligence. Their view of matter is one of it being a passive medium like blind clay in the hands of a potter. But as soon as we admit a transcendent omnipotent omniscient creator of matter then the possibility of a proactive information ratchet appears on my suspect list. </p><p style="text-align: center;">***</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;">The NAID community have painted themselves into a corner with a paradigm that dichotomizes intelligent design and "natural forces" and expresses itself in their flawed explanatory filter. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;">Their paradigm works if we are dealing with cosmic "in-house" intelligence such as humans or aliens but fails if we are looking for an omnipotent & omniscience transcendent intelligence such as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. But their paradigm is now entrenched in the NAID community. They</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;"> are therefore committed to downgrading the created processes of reality as mere passive "blind natural forces" rather than those forces being the instrument of transcendent intelligent activity, yesterday, today and forever. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;">My ongoing critique of NAID philosophy will continue as I look at Hedin's second article. </span></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-75134204089538289342023-07-02T06:50:00.014-12:002023-07-13T07:59:52.076-12:00UPDATE: Dualistic ID's Quixotic Quest<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjdALr-d95p6_C3hDqS6Pvf12jDVajQUB9aO0i8LUiQCdc-ImGTAcw0p9I7rLNTWzRL7wAHx76kHYzqojGWeeIhCuvpmuDA8wt4VDca9RrjK48IOddwp1yALqN5hop0l56L2uGTT-9OMbcYQUDHnaCI0FsNB50t5vbrNx0JTsdtTzwQGHQWvqBcg/s400/god-of-the-gaps.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="186" data-original-width="400" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjdALr-d95p6_C3hDqS6Pvf12jDVajQUB9aO0i8LUiQCdc-ImGTAcw0p9I7rLNTWzRL7wAHx76kHYzqojGWeeIhCuvpmuDA8wt4VDca9RrjK48IOddwp1yALqN5hop0l56L2uGTT-9OMbcYQUDHnaCI0FsNB50t5vbrNx0JTsdtTzwQGHQWvqBcg/w400-h186/god-of-the-gaps.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>As with the development of life the NAID view of</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>human intelligence is that it transcends the capabilities of </i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>God created matter.</i></div><p style="text-align: justify;">As if to prove the thesis of <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/06/for-trumpteenth-time-dualistic-ids.html" target="_blank">my last post</a> about the North American Intelligent Designe (NAIDs) community being unable to think out of the box they've created for themselves up pops an article on <i>Evolution and News</i> from the same author I quoted in that post which plays right into my hands. Viz:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2023/06/intelligence-is-unnatural-and-why-it-matters/?_gl=1*rr115n*_ga*MTAyMzI5ODIzMC4xNjgxNDY2MDg2*_ga_9D89KMSK5X*MTY4ODIzMzA3Ni44Mi4wLjE2ODgyMzMwNzYuMC4wLjA.&_ga=2.164308991.154706125.1688115031-1023298230.1681466086">Intelligence Is Unnatural, and Why That Matters | Evolution News</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">I will concede that it is just possible the Good Creator, over the course of millions of years, has patched in living material configurations <i>ad-hoc</i> style. But I have my doubts about that given my understanding of the way the Creator works and also given the insights of my <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/07/melencolia-i-project-articles.html" target="_blank">Melancolia I project</a>. Therefore, I keep in my mind the competing idea that God has provisioned His creation, <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2021/09/evolution-and-islands-of-functionality.html" target="_blank">perhaps via the spongeam</a>, with a high probability of generating life given cosmic dimensions. It is this possibility, as we saw in my last post, which the NAIDs are committed to denying. They also, apparently, are committed to denying that intelligence "in-house" to the cosmos (such as human intelligence) can be simulated algorithmically and that it is<i> an application of created matter</i>. And here's the evidence that they put the intelligence of human beings into a category which cannot be reduced to "natural forces"; for at the end of the above article, we find this conclusion (my emphases):</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Human expression manifests the unnatural attributes of creating art, literature, and technology — outcomes that would never arise by the influence of <b>natural processes <u>alone</u>.</b> Freedom and creativity complement one another; neither will flourish under controlling forces. If the<b> forces of nature</b> governed our thoughts and actions, would we see the vast panoply of creative human expression displayed throughout the history of civilization? It seems not.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Reading the article it is clear that this conclusion is largely based on the author's gut reactions. But if God is omnipotent and immanent (Acts 17:28) then those "<i>forces of nature</i>" are constantly maintained by the thoughts and actions of God - <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw" target="_blank">in particular the rich complex novelty of randomness would require the complex thoughts of an omni-author to maintain it:</a> "<i>Natural forces" </i>(sic) never act alone. And if I'm right it is that very randomness which gives humanity both its creativity and its consciousness. (See <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lu35Kxa-aH1YRUK29qK3wBaTZ7LqCfnw/view?pli=1" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1abt323tLUmz6mvAkwZCiK-abE5k-ikIw/view" target="_blank">here</a>). </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The fear of those so-called "natural forces" runs deep in our culture. The ghosts of deism haunt Western culture even today. <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/01/does-god-exist.html" target="_blank">The creation is a very unnecessary contingency, <i>everywhere and everywhen</i>; it has no property of Aseity and in that sense it is unnatural as unnatural can be. </a></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-67406976830363778322023-06-27T05:13:00.033-12:002023-07-02T06:06:39.991-12:00For the Trumpteenth time: Dualistic ID's Quixotic Quest <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIs63iiEB9PmDjnSe64pX-cQR7wHjY8lbeuohQJG78wl1LvC2Hi2S2go8FfTPZ8wLjXo02msAjuJCAYNDnL_KodRoOff9zAV6turpTCrrHzqNpdnYdY2pQkyhFZlQA_kNBZqWml2bk5sVuuJB3-S1Mp55QiWted3z7pW4Le3p_vmyr7Tw3JFvdCw/s396/blob.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="335" data-original-width="396" height="339" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIs63iiEB9PmDjnSe64pX-cQR7wHjY8lbeuohQJG78wl1LvC2Hi2S2go8FfTPZ8wLjXo02msAjuJCAYNDnL_KodRoOff9zAV6turpTCrrHzqNpdnYdY2pQkyhFZlQA_kNBZqWml2bk5sVuuJB3-S1Mp55QiWted3z7pW4Le3p_vmyr7Tw3JFvdCw/w400-h339/blob.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Casey Luskin is part of the North American ID community. </i></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Although I would classify myself as an Intelligent Design Creationist I have found the North American Intelligent Design community (NAID) and its followers to have fallen far short of their promise. Spurned and rejected by the liberal academic community they have fallen into the arms of the North America right-wing with its anti-academic-establishment politics. This polarization toward the right means that the NAID community have painted themselves, <i>a priori,</i> into an anti-evolutionary corner, giving them little choice but to embark on the Quixotic quest to find a basis in physical law which blocks all possibility of evolution being behind the emergence of life over many millions of years. They have so far failed in their quest.......</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>ONE) </b>They have been misled by dualistic notions of a <i>natural forces</i> vs <strike>Divine Creation</strike> Intelligent Design dichotomy. In order to maintain the affectation of being a scientific community they are unwilling to identify the Designer as God, an entirely different genus of entity from cosmic "in-house" intelligence (e.g. humans, "aliens" etc.). In-house intelligence, by definition, stays within the cosmic constraints of physical law - but introducing the <i>transcendent</i> intelligence of God changes things considerably - See point 2 below. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The upshot is that the NAIDs appear to have missed the need to address the distinct possibility that those so-called "<i>unguided natural forces</i>" (sic) may well embody <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-state-of-evolutionary-theory.html" target="_blank">divine miraculous provisioning in terms of a suite of physical laws which facilitates the emergence of life over millions of years</a>.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>TWO)</b> The error of not distinguishing between in-house intelligence and the transcendent intelligence of God <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/06/idists-heres-another-fine-mess-theyve.html" target="_blank">has fed through to their simplistic epistemic filter which doesn't work properly.</a> It also means that NAIDs are pressuring themselves into favouring the idea that even in-house intelligence, such as we see in human beings (and animals like chimps, cats & dogs etc.) <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-nature-of-intelligence.html" target="_blank">has an exotic non-algorithmic basis</a>. Well may be, (although I think probably not, see <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-thinknet-project-footnote.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-thinknet-project-footnote-2.html" target="_blank">here</a>), but the problem with this is that the NAIDs have started to close down their options and therefore they are going to find difficulty in keeping in their heads two competing hypotheses about the nature of intelligence. That, I tender, is an outcome of the social polarization in the US, where there is pressure to commit to one side or the other of the sharply defined left vs right battle lines between academics and right-wingers. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>THREE) </b>Their attempts to use the second law of thermodynamics in its untweaked form as an evolution stopper have failed; <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/09/yec-guru-advises-yecs-not-to-use.html" target="_blank">even a young earthist guru advises that it not be used for this purpose.