Is social media killing Wikipedia?

_{Denyse O'Leary

October 24, 2017

Culture, Darwinism, Media, Naturalism, Science}

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From Hossain Derakhshan at Wired:

Wikipedia has never been as wealthy or well-organized. American liberals, worried that Trump’s rise threatened the country’s foundational Enlightenment ideals, kicked in a significant flow of funds that has stabilized the nonprofit’s balance sheet.

That happy news masks a more concerning problem—a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website. It is another troubling sign of a general trend around the world: The very idea of knowledge itself is in danger.

…

Now the challenge is to save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge amid the conquest of new and old television—how to collect and preserve knowledge when nobody cares to know. Television has even infected Wikipedia itself—today many of the most popular entries tend to revolve around television series or their cast. More.

<em>Teapot</em> Cobalt Blue Well, like we’ve said before, when a king cobra mixes it up with a giant sidewinder, it’s hard to know which side to back…

We think naturally of Wikipedia “disappearing” paleontologist Gunter Bechly and diminishing engineering prof Walter Bradley. Social media can, of course, also zap whoever the employees anticipate that Mark Zuckerberg and cronies don’t like. But they don’t pretend to be reference sources.

Wikipedia’s lofty goals were conceived in apparent ignorance of the usual ways human beings behave. One could be getting the opinions of experts, however motivated by the politics of a discipline, as with all encyclopaedias throughout history. But, in a new development, one could just be getting the opinions of trolls —information landfill. Some of it may be salvageable but who’s going to go to the trouble of digging in deep to find out?

Also: At “Wikipedians diminish another high achiever sympathetic to ID,” a commenter writes “Larry Moran isn’t in Wikipedia” (either). News replies,

ET at 3: The fact that Larry Moran isn’t in Wikipedia is not a good defence for that source. He has been quite active in recent evolution discussions. He was in Forbes in 2015 on that very topic, just for example.

If one wants to know what is happening, Wikipedia is not the place to look. But if a kid wants to sloven through homework in a failing school system and that’s okay with the folks at home, it’s ideal.

Note: Hossein Derakhshan (@h0d3r) is an Iranian-Canadian media analyst who was imprisoned in Iran from 2008 to 2014.

See also: Wikipedians diminish another high achiever sympathetic to ID. Yes, there is sometimes useful information in Wikipedia. But one can say that of the supermarket tabloids as well. It’s a question of how likely that is, relative to stuff we can’t evaluate or should avoid, averaged against the value of one’s time sorting it out.

Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

Comments

You want me to answer that? Sure, but you answer it first. Be specific. EDIT: Then you can tell me what this has to do with supporting you position.Upright BiPed_{November 6, 2017
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How did you know the first amino acid was lysine? Where did that piece of information come from?MatSpirit_{November 6, 2017
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Matt, I don't answer your question because, like the last exchange we had, you refuse to respond to the content of what is being said to you. Simply repeating what you've already said (which is exactly what you did) is not a response that interest me in the least. The fact is, I can tell you exactly where the information comes from in your make-believe scenario. Unfortunately, it would not make one iota of difference to you. That's how you operate. You are a person who simultaneously (totally) misunderstands the issues involved, yet you are absolutely certain of yourself. You started out talking about material mediums that contain encoded information. I reminded you that all encoded mediums of information (like the genome) require interpretation by systematic constraints (i.e. they are undeniably IC). To avoid this fact, you immediately equivocated to a reified anthropic projection of "information", suggesting that (given this projection of structural "information" in a protein) nothing else is needed, and therefore all that the complex translation machinery is unnecessary. I then reminded you that your anthropocentric projection of “information” in the structure of a protein does not cause that protein to replicate itself. Does that fact even slow you down? Does it give you even a moment of reflection? Nope. Facts make no difference to you. Now you’ve asked a question you think should somehow trip me up – where the answer is so obvious it hurts. Yet, you undoubtedly just don’t get it. It’s complete lunacy.Upright BiPed_{November 6, 2017
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Well, I think this conversation has pretty well wound down. Upright Biped seems to have flounced off. If I ever see him talking about epistemic cuts or saying reproduction without DNA, translation, etc is impossible again, I'll post my example of protein copying and ask him if hes figured out where the data comes from. Maybe he'll answer me. By the way, KF, you've quoted some famous physicist whose name ive forgotten several times about the four things that are necessary to copy something. I forget the details, but I trust that if you post that again, you'll mention that if you have the original protein to examine, then it contains all the information necessary to specify the duplicate so you don't need an external store of data such as DNA. That will reduce some of the ID confusion. By the way, I found out where Roger Penrose got that 10^ (10^123) figure from. Thats Penrose's figure for the likelihood of the entire observable universe fluctuating into existence at once from a disordered state. I assume he did that calculation to show how unlikely Boltzmann's theory is compared to the origin of our universe, which appeared as a very low information state and attained it's present complexity over billions of years. Whatever his reason, Penrose remains an atheist. Origenes and KF, Boltzmann Brains rule out only Boltzmann's universe. Our Big Bang was so low in information compared to a Boltzmann Brain that we would see uncountable gazillions of Big Bangs before a single Boltzmann Toenail popped into existance. The fact that Craig disagrees with this is a reflection on Craigs lack of understanding of the whole Boltzmann Brain issue. Origenes, a material brain that is capable of intelligent thought is fully compatible with theism, just as a material heart that pumps blood is theistically possible. KF, since it is essential to your argument that a Boltzmann Brain is intelligent enough to be an observer, I've made a copy of message 95 so that I will always remember that you will make a proposition that you believe is false if you think it will help you win an argument.MatSpirit_{November 6, 2017
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MS, You are simply doubling down by repetition. It has already been pointed out that the physics of the observed (don't forget: fine tuned at a deeply isolated operating point) universe is patently hugely informational -- there is a reason why physics is the hardest of the sciences.Then, the attempt to dismiss fine tuning by asserting a quasi-infinite (unobserved) multiverse and a selection effect runs into the utter implausibility of seeing this sort of cosmos rather than -- yes -- a Boltzmann brain world that popped up out of the underlying sub-world. Where, BTW, explaining a cosmos "bakery" that throws up coherent worlds is itself a deeper level of fine tuning problem, as Robin Collins long since pointed out. KF PS: The Boltzmann brain world is within the circle of "for sake of argument" we take it that a brain somehow tosses up a mind if sufficiently complex.kairosfocus_{November 4, 2017
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MatSpirit, WRT a Boltzmann Brain world. In short, the point is that our universe is not explained by the observer self-selection effect — a Boltzmann Brain world is far more likely. IOWs the multiverse idea was that it was likely that we would find ourselves in a universe such as the one we are in. That is not the case, instead, most observable worlds will be Boltzmann Brain worlds.
