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

MatSpirit: NO CYBERNETIC CUT!
Are you sure? How about an epistemic cut?
MatSpirit: WE HAVE THE INFORMATION THAT IS BUILT INTO THE PHYSICAL POSITIONS OF THE AMINO ACIDS THAT MAKE UP THE PROTEIN AND WE CAN USE THIS INTRINSIC INFORMATION TO DUPLICATE THE ORIGINAL PROTEIN! AND SO COULD EARLY LIFE!
HOW??Origenes_{October 30, 2017
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Upright @ 31: "You are equivocating on two entirely different physical phenomena, giving them the same name and pretending they are in some way equivalent to one another." And you win the UD reading incomprehension award. I wasn't talking about the transmission of information as symbols, but the far more important fact that ALL information is embodied in the arrangement of matter. SOME information is transmitted symbolically by embodying it in ink or pulses of light or what gave you, but MOST of the information in the universe exists solely in the physical arrangement of its atoms. Let me give you what I hope is a simple enough example for you (and maybe even KF and the rest of the UD crew) to understand. Remember that protein I mentioned that holds two atoms in depressions in its surface until they can combine into a molecule? I hope you know that there are hundreds of kinds of this type of catalyst in every living organism. Ok, let's construct a series of short proteins by randomly joining amino acids together. We do so and eventually, lo and behold, one of the proteins we make has two depressions in its surface that capture and hold two atoms until they join together to make a molecule we need. Hooray, we've got a catalyst! But we want more catalytic molecules just like that one, so how do we make more? We can't find the section of DNA that specifies the RNA that specifies the sequence of amino acids in the protein molecule because we never had any. We built that catalytic molecule by randomly joining amino acids together. WE DON'T HAVE ANY DNA OR RNA OR ANY OTHER SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION OF THE AMINO ACID SEQUENCE THAT MAKES UP THAT PROTEIN! Now did you notice that last sentence? Did you read it? Do you comprehend it? Let me restate the situation, because you seem to have a little problem with comprehension: We have a useful protein molecule and we'd like to make another copy of it, BUT WE HAVE NO DNA OR RNA OR ANY OTHER SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION. Got that? Now, one more very important fact: WE'RE IN EXACTLY THE SAME SITUATION AS EARLY LIFE BEFORE DNA WAS AVAILABLE FOR STORING SYMBOLIC INFORMATION! So what do we do? What does early life do? We want to copy a protein, but we have no DNA. Is it even possible to make a copy without DNA and the symbolic information it contains? Where do we get the information to specify the sequence of amino acids in our new protein molecule? Well, we've got the original protein molecule! It has the amino acids joined together in exactly the right order! WE HAVE THE INFORMATION THAT IS BUILT INTO THE PHYSICAL POSITIONS OF THE AMINO ACIDS THAT MAKE UP THE PROTEIN AND WE CAN USE THIS INTRINSIC INFORMATION TO DUPLICATE THE ORIGINAL PROTEIN! AND SO COULD EARLY LIFE! NO DNA! NO RNA! NO SYMBOLIC INFORMATION! NO CYBERNETIC CUT! I hope you comprehend this. I hope you realize that the scores of pretentious messages you've written about how the famed cybernetic cut makes life impossible were based on your basic misunderstandings of what information is and how it works. I hope you'll comprehend this explanation and go on to be a better man. But, realistically, I expect some wise acre answer and another 300 messages claiming the cybernetic cut poses an insoluble difficulty to early life, evolution and materialism in general.MatSpirit_{October 30, 2017
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Hello Origenes Thank you for the interesting question, I am just now seeing it. I'm trapped in other things right now, but will return later to answer it. Again, thanks.Upright BiPed_{October 30, 2017
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Upright Biped @32 Would you say that the following statement is correct?:
Thanks to translation, information embedded in DNA sequence is able to control physical effects — specify a thing among alternatives.
