Granville Sewell on origin of life as a provably unsolvable problem

Viola Lee, and if the measurement settings are not determined and/or super determined by any possible 'local' causal influences from our past space-time history, and yet we ourselves supposedly don't have free will in a real and meaningful sense that is necessary to choose the measurement settings for ourselves, then what possible non-local hidden variable is choosing the measurement settings for us and giving us the illusion that we are responsible for choosing the measurement settings for ourselves? I certainly haven't heard anything resembling a coherent argument against us having free will, in a real and meaningful sense, that is necessary to choose the measurement settings for ourselves. For Instance VL, do you believe, as Gordon apparently does, that he chose one measurement setting in this universe, but instantaneously another Gordon happens to appear in another parallel universe that just so happened to choose another measurement setting?

Too many worlds - Philip Ball - Feb. 17, 2015 Excerpt:,,, You measure the path of an electron, and in this world it seems to go this way, but in another world it went that way. That requires a parallel, identical apparatus for the electron to traverse. More – it requires a parallel you to measure it. Once begun, this process of fabrication has no end: you have to build an entire parallel universe around that one electron, identical in all respects except where the electron went. You avoid the complication of wavefunction collapse, but at the expense of making another universe.,,, http://aeon.co/magazine/science/is-the-many-worlds-hypothesis-just-a-fantasy/

I certainly don't think the preceding MWI scenario is anything close to being a coherent argument against us having free will in a real and meaningful sense that is necessary to choose the measurement settings for ourselves In fact, as I have stated several times now, I think the MWI is an insane belief for someone to hold. Even a stark raving mad belief for someone to hold. Of supplemental note, and to repeat for the fourth time on this thread, the MWI denies the reality of wave function collapse,

The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wavefunction collapse.[2] - per wikipedia

,, but wave function collapse is now experimentally shown to be a real effect:

Quantum experiment verifies Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ – March 24, 2015 Excerpt: An experiment,, has for the first time demonstrated Albert Einstein’s original conception of “spooky action at a distance” using a single particle. ,,Professor Howard Wiseman and his experimental collaborators,, report their use of homodyne measurements to show what Einstein did not believe to be real, namely the non-local collapse of a (single) particle’s wave function.,, According to quantum mechanics, a single particle can be described by a wave function that spreads over arbitrarily large distances,,, ,, by splitting a single photon between two laboratories, scientists have used homodyne detectors—which measure wave-like properties—to show the collapse of the wave function is a real effect,, This phenomenon is explained in quantum theory,, the instantaneous non-local, (beyond space and time), collapse of the wave function to wherever the particle is detected.,,, “Einstein never accepted orthodox quantum mechanics and the original basis of his contention was this single-particle argument. This is why it is important to demonstrate non-local wave function collapse with a single particle,” says Professor Wiseman. “Einstein’s view was that the detection of the particle only ever at one point could be much better explained by the hypothesis that the particle is only ever at one point, without invoking the instantaneous collapse of the wave function to nothing at all other points. “However, rather than simply detecting the presence or absence of the particle, we used homodyne measurements enabling one party to make different measurements and the other, using quantum tomography, to test the effect of those choices.” “Through these different measurements, you see the wave function collapse in different ways, thus proving its existence and showing that Einstein was wrong.” https://phys.org/news/2015-03-quantum-einstein-spooky-action-distance.html

bornagain77

Hi Gordon. I haven't been following your discussion with BA, but I will say that back in February I also questioned his interpretation of the Zeilinger experiments. You might be interested in my post#65 here: Post 65 It starts,

FYI: I don’t think BA’s interpretation on Anton Zeilinger’s experiments means what he thinks it means. He think it means that humans have libertarian free will. What it really means is that the universe is not superdetermined, and that genuine quantum phenomena, including entanglement and probabilistic outcomes, occur without deterministic “hidden variables”. That is why it’s often written “free will” loophole, not free will loophole.

I also supplied some links to some relevant articles. Viola Lee

The specific statement that Einstein made to Carnap on the train, “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.” was a very interesting statement for Einstein to make to the philosopher since “The experience of ‘the now’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, established itself as very much being a defining part of our physical measurements in quantum mechanics. As the following experiment, (that was done with atoms instead of photons), found, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”,,, “The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,”

New Mind-blowing Experiment Confirms That Reality Doesn’t Exist If You Are Not Looking at It - June 3, 2015 Excerpt: Some particles, such as photons or electrons, can behave both as particles and as waves. Here comes a question of what exactly makes a photon or an electron act either as a particle or a wave. This is what Wheeler’s experiment asks: at what point does an object ‘decide’? The results of the Australian scientists’ experiment, which were published in the journal Nature Physics, show that this choice is determined by the way the object is measured, which is in accordance with what quantum theory predicts. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Truscott in a press release.,,, “The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” he said. Thus, this experiment adds to the validity of the quantum theory and provides new evidence to the idea that reality doesn’t exist without an observer. http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html

Likewise, the following violation of Leggett's inequality stressed the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it.

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality - Apr 20, 2007 Excerpt: They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism." http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640

The Mind First and/or Theistic implications of quantum experiments such as the preceding are fairly obvious. As Professor Scott Aaronson of MIT once quipped, “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists,,, But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”

“Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists who think the world sprang into existence on October 23, 4004 BC at 9AM (presumably Babylonian time), with the fossils already in the ground, light from distant stars heading toward us, etc. But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!” – Scott Aaronson – MIT associate Professor quantum computation – Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables

Besides such experiments as the preceding from quantum mechanics demonstrating that "reality does not exist when we're not observing it", it is now also found that “quantum mechanics can even mimic an influence of future actions on past events”

Quantum physics mimics spooky action into the past – April 23, 2012 Excerpt: According to the famous words of Albert Einstein, the effects of quantum entanglement appear as “spooky action at a distance”. The recent experiment has gone one remarkable step further. “Within a naïve classical world view, quantum mechanics can even mimic an influence of future actions on past events”, says Anton Zeilinger. http://phys.org/news/2012-04-quantum-physics-mimics-spooky-action.html Quantum Weirdness Now a Matter of Time – 2016 Bizarre quantum bonds connect distinct moments in time, suggesting that quantum links — not space-time — constitute the fundamental structure of the universe. Excerpt: Not only can two events be correlated, linking the earlier one to the later one, but two events can become correlated such that it becomes impossible to say which is earlier and which is later.,,, “If you have space-time, you have a well-defined causal order,” said Caslav Brukner, a physicist at the University of Vienna who studies quantum information. But “if you don’t have a well-defined causal order,” he said — as is the case in experiments he has proposed — then “you don’t have space-time.”,,, Quantum correlations come first, space-time later. Exactly how does space-time emerge out of the quantum world? Bruner said he is still unsure. https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160119-time-entanglement/

And as the following 2017 article states, “a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.”

Physicists provide support for retrocausal quantum theory, in which the future influences the past July 5, 2017 by Lisa Zyga Excerpt: retrocausality means that, when an experimenter chooses the measurement setting with which to measure a particle, that decision can influence the properties of that particle (or another particle) in the past, even before the experimenter made their choice. In other words, a decision made in the present can influence something in the past. https://phys.org/news/2017-07-physicists-retrocausal-quantum-theory-future.html

And to clearly drive this point further home, in the following 2018 article Professor Crull provocatively states “entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted,,, it implies that the measurements carried out by your eye upon starlight falling through your telescope this winter somehow dictated the polarity of photons more than 9 billion years old.”

You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time – Feb. 2018 Excerpt: Just when you thought quantum mechanics couldn’t get any weirder, a team of physicists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported in 2013 that they had successfully entangled photons that never coexisted. Previous experiments involving a technique called ‘entanglement swapping’ had already showed quantum correlations across time, by delaying the measurement of one of the coexisting entangled particles; but Eli Megidish and his collaborators were the first to show entanglement between photons whose lifespans did not overlap at all.,,, Up to today, most experiments have tested entanglement over spatial gaps. The assumption is that the ‘nonlocal’ part of quantum nonlocality refers to the entanglement of properties across space. But what if entanglement also occurs across time? Is there such a thing as temporal nonlocality?,,, The data revealed the existence of quantum correlations between ‘temporally nonlocal’ photons 1 and 4. That is, entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted. What on Earth can this mean? Prima facie, it seems as troubling as saying that the polarity of starlight in the far-distant past – say, greater than twice Earth’s lifetime – nevertheless influenced the polarity of starlight falling through your amateur telescope this winter. Even more bizarrely: maybe it implies that the measurements carried out by your eye upon starlight falling through your telescope this winter somehow dictated the polarity of photons more than 9 billion years old. https://aeon.co/ideas/you-thought-quantum-mechanics-was-weird-check-out-entangled-time

Moreover, not only does “quantum mechanics show us that “a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.”, but quantum mechanics also shows us that our present conscious choices ultimately determine what type of future will be presented to us in our measurements of quantum systems. As leading experimentalist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”

“The Kochen-Speckter Theorem talks about properties of one system only. So we know that we cannot assume – to put it precisely, we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement. Not always. I mean in certain cases. So in a sense, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.” Anton Zeilinger – Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism – video (7:17 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=437

As well, with contextuality we find that, “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation”

Contextuality is ‘magic ingredient’ for quantum computing – June 11, 2012 Excerpt: Contextuality was first recognized as a feature of quantum theory almost 50 years ago. The theory showed that it was impossible to explain measurements on quantum systems in the same way as classical systems. In the classical world, measurements simply reveal properties that the system had, such as colour, prior to the measurement. In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation. Imagine turning over a playing card. It will be either a red suit or a black suit – a two-outcome measurement. Now imagine nine playing cards laid out in a grid with three rows and three columns. Quantum mechanics predicts something that seems contradictory – there must be an even number of red cards in every row and an odd number of red cards in every column. Try to draw a grid that obeys these rules and you will find it impossible. It’s because quantum measurements cannot be interpreted as merely revealing a pre-existing property in the same way that flipping a card reveals a red or black suit. Measurement outcomes depend on all the other measurements that are performed – the full context of the experiment. Contextuality means that quantum measurements can not be thought of as simply revealing some pre-existing properties of the system under study. That’s part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics. http://phys.org/news/2014-06-weird-magic-ingredient-quantum.html

Thus, Stanley Jaki’s contention that “There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future.”, is now experimentally established to be true by the fact that “a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.” and is also experimentally established by the fact that, “We are not just passive observers,,, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure”. Thus, recent experiments in quantum mechanics, (contrary to what Einstein himself thought was possible for experimental physics), have now shown, in overwhelming fashion, that ‘the experience of the now’ is very much a part of experimental physics. In fact, due to advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate to rephrase Einstein’s answer to the philosopher Rudolph Carnap in this way:

“It is impossible for “the experience of ‘the now’” to ever be divorced from physical measurement, it will always be a part of physics.”

Gordon, you claimed that I should 'stretch your own mind a bit' and just accept the insane MWI contention that you currently exist in a veritable infinity of other places which are completely undetectable. In reply, I will ask you to accept that a foundational characteristic of the immaterial mind, , i.e. 'the experience of 'the now'', is now experimentally shown to be a foundational aspect of reality. And to also accept that it readily, and easily, explains why some of these experiments in quantum mechanics seem as weird to us as they do. Let's just say Gordon, to put it mildly, accepting the Christian Theist's "Mind First" view of reality is far more parsimonious in regards to its explanatory power, and also in regards to the evidence we now have in hand, than is postulating a veritable infinity of other undetectable Gordon's. Scientifically speaking, the comparison is not even close as to which of our explanations has more explanatory power.

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

bornagain77

Gordon states,

I wasn’t asking for congratulations, I was just trying to explain my views… and hopefully get you to stretch your own mind a bit. But I guess your mental straitjacket is too strong for that.

So you consider it close minded of me to not play along with your insane belief that you hold it to be true, or at least hold it to be rational, that you are splitting into a veritable infinity of other equally real Gordons? Someone once said that it is good to have an open mind but not so open that your brains fall out. Clearly that quote applies more than ever now.

Prof. Walter Kotschnig (in 1940) told Holyoke College students to keep their minds open—“but not so open that your brains fall out.” He condemned the purpose of students who go to college merely to learn skill and urged his listeners to find the “real aim of education, to acquire a philosophy of life, intellectual honesty, and a constant search for truth.” - per quote investigator

Gordon then states,

And I see you also still think there’s something important about the free will loophole.

Anton Zeilinger himself, in one of his interviews (I can't recall exactly which one right now), said something to the effect that it was perhaps one of his most important experimental results that he has gotten. Gordon goes on,

Whether the loophole has been completely closed (as you seem to think) or only narrowed (as Zeilinger actually says) isn’t the main point. The main point is that closing the loophole doesn’t have much significance, and doesn’t have any significance to atheism.

Actually I have stated that the setting independence and/or free will loophole has been closed practically all the way back to the Big Bang itself a few times now in this thread. One time in the thread I said that the free will loophole was closed without throwing in the "practically all the way back to the Big Bang itself" part. With my emphasis of Hossenfelder's appeal to 'super-determinism' I thought I was being clear on that point. Sorry if I wasn't being clear enough. Gordon you also claimed that showing free will to be a real and tangible part of quantum experiments "doesn’t have much significance, and doesn’t have any significance to atheism." Other atheists, especially Darwinian atheists, who have spilled much ink denying the reality of free will, and defending determinism tooth and nail, would disagree with you.

THE ILLUSION OF FREE WILL - Sam Harris - 2012 Excerpt: "Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it." - Jerry Coyne https://samharris.org/the-illusion-of-free-will/ Free Will: Weighing Truth and Experience - Do our beliefs matter? - Mar 22, 2012 Excerpt: If we acknowledge just how much we don’t know about the conscious mind, perhaps we would be a bit more humble. We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-brain-social-mind/201203/free-will-weighing-truth-and-experience Matthew D. Lieberman – neuroscientist – materialist – UCLA professor

Gordon, you go on to say that the experimental results only apply to local hidden variable theories and does not apply to non-local hidden variable theories. And even go so far as to claim that atheism is completely compatible with practically all of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. We'll leave the last claim you made about atheism basically being compatible with everything in quantum mechanics to one side for now. But as to your brushing Zeilinger's experimental results off with the remark, "closing the loophole doesn’t have much significance, and doesn’t have any significance to atheism." And as to your final remark that you made in that section, "I have no idea why you’re so obsessed with superdeterminism and Sabine Hossenfelder." Well Gordon, determinism, (and/or super-determinism), (which Darwinian materialists themselves hold to be a VERY big deal), holds that our thoughts are caused by the prior state of the 'material' particles of our brain. Yet, Quantum Mechanics flips that entire notion on its head and says that the 'material' particles, and/or the state of the 'material' particles, don't even exist until we choose, via our free will, how to measure them. In other words, instead of our thoughts being the product of the prior state of 'material' particles, our thoughts are instead shown to be prior to the existence of particles themselves. i.e. It is a fairly direct falsification of determinism (as determinism is commonly understood). Now Gordon, you have defined your particular brand of atheism as being compatible with practically everything within quantum mechanics. I find that to be, let's say, a fairly extravagant thing for you to do, (especially given the pushback that atheists have given over the years against many of the models that you listed). But anyways, be that as it may, I am still going to assume that you, as an atheist, still hold that we do not have immaterial minds and/or souls that are separate and distinct from our material brains, and/or our material bodies,. as is held as a primary presupposition within Christian Theism. Hopefully this is a safe assumption on my part, (and if your atheism is also compatible with the Christian contention that our immaterial mind is distinct and separate from the material brain, well then, I can see no difference whatsoever between your brand of atheism and Christian Theism). Now, there are several properties of the immaterial mind that are irreducible to the material brain. Dr. Michael Egnor, (who is a neurosurgeon as well as professor of neurosurgery at the State University of New York, Stony Brook), lists six properties of the immaterial mind that are irrediucible to the material brain as such, “Intentionality,,, Qualia,,, Persistence of Self-Identity,,, Restricted Access,,, Incorrigibility,,, and Free Will,,,”

The Mind and Materialist Superstition – Michael Egnor – 2008 Six “conditions of mind” that are irreconcilable with materialism: – Excerpt: Intentionality,,, Qualia,,, Persistence of Self-Identity,,, Restricted Access,,, Incorrigibility,,, Free Will,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/11/the_mind_and_materialist_super013961.html

Likewise, J. Warner Wallace has a very similar list, (but not an exact match to Dr. Egnor’s list), of six properties of immaterial mind that are irreducible to the material brain

Six reasons why you should believe in non-physical minds – 01/30/2014 1) First-person access to mental properties 2) Our experience of consciousness implies that we are not our bodies 3) Persistent self-identity through time 4) Mental properties cannot be measured like physical objects 5) Intentionality or About-ness 6) Free will and personal responsibility http://winteryknight.com/2014/01/30/six-reasons-why-you-should-believe-in-non-physical-minds/

For now, I will focus only on the specific immaterial mental attribute of the mind of "Persistent self-identity through time." ‘Persistence of Self-Identity through time’ (which may also be termed ‘the experience of ‘the Now”), although being a mental attribute which is irreducible to materialism, never-the-less, makes its presence clearly known to us in recent experimental evidence from quantum mechanics. As to defining the specific mental attribute of the ‘Persistence of Self-Identity through time’ (and/or ‘the experience of ‘the Now”) in particular, it is first important to note that we each have a unique perspective of being outside of time. In fact we each seemingly watch from some mysterious outside perspective of time as time seemingly passes us by. Simply put, we each seem to be standing on an little island of ‘now’ as the river of time continually flows past us. In the following video, Dr. Suarez states that the irresolvable dilemma for materialism as such, (paraphrase) “it is impossible for us to be 'persons' experiencing 'now' if we are nothing but particles flowing in space time. Moreover, for us to refer to ourselves as 'persons', we cannot refer to space-time as the ultimate substratum upon which everything exists, but must refer to a Person who is not bound by space time. (In other words) We must refer to God!”

Nothing: God's new Name - Antoine Suarez – video Paraphrased quote: (“it is impossible for us to be 'persons' experiencing 'now' if we are nothing but particles flowing in space time. Moreover, for us to refer to ourselves as 'persons', we cannot refer to space-time as the ultimate substratum upon which everything exists, but must refer to a Person who is not bound by space time. i.e. We must refer to God!”) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOr9QqyaLlA

In further defining the mental attribute of ‘the experience of the now’, in the following article Stanley Jaki states that “There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,, ,,,There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future. The mind remains identical with itself while it lives through its momentary nows.”

The Mind and Its Now – Stanley L. Jaki, May 2008 Excerpts: There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,, Three quarters of a century ago Charles Sherrington, the greatest modern student of the brain, spoke memorably on the mind’s baffling independence of the brain. The mind lives in a self-continued now or rather in the now continued in the self. This life involves the entire brain, some parts of which overlap, others do not. ,,,There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future. The mind remains identical with itself while it lives through its momentary nows. ,,, the now is immensely richer an experience than any marvelous set of numbers, even if science could give an account of the set of numbers, in terms of energy levels. The now is not a number. It is rather a word, the most decisive of all words. It is through experiencing that word that the mind comes alive and registers all existence around and well beyond. ,,, All our moments, all our nows, flow into a personal continuum, of which the supreme form is the NOW which is uncreated, because it simply IS. http://metanexus.net/essay/mind-and-its-now

And ‘the experience of ‘the now” also happens to be exactly where Albert Einstein got into trouble with leading philosophers of his day and also happens to be exactly where Einstein eventually got into trouble with quantum mechanics itself. Around 1935, Einstein was asked by Rudolf Carnap (who was a philosopher):

“Can physics demonstrate the existence of ‘the now’ in order to make the notion of ‘now’ into a scientifically valid term?” Rudolf Carnap - Philosopher

Einstein’s answer was ‘categorical’, he said: “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.”

The Mind and Its Now – May 22, 2008 – By Stanley L. Jaki Excerpt: ,,, Rudolf Carnap, and the only one among them who was bothered with the mind’s experience of its now. His concern for this is noteworthy because he went about it in the wrong way. He thought that physics was the only sound way to know and to know anything. It was therefore only logical on his part that he should approach, we are around 1935, Albert Einstein, the greatest physicist of the day, with the question whether it was possible to turn the experience of the now into a scientific knowledge. Such knowledge must of course be verified with measurement. We do not have the exact record of Carnap’s conversation with Einstein whom he went to visit in Princeton, at eighteen hours by train at that time from Chicago. But from Einstein’s reply which Carnap jotted down later, it is safe to assume that Carnap reasoned with him as outlined above. Einstein’s answer was categorical: The experience of the now cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement. It can never be part of physics. http://metanexus.net/essay/mind-and-its-now

Prior to that encounter with Carnap, Einstein also had another disagreement with another famous philosopher, Henri Bergson, over what the proper definition of time should be (Bergson was also very well versed in the specific mental attribute of the ‘experience of the now’). In fact, that disagreement with Henri Bergson over what the proper definition of time should actually be was one of the primary reasons that Einstein failed to ever receive a Nobel prize for his work on relativity:

Einstein vs Bergson, science vs philosophy and the meaning of time – Wednesday 24 June 2015 Excerpt: The meeting of April 6 was supposed to be a cordial affair, though it ended up being anything but. ‘I have to say that day exploded and it was referenced over and over again in the 20th century,’ says Canales. ‘The key sentence was something that Einstein said: “The time of the philosophers did not exist.”’ It’s hard to know whether Bergson was expecting such a sharp jab. In just one sentence, Bergson’s notion of duration—a major part of his thesis on time—was dealt a mortal blow. As Canales reads it, the line was carefully crafted for maximum impact. ‘What he meant was that philosophers frequently based their stories on a psychological approach and [new] physical knowledge showed that these philosophical approaches were nothing more than errors of the mind.’ The night would only get worse. ‘This was extremely scandalous,’ says Canales. ‘Einstein had been invited by philosophers to speak at their society, and you had this physicist say very clearly that their time did not exist.’ Bergson was outraged, but the philosopher did not take it lying down. A few months later Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the law of photoelectric effect, an area of science that Canales noted, ‘hardly jolted the public’s imagination’. In truth, Einstein coveted recognition for his work on relativity. Bergson inflicted some return humiliation of his own. By casting doubt on Einstein’s theoretical trajectory, Bergson dissuaded the committee from awarding the prize for relativity. In 1922, the jury was still out on the correct interpretation of time. So began a dispute that festered for years and played into the larger rift between physics and philosophy, science and the humanities. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/science-vs-philosophy-and-the-meaning-of-time/6539568

bornagain77

Drc466 @ 89 (responding to my example of an entropy decrease & energy increase in #35):

For all three examples, the problem is that you are not accounting for the increase in entropy due to compression. So a compressed gas at the same temperature as a non-compressed gas has a higher entropy, not the same entropy. Therefore the final result of the compression process can only end in lowered entropy if the temperature of the gas decreases. While it is true that entropy (heat) is lost to the heat sinks in cases two and three, the lost heat is always less than the gain in entropy due to compression – otherwise the end state of the gas would be a lower temperature than when you started.