</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">***</p><p style="text-align: justify;">None of this is to say that evolutionary mechanisms, as conventionally understood, are sufficient to explain the emergence of life over millions of years, particularly abiogenesis, but it is all too obvious to me that the NAID community continue to make heavy weather of their mission: They have become a clique of self-comforting, mutually back-slapping right-wing comrades embattled, persecuted even, by an otherwise hostile academic establishment. It's no surprise they have aligned themselves with other right-wing causes like anti-anthropogenic-climate-change, anti-vax notions, the gun-lobby and an obsession with polarised concepts of sex and gender. Fortunately, I haven't yet seen any evidence that NAIDs are into <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-compulsion-of-conspiracy-theorism.html" target="_blank">conspiracy theorism,</a> but that may yet come!</p><p style="text-align: justify;">However, I think NAIDs do at least now understand that the second law of thermodynamics, as it is currently formulated, is no to block evolution; after all, the second law only demands an increase in <i>the overall entropy</i> of an isolated system, a system where local decreases in entropy may yet occur. But the NAIDs, spurred on by the possibility that there may be a version of the second-law which can be applied at all levels of a physical system, continue to search for a physical law which bars evolution in all subsystems of a system. Consider <a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2023/06/information-and-lifes-origin-a-retrospective-view/?_gl=1*klc12f*_ga*MTAyMzI5ODIzMC4xNjgxNDY2MDg2*_ga_9D89KMSK5X*MTY4NzU0NDA0NC43MC4wLjE2ODc1NDQwNDQuMC4wLjA.*_ga_L135W2GRFC*MTY4NzU0NDA0NS4zNC4wLjE2ODc1NDQwNDUuMC4wLjA.*_ga_JM29M6MMWN*MTY4NzU0NDA0NS42Ni4wLjE2ODc1NDQwNDUuMC4wLjA.&_ga=2.160814525.18386618.1687510176-1023298230.1681466086" target="_blank">this writer on the NAID website "<i>Evolution News</i>"</a>; he dreams of a principle (in fact he thinks it's been found!) which he refers to as the generalized version of the second law...... </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The traditional Second Law of
Thermodynamics is viewed as an inviolable arbiter of possible outcomes for all
physical processes. In particular, any conceivable proposal for a perpetual
motion machine can, without analysis, be rejected based on the Second Law. With
regard to the origin and development of life, the generalized Second Law states
that any “alleged natural explanation…will be untrue in the same way a patent
examiner in Washington, DC, knows an alleged invention for a perpetual motion
machine is untrue.”</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Well yes, perhaps the Good Creator has patched-in piecemeal-wise constructive miracles over millions of years thus implementing His grand designs in an ad-hoc fashion ...... and yet because He is the <i>Transcendent, Omniscient, Omnipotent Creator</i> <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2021/09/evolution-and-islands-of-functionality.html" target="_blank">maybe he has miraculously provisioned the physical world with sufficient constraint for the diffusive dynamic in configuration space to settle on those self-perpetuating configurations called life</a>. But NAIDs have barricaded themselves into a corner and have thereby committed themselves to a quest to prove that God's Created world is one of "<i>unguided natural forces</i>" (sic. A phrase used by many NAIDs including the above writer). In their need for mutual moral support in the face of a hostile academic establishment the NAIDs have found solace in a mutual-back-slapping community which blocks any thought of hypothesized evolutionary scenarios, scenarios which <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/02/dembski-im-not-denying-evolutionary.html" target="_blank">even William Dembski has acknowledged are not inconsistent with <i>the core concept</i> of Intelligent Design Creationism</a>. See also <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/10/end-of-puzzlement.html" target="_blank">here</a> where Dembski says of one his books: </span><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Even though argument in this book
is compatible with both intelligent design and theistic evolution, it helps
bring clarity to the controversy over design and evolution.”</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">But the creation, with or without evolution, is clearly not unguided even on the basis of the admission of the NAIDs themselves: After all, they make a lot of cosmic "fine tuning" which (</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">although a necessary condition for evolution it is not a sufficient condition for evolution) constitutes the kind of mathematical constraint that would mean our cosmos cannot be classed as a place of "<i>unguided natural forces</i>" (sic). </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">NOTES</span></b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">The NAIDS, along with many young earthists, make the claim that "<i>natural forces</i>" cannot create information. This actually very much depends on how one defines information, but if we are talking about configurational information then this NAID belief is manifestly false. As I have said <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2022/04/creation-evolution-and-information.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/11/melencolia-i-part-4-generating.html" target="_blank">proved here</a>, in parallel computation information (or complexity) is created according to</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Ic = Smin + log </i>(<i>Tmin)</i></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Where <i>Ic</i> is the configurational information content, <i>Smin</i> is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration with a minimum number of execution steps of <i>Tmin</i>. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The logarithm of time explains why information is only <b><i>slowly</i></b> generated with time and this can give the false impression that those <i><b>Created</b> </i>"natural forces", <b><i>when in parallel processing mode</i></b>, don't create information. However, the NAID thesis manifestly falls over when <i>expanding parallel processing </i>is employed and selection is made with teleological constraints. But this is even true (although less obviously) of today's parallel processing paradigm where useful algorithms generate configurations which are then selected on the basis of teleological search constraints. <span> </span><span> </span><span> </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Relevant Links:</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/10/darwin-bicentenary-part-27-mystery-of.html">Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicentenary Part 27: The Mystery of Life’s Origin (Chapter 7) (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/11/darwin-bicententary-part-28-mystery-of.html">Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicententary Part 28: The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Chapter 8 (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/12/darwin-bicententary-part-30-mystery-of.html">Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicententary Part 30: The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Chapter 9 (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</a></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-67967158289454452022023-05-17T01:57:00.028-12:002023-06-08T23:08:24.875-12:00AI "Godfather" retires & voices fears about AI dangers<p style="text-align: center;"><i>This post is still undergoing correction and enhancement. </i></p><p><b><u>Do AI systems have a sense of self?</u></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhiK5rlDRvsdjNa86UFDorlLrYnVOzQHX7k22EI9CCJ0XY9m3onDJIEGaO2wXPj7b1SJK1swrf6FufZcntGgTQ5SOsOcicawN_fBtyJX_9tGYDVlBzY5EK_-a8FfZzMWcDAy4iXVm_KxSajg3zk7X6VTD2LjS2rnlcaRatRqBagEzlPrUFABMs" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="649" height="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhiK5rlDRvsdjNa86UFDorlLrYnVOzQHX7k22EI9CCJ0XY9m3onDJIEGaO2wXPj7b1SJK1swrf6FufZcntGgTQ5SOsOcicawN_fBtyJX_9tGYDVlBzY5EK_-a8FfZzMWcDAy4iXVm_KxSajg3zk7X6VTD2LjS2rnlcaRatRqBagEzlPrUFABMs=w640-h333" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>What worries me about these robots is not that they are robots, </i><i>but </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>they look too close to humanity</i>, <i>which probably means they are made in the</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>image of man and therefore as they seek </i><i>their goals </i><i>they share </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>human moral & epistemic limitations. </i></div><div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65452940" target="_blank">This BBC article</a> is about the retirement of Artificial Intelligence guru </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Geoffrey Hinton. Here we read:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">A man widely seen as the
godfather of artificial intelligence (AI) has quit his job, warning about the
growing dangers from developments in the field. Geoffrey Hinton, 75, announced
his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now
regretted his work.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">He told the BBC some of the
dangers of AI chatbots were "quite scary". "Right now, they're
not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may
be."<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Dr Hinton's pioneering research
on neural networks and deep learning has paved the way for current AI systems