If so, would you agree that the follow-up question is: who or what controls the information embedded in DNA? Two possibilities: (1) If blind particles are in control, whence cometh the coherence of the organism? IOWs why is the information applied coherently? (2) If higher-level information is in control, then what controls that information? Higher-higher-level information? Do we escape an infinite regress?Origenes_{October 30, 2017
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"quasi-infinite"? :-o Is there such thing as "quasi-pregnant"?daveS_{October 30, 2017
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UB, yup. KFkairosfocus_{October 30, 2017
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MS, empirical evidence for a quasi-infinite multiverse? NIL. Then, even were such the case, there is a big challenge to account for Leslie's lone fly on a patch of wall swatted by a bullet, instead of a fly-carpet zone elsewhere. In other words, you are posting up imaginary quasi-infinite resources to get to a probabilistic miracle in order to protect a prior commitment to evolutionary materialist scientism and/or fellow travellers; a serious worldviews telltale. Besides, the evo mat stance cannot credibly account for mindedness governed by conscience -- responsible, rational freedom and logical consequence vs blind mechanical and/or chance driven causal chains; it ends in self-referential incoherence. Going beyond, you are categorically confusing location in a space etc with the organisation and coherence that frames the physics for a cosmos amenable to life such as we enjoy. That's another telltale. There's more, but this is enough for starters. KFkairosfocus_{October 30, 2017
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It is important to emphasize this epistemic necessity of the complementarity of laws and measurements since it is often ignored. Reductionists try to avoid the epistemic cut and take an entirely objective, unified, or reified view of information as if it exists in the structures of the physical world independent of an organism or observer. Such a view is possible only because formal or structural information measures can, in fact, be applied to any physical structure without regard to its epistemic function in construction, measurement, prediction, or control. That is, structural information measures need have no relation to fitness, function, or meaning. This gratuitous use of structural information measures, while it may be made formally consistent with physical theory, simply has no significance for the naturally selected semantic information in biological systems and for predictive information used in control systems. HH Pattee - The physics of symbols and the evolution of semiotic controls Department of Systems Science State University of New York at Binghamton
Upright BiPed_{October 29, 2017
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Matt,
Upright, most of the information in the universe is ‘encoded’ in the physical arrangement of atoms and works directly, without being ‘decoded’. An example would be a protein molecule that works as a catalyst by capturing two atoms in adjacent depressions in its 3D surface and holding them there until they join together into a molecule. No decoding necessary.
You are equivocating on two entirely different physical phenomena, giving them the same name and pretending they are in some way equivalent to one another. In your previous post, you mentioned several types of encoded information (writing, radio waves, electromagnetic impulse, computer code, etc). We can take any of them to demonstrate your equivocation, say, ink on paper for example. If I write the word "apple" in ink on a piece of paper, we can then describe this supposed example of "information" as consisting of atoms that make-up pressed and bleached wood pulp fibers, along with a specific concoction of ink dyes and resins on it. We can then describe it further to say the ink is perhaps blue or black in reflected color spectrum, and the paper is 3 inches by 5 inches, etc, etc, etc. We can even describe the temperature of the paper and ink, and pin how how much atmospheric moisture is retained in the paper, its pH level and specific gravity, etc, etc, etc. Or, we can simply say that an "apple" is the pomaceous fruit of a malus tree that makes a heck of a tasty cobbler. What you want to do is deliberately conflate these two entirely different physical processes, which have absolutely nothing to do with each other. You do this for the express purpose of obscuring the (already known, fully described, and verified) semantic nature of genetic translation -- which has, again, absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with the reified, anthropocentric, physicalist definition of information you want to conflate it with. You just did this, for anyone to see. You even put the words "encode" and "decode" in scare quotes, signifying some distinction ... a distinction that you needn't make in the writing of a mere word like "apple" on a piece of paper. You betray your own equivocation. - - - - - - - - - - - - - I have a question for you: In order to organize the proteins of a heterogeneous living cell, there must be the capacity to specify an object among alternatives and encode that specification in a heritable medium of information. Nature is entirely unambiguous about how this is accomplished. For each object to be specified, the system uses one arrangement of matter to serve as a representation within the medium, and a second arrangement of matter as a constraint to establish what is being specified. These two objects are well documented inside the cell; the codon in DNA and the aaRS in the translation machinery. How many objects does it take to specify something from a medium of information?Upright BiPed_{October 29, 2017