I think you're mistaken about compression increasing entropy... unless you're assuming a constant volume of gas? I'm assuming a constant amount of gas (i.e. a constant number of molecules) being squeezed into a smaller space. If you're thinking about compression via adding more gas to a constant volume, that would give an entropy increase, but that's not what I was describing (or at least, not what I was trying to describe). For the simple case of a monatomic ideal gas, you can derive the entropy decrease due to compression from the Sackur-Tetrode equation (see here for example) as DeltaS = N*k*ln(V_final/V_initial), which is clearly negative if V_final < V_initial. For realistic gasses, the math's going to be more complex, but the result'll be pretty similar. Gordon Davisson

Bornagain77 @ 94:

Bear in mind that others do not see your becoming comfortable with the idea that you exist in an veritable infinity of other places as an achievement of any sort but see it as a mental deterioration on your part..

I wasn't asking for congratulations, I was just trying to explain my views... and hopefully get you to stretch your own mind a bit. But I guess your mental straitjacket is too strong for that. And I see you also still think there's something important about the free will loophole.

As to closing the freedom of choice loophole, if it is all the same with you, I think I will stick with Anton Zeilinger and company when his says he closed the loophole, and not with your denial that he closed it.

Whether the loophole has been completely closed (as you seem to think) or only narrowed (as Zeilinger actually says) isn't the main point. The main point is that closing the loophole doesn't have much significance, and doesn't have any significance to atheism. Back in comment #90, you said:

Basically with super-determinism, and with the closing of the setting independence and/or ‘free will’ loop hole by Zeilinger and company, the Atheistic naturalist is now reduced to arguing that “a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure.”

This, again, is complete nonsense. Closing loopholes in Bell's theorem tests is only relevant to hidden variable theories. Not to any non-local-hidden-variable interpretation of QM, and not to atheism. As I said before, none of the interpretations I talked about, MWI, Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber, de Broglie–Bohm, and the transactional interpretation, are local hidden-variable theories, so the presence or absence of loopholes in the Bell tests is irrelevant to them. And there's no reason atheists would be restricted to those interpretations. There are atheism-compatible interpretations that assign special status to consciousness, like the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation (which says conscious observation causes collapse), or Penrose and Hameroff's orchestrated objective reduction theory (which if I understand right says that collapse causes consciousness). There's also no reason at all that atheists can't prefer antirealist interpretations, like the original Copenhagen interpretation, QBism, Zeilinger and Brukner's information-based interpretation, Wheeler's "it from bit", approach, etc etc etc. I have no idea why you're so obsessed with superdeterminism and Sabine Hossenfelder. You also said, in #96:

Moreover, if we really ‘follow the math’ as Gordon implores us to do, and ask ourselves, “why should math even be applicable to the universe in the first place?”, we are led not to the insanity of the atheistic/naturalistic MWI as Gordon implies, but rather we are instead led to God.

Huh? Are you seriously unable to comprehend how math could work without God being involved? If so, that's your problem, not mine.

Also of note, a lot of the ‘weirdness’ in quantum mechanics also evaporates for us once we realize that there is a very strong correspondence and/or correlation between the ‘weird’ actions we observe in quantum mechanics and some of the defining attributes of the immaterial mind, (namely ‘the attribute of ‘the experience of the now’, and the attribute of ‘free-will’)

...and exactly how does this interpretation of yours work? Waving your hands and saying "there is a very strong correspondence" may satisfy you, but it's not in the same league with what I'd call a real interpretation. Put it this way: one of the significant problems with MWI is that it's hard to fully justify the Born rule for probabilities in it. Can you do better? How does your interpretation explain the Born rule (or can it)? For example, in the original Bell test (2 electrons in the spin-0 singlet state), why do the two spin measurements agree with probability 0.5 minus half the cosine of the angle between the two detectors? Not just why is there a correlation, but why that specific correlation? Why does summing across a bunch of Feynman diagrams give such good predictions of how particles will interact? Why can't two identical fermions occupy the same state (the Pauli exclusion principle), but identical bosons can? etc etc etc These are the sorts of questions a real interpretation of QM should be able to answer. If you can't answer questions like these, you don't actually have an interpretation, you've just decided that QM fits well with your views without bothering to understand it or think hard about it first. Gordon Davisson

Well Andy Clue, Zeilinger and company also stated "excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today." And as I also stated previously, that experiment by Zeilinger and company is also one of the primary reasons that Hossenfelder opted for super-determinism, over and above free will, where all our choices were somehow super-determined at the Big Bang. The denial of free will by determinism was irrational to begin with. The denial of free will by superdeterminism is obviously exponentially worse for the atheist. In fact, as I quipped when Hossenfelder first appealed to superdeterminism, welcome to Christianity (Hossenfelder), Calvinists have basically been arguing for superdetermism for centuries now. bornagain77

Gordon states,

Why not lock our intuitions in the metaphorical basement, ignore the plaintive whimpering(*), and follow the math wherever it leads? (Because, again, the math does seem to be a reliable guide.) If you do that, you pretty much wind up with MWI.

That plaintive whimpering is your sanity and common sense crying to be let out. Moreover, if we really 'follow the math' as Gordon implores us to do, and ask ourselves, "why should math even be applicable to the universe in the first place?", we are led not to the insanity of the atheistic/naturalistic MWI as Gordon implies, but rather we are instead led to God. Don't take my word for it. Eugene Wigner, (who's insights into quantum mechanics continue to drive breakthroughs in quantum mechanics; per A. Zeilinger), And Albert Einstein, who needs no introduction, are both own record as to regarding it as a miracle that math should even be applicable to the universe. Moreover, Wigner questioned Darwinism in the process of calling it a miracle, and Einstein even went so far as to chastise 'professional atheists' in his process of calling it a miracle.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - Eugene Wigner - 1960 ?Excerpt: ,,certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.,,,?It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.,,,?The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. ?http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html On the Rational Order of the World: a Letter to Maurice Solovine - Albert Einstein - March 30, 1952 Excerpt: "You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way .. the kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the 'miracle' which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands. There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only successfully rid the world of gods but “bared the miracles." -Albert Einstein http://inters.org/Einstein-Letter-Solovine

Something tells me that Gordon's desire to ''follow the math' will evaporate once he realizes that 'following the math' actually leads to God, and not to his atheistic/naturalistic MWI. Further to 'following the math' to wherever it leads,

January 2021 Whereas atheists have no observational evidence that the Multiverses that they postulated to ‘explain. away’ the fine tuning of the universe are real, nor do Atheists have any evidence that the ‘parallel universes’ that they postulated to ‘explain away’ quantum wave collapse are real, Christians, on the other hand, can appeal directly to (the higher dimensional mathematics of) Special Relativity, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics, (i.e. our most precisely tested theories ever in the history of science), to support their belief that God really does uphold this universe in its continual existence, as well as to support their belief in the reality of a higher heavenly dimension and in the reality of a hellish dimension.” https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/closer-to-truth-are-there-really-extra-dimensions/#comment-722947

Also of note, a lot of the 'weirdness' in quantum mechanics also evaporates for us once we realize that there is a very strong correspondence and/or correlation between the 'weird' actions we observe in quantum mechanics and some of the defining attributes of the immaterial mind, (namely 'the attribute of 'the experience of the now', and the attribute of 'free-will')

How Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Correlate - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0hL3Nrdas

So in conclusion, I am, as a Christian Theist, quite comfortable with the 'counter-intuitive' findings of both relativity and quantum mechanics, whereas Gordon, on the other hand, is forced to appeal to the insanity of the MWI, and is also forced to endure the "plaintive whimperings" of his sanity and common sense which he has, by his own admission, locked in a closet. bornagain77

@bornagain77:

As to closing the freedom of choice loophole, if it is all the same with you, I think I will stick with Anton Zeilinger and company when his says he closed the loophole, and not with your denial that he closed it.

How is what Gordon posted different from what Zeilinger & co. claimed in their paper? Neither Gordon nor Zeilinger & co. claimed that the freedom-of-choice loophole is closed: Zeilinger & co.:

This experiment pushes back to at least 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation (...) We also constrain the freedom-of-choice loophole with detector settings determined by extragalactic events, such that any local-realist mechanism would need to have acted no more recently than 7.78 Gyr or 3.22 Gyr ago (...)

Gordon @52:

In the first place, the test of Bell’s theorem you cited (which used distant quasar light as a source of randomness for setting the detectors) doesn’t completely eliminate the “free will” loophole, just pushes it out some (and not as much as it might seem).

AndyClue

Gordon states,

So understanding MWI is a bit of an achievement, and one I have achieved (and am therefore invested in, and therefore biased toward — as I said).

I would bet the 14 men under the delusion that they were Napoleon also felt a certain satisfaction as to having achieved such status. :) Bear in mind that others do not see your becoming comfortable with the idea that you exist in an veritable infinity of other places as an achievement of any sort but see it as a mental deterioration on your part.. As to closing the freedom of choice loophole, if it is all the same with you, I think I will stick with Anton Zeilinger and company when his says he closed the loophole, and not with your denial that he closed it. After all, besides his long track record of breath-taking and astonishing accomplishments in pushing Quantum Experimentation forward, he is actually mentally stable enough to know for a fact that he does not exist in an infinity of other places. You, on the other hand, apparently consider it an intellectual achievement for you to finally be able to believe that you exist in an infinity of other places.

Romans 1:22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

bornagain77

Bornagain77 @ 61: No, I don't agree that liking preferring MWI is "stark raving mad". MWI is certainly unintuitive and hard to think about, but actually that's part of the reason I like it. (And again, I like it, but I don't particularly believe it. I like it for what're basically aesthetic reasons, as well as some reasons that're really all about personal bias.) J. B. S. Haldane wrote that "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." I view MWI partly as a challenge -- a dare almost -- in seeing just how queerly we can suppose, or if you prefer how far we can stretch our minds. Everett and DeWitt have thrown down the gauntlet: can you wrap your mind around this? And I replied, "Challenge accepted!" So understanding MWI is a bit of an achievement, and one I have achieved (and am therefore invested in, and therefore biased toward -- as I said). But that's not a reason to take it seriously. Thinking about counterintuitive math puzzles is fun and cool and all, but that's no reason to think they have anything to do with reality. A big part of the reason to take MWI seriously is that the alternatives don't make a lot of sense either. All of the interpretations of QM are weird and unsatisfactory in one way or another. If you seriously want to defeat MWI, you need to provide an alternative that's objectively less weird, not just differently weird. So far, nobody's done it. But that's not really a reason to like MWI either. To explain why I say I like it, consider that our intuition is not very good at dealing with QM. In fact, it's really really bad. And QM is not the only area of physics were intuition is not a reliable guide: relativity, thermodynamics, orbital mechanics, ... really, quite a few areas that're outside of our normal areas of experience (i.e. the areas our intuitions have been trained on). But the math works. Do any amount of physics -- especially advanced physics -- and you learn to trust the math over your intuition (at least until you've retrained your intuition to follow the math, which is absolutely a thing that you do). The math of QM is weird and hard to understand; most interpretations try to find a way to make it conform as much as possible to our intuitions (and it doesn't work very well). But as I said, intuition isn't a reliable guide here, so why are we trying to pacify it? Why not lock our intuitions in the metaphorical basement, ignore the plaintive whimpering(*), and follow the math wherever it leads? (Because, again, the math does seem to be a reliable guide.) If you do that, you pretty much wind up with MWI. (* Dang, I sound like a scary person here. I swear, I'm not scary in person, and have never locked anyone in my basement. Honest!) (Also, "intuition" isn't really the right term for what I'm talking about. I'll try to clarify later.) To explain what's going on in MWI a little better, let me run through the Wigner's friend thought experiment. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's an extension of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment: you have a box containing a cat, an unstable atom with a half-life of an hour, and an atomic decay detector hooked up to a vial of poison. After an hour, classical physics says that the box will contain either a live cat and an intact atom and vial, or else it will contain a dead cat, a decayed atom, and an open vial. QM, on the other hand, seems to imply that the box will be in a superposition of both of those states, not in either one alone. In the Wigner's friend extension, one of Eugene Wigner's friends opens the box and looks inside. From the friend's point of view, the cat etc now collapse from that superposition into a definite state of either alive&intact or dead&decayed&open. But Wigner himself hasn't looked yet, and isn't even in the same room. From his point of view, QM seems to imply that his friend has simply joined into the entangled superposition along with the cat, atom, and vial. His friend is now in a superposition of being happy (because the cat is alive) or sad (because the cat is dead). There are a variety of ways to resolve this: pick some point at which collapse actually happens (and depending on what point you pick, either Wigner or his friend are right... or maybe both wrong), infer that reality is observer-dependent and they're both right (from their own point of view), etc. But there's one really important fact I want to point out: QM doesn't allow the friend any way to discover whether they're in a superposition or not. They shouldn't be able to perceive the conflict, and there's no experiment they can perform that'll settle the question of whether they're in a superposition or in a definite state. We can perform experiments (from the outside) on smaller things, like photons, atoms, groups of atoms, ... even up to bacteria(!), and confirm that they're in superposition states. But testing this gets beyond impractical for bigger, messier things, like actual cats and humans. Some people who've gotten used to the idea that these small things can be in quantum superpositions, but cavil at the idea that they could be in such a state. The possibility goes against what we perceive our own states to be (although, as I said, there's no way we'd be able to tell), and is really hard to think about. (BTW, as you mentioned, a variant of the Wigner's friend experiment has actually been performed, although it replaced the cat and friend with photons (and there were two catphotons and two friendphotons). The results are in full agreement with MWI. If you think otherwise, you really really need to take some more time to understand what's going on in the experiment and how it'd work under MWI.) I think this is really why we wind up on opposite sides here. It's hard to think about ourselves being in a superposition of wildly different states. You think it's insane. But I appreciate that MWI doesn't bother about trying to be easy to think about. Reality is under no obligation to be easy to understand (if it were, QM wouldn't be a thing in the first place and we wouldn't be having this conversation), and MWI doesn't try to force it to be easy. In #91, you said:

Yet, regardless of how Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave.

...I agree, but you need to realize that QM also couldn't care less how you want the world to behave either. Also, the implications of MWI aren't as wild as you seem to think. Not everything is possible, and only possible things wind up in the superposition. Wigner's friend winds up in a superposition of being happy and sad (actually, many slightly different happy states and many slightly different sad states), but there's no component of the overall wavefunction where he turns into Dracula, drinks the cat's blood, then starts flapping around the room in bat form. And while the overall wavefunction contains some weird-looking states, it's completely dominated by "normal" ones. I gave a simple example here:

That’s not how MWI works. Deterministic things are the same in all worlds; things like 2+2=4 hold universally, and the same applies at the physical level. The only things that vary between worlds are those that are indeterminate at the quantum level. What about things that are quantum-random? Let’s take a simple case: suppose I flip 500 quantum-random coins. MWI says the universe splits into 2^500 worlds, one for each possible combination of flips. (Note: actually, it’s a 2^500-way superposition; “world” is just a way of describing this without getting into QM terminology.) There’ll be worlds where fantastically improbable things happen: one where I flipped 500 heads in a row, one where I flipped 500 tails, etc. But the probability that I (as an inhabitant of the universe) will actually experience the all-heads world is only 1 in 2^500 — it’s nearly guaranteed that I’ll find myself in a world where I flipped roughly equal numbers of heads and tails, because that’s true in the vast majority of the worlds. Ok, that was a simple case, and I ducked some tricky questions. But there are reasonable arguments that MWI leads to the same observed probabilities as all the other (viable) interpretations. Weird stuff is happening in a few worlds, but we don’t live there so why should we care?

Now, you cited several real physicists as disagreeing with or disliking MWI, but I don't see anyone coming close to your dismissal of it as "insane". For example, in the article by George Ellis you cited, he mostly talks about other sorts of multiverse hypotheses. He does talk about MWI briefly:

Sean Carroll, David Deutsch, Max Tegmark, and David Wallace have all claimed that the quantum wave function of the universe splits into multiple branches every time a measurement is made. Each branch is a universe.[4] This idea was originally advanced by Hugh Everett III in his Princeton dissertation. Multiple worlds emerge as branches of the wave function, and having branched, the various branches remain in a state of superposition, entirely subordinate to the linear and deterministic Schrödinger equation. The wave function never collapses. The Born rule is not needed on Everett’s scheme. But it is the Born rule that establishes that the squared amplitude of the wave function is a measure of probability. Something must take its place or do the same work. Some physicists argue that the many worlds of quantum mechanics and the many worlds of the multiverse are one and the same. The multiverse, some physicists claim, is necessary to give exact operational meaning to probabilistic predictions from quantum mechanics.[5]

...and he's right, the Born rule (for probabilities) is tricky to fully explain in general in MWI. (In my 500 coins example, I carefully only considered 50%/50% events; measurements with unequal probabilities are one of the "tricky questions" I ducked). And Sean Carroll would agree as well; this is a well-known issue with MWI. That's why he (along with many other people) are actively researching it, from a variety of angles. There are a number of arguments that MWI produces the Born rule (or something functionally equivalent), but it's not entirely clear that they work. See this blog post where he discusses the issue. The strongest criticism you quoted was Steven Weinberg saying "I find the many worlds interpretation repellent". Here's an extended quote (from an interview in Physics Today):

PT: There has been discussion on the Web about your "evolving" views on interpretations of quantum mechanics. What are the general flaws you see in existing interpretations? Are you working on a more satisfactory interpretation, and do you see one on the horizon? Weinberg: Some very good theorists seem to be happy with an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which the wavefunction only serves to allow us to calculate the results of measurements. But the measuring apparatus and the physicist are presumably also governed by quantum mechanics, so ultimately we need interpretive postulates that do not distinguish apparatus or physicists from the rest of the world, and from which the usual postulates like the Born rule can be deduced. This effort seems to lead to something like a "many worlds" interpretation, which I find repellent. Alternatively, one can try to modify quantum mechanics so that the wavefunction does describe reality, and collapses stochastically and nonlinearly, but this seems to open up the possibility of instantaneous communication. I work on the interpretation of quantum mechanics from time to time, but have gotten nowhere.

As I said earlier, "Since there are many interpretations consistent with our observations, which one(s) we prefer (or think most likely to be true) is largely a matter of personal preference… and therefore it largely a matter of personal bias." I think it's entirely reasonably for Weinberg to find MWI repellent, I just happen to have different tastes and personal biases. But note that he didn't say it was necessarily wrong, or that it was insane for someone to have a different opinion from him. Also, note that he's been working on finding something better, but has "gotten nowhere". The others you cited also basically don't like MWI. Again, I consider these reasonable opinions, but they're just that: opinions. They're nothing like a basis for your extreme rejection. Finally, in #91, you reiterated your argument about superdeterminism and closing the free will loophole. As I explained in detail in #52, this is complete and utter nonsense. You simply have no idea what you're talking about here. Many of our differences are matters of opinion and/or differences in bias. This one is not. I am right, and you are wrong. Read my explanation in comment #52. Learn from it. And stop making the same bogus argument over and over again. Gordon Davisson

Huh? I never claimed that you personally believe the MWI. As far as I can tell about you personally, you never really cling too tightly to any naturalistic position that might be falsified. At least that is how I read your debating style for atheism. bornagain77

Bornagain77: So in conclusion JVL, the primary “motivations and rationale” for Atheists opting for the MWI over the instrumentalist approach is simply their desire to deny agent causality. and/or free will, any place whatsoever in quantum physics. Simply put, atheists opt for the insanity of MWI simply because Atheists don’t want a “Divine Foot in the door” (R. Lewontin). Your antagonism is curious since I clearly stated that I, too, do not lean towards the many worlds view. I guess you're just in some kind of attack mode and aren't really paying attention to what people are actually writing. What I said was correct: there are some physicists who think the many worlds conjecture is correct. But you chose not to acknowledge that I actually agree with you; instead you did your usual hatchet job on views opposed to yours. Why you cannot even try to build bridges with people who at least agree with you on some points is bewildering to me. Perhaps I won't try anymore seeking out any common ground. I'll leave you to your righteous anger. JVL

Well JVL, and I'm sure the 14 men who believed they were Napoleon had their own "motivations and rationale" for believing they were Napoleon. Yet the fact remains that they were definitely not Napoleon. As such, MWI proponents definitely do not currently exist in a veritable infinity of other places that are as equally real as this world. (which is their claim, not mine). To dive a little deeper into the "motivations and rationale" for why some people choose the MWI. To repeat what I cited earlier, and as explained by Steven Weinberg, there are two widely followed approaches in quantum mechanics that deal with the question of how probabilities get into quantum mechanics. The realist approach and the instrumentalist approach.

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 2017 Excerpt: Today there are two widely followed approaches to quantum mechanics, the “realist” and “instrumentalist” approaches,9 which view the origin of probability in measurement in two very different ways. For reasons I will explain, neither approach seems to me quite satisfactory.10,,,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11,,,, In the realist approach the history of the world is endlessly splitting; it does so every time a macroscopic body becomes tied in with a choice of quantum states. This inconceivably huge variety of histories has provided material for science fiction. 12 http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

Moreover, Weinberg rightly rejected the realist approach because of the insanity inherent in the MWI, but it is interesting to note exactly why he rejected the instrumentalist approach As Steven Weinberg himself, an atheist, put it, "In the instrumentalist approach (in quantum mechanics) humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,, the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure,,, Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,"

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 19, 2017 Excerpt: The instrumentalist approach,, (the) wave function,, is merely an instrument that provides predictions of the probabilities of various outcomes when measurements are made.,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11 Thus the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans. We may in the end have to give up this goal,,, Some physicists who adopt an instrumentalist approach argue that the probabilities we infer from the wave function are objective probabilities, independent of whether humans are making a measurement. I don’t find this tenable. In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,, http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

So Weinberg, again an atheist, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within and because man, via his free will, is brought into the laws of nature at their most fundamental level. (i.e. that was his 'rationale and motivation' for rejecting the instrumentalist approach.) Yet, regardless of how Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave. For instance, this recent 2019 experimental confirmation of the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment established that “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”.

More Than One Reality Exists (in Quantum Physics) By Mindy Weisberger – March 20, 2019 Excerpt: “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”. https://www.livescience.com/65029-dueling-reality-photons.html

This follow up 2020 paper reinforced the preceding finding:

Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality - George Musser - Aug. 17, 2020 Excerpt: Now, researchers in Australia and Taiwan offer perhaps the sharpest demonstration that Wigner’s paradox is real. In a study published this week in Nature Physics, they transform the thought experiment into a mathematical theorem that confirms the irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the scenario. The team also tests the theorem with an experiment, using photons as proxies for the humans. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/quantum-paradox-points-shaky-foundations-reality

Moreover, Anton Zeilinger and company recently (2018) closed the setting independence and/or 'freedom of choice' loophole

Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars – Anton Zeilinger – 14 June 2018 Excerpt: This experiment pushes back to at least approx. 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403

After this experiment came out some theoretical physicists, such as Sabine Hossenfelder, instead of accepting the fact that we have free will in a real and meaningful sense, instead opted for 'super-determinism'

Superdeterminism: A Guide for the Perplexed - Sabine Hossenfelder - 2020 Superdeterminism is presently the only known consistent description of nature that is local, deterministic, and can give rise to the observed correlations of quantum mechanics. I here want to explain what makes this approach promising and offer the reader some advice for how to avoid common pitfalls. In particular, I explain why superdeterminism is not a threat to science, is not necessarily finetuned, what the relevance of future input is, and what the open problems are. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.01324

Basically with super-determinism, and with the closing of the setting independence and/or ‘free will’ loop hole by Zeilinger and company, the Atheistic naturalist is now reduced to arguing that “a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure.”