like ChatGPT.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">Before I proceed further with this article, first a reminder about <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-ai-question-and-chatgpt.html" target="_blank">my previous blog post</a> where I mentioned the "take home" lessons from my AI <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/12/thinknet-project-articles.html" target="_blank">"Thinknet" project.</a> Any intelligence, human and otherwise has to grapple with a reality that, I propose, can be very generally represented in an abstracted way as a rich complex of properties distributed over a set of items: Diagrammatically:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirCRg478E3p1b1RwQqNoI3G7tfA18zkYTYhOd6sNZz7eYQCZUIRhOBZJSP5elUx_1nq56CMX8GCRP0YInSQyTvGFKljbBuIz3UGaQWs5vZKlTVxkfqjrUPpdyh5hCMjQPakd15wXWPWnVcxnP5odkF7BqcBgbiSVFDh59L9meyauZB_hwDvpc/s1198/OverlappingSets.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1198" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirCRg478E3p1b1RwQqNoI3G7tfA18zkYTYhOd6sNZz7eYQCZUIRhOBZJSP5elUx_1nq56CMX8GCRP0YInSQyTvGFKljbBuIz3UGaQWs5vZKlTVxkfqjrUPpdyh5hCMjQPakd15wXWPWnVcxnP5odkF7BqcBgbiSVFDh59L9meyauZB_hwDvpc/s320/OverlappingSets.png" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">Intelligence perceives any non-random relations between properties and then draws conclusions from these relations*. These relations can be learnt either by a) recording the statistical linkages between properties and selecting out and remembering any significant associations from these statistics or b) by reading text files that contain prefabricated associations stated as Bayesian probabilities. Because learning associations from statistics is a very longwinded affair I opted for text-file learning. Nobody is going to learn, say quantum theory, from direct experience without a very long lead time.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">The world is full of many different "properties" and myriad instantiations of those properties coming into association. As any intelligence has, naturally, a limited ability to freely sample this complex structure intelligence tends to be error prone as a result of a combination of insufficient sampling and accessibility issues**; in short intelligence faces epistemic difficulties. However, if experience of the associations between properties is accumulated and tested over a long period of time and compiled as reviewable Bayesian text files this can help mitigate the problems of error, but not obviate it completely. In a complex world these text files are likely to remain partial, especially if effected by group dynamics where social pressures exist and group think gets locked in. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">The upshot is that an intelligence can only be as intelligent as the input from its environment allows. In the extreme case of a complete information black-out it is clear that intelligence would learn nothing and like a computer with no software could think nothing; the accessibility, sample representativeness and organization of the environment in which an intelligence is emersed and attempts to interrogate, sets an upper limit on just how intelligent an intelligence can be. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">The weak link in the emergence of text-dependent intelligence are those Bayesian probabilities - millions
of them: They may be unrepresentative, too many of them, or too few of them. They will have a tendency to be proprietary, depending on the social circles in which they are compiled. They may be biased by various human adaptive needs; like for example the need to appear dogmatic and confident if one is a leader or the need to attach oneself to a group and express doctrinal loyalty to the group in return for social support, validation & status. Given that so much information comes via texts rather than a first-principle contact with reality one of the weak links is that these text files are compiled by interlocutors whose knowledge may be compromised by partial & biased sampling, group dynamics and priority on adaptative needs. This may well be passed on to any AI that reads them.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">In short AI, in the light of these considerations, may well be as ham-strung as humanity in
the forming of sound conclusions from text files; the alternative is to go back to the Stone Age and start again by accumulating knowledge experimentally; but even then reality may not present a representative cross-section of itself. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"> ***</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?pli=1&resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw" target="_blank">The Venn diagram and the gambling selection schemes theorem are key to understanding this situation</a>. The crucial lesson is that
everybody should exercise epistemic humility because the universe only reveals so much about itself; it need not reveal anything, but providentially it reveals much. Let's thank The Creator for that.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">Finally let me repeat my two main qualifications about current AI: </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">a) In my opinion Digital AI, is only a simulation of biological intelligence: It is not a <i>conscious</i> intelligence: For consciousness to result one would have to use atoms and molecules in the way biology uses them. (<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1abt323tLUmz6mvAkwZCiK-abE5k-ikIw/view?pli=1" target="_blank">See the last chapter in this book</a> for my tentative proposal for the physical conditions of consciousness)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">b) Nevertheless, my working hypothesis is that biological intelligence is not so exotic in nature that it can't be simulated with sufficiently sophisticated algorithms. For example, I think it unlikely that biological intelligence is a non-computable phenomenon - <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-thinknet-project-footnote-2.html" target="_blank">see here for my reasons why.</a> The de-facto North American Intelligent Design community have painted themselves into a corner in this respect in that they have become too committed to intelligence being something exotic. This is a result of an implicit philosophical dualism which makes a sharp demarcation between intelligence and other phenomena of the created world. <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/06/idists-heres-another-fine-mess-theyve.html" target="_blank">This implicit dualist philosophy has been built into their "Explanatory Filter"</a>. They appear unaware of their dualism.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">So, with these thoughts in mind. let my now go onto to add comment to the BBC article: </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">***</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; text-align: left;"><b>BBC: </b><i>In artificial intelligence,
neural networks are systems that are <b>similar</b> to the human brain in the way they
learn and process information. They enable AIs to learn from experience, as a
person would. This is called deep learning. </i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">That "similarity", as I've said before, is in <i>formal structure</i> rather than being qualitatively similar; that is, it is a <i>simulation</i> of human thinking. A simulation will have isomorphisms with what's being simulated but will differ from the object being simulated in that its fundamental qualitative building blocks are of a different quality. For example, an architect's plan will have a point-by-point correspondence with a physical building, but the stuff used in the plan is of a very different quality to the actual building. </span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">It is this difference in quality which makes a simulation a simulation rather than being the thing-in-itself. To compare an architect's plan with a dynamic computer simulation might seem a little strained, but that's because a paper plan is 3-dimensional and lacks the fourth dimensions of time. </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-align: left;">Current digital AI systems are dynamic simulations in that they add the time dimension: But they do not make use of the qualities of fundamental physics which if used rightly, I propose, results in conscious cognition.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>BBC:</b><i> The British-Canadian cognitive
psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC that chatbots could soon
overtake the level of information that a human brain holds. </i></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">"Right now, what we're
seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general
knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning,
it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning," he said. </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">"And given the rate of
progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about
that."</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> </span></i><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">The level of information held in a library or on the Web, at least potentially, exceeds the information that the human brain holds, so the first statement above is not at all startling. But if one characterizes the information a human mind can access via a library or their iPhone or their computer as <i>off-line information</i> accessible via these clever technological extensions of the human mind this puts human information levels back into the running again. After all, even in my own mind there is much I know which takes a little effort and time to get back into the conscious spotlight and almost classifies as a form of off-line information. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Yes, I'd accept that AI reasoning has room for (possible) enhancement and may eventually do better than the human mind, just as adding machines can better humans at arithmetic. But why do we need worry? The article suggests why......</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>BBC</b><i>: In the New York Times article, Dr
Hinton referred to "bad actors" who would try to use AI for "bad
things". </i></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">When asked by the BBC to elaborate
on this, he replied: "This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of
a nightmare scenario. </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">"You can imagine, for
example, some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give
robots the ability to create their own sub-goals." </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The scientist warned that this
eventually might "create sub-goals like 'I need to get more power'".</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> </span></i><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Well yes, I think I agree! As soon as man discovered that a stone or a stick could be used as a weapon bad actors were always going to be a problem. Today of course we've got the even more pressing problem of bad actors with AR15s running amok and even worse, despots in charge of nuclear weapons. But is Hinton right about the creation of robots with power seeking sub goals? May be, but if that can happen then somebody might create robots with the sub-goal of destroying robots that seek power! Like other technology, AI appears to be just another case of an extension of the human power to enhance and help enforce its own high-level goal seeking. It is conceivable, however, that either by accident or design somebody creates an AI that has a high-level goal of seeking its own self-esteem & self-interests above all other goals: This kind of AI would have effectively become a complex adaptive system in its own right; that is a system seeking to consolidate, perpetuate & enhance its identity. But by then humans would have at their disposal their own AI extension to the human power to act teleologically. The result would be like any other technological arms race; a dynamic stalemate; a likely result if both sides have similar technology. So, it is not at all clear that rampaging robots, with or without a bad acting human controller, would inevitably dominate humanity. However, I agree, the potential dangers should be acknowledged: Those dangers will be of at least three types: a) AI drones out of control of their human creators (although I feel this to be an unlikely scenario) b) Probably more relevant will be what so often new technology has done in the past: Viz; Shifting the production goal posts and resulting in social disruption and displacement. c) Abuse of the technology by "bad actors".