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KF @ 26 - Do I understand how much precise, coherent organisation — aka fine tuning — has to be in place to get to a BB that gives rise to a world fitted for C-chem, aqueous medium, terrestrial planet and galactic habitable zone based, cell architecture life? Yes. Did you understand that no matter how unlikely that would be, when you divide it into infinity, the answer is infinity? Do you realize that ANY number goes into infinity an infinite number of times? Do you realize that a chaotic meta-verse that has always existed and which has been occasionally spitting out universes all that time will produce an infinite number of universes? Finally, do you realize that a low information chaotic universe that has always existed is a LOT more likely than a fantastically fine tuned conscious being that has always existed? The laws that operate our "fine tuned" universe don't require many bits of information to specify. If it takes a hundred constants to specify this universe and each constant is fine tuned to twenty decimal digits, thats only 2000 decimal digits. Thats only 8000 bits if they're written in inefficient binary coded decimal, fewer in straight binary. Multiply that by one hundred just to be conservative and you're still only talking eight megabits to fine tune the universe. That's paltry! You can't even take a good picture with eight megabits, but it's more than enough to specify the fine tuning of this universe! Now compare that to a Being that has always existed. How complex does that have to be? Well, to start with, a Being is something that can think. What kind of Artificial Intelligence program can you write with eight million bits? Remember, that's only ONE MEGABYTE! How many Gigabytes do you need to write an AI program that's even of human intelligence? Could you even do it in gigabytes? I think it would be in the terrabyes for human quality intelligence. But the Christian God is supposed to be as far above a human's intellect as a mountain is above a grain of sand. Let me know when you figure out how complex your always existing God would have to be and then we'll compare that to how simple a chaotic multi-verse would have to be and you'll be much closer to understanding why so many people don't think your God exists.MatSpirit_{October 29, 2017
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ET- And you would be right. Don't think you're going to surprise science by pointing out that without information, the matter of the world would be mush. When you see a believer trumpet something about the importance of information (even on this very blog), be aware that they got that idea, directly or indirectly, from science. We're just trying to help the trumpeter understand what they're saying.MatSpirit_{October 29, 2017
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MatSpirit- My point is there wouldn't be any matter without information. It took information to make matter.ET_{October 29, 2017
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Upright, most of the information in the universe is 'encoded' in the physical arrangement of atoms and works directly, without being 'decoded'. An example would be a protein molecule that works as a catalyst by capturing two atoms in adjacent depressions in its 3D surface and holding them there until they join together into a molecule. No decoding necessary. ET, for us to understand what information is encoded in intelligently designed hieroglyphics, we need to know what code the writer used to encode the information. In the case of the catalyst, we have to study it at work to discover that two target atoms snuggle into two depressions until they join together. You're right that all matter encodes at least some information. The atoms in that catalyst encode information in their physical locations relative to each other that produce a molecule with those two depressions that hold the atoms so they can join together. Even a single atom floating in space encodes some information in its 3D location, information that would enable you to find it, for example. The concept of information isn't inherently difficult to understand, but there are traps for the unwary that can be confusing. The difference between intrinsic and symbolic information is one example and thinking that any encoding / decoding scheme must be designed by an intellect would be another.MatSpirit_{October 29, 2017
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MS, this is not a theology forum and you have already been advised that there are fora that can help you with such. More on topic, do you begin to understand how much precise, coherent organisation -- aka fine tuning -- has to be in place to get to a BB that gives rise to a world fitted for C-chem, aqueous medium, terrestrial planet and galactic habitable zone based, cell architecture life? Do you really imagine that the physics of a cosmos is a low functional information/ organisation entity? I suggest, start with what it takes to get to water. KFkairosfocus_{October 29, 2017
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MatSpirit:
You have to examine the material that encodes the information and figure out what the information is by examining its patterns.