In other words, the observer self-selection effect is explanatorily vacuous. It does not suffice to show that only finely tuned worlds are observable. As Robin Collins has noted, what needs to be explained is not just intelligent life, but embodied, interactive, intelligent agents like ourselves. Appeal to an observer self-selection effect accomplishes nothing because there is no reason whatever to think that most observable worlds are worlds in which that kind of observer exists. Indeed, the opposite appears to be true: most observable worlds will be Boltzmann Brain worlds. [Craig]
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MatSpirit: And have you figured out yet why Boltzmann Brains have memories and thoughts, but human brains need a supernatural component to function?
You do understand that the whole line of reasoning is conducted under the (highly dubious) assumption that naturalism is true?Origenes_{November 4, 2017
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Oh, and you still dont understand Boltzmann Brains. They defeat only Boltzmann's universe, where an incredibly complex, high information universe suddenly appears out of nothing, not our universe which was extremely simple at its beginning. In our universe, we compare the probability of a low information, low entropy universe suddenly appearing vs a very high information brain suddenly appearing. The Big Bang always wins that comparison. And have you figured out yet why Boltzmann Brains have memories and thoughts, but human brains need a supernatural component to function?MatSpirit_{November 3, 2017
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The extremely low information content of the universe and the low (nearly zero) entropy at the Big Bang is exactly what we'd expect from the chaotic multi-verse and also the re-inflating universe. The existence of virtual particles appearing from empty space is more evidence for re-inflation. I'd be interested in seeing some empirical evidence for God. Not the things that Paul talks about, which we now know to have natural causes, but real evidence like people consistently getting cured when they're prayed for. Of course, rather well designed scientific experiments have been conducted looking for just such evidence, but the results were null. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for Upright Biped to tell us Where the information came from to specify lysine as the first amino acid in #87. It sure didn't come from "incredible".MatSpirit_{November 3, 2017
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MS, empirical evidence actually observed for a quasi-infinite multiverse? Nil. You are exerting ideological faith and simply refuse to attend to the implausibilities implied by relative statistical weight. Which was the point of the Boltzmann brain issue. KFkairosfocus_{November 3, 2017
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incredible
The incredible intelligent protein builder! Surely using one amino acid as a template for the same amino acid to create another polypeptide was the first thought that came to mind when scientists were trying to figure out how proteins come to exist in a cell.Mung_{November 3, 2017
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How did you know the first amino acid was lysine? Where did that piece of information come from?MatSpirit_{November 3, 2017
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incredibleUpright BiPed_{November 2, 2017
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Upright BiPed, I'm going to run through two ways to make a protein in hopes of showing you how two different kinds of information work. First, we'll use the method our modern cells use. When you want to make a protein: First, find the section of DNA that contains the information that specifies the order of amino acids in the protein. DNA specifies each amino acid with a triplet of base-pairs. There's also some junk mixed in. The DNA is copied to messenger RNA, where the amino acids are represented as triplets of codons. The junk is also removed and the mRNA is exported out of the nucleus into the outer cell. A ribosome wraps around the mRNA and begins to create the protein, one amino acid at a time. It does this by uncovering three of the mRNA's codons at a time. Brownian motion starts to slam molecules of transfer RNA against the exposed codons. Each tRNA molecule is a rod that has three anticodons on one end and an amino acid on the other. These anticodons will pair up with only one codon triplet. The amino acid on the other end is the one specified by that triplet. tRNAs are continually slammed up against the exposed codons and thrown away if they don't fit. When one is found that does fit, the amino acid it's carrying is added to the protein and the ribosome steps down the mRNA and exposes the next three codons. This process continues until a codon triplet is uncovered that marks the end of the protein and synthesis stops. Now in this system, the data specifying protein sequence is stored first in the DNA, with the amino acids encoded by triplets of base pairs. Then the information is passed to the messenger RNA, where it is encoded as triplets of codons. Then the mRNA is passed to the ribosomes where transfer RNA decodes the codon triplets into amino acids and assembles them into a protein. So our