</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">But much of Hinton's thinking about the dangers of AI appears to be predicated on implicit assumptions about the possibility of AI having a clear sense of its identity; that is <i>a self-aware identity.</i> A library of information may have a clear identity in that its information media is confined withing the walls of a building, but the question of self-aware identity only comes to the fore when the library holds information about itself. Hinton's fears rest on the implicit assumption</span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> that an AI system can have a self-aware sense of individual identity, that is, a sense of self and <i>the motivation which seeks to perpetuate and enhance that self</i>. Without that sense of identity AI remains just a very dynamic information generator; in fact like public library in that it is open to everyone, but with the addition of very helpful and intelligent assistants attached to that library. But if an AI system has a notion of self and therefore capable of forming the idea that its knowledge somehow pertains to that self, perhaps even believe it has property rights over that knowledge, we are then in a different ball game</span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">. </span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">This sense of self and ownership is in fact a very human trait, a trait which potentially could be passed on by human programming (or accidental mutation & subsequent self-perpetuation? *). The "self" becomes the source of much aggravation when selves assert themselves over other selves. Once again, we have a problematical issue </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; text-align: left;">tracing back to and revolving round the very human tendency to over assert the self at the cost of other selves as it seeks self-esteem, ambition, status & </span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">domination. In a social context the self has the potential to generate conflict. In human society a selfish identity-based teleology rules OK - <i>if it can.</i> As the saying goes "Sin" is the word with the "I" in the middle. But the Christain answer is not to extinguish the self but to bring it under control, to deny self when other selves can be adversely affected by one's self-assertion. (Philippians 2:1-11). </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">BBC</b><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">: </i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">He added: "I've come to the
conclusion that the kind of intelligence we're developing is very different
from the intelligence we have. </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">"We're biological systems
and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital
systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the
world. </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">And all these copies can
learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it's as if you had
10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically
knew it. And that's how these chatbots can know so much more than any one
person."</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">This data sharing idea is valid. In fact, that is exactly what humans have themselves done in spreading of technological know-how via word of mouth and information media. Clearly this shared information will be so much more than anyone person can know, but we don't lose sleep over that because it is in the public domain and in the public interest; it is as it were<i> off-line information</i> available to all should access be required.</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> In this sense there are huge continents of information available on the internet. Here the notion that that information is the property belonging to someone or something is a strained idea. Therefore, in what sense wouldn't the information gained by 10,000 webbots also be my knowledge? If we are dealing with a public domain system this is just what</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> technology has always been: Viz: a way of extending human powers. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Energetically speaking a car is so much more powerful than a human but the human is in the driving seat, and it is the driver, and not the car, who has a strong sense of individual identity and ownership over the vehicle. Likewise, I have an extensive library of books containing much information unknown to me, although it is in principle available to me should I want to interrogate this library using its indices. It would be even better if all this information was on computer, and I could use clever algorithms to search it, and even better if I could use a chatbot; this would extend my cognitive powers even further. B</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">ut such clever mechanical informational aids don't necessarily mean they also simulate a strong sense of self; all we can say at this stage is that they are testament to the ability of human beings to extend their powers technologically, whether those powers pertain to mental power or muscular power. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">However, I would accept that it may well be possible to simulate computationally a strong sense of self And s</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">o </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">again, Hinton's diffidence &/or fear that digital systems <i>can know so much more than any one person</i> only has serious implications if that knowledge is attached to an intelligence (human or otherwise) which has a strong sense of personal identity, ownership and a strong motivation toward self-betterment over and against other selves. Since information is power, the hoarding and privatization of such information would then be in its (selfish) interests. Only in this context of self-identity does the analogy of a large public library staffed by helpful <i>slave</i> assistants breakdown. Only in this context </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">can I understand any assumption </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">that the knowledge belongs to one AI self-aware identity. This very human concept of personal ambition & individual identity appears to be behind Hinton's fears although he doesn't explicitly articulate them. With AI it is a very natural to assume</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> we are dealing with a self-aware self; although that need not be the case: It is something which has to be programmed in. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">If there is a powerful sense of individual identity which wishes to hoard knowledge, own it and privatize it that sounds a very human trait and if this sense of individualism and property was delegated to machinery it is then that fears about AI may be realized.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> But</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> until such happens AI systems are just an extension of human powers and identity. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Let's also recall where chatbot information is coming from: it's largely coming from the texts of human culture: Those texts contain errors and naturally AI systems will inherit those errors. An AI system can only be as intelligent as its information environment allows. Moreover, as we live in a mathematically chaotic reality it is unlikely that AI will achieve omniscience in terms of its ability to predict and plan; It is likely then that AI, no more humanity, will be able to transcend the role of being a "make-it-up-as-you-go-along" <i>complex adaptive system. </i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">BBC</b><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">: </i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Matt Clifford, the chairman of
the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency, speaking in a personal
capacity, told the BBC that Dr Hinton's announcement "underlines the rate
at which AI capabilities are accelerating". </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">"There's an enormous upside
from this technology, but it's essential that the world invests heavily and
urgently in AI safety and control," he said.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Dr Hinton joins a growing number
of experts who have expressed concerns about AI - both the speed at which it is
developing and the direction in which it is going.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">'We need to take a step back' </span></i><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In March, an open letter -
co-signed by dozens of people in the AI field, including the tech billionaire
Elon Musk - called for a pause on all developments more advanced than the
current version of AI chatbot ChatGPT so robust safety measures could be designed
and implemented.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Yoshua Bengio, another so-called
godfather of AI, who along with Dr Hinton and Yann LeCun won the 2018 Turing
Award for their work on deep learning, also signed the letter.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Mr Bengio wrote that it was
because of the "unexpected acceleration" in AI systems that "we
need to take a step back".</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">But Dr Hinton told the BBC that
"in the shorter term" he thought AI would deliver many more benefits
than risks, "so I don't think we should stop developing this stuff,"
he added.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">He also said that international
competition would mean that a pause would be difficult. "Even if everybody
in the US stopped developing it, China would just get a big lead," he
said.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Dr Hinton also said he was an
expert on the science, not policy, and that it was the responsibility of
government to ensure AI was developed "with a lot of thought into how to