And yet without the Rosetta Stone we never could have done so with Egyptian hieroglyphs.
If you doubt this, try to think of even one example of information that exists without matter.
Try to think of an example of matter existing without information.ET_{October 29, 2017
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Information has no mass because all information is encoded in the arrangement of matter, i.e. in the arrangement of ink on a page, the timing of pulses of light or bursts of radio waves, the arrangement of electrons in a RAM chip, of chemicals in brain synapses, the polarity of the magnetic domains on a hard drive, etc. Norbert Weiner was right. If you try to weigh information or feel it or smell it, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
So you are saying that any arrangement of matter that encodes information must be interpreted to actualize it. Welcome to the world of IC.Upright BiPed_{October 28, 2017
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KF @17 & 18, Well, I guess I can't thank you for your brevity this time. I'll have to read these and reply tomorrow.MatSpirit_{October 28, 2017
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KF @ 14, I don't think Wikipedia has been taken over by ideologues. The Discovery Institute, on the other hand, started out as a civic minded Seattle organization whose first concern, if I remember rightly, was regional transportation. They were conventional enough to attract donations from Microsoft. Nowadays the DI is an extreme right wing religious 'think tank' and hardly anybody donates to them, as you can tell from last year's layoffs of Dembski and LuskinMatSpirit_{October 28, 2017
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KF @ 13, Do you agree that there was very little information present at the Big Bang? No planets, stars or pine trees, not even any hydrogen, just energy compressed into a very tiny place and maybe some low information laws? This is important because if that's how it was then we don't require any intelligence to create the universe. What's your opinion on learning right from wrong turning out to be the Original Sin? Do you think learning morals is still a sin? Do you think people should give their children moral instruction? Do you instruct yours? You write, " MS, your reconstruction of the BB is rather simplistic, and fails to understand what a deeply isolated operating point in a field of possible configs would do to hoped for occasional popping up of a fine tuned cosmos." Your phraseology is a little confusing, but I think you're saying that liveable universes would be extraordinarily rare in a multiverse scenario and that the overwhelming majority of all randomly configured universes would be wildly unfit for life. If that's what you meant, I agree with you. But if theres a meta-verse punching out new universes every once in a while then it probably didn't start doing it last Tuesday. In fact, if such a meta-verse exists, it has probably always existed and if it has always existed then it has already produced an infinite number of universes. And that's a hard, actual infinity. We can't have a real infinity of things in our finite universe, but a meta-verse isn't subject to those limitations. As a man of science, you know from reading Kantor that infinity divided by any number, no matter how large, gives infinity. This means that no matter how rare liveable universes are, there are an infinite number of them. (Along with a much bigger infinity of chaotic universes, but nobody lives in them, so who cares.) Another point to consider is how likely is it that a chaotic meta-verse not only exists but has always existed? I don't know, but a chaotic universe is a low information universe . An intelligent Being, on the other hand, has to contain an extraordinarily large amount of highly ordered information in order to even be able to carry on a conversation, say from a burning bush. That means an intelligent Being would be extraordinarily less likely to exist than a low information chaotic multi-verse. Less likely even than a Boltzman Brain.MatSpirit_{October 28, 2017
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ET, information has no mass because all information is encoded in the arrangement of matter, i.e. in the arrangement of ink on a page, the timing of pulses of light or bursts of radio waves, the arrangement of electrons in a RAM chip, of chemicals in brain synapses, the polarity of the magnetic domains on a hard drive, etc. Norbert Weiner was right. If you try to weigh information or feel it or smell it, you're barking up the wrong tree. You have to examine the material that encodes the information and figure out what the information is by examining its patterns. If you doubt this, try to think of even one example of information that exists without matter.MatSpirit_{October 28, 2017
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Materialism fails the information test:
“Information is information, neither matter nor energy. Any materialism which disregards this, will not survive one day.” Norbert Weiner
ET_{October 28, 2017
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PS: And laying aside the scientism, evolutionary materialism was exposed as utterly bankrupt and destructive 2350+ years ago:
Ath [in The Laws, Bk X 2,350+ ya]. . . .[The avant garde philosophers and poets, c. 360 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [i.e the classical "material" elements of the cosmos], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art . . . [such that] all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only [ --> that is, evolutionary materialism is ancient and would trace all things to blind chance and mechanical necessity] . . . . [Thus, they hold] that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.-
[ --> Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT, leading to an effectively arbitrary foundation only for morality, ethics and law: accident of personal preference, the ebbs and flows of power politics, accidents of history and and the shifting sands of manipulated community opinion driven by "winds and waves of doctrine and the cunning craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming . . . " cf a video on Plato's parable of the cave; from the perspective of pondering who set up the manipulative shadow-shows, why.]