data is first stored in DNA, then transferred to mRNA and finally decoded into amino acids by tRNA. Any questions? Ok. Now let's copy a protein the way cells had to make copies before DNA. Since I have no idea what copying machinery existed pre-DNA, and neither do you, we'll have you do the job manually. I've already stretched the protein out so you can get at it easily. Step 1) See what the topmost amino acid is. Let's say it's lysine. Step 2) Select a lysine molecule out of your jar of assorted amino acids and plunk it down on the slide. But wait a minute!! How did you know that first molecule was lysine? You didn't get that information from the DNA because there is no DNA. You didn't get it from the mRNA because there is no mRNA. And you didn't have anything decoded by tRNA because there is no tRNA and besides, you dont have anything coded that needs decoding! Instead, you got the data from the protein you're copying. It's intrinsic data, like I've been talking about for the last couple of days. No semantics, no epistemic cut, no symbols, no codes, no coding or decoding, no DNA, no translation, no nothing. Just the raw data. Got it now?MatSpirit_{November 2, 2017
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KF @ 84 : "MS, you clearly are unfamiliar with the cumulative nature of the fine-tuning evidence." As a man who's familiar with math, I'm sure you realize that when you concatenate binary numbers as I did throughout my message, you are in effect multiplying them, just like the real life factors. KF: "PS: Your attempted rewriting of Leslie’s famous analogy speaks inadvertent volumes. A lone fly on a patch of wall hit by a bullet speaks of marksmanship and of a tack-driver of a rifle." A single shot would, but we're talking about multiple shots. Remember, We're talking about a real infinity of universes here. Infinity devided by any number is infinity, remember? KF @ 85: "If the other island is significantly larger than ours (for a given multiverse measure), then observers should expect to be on the other island." Oh yes. Observers in Hawaii should expect to be on the mainland. The pronnlem here is that he's talking about a Boltzmann like chaotic universe in which patches of order occasionally form out of the chaos and then fade back into chaos. We don't live in that kind of universe. Our's was produced as one tiny piece and it's been expanding as a unitary piece ever since. Forget Boltzmann's universe. He was wrong, it doesn't exist. Forget Boltzmann's Brains. They just bring you embarrassment. For instance, people on this blog are in near 100% agreement that a brain alone can not think. You believe something non-material is also needed for thought. Yet here you are postulating huge numbers of Boltzmann Brains popping into existence, each a fully conscious observer and complete with fake memories of a non-existant past. C'mon!MatSpirit_{November 2, 2017
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PPS: Barnes, pp. 60 - 61 (and kindly read the preceding para -- symbols likely won't reproduce):
The discovery of another life-permitting island in parameter space potentially creates a problem for the multiverse. If the other island is significantly larger than ours (for a given multiverse measure), then observers should expect to be on the other island. An example is the cold big bang, as described by Aguirre (2001). Aguirre’s aim in the paper is to provide a counterexample to what he calls the anthropic program : “the computation of P [the prob- ability that a randomly chosen observer measures a given set of cosmological parameters]; if this probability distribution has a single peak at a set [of parameters] and if these are near the measured values, then it could be claimed that the anthropic program has ‘explained’ the values of the parameters of our cosmology”. Aguirre’s concern is a lack of uniqueness.
A bit of a different problem, but it highlights the issue of relative statistical weight. We should be seeing a sol system only sub-cosmos, or even far more "likely" a Boltzmann brain cosmos (including the case of a hallucination of a larger sub cosmos). We should not be where we credibly are, were this a part of a quasi-infinite multiverse.kairosfocus_{November 2, 2017
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MS, you clearly are unfamiliar with the cumulative nature of the fine-tuning evidence. I suggest that you take time to read Barnes: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4647.pdf As for attempts to side-track into tangential debates over biblical exegesis etc, I have already repeatedly pointed out that that is not the proper focus for this forum and have suggested where you could go for serious answers. Trying to project the typical new atheist problems with reading in context with a modicum of respect for the integrity of the text is not going to help either. I wonder whether you have ever built or analysed the construction of a precision item that needed to be exact to one part in a thousand, much less a million or a thousand million. A single gear embeds enough FSCO/I to be decisive. The cumulative precision of the op point of our observed cosmos is well beyond 1 in 10^100. Indeed there are numbers on order1 in 10^ (10^123) that have come up. KF PS: Your attempted rewriting of Leslie's famous analogy speaks inadvertent volumes. A lone fly on a patch of wall hit by a bullet speaks of marksmanship and of a tack-driver of a rifle. Hitting another section carpeted with flies implies that odds of hitting some fly or other were much higher. LOCAL fine tuning is all that is needed, and we have it.kairosfocus_{November 2, 2017