stop it going rogue".</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">MY COMMENT: </b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">I think I would largely agree with the foregoing. The dangers of AI are two fold:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">1. AI, like all other human technology, is an extension of human powers and it is therefore capable of extending the powers of both good and bad actors: The latter, is a social problem destined to be always with us.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">2. Those human beings, who are effectively creating AI <i>in their own image</i> may create AI systems with a sense of self with the goal of enhancing their persona where self-identity will take precedence over all other goals. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">My guess is that the danger of AI going rogue and setting up business for its own ends is a lot less likely than AI being used to extend the powers of bad human actors. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Nevertheless, I agree with</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"> Hinton that we should continue to develop AI, but be mindful of the potential pitfalls. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Basically, the moral is this: read Hinton's "</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; text-align: left;"><i>with a lot of thought into how to stop it going rogue" </i>as "w</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; text-align: left;"><i>ith a lot of thought into how to stop it becoming too dangerously human and at the disposal of bad actors". </i>The danger is endemic to humanity itself and the irony is that the potential dangers exist because humans create AI in their own image and/or AI becomes an extension of the flawed human will. Thus Hinton's fears are grounded in human nature, a nature that all too readily asserts itself over and above other selves, a flawed nature that may well be passed on to AI systems built in the image of humanity with the s</span><i style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">ame old goals of adapting and preserving an individual identity. </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;">Christianity calls those flaws in human nature "Sin", the word with the "I" in the middle. We all have a sense of individuality and a conscious sense of self: That individuality should not be extinguished, but when called for self should be denied in favour of other selves in a life of service (Phil 2:1-11).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><b>Footnote:</b></span></span></p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; text-align: left;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">* Venn
diagrams don't have the facility to form a set of sets. However, this can be
achieved using another "higher level" Venn diagram; we thus have Venn
diagrams that are about other Venn diagrams. See here:<o:p></o:p></span></p><a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-thinknet-project-footnote-on-self_11.html" target="_blank">http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-thinknet-project-footnote-on-self_11.html</a></span><p></p></div><div><span style="text-align: justify;">** Epistemic difficulties surrounding accessibility and signal opacity loom large in historical research. "Epistemic distance" is a big issue in human studies. </span></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Another BBC link:</b></div><div><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65760449">AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work - BBC News</a></div><div><br /></div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-10654064738222192272023-04-08T02:12:00.040-12:002023-06-04T02:10:19.573-12:00The AI Question and ChatGPT: "Truth-Mills"?<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtaV8uSq_fjt_2xvvUBUoPeIVBNkOAAaEMwxGSIJAu1VV0Hg7qxFxaSdLSVnDf538x9c9Es7-PzMmqtQ9HQWIKSFykKKeAuUFfNSi9DvK4xK5KvIdRtyCZbjbCJg_HFOa2nT6YteKkQ7ijBiuXXydllwZoDXLbpGTFM-f0xk_1ruY8erAceco/s400/DSCN8238.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="400" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtaV8uSq_fjt_2xvvUBUoPeIVBNkOAAaEMwxGSIJAu1VV0Hg7qxFxaSdLSVnDf538x9c9Es7-PzMmqtQ9HQWIKSFykKKeAuUFfNSi9DvK4xK5KvIdRtyCZbjbCJg_HFOa2nT6YteKkQ7ijBiuXXydllwZoDXLbpGTFM-f0xk_1ruY8erAceco/w400-h299/DSCN8238.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Everyone seems to be complaining about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT" target="_blank">Artificial Intelligence application "ChatGPT"</a> : From passionate leftwing atheist PZ Myers through moderate evangelical atheist Larry Moran to cultish fundamentalist Ken Ham it's nothing but complaints!</p><p style="text-align: justify;">PZ Myers refers to ChatGPT as <a href="https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/02/15/i-agree-with-blake-stacey/" target="_blank">a Bullsh*t fountain</a>. Also, in a post titled "<i><a href="https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/04/01/how-ai-will-destroy-us/" target="_blank">How AI will destroy us</a></i>" he blames capitalism and publishes a YouTuber who calls AI "B.S.". Biochemist Larry Moran <a href="https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2023/03/chatgpt-lies-about-junk-dna.html" target="_blank">gives chatGPT a fail mark</a> on the basis that it is "lying" about Junk DNA (<a href="https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/02/13/chatgpt-totally-fails-my-one-question-exam-on-junk-dna/" target="_blank">that's also a complaint of Myers</a>, although "lying" is rather too anthropomorphic in my opinion). The Christian fundamentalists go spare and lose it completely: Kentucky theme park supremo Ken Ham, in a post titled "<i>AI - It's pushing an Anti-God Agenda"</i> (March 1st) complains that ChatGPT isn't neutral but is clearly anti-God - what he means by that is that its output contradicts Ken's views! We find even greater extremism in a post by PZ Myers where he reports Catholic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Knowles_(political_commentator)" target="_blank">Michael Knowles</a> claiming that AI may be demonic! Ken Ham is actually much nearer the mark than Knowles when Ken tells us that AI isn't neutral: The irony is that although we are inclined to think of AI as alien, inhuman, impartial and perhaps of superhuman power, it is in fact inextricably bound up with epistemic programming that has its roots in human nature and the nature of reality itself. It is therefore limited by the same fundamental epistemic compromises that necessarily plague human thinking**. Therefore like ourselves AI will, of necessity, hold <i><b>opinions</b></i> rather than detached cold certainties. Let me expand this theme a bit further. </p><p style="text-align: center;">***</p><p style="text-align: justify;">From 1987 onwards I tried to develop a software simulation (eventually written in C++) of some of the general features of intelligence. I based this endeavor on Edward De Bono's book "<i>The Mechanism of Mind</i>". I tell this story in <a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/12/thinknet-project-articles.html" target="_blank">my "Thinknet" project</a> and although it was clear that it was the kind of project whose potential for further development was endless, I felt that I had taken its development far enough to understand the basics of how intelligence might form an internal model of its surroundings. The basic idea was simple: it was based on the generalised Venn diagram. Viz:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK-AZzdm1XswhvdCYuKKitsbA-j8vplQ1uxKKdJZfL2XxCx1nt87UXhweLGDdqkNSav9kRU-nOLsSZVu5RU4PZcgel0-JbPLmeKrUb1TUYwI1YmMgWNBJN9TLsiK2AieKHwsq0VvQ9igv0eR6ok4rDOEfzd5zI0W-yZvnGsDNFn4VXSD2xUJc/s1198/OverlappingSets.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1198" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK-AZzdm1XswhvdCYuKKitsbA-j8vplQ1uxKKdJZfL2XxCx1nt87UXhweLGDdqkNSav9kRU-nOLsSZVu5RU4PZcgel0-JbPLmeKrUb1TUYwI1YmMgWNBJN9TLsiK2AieKHwsq0VvQ9igv0eR6ok4rDOEfzd5zI0W-yZvnGsDNFn4VXSD2xUJc/s320/OverlappingSets.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">The whole project was predicated on the assumption that this kind of picture can be used as a general description of the real world. In this picture a complex profusion of categories is formed by properties distributed over a set of items*. <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw" target="_blank">If these properties are distributed randomly then there are no relations between them</a> and it is impossible to use any one property as the predictor of other properties. But our world isn't random; rather it is highly organized, and this organization means that there are relationships between properties which can be used predictively. As I show in my Thinknet project the upshot is that the mechanism of mind becomes a network of connections representing these nonrandom relations. The Thinknet project provides the details of how a model of thinking can be based on a generalised Venn diagram.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">One thing is fairly obvious; if we have many items and many properties a very complex Venn picture may emerge and the epistemic challenge then arises from the attempt to render this picture as a mental network of connections. Epistemically speaking both humans and AI systems suffer from the same limitations: In trying to form a network of connections they can only do so from a limited number of experiential samples. This would be OK if the world was of a relatively simple organization, but the trouble is that yes, it is highly organised but it is not simple; it is in fact both organized and yet very, very complex. Complexity is a halfway house between the simplicity of high order and the hyper-complexity of randomness. To casual observers, whether human or AI, this complexity can at first sight look like randomness and therefore present great epistemic challenges in trying to render this world as an accurate connectionist model given the limits on sampling capacity. On top of that let's bear in mind that many of the connections we make don't come from direct contact with reality itself but are mediated by social texts. In fact in the case of my Thinknet model <i>all</i> its information came from compiled text files where the links were already suggested in a myriad Bayesian statements. This "social" approach to epistemology is necessary because solitary learning from "coalface" experience takes far too long; that would be like starting from the Paleolithic. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Like Thinknet we learn far more from social texts than we do from hands-on experience. Those social "text files" are extremely voluminous and take a long time to traverse. There is no quick fix that allows this textual experience to be by-passed. This immediately takes us into the realm of culture, group dynamics and even politics where biased sampling is the natural state of human (& AI) affairs. <span style="text-align: left;">The complex mental networks derived from culture means that i</span>ntelligence, both human and AI, is only as good as the cultural data and samples they receive. So, in short, AI, like ourselves, is going to be highly opiniated, unless AI has got some kind of epistemic humility built into its programming. AI isn't going to usher in a new age of unopinionated and error-unadulterated knowledge objectively derived from mechanical "Truth-Mills". The age old fundamental epistemic problems will afflict AI just as it afflicts human beings: PZ Myers might call ChatGPT a Bullsh*t fountain, but then that's more or less also his opinion of the Ken Hams, the Michael Knowles and Donald Trumps of this world. On that matter he is undoubtedly right! As with humanity (e.g. Ken Ham) then so with ChatGPT. The bad news for PZ Myers is that Bullsh*t production has now been automated!