Closing the ‘free will’ loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell’s theorem – February 20, 2014 Excerpt: Though two major loopholes have since been closed, a third remains; physicists refer to it as “setting independence,” or more provocatively, “free will.” This loophole proposes that a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure — a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting. Such a scenario would result in biased measurements, suggesting that two particles are correlated more than they actually are, and giving more weight to quantum mechanics than classical physics. “It sounds creepy, but people realized that’s a logical possibility that hasn’t been closed yet,” says MIT’s David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and senior lecturer in the Department of Physics. “Before we make the leap to say the equations of quantum theory tell us the world is inescapably crazy and bizarre, have we closed every conceivable logical loophole, even if they may not seem plausible in the world we know today?” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm

In other words, instead of believing what the experimental results of quantum mechanics are actually telling us, (i.e. that free will is a real and tangible part of reality),, the Determinist, and/or Atheistic Naturalist, is now forced to claim, via ‘superdeterminism’, that the results of the experiments were somehow ‘superdetermined’ at least 7.8 billion years ago, (basically all the way back to the creation of the universe itself), and that the experimental results are now somehow 'conspiring' to fool us into believing that our experimental results in quantum theory are trustworthy and correct and that we do indeed have free will. To call such a move on the part of Atheistic Naturalists, (i.e. the rejection of experimental results that conflict with their apriori philosophical belief in ‘determinism’), unscientific would be a severe understatement. It is a rejection of the entire scientific method itself. As should be needless to say, if we cannot trust what our experimental results are actually telling us, then science is, for all practical purposes, dead. Moreover, the refusal to accept the agent causality of man into quantum mechanics is pretty doggone irrational, even insane, in its own right. Think about it. Men intelligently Designed these very sophisticated experiments into quantum mechanics, testing our most foundational assumptions about reality itself. Elaborate mathematics, which men also intelligently formulated, lie behind the intricate design of these very sophisticated experiments. The experiments also use our latest cutting edge technology (which has been, or course, also intelligently designed). Elaborate mathematics, which men also intelligently formulated, also lies behind the interpretation of the experiments into the foundations of quantum mechanics. And yet, after all that intelligent agent causality of man that is poured into intelligently designing these very sophisticated experiments in the first place, the atheist wants to say that the measurement settings in the experiment were somehow 'super-determined' billions of years ago, (all the way back to the Big Bang itself), and that man is not truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiment that he may so desire to choose so as to 'logically' probe whatever foundational aspect of quantum mechanics that he is interested in probing. No two ways about it, it simply is insane to deny that man has the freedom to choose whatever measurement setting he may so desire to choose in the experiment after all that agent causality that lay behind the existence of the measurement settings in the experiment in the first place. If man is not free to choose the measurement setting in the experiments then neither was man free to choose any of the other thousands upon thousands of choices that went into intelligently designed these extremely sophisticated experiments in the first place. If man does not have free will is a real and meaningful sense, then man did not really intelligently design these experiments, but rather the laws of physics designed the experiments and we were only under the illusion that we were designing them. As George Ellis commented on Einstein's denial that we had free will in a real and meaningful sense. "if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options. I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense."

Physicist George Ellis on the importance of philosophy and free will - July 27, 2014 Excerpt: And free will?: Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will? Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating the belief that all causation is bottom up. This simply is not the case, as I can demonstrate with many examples from sociology, neuroscience, physiology, epigenetics, engineering, and physics. Furthermore if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options. I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense. Physicists should pay attention to Aristotle’s four forms of causation – if they have the free will to decide what they are doing. If they don’t, then why waste time talking to them? They are then not responsible for what they say. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/physicist-george-ellis-on-the-importance-of-philosophy-and-free-will/

Of note, "it does not seem to make any sense" is the very polite way for Ellis to say that it is simply insane for Einstein to claim he did not have free will in a real and meaningful sense. So in conclusion JVL, the primary "motivations and rationale" for Atheists opting for the MWI over the instrumentalist approach is simply their desire to deny agent causality. and/or free will, any place whatsoever in quantum physics. Simply put, atheists opt for the insanity of MWI simply because Atheists don't ever want to allow a "Divine Foot in the door" (R. Lewontin). bornagain77

Gordon Davisson, (Deleted earlier comment because it was confusing and obscured the main point). Pardon my lateness to the conversation, but as an engineer by education, I wanted to comment that I don't think your partially-insulated gas example works, and Dr. Miller is correct. Here are the three examples you give, restated: Insulated: Heat from compression energy stays in gas. Energy Up, Entropy (relatively) unchanged. Gas gets hotter but loses no entropy. Non-Insulated: Heat from compression energy goes into heat sink. Energy (relatively) unchanged, Entropy Down. Gas stays same temperature, Entropy is lost as heat is removed. Partially-Insulated: Some heat from compression energy stays is gas, some goes into heat sink. Energy goes up (gas is hotter), and entropy due to heat removed is lost. For all three examples, the problem is that you are not accounting for the increase in entropy due to compression. So a compressed gas at the same temperature as a non-compressed gas has a higher entropy, not the same entropy. Therefore the final result of the compression process can only end in lowered entropy if the temperature of the gas decreases. While it is true that entropy (heat) is lost to the heat sinks in cases two and three, the lost heat is always less than the gain in entropy due to compression - otherwise the end state of the gas would be a lower temperature than when you started. (FYI - if this wasn't true, you'd potentially be able to build a perpetual energy machine through a series of compression/expansion cycles, using the energy released by expanding gas to power the compression phase). My engineering training tells me Dr. Miller is correct re: higher energy/lower entropy processes, but I'm open to other possible counterexamples. drc466

Bornagain77: I would personally like to thank you for sharing your testimony and I shall never, ever attempt to denigrate or make less of it. My point was that some people might view your faith and your reasons for holding that faith in the same way that you view the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. I was trying to say that it's very hard to accurately judge someone's motivations and rationale when you're on the outside or, even, the 'other' side. Personally, like you, I find the many worlds interpretation pretty silly. BUT I can't ignore the fact that there are people who have spent a lot more time than I have considering QM and it's requirements and recommendations. Who am I to question a view held by a lot of intelligent and knowledgable people? So, just like I would not call your beliefs 'insane' I would not call the Many Worlds interpretation insane. I don't agree with either one, but I realise that a lot of people find both beliefs valid and sensible. Who am I to say otherwise? I won't. JVL

Well actually JVL, besides having "very old texts" ("very old texts" which, by the way, have withstood intense scrutiny), I also have the fact that I have personally experienced 'small miracles' in my life. Especially when I was at very low points in my life. For instance, here is my personal testimony of how I became a Christian:

I served in the Air Force back in the 1980’s. I worked on jet engines. When I got out of the service, I landed a job working for General Electric (GE) working on some of the most advanced jet aircraft in the world. I loved that job. Besides being well paying, I was very much honored to work on America’s top stealth aircraft. And I was well qualified for that job having spent 4 years in the Air Force. Yet, I had a problem with alcohol and drugs that was getting worse and worse as time went along. To the point that that problem ended up negatively affecting my work performance. Long story short, I ended up losing my dream job at GE. That evening, when I got home after losing my job, I was just numb. Devastated but just numb. Anyway, in my devastation I picked up my (very dusty) Bible. To this day, I do not know why I picked my Bible up at that particular time in my life. It was not like I was in a particular habit of reading my Bible. In fact, throughout my entire service in the Air Force I remember picking my Bible up only once. And that was because my roommate had asked me to see what John 3:16 actually meant during a football game. (They used to hold John 3:16 up in the end zones during professional football games back then). Yet, at that moment, as I began to read the Bible, and as clear as day, a miracle happened. That inanimate book, i.e. the Holy Bible, became alive and the words I was reading out of the bible at that very moment were speaking directly to me as if a living person were speaking directly to me. I was shocked to put it mildly. I ran my finger over the passage that I had just read, the passage that had spoken directly to me, and it felt as if someone had just opened a window on the passage I had read. The rest of the page felt normal, like paper, but that passage felt mysteriously cool and breezy. I knew in no uncertain terms, at that very moment, that God was really real and that He was and is very much a personal God who cares very deeply for each of us. Fast forward a few years later. I had relapsed into drinking and using. It was in the summer of 1993, I was down and out in Ft. Myers, Florida. This was about the second year that I was homeless. I was staying at the Salvation Army in Ft. Myers working temporary day labor and paying 8 bucks a night to stay at the homeless shelter. Since AA had failed me, I had come up with another idea to help me defeat the destructive desires for drinking and using that had kept me broke and bound to the homeless street life. I was finally going to read the Bible cover to cover. Surely, this would cure me once and for all of my destructive desires. Every night before I would go to sleep I made sure that I would read through at least 30 minutes worth of the Bible. This was done in my bunk in the open dormitory of the salvation army. Well, after about a month or 6 weeks of reading in this fashion, I was getting pretty far along into the Bible and had pretty much established myself, among the guys staying in the dorm with me, as some sort of Jesus Freak. One evening a man, who like me wasn’t fairing to well in this world, comes up to my bunk as I was reading the Bible. He angrily says something to this effect, “Where Is God? Just where is God? If I knew where God was my life would be alright.” Calmly I told him something to this effect, “Well I know that it may sound strange to you, but sometimes when I really need it, God seems to speak directly to me from the Bible, giving me guidance and comfort, and I believe that He may speak directly to you since you seem to be in a pretty bad spot.” Then I closed my Bible and handed it to him. Then he asks me “Do you mean like this?” and he just randomly flips the Bible open, but instead of gently reading the first words that his eyes landed on, as I thought he would do, he went and stabbed his finger down onto the page that the Bible had fell open to. Then, he looks over to me and asks me “Like this?” I nervously, in spite of my reservations of the brazenness of his act, indicated that “I guess that will work.”. Well his boldness paid off for his finger landed right on top of Job 23:3 which says “Oh, that I knew where I might find God, that I might come to His seat!”, (In fact that entire passage in Job 23 was related to his particular situation). Needless to say, we both were in awe about God, the creator of the universe, personally revealing Himself to him in the ‘Living Word’ that clearly. We even went to the chaplain of the Salvation Army that evening, told the chaplain what just happened and got him his very own Bible from the chaplain.,,,

So no JVL, I just don't rely on 'very old texts' (although the reliability of scriptures has been established from several different angles) .,,, I know from personal experience that Christianity is very much true. Moreover, we have the Shroud of Turin, ( by far the most scientifically scrutinized ancient relic of man), that testifies to the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

The evidence for the Shroud's authenticity keeps growing. (Timeline of facts) - What Is the Shroud of Turin? Facts & History Everyone Should Know - Myra Adams and Russ Breault - November 08, 2019 https://www.christianity.com/wiki/jesus-christ/what-is-the-shroud-of-turin.html John 20:6-9 Simon Peter arrived just after him. He entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there.The clothb that had been around Jesus’ head was rolled up, lying separate from the linen cloths. Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in. And he saw and believed. For they still did not understand from the Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.

In fact, I hold Jesus Christ's resurrection from the dead to be the correct solution for the much sought after 'theory of everything'

Jesus Christ as the correct "Theory of Everything" - video https://youtu.be/Vpn2Vu8--eE

So, directly contrary to what you claimed JVL, my belief in Christianity is very much a 'true belief' that I hold to be true from my personal experience and also hold to be true from my knowledge of the facts. Atheists, on the other hand, from what I can tell, have no scientific evidence whatsoever that they can appeal to so as justify their belief that the universe, life, and everything around us, is just one big ole meaningless accident. Indeed, we can't even 'do science' in the first place without presupposing teleology on some level. Talk about 'blind faith' that is not based in facts. Atheists have it in spades. bornagain77

Bornagain77: Yet, If believing you actually exist in a veritable infinity of other places, (without any evidence whatsoever that it is actually true), does not, in over the top fashion, qualify as an insane belief then no other delusions that people may harbor can ever be classified as insane beliefs. Some might say that believing that a man lay dead in a tomb for 36 hours or so and then came back to life was a bit crazy. But you do believe that without having witnessed it yourself. You depend on some very old texts written by unknown persons for your evidence. I'm not trying to downplay your faith; I'm just saying if you use the same criteria . . . JVL

Claiming that it is merely "hyperbolic rhetoric" for me to call MWI insane insinuates that it is not actually true that MWI is an insane belief. Yet, If believing you actually exist in a veritable infinity of other places, (without any evidence whatsoever that it is actually true), does not, in over the top fashion, qualify as an insane belief then no other delusions that people may harbor can ever be classified as insane beliefs. Indeed, MWI makes the 14 men who thought they were Napoleon look mild in comparison.

,,, In December 1840, nearly twenty years after his death, the remains of Napoleon were returned to Paris for burial—and the next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men who claimed to be Napoleon. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo15344276.html

bornagain77

You take my calling MWI to be insane as an insult to others who hold MWI to be true.

Nope. I said that calling it "insane" is hyperbolic rhetoric. That's still my opinion. William J Murray

WJM, Yes you were misusing the term 'true belief' in regards to the intent and context in which I used the term 'true belief'. I used the term in regards to what we can have personal knowledge of as being true. You, in fact, SHOULD have been criticizing the MWI proponents instead of me for their holding beliefs to be true for which they have no personal knowledge of as being true. (i.e. blind faith belief) They are trying to claim that it is a 'true belief', or at least a 'rational belief', to believe that they exist in a veritable infinity of other places (an outlandish and even insane belief for which they have no personal knowledge of). I am saying that their 'belief', which THEY hold to be true and rational, conflicts we my 'true belief' (a belief which I have gained from my own personal knowledge that, number 1, I exist, and number 2, that I only exist in one place). Moreover, I pointed out that if I regarded their belief as actually being a true belief then it undermines any other true beliefs that I, or anyone else, may have formed from our knowledge. To repeat what Philip Ball stated, “It, (The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics), says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth.”

Why the Many-Worlds Interpretation Has Many Problems – Philip Ball – October 18, 2018 Excerpt: It, (The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics), says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable. Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be. Some Everettians insist that this is not a problem and that you should not be troubled by it. Perhaps you are not, but I am. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/

So again, your criticism, (especially with your emphasis on personal experience in your MRT-IRT worldview in regards to our forming 'true beliefs' in regards to our personal knowledge and experience), would have been much more aptly directed towards the insanity of the MWI rather than towards me since I was, in fact, defending the integrity of true beliefs that are gained by personal experience and/or knowledge over and above 'blind faith' beliefs that are held in spite of true beliefs that are formed by personal experience and knowledge to the contrary. You take my calling MWI to be insane as an insult to others who hold MWI to be true. Yet, the MWI is insane. Period. If a person came up to me on the street and insisted that he existed in a veritable infinity of other places, (with absolutely no evidence whatsoever), I would, without hesitation think that the man was stark raving mad. Yet I am suppose to give such a insane belief respect because the person saying it has a PhD behind his name? Excuse me, it does not work that way. Nonsense is still nonsense even when it comes out of the mouth of a PhD. (hat tip: John Lennox) Verse:

2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

bornagain77

BA77 said:

WJM, you are misusing language again. I used the term ‘true beliefs’ in the broad sense of having true beliefs based on knowledge. Yet you tried to imply that I was using the term in a ‘blind faith’ sort of way.

No, I wasn't. I'm just stating the logically obvious that is derived from the difference between the meanings of the words, at least as they are normally used.

As was accused of me earlier in this thread, that was ‘uncharitable’ of you to imply that I was using the term ‘true belief’ in that ‘detached from reality’ sort of way.

Your inference is not my implication.

I miss the old WJM on UD who use to make powerful, and rationally coherent, arguments against atheists. I certainly do not like this new WJM who has apparently decided to side with atheists every chance he gets,,,, even when their arguments undermines his own MRT-IRT theory.

I'm willing to follow the evidence and argument wherever it leads, even if, especially if, it undermines IRT. That would be so interesting to me. Like the argument from evidence you made about geocentrism; that was one of the most enjoyable exchanges I've ever experienced on this site because you were able to prove your thesis - and I admitted, happily, that you had done so. The available evidence, and reasoning from that evidence, clearly supported your position. I actually like everyone here, inasmuch as that is possible via such a platform. I like you, I like KF, I like Seversky, Jerry, SB, Viola, KM, UB, etc. I enjoy people that vigorously argue ideas and vigorously criticize mine. But, I can understand your dislike.

Jerry says you have basically become a troll on UD. I thought that was a bit over the top for him to say that. But your last posts to me, which were ‘uncharitable’ and basically incoherent, makes me think that perhaps Jerry is far closer to the mark than I had realized. As Jerry likes to say, “Prove me wrong”.

Well, I don't know how I would go about "proving" to anyone I'm not a "troll." I don't really know what purpose such a designation would serve other than to justify not engaging with a person in the debate of ideas, logic, and evidence. I mean, if a "troll" makes a good argument, what difference does it make if that person is a "troll" or not? It would be different if I was calling people names, attacking their character, their motivations, treating others with condescension, ridiculing them and their position, but I think we'd all agree I very rarely dip into that kind of behavior. I always try to keep it civil, friendly, non-personal and about the facts, evidence and logic, even when others are making disparaging comments about me during the process. I never (or extremely rarely) respond in kind. I would think that if I was a "troll," I would jump on every such opportunity and milk it for all the "attention" I could get out of it. But, in the end, I cannot prove to anyone I'm not a troll, so it's up to every individual to come to their own individual assessment - or, if Mr. Arrington decides I am a "troll," to kick me out of UD altogether. William J Murray

Bornagain77: Yet Seversky conveniently neglected to mention that I also cited three Nobel Laureates, (Sheldon Lee Glashow, Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg), who all disagree with Carroll. So? No one knows who is right. There are several 'versions' of Quantum Mechanics because physicists can't agree and they all admit that!! Some, like you, might fervently believe their 'version' is right but the truth is: no one knows. JVL

WJM, you are misusing language again. I used the term 'true beliefs' in the broad sense of having true beliefs based on knowledge. Yet you tried to imply that I was using the term in a 'blind faith' sort of way. As was accused of me earlier in this thread, that was 'uncharitable' of you to imply that I was using the term 'true belief' in that 'detached from reality' sort of way. Why you are trying to be facetious and trivial in your definitions I have no idea. As you yourself admitted, you yourself don't subscribe to MWI and yet here you are siding with atheists when I call them out for the fact that MWI undermines our ability to maintain 'true beliefs' that are based on our own personal knowledge. (Which is, ironically, the very thing you falsely accused me of being guilty of). I miss the old WJM on UD who use to make powerful, and rationally coherent, arguments against atheists. I certainly do not like this new WJM who has apparently decided to side with atheists every chance he gets,,,, even when their arguments undermines his own MRT-IRT theory. Jerry says you have basically become a troll on UD. I thought that was a bit over the top for him to say that. But your last posts to me, which were 'uncharitable' and basically incoherent, makes me think that perhaps Jerry is far closer to the mark than I had realized. As Jerry likes to say, "Prove me wrong". bornagain77

Seversky states,

William Lane Craig is a philosopher and theologian. Ronald Cram is a theologian. Michael Egnor is a pediatric neurosurgeon. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist.

Yet Seversky conveniently neglected to mention that I also cited three Nobel Laureates, (Sheldon Lee Glashow, Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg), who all disagree with Carroll. I could have also cited George Ellis who also finds the evidence free multiverse musings of atheists to be preposterous:

Physics on Edge - George Ellis https://inference-review.com/article/physics-on-edge

Seversky also tries to maintain that Carroll was not being deceptive in how he handled the evidence in the debate. Yet he certainly was being deceptive in the debate. For instance, Carroll claimed in the debate that the BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. That simply is not true. As Vilenkin, who is the V in the BVG theorem, himself stated in a paper he delivered to Hawking's 70th birthday. “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”

“All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.” - Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston – in paper delivered at atheist Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday party (Characterized in the press as the 'Worst Birthday Present Ever') – January 2012

TimR also conveniently pretends that I did not list three Nobel Laureates who disagree with Carroll and states,

Edit: just Seversky’s comment which pretty much says the same thing If I was considering spinal surgery, I would consider the views of qualified spinal surgeons. If I am thinking about foundations of physics, I consider the views of qualifies theoretical physicists. As opposed to some guy on the internet.

Well, a far better analogy, (given that I cited three Nobel Laureates who disagree with Carroll). would be if you had a doctor, or even a group of doctors, who wanted to remove your brain with absolutely no physical evidence that your brain needed to be removed. Yet, more qualified doctors said that removal of your brain was completely unwarranted. Yet you opted to follow the advice of the quack doctors and have your brain removed anyway. Now that is a far better analogy for what is really going on. i.e. People who believe, (without any physical evidence whatsoever), that they exist in a virtual infinity of other places have literally lost their minds. Or to put it another way, By refusing to allow God as the explanation for quantum wave collapse, (and for the Creation of the 'fine-tuned' universe) atheists, (in their appeal to an infinity of other universes to try to 'explain away' the beginning, fine-tuning, and quantum wave collapse, of this universe), have literally become babbling idiots who have no brain.

"When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything." - Chesterton

TimR also asks,

what about it (MWI) is inconsistent with experiment?

Well Tim, one thing is that, as you already mentioned, MWI denies the reality of wave function collapse. Yet, as I have already referenced twice in this thread, the collapse of the wave function is now experimentally shown to be a real effect,,

Quantum experiment verifies Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ – March 24, 2015 Excerpt: An experiment,, has for the first time demonstrated Albert Einstein’s original conception of “spooky action at a distance” using a single particle. ,,Professor Howard Wiseman and his experimental collaborators,, report their use of homodyne measurements to show what Einstein did not believe to be real, namely the non-local collapse of a (single) particle’s wave function.,, According to quantum mechanics, a single particle can be described by a wave function that spreads over arbitrarily large distances,,, ,, by splitting a single photon between two laboratories, scientists have used homodyne detectors—which measure wave-like properties—to show the collapse of the wave function is a real effect,, This phenomenon is explained in quantum theory,, the instantaneous non-local, (beyond space and time), collapse of the wave function to wherever the particle is detected.,,, “Einstein never accepted orthodox quantum mechanics and the original basis of his contention was this single-particle argument. This is why it is important to demonstrate non-local wave function collapse with a single particle,” says Professor Wiseman. “Einstein’s view was that the detection of the particle only ever at one point could be much better explained by the hypothesis that the particle is only ever at one point, without invoking the instantaneous collapse of the wave function to nothing at all other points. “However, rather than simply detecting the presence or absence of the particle, we used homodyne measurements enabling one party to make different measurements and the other, using quantum tomography, to test the effect of those choices.” “Through these different measurements, you see the wave function collapse in different ways, thus proving its existence and showing that Einstein was wrong.” - per physorg

So yes, there is the rather inconvenient and embarrassing fact for atheists that MWI is now shown to disagree with experiment. But hey, what does a little experimentation matter when it comes to having your brain completely removed by someone as prestigious as Sean Carroll is? Think about it, although you will have completely lost all your common sense, at least you can rest assured that you exist in a virtual infinity of other universes. What does common sense, (or reality), possibly have to compare with such a delusion of grandeur?