These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might,
[ --> Evolutionary materialism -- having no IS that can properly ground OUGHT -- leads to the promotion of amorality on which the only basis for "OUGHT" is seen to be might (and manipulation: might in "spin") . . . ]
and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [ --> Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality "naturally" leads to continual contentions and power struggles influenced by that amorality at the hands of ruthless power hungry nihilistic agendas], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is,to live in real dominion over others [ --> such amoral and/or nihilistic factions, if they gain power, "naturally" tend towards ruthless abuse and arbitrariness . . . they have not learned the habits nor accepted the principles of mutual respect, justice, fairness and keeping the civil peace of justice, so they will want to deceive, manipulate and crush -- as the consistent history of radical revolutions over the past 250 years so plainly shows again and again], and not in legal subjection to them [--> nihilistic will to power not the spirit of justice and lawfulness].
kairosfocus_{October 28, 2017
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F/N: On the failure of evolutionary materialistic scientism via self-referential incoherence. Pardon, it is time to lay out a summary in-thread:
First, some materialists actually suggest that mind is more or less a delusion, which is instantly self-referentially absurd. For instance, Sir Francis Crick is on record, in his 1994 The Astonishing Hypothesis:
. . . that "You", your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased: "You're nothing but a pack of neurons." This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.
Philip Johnson has replied that Sir Francis should have therefore been willing to preface his works thusly: "I, Francis Crick, my opinions and my science, and even the thoughts expressed in this book, consist of nothing more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Johnson then acidly commented: “[t]he plausibility of materialistic determinism requires that an implicit exception be made for the theorist.” [Reason in the Balance, 1995.] In short, it is at least arguable that self-referential absurdity is the dagger pointing to the heart of evolutionary materialistic models of mind and its origin. For, there is a very good reason we are cautioned about how easily self-referential statements can become self-refuting, like a snake attacking and swallowing itself tail-first. Any human scheme of thought that undermines responsible [thus, morally governed] rational freedom undermines itself fatally. We thus see inadvertent, inherent self-falsification of evolutionary materialism. But, “inadvertent” counts: it can be hard to recognise and acknowledge the logically fatal nature of the result. Of course, that subjective challenge does not change the objective result: self-referential incoherence and irretrievable self-falsification. (An audio clip, here, by William Lane Craig that summarises Plantinga's argument on this in a nutshell, is useful as a quick reference.) This issue can be discussed at a much higher level, but it can also be drawn out a bit in a fairly simple way for blog level discussion:
a: Evolutionary materialism argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature; from hydrogen to humans by undirected chance and necessity. b: Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws of chance and/or mechanical necessity acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of happenstance initial circumstances.