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KF @ 79, first of all, thanks for the link to "Our Place in the Cosmos". Not only is it an excellent article, but if you click on "Articles" at the top of the page, there's Mary Midgley's famous article where she did a complete face plant over selfish genes plus the article by J.L. Mackie she was reacting to, Mackie's answer to her and right below tharpt, Dawkin's answer to her. Its fun to see a pretentious know it all like Midgely get her due. But then there's more! Two articles by David Stove, Australia's Worst Philosopher Ever, including his classic, "So You Think You are a Darwinian", followed by Simon Blackburn's, "I Rather Think I Am a Darwinian" and James Franklin's, "Stoves Anti-Darwinism". I'm looking forward to re-reading Stove and then seeing how a couple of professional philosophers handle his twaddle. With all these articles and more, I'll be reading till Christmas! Thanks again. As for "Our Place in the Cosmos", I'm at a loss to know why you offer it since it supports my position. I'm thinking we might have another example of the reading comprehension problem that plagues this blog. Let's start with, "Had the early expansion speed been a trifle slower, perhaps by less than one part in a billion, then gravity would have pulled everything into a Big Crunch very quickly, our universe remaining immensely hot throughout its brief career. An equally minor increase in the expansion speed would soon have resulted in very cold, very dilute gases unable to form any life-giving stars." One in a billion. That's nine decimal digits. But let's be conservative and say it's twenty. And we'll be more conservative still by using binary coded decimal notation which uses four bits per decimal digit or 80 bits total to specify the expansion speed of the universe. Next, "it is thought that the two main forces controlling the centre of the atom - the weak nuclear force, that is to say, and the strong nuclear force - had to fall inside very narrow limits if there were to be any long-living, steadily burning stars." Okay, give them each a very conservative 80 bits each. We're now up to 120 bits. Next, "The same is true of the strength ratio between gravity and electromagnetism: a divergence from the actual ratio by less than one part in a billion would apparently have made sun-like stars impossible. " Okay, another ultra conservative 80 bits and now we're up to 320 bits. Next, we have "chemistry, which is essential to life as we know it, seemingly demanded very precise adjustment of the masses of the neutron, the proton and the electron. And so on, down rather a long list." Okay, another ultra conservative 80 bits each for the masses of the neutron, proton and electron. Our total is up to 560 bits. Let's go hog wild and allow a thousand more bits for the "rather long list" ... no, to heck with caution, let's allocate EIGHTY thousand more bits for that long list! Maybe there are a thousand numbers in that list and we need to specify every one of them to twenty decimal digits accuracy. What's our total now? Hmmm, only 80,560 bits. Enough for a fairly good .jpg picture. Now let's compare that to a Being who can understand and speak Hebrew, as from a burning bush. How much information does that require? XKCD has a delightful cartoon describing the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo 11 to the moon and back, written in the most common 1,000 words in English: https://xkcd.com/1133/ Lets give God a break and assume he used only the 1,000 most common Hebrew words when he spoke to Noah. I don't read Hebrew, but for the sake of argument, let's assume the 1,000 most common Hebrew words have about the same informational content as their English counterparts. Ten bits would let us distinguish between 1024 different things, so God would have to know 10,000 bits of information just to specify one word from the other 999. But that wouldn't do anything to define those words. Here things get a bit murky. How many bits to define a word? Hundreds? Thousands? Let's be conservative again and say it's only 1000, a number that is far too low. That still bumps up God's required knowledge to over one million bits, far exceeding the 80,560 bits needed to fine tune a universe. And we still haven't covered the rules of grammar or the other words that will be needed to define the first 1000, let alone all the other information needed to understand basic Hebrew. And that's just language. If God designed us, then he has to know how we work! Just imagine the shelf full of books that would be required to explain how the human body works, never mind the mental aspects. He'd also have to understand how every other organism on earth works, from the lowliest virus to the fleeting horse and the eagle soaring overhead (so include aerodynamics, I guess). Let's just say that God would require far, far, far more information to have even a child's comprehension of Hebrew than is required to specify the universe we live in and let it go with that. Thanks for telling us about this article, although I still don't know why you find it. Oh yeah, those flies. Re-read that section again. "Here it can be useful to think of a fly on a wall, surrounded by an empty region. A bullet hits the fly Two explanations suggest themselves. Perhaps many bullets are hitting the wall or perhaps a marksman fired the bullet. There is no need to ask whether distant areas of the wall, or other quite different walls, are covered with flies so that more or less any bullet striking there would have hit one. The important point is that the local area contains just the one fly." He's saying it doesn't matter if there's more than one set of fine tuned constants that would provide a viable universe. Whether there's one fly on the wall or many, if you hit a fly with a bullet, it can mean that you're a marksman or just a poor shot who fired lots of bullets. God or a multiverse. The multi-verse is much more likely.MatSpirit_{November 1, 2017