Romans 1:22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools,

bornagain77

BA77 asks:

So we can’t hold true beliefs? What about WJM preceding statement, does he hold it as a ‘true belief.”

I'm just following the logic. If you believe a thing, you cannot know it is true, and so cannot characterize it as true. If you know it to be true, it is not a belief, it is knowledge.

WJM, you do realize that MWI renders free will illusory? And as such, does that not also render your very own Mental Reality Theory false? Or has that little detail escaped your notice?

I didn't say I subscribe to it; I was just making a logical observation. The MWI under discussion is framed under the idea of external (of universal mind), physical universes, which of course is not compatible with IRT (formerly MRT.) William J Murray

BA77: I've never heard Sean Carroll described as a new atheist before. He very rarely talks about religion. And no I'm not saying MWT is a sane belief because Sean Carroll says it is. I'm saying its a theory that arises from the equations of quantum mechanics (and is in fact the simplest application of those equations. It doesn't require a collapse of the wave function, or hidden variables). Eminent physicists treat it as a legitimate theory and a fruitful area of enquiry. And by the way, the theory doesn't require an infinite number of worlds. Edit: just Seversky's comment which pretty much says the same thing If I was considering spinal surgery, I would consider the views of qualified spinal surgeons. If I am thinking about foundations of physics, I consider the views of qualifies theoretical physicists. As opposed to some guy on the internet. But perhaps rather than describing it as crazy, you could identify what is wrong with MWI from a theoretical perspective - what about it is inconsistent with experiment? TimR

Bornagain77/74

So TimR, you find the evidence free belief that you exist in a infinite number of places to be a sane belief just because Sean Carroll says so?

William Lane Craig is a philosopher and theologian. Ronald Cram is a theologian. Michael Egnor is a pediatric neurosurgeon. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist. On questions in cosmology, who would you say has the greater expertise, whose opinion carries more weight?

Moreover, I have never been overly impressed with Sean Carrol musings in physics.

You are entitled to your opinion but do you have expertise or qualifications in this field that would make that opinion any thing more than that of just another layperson?

Sean Carroll’s Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014 – By Ronald Cram – April 15, 2020 Excerpt: (In his debate with William Lane Craig), Carroll was dishonest on two important points. Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem.,,, Carroll,, knows that QET is not really a theorem at all and so cannot honestly be described as better than BGV theorem […] Carroll’s denial that BGV theorem implies the universe/multiverse had an ultimate beginning was shocking and dishonest.

You could, in fairness, have linked to Carroll's Post-Debate Reflections where he writes:

The second premise of the Kalam argument is that the universe began to exist. Which may even be true! But we certainly don’t know, or even have strong reasons to think one way or the other. Craig thinks we do have a strong reason, the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem. So I explained what every physicist who has thought about the issue understands: that the real world is governed by quantum mechanics, and the BGV theorem assumes a classical spacetime, so it says nothing definitive about what actually happens in the universe; it is only a guideline to when our classical description breaks down. Indeed, I quoted a stronger theorem, the “Quantum Eternity Theorem” (QET) — under conventional quantum mechanics, any universe with a non-zero energy and a time-independent Hamiltonian will necessarily last forever toward both the past and the future. For convenience I quoted my own paper as a reference, although I’m surely not the first to figure it out; it’s a fairly trivial result once you think about it. (The Hartle-Hawking model is not eternal to the past, which is fine because they imagine a universe with zero energy. In that situation time is an approximation rather than fundamental in any case — that’s the “problem of time” in quantum gravity.)

For a theologian to accuse a physicist of dishonesty and deception on questions of cosmology does not, in my view, reflect well on the theologian. Seversky

I have more notes on the subject of ORFan genes if you want them

Not at the moment. I don't have time at the moment to pursue any of this. I was just pushing my long held solution to the issue which would be a no brainer if it was true and would end the debate immediately. But as I said - silence. Thank you for the offer. I may take you up on it some time in the future. jerry

So TimR, you find the evidence free belief that you exist in a infinite number of places to be a sane belief just because Sean Carroll says so? Really??? And I guess if someone like Einstein told you that you were a poached egg would you then believe that you were a poached egg? As John Lennox once said in reference to Hawking's book "The Grand Design", “Nonsense remains nonsense, even when talked by world-famous scientists.” Moreover, at least three Nobel Laureates, (Sheldon Lee Glashow, Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg), all disagree with Sean Carroll.

A Hand-Waving Exact Science Sheldon Lee Glashow In response to “It’s You, Again” Excerpt: Consider what several of my distinguished scientific colleagues say about Everett’s many worlds: Arthur Fine: "There is, I think, no sense at all to be made of the splitting of worlds."3 John Bell: "The many worlds interpretation seems to me an extravagant, and above all an extravagantly vague hypothesis."4 Murray Gell-Mann: "Everett’s ideology that there are many worlds that are equally real is operationally meaningless."5 Steven Weinberg: "I find the many worlds interpretation repellent."6 https://inference-review.com/letter/a-hand-waving-exact-science

Moreover, I have never been overly impressed with Sean Carrol musings in physics. For instance, here is a critique of Sean Carrol's 'preposterous' universe

Sean Carroll’s Preposterous Universe - Michael Egnor - February 13, 2018 Excerpt: Physicist Sean Carroll is a bit of a celebrity among New Atheists. Carroll is better credentialed (as a scientist) than many of his ideological comrades, and he is a prolific advocate for atheism and naturalism. His arguments have a superficial credibility, but generally lack any real logical or philosophical substance. He has famously made the argument that an infinite number of universes is more plausible than God. His views are the usual witless atheist/materialist boilerplate, with a patina of (fake) scientific credibility.,,,, Carroll’s universe — a universe without cause — is indeed preposterous. The material universe must be caused, and it cannot be the cause of its own existence. There are clear coherent reasons to infer a Creator, and the only way to deny creation is to deny logic and, ironically, to deny science. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/02/sean-carrolls-preposterous-universe/

Moreover, besides being philosophically, and scientifically, incoherent, Sean Carrol was also once caught being less than forthright, (if not outright deceptive), with the evidence in a 2014 debate with William Lane Craig.

Sean Carroll’s Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014 - By Ronald Cram - April 15, 2020 Excerpt: (In his debate with William Lane Craig), Carroll was dishonest on two important points. Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem.,,, Carroll,, knows that QET is not really a theorem at all and so cannot honestly be described as better than BGV theorem. Conclusion Uninformed viewers of the 2014 Carroll-Craig debate may think that Carroll won the debate. After all, Carroll is a cosmologist, he’s brilliant, confident and likable. He attacked and undermined BGV theorem, the science upon which Craig often bases his arguments. Carroll even enlisted the help of Alan Guth to undermine his own theorem. Then Carroll sprung the quantum eternity theorem on Craig, who was caught off-guard by the term since it had never appeared in the scientific literature. Informed viewers of the debate came away with a different view. Carroll’s denial that BGV theorem implies the universe/multiverse had an ultimate beginning was shocking and dishonest. Also, informed viewers saw it as rather underhanded for Carroll to claim “quantum eternity theorem” was a recognized theorem that implies the universe is eternal into the past (since the term had not even appeared in the scientific literature at that point). On the basis of the science, Craig was truthful with the audience and Carroll was not. Truth will win out as they say. Carroll’s (dishonest) behavior can only be seen as harmful to science. https://freethinkingministries.com/sean-carrolls-dishonesty-the-debate-of-2014/

Of related note is this 2015 lecture that William Lane Craig gave where he, (directly contrary to what Carrol was trying to deceptively imply in the 2014 debate), firmly established that the universe did indeed have a beginning.

Cosmology: A Religion For Atheists? | William Lane Craig critiques (Hawking's) "The Theory Of Everything" movie - 28:00 minute mark – Hawking's quantum model still implies, despite misconceptions, a beginning for the universe https://youtu.be/i08-gCue7Ds?t=1687

So TimR, let's just say, to put it mildly, that I am very unimpressed with your appeal to Sean Carroll as your supposed expert of choice. bornagain77

BA77 - why call MWI crazy? It's a position in quantum foundations adopted by some very eminent theoretical physicists, including Sean Carroll, who is knows far more about the subject than you or I will ever know. It is in fact the result of taking the equations of quantum mechanics seriously and accepting that they reflect reality. You may not find it compelling. But it most definitely is not "crazy". TimR

Jerry, GD cited this paper to you. From Tautz, D., Domazet-Lošo, T. The evolutionary origin of orphan genes. Nat. Rev. Genet. 12, 692–702 (2011): Cornelius Hunter, (PhD biophysics), commented on the disingenuous nature of that very paper here:

The Evolutionary Origin of Orphan Genes Beware of the Football - Cornelius Hunter - 2012 Excerpt: The evolution of even a single protein-coding gene is astronomically unlikely. How do I know? Because even the evolutionists unrealistically optimistic estimates show a 27 order of magnitude shortfall. And so a review paper from last year entitled “The evolutionary origin of orphan genes” attracted no little attention. Orphan genes are protein-coding genes that appear in a single species. Because they appear only once in the evolutionary tree, they must have evolved relatively rapidly and their history cannot be traced back to early evolutionary history. This means evolutionists cannot appeal quite so much to strange, unobservable and unverifiable events and processes to explain their origin. Given the 27 order of magnitude shortfall, an explanation for how protein-coding genes evolved, including mature, functional orphan genes, would be a terrific breakthrough. So did the paper actually explain “The evolutionary origin of orphan genes”? [Hint: Lucy was an evolutionist] The review paper did not actually explain how orphans could have evolved. Rather, it assumed they evolved and explained that, given that orphans evolved, how fast they must have evolved, how they are identified, how they can help explain protein evolution, and so forth. It did, however, in passing admit to the gravity of the underlying problem: "If de novo emergence does indeed have a large role in orphan evolution, one has to explain how a new functional protein can emerge out of a previously non-coding sequence. This would seem highly unlikely a priori, particularly when one considers our current knowledge of protein evolution" Indeed it is highly unlikely according to our “current knowledge.” http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2012/12/did-proteins-evolve-from-long-non.html

So NO, they did not demonstrate the evolutionary origin of a new protein in that paper. And given that it is a 2011 review paper and given that all of Gordon's other papers are dated earlier than 2011, I will assume the other papers have the same shortfall. And Jerry, here are a few more notes that you may find interesting:

Is the Origin of New Genes “Basically a Solved Problem”? - Cornelius Hunter - Sept. 11, 2014 Excerpt: If you read the headlines, you would have the impression that the problem is well in hand. For instance, super-star science writer Carl Zimmer wrote in the New York Times earlier this year that “researchers have documented the step-by-step process by which a new gene can come into existence.”?Case closed right??Well not quite. In fact, not even close. What Zimmer tells his readers is a “step-by-step process” is what scientists affectionately refer to as a cartoon. In fact, here it is:,,, ,,,This evolutionary narrative is certainly not “basically a solved problem.” In fact, what evolutionists have are high claims of the spontaneous evolution of incredibly complex structures, not because of the evidence, but in spite of the evidence. So what gives evolutionist’s their confidence? It is not that they understand how such genes could have evolved, but that the genes must have evolved because solo genes are observed over and over: "Several studies have by now also shown that de novo emerged transcripts and proteins can assume a function within the organism. All of this provided solid evidence that de novo gene birth was indeed possible.",,, Does any of this mean that the de novo genes evolved from random mutations as the evolutionists claim? Of course not.,,, Only a few years ago they agreed that such evolution of new genes would be impossible. Now they have been forced to adopt it because the evidence unambiguously reveals solo genes, and evolutionists dogmatically insist that everything must have spontaneously evolved.,, http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2014/09/is-origin-of-new-genes-basically-solved.html Common Sense Design Principles and the Real World - Ann Gauger - January 11, 2016 Excerpt: A recent paper in PLOS Genetics considers the origins of new "genes" in humans and chimps. By comparing RNA sequences, researchers identified over 600 transcriptionally active "genes" that appear to be present only in humans and not in chimps or the other mammal species tested. They claimed that these "genes" were the product of evolution from previously non-coding, untranscribed DNA.,,, Something to bear in mind -- all these conclusions are based only on the comparison of DNA sequences among species. They are conclusions based on the assumption that the differences reflect some sort of genetic history based on common descent -- the conclusions are not based on any experiments or observations of real events happening in real time.,,, What I doubt is the claim that these genes evolved from untranscribed random sequences that somehow acquired promoter sequences, became transcribed, and even further, sometimes became translated and then became functional. The reason I doubt this? Douglas Axe's and my work on the evolution of enzymes, and a dose of common sense. First of all, it is no trivial thing to "acquire" the promoter sequences that turn on a gene's transcription, and the signals that say when to stop. That one little undemonstrated word hides a multitude of requirements, and probably signifies a designer's action. Second, the words "became translated" hide all sorts of complex signals and activities, and likely require a designer as well. But the biggest problem of all is the business of taking non-functional protein and turning it into functional protein. This scenario is what we tested in our most recent paper in BIO-Complexity.,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/01/common_sense_de102221.html podcast - Paul Nelson on Orphan Genes and Evolution - March 15, 2017 https://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2017/03/paul-nelson-on-orphan-genes-and-evolution/ Orphan genes are DNA sequences coding for proteins with no known genetic relatives. They exist in great numbers. They often serve in vital roles in organisms ,,, Orphan genes are another example where predictions of standard evolutionary theory are defeated by the evidence. Meanwhile ID takes the evidence in stride. As a scientific theory, Darwinian evolution is indeed testable, except that it fails its tests. -

I have more notes on the subject of ORFan genes if you want them, but the above notes should give you a clear view of the games that Darwinists are playing trying too avoid the fact that the widespread presence of ORFan genes actually falsifies their theory and does not support it. bornagain77

WJM claims that "The concept of a “true belief” is self-contradictory. Some is either known to be true, or it is a belief not known to be true." So we can't hold true beliefs? What about WJM preceding statement, does he hold it as a 'true belief". If so, he just refuted himself. As to WJM jumping on the MWI crazy train, that is a bit surprising. WJM, you do realize that MWI renders free will illusory? And as such, does that not also render your very own Mental Reality Theory false? Or has that little detail escaped your notice? Or do you now also deny the reality of free will just like you are now trying to deny the reality of objective morality over on KF's thread? bornagain77

The idea that MWI represents "sheer insanity" is hyperbolic rhetoric. True statements can always be made; the only question is what true statements can be made about. MWI changes what most "true statements" can be made about, and that is decided by ontology, not epistemology. MWI simply changes the ontology within which true statements can be made and how they can be made (resulting epistemology.) William J Murray

The concept of a "true belief" is self-contradictory. Some is either known to be true, or it is a belief not known to be true. William J Murray

Hmm JVL, you might have had a point that the sheer madness inherent in MWI could possibly be true save for the fact that I can appeal to a virtual infinity of other Gordon's, who currently exist in other undetectable universes, who believe the MWI to also be sheer madness. In fact, in the insanity of Many World's, there are now presently a virtual infinity of Gordon Davissons in parallel universes, who believe MWI to be sheer madness, and who are now trying to convince a virtual infinity of bloggers named Bornagain77, who believe in MWI to be true, that MWI is sheer madness. In short, there are no objectively 'true beliefs' to be had in MWI. i.e. It is a self refuting worldview. If MWI is held to be true then it undermines its own claim of being an objectively true belief that someone can rationally hold. As Philip Ball noted, "It, (The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics), says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth."

Why the Many-Worlds Interpretation Has Many Problems – Philip Ball – October 18, 2018 Excerpt: It, (The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics), says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable. Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be. Some Everettians insist that this is not a problem and that you should not be troubled by it. Perhaps you are not, but I am. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/

Verse:

2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

bornagain77

Bornagain77: and yet here you sit unwilling to honestly admit that your ‘mistake’ of preferring the Many World interpretation is stark raving mad? But that's not the case is it? YOU think it's crazy but others don't. I don't find the 'many worlds' approach very . . . compelling. But I do have to admit that a lot of physicists take it seriously. Some of Quantum Mechanics sounds pretty crazy to me already but, apparently, the basic theories have been heavily verified. So, who am I to cast aspersions on an idea I personally find difficult to wrap my head around? JVL

Gordon Davisson, Thank you for your reply. Two parts 1) you are completely disingenuous on our knowledge of what is important. If I was going to rate the importance of areas facing evolutionary biology, it would be verifying the origin of new proteins as #1. Anything else is a very distant second. Why? Because it provides a basis for establishing macro-evolution of which the absence of any examples is the biggest criticism of whatever the latest synthesis is. We had this discussion here with experts on evolutionary biology several times. None have been around much in recent years but several knowledgeable people have commented here in the past. As I said, silence. All they presented as evidence for evolution was micro evolution. Allen MacNeill presented his 47 engines of variation (later increased in number) but no concrete results on what they actually produced. Yes, a Nobel prize would await the people who show how macro evolution occurred and it has nothing to do with ID. That was a extremely specious remark. 2) your examples of orphan gene formation are appreciated and I will look at them as best I can. I await the review of how all these have led to new functions in diverging species. I have been aware of this effort for over 12 years afterAllen MacNeill discussed them here 12-14 years ago. Aside: Allen taught evolutionary biology at Cornell. I have no idea what he’s doing now. jerry

PaulT- seeing that you can't say why you side with Gordon, no one cares ET

Earth to Gordon Davisson- The paper "Waiting for TWO Mutations" refutes the notion of gene duplication as a blind watchmaker mechanism. There just isn't enough time to duplicate a gene, get a new binding site for the duplicated gene and then alter the duplicate so that you have a change in the protein. But that is moot anyway as changes to genetics can't produce the diversity of life. DNA doesn't determine biological form. By the way, to refute ID all one has to do is step up and find evidentiary support for mainstream evolution. And I would think that would be very relevant to scientists. Yet you seem to think otherwise. Strange. ET

Well PaulT, calling it 'uncharitable' for me to consider the MWI to be anything other than the ravings of a madman is a compliment in my book. That I would 'double down' on calling the belief insane is a further compliment. Sometimes the emperor must be called out for having no clothes on even if others play along with the insanity. So PaulT, as a, ahem, 'unbiased reader', do you also believe, like GD, that you are also constantly splitting into a virtual infinity of other parallel universes? If so, talk about delusions of grandeur. There are no two ways about it, the belief is simply stark raving mad. Seriously, go to a psychiatrist and try to tell him that you believe that there are an infinite number of other yous that are currently existing in parallel universes. But unfortunately you can't prove it to him, he just has to take your word for it. See how far that gets you. :)

"Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit.” - J. Budziszewski

bornagain77

Bornagain77/45 "Well GD, I disagree with you and I will, (since I referenced actual empirical evidence and you did not), let my posts stand as written for unbiased readers to judge for themselves and see who has presented the better case, and who is refusing to have their worldview challenged by the scientific evidence." Unbiased reader here. I side with Gordon Davisson in this instance. More-so after your uncharitable comment at 57 and the double-down at 61. Please reconsider these. PaulT

Gordon Davisson, don't you find it the least bit hypocritical of you that you would accuse me of not being willing to admit to my supposed mistake in my interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and yet here you sit unwilling to honestly admit that your 'mistake' of preferring the Many World interpretation is stark raving mad? That you take my observation that your MWI is stark raving mad as a ad hominem insult is interesting. MWI clearly is insane. A five year old child would instantly see that if someone claimed that they were constantly splitting into an infinite number of other unobservable places that person would be stark raving mad. There is nothing really personal about me observing that your belief in MWI is insane. It is only in so far as you are unwilling to let go of the clearly insane MWI, and are unwilling to admit to your mistake of preferring MWI over the instrumentalist approach, that you could possibly consider it a personal ad hominem against yourself for me to say your belief in MWI is insane. Steven Weinberg himself, an atheist, finds your belief to be insane,

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 2017 Excerpt: Today there are two widely followed approaches to quantum mechanics, the “realist” and “instrumentalist” approaches,9 which view the origin of probability in measurement in two very different ways. For reasons I will explain, neither approach seems to me quite satisfactory.10,,,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11,,,, In the realist approach the history of the world is endlessly splitting; it does so every time a macroscopic body becomes tied in with a choice of quantum states. This inconceivably huge variety of histories has provided material for science fiction. 12 http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

Gordon, you are the one who wanted to argue over interpretations. Not me. So let's get things clear from the start, your preferred interpretation(MWI) is stark raving mad. PERIOD! Until you honestly admit to that fact I can see us making no further progress in correcting your other mistakes. Like I said, go get your own house in order in regards to your own interpretation in quantum mechanics before you begin to try to prove to me that my interpretation, (the instrumentalist approach), is incorrect. bornagain77

Jerry @ 58: Um, no. This is not the "most important issue in naturalistic evolution" (and you haven't "seen nothing" -- you saw the info I posted before).

If it existed all the critics would be here presenting it.

No, very very little of the evidence for evolution gets presented here. There's a huge amount of evidence for evolution, but UD is pretty much an IDist echo chamber. You should get out and read some actual science, rather than hanging out in an ID-friendly safe space.

There would be Nobel Prizes for it.

Again, no. Refuting ID (which, as I said, this wouldn't actually do) is just slightly more relevant to actual science than refuting the flat Earthers is to geography or astronomy. Getting more info about the origin of genes is certainly worth researching (and people are doing it), but you have a vastly exaggerated view of its importance.

I take the silence as confirmation that it doesn’t exist.

Just because nobody's spoon-fed something to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Here's some relevant sections of a review paper I found. Feel free to read the references for yourself (but note that it's a decade old, so there's sure to be newer research since then -- look for more!). From Tautz, D., Domazet-Lošo, T. The evolutionary origin of orphan genes. Nat. Rev. Genet. 12, 692–702 (2011):

Abstract | Gene evolution has long been thought to be primarily driven by duplication and rearrangement mechanisms. However, every evolutionary lineage harbours orphan genes that lack homologues in other lineages and whose evolutionary origin is only poorly understood. Orphan genes might arise from duplication and rearrangement processes followed by fast divergence; however, de novo evolution out of non-coding genomic regions is emerging as an important additional mechanism. This process appears to provide raw material continuously for the evolution of new gene functions, which can become relevant for lineage-specific adaptations.

...

De novo evolution. In this scenario, randomly occurring sequence combinations would form cryptic functional sites (for example, transcription initiation regions, splice sites and polyadenylation sites) and would come under a regulatory control to produce a distinct processed RNA transcript (FIG. 3). This RNA could initially function as an antisense or structural RNA[39] and would eventually acquire a functional ORF from which a completely new protein could evolve. The most stringent criterion for indicating the involvement of this mechanism requires that the corresponding genomic region of the gene is present in outgroup organisms, but as a non-coding stretch that is neither transcribed nor translated. Although this possibility for the emergence of new gene functions initially seemed the least likely[2], there are now a number of fully documented cases supporting de novo origination by this mechanism[40–44] (BOX 2). In addition, several surveys identified many more candidates for possible de novo evolved genes in various species[45–49].

...