(This is physicalism. This view covers both the forms where (a) the mind and the brain are seen as one and the same thing, and those where (b) somehow mind emerges from and/or "supervenes" on brain, perhaps as a result of sophisticated and complex software looping. The key point, though is as already noted: physical causal closure -- the phenomena that play out across time, without residue, are in principle deducible or at least explainable up to various random statistical distributions and/or mechanical laws, from prior physical states. Such physical causal closure, clearly, implicitly discounts or even dismisses the causal effect of concept formation and reasoning then responsibly deciding, in favour of specifically physical interactions in the brain-body control loop; indeed, some mock the idea of -- in their view -- an "obviously" imaginary "ghost" in the meat-machine. [There is also some evidence from simulation exercises, that accuracy of even sensory perceptions may lose out to utilitarian but inaccurate ones in an evolutionary competition. "It works" does not warrant the inference to "it is true."] )
c: But human thought, clearly a phenomenon in the universe, must now fit into this meat-machine picture. So, we rapidly arrive at Crick's claim in his The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994): what we subjectively experience as "thoughts," "reasoning" and "conclusions" can only be understood materialistically as the unintended by-products of the blind natural forces which cause and control the electro-chemical events going on in neural networks in our brains that (as the Smith Model illustrates) serve as cybernetic controllers for our bodies. d: These underlying driving forces are viewed as being ultimately physical, but are taken to be partly mediated through a complex pattern of genetic inheritance shaped by forces of selection ["nature"] and psycho-social conditioning ["nurture"], within the framework of human culture [i.e. socio-cultural conditioning and resulting/associated relativism]. And, remember, the focal issue to such minds -- notice, this is a conceptual analysis made and believed by the materialists! -- is the physical causal chains in a control loop, not the internalised "mouth-noises" that may somehow sit on them and come along for the ride.
(Save, insofar as such "mouth noises" somehow associate with or become embedded as physically instantiated signals or maybe codes in such a loop. [How signals, languages and codes originate and function in systems in our observation of such origin -- i.e by design -- tends to be pushed to the back-burner and conveniently forgotten. So does the point that a signal or code takes its significance precisely from being an intelligently focused on, observed or chosen and significant alternative from a range of possibilities that then can guide decisive action.])
e: For instance, Marxists commonly derided opponents for their “bourgeois class conditioning” — but what of the effect of their own class origins? Freudians frequently dismissed qualms about their loosening of moral restraints by alluding to the impact of strict potty training on their “up-tight” critics — but doesn’t this cut both ways? Should we not ask a Behaviourist whether s/he is little more than yet another operantly conditioned rat trapped in the cosmic maze? And -- as we saw above -- would the writings of a Crick be any more than the firing of neurons in networks in his own brain? f: For further instance, we may take the favourite whipping-boy of materialists: religion. Notoriously, they often hold that belief in God is not merely cognitive, conceptual error, but delusion. Borderline lunacy, in short. But, if such a patent "delusion" is so utterly widespread, even among the highly educated, then it "must" -- by the principles of evolution -- somehow be adaptive to survival, whether in nature or in society. And so, this would be a major illustration of the unreliability of our conceptual reasoning ability, on the assumption of evolutionary materialism. g: Turning the materialist dismissal of theism around, evolutionary materialism itself would be in the same leaky boat. For, the sauce for the goose is notoriously just as good a sauce for the gander, too. h: That is, on its own premises [and following Dawkins in A Devil's Chaplain, 2004, p. 46], the cause of the belief system of evolutionary materialism, "must" also be reducible to forces of blind chance and mechanical necessity that are sufficiently adaptive to spread this "meme" in populations of jumped- up apes from the savannahs of East Africa scrambling for survival in a Malthusian world of struggle for existence. Reppert brings the underlying point sharply home, in commenting on the "internalised mouth-noise signals riding on the physical cause-effect chain in a cybernetic loop" view:
. . . let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, together cause the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts . . . [But] if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and [so] we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be, the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions.
i: The famous geneticist and evolutionary biologist (as well as Socialist) J. B. S. Haldane made much the same point in a famous 1932 remark:
"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” ["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. (NB: DI Fellow, Nancy Pearcey brings this right up to date (HT: ENV) in a current book, Finding Truth.)]
j: Therefore, though materialists will often try to pointedly ignore or angrily brush aside the issue, we may freely argue: if such evolutionary materialism is true, then (i) our consciousness, (ii) the "thoughts" we have, (iii) the conceptualised beliefs we hold, (iv) the reasonings we attempt based on such and (v) the "conclusions" and "choices" (a.k.a. "decisions") we reach -- without residue -- must be produced and controlled by blind forces of chance happenstance and mechanical necessity that are irrelevant to "mere" ill-defined abstractions such as: purpose or truth, or even logical validity.