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F/N2: Do objectors understand that constant appeal to statistical miracle undermines responsible, rational freedom? As in your and my comment posts are far more plausibly explained on statistical fluctuations accompanied by the delusion of having reasoned them out, than on reasoned thought leading to rational dialogue. That's part of J B S Haldane's insightful point that was cited way up. KFkairosfocus_{November 1, 2017
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F/N: Back to the OP, clipping 55 above:
BTW, on the OP, by definition Wikipedia is itself a form of social media pivoting on the notion of a collective effort producing a planetary knowledge base. Predictably, given the power of making a crooked yardstick the standard for straightness and accuracy, nihilistic ideologues manipulated it to seize power over what they were interested in, self-appointing themselves as the new magisterium. Then, if crookedness is now the institutional yardstick, what is really straight and accurate will NEVER pass the crooked test and will be rejected. To solve this we need plumb-line truths that are naturally straight and truly vertical, which can then expose crookedness. But those who are entrenched in power and profit from perpetuation of the crooked yardstick system will fight the breaking of their power tooth and nail. As is ever so evident from too many Wikipedia horror stories. A post modern world is a world in which folly clothes itself as wisdom and insists on leading a global march straight over the cliff. And that is a challenge that another social medium, a blog with forum elements, faces
KFkairosfocus_{November 1, 2017
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PPPS: I should note, another way of seeing this is to take apart an ill-advised way to put the million monkeys typing out Romeo and Juliet-type claim. So long as the monkeys freely type whatever they do, there is by definition no constraint forcing them to ever get to a particular text or class of text. So, we are forced instead -- this is now statistical thermodynamics -- to look at comparative statistical weights of clusters of microstates. In this case, the gibberish cluster is utterly overwhelming and that is what we expect. A good way to see is to go to bits, thus the binomial distribution: overwhelmingly dominated by gibberish near the 50-50 H-T or 1-0 peak. Next, we inject the anthropic constraint that we are in fact present as observers, so the issue is now how so. On a multiverse type hyp, the point of the extension of the Boltzmann brain type case is that that is a far less special and complicated world so it should carry much higher statistical weight than a sol system alone type world which in turn is vastly more abundant than the sort of full orbed cosmos we see. So, a statistical fluctuation type hyp would overwhelmingly expect that observers would be isolated brains, then isolated sol like systems. Thus, we do not have a PLAUSIBLE explanation for what we do see. Thence, we should be looking at explanations that do routinely produce functionally coherent, organised, information rich entities of high complexity; where high is 500 - 1,000 bits plus. Namely, intelligently directed configuration. The constant resort to the utterly implausible to the point of being appeal to statistical miracle in order to avoid what is empirically very well warranted, that FSCO/I is a well warranted and analytically highly plausible sign of design, speaks volumes.kairosfocus_{November 1, 2017
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MS, the implication that on a multiverse and chance bubbling up hyp we are far more likely to have a Boltzmann brain sub cosmos than one like ours, or even just an isolated sol-like system is the substantial issue you have ducked; I am too busy just now to chase down your strawman claims, which are inherently unlikely to be relevant as the direct issue of the lone fly on a section of wall swatted by a bullet vs the fly carpet is decisive. I suggest that this is the well warranted challenge of any attempt to eliminate fine tuning by suggesting an imaginary, quasi-infinite expansion of physical resources. For, our observed cosmos sits in a DEEPLY isolated operating point in the config space of the associated physics. In short, the imaginary expansion of resources is a vastly inferior explanation to the one that simply notes the fine tuning phenomena then points out that there is no guarantee that all possibilities will be found on an empirical sampling of a space of possibilities so if we are in a very special zone that is deeply isolated as an operating point, that is a credible mark of design. KF PS: John Leslie on the fly on the wall, long before recent exchanges popped up:
"One striking thing about the fine tuning is that a force strength or a particle mass often appears to require accurate tuning for several reasons at once. Look at electromagnetism. Electromagnetism seems to require tuning for there to be any clear-cut distinction between matter and radiation; for stars to burn neither too fast nor too slowly for life’s requirements; for protons to be stable; for complex chemistry to be possible; for chemical changes not to be extremely sluggish; and for carbon synthesis inside stars (carbon being quite probably crucial to life). Universes all obeying the same fundamental laws could still differ in the strengths of their physical forces, as was explained earlier, and random variations in electromagnetism from universe to universe might then ensure that it took on any particular strength sooner or later. Yet how could they possibly account for the fact that the same one strength satisfied many potentially conflicting requirements, each of them a requirement for impressively accurate tuning?" [Our Place in the Cosmos, The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 1998 (courtesy Wayback Machine) Emphases added.] AND: ". . . the need for such explanations does not depend on any estimate of how many universes would be observer-permitting, out of the entire field of possible universes. Claiming that our universe is ‘fine tuned for observers’, we base our claim on how life’s evolution would apparently have been rendered utterly impossible by comparatively minor alterations in physical force strengths, elementary particle masses and so forth. There is no need for us to ask whether very great alterations in these affairs would have rendered it fully possible once more, let alone whether physical worlds conforming to very different laws could have been observer-permitting without being in any way fine tuned. Here it can be useful to think of a fly on a wall, surrounded by an empty region. A bullet hits the fly Two explanations suggest themselves. Perhaps many bullets are hitting the wall or perhaps a marksman fired the bullet. There is no need to ask whether distant areas of the wall, or other quite different walls, are covered with flies so that more or less any bullet striking there would have hit one. The important point is that the local area contains just the one fly." [Emphasis his.]
PPS: Your several hundred thousand words gross rhetorical exaggeration clip is little more than a rude way to duck addressing a cluster of substantial issues your side brought up as a largely distractive matter. Yes, it is easy to toss rhetorical bombs, but much harder to address substantial worldview-level cases; FYI, full bore works on that subject tend to make one main point per 50 pp or so chapter, and on the extended issue of systematic theology a 1,000 pp book is going to be an introductory survey. I won't even bother to speak of history or the like, for which the quip is, you came to READ for a degree. Your latest talk-point line only manages to indicate that you have not seriously engaged the case.kairosfocus_{November 1, 2017
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Matt: If it was me doing it today, I’d stretch the original protein out straight and then I’d build a new one right next to it, making sure each amino acid I put down was identical to the one next to it. UB: Egads, this guy actually doesn’t see the flaw. Matt: No, I don’t.
Yikes. You would “stretch out” the protein and then look at it in order to specify the amino acids that it contains, and then you would assemble other amino acids in the right order. Hello? You would be doing the job of the DNA/RNA/translation apparatus -- all that useless complexity you say the system doesn’t need. Don't you remember, that was your point! The existing protein has all that “information” you say it has, just because it exist. But the funny thing is, having all that (anthropocentric, physicalist, reified) “information” you say it has ain’t making it duplicate itself, is it Matt? Now let's take you out of the system. We can still give you the benefit of the doubt, and we'll assume not merely a protein appears, but a whole damn organism miraculously forms. Just think of it; it would have all that "information" you say it has, and it still wouldn't have the semantic information that is required to reproduce and maintain itself. The moral of this story, of course (just as Pattee would suggest) is that your materialist projection of "information" in the structure of the system is an anthropocentric illusion that stems from your ability to measure the structure of that system and calculate its trajectory based on physical law (just as Pattee said in his quote). Matt, The capacity to specify the sequence of amino acids in a protein (and all that complexity that comes with it) is not merely incidental to the capacity to replicate that protein; it's the only way to replicate that protein. This is the fact, even if you don't like it. Your outburst are not going to change anything. :)Upright BiPed_{October 31, 2017
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I see that I've fallen several hundred thousand words behind KF. It's been a long day, I'll read his messages tomorrow.MatSpirit_{October 31, 2017