Box 2 | Examples of unequivocally identified de novo evolved genes The most stringent criteria for a de novo evolved gene require evidence that a genomic region that is non-coding in multiple outgroup species is transcribed into a distinct RNA in the ingroup or focal species and that this RNA is translated or can be shown to be functional. Ideally, one should show that a non-coding RNA in the outgroup species has assumed a functional ORF in the ingroup species. The following examples fulfil these criteria. BSC4 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae The gene is expressed as a non-coding RNA in closely related species. It evolved an ORF encoding a peptide of 132 amino acids in length in S. cerevisiae. The new protein appears to be involved in DNA repair. Its functionality is supported by population genetics, expression, proteomics and synthetic lethal data[40]. Pldi in Mus musculus The Pldi gene has three exons; it is specifically expressed in the testis, and it evolved about 3 million years ago. The gene region was subject to selective sweeps in some populations. Although short ORFs are present, the gene is most likely to act as a non-coding RNA that is involved in chromatin organization. Knocking out this gene leads to a lowered mobility of sperm cells[41]. CLLU1, C22ORF45 and DNAH10OS in humans These genes were identified as human-specific genes that have syntenic, non-transcribed regions in other primates. Functional evidence for CLLU1, C22ORF45 and DNAH10OS comes from polymorphism data, expression data and proteomics. CLLU1 was first identified as an upregulated gene in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia[42]. MDF1 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae MDF1 originated de novo from a previously non-coding sequence. It functions as a suppressor of mating efficiency in a rich medium by binding MAT?2 and thus promotes vegetative growth. It is regulated by the antisense gene ADF1, which acts as a transcriptional suppressor[43]. FLJ33706 in humans FLJ33706 is a six-exon gene with a human-specific ORF of 194 amino acids that evolved from a non-coding region that is generally present in eutherian mammals. The first exon and some splice junctions were partially created by the insertion of Alu elements. The RNA and protein are expressed in the brain, and elevated expression is observed in Alzheimer’s brain samples. Polymorphism data support functionality of the reading frame[44].

References:

40. Cai, J. J., Zhao, R., Jiang, H. & Wang, W. De novo origination of a new proteincoding gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Genetics 179, 487–496 (2008). This was the first study that provided direct functional evidence for the evolution of a completely new ORF out of a previously non-coding RNA. 41. Heinen, T. J., Staubach, F., Häming, D. & Tautz, D. Emergence of a new gene from an intergenic region. Curr. Biol. 19, 1527–1531 (2009). This was the first study that provided direct functional evidence for the de novo evolution of a new transcript out of a non-coding genomic region. 42. Knowles, D. G. & McLysaght, A. Recent de novo origin of human proteincoding genes. Genome Res. 19, 1752–1759 (2009). 43. Li, D. et al. A de novo originated gene depresses budding yeast mating pathway and is repressed by the protein encoded by its antisense strand. Cell Res. 20, 408–420 (2010). 44. Li, C. Y. et al. A human?specific de novo proteincoding gene associated with human brain functions. PLoS Comput. Biol. 6, e1000734 (2010). 45. Levine, M. T., Jones, C. D., Kern, A. D., Lindfors, H. A. & Begun, D. J. Novel genes derived from non?coding DNA in Drosophila melanogaster are frequently Xlinked and show testis?biased expression. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 103, 9935–9939 (2006). 46. Begun, D. J., Lindfors, H. A., Kern, A. D. & Jones, C. D. Evidence for de novo evolution of testis?expressed genes in the Drosophila yakuba/Drosophila erecta clade. Genetics 176, 1131–1137 (2007). 47. Zhou, Q. et al. On the origin of new genes in Drosophila. Genome Res. 18, 1446–1455 (2008). 48. Toll?Riera, M. et al. Origin of primate orphan genes: a comparative genomics approach. Mol. Biol. Evol. 26, 603–612 (2009). This is currently the most comprehensive systematic survey of orphan genes in primates, drawing specific reference to the modes of origin of this gene class. [This is the one I cited before -GD] 49. Ekman, D. & Elofsson, A. Identifying and quantifying orphan protein sequences in fungi. J. Mol. Biol. 396, 396–405 (2010).

Gordon Davisson

BA77 @ 57: So, you claim to be willing to admit to your mistakes, but when faced with having to do so you retreat into ad-hominem insults and refuse to follow through. Classy. Real classy. Gordon Davisson

So far, everything I’ve seen on the subject indicates the exact opposite of that.

It is most important issue in naturalistic evolution and I have seen nothing. If it existed all the critics would be here presenting it. There would be Nobel Prizes for it. I take the silence as confirmation that it doesn't exist. jerry

Gordon Davisson, To tell you the truth, I quit taking your posts seriously when you stated that you prefer MWI. I mean really, what is the point of trying to be reasonable with someone who actually thinks it is reasonable for him to believe that he actually exists in an infinite number of places? As Dr. Michael Egnor noted, "the issue here isn’t physics or even logic. ,,, The issue is psychiatric. We have a highly accomplished physicist, who regards the existence of God as preposterous, asserting that the unceasing creation of infinite numbers of new universes by every atom in the cosmos at every moment is actually happening (as we speak!), and that it is a perfectly rational and sane inference. People have been prescribed anti-psychotic drugs for less."

Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God - Michael Egnor - August 2, 2017 Excerpt: as I noted, the issue here isn’t physics or even logic. The issue is psychiatric. We have a highly accomplished physicist, who regards the existence of God as preposterous, asserting that the unceasing creation of infinite numbers of new universes by every atom in the cosmos at every moment is actually happening (as we speak!), and that it is a perfectly rational and sane inference. People have been prescribed anti-psychotic drugs for less. Now of course Carroll isn’t crazy, not in any medical way. He’s merely given his assent to a crazy ideology — atheist materialism —,,, What can we in the reality-based community do when an ideology — the ideology that is currently dominant in science — is not merely wrong, but delusional? I guess calling it what it is is a place to start. https://evolutionnews.org/2017/08/atheist-physicist-sean-carroll-an-infinite-number-of-universes-is-more-plausible-than-god/

GD, If I take advice from you on what interpretation of QM is the correct one, perhaps I should also go down to the street corner and get advise on how to live my life from a homeless wino? After all, his advice on how to live life would in all likelihood be far more sane advice than what you are believing with your MWI. Question for you GD, besides omnipresence, are there any other Theistic attributes that you think that you might possess? Like omniscience and omnipotence? :) Seriously, you should get your own house in order with Quantum Mechanics before you try to correct anyone else on their particular interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

“The Kochen-Speckter Theorem talks about properties of one system only. So we know that we cannot assume – to put it precisely, we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement. Not always. I mean in certain cases. So in a sense, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.” Anton Zeilinger – Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism – video (7:17 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=437

bornagain77

BA77 @ 54: Your last response seems to be mostly a copy of your previous one (#49), with the one point I argued against (closing the "free will" loophole refuting MWI) removed. Does that mean you admit that point was wrong? Again, back at #37, you said:

Personally myself, when I make a scientific mistake, and when that mistake is pointed out to me, I, like you, like to honestly admit my mistake as soon as possible and to then move on and try to, if I can, make my case from another angle. Or, If I can’t make my case from another angle, to then honestly admit that I was completely wrong in my presupposition about the science.

I'm basically calling you out here. Are you actually willing to admit your mistake? Because frankly it looks to me like you're trying to move on without admitting to the mistake... and probably repeat the bogus argument again later, the next time the subject comes up. Gordon Davisson

Jerry @ 51:

A month or so ago I presented to Gordon Davisson an ironclad way to affirm or disprove Darwin’s or the latest synthesis’ ideas of evolution. His response was that there seems to be evidence/support for Darwin and latest version based on current analysis It has to do with the origin of proteins. Other than an off handed remark, silence. So I assume the evidence doesn’t exist and protein origin is a major stumbling block.

Um... why would you assume that? I think your idea is a good one and worth pursuing, but I'm not very knowledgable about genomics, so I'm not the right person to pursue it. I did find a couple of people who had looked into it (or something very similar), and both found results that seem to match the prediction of standard evolutionary theory, and cited them. Actually, I think this is worth further investigation on at least two fronts: first and most obviously, looking further into the existing research (further than I did), and maybe doing additional original research to supplement it. But again, I'm not particularly knowledgable about the subject and tools, so I might well botch the research and/or analysis of the results. I wouldn't particularly trust my results, and there's no reason you should either. So if you want it pursued, you should talk to someone who knows the subject better. The second front is to try to explain the results in terms of ID. I took a quick stab at this in my answer to you, and actually I'm really tempted to go into it further... but I think you wouldn't like what I have to say. I'm on the evolution side, so do you really want me trying to tell you what your theory should be? But the real problem is that in order to properly address this from the ID side, you'd need to move past the current "generic design detection" (or "design-centric") approach to ID, and actually start building specific hypotheses about how the designs were implemented, and testing them against the evidence. I've thought for a long time that ID needs to do this if it ever seriously wants to compete with evolution, but the ID community has shown no interest in this. (I've been meaning to get back to the Common Descent/Common Design thread about this point, because I think it also applies to many other aspects of that disussion. But I haven't gotten around to it.) In any case, you shouldn't assume that I haven't pursued it because "the evidence doesn’t exist and protein origin is a major stumbling block". So far, everything I've seen on the subject indicates the exact opposite of that. Gordon Davisson

GD wants to argue over interpretation, so In regards to interpretation, GD stated,

” I like the many worlds interpretation (MWI), but I don’t make the mistake of thinking that my liking for it is much of an argument for it actually being correct.” – Gordon Davisson – post 44

So to repeat again, As far as I’m concerned, Gordon Davisson, when he said that her prefers MWI, could just as well said that he prefers sheer insanity over sanity.

Too many worlds – Philip Ball – Feb. 17, 2015 Excerpt:,,, You measure the path of an electron, and in this world it seems to go this way, but in another world it went that way. That requires a parallel, identical apparatus for the electron to traverse. More – it requires a parallel you to measure it. Once begun, this process of fabrication has no end: you have to build an entire parallel universe around that one electron, identical in all respects except where the electron went. You avoid the complication of wavefunction collapse, but at the expense of making another universe.,,, per aeon Why the Many-Worlds Interpretation Has Many Problems – Philip Ball – October 18, 2018 Excerpt: It, (The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics), says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable. Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be. Some Everettians insist that this is not a problem and that you should not be troubled by it. Perhaps you are not, but I am. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/

Of related note to empirically refuting the MWI,,,, MWI denies the reality of wave function collapse. Yet the following experiment shows that the collapse of the wave function is a real effect,,

Quantum experiment verifies Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ – March 24, 2015 Excerpt: An experiment,, has for the first time demonstrated Albert Einstein’s original conception of “spooky action at a distance” using a single particle. ,,Professor Howard Wiseman and his experimental collaborators,, report their use of homodyne measurements to show what Einstein did not believe to be real, namely the non-local collapse of a (single) particle’s wave function.,, According to quantum mechanics, a single particle can be described by a wave function that spreads over arbitrarily large distances,,, ,, by splitting a single photon between two laboratories, scientists have used homodyne detectors—which measure wave-like properties—to show the collapse of the wave function is a real effect,, This phenomenon is explained in quantum theory,, the instantaneous non-local, (beyond space and time), collapse of the wave function to wherever the particle is detected.,,, “Einstein never accepted orthodox quantum mechanics and the original basis of his contention was this single-particle argument. This is why it is important to demonstrate non-local wave function collapse with a single particle,” says Professor Wiseman. “Einstein’s view was that the detection of the particle only ever at one point could be much better explained by the hypothesis that the particle is only ever at one point, without invoking the instantaneous collapse of the wave function to nothing at all other points. “However, rather than simply detecting the presence or absence of the particle, we used homodyne measurements enabling one party to make different measurements and the other, using quantum tomography, to test the effect of those choices.” “Through these different measurements, you see the wave function collapse in different ways, thus proving its existence and showing that Einstein was wrong.” per physorg

So we have experimental evidence on one side, and Davisson’s personal preference for MWI, and/or personal preference for sheer insanity, on the other. Myself I choose to follow experimental evidence (and sanity). bornagain77

I guess you guys didn't didn't get the memo. It's been over:

The mid 1990s A new problem appeared. Tomas Lindahl and other researchers discover that the DNA molecule was not as stable as what was originally thought. The 2015 Nobel Chemistry Prize honoured three of these researchers that discovered this instability and the proofreading and error correcting machinery that counteract the instability. The following is a quote from the Press Release of the Royal Swedish Academy that stresses the importance of these researchers work:

“Each day our DNA is damaged by UV radiation, free radicals and other carcinogenic substances, but even without such external attacks, a DNA molecule is inherently unstable. Thousands of spontaneous changes to a cell’s genome occur on a daily basis. Furthermore, defects can also arise when DNA is copied during cell division, a process that occurs several million times every day in the human body. The reason our genetic material does not disintegrate into complete chemical chaos is that a host of molecular systems continuously monitor and repair DNA. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 awards three pioneering scientists who have mapped how several of these repair systems function at a detailed molecular level. In the early 1970s, scientists believed that DNA was an extremely stable molecule, but Tomas Lindahl demonstrated that DNA decays at a rate that ought to have made the development of life on Earth impossible. This insight led him to discover a molecular machinery, base excision repair, which constantly counteracts the collapse of our DNA.”

(The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2015/press.html ) This code carrier instability has an important consequence. It has a negative impact on the understanding of the origin and development of the genetic code. The error correcting software is specific for DNA and without it a DNA molecule is doomed as a code carrier.

It's chickens and eggs all the way down :) ET

BA77: You're correct that I haven't cited any experimental evidence (in the current discussion), but that's irrelevant to the point I'm making. I'm not disputing the experimental evidence that you've mentioned, I'm disputing your interpretation of what that experimental evidence means. For example, in your most recent response (#49), you said:

IMHO, there really is not much left for me to say after someone says they prefer the Many Worlds interpretation over experimental evidence that closed the setting independence and/or ‘free will’ loop hole.

This is complete nonsense. In the first place, the test of Bell's theorem you cited (which used distant quasar light as a source of randomness for setting the detectors) doesn't completely eliminate the "free will" loophole, just pushes it out some (and not as much as it might seem). But that's not the real problem with what you're saying. The real problem is that superdeterminism and the "free will" loophole have nothing -- nothing -- to do with the many worlds interpretation. You're refuting something completely irrelevant. Let me repeat what I said in #44:

There are a variety of interpretations that are consistent with our observations (at least so far); some are instrumentalist, some are physicalist, some assign a special role to observers (though not necessarily conscious observers), and some don’t. The physicalist options that don’t have a special role for observers include (but are not limited to): many worlds, Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW), de Broglie–Bohm (pilot wave), and the transactional interpretation. You could probably add superdeterminism to that list, but I don’t understand it well enough to have an opinion.

Note that superdeterminism is an alternative to the other physicalist interpretations that I listed (MWI, GRW, dBB, and TI). If it were ruled out (and again that hasn't actually been done), it'd have no effect at all on the others. Let me explain that in more detail: Bell's theorem says that there are limits to the type of correlations that local hidden-variable theories can explain, and QM predicts violations of these limits. These correlations have been tested many times in many ways, and the results have always matched QM, not the local-hidden-variable prediction. But the tests all have various loopholes, which prevent them from completely ruling out local hidden-variable theories. The first tests of Bell's theorem had lots of huge loopholes, but subsequent experiments have narrowed or eliminated those loopholes. "Superdeterminism" refers to the possibility that the setting independence assumption in Bell's theorem is violated, i.e. the "free will" loophole. The quasar-light experiment significantly narrows this loophole, making superdeterminism even less plausible than it was before as an explanation for the test results. (Personally, I've never attached much significance to the loopholes, even back when there were lots of them. Local hidden-variable theories haven't been completely ruled out, but they've been ruled out to my satisfaction for a long time.) (BTW, let me explain the terminology here: "Hidden-variable theories" are those which propose that the apparent randomness of measurement results in QM is actually a result of us not knowing the entire state of the system; thus the "random" results are actually deterministic, just determined by things we don't know about, i.e. "hidden variables". "Local" means that causal influences cannot travel faster than the speed of light. This is important because according to relativity, faster-than-light is sort-of equivalent to backwards-in-time (heavy on the "sort of"), and backwards-in-time causality would be weird.) Of the interpretations I mentioned, MWI, GRW, dBB, and TI, none are local hidden-variable theories. dBB is the only hidden-variable theory in the bunch, and it's explicitly non-local. GWR and TI are both explicitly non-local and assume true randomness rather than hidden variables. MWI can be formulated as a local theory (depending on how you think about it), but it's about as far from a hidden-variable theory as you can get. So even if all loopholes were completely eliminated in the Bell's theorem tests, it wouldn't be a problem for any of these interpretations. So citing the quasar-light experiment as evidence against MWI is complete and utter nonsense. Now, back at #37, you said:

Personally myself, when I make a scientific mistake, and when that mistake is pointed out to me, I, like you, like to honestly admit my mistake as soon as possible and to then move on and try to, if I can, make my case from another angle. Or, If I can’t make my case from another angle, to then honestly admit that I was completely wrong in my presupposition about the science.

So... are you willing to admit that using the quasar-light experiment (or Bell's theorem tests in general) to argue against MWI (or physicalist interpretations of QM in general) is a mistake, and move on? (Note: I'm aware you discussed several other points, but I want to try to avoid the need-to-discuss-everything-in-order-to-discuss-anything effect I mentioned earlier. Therefore, I want to try to discuss and settle one point at a time before moving on to the next, and this seemed like a good point to start with.) Gordon Davisson

A month or so ago I presented to Gordon Davisson an ironclad way to affirm or disprove Darwin's or the latest synthesis’ ideas of evolution. His response was that there seems to be evidence/support for Darwin and latest version based on current analysis It has to do with the origin of proteins. Other than an off handed remark, silence. So I assume the evidence doesn't exist and protein origin is a major stumbling block. Also from the current comment which is really two (more?) very long comments from what I can see. The first being about being reasonable in discussions and the second part about how the laws of thermodynamics don’t prohibit decreases in entropy is isolated systems. Then there is quantum mechanics. Should they have been separated for easier understanding? I personally am willing to entertain any potential mechanism for the origin of the highly improbable events that ID identify. But is Gordon Davisson willing to admit there may be too many of these events and that an intelligence is a likely explanation? Has he done so? jerry

Bornagain77: Well JVL, since GD referenced no actual experimental evidence to refute the experimental evidence I presented, what exactly do you think I was suppose to respond to? He also asked you some questions. It's not important; never mind. JVL

Well JVL, since GD referenced no actual experimental evidence to refute the experimental evidence I presented, what exactly do you think I was suppose to respond to? GD said, in essence, look at all these other options for interpretations instead of refuting my personal interpretation with any empirical evidence of his own. For instance, GD personally prefers the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, (i.e. realist approach), instead of preferring the Instrumentalist approach to quantum mechanics.

" I like the many worlds interpretation, but I don’t make the mistake of thinking that my liking for it is much of an argument for it actually being correct." - Gordon Davisson - post 44 The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 2017 Excerpt: Today there are two widely followed approaches to quantum mechanics, the “realist” and “instrumentalist” approaches,9 which view the origin of probability in measurement in two very different ways. For reasons I will explain, neither approach seems to me quite satisfactory.10,,,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11,,,, In the realist approach the history of the world is endlessly splitting; it does so every time a macroscopic body becomes tied in with a choice of quantum states. This inconceivably huge variety of histories has provided material for science fiction. 12 http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf - Instrumentalist approach is experimentally confirmed to be true. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/granville-sewell-on-origin-of-life-as-a-provably-unsolvable-problem/#comment-729788

IMHO, there really is not much left for me to say after someone says they prefer the Many Worlds interpretation over experimental evidence that closed the setting independence and/or 'free will' loop hole. As far as I'm concerned, Gordon Davisson, when he said that her prefers MWI, could just as well said that he prefers sheer insanity over sanity.

Too many worlds - Philip Ball - Feb. 17, 2015 Excerpt:,,, You measure the path of an electron, and in this world it seems to go this way, but in another world it went that way. That requires a parallel, identical apparatus for the electron to traverse. More – it requires a parallel you to measure it. Once begun, this process of fabrication has no end: you have to build an entire parallel universe around that one electron, identical in all respects except where the electron went. You avoid the complication of wavefunction collapse, but at the expense of making another universe.,,, http://aeon.co/magazine/science/is-the-many-worlds-hypothesis-just-a-fantasy/ Why the Many-Worlds Interpretation Has Many Problems - Philip Ball - October 18, 2018 Excerpt: It, (The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics), says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable. Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be. Some Everettians insist that this is not a problem and that you should not be troubled by it. Perhaps you are not, but I am. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/

Of related note to empirically refuting the MWI,,,, MWI denies the reality of wave function collapse. Yet the following experiment shows that the collapse of the wave function is a real effect,,

Quantum experiment verifies Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance' - March 24, 2015 Excerpt: An experiment,, has for the first time demonstrated Albert Einstein's original conception of "spooky action at a distance" using a single particle. ,,Professor Howard Wiseman and his experimental collaborators,, report their use of homodyne measurements to show what Einstein did not believe to be real, namely the non-local collapse of a (single) particle's wave function.,, According to quantum mechanics, a single particle can be described by a wave function that spreads over arbitrarily large distances,,, ,, by splitting a single photon between two laboratories, scientists have used homodyne detectors—which measure wave-like properties—to show the collapse of the wave function is a real effect,, This phenomenon is explained in quantum theory,, the instantaneous non-local, (beyond space and time), collapse of the wave function to wherever the particle is detected.,,, "Einstein never accepted orthodox quantum mechanics and the original basis of his contention was this single-particle argument. This is why it is important to demonstrate non-local wave function collapse with a single particle," says Professor Wiseman. "Einstein's view was that the detection of the particle only ever at one point could be much better explained by the hypothesis that the particle is only ever at one point, without invoking the instantaneous collapse of the wave function to nothing at all other points. "However, rather than simply detecting the presence or absence of the particle, we used homodyne measurements enabling one party to make different measurements and the other, using quantum tomography, to test the effect of those choices." "Through these different measurements, you see the wave function collapse in different ways, thus proving its existence and showing that Einstein was wrong." http://phys.org/news/2015-03-quantum-einstein-spooky-action-distance.html

So we have experimental evidence on one side, and Davisson's personal preference for MWI, and/or personal preference for sheer insanity, on the other. Myself I choose to follow experimental evidence (and sanity). bornagain77

Bornagain77: Why did you choose not to respond to the questions put forward by Gordon Davisson? JVL

Gordon Davisson/44

When you think Seversky has been refuted, has he been refuted to your satisfaction, or to his satisfaction?