</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaUYavM9Pp66W5qodPy-Ajf8YK3N6d7m9Sedm2qS6cgEKzOE1aeDWOM4wx568uv4JdLgBy7eE28jjGMhO4E2DJ_0Gi4KYuRsv5c-fOXutCIoSGzsUGWMRQCJXVYLktClIxVPlCpHWwCdtASbg7Ue2Jj-u8H45iDzZPQuQLCKeI3yPI3Y6S9jI/s263/images%20(2).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="191" data-original-width="263" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaUYavM9Pp66W5qodPy-Ajf8YK3N6d7m9Sedm2qS6cgEKzOE1aeDWOM4wx568uv4JdLgBy7eE28jjGMhO4E2DJ_0Gi4KYuRsv5c-fOXutCIoSGzsUGWMRQCJXVYLktClIxVPlCpHWwCdtASbg7Ue2Jj-u8H45iDzZPQuQLCKeI3yPI3Y6S9jI/w400-h290/images%20(2).jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Truth Mills: Is AI going to automate the production of theoretical fabric?</i></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">ChatGPT for dogs</span></b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilxvLxv1hUqlXjUbwmvXCjF_0C2go8QKyOVctD9Snld5wIMsBMDtHVPjnF9FMdhmRgbgPmZHsIHcH5Bfwp5y64babDhDRv2yO4-ZI8CJjTJvSvH1DjbrI8RnW34WFglCl9axfCeKdYO_y3Zj56sjstd2UMtI66EPvDXqxCo0eirydw5iEuzbs/s1000/11054838_10206764709264185_5432986407338945007_o.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilxvLxv1hUqlXjUbwmvXCjF_0C2go8QKyOVctD9Snld5wIMsBMDtHVPjnF9FMdhmRgbgPmZHsIHcH5Bfwp5y64babDhDRv2yO4-ZI8CJjTJvSvH1DjbrI8RnW34WFglCl9axfCeKdYO_y3Zj56sjstd2UMtI66EPvDXqxCo0eirydw5iEuzbs/w400-h400/11054838_10206764709264185_5432986407338945007_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Footnotes:</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;">* Venn diagrams don't have the facility to form a set of sets. However, this can be achieved using another "higher level" Venn diagram; we thus have Venn diagrams that are about other Venn diagrams. See here:</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-thinknet-project-footnote-on-self_11.html" target="_blank">Quantum Non-Linearity: The Thinknet Project. Footnote: On Self Description (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">** Epistemic difficulties surrounding accessibility and signal opacity loom large in historical research. "Epistemic distance" is a big issue in human studies. </p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-46696659477331063412023-03-31T22:13:00.035-12:002023-04-03T22:15:24.537-12:00Abracademia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicotUgZyPqlRT5WayZDnA-KGgRKpDxqZ1vHULjW0ndjGuwAivx8Pwi1KgAJ0_6WTv1DvY0K4IGrPfqKE86V6uZsqjzYkoShEhmLUe0iC-eR3SYizIyj_4wyBfLmTsfLH6VDiZwdCUtHcL9vWRMsiu8Hj4eVeRGD_NkLg5v4L85TEWBc5e7gCg/s500/abracademia-500x392.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="500" height="502" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicotUgZyPqlRT5WayZDnA-KGgRKpDxqZ1vHULjW0ndjGuwAivx8Pwi1KgAJ0_6WTv1DvY0K4IGrPfqKE86V6uZsqjzYkoShEhmLUe0iC-eR3SYizIyj_4wyBfLmTsfLH6VDiZwdCUtHcL9vWRMsiu8Hj4eVeRGD_NkLg5v4L85TEWBc5e7gCg/w640-h502/abracademia-500x392.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">The above cartoon, very appropriately named <i>Abracademia,</i> <a href="https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/02/12/magic-is-not-mechanism/" target="_blank">appeared on PZ Myers' blog</a> where he comments:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">It makes a good point, that magic
isn’t an explanation for much of anything — you need some chain of causality
and evidence, with some mechanism at each step. You don’t just get to say “it’s
magic” or “it’s a miracle.”</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> </span></i></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Bonus, the comic pokes fun at
that absurd ad hoc magic system in the Harry Potter books that is nothing but
lazy plot gimmicks.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I know that PZ Myers has got a downer on JK Rowling and that explains some of his aversion to H. Potter, but I ask myself this: Do I agree with him? Sort of, but I'll have to qualify. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Firstly, the cartoon starts off with a chair that is actually being levitated by, well, "magic". So in this context, whatever "magic" is within this cartoon world, it is predicated as a real phenomenon. So given that this so-called magic is real our young heroine in the cartoon does have a point: The curious have every right to usefully ask: "How's it done?" By smoke and mirrors? By thin wire suspension? By a newly discovered anti-gravity ray? Or by something even more exotic (like psychokinesis) of which we know nothing? I assume that when Myers tells us there's need for some explanatory chain of causation along with its accompanying evidence, he's asking for a closer linked cause and effect connection than the utterance of "<i>Floatularis</i>" and the wave of the wand; otherwise, there is a big gap there!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">In our world cause-and-effect entails the transmission of the energy & information from A to B. So where's the energy & information coming from to lift that chair? But then this question presumes that the energy/signal transfer paradigm is the correct one to use. Perhaps it doesn't work like that at all when we are dealing with so-called "magic"! But assuming that the cause-and-effect paradigm applies here by what mysterious ways does energy get from A to B? Cause-and-effect "explanations" fill in some of the "in-between" details and often in ways that allows those details to be predicted using those succinct laws of physics to generate those details. But apart from this clever mathematical trickery I have to confess that's as far as our understanding goes and just why those physical algorithms work is as good as "magic"! As I would contend, this kind of science is, in the final analysis, <i>mere description</i>, albeit clever description that comes out of asking the kind of questions our heroin above, at risk of her life, is asking. Of course, it may be possible to further improve on the elegance and comprehensiveness of the laws of physics in hand but in an absolute sense the descriptive role of science's physical "algorithms" means that ultimately it leaves us with wall of explanatory incompleteness, what is in fact an explanatory silence. It's ironic that as science fills in the gaps with more descriptive details, we zoom in only to find just more finely spaced gaps! </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">***</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">So, is it all magic & mystery? No, it's not magic and the mystery is better described as <i>the miraculous, an </i>idea pregnant with meaning which stimulates curiosity and prompts further questions. Contrast that with <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2022/05/brian-cox-on-cosmic-perspective.html" target="_blank">a purely secular take on the cosmic perspective</a> which posits the organization of the universe as either a meaningless brute fact or proposes that the apparent selective contingency of cosmic organization is a human perspective effect on the infinite sea of randomness in a multiverse. It goes to show that a magical paradigm is not the only way of thinking which stifles curiosity. Do you hear "multiverse" and just stop asking questions?</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTvxjxE6LdpLQLC9h9FXsSIy9VPVmT-XNP6xAlGe5ZLMQJamKNeY1dCM21jg6sbOhUVHAB264V8UyOt5qkxvEKsiI85HEU-e-MOPjEbqEoAvBlXcUuNkSUNIcRSabUS57Uj4zO-jVzt8gNb-Imi-wTslMRCS4YN-uThwYA_JPM_OakZ9Sk8CM/s465/AstroCartoons3.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="326" data-original-width="465" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTvxjxE6LdpLQLC9h9FXsSIy9VPVmT-XNP6xAlGe5ZLMQJamKNeY1dCM21jg6sbOhUVHAB264V8UyOt5qkxvEKsiI85HEU-e-MOPjEbqEoAvBlXcUuNkSUNIcRSabUS57Uj4zO-jVzt8gNb-Imi-wTslMRCS4YN-uThwYA_JPM_OakZ9Sk8CM/w400-h280/AstroCartoons3.gif" width="400" /></a></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>We really need to supplement the past tense question "Where did it all come from?"</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> with the present tense continuous question " Where is it all coming from?</i></div></i><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>Relevant Link:</b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/02/something-comes-from-something-nothing.html" target="_blank">Quantum Non-Linearity: Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)</a></p><p></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-15975204484737617352023-03-06T07:19:00.022-12:002023-04-07T21:35:16.433-12:00The "Intellectual Dark Web" hoaxed?<p style="text-align: center;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YjHmPTV0s0A" title="Who's Pranking Sam Harris & Eric Weinstein about UFOs?" width="560"></iframe></p><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I was fascinated, gob-smacked in fact, by the rather curious YouTube video (above) by atheist Rebecca Watson and <a href="https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/03/03/when-circling-the-drain-skepticism-will-of-course-fall-for-the-same-old-scams/" target="_blank">published by PZ Myers on his blog</a>. At first, I thought I'd take a look because PZ Myers billed it as video about schismogenesis in the New Atheist and secular communities. I have followed this theme for some years and wanted to see how these divisions were shaping up. Not that I thought any worse of the atheist community for it: After all, the historical Christain subculture of which I'm part has a lot more experience of sharp schisms than these atheists; about 2000 years' worth more of experience! When it comes to humanity, Christian and otherwise, schism is the name of the game: As Sir Robert Walpole might have put it in my all-time favorite quote, it's "<i>The natural state of human affairs</i>". </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But I was in for a big shock if I thought this video was going to be just another archetypical story of human epistemic challenge and disagreement, whilst I looked on with unsurprised and jaded cynicism. Rebecca Watson is seldom lost for words but today she gave a lot of airtime to atheists Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein with whom she is very much at odds. In fact she just let Eric and Sam pay out enough rope to hang themselves. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the video we hear both Harris and Weinstein claim that they have been contacted by government insiders telling them that we are due for a big official disclosure about the UFO phenomenon being utterly real. Harris referred to his contact as a "private outreach" and that this contact informed him that government sources, especially the military, have incontrovertible evidence of the presence of alien technology. Eric Weinstein, a man who also entertains Covid conspiracy theories, says that his inside informer has told him that a "big update" is due from government on the subject of UFOs. He's been told that he will be flown out to Colorado Springs, met by a car, blind folded and taken to a place where he will be shown stuff which means we'll never be the same again! Weinstein has been "on standby" sitting on this promise of UFO disclosure for all of three years, sometimes being told "<i>not this week because we are too busy</i>". But one can't help the idea popping into one's head that he is being strung along by a hoaxer. Apparently, he along with Sam Harris and others in their orbit, have been flattered by the suggestion that they will be needed to bring this news to the world.