(NB: The conclusions of such "arguments" may still happen to be true, by astonishingly lucky coincidence — but we have no rational grounds for relying on the “reasoning” that has led us to feel that we have “proved” or "warranted" them. It seems that rationality itself has thus been undermined fatally on evolutionary materialistic premises. Including that of Crick et al. Through, self-reference leading to incoherence and utter inability to provide a cogent explanation of our commonplace, first-person experience of reasoning and rational warrant for beliefs, conclusions and chosen paths of action. Reduction to absurdity and explanatory failure in short.)
k: And, if materialists then object: “But, we can always apply scientific tests, through observation, experiment and measurement,” then we must immediately note that -- as the fate of Newtonian Dynamics between 1880 and 1930 shows -- empirical support is not equivalent to establishing the truth of a scientific theory. For, at any time, one newly discovered countering fact can in principle overturn the hitherto most reliable of theories. (And as well, we must not lose sight of this: in science, one is relying on the legitimacy of the reasoning process to make the case that scientific evidence provides reasonable albeit provisional warrant for one's beliefs etc. Scientific reasoning is not independent of reasoning.) l: Worse, in the case of origins science theories, we simply were not there to directly observe the facts of the remote past, so origins sciences are even more strongly controlled by assumptions and inferences than are operational scientific theories. So, we contrast the way that direct observations of falling apples and orbiting planets allow us to test our theories of gravity. m: Moreover, as Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin reminds us all in his infamous January 29, 1997 New York Review of Books article, "Billions and billions of demons," it is now notorious that:
. . . It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel [[materialistic scientists] to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. [And if you have been led to imagine that the immediately following words justify the above, kindly cf. the more complete clip and notes here.]
n: Such a priori assumptions of materialism are patently question-begging, mind-closing and fallacious. o: More important, to demonstrate that empirical tests provide empirical support to the materialists' theories would require the use of the very process of reasoning and inference which they have discredited. p: Thus, evolutionary materialism arguably reduces reason itself to the status of illusion. But, as we have seen: immediately, that must include “Materialism.” q: In the end, it is thus quite hard to escape the conclusion that materialism is based on self-defeating, question-begging logic. r: So, while materialists -- just like the rest of us -- in practice routinely rely on the credibility of reasoning and despite all the confidence they may project, they at best struggle to warrant such a tacitly accepted credibility of mind and of concepts and reasoned out conclusions relative to the core claims of their worldview. (And, sadly: too often, they tend to pointedly ignore or rhetorically brush aside the issue.)

In short, evolutionary materialistic scientism simply is not a live worldview option. Never mind how it is pushed by dressing it up in the lab coat thus kidnapping the prestige of Big-S science. KF
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rvb8:
It is a resource I encourage my students to use.
Thankfully you are not a teacher around here. Wikipedia is loaded with nonsense. For example the article on genetic algorithms says GAs model natural selection yet GAs are guided towards solutions whereas NS is not. That is just lame.ET_{October 28, 2017
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Mat Speirit: /
KF, thank you for the blessedly brief response, but you forgot to mention any of those reasonable tests that materialism fails.