I have been rebutted on many occasions but rarely refuted, to my own satisfaction at least. That said, I agree with Paige. That was an excellent post and we could use more like it. Seversky

GD@44, excellent post. It is refreshing to see someone criticize other viewpoints without making it personal. paige

Well GD, I disagree with you and I will, (since I referenced actual empirical evidence and you did not), let my posts stand as written for unbiased readers to judge for themselves and see who has presented the better case, and who is refusing to have their worldview challenged by the scientific evidence. bornagain77

BA77 @ 37 etc: I've been dithering about replying to you for a while now, but I think I need to. Here's the thing: from my perspective it looks like pretty much the mirror image of what you describe. If (/when) I make a mistake, I prefer to have it pointed out to me, correct it, and move on. But what I see of those on the ID/antievolution side is pretty much like what you say of "Atheistic Naturalists" -- I rarely see anyone on the other side admit to a mistake, and they'll continually repeat the same mistake over and over again for years. (I should mention there are some exceptions on the ID side -- Vincent Torley and Sal Cordova come to mind -- who've been willing to adjust their views based on counterarguments.) The "conflict" between second law of thermodynamics and evolution and/or abiogenesis is a good example. There isn't one. Or rather, it's a bit like the conflict between the law of gravity and helium balloons: at first glance it looks like there's a conflict, but if you actually look at the physics there's no problem. I've been intermittently following/participating in the evolution/creation (and now /ID) conflict since the 80's and I've seen this argument wax and wane. It died down for a while (one of the big creationist organizations -- maybe ARN? -- even issued a statement that this argument shouldn't be used). But then Granville Sewell's paper on X-Entropy and diffusion seems to have resurrected it again. I've tried to get Sewell to face the problems with his analysis (basically, it only works in the very specific situation he analyzed), but I don't recall him ever responding or acknowledging any problem. He has very gradually made his claims vaguer and vaguer, to the point where he's how just yelling "inconceivable" and mistaking that for some sort of proof. I've also had arguments with both you and Kairosfocus in the past, and never seemed to be able to get either of you to correct even what I considered obvious mistakes in your claims and arguments. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that KF has gotten very frustrated with me when I fail to admit to the force of his counterarguments (but which I regard as mostly irrelevant and/or nonsense). I think I've refuted you, Sewell, and KF in the past, and I don't think any of you have actually acknowledged that I was right... but while I've refuted you to my satisfaction, have I refuted you to your satisfaction? When you and/or KF think you've refuted me, you've refuted me to your satisfaction, but have you refuted me to my satisfaction? When you think Seversky has been refuted, has he been refuted to your satisfaction, or to his satisfaction? Before I go any further... are you familiar with Hanlon's razor, which says that you should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity? Let me propose a variant: never attribute to malice OR stupidity that which can be adequately explained by a difference in perspective and/or bias. I'm being careful here to refer to a difference in perspective and/or bias, not to the other side's perspective and/or bias. I see a fair bit of discussion here about evolutionists/Darwinists/materialists/whateverists' biases, but no sort of awareness that those on the ID side have biases too. Everyone has biases. It's a normal part of human cognition. If you think you're unbiased, that's really just an indication that you're unaware of your own biases. (I try to be aware of my own biases, and not let them lead me around too much -- but this is by its very nature an imperfect and unreliable process.) I think one of the most important biases in this discussion is confirmation bias: we tend to accept new information/arguments/etc that confirm our current beliefs, and look for reasons to reject new information/arguments/etc that go against our current beliefs. My ozone argument is actually a good example of this. Someone mentioned it a few years ago on the talk.origins newsgroup, and since I knew the basic principle it illustrated was right, and it's thermodynamically plausible -- again, it would be right except for the extreme sparseness of O3 -- so I accepted it as a neat illustration without checking it out carefully. Thus we have a situation where I might make an argument I find compelling (because I'm biased toward it, and therefore judging it by a low standard) but you reject (because you're biased against it, and therefore judging it by a high standard). Then you make a counterargument that you find compelling and I reject, for the same reasons. And each of us goes away thinking the other is an idiot, incapable of being reached by any logic. Whee! I think Jonathan Wells' books are another example here. He's made a variety of accusations of dishonesty against evolutionists, and they've made counter-accusations of dishonesty and distortion on his part. Now, I haven't looked into any of this in detail for myself, and his "icons" aren't topics I happen to know much about (I'm more of a computers-math-physics guy), but overall I believe his accusers over him. You can certainly chalk this up to confirmation bias on my part. You clearly believe Wells over the evolutionists, but have you really taken a detailed and unbiased look at the cases, or are you also just relying on your confirmation bias? Are you in the same boat as me here? There's another aspect of this as well: we don't just have individual beliefs, we have webs of interconnected and mutually supportive beliefs. If you take some individual (atomic?) belief of mine and try to fit it into your web of surrounding beliefs, it'll look like obvious nonsense, because it doesn't fit in with anything else. But in my web of surrounding beliefs, it makes perfect sense. (Actually, I try to avoid having too tight of a web, or to get too attached to specific beliefs. I sometimes describe myself as a rabid agnostic and weak atheist, and subscribe to something vaguely like the Jain concept of anekantavada. I try to maintain the ability to think about a given thing from multiple perspectives, and to be able to switch between different "beliefs" without actually believing too much in any of them.) I've noticed this interconnectedness seems to be particularly strong with you. Whenever anything you believe gets challenged, you tend to bring in everything nearby in your web of beliefs to support it. In this thread, for example, my challenge about thermodynamics led you to bring in your views on the role of observers and information in thermodynamics, interpretations of quantum mechanics, etc. And if I got sidetracked into QM, I'm pretty sure that'd lead to expanding the discussion into everything else related to that, etc. Basically, it seems to be impossible to discuss and settle a disagreement about anything without discussing and settling our disagreements about everything, and that's far too much to take on at one time. So... let me turn the problem back on you. You say that when a mistake is pointed out to you, you like to admit it, move on, and (if possible) make your case from another angle. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all of your arguments based on thermodynamics and quantum mechanics are based on misunderstandings of those fields. What would it take to convince you that the arguments you're making based are fallacious, and that you need to discard them? (Or even just that you don't have the necessary expertise to judge whether they're correct or not, in which case you probably shouldn't be using them. For instance, I don't know enough about nonequilibrium thermodynamics to judge whether Jeremy England's argument that life is a consequence of thermodynamics is valid, so while I might cite it as a possible argument, I'm going to treat it as tentative.) More specifically, here's a summary of my views on some of the subjects you've been discussing. If I'm right about all (or even any) of these, how could I convince you of this? (For my part, if you can actually make what I'd consider a solid argument about any specific point -- rather than just firehosing me with other arguments that I also consider bogus -- I'm certainly willing to change my views. I may take some convincing, but I think that if you actually have a solid argument and understand it well enough to explain it thoroughly, it can be done.) - The second law of thermo doesn't forbid either evolution or abiogenesis. Compensation is real, and the boundary conditions of a system matter for how 2LT applies to it. In a system with incoming low-entropy energy/matter and outgoing high-entropy energy/matter, 2LT doesn't forbid very much. (This doesn't mean anything's possible, it just means 2LT doesn't tell you much about what's possible vs impossible.) The Earth is such a system, and so are the environments living organisms inhabit, as are living organisms themselves. So are many environments on a pre-biotic Earth. Another way to make this point is that the 2LT constraints on going from 0 organisms to, say, 100 organisms are essentially the same as on going from 100 organisms to 200. Thus, in a situation where population growth is allowed by 2LT, so is abiogenesis (and a similar argument applies to evolution). Again, this doesn't mean it's actually possible, just that 2LT doesn't forbid it. - Concerning Dr. Brian Miller's statements about energy and entropy: I don't think this is really a major issue, or rather it's a minor side issue (of him being a bit sloppy in his phrasing) on the way to a much bigger, and real, issue. There's a sort of back-and-forth between evolutionists (or abiogenesists?) and anti-whateverists that goes a bit like this: Anti-abiogenesists: The second law forbids decreases in entropy, but abiogenesis requires a decrease, so 2LT forbids abiogenesis. (My note: this is just plain wrong.) Pro-As: 2LT doesn't forbid decreases in entropy, they happen all the time: water freezing, micelles, etc. (My note: this is correct, but semi-irrelevant because of the next point.) Anti-As: But those involve a decrease in energy as well; you need a decrease in entropy and an increase in energy. (My note: what's really needed is an increase in free energy, which takes into account both changes in entropy and energy. Dr. Miller knows this, but is trying to avoid getting into the math, and being sloppy in the process.) Pro-As: No problem, just add low-entropy energy (this is technically what increases free energy) and also remove low-entropy energy (for heat @ ambient temp, this doesn't affect free energy). Anti-As: But that's not enough, you need a mechanism to get the free energy in a relevant form, and you haven't shown the existence of one. (True, but...) Pro-As: But it's not thermodynamically forbidden. There's a huge difference between "we don't know of a process by which this could happen" and "we know there cannot be a process by which this could happen". ...And in my opinion, that's where we stand. We don't know that there's a plausible process by which abiogenesis could have happened, but we also don't know that there isn't one. The second law does constrain the possible processes (since it must follow 2LT at every step, not just overall), but it doesn't rule out the possibility of such a process. - Concerning Harold Morowitz's calculation of the probability beginning under "natural conditions": I haven't looked up the original, but I think it's pretty obvious he analyzed the probability of life forming at thermodynamic equilibrium. That's not at all the same thing as "natural conditions", and the calculation is completely inapplicable to any system driven away from equilibrium by energy flows -- like those environments I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. - Thermodynamics doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. Thermodynamics is fundamentally about heat and other forms of energy. It's entirely valid to think of entropy as being related to information, but you wind up with a definition of information that's all about heat and energy, and nothing to do with intelligence. Thinking of entropy in terms of information just changes how you think about it, not what it actually is or how it behaves. - I don't see "observers" as having any special role in thermodynamics; as far as I can see, they're just ordinary physical systems except that they can correlate (or even entangle) their physical states with the microstate of the thing being observed. (Observers are not even special in this sense, since there are a variety of other kinds of interactions that can lead to correlations/entanglement between systems.) These correlation makes things complicated, because the entropy of both systems (observer and observed) is less than the sum of their individual entropies, and it's reasonable to say that the entropy of either one is lower from the perspective of the other. But you don't need to view either from the other's perspective, just to understand the effects of inter-system correlations. (The rule I learned at by daddy's knee was that if the energy of two systems together was the sum of their individual energies, then the same would be true of their entropies. This type of correlation violates that rule, because their energies sum normally.) The idea that "an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer" is obviously wrong, since thermodynamics works fine even when nobody's watching. (If it didn't, we couldn't apply it to abiogenesis!) Note: I haven't looked at the recent Maxwell's demon experiments in great detail, but it looks to me like they fit this model. But even without going into detail, one easy way to refute the idea that conscious observers are playing a special role in them is to notice that the "observers" are actually non-conscious apparatuses, which store their "observed information" in their ordinary physical states. - Concerning Boltzmann brains: It's obvious we're not Boltzmann brains, since we don't observe a thermal-equilibrium soup around ourselves. Every single observation we make of a consistent, nonequilibrium external world is incredibly strong evidence against us being BBs. This is a problem for cosmologies that imply that we should be BBs, but not for those that don't imply this. There are physicalist cosmologies that don't imply this. So what's the problem? - Concerning interpretations of quantum mechanics: There are a variety of interpretations that are consistent with our observations (at least so far); some are instrumentalist, some are physicalist, some assign a special role to observers (though not necessarily conscious observers), and some don't. The physicalist options that don't have a special role for observers include (but are not limited to): many worlds, Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW), de Broglie–Bohm (pilot wave), and the transactional interpretation. You could probably add superdeterminism to that list, but I don't understand it well enough to have an opinion. Importantly, none of the experiments you cited contradict any of these interpretations. So citing those experiments as refuting physicalism or showing a special role for observers is completely fallacious. (I think that whether they refute materialism depends more on how you define "materialism" than anything else, and hence I consider it an uninteresting semantic question. Do you consider many worlds, GRW, etc materialist interpretations? If you do, then clearly materialism has not been refuted.) Since there are many interpretations consistent with our observations, which one(s) we prefer (or think most likely to be true) is largely a matter of personal preference... and therefore it largely a matter of personal bias. Personally, I like the many worlds interpretation, but I don't make the mistake of thinking that my liking for it is much of an argument for it actually being correct. (In fact, my actual guess would be that the truth is probably weirder than anything we've thought of yet -- and to paraphrase Heisenberg, it may be stranger than anything we can think of.) - Concerning quantum teleportation and the physical basis of information: this is an interesting trick, where the quantum state of a particle is (sort of) split into two pieces: a classical piece (which is transmitted via normal classical channel) and a quantum piece (which is "transmitted" -- or more accurately correlated) via entanglement. I assume the classical piece isn't controversial here, just the entanglement piece. But all of the interpretations I mentioned -- WMI, GRW, de Broglie–Bohm, and transactional -- provide a physicalist basis for entanglement. So if any of those interpretations are right, there's an entirely physical explanation for why quantum teleportation works. (Note: it's reasonable to say that the basis for quantum teleportation isn't "matter and energy", but according to those interpretations, reality includes something like the quantum wave function, which is not itself matter and/or energy, but in some sense underlies matter and energy, or at least their behavior. So ruling out just "matter and energy" might rule out materialism, it doesn't rule out physicalism.) - Concerning a special role for conscious observers: as with the Maxwell's demon experiments, QM experiments mostly use unconscious observers -- and work fine. So to the extent the experiments say anything at all about the subject, they seem to indicate that consciousness is not special. - Interaction-free measurements don't somehow refute decoherence. At all. This is just nonsense. Decoherence is indisputably a thing that happens; it's predicted by quantum theory, and we can observe its effects. What's controversial is whether it can effectively replace wavefunction collapse and solve/avoid the measurement problem, since it produces effects indistinguishable from collapse. I'm not sure I understand the situation well enough to have a solid opinion on this larger-scale question, so I reserve judgement on it. But in the particular case of the interaction-free quantum Zeno effect tests, I don't see how you can explain them without invoking decoherence. These experiments don't really even involve unconscious observers (let alone conscious ones), just laser beams that'll interact with the object if it decays. Do you think interacting with a laser beam can cause wavefunction collapse? If not, then you need to invoke decoherence (via entanglement with the laser beam) to explain the results, and at least as far as I can see it'll do a perfectly good job of it. - Concerning "free will" in choosing what measurements to make: I think you misunderstand what's meant by this and its status. What we're calling "free will" here is really about choosing measurements in a way that is statistically independent of what's being measured (and sometimes the measurement chosen elsewhere). This is all about statistical randomness, not conscious free will. Also, most interpretations of QM say that it doesn't matter: the results of a measurement don't depend on how it's chosen, just what measurement winds up being made. The reason "free will" is important is that if it turns out that it does matter, it opens up a whole new can of worms WRT possible interpretations of QM. Since we don't want to deal with that can of worms, most of us assume measurement choice doesn't matter, and so far the "free will" tests support this... but we can't actually prove it, just try to set up situations where it's implausible that the measurements could be correlated. So... back to you. Do you think it's possible to discuss a specific point without getting into everything related to it? Are you willing to have your views challenged? Do you want to seriously try to challenge mine? Gordon Davisson

GD, kindly explain to us how machine language, string data structures, executing units and algorithmic processes of significant complexity per actual empirical observation -- a key criterion of doing science -- can and do arise beyond 500 - 1,000 bits of complexity, through blind chance and/or mechanical necessity. We routinely empirically know just one source for the king of work of configuration implied, language using intelligence. BTW, there is a whole informational approach to entropy, which can be quantified on missing information to specify microstate, on the degree of information specified by macrostate. KF kairosfocus

Gordon Davisson, as to this claim that you made in particular,

“I agree that entropy is closely related to information, but I disagree that this means it has something to do with intelligence (it’s more-or-less what Dembski would call complex information, but not complex specified information), and it’s completely physical (it’s literally the information in the physical state of a system). (Quantum mechanics is a whole other can of worms; suffice to say it’s fundamentally weird, but I don’t see any reason to think it’s weird in the way that you propose.)” – Gordon Davisson

Gordon Davisson, in so far as you disagree that entropy has something to do with intelligence, you are disagreeing with known science. To repeat what I have cited previously in this thread, and as the following article states, “when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer. ”

Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy – June 1, 2011 Excerpt: The new study revisits Landauer’s principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. When the memory content is known, it should be possible to delete the bits in such a manner that it is theoretically possible to re-create them. It has previously been shown that such reversible deletion would generate no heat. In the new paper, the researchers go a step further. They show that when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer. Applied to the example of deleting data, this means that if two individuals delete data in a memory and one has more knowledge of this data, she perceives the memory to have lower entropy and can then delete the memory using less energy.,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm

And this is far more than just theoretical posturing. This claim has know been experimentally confirmed, As the following 2017 articles states, “James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,, quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,, ,,, a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm,,, Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,

The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017 Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.” In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,, Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/

To repeat that last statement, “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, To point out the obvious, these experimental realizations of ",,, a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge,, that have now proven that "entropy is not a property of a system, but is a property of an observer who describes a system” directly contradict your claim that entropy does not have anything to do with intelligence. In short, you are disagreeing with empirical science. To further solidify the claim that entropy in not a property of a system, but is a property of an observer who describes a system, I can also appeal to the quantum Zeno effect. An old entry in wikipedia described the Quantum Zeno effect as such “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.”

Perspectives on the quantum Zeno paradox - 2018 Excerpt: The quantum Zeno effect is,, an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/196/1/012018/pdf

Atheistic materialists have tried to get around the Quantum Zeno effect by postulating that interactions with the environment (i.e. decoherence) are sufficient to explain the Quantum Zeno effect.

Perspectives on the quantum Zeno paradox - 2018 Excerpt: The references to observations and to wavefunction collapse tend to raise unnecessary questions related to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Actually, all that is required is that some interaction with an external system disturb, (i.e. decoherence), the unitary evolution of the quantum system in a way that is effectively like a projection operator. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/196/1/012018/pdf

Yet decoherence is experimentally known to be wrong as an explanation in quantum mechanics by 'interaction-free' measurements. As physics professor Richard Conn Henry explains, "A common way to evade the mental universe is to invoke "decoherence" - the notion that "the physical environment" is sufficient to create reality, independent of the human mind. Yet the idea that any irreversible act of amplification is necessary to collapse the wave function is known to be wrong: in "Renninger-type" experiments, (i.e. interaction-free measurements), the wave function is collapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing."

The Mental Universe - Richard Conn Henry - Professor of Physics John Hopkins University Excerpt: The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.,,, Physicists shy away from the truth because the truth is so alien to everyday physics. A common way to evade the mental universe is to invoke "decoherence" - the notion that "the physical environment" is sufficient to create reality, independent of the human mind. Yet the idea that any irreversible act of amplification is necessary to collapse the wave function is known to be wrong: in "Renninger-type" experiments, the wave function is collapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing. The universe is entirely mental,,,, The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy. http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf

In fact, the following interaction-free measurement of the Quantum Zeno effect verified that the presence of the Quantum Zeno effect can be detected without interacting with a single atom.

Interaction-free measurements by quantum Zeno stabilization of ultracold atoms – 14 April 2015 Excerpt: In our experiments, we employ an ultracold gas in an unstable spin configuration, which can undergo a rapid decay. The object—realized by a laser beam—prevents this decay because of the indirect quantum Zeno effect and thus, its presence can be detected without interacting with a single atom. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150414/ncomms7811/full/ncomms7811.html?WT.ec_id=NCOMMS-20150415

In short, decoherence is experimentally shown to be false as the explanation of the quantum Zeno effect, and thus the original wikipedia statement of, “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay”, stands as being a true statement. The reason why I am very impressed with the preceding experiments demonstrating that "entropy is a property of an observer who describes the system" is that entropy has broad explanatory power in science and in considered one of our most powerful theories in science. As the following article states, “Entropy explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe;,,”,, “Even gravity,,,, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy.,,,”

Shining Light on Dark Energy – October 21, 2012 Excerpt: It (Entropy) explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe;,, Even gravity, Vedral argued, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy.,,, The principles of thermodynamics are at their roots all to do with information theory. Information theory is simply an embodiment of how we interact with the universe —,,, http://crev.info/2012/10/shining-light-on-dark-energy/

On top of the fact that “(Entropy) explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe”, entropy is also, by a very wide margin, the most finely tuned of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Finely tuned to an almost incomprehensible degree of precision, 1 part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. As Roger Penrose, (an agnostic), himself stated that, “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.”

“This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.” Roger Penrose - How special was the big bang? – (from the Emperor’s New Mind, Penrose, pp 339-345 – 1989) “The time-asymmetry is fundamentally connected to with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: indeed, the extraordinarily special nature (to a greater precision than about 1 in 10^10^123, in terms of phase-space volume) can be identified as the “source” of the Second Law (Entropy).” Roger Penrose - The Physics of the Small and Large: What is the Bridge Between Them?

In fact, entropy is also the primary reason why our own material, temporal, bodies grow old and eventually die in this universe,,,

Entropy Explains Aging, Genetic Determinism Explains Longevity, and Undefined Terminology Explains Misunderstanding Both - 2007 Excerpt: There is a huge body of knowledge supporting the belief that age changes are characterized by increasing entropy, which results in the random loss of molecular fidelity, and accumulates to slowly overwhelm maintenance systems [1–4].,,, http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030220

And yet, to repeat the last sentence from the quantum information paper I cited, “we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.” That statement is simply fascinating! Why in blue blazes should the finely tuned entropic actions of the universe, entropic actions which also happen to explain time itself, even care if I am consciously observing them, and/or describing them, unless 'conscious observation' really is more foundational to reality than the finely tuned 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe is? To state the obvious, this finding of entropy being “a property of an observer who describes a system.” is very friendly to a Mind First, and/or to a Theistic view of reality. Indeed, the Bible 'predicted' entropy to be foundational to the universe all along. As Psalm 102 states, "they, (the heavens and earth), will all grow old like a garment; Like a cloak You will change them, And they will be changed."

Psalm 102:25-27 Of old You laid the foundation of the earth, And the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You will endure; Yes, they will all grow old like a garment; Like a cloak You will change them, And they will be changed. But You are the same, And Your years will have no end.

As as Sir William Thomson himself stated, “We have the sober scientific certainty that the heavens and earth shall ‘wax old as doth a garment’…. Dark indeed would be the prospects of the human race if unilluminated by that light which reveals ‘new heavens and a new earth.’”

“We have the sober scientific certainty that the heavens and earth shall ‘wax old as doth a garment’…. Dark indeed would be the prospects of the human race if unilluminated by that light which reveals ‘new heavens and a new earth.’” Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907) – pioneer in many different fields, particularly electromagnetism and thermodynamics.