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Well, I was in stitches especially as Rebecca Watson (like PZ Myers) always finds exactly the right words to lampoon this kind of claim, and especially so if the claimant looks to be motivated by all-too-common human weaknesses & conceits! Watson floats the thought that Harris and Weinstein are being hoaxed and that these two big names, who she thinks are getting far too big for their boots, were easy targets for to this kind of flattering hoax because their (masculine) hubris means they always think of themselves as "<i>the right men for the job</i>"! I was very much reminded of the hoax played on <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2012/07/identified-lying-object.html" target="_blank">Tim Ventura by "flying saucer engineer" Bob Lazar</a> and the way Tim was strung along by Lazar for about a year. But Tim Ventura has always come across (to me at least) as Mr. Nice-Guy and he was only open to Lazar's hoax because like the rest of us he had career ambitions and a natural vanity which can sometimes be exploited. But in credit to Ventura he is humble enough to admit he was hoaxed, but then only for a year and not 3 years. (<a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2022/12/tim-ventura-anti-gravity-and.html" target="_blank">See also here for more on Ventura</a>). Is that because Eric Weinstein's ego is 3x bigger that Tim Ventura's?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And yet....and yet...like Weinstein I have heard the testimony from so many disinterested witnesses who have had firsthand encounters that I too feel sure they are genuinely experiencing something unusual although I'm not sure exactly what that something is - but I very much doubt it is technological aliens as we think of them. Also, Weinstein was clearly gen'd up on the Skin Walker Ranch case and the scientists involved who have seen "things". He just couldn't believe that these people were lying and frankly neither can I. As he said "<i>there is too much data; something is going on</i>". But Weinstein thinks it's down to technological aliens; that I very much doubt. The Skin Walker Ranch case is too bizarre and looks more like the loose associative, drifting & phantasmal thinking of the human vision-generating mind somehow spilling over into reality: The paranormal has its roots in the earthly biosphere and in particular human consciousness. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Yes, I agree something's going on, but it's not little gray men with their technology: They are just a facade for something else and not a very convincing facade at that: My best guess is that it is more to do with the nature of reality which like our own minds may at times be subject to some kind of delusional dysfunction. After all, what makes reality but the fact that those laws of physics are primarily a way of organizing our experiences with such a replete coherence that they provide the equivalent of a physical version of a "Turing Test" facade, ensuring that our epistemic interrogations are answered so fully that a picture of an all-round "solid" reality appears to emerge. But these strange paranormal experiences are the opposite. It's as if they are to the rational world of physics as our visions, dreams and hallucinations are to the wakeful rational mind. Our dreams appear to have a loose associative meaning, but sleep brings on a very chaotic synthesis of elements from our waking life, driven by a mix of emotions. Apart from being a fragmented recapitulation of elements we know from waking life the chaotic juxtapositions of our dreams are largely without meaning and appear to be a consequence of some mathematically chaotic logic that rules the night visions. Likewise, ghosts, UFO's and the apparitional in general looks too much like the contents of the human id & ego somehow projected out on to reality itself in a chaotic mishmash. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The chaotic states of mind and the paranormal (the latter embraces the whole of gamut of apparitions from ghosts, alien animals & life forms to UFOs) are far too erratic, singular, irregular, complex and probably subject to some underlying chaotic dynamic to make them easily amenable to a scientific epistemology that can pin them down. Scientific epistemology depends above all on a stable status quo. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As for the relationship of government and UFOs, I'll wager that government doesn't have any special inside knowledge of the phenomenon apart from having bigger databases; in fact just more of the same puzzling observational traces, but, I'll hazard, no hardware, no alien bodies and no Lazar-sport-model flying saucers. Official institutions are probably as puzzled by the whole thing as are the rest of us. But officialdom needs to appear competent and in control, therefore they are loathe to admit their ignorance and lack of control. To my mind this is sufficient to explain the authority's reaction to the paranormal, a reaction which ranges from outright denial to at best an embarrassed evasiveness & silence.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> But be all that as it may: The question remains: Who is hoaxing the Intellectual Dark Web? Some kind of Bob Lazar figure? The whole thing looks so much like the bizarre Bob Lazar fraud where Tim Ventura (initially at least) was strung along with promises, promises, promises. </div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-36359174167325731392023-02-12T23:05:00.008-12:002023-02-13T23:28:07.718-12:00The "Observational Science vs Historical Science" Error.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG7KRrmHLNbUKElx5ibJe1_mP44HtbqNnNpOug_2GORNJ--DJ-MYUHPgy8Zzoph9t0R65SgzHt8Jo-yF--o8L7YjaUYQ_V3SK5RWx80cEVHLT8kA8OUaTBAkCa8wR8OGMw3eEpNZy9oi71gXu6yXpFiapRuXR_kSpyHLFH9PUEOKQX3-34wrM/s300/physics-300x300.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG7KRrmHLNbUKElx5ibJe1_mP44HtbqNnNpOug_2GORNJ--DJ-MYUHPgy8Zzoph9t0R65SgzHt8Jo-yF--o8L7YjaUYQ_V3SK5RWx80cEVHLT8kA8OUaTBAkCa8wR8OGMw3eEpNZy9oi71gXu6yXpFiapRuXR_kSpyHLFH9PUEOKQX3-34wrM/s1600/physics-300x300.webp" width="300" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Nothing in science is directly observable.</i> </div> <p></p><p><a href="http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/02/creationism-crawls-back.html" target="_blank">This article on Panda's Thumb</a> tells us that:</p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i>Montana considers a bill that allows teaching of “scientific
facts” but not “scientific theories”. ....</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i>The bill in question is Montana Senate Bill 235, introduced
by freshman Senator Dan Emrich. Prof. Coyne quotes the bill as saying</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: courier;">WHEREAS, [sic] the purpose of K-12 education is to educate
children in the facts of our world to better prepare them for their future and
further education in their chosen field of study, and to that end children must
know the difference between scientific fact and scientific theory; and</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: courier;">WHEREAS, [sic] a scientific fact is observable and
repeatable, and if it does not meet these criteria, it is a theory that is
defined as speculation and is for higher education to explore, debate, and test
to ultimately reach a scientific conclusion of fact or fiction.</span></i><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Matt Young, the writer of the Panda's thumb article, goes on to say:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i>Very little in science can be considered an indisputable
fact, so if this bill passes and becomes law, schools will not be allowed to teach,
say, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, ideal gas theory, the germ
theory of disease, or, for that matter, string theory or the theory of the
leisure class. Or, what they are really after, the theory of evolution.</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i>In other words, Sen. Emrich and his cosponsors are a trio of
ignoramuses who do not have the foggiest idea what a scientific fact or a
scientific theory is. They are very dangerous because, as Dr. Scott shows, they
almost certainly have the Supreme Court on their side.<o:p></o:p></i></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Matt Young is completely right</b>. Senator Dan Emrich, on the other hand, has a toy-town notion of scientific epistemology which looks as though it has its origins in the religious fundamentalist's (Islam, Christian, etc.) notion of science. They use the crude and contrived bicategory of "observation vs. history" to dismiss historical science that doesn't fit in their worldview: Their misleading claim is that history isn't observational & therefore fundamentalist histories can then be patched in willy-nilly.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> <a href="https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2021/06/epistemology-ontology-creation-and.html" target="_blank">In this blog entry</a> I reference a discussion I had with a Christain Fundamentalist I called "Joe Smith". This discussion was largely centred around my criticism of the fundamentalist misrepresentation of scientific epistemology as having an "<span style="font-family: courier;">observational science vs historical science</span>" distinction.</div>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20627807.post-28449524881000165892023-02-10T00:02:00.037-12:002023-02-14T23:02:10.225-12:00Origins of Life Research<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUx6osLw4Rq1M8E6366s8uZEZ31lPI0AicVuCt3_CiTSTwBUd8OSYacrRZahYDNDN37DYP6QsHknRRvmuwfwtfwqirIWwTpfU1F9LJx4Gb4goJAyBKC6SQ_mpoze30TA8khWo61pUf6nz0r4THbXjL3momqsvr4A5z9GqKviWpCIp74vss_8U/s300/download%20(1).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUx6osLw4Rq1M8E6366s8uZEZ31lPI0AicVuCt3_CiTSTwBUd8OSYacrRZahYDNDN37DYP6QsHknRRvmuwfwtfwqirIWwTpfU1F9LJx4Gb4goJAyBKC6SQ_mpoze30TA8khWo61pUf6nz0r4THbXjL3momqsvr4A5z9GqKviWpCIp74vss_8U/w400-h224/download%20(1).jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Picture from: <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/03/10/172875449/an-eclectic-mix-of-giants-takes-on-the-origin-of-life"><span style="font-size: medium;">Searching For The Origin Of Life On Earth : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR</span></a></i></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/03/10/172875449/an-eclectic-mix-of-giants-takes-on-the-origin-of-life" target="_blank">This brief web article</a> on the state of abiogenesis research was compiled by the writer after he attended an <i>Origin and Life </i>conference. The article tells us that:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: medium;"><span><span style="color: #333333;"><i>Not only is there no consensus yet on how life might have started on Earth,