Are there any that it passes?ET_{October 28, 2017
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RVB8, you may find it useful to attempt to ground morality on your evolutionary materialistic scientism, showing us a bridge from IS to OUGHT that does not fall apart on closer inspection or reduce to might and manipulation make right etc. As for Wikipedia, it is patent that it has been taken captive by ideologues. And, the ongoing million victims per week holocaust and its enablers shows the true state of our civilisation. It is high time to wake up and stop the mad cliff-march. KFkairosfocus_{October 28, 2017
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MS, your reconstruction of the BB is rather simplistic, and fails to understand what a deeply isolated operating point in a field of possible configs would do to hoped for occasional popping up of a fine tuned cosmos. The usual way to put it is to ask why we do not instead experience the vastly more likely Boltzmann Brain pops up world. Besides, BB theory and fine tuning have v little or nothing to do with what was discussed. Haldane was and is right, advances in brain etc studies only deepen the mystery, and do utterly nothing to break out of the inherent gap between blind mechanical necessity and/or equally blind chance and responsible, rational freedom. You may need to know that I am qualified in science myself. As for your further attempt to double down on a hostile, strawman caricature misreading, I just note it; further noting that it is distractive for both UD and for the linked discussion. Those who are serious may go find a good commentary discussion which is readily accessible online. The focal issue is still there, that ethical theism is readily seen to be a responsible worldview, and those who project in the way Lewontin and Sagan did are doing a disservice. KFkairosfocus_{October 28, 2017
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"Is Social Media Killing Wikipedia?" No! Why not? Simple, people find Wikipedia useful, and there are no adds. Is Wikipedia flawed? Certainly, and those flaws are well documented; on occasion, poor editing; on occasion, personal views and opinion; on occasion, lack of peer review. However these flaws are weighted against the vast volume of free, generally good information, and resource materials. It is a resource I encourage my students to use. And unlike Kairosfocus who believes the morality of the world is imploding, I believe, as witnessed by Wikipedia's growth, the opposite is true. Man's morality is evolving and improving, as witnessed by international treaties governments actually adhere to. Unlike Moses's covenant with God, which both sides relentlessly ignored, climate change deals, arms deals, and border deals, are remarkably robust, aside from some infractions. It appears Man, is far more a reliable partner than God; and Wikipedia is a useful tool in that armoury of information.rvb8_{October 27, 2017
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KF, again I thank you for your brevity. I read the Nicene Creed piece, which opened at the "turtles all the way" down section. This gave me a smile because as we all know, there's really only the one turtle, A'Tuin the Great. Read any of the Discworld books for details. As far as grounding our views in "First Plausibles", cosmology, physics and the rest of science seem to be converging on the view that this universe was very simple at the Big Bang, with very low information content, and all or most of that content having random values. Subsequent complexity (stars, galaxies, planets, people etc) was generated materialistically, powered by the ultra low entropy at time zero. "Big Bangs" are suspected to occur frequently, but with only a tiny fraction of the universes produced being suitable for life. With the low initial information content of this universe, whatever generated it doesn't have to be complex. A chaotic meta universe that occasionally spits out a random Big Bang will do fine. There's certainly no need for anything so supremely complex (and hence supremely unlikely) as a Being capable of thought. Haldane wrote "When I am dead" in 1927. If he was aware of the advances in brain and mind science that have been made since then, I think he would realize he was mistaken and would say so, at length. Believe it or not, science is well aware that the human mind is fallible. That's why comparing theories against the world is THE vital heart of science. At least half the effort in science is used for guarding against errors and estimating just how accurate our data is. Philosophy and especially theology would do well to copy that. It's interesting that Christianity shies away from some of the implications in the Forbidden fruit story. All the sermons and Sunday school lessons talk about the Forbidden fruit, disobeying Gods orders, and the consequences but they seldom mention what the fruit actually does. Not too surprising, since knowing good from evil is generally considered to be a Good Thing. We never teach our children to be amoral animals, yet God seems to have wanted just that.MatSpirit_{October 27, 2017
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MS, if you had taken time to read at the linked you would have seen why evolutionary materialistic scientism is self referentially incoherent. Cf Here on for a shorter summary. KF PS: JBS Haldane is a good place to start:
"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” ["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. (NB: DI Fellow, Nancy Pearcey brings this right up to date (HT: ENV) in a current book, Finding Truth.)]
PPS: Your scripture-wrenching efforts above do not put you in good light; I suggest you learn to read in context, coherently, with a modicum of respect for the text in front of you instead of erecting village atheist-level strawman caricatures.kairosfocus_{October 27, 2017
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