Moreover Gordon, with the falsification of decoherence as a viable explanation for the Quantum Zeno effect, Atheistic Naturalists simply have no clue why an unstable particle should even care if I am observing it or not whereas Christian Theism pretty much predicted this 'weird' Zeno effect from human observation all along. For instance Romans chapter 8: verses 20 and 21 itself states, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

Romans 8:20-21 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

bornagain77

Gordon Davisson, to repeat the claims you made that I feel I am capable of dealing with,

"I agree that entropy is closely related to information, but I disagree that this means it has something to do with intelligence (it’s more-or-less what Dembski would call complex information, but not complex specified information), and it’s completely physical (it’s literally the information in the physical state of a system). (Quantum mechanics is a whole other can of worms; suffice to say it’s fundamentally weird, but I don’t see any reason to think it’s weird in the way that you propose.)" – Gordon Davisson

Gordon, by the way you said, "it’s (Quantum Mechanics is) fundamentally weird I don’t see any reason to think it’s weird in the way that you propose", and since you are defending the position of Atheistic Naturalism, I am assuming that you are defending the 'weird' realist interpretation of Quantum Mechanics' and are shunning the 'weird' Instrumentalist interpretation of quantum mechanics. Gordon, since 'weird' is very much a matter of personal subjective opinion, it is good to point out just how weird the Atheist's realist interpretation of quantum mechanics actually is when compared to the Theist's instrumentalist interpretation,

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics - Steven Weinberg - January 2017 Excerpt: Today there are two widely followed approaches to quantum mechanics, the “realist” and “instrumentalist” approaches,9 which view the origin of probability in measurement in two very different ways. For reasons I will explain, neither approach seems to me quite satisfactory.10,,,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11,,,, In the realist approach the history of the world is endlessly splitting; it does so every time a macroscopic body becomes tied in with a choice of quantum states. This inconceivably huge variety of histories has provided material for science fiction. 12 http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

Gordon, do you, in defending the Atheist's 'realist' interpretation, actually believe that you live in an infinite number of parallel universes? If so, I definitely think it goes far beyond merely a 'pot calling the kettle black' for you to call the instrumentalist interpretation of quantum mechanics 'weird' while you yourself believe you actually exist in an infinitude of different universes. In the instrumentalist approach humans are 'merely' brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level, (and OK, that is 'weird', I will grant that). But in the realist approach you are literally creating an infinitude of universes and an infinitude of humans ad hoc just in order to 'explain away' quantum wave collapse.

Too many worlds - Philip Ball - Feb. 17, 2015 Excerpt:,,, You measure the path of an electron, and in this world it seems to go this way, but in another world it went that way. That requires a parallel, identical apparatus for the electron to traverse. More – it requires a parallel you to measure it. Once begun, this process of fabrication has no end: you have to build an entire parallel universe around that one electron, identical in all respects except where the electron went. You avoid the complication of wavefunction collapse, but at the expense of making another universe.,,, http://aeon.co/magazine/science/is-the-many-worlds-hypothesis-just-a-fantasy/

If you do not find that to be far weirder that humans 'merely' being brought into the laws of nature at their most fundamental level, might I humorously suggest that it is way past time for you to get your 'weird' measuring device fully recalibrated? It is seriously out of wack :) Moreover Gordon Davisson, even if you don't own up to the full weirdness of 'many worlds' that is inherent in the Atheist's 'realist' interpretation of quantum mechanics, (I can hardly blame anyone for trying to distance themselves from such insanity), I can still appeal to the fact that the setting independence, and/or the 'freewill', loophole has now been experimentally closed, and thus the instrumentalist interpretation has now been experimentally confirmed as being the true interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars – Anton Zeilinger – 14 June 2018 Abstract: In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time measurements of the wavelength of photons from high-redshift quasars, whose light was emitted billions of years ago; the experiment simultaneously ensures locality. Assuming fair sampling for all detected photons and that the wavelength of the quasar photons had not been selectively altered or previewed between emission and detection, we observe statistically significant violation of Bell’s inequality by 9.3 standard deviations, corresponding to an estimated p value of approx. 7.4 × 10^21. This experiment pushes back to at least approx. 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403

As Anton Zeilinger commented in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”

“The Kochen-Speckter Theorem talks about properties of one system only. So we know that we cannot assume – to put it precisely, we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement. Not always. I mean in certain cases. So in a sense, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.” Anton Zeilinger – Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism – video (7:17 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=437

In other words Gordon, no matter how 'weird' you and Steven Weinberg, (who is an atheist himself), may find the instrumentalist interpretation to be, experiments now confirm that humans are indeed brought into the laws of nature at their most fundamental level. Sure you can appeal to 'superdeterminism' like Sabine Hossenfelder did, to try to get around the closing of the free will loop hole, but I point out that, if you choose to do so, you are basically saying we cannot trust what our experimental results are telling us. Basically, with the closing of the setting independence and/or ‘free will’ loop hole, by Zeilinger and company, the Atheistic naturalist is now reduced to arguing that “a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure.”

Closing the ‘free will’ loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell’s theorem – February 20, 2014 Excerpt: Though two major loopholes have since been closed, a third remains; physicists refer to it as “setting independence,” or more provocatively, “free will.” This loophole proposes that a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure — a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting. Such a scenario would result in biased measurements, suggesting that two particles are correlated more than they actually are, and giving more weight to quantum mechanics than classical physics. “It sounds creepy, but people realized that’s a logical possibility that hasn’t been closed yet,” says MIT’s David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and senior lecturer in the Department of Physics. “Before we make the leap to say the equations of quantum theory tell us the world is inescapably crazy and bizarre, have we closed every conceivable logical loophole, even if they may not seem plausible in the world we know today?” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm

In other words, instead of believing what the experimental results of quantum mechanics are actually telling us, (i.e. that free will is a real and tangible part of reality),, the Determinist, and/or Atheistic Naturalist, is now forced to claim, via ‘superdeterminism’, that the results of the experiments were somehow ‘superdetermined’ at least 7.8 billion years ago, (basically all the way back to the creation of the universe itself), and that the experimental results are now 'conspiring' to fool us into believing that our experimental results in quantum theory are trustworthy and correct and that we do indeed have free will. As should be needless to say, if we cannot trust what our experimental results are actually telling us about reality, then science is, for all practical purposes, dead. Atheistic Naturalists, in their appeal to superdeterminism, and in their rejection of experimental results that conflict with their a-priori philosophical belief in determinism and/or atheistic materialism, have basically become ‘science deniers' in the truest sense of the term ‘science denier’,,,

1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test all things; hold fast what is good.

bornagain77

GD, strawman, again. The issue remains as Orgel put it in the early 70's, account for complex functional organisation and associated information, some of which is algorithmic code. We can compress systems and get phase changes, we can cool systems and get phase changes with higher structure, we can export heat to something at lower temperature and see half of the expression on entropy - d'Q/Thot --> + d'Q/Tcols, so add up and net ds is positive but obviously one half of the system has ds negative, etc etc. None of that answers to spontaneous -- theromodynamically driven -- origin of complex functional organisation. KF PS: Again, Orgel:

living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity . . . . [HT, Mung, fr. p. 190 & 196:] These vague idea can be made more precise by introducing the idea of information. Roughly speaking, the information content of a structure is the minimum number of instructions needed to specify the structure.

[--> this is of course equivalent to the string of yes/no questions required to specify the relevant J S Wicken "wiring diagram" for the set of functional states, T, in the much larger space of possible clumped or scattered configurations, W, as Dembski would go on to define in NFL in 2002, also cf here, -- here and -- here -- (with here on self-moved agents as designing causes).]

One can see intuitively that many instructions are needed to specify a complex structure. [--> so if the q's to be answered are Y/N, the chain length is an information measure that indicates complexity in bits . . . ] On the other hand a simple repeating structure can be specified in rather few instructions.  [--> do once and repeat over and over in a loop . . . ] Complex but random structures, by definition, need hardly be specified at all . . . . Paley was right to emphasize the need for special explanations of the existence of objects with high information content, for they cannot be formed in nonevolutionary, inorganic processes [--> Orgel had high hopes for what Chem evo and body-plan evo could do by way of info generation beyond the FSCO/I threshold, 500 - 1,000 bits.] [The Origins of Life (John Wiley, 1973), p. 189, p. 190, p. 196.]

Fifty years later . . . kairosfocus

JVL, there is no unified field theory research programme as such today. there is stuff that studies high energy physics and that studies -- mostly theoretically -- strings and onward ideas. None of these is basically asking us to try to find the statistical equivalent of perpetual motion in violation of 2 LOT. Big difference, hunting fluctuations like that. KF kairosfocus

Gordon Davisson, as to your new example of "compressing a semi-insulated gas" being a refutation of Dr. Miller's claim that, "No system without assistance ever moves both toward lower entropy and higher energy which is required for the formation of a cell”, again I suggest that you contact Dr. Miller, via the Discovery Institute, to see if your new example really does refute his claim. As for my part, I simply lack the technical expertise, especially in mathematics, in order to defend Dr. Miller's claim in any great detail. Dr. Miller, from what I can tell, is a man of integrity, and will honestly admit if your new example refutes his claim, or show you, in detail, why you are wrong in believing that it refutes his claim. Please let me know how your conversation turns out. (If the conversation happens, it would be very interesting to see what he says about your example). But, even though I can't comment on your new example, I can comment on two other claims that you made in your post You claimed,

I agree that entropy is closely related to information, but I disagree that this means it has something to do with intelligence (it’s more-or-less what Dembski would call complex information, but not complex specified information), and it’s completely physical (it’s literally the information in the physical state of a system). (Quantum mechanics is a whole other can of worms; suffice to say it’s fundamentally weird, but I don’t see any reason to think it’s weird in the way that you propose.) - Gordon Davisson

In regards to your claim that "it’s (information is) completely physical". In refuting your claim that information is completely physical, first it is important to point out that there is a profound difference in what you mean, and what I mean, when we say that 'information is physical'. When you say that information is physical, you are saying that information is physical in the same sense that Rolf Landauer claimed that 'information is physical'

“Information is Physical” - 1991 Rolf Landauer (February 4, 1927 – April 28, 1999) http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.881299

When I first heard that Landauer said 'Information is Physical', I first thought that Landauer was directly implying that information is physically real and therefore independent of matter and energy. Yet on closer examination I found out that my first impression of what Landauer meant by his statement 'Information is Physical' was wrong. Landauer was actually implying that information is physical simply because it is inevitably inscribed on a physical medium. i.e. Landauer believed that information did not have an independent existence apart from its representation on a physical medium. In fact Landauer said that Roger Penrose's contention that information has an existence independent of matter and energy was a quote unquote 'quaint notion'.

Information is a Physical Entity - Rolf Landauer Excerpt: Information is inevitably inscribed in a physical medium. It is not an abstract entity. It can be denoted by a hole in a punched card, by the orientation of a nuclear spin, or by the pulses transmitted by a neuron. The quaint notion that information has an existence independent of its physical manifestation is still seriously advocated [6],,, [6] R. Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.192.2928&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Yet, when I say that 'information is physical' I, like Rodger Penrose and Norbert Weiner (and many others), specifically mean that information has a physically real existence that is separate from matter and energy. The simplest way to prove that 'information is physical' in the sense that I am claiming that 'information is physical' is with quantum teleportation. As the following article states. “scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart,,, information,,, is transferred from one place to another, but without traveling through any physical medium.”

First Teleportation Between Distant Atoms – 2009 Excerpt: For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing. Teleportation may be nature’s most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, but without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third. None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances. Now a team from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Michigan has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a substantial distance https://jqi.umd.edu/news/first-teleportation-between-distant-atoms

And as the following article states, “the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement.,,,”

Quantum Teleportation Enters the Real World – September 19, 2016 Excerpt: Two separate teams of scientists have taken quantum teleportation from the lab into the real world. Researchers working in Calgary, Canada and Hefei, China, used existing fiber optics networks to transmit small units of information across cities via quantum entanglement — Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”,,, This isn’t teleportation in the “Star Trek” sense — the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement.,,, ,,, it is only the information that gets teleported from one place to another. https://www.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/09/19/quantum-teleportation-enters-real-world/#.V-HqWNEoDtR

Gordon, as should be obvious, the experiments that have teleported information without traveling through any physical medium would simply be impossible if information were 'merely' physical in the sense that you and Landauer have implied. As the citation I cited previously stated, "the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”

Scientists show how to erase information without using energy – January 2011 Excerpt: Until now, scientists have thought that the process of erasing information requires energy. But a new study shows that, theoretically, information can be erased without using any energy at all.,,, “Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”, Vaccaro explained. - per physorg

In short, the empirical demonstration, via quantum teleportation, that information has a physical existence that is separate from matter and energy is a direct empirical falsification of your, and Landauer's, contention that information does not exist apart from its representation on a physical medium. Gordon, I'll try to pick up your other claim later on today and address it, but suffice it now for me to hold that you, and Landauer, are empirically shown to be wrong in your core belief that information does not have an existence apart from its representation on a physical medium.

John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

bornagain77

Gordon Davisson, thank you very much for honestly admitting your mistake with your ozone example. It is (very) refreshing to see someone who believes in Atheistic Naturalism to honestly admit when they have made a mistake. And to then move on and try to make their case from another angle. It is very rare, at least on UD, for Atheistic Naturalists to ever honestly admit they have made a mistake. In fact, I’ve seen Atheistic Naturalists here on UD, such as Seversky, continually repeat their same scientific mistakes over and over again for years, even though they have been corrected on their misunderstanding of the science behind their mistake(s) many times. And not only on UD, but this lack of honesty and humility on the part of Darwinists is a huge problem with the supposed ‘science’ of Darwinian evolution in general. Jonathan Wells has written two books, (‘Icons of Evolution’ and ‘Zombie Science’), on the fact that, even though the science is known to be wrong behind their examples, Darwinists continually republish, year after year, scientifically false examples of evolution in Textbooks to illegitimately promote Darwinian evolution.

'Icons Of Evolution' - Tenth Anniversary - video clip playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR8eQzfCOiS2RPQAPifs6t__mIAqITpYy Jonathan Wells Presents Zombie Science at National Book Launch – video - 2017 https://youtu.be/I2UHLPVHjug?list=PLR8eQzfCOiS1rO4HiEiRBLalzTx-TaKYC

Personally myself, when I make a scientific mistake, and when that mistake is pointed out to me, I, like you, like to honestly admit my mistake as soon as possible and to then move on and try to, if I can, make my case from another angle. Or, If I can't make my case from another angle, to then honestly admit that I was completely wrong in my presupposition about the science. I am far more interested in discovering the truth about reality than I am in maintaining some sort of false pride in myself to be infallible in my scientific beliefs. Science itself, shoot even ordinary everyday honest discussions themselves, are very much dependent on such honesty and humility. Science simply could not proceed, nor could honest discussions even happen, if one side of the discussion simply lacked the humility and honestly necessary to tell the truth even when it is inconvenient to do so. Not to say that Christians have been shining examples of honesty and humility (far from it, even though confessing our sins, i.e. our mistakes, to God and to one another is suppose to be a very big, even central, part of being a Christian), but I have been literally shocked many times over by the complete lack of honesty and humility on the Darwinian side in regards to being honest with the science at hand. So thanks again for your honesty and humility. It is very refreshing to see!

Cargo Cult Science - Richard Feynman Excerpt: "But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I’m not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen." https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

Verse:

Matthew 18:21-22 Then Peter approaching asked him, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.

bornagain77

P.s. I think I'd better clarify an important point, before I'm misunderstood: my example of compressing a semi-insulated gas is not in any way shape or form intended to be an analogy for how life might've started. It's intended as a counterexample to Dr. Miller's claim about energy and entropy changes, and that is all. The only similarity I can see is that it's taking in low-entropy energy, and emitting high-entropy energy; any plausible abiogenesis process will almost certainly also involve a low-to-high-entropy energy flow, but it'd be a very different form of energy (probably chemical and/or high-temp heat energy), and that energy would power completely different processes. And maybe most importantly, my compressed-gas example stays as close as possible to thermodynamic equilibrium; life is a far-from-equilibrium phenomenon, so any process that produces it must necessarily involve driving something far away from equilibrium. So, it's just a counterexample, not an analogy. Don't read any more into it. Gordon Davisson

Hi, BA77. Thanks for your responses. I won't have time to respond to everything you've written (I tend to write slowly, and like to mull my responses for a while first) but I need to discuss my argument against what Dr. Brian Miller said. I need to start with a mea culpa: my ozone counterexample doesn't really work. While ozone production from O2 would be an entropy decrease at some pressures (and temperatures), under the conditions in the actual ozone layer the low partial pressure of ozone boosts its entropy above that of the O2 it forms from, so the reaction actually winds up producing an entropy increase. Before I go back and try to salvage my point (and dignity), let me summarize the math that led me to this conclusion. Someone posted the relevant section of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics here, so I'll use the figures from that. It gives the molar entropy of O2 gas as 205.2 J/K and that of O3 as 238.9 J/K. The entropy of O3 is higher per mole (and hence per molecule), but the reaction 3 O2 => 2 O3 turns three molecules of O2 into two of O3, and the entropy of O3 is less than 1.5x that of O2, the reaction corresponds to a decrease in entropy. But those are their entropies at standard temperature (298.15 K = 25° C = 77° F) and pressure (100 kPa = about sea-level atmospheric pressure), and the conditions in the ozone layer are different. For one thing, the temperature is only around 220 K, so that's going to decrease the entropy of everything involved. For ideal gasses (which I'm pretty sure is a good enough approximation here), the entropy decrease is C_p * ln(T_high/ T_low), where C_p is the heat capacity of the gas at constant pressure. The CRC tables gives that as 29.4 J/mol K for O2, so the molar entropy of O2 is decreased by 8.8 J/K. C_p for O3 is 39.2 J/mol K, so its molar entropy is decreased by 12 J/K. This doesn't make much difference. Pressure is what does make a difference, especially since it's the partial pressure of each of the gasses that matters. Decreasing pressure increases the entropy of an ideal gas by R * ln(P_high / P_low), where R is the ideal gas constant, 8.3 J/mol K. The total pressure in the ozone layer depends on the exact altitude you look at (it's significantly lower at the top than the bottom), but about 7.5 kPa seems reasonable. O2 makes up about 20% of that, so its partial pressure will be around 1.5 kPa. Plugging that into the ideal gas formula gives an increase in the molar entropy of O2 of 34 J/K. Add that to its standard molar entropy, and subtract the decrease due to temperature, and you get about 230 J/K for O2. The partial pressure of O3 is much much lower; if I'm reading the graphs right, it peaks around 16 mPa. Plugging that in gives an entropy increase of about 130 J/K (!). Adding that and the standard entropy and subtracting the temperature correction gives a total molar entropy of 360 J/K for O3. That is more than 1.5x the entropy of O2, so the reaction gives a net entropy increase. I therefore withdraw the example. But I still maintain that Dr. Miller is wrong, and there are plenty of other counterexamples available. But before I give another (better) one, let me explain the problem with his reasoning. He said:

More specifically, the process of freezing releases heat that increases the entropy of the surrounding environment by an amount greater than the entropy decrease of the water molecule forming the rigid structure. Likewise, soap molecules coalescing into micelles represents a net increase of entropy since the surrounding water molecules significantly increase in their number of degrees of freedom. No system without assistance ever moves both toward lower entropy and higher energy which is required for the formation of a cell.

The first two paragraphs here are correct; he's describing examples where there's a heat flow from the system to its surroundings. Heat flows have an associated entropy flux, so essentially when there's heat flowing from the system to its surroundings, there's also entropy flowing in the same direction. This entropy flux increases the entropy of the surroundings, and also allows an entropy decrease in the system. Note that it doesn't guarantee an entropy decrease in the system, because entropy can also be produced by thermodynamically irreversible processes inside the system; if entropy is produced inside the system faster than it leaves the system, the system's entropy will increase anyway (which is basically what happened in the ozone example). And if there's also entropy entering the system, you of course also need to take that into account. Now, that heat flow out of the system is going to decrease the energy of the system, as in the examples he gave. But he hasn't allowed for the possibility that there might be some other, non-thermal, energy entering the system. If there is more energy entering than heat leaving, and the energy entering doesn't have an associated entropy flux (what's known as "work" in thermodynamics), or even just has a lower entropy flux (like heat at a high enough temperature), then the system's energy will increase while still allowing that entropy decrease. So, any system with high-entropy energy (e.g. low-temperature heat) leaving, and a larger amount of low- or no-entropy energy entering (work or heat at high temperature), and there isn't enough entropy produced inside the system to make up the difference, you'll get something that contradicts Miller's claim. That's a kind of specific combination of factors, but it's actually not all that uncommon. And note that there's nothing that even slightly violates the second law of thermodynamics here, just ordinary heat and energy transfers. So, let me take another stab at an example to illustrate this. How about compressing a semi-insulated gas? To understand this example, let me first explain the cases of compressing completely insulated and completely un-insulated gases. The completely insulated situation is what's known as adiabatic compression. This is one of the processes that gets covered in any intro to thermodynamics. It's one of the phases of the Carnot cycle, so if you've studied any thermo at all you should've seen it. Since it's completely insulated, there's no entropy flux in or out of the gas. If it happens reasonably slowly, there'll be no (or very little) entropy produced by it (i.e. it'll be thermodynamically reversible). That means the entropy of the gas will remain constant during the process (or maybe go up a tiiiiny bit if it's not quite reversible). But the energy of the gas does increase -- the compression does work on the gas, and that energy remains in the gas (and raises its temperature). Note that this isn't a counterexample to Miller's claim, since there's an energy increase but no entropy decrease. Now consider the completely un-insulated situation, specifically compressing a gas that's in good thermal contact with a very large heat reservoir. This one's known as isothermal compression, and again it's something you'll run into in basic thermo classes (and it's another phase of the Carnot cycle). Here, rather than getting warmer, the gas dumps heat to its surroundings (the heat reservoir). This heat flow decreases the entropy of the gas but increases that of the reservoir. This is very similar to the examples Miller described in the first two paragraphs I quoted, with one exception: the energy of the gas stays at least roughly constant. If this were an ideal gas, it'd be exactly constant (since the energy of an a given amount of an ideal gas depends only on its temperature). What's happening is that the energy added to the gas by the work of compressing it is balanced by the energy it loses as heat. Again, not a counterexample, since there's an entropy decrease but no energy increase. But now consider the case where only some of the energy added by compression work escapes as heat. The energy that doesn't escape increases the energy of the gas. The energy that does escape as heat decreases the entropy of the gas (and increases that of its surroundings). This can happen if the gas is partially insulated, or if its surroundings don't have infinite heat capacity (and therefore heat up along with the gas), or if there's some isothermal compression followed (or preceded) by some adiabatic compression (which is exactly what happens in the compression phases of the Carnot cycle). Again, this doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics at all. Trust me, if the compression phases of the Carnot cycle violated the second law, someone would have noticed by now. If you think this does violate the second law, then you need fix your understanding of the second law. Ok, that's enough writing for a bit. I'll try to get back to you more about the connection between thermodynamics and information, but in the meantime I recommend reading this essay that I wrote back in 2000 on the subject. Really short summary: I agree that entropy is closely related to information, but I disagree that this means it has something to do with intelligence (it's more-or-less what Dembski would call complex information, but not complex specified information), and it's completely physical (it's literally the information in the physical state of a system). (Quantum mechanics is a whole other can of worms; suffice to say it's fundamentally weird, but I don't see any reason to think it's weird in the way that you propose.) Oh, and as far as I can see, the Maxwell's Demon experiments you cited look pretty much like what I described as theoretical possibilities back in 2000. I said:

1) The Shannon-entropy of a physical system can increase freely, but can only decrease if there's a compensating thermo-entropy increase involved. But the required thermo-entropy increase -- 9.57e-24 J/K per bit, or 8.42e-11 J/K per terabyte -- is so miniscule that it'd be difficult to even detect it. 2) Thermo-entropy in non-information forms can decrease, at the cost of an increase of Shannon-entropy. But by the time you've filled up your terabyte store, you only have a 8.42e-11 J/K thermo-entropy decrease to show for it. It hardly seems worth the bother.