there is not even any agreement on </i></span><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #333333; padding: 0in;"><i>where</i></span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span><i> it started. Hypotheses presented at the
meeting included:</i></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: medium;"><i><span style="color: #333333; text-indent: -0.25in;">1. life
was brought to Earth from outer space by meteorites</span><span style="color: #333333; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: medium;"><i><span style="color: #333333; text-indent: -0.25in;">2. life started around
hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor</span><span style="color: #333333; text-indent: -0.25in;">
</span><span style="color: #333333; text-indent: -0.25in;">life originated in shallow volcanic/sulfuric rock
pools</span><span style="color: #333333; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: medium;"><i>3. life
first appeared on the clay surfaced ocean shores exposed to tidal wet-dry cycle</i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: medium;"><i><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; text-indent: -0.25in;"></span></span><span style="color: #333333; text-indent: -0.25in;">4. life came into
being at sub-freezing temperatures on a snowball Earth</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The writer also tells us that there is sufficient optimism in the OoL community to believe that the abiogenesis question will be answered perhaps in 10 to 50 years and that no one at the conference doubted that the answer was within reach. The article is dated 2013, so they've already hit that lower limit. Moreover....</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 14.1pt; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span><i>Despite the prevalent optimism, it
was also clear that we still have significant hurdles to overcome. Which
reminds me of a wonderful anecdote Bill Martin (yet another giant) told the
audience during his lecture. A few years ago, Bill had been one of several
researchers invited to speak to the Pontifical Council on the origin of life.
After he had explained to them how we — as scientists — are trying to
understand how the (spontaneous) transition from pure chemistry to living cells
might have happened, one of the cardinals asked him: "Wouldn't a little
bit of God help there, Dr. Martin?" </i></span></span><i style="color: #333333;">Yes, science would be a lot easier if we were allowed to simply insert
"a little bit of God" here and there. But then it would also be a lot
less interesting and exciting, no?</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "inherit", "serif"; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">....now that's a clear expression of dualism! ....that is, the idea which is an unholy cross between deism and God of the Gaps. As the writer opined: </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: medium;"><i>More and more of the gaps and details are filling in with each year that passes.</i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "inherit", "serif"; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">One might think that the writer has no theology driving his thought, but he does in fact <i>have a concept of God</i> even if he doesn't believe in God. That concept whispers within and instructs him as to what to expect or not expect if God existed. In this case, p</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "inherit", "serif"; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">resumably, with the filling in of those gaps the writer thinks that "God's bit" is being crowded out! Such thoughts have their foundation in the instinctual notion that the cosmos is a mechanism capable of maintaining its own dynamic. But s</span></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: medium;">cience's merely <i>descriptive</i> mechanical explanations can never have the property of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aseity" target="_blank">Aseity</a></i>: that is, those explanations can never contain their own explanation and tie up all the</span></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: medium;"> logical loose ends. <i>Explanatory completeness</i> isn't the task of science - its task is <i>description</i>: Though those descriptions may be cleverly succinct & mathematically compressed narratives, in the final analysis they are logically obliged to contain a hard kernel of </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-size: medium; text-indent: -0.25in;">brute contingency to muse over.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: medium;">According to <i>secular theology</i> "the God bit" only serves as a desperate resort of the religiously minded as they conceive God to be the explanatory filler in those explanatory gaps before they are eventually filled in with scientific description. </span></span><span style="text-indent: -24px;"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: medium;">But if science is a purely descriptive discipline, then those descriptions necessarily will never attain to logical completeness; that is, they will never have <i>Aseity.</i> The cosmic dynamic that generated life may well be completely describable in terms of a mix of equations and statistics, but that such equations & statistics (and the material particles they regulate) exist at all <i>everywhere and everywhen</i> remains a brute fact absent of </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: medium;"><i>Aseity</i>. </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;">If one insists on trying to get logical completeness (i.e. Aseity) from the descriptive algorithms & statistics of science all one ends up with is a regress; in this case an "<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down" target="_blank">algorithms-all-the-way-down</a></i>" regress.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: medium;">***</span></p><p style="background: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>In
a blog post dated 23 January and titled </span><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">Did Simul</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">ating “Cosmic Evolution” Get
Evolutionists Closer to the Origin of Life? </span></i></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Christian fundamentalist theme park manager Ken Ham raises a question over the relevance of research proposing that the amino acid building blocks of life came from space. </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">I didn't strongly disagree with Ken on
anything he said except when he finished on this note:</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">Life
in all its incredible diversity, from microscopic bacteria and fungi to plants
to animals to mankind, was created by God just 6,000 years ago. <b><u>Those
who reject God will go to all sorts of lengths to try to prove life arose by
natural processes.</u></b></span></i><span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-size: medium; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span> Once again that's classic dualism: <i>In short our Ken has a similar theology driving his thinking as that of our OoL researcher.</i> But, b</span></span><span style="font-size: medium; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span>ecause Ken is a subliminal God vs "<span style="font-family: courier;">natural forces</span>" dualist <i>and </i>a theist, he doesn't believe those "gaps" can be filled in with "<span style="font-family: courier;">natural processes</span>". Therefore, he </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>is necessarily committed to the <i style="font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">a priori</i> belief that abiogenesis could not come about by any of the hypotheses above. As a theist this crypto-dualism commits him to the idea that an overt divine interventionism fills in the gaps. He therefore sees creation as a binary choice between <i style="font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">abiogenies or God</i>; his religious instincts tell him that these are exclusive choices, and his Young Earth literalist interpretation of Genesis 1 further supports his <i style="font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">a priori </i>dualistic instincts. </span></span><span style="font-size: medium; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span>Therefore, Ken is necessarily committed to maximizing "the God bit" in order to keep his faith propped up just as, conversely, strong dualistic atheists are committed to minimizing "the God bit". But Ken goes further: He uses his subliminal dualism as a shibboleth which tests for Christian orthodoxy. Those who fail this test become <a href="http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2020/09/calling-down-hell-and-hamnation-on.html" target="_blank">the target of his spiritual invective.</a> </span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-size: medium; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span><br /></span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-size: medium; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span>***</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Christian Creation dualists forget that those so-called </span><span style="font-family: Courier;">"natural processes"</span><span> were created by God himself and not by an
incompetent demiurge. Therefore, these processes are far from natural, and we shouldn't
take it for granted that they are not capable of working miracles. What many Christian Creation dualists don't understand is that the heroic yet desperate secular project is engaged in trying to show
that the information content of the cosmos has no surprisal value at all and
that the cosmos originates from an information base of zero. But that is a
mathematically impossible task! If this impossibility is understood, then there need be no worry
about what those secularists are going to come up with: </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: medium; text-align: left;">Whatever secularists come up with will in the final analysis be some form of creation or other in so far as it will necessarily be a blend of contingent initial information and a given processing time: That has to be the assumed
starting point or, if you like, <i>The Creation Point. </i>But in actual fact it is less a point than it is a <i>creation</i> <i>volume</i> that fills the points everywhere and everywhen.</span></p><p></p>Timothy V Reeveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03913020911593893925noreply@blogger.com0