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Upright @ 46 Me: If it was me doing it today, I’d stretch the original protein out straight and then I’d build a new one right next to it, making sure each amino acid I put down was identical to the one next to it. UB: Egads, this guy actually doesn’t see the flaw. No, I don't. From past experience reading your exposition, I doubt if you do either, but maybe I'm wrong. Please describe my error in detail and light on the jargon.MatSpirit_{October 31, 2017
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Origenes @ 44: MatSpirit: AND SO COULD EARLY LIFE! [copy a protein] O: HOW?? MatSpirit: Show me what early life was like and I could answer. O: So, your claim is empty. You don’t know what early life looks like, but, nonetheless, you are willing to claim that it can make proteins without translation. No, I claim that without the DNA based replication system in place, any copying must have been done directly. It's kind of a logical thing: 1: Early life had no translational based copying system. 2: Yet copies were made. 3: Therefore, the copying was done directly. Now 3 doesn't actually follow from 1 and 2. There could have been some other system in place, such as an immortal, all-powerful, omniscient all-loving supernatural Being at work in the mud, jiggering with the atoms. In fact, thats basically ID's claim, so show us the details or your claim is empty and we win. Kind of an annoying tactic, isn't it? We have an interesting situation with early life. It happened billions of years ago, all the action was in sub-microscopic molecules and, so far as we know, left no fossils. Nobody on either side of the debate knows the details of early life because we don't have those fossils. Yet creationists think that demanding their opponants produce exact details of early life is a show stopper if those details can't be produced. Demanding those details is thus a clever tactic, unless it's used on you, then it becomes a "turn-around" tactic, which apparently is bad, according to KF.MatSpirit_{October 31, 2017
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KF @ 50: Sorry I'm late replying to you, but I followed your link to Wintery Knight's blog and found an interesting example of quote mining in action. Here's the payoff out-of-context quotation, attributed to Shawn Carroll: "So the reductio ad absurdum of this scenario is that the overwhelming majority of intelligences in this multiverse will be lonely, disembodied brains, who fluctuate gradually out of the surrounding chaos and then gradually dissolve back into it. Such sad creatures have been dubbed “Boltzmann brains” by Andreas Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo…." Wow! What a direct refutation of the multi-verse! The problem is that I've read a lot of Shawn Carroll and he's nowhere near dumb or ignorant enough to say anything like that. So I looked at the article more closely. First, Wintery isn't quoting Shawn directly, she's quoting an article from About.com. So I followed the link to About.com and found somebody named Andrew Zimmerman Jones quoting from Shawn Carroll's "From Eternity to Here". Well, I have that book in my Kindle so I did some text searching and quickly found the quoted section. And it turns out that Carroll was talking about the cosmology that Boltzmann proposed over a century ago, which is totally chaotic, with atoms zipping around at random until they v e r r y occasionally slam into each other and stick together to make the universe we see around us. As others pointed out a century ago, a human brain is much simpler than the huge universe we see around us and consequently should be much more likely to pop into existence than the entire universe. Thus for every universe we see, there should be an enormous number of Boltzmann's brains floating around and we don't see that, so Boltzmann's cosmology was refuted over 100 years ago and Carroll's quotation has nothing to do with the multi-verse proposed today Well, as Wintery says elsewhere, "I am a firm supporter of intelligent design," and this kind of multi-level quoting out of context is absolutely typical for creationists of all stripes, so nothing is surprising here, including your falling for a third hand quote mine. I didnt see anything about bullets hitting flies though. Could you tell us more about that?MatSpirit_{October 31, 2017
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F/N: A discussion here at UD: https://uncommondescent.com/category/the-flying-sphagetti-monster-parody-of-natural-theology/ KFkairosfocus_{October 31, 2017
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Origines, that i do not know; though to some extent the body is a cyber-controlled system. KFkairosfocus_{October 31, 2017
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DS, I have seen atheistical panel show videos that do just that. To find such now, though may be a prob. KFkairosfocus_{October 31, 2017
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Kairosfocus: ... decisions may be mechanised — as algorithms show — but in the end a true decision implies a choosing mind, which is self-moved.
WRT mechanized (or automated) decisions I often think about driving a car. A lot of my actions are automatic, but I am in control. In fact, because a lot of my actions are automatic, my control is enhanced. I fully agree with what you say. Just out of curiosity a question: Do you think that the self-moved choosing mind is external to the organism — which would imply that the organism is an automaton?Origenes_{October 31, 2017
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