...they're basically demonstrating variants of what I described in point 2 (which is seriously cool, but still really just confirm what I already knew). These also don't violate the second law, because they're just converting entropy between different forms, not actually destroying it. Gordon Davisson

Bornagain77: And you think that is actually a rational argument against my position? ? No, I was making a joke. I think you just should have said “I’ve got nothing”, and saved yourself some embarrassment. I don't think I've got nothing. But I also realise you have heard everything I have to say many times over. So, is there a point in spelling it all out again? Here's a question: why do you keep responding? JVL

as to: "I don’t see what the God Hypothesis adds to that. But that’s just me." Well, I guess you are right, the elephant in the living room does sort of blend in with the wallpaper. https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/elephantinthelivingroomfixed_2517.jpg I guess it would be easy for someone to miss it. :) As to: "And even though ‘dog’ is ‘god’ backwards I don’t think dogs are theists." And you think that is actually a rational argument against my position? :) I think you just should have said "I've got nothing", and saved yourself some embarrassment. bornagain77

Bornagain77: Atheistic Naturalists simply have no clue why the universal constants should remain constant. We don't even know if they CAN change. This whole notion that the universe's physical constants can be altered is just baseless speculation. Whereas Christian Theists, on the other hand, ‘predict’ that there never will be found to be any variance in the laws of nature since they come from God, (Who is unchanging). Um . . . is that correct? I mean the God of The Bible seems to have changed their tune quite a bit over the centuries. Maybe it's just me but I find it hard to reconcile the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill with the Israelites slaughtering the men, woman and children of Jericho. And what was that bit about collecting the foreskins of Philistines? That is just really weird. And didn't God themself kill most of the human population on the Earth (Noah), in Sodam and Gemorrah (apologies for bad spelling) whereas Jesus said we should love our neighbour as ourselves? It is that Atheistic Materialism, in the end, ends up predicting that ALL our cognitive faculties are totally unreliable. I'm going to disagree on that point. Your worldview, is so far as you are clinging to atheism, is not for me since it simply can provide no coherent and rational basis for our ability to practice science in the first place.,,, (Not to mention the nihilism that is inherent within atheism) I really don't see how the ability to notice and remember and study patterns observed has anything to do with theism but I know you think it does. Even a dog notices and remembers patterns!! And even though 'dog' is 'god' backwards I don't think dogs are theists. If you observe a pattern, that one things seems to generally follow another thing, then I think you've got the beginning of being able to think scientifically. I don't see what the God Hypothesis adds to that. But that's just me. JVL

JVL: "Isn’t it possible to check out the universe’s rationality without assuming how it came about?" Well, interestingly, in so far as the fundamental constants of the universe don't change, the universe remains rational for us. Atheistic Naturalists simply have no clue why the universal constants should remain constant.

Scientists Question Nature’s Fundamental Laws – Michael Schirber – 2006 Excerpt: “There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant,” says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. “These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are.”,,, The observed differences are small-roughly a few parts in a million-but the implications are huge (if they hold up): The laws of physics would have to be rewritten, not to mention we might need to make room for six more spatial dimensions than the three that we are used to.”,,, The speed of light, for instance, might be measured one day with a ruler and a clock. If the next day the same measurement gave a different answer, no one could tell if the speed of light changed, the ruler length changed, or the clock ticking changed.? http://www.space.com/2613-scientists-question-nature-fundamental-laws.html

Whereas Christian Theists, on the other hand, 'predict' that there never will be found to be any variance in the laws of nature since they come from God, (Who is unchanging). C. S. Lewis, in his clear no nonsense style, put it like this

“Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it.” Lewis, C.S., Miracles: a preliminary study, Collins, London, p. 110, 1947. James 1:17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

JVL, in regards to your comment on our cognitive faculties, it is not that Atheistic Materialism predicts our cognitive faculties are somewhat reliable. Shoot even Christian Theism does that, (i.e. finite, fallible, humans). It is that Atheistic Materialism, in the end, ends up predicting that ALL our cognitive faculties are totally unreliable. (see Donald Hoffman in the following link) https://uncommondescent.com/philosophy/philosopher-mary-midgeley-1919-2018-on-scientism/#comment-728598 Your worldview, is so far as you are clinging to atheism, is not for me since it simply can provide no coherent and rational basis for our ability to practice science in the first place.,,, (Not to mention the nihilism that is inherent within atheism) bornagain77

Bornagain77: we have no philosophical basis for believing the universe to be rational, Isn't it possible to check out the universe's rationality without assuming how it came about? nor our cognitive faculties to be reliable. I don't think they are 100% reliable, it's very easy for us to fool ourselves. That's why I don't change my mind about a well-established scientific 'truth' until the dissenting evidence has been checked, rechecked, repeated and repeated again at least. Especially these days with the pressure to publish. JVL

Kairosfocus: Those who wish to fund and pursue OOL experiments can do so [preferably on their own dime] but on nearly 100 years of work since Oparin, there is no reason to be confident that a realistic exercise of that type will succeed. Perhaps. Do you feel the same way about pursuing a unified field theory in physics? They've been at that for a while . . . JVL

Martin_r: So i am not sure what do you want from me … i can’t imagine what kind of experiment could create a system where thousands of parts work together for a purpose… i just can’t. I don't 'want' anything from you; I just wondered if you thought any piece of the origin of life research was worth pursuing. Which you've answered. JVL

JVL at post 23 asks Martin_r:,

So, given what Dr Tour says . . . What sorts of experiments would you carry out? What particular questions would you focus on first? I’d just like to hear your research agenda. As Dr Tour admits, he can’t say science will never figure these things out so what would you tackle first?

Not to presume to speak for Martin_r, or for Dr. Tour, but 'science', (operating under naturalistic presuppositions), also can't rule out the possibility that any one of us could, this instant, spontaneously combust. Thermodynamics, by itself, simply does not rule that remote possibility out.

"Any one of us could this instant spontaneously combust if all the most rapidly moving air molecules in our vicinity suddenly converged on us. Such an event, however, is highly improbable, and we don't give it a second thought." [Dembski, 98]

And that is the context in which Dr. Tour was saying that he could not, using science alone, prove with 100% certainty that a naturalistic origin of life (OOL) will never be found. Dr. Tour, from presently known science, knows that a naturalistic OOL is extremely improbable, but science, all by its lonesome, simply never rules anything out with 100% probability. For instance, working from thermodynamic considerations, it is known that the probability against the naturalistic origin of a 'simple' bacterium is "ONLY" one chance in 10^100,000,000,000.

DID LIFE START BY CHANCE? Excerpt: Molecular biophysicist, Harold Morowitz (Yale University), calculated the odds of life beginning under natural conditions (spontaneous generation). He calculated, if one were to take the simplest living cell and break every chemical bond within it, the odds that the cell would reassemble under ideal natural conditions (the best possible chemical environment) would be one chance in 10^100,000,000,000. You will have probably have trouble imagining a number so large, so Hugh Ross provides us with the following example. If all the matter in the Universe was converted into building blocks of life, and if assembly of these building blocks were attempted once a microsecond for the entire age of the universe. Then instead of the odds being 1 in 10^100,000,000,000, they would be 1 in 10^99,999,999,916 (also of note: 1 with 100 billion zeros following would fill approx. 20,000 encyclopedias) http://members.tripod.com/~Black_J/chance.html Of note: Harold Joseph Morowitz was an American biophysicist who studied the application of thermodynamics to living systems. Author of numerous books and articles, his work includes technical monographs as well as essays. The origin of life was his primary research interest for more than fifty years.

So yes, science can't rule out that a naturalistic OOL will someday be found with 100% certainty, but science can say that it is so extremely improbable, i.e. 1 chance in 10^100,000,000,000, that it is a very, very, unlikely that a naturalistic OOL will ever be found. Speaking of probabilities, nor can 'science', operating under naturalistic presuppositions, rule out the possibility that you are merely a Boltzmann Brain with false memories. In fact, due to thermodynamic considerations, (and given the veritable infinity of other possible universes that atheists have postulated to try to get around the beginning, and fine-tuning, of this universe), 'science', operating under naturalistic presuppositions, actually predicts it is far more likely that you are a Boltzmann Brain with false memories rather than being a 'real' person with a real past,

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - 2008 It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.,,, If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds. But the cosmologists say the brain problem serves as a valuable reality check as they contemplate the far, far future and zillions of bubble universes popping off from one another in an ever-increasing rush through eternity. What, for example is a “typical” observer in such a setup? If some atoms in another universe stick together briefly to look, talk and think exactly like you, is it really you? https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html GORDON: Hawking irrational arguments - Washington Times - 2010 Excerpt: What is worse, multiplying without limit the opportunities for any event to happen in the context of a multiverse - where it is alleged that anything can spontaneously jump into existence without cause - produces a situation in which no absurdity is beyond the pale. For instance, we find multiverse cosmologists debating the “Boltzmann Brain” problem: In the most “reasonable” models for a multiverse, it is immeasurably more likely that our consciousness is associated with a brain that has spontaneously fluctuated into existence in the quantum vacuum than it is that we have parents and exist in an orderly universe with a 13.7 billion-year history. This is absurd. The multiverse hypothesis is therefore falsified because it renders false what we know to be true about ourselves. Clearly, embracing the multiverse idea entails a nihilistic irrationality that destroys the very possibility of science. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/1/hawking-irrational-arguments/

The point being is that if Atheistic Naturalism and/or Atheistic Materialism is held to be true as the starting philosophical presupposition in science, (as it is held to be true in most Universities today), then we have no philosophical basis for believing the universe to be rational, nor our cognitive faculties to be reliable.

Is Sean Carroll a Boltzmann Brain? - Michael Egnor - July 31, 2017 Excerpt: Carroll can’t appeal to laws of physics to adjudicate a debate on whether we are capable of knowing the laws of physics. The Boltzmann brain argument dovetails in some respects with Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism. Materialism fatally undercuts the reliability of our perceptions and concepts if we are indeed merely material evolved beings. If you are an isolated Boltzmann brain floating in chaotic soup, you have no way of really knowing that you are (or are not) a Boltzmann brain. Quantum mechanics won’t get you out of the jam, because if you are a Boltzmann brain, you are deluded about nature and you have no reason to trust your conception of quantum mechanics. Materialistic explanations for man are always, in the final analysis, self-refuting. https://evolutionnews.org/2017/07/is-sean-carroll-a-boltzmann-brain/

Apparently, we are forced to use something that escapes science, (namely common sense), to say, "Hey, I don't care what your scientific theory says, I know for a 100% fact that I ain't no friggin' brain is a vat being fed false memories'!" Science, all by its lonesome, and operating under naturalistic presuppositions, simply can't rule the possibility out that you are a brain in a vat being fed false memories. In fact, and to repeat, operating under naturalistic presuppositions, science actually predicts that it is vastly more likely that you are brain in a vat being fed false memories rather than you being a 'real' person with real memories. In fact, under the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution, this irresolvable 'epistemological' problem gets exponentially worse for the Atheistic Naturalists. Because of reductive materialism (and/or methodological naturalism), the atheistic materialist (who believes Darwinian evolution to be true) is forced to claim that he is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’ (Coyne, Dennett, etc..), who has the illusion of free will (Harris), who has unreliable, (i.e. illusory), beliefs about reality (Plantinga), who has illusory perceptions of reality (Hoffman), who, since he has no real time empirical evidence substantiating his grandiose claims, must make up illusory “just so stories” with the illusory, and impotent, ‘designer substitute’ of natural selection (Behe, Gould, Sternberg), so as to ‘explain away’ the appearance (i.e. the illusion) of design (Crick, Dawkins), and who also must make up illusory meanings and purposes for his life since the hopelessness of the nihilism inherent in his atheistic worldview is simply too much for him to bear (Weikart), and who must also hold morality to be subjective and illusory since he has rejected God (Craig, Kreeft). Who, since beauty cannot be grounded within his materialistic worldview, must also hold beauty itself to be illusory (Darwin). Bottom line, nothing is truly real in the atheist’s worldview, least of all, beauty, morality, meaning and purposes for life. Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist and/or Methodological Naturalist may firmly believe that he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for naturalistic explanations over and above God as a viable explanation), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Atheists themselves are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to. It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, indeed more antagonistic to reality itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.

2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

We simply take it on faith that the universe is not absurd and that we have reliable cognitive faculties that can understand the universe around us. In fact, the belief that we live in a rational universe, since it was created by the Mind of God, and the belief that we have reliable cognitive faculties that can understand the universe, since we were made in the 'image of God, were 2 of the 3 necessary Christian presuppositions that lay at the founding of modern science.

“Science in its modern form arose in the Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world”, because only the Christian West possessed the necessary “intellectual presuppositions”. – Ian Barbour Via Stephen Meyer’s book, here are the three necessary presuppositions that lay at the founding of modern science in Medieval Christian Europe. Presupposition 1: The contingency of nature “In 1277, the Etienne Tempier, the bishop of Paris, writing with support of Pope John XXI, condemned “necessarian theology” and 219 separate theses influenced by Greek philosophy about what God could and couldn’t do.”,, “The order in nature could have been otherwise (therefore) the job of the natural philosopher, (i.e. scientist), was not to ask what God must have done but (to ask) what God actually did.” Presupposition 2: The intelligibility of nature “Modern science was inspired by the conviction that the universe is the product of a rational mind who designed it to be understood and who (also) designed the human mind to understand it.” (i.e. human exceptionalism), “God created us in his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts” – Johannes Kepler Presupposition 3: Human Fallibility “Humans are vulnerable to self-deception, flights of fancy, and jumping to conclusions.”, (i.e. original sin), Scientists must therefore employ “systematic experimental methods.” – Stephen Meyer on Intelligent Design and The Return of the God Hypothesis – Hoover Institution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_8PPO-cAlA

Science simply can't prove with 100% certainty that those Christian presuppositions that undergird the founding of modern science are 100% true. We simply take it on faith that those presuppositions are true. (And indeed, holding those Christian presuppositions to be true, has been very, very, fruitful for man). And Paul Davies commented in his Templeton address, "even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.”

Physics and the Mind of God: The Templeton Prize Address – by Paul Davies – August 1995 Excerpt: “People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature-the laws of physics-are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least they do not do so in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.” https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/08/003-physics-and-the-mind-of-god-the-templeton-prize-address-24

All of this puts the committed atheist in quite an embarrassing situation. In order to even have a rational basis from which to argue against God in the first place, the atheist is forced to believe that he lives in a rational universe, but in order to believe he lives in a rational universe, the atheist is forced to believe in God. As Cornelius van Til put the dilemma facing atheists, "A little child may slap his father in the face, but it can do so only because the father holds it on his knee."

“The ultimate source of truth in any field rests in him. The world may discover much truth without owning Christ as Truth. Christ upholds even those who ignore, deny, and oppose him. A little child may slap his father in the face, but it can do so only because the father holds it on his knee. So modern science, modern philosophy, and modern theology may discover much truth. Nevertheless, if the universe were not created and redeemed by Christ no man could give himself an intelligible account of anything. It follows that in order to perform their task aright the scientist and the philosopher as well as the theologian need Christ.” – Cornelius Van Til, The Case for Calvinism p.147-148

Verse and quote:

John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” ‘the Word’ in John1:1 is translated from ‘Logos’ in Greek. Logos also happens to be the root word from which we derive our modern word logic

bornagain77

PS: There is reason to believe that life from Earth would seed to planets and moons out to the gas giants. kairosfocus

JVl, the relevant experiments are those of genetic engineering, which now proceed apace through Venter et al. Yes, intelligent design of life forms is already a fact, albeit at relatively simple and crude level. Of course, molecular nanotech work such as by Tour et al -- he is the molecular car guy -- are also relevant, and point to the emerging world of nanotech. (NB: Potentially highly dangerous but also a gateway to a different future.) Those who wish to fund and pursue OOL experiments can do so [preferably on their own dime] but on nearly 100 years of work since Oparin, there is no reason to be confident that a realistic exercise of that type will succeed. KF kairosfocus

JVL, first of all, and by now you should know me, i would not carry out any experiments on OOL. Further research on OOL is monkey business. Not to mention, it is only time/money wasting. When you follow molecular biology, cell biology and i don't know what else, it is clear that life was designed. The only mystery is why Darwinism is still accepted ... To be honest, i don't understand, what these OOL-Darwinists expect to find out? Do they expect, that they will pour in and mixing some chemicals and suddenly these chemicals start working together for a purpose??? Thousands/millions of molecules suddenly start co-operating ??? I really don't understand what these Darwinian scientists expect to prove ... even a 'stupid' cell division in extremely complex process, let me quote a mainstream source: "Perhaps the most amazing thing about mitosis is its precision, a feature that has intrigued biologists since Walther Flemming first described chromosomes in the late 1800s (Paweletz, 2001). Although Flemming was able to correctly deduce the sequence of events in mitosis, this sequence could not be experimentally verified for several decades, until advances in light microscopy made it possible to observe chromosome movements in living cells. Researchers now know that mitosis is a highly regulated process involving hundreds of different cellular proteins. The dynamic nature of mitosis is best appreciated when this process is viewed in living cells." So i am not sure what do you want from me ... i can't imagine what kind of experiment could create a system where thousands of parts work together for a purpose... i just can't. But, if you insist, i think that Dr. Tour summarized pretty well where to start when you want to waste other people money and continue with OOL research. What Dr. Tour suggests at least makes sense, first you have to solve the fundamental OOL-research problems... Now it is clear why OOL-researchers use purchased out-of-freezers chemicals extracted from living organisms. If not, they won't be even able to start doing any experiments on OOL And even when they use purchased chemicals extracted from living organisms, it won't help that much, obviously, because after decades of research they have got nothing. Because they trying to develop a smartphone by heating / cooling / mixing some chemicals... this can't be done... never... life was created... 100%...no doubts.... that is the reason why after 150 years of Darwinism there are no results in OOL-research. martin_r

Martin_r: So, given what Dr Tour says . . . What sorts of experiments would you carry out? What particular questions would you focus on first? I'd just like to hear your research agenda. As Dr Tour admits, he can't say science will never figure these things out so what would you tackle first? JVL

GD:

This [a case of UV injection] doesn’t violate the second law, because it’s driven by an outside source of nonequilibrium energy (the UV from the sun). The second law still applies to systems with incoming nonequilibrium energy, but it has very different implications. For instance, perpetual motion is entirely possible if there’s an external source of nonequilibrium energy. Take winds in the Earth’s atmosphere as an example of that. They may get stronger and weaker from time to time and place to place, but they don’t run down overall; the Earth’s atmosphere is perpetually in motion. Thermodynamically, this is totally normal, because the winds are powered by nonequilibrium heat from the sun. If you want to claim that there’s a conflict between the second law and evolution and/or abiogenesis, you need to show a conflict with the actual second law, not some misunderstood or imaginary version of it. And I’ve never seen anyone do that.

This reinforces my longstanding point that we need to recognise the functionally Specific, highly complex, organised, information-rich entity we are speaking of, i/l/o what physical work is. That is forced, ordered motion, often used to organise entities in functional ways, which are highly aperiodic but shaped and fitted together to achieve a specific configuration-based, functional outcome. For telling example, the PC I am typing on uses various subsystems to generate text messages resting on 7-bit code, ASCII data strings. Where, consideration on strings is WLOG, as description languages [think, AutoCAD etc] exist that allow suitable entities -- machines or sociotechnical systems etc -- to synthesise 3-d functional entities on the information. That is, information can be implicit in functionally specific complex organisation [FSCO] hence, my extension, FSCO/I. This allows us to spot a pattern that, though commonly present, is suppressed by a dominant paradigm that is too often domineering. You speak of convection loops, which at planetary scale gives rise to wind systems, with reasonably high consistency. That's a clue on lawlike necessity at work. A far more relevant example is jet engines. Yes, mass and energy flow through can enable a sustained [but not perpetual] process. The turbo-jet and its now more common sister, the turbofan, show our pattern, inlet > compressor and/or fan > combustion zone where fuel is injected, mixed and ignited, raising temperature dramatically, then > the exhaust involving a turbine that drives the compressor, and perhaps > an after-burner that in effect adds a ramjet phase, boosting thrust. All of which depends on highly precise organised structures and support systems such as the fuel supply. Onward, there is a sociotechnological architecture that brings the fuel to the engine, tied to the energy source - refining - transformation -- transmission/transport -- energy using technological systems -- desired work and energy based services framework. And of course, the SR71 reminds us that an engine already moving fast enough can simply feed in and ignite fuel, with an unlimited upper end, save as constrained by highly sophisticated materials. (Recall, the CIA stunts to source the required Ti from the intended target, the USSR.) This pattern is in plain sight all across the world of technology, and thermodynamics is a closely integrated aspect of design. The world of electric motors (and generators) is similar, with the same basic rotor-stator architecture. Indeed, gas turbine plants bring the two together. Which also brings to bear, steam turbines and even wind or water turbines etc. Now, compare two molecular rotor-based cellular machines: the turreted enzyme that makes ATP (an energy carrier for cellular life processes analogous to fuel or batteries or capacitors for the living cell) and the bacterial flagellum. These are using highly specific materials based on smart polymers assembled in a cellular NC machine, the Ribosome, and are rotor-stator machines. There is a lot of FSCO/I involved, and frankly it is NOT fallacious pseudoscience but simple fact to note that FSCO/I beyond 500 - 1,000 bits has just one actually observed -- not inferred on some imagined deep past of origin of life etc -- causal source, intelligently directed configuration. Similarly, and highly relevantly, coded -- linguistic! -- information beyond the relevant threshold has precisely the same sole observed causal source, design. The reason for that is manifest. Information leading to search-challenge. One bit has two possible states, often 1/0 or T/F or Hi/Lo or N/S etc. Two bits have four states as b1 is 1/0 for EACH of b2's 1/0 pairs tied to b1: 00/01/10/11. It is not a coincidence that cells use a 4-state string structure, AGCT/U. As in D/RNA. For n bits, there are 2^n states forming a configuration space 000 . . . 0 to 111 . . . 1 inclusive. for n+1 bits, there therefore are 2 x 2^n states, i.e. every additional bit doubles the configuration space. Yes, this is simple stuff but sometimes we need to see that A is itself, A i/l/o its core characteristics. At 500 bits the c-space is 3.27*10^150 states and for 1,000 it is 1.07*10^301. That means that blind search on chance and/or mechanical necessity on the scope of sol system, 10^57 atoms, or the observed cosmos, 10^80 atoms, with chem interactions typically 10^-12 to 10^-15s, will be deeply search challenged to find deeply isolated islands of configuration based function. Where that isolation comes from precisely the deep constraints of specific configuration. There is wiggle room but not enough to form the imagined, implicit well behaved continent of function for OOL and origin of body plans. We can see this by starting with the deep isolation of fold domains in AA sequence space, much less that of wider organic chemistry. There is a reason why cellular metabolism uses key process units such as ribosomes driven by mRNA tapes and effected through tRNA AA carriers with the CCA universal joint tool tips and a bevy of loading enzymes. And of course, enzymes, thousands of them. FSCO/I is deeply embedded in the system. I