kairosfocus

The inimitable BA77 observes: I [used] to think that if ID could only get its evidence to the right people in the right places then they would change their mind about Darwinian evolution and we would have a fundamental ‘paradigm shift’ from the ‘top down’. But after a few years of banging my head on that wall to no avail, I realized that it is not a head problem with these people so much as it is a heart problem. i.e. many influential people in academia simply don’t want Design to be true no matter what evidence you present to them. Indeed, in many educational institutions, there is a systematic effort in academia to Expel anyone who does not toe Read More ›

One of the major features of UD, is the impact of commenters. So on occasion, it is useful to do a guest-post, here by Silver_Asiatic. And, if you think the semi-humorous suggestions below are strawman caricatures to be skewered, why not try the pattern we find ever so often, as is responded to here in the UD WACs — often to no effect as the strawmen are oh so rhetorically effective? So, please take the following as a light-hearted version of “sauce for the goose . . . “: SA: >>Over the past week, UD readers reflected on an aphorism, by News Desk’s, Denyse O’Leary: “Prediction: Increasingly, logic will be seen as a covert form of theism.” Along with some Read More ›

In a recent UD post, our Newsdesk predicted: “Increasingly, logic will be seen as a covert form of theism.” This was actually fulfilled two and a half years ago, in a combox exchange at the shadow-site, TSZ. I commented on UD President BA’s post on the prediction, and wish to headline that, feeding in some multimedia elements: ________________ >>BA & News: Actually, the prediction has already happened, note this from a TSZ combox for a post there that was trying to dismiss first principles of right reason, 2 1/2 years ago: Flint on February 21, 2012 at 2:37 am said: aleta, I don’t think I quite understand what you are saying with some of the rest of your post. However, Read More ›

I have been watching. Just now: A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no… (199,761) The surge has tapered but the interest plainly continues at a steady pace.  END

John Lennox is always a treat, here in a video in reply to the God Delusion thesis: Food for thought and comment, starting with, what is a delusion and then pivoting on the power of agent explanation. What do we think, why? END

This weekend, the Apollo 11 Moon Landing happened forty-five years ago to day and date.  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRwKUScppvQ I remember sitting on the stone ledge of our patio after church on Sunday, July 20, 1969 sipping a drink as radio carried the story of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Then, that evening my Dad tuned to a shortwave station in the darkened living room as we heard, live, the story of the Moon Walk. The next morning, the Gleaner headline was I think two inches high in block capitals. Let us remind ourselves of this now long ago but still important event in the history of science and technology. END

A food-for-thought lecture: Thoughts? END PS: Kindly note this (and the discussion in the original post here with onward discussion and video here) on the problem of neural networks, computation vs contemplation and trying to get North by heading West:

Just now, I’ve been noticing: A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no… (197,060) VJT’s thread just keeps on going. END  

When I was maybe five or six years old, my mother (a distinguished teacher) said to me about problem solving, more or less: if you can draw a picture of a problem-situation, you can understand it well enough to solve it. Over the many years since, that has served me well. Where, after so many months of debates over FSCO/I and/or CSI, I think many of us may well be losing sight of the fundamental point in the midst of the fog that is almost inevitably created by vexed and complex rhetorical exchanges. So, here is my initial attempt at a picture — an info-graphic really — of what the Complex Specified Information [CSI] – Functionally Specific Complex Organisation and/or Read More ›

It seems that self-aware mindedness is now on the table for discussion. In that context, I see that Reciprocating Bill is arguing: Given the fact that you entertain the notion that brains aren’t necessary for dreaming, why can’t that which dreams without a brain be a rock? This is a carry over from a discussion where I have pointed out: And also how a neural network is an example of how refined rock organised into a GIGO-limited computational unit still has not broken through from mechanical cause effect computation — which a raw rock obviously cannot do — to self-aware insightful reasoning contemplation: . . . in the brain:   That is, just as for a Thomson Mechanical Integrator: . Read More ›

Sometimes, an objector to design theory brings to the table a key remark that inadvertently focuses the debate back on the core basics. In his comment at 339 in the ongoing nature/detection of intelligence thread here at UD, longtime objector RDFish does so in these initial remarks: Intelligent Design Theory 1) No current theory of evolutionary biology can account for the complex form and function of living organisms. 2) This sort of complex form and function (let’s call it “CSI”) is, in our experience, produced only by human beings. 3) ID argues that the best explanation (let’s call it the “Designer”) for biological complexity can therefore be inferred to be similar to human beings in that both human beings and Read More ›

Design theory infers to design on inductive inference on tested reliable empirical signs. While many are disinclined to accept such inferences on matters linked to origins, that says more about lab coat clad materialist ideological a prioris and their cultural influences than it does about the actual balance of evidence on the merits. But also, design implies designer. One who exhibits creative, purposeful, imaginative, skilled intelligence adequate to configure a functionally specific, complex organised information-rich entity. Ranging from the text of this contribution (well beyond the 500 – 1,000 bits of FSCO/I that are easily shown to be beyond the plausible reach of blind chance and mechanical necessity on the gamut of solar system or observed cosmos), to complex body Read More ›

Today is the 70th Anniversary of the costly but vital D-Day Neptune- Overlord invasion in Normandy, France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIjmOcp_xhQ Worth a pause to reflect on in light of the final stanza of the US National Anthem: O thus be it ever, when freemen shall standBetween their loved home and the war’s desolation.Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued landPraise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall waveO’er the land of the free and the home of the brave! And, as well, the final verse in Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Afro-American Read More ›

In Jamaica, this distinguished professor — literally the man who led the Caribbean region’s medical fight against HIV/AIDS from the beginning in 1983 on — has been fired as at Tuesday afternoon by UWI’s Vice Chancellor for giving a politically incorrect expert testimony to The Supreme Court in Belize. This is a sign of how pressure group activism led by radicals of various stripes . . . it hardly matters that they all think they have cornered the market on the correct view on whatever bees are buzzing in their bonnets . . . is undermining the civilisation’s hard won consensus on freedom of inquiry, of expression and of educators and students around the world. Not to mention, just plain Read More ›

One of the underlying debates linked to the design issue is the notorious mind-brain gap challenge. It keeps coming up, and on both sides of the ID debate. I would therefore like to spark a bit of discussion with a clip from a Scott Aaronson Physics course lecture: >> . . . If we interpret the Church-Turing Thesis as a claim about physical reality, then it should encompass everything in that reality, including the goopy neural nets between your respective ears. This leads us, of course, straight into the cratered intellectual battlefield that I promised to lead you into. As a historical remark, it’s interesting that the possibility of thinking machines isn’t something that occurred to people gradually, after they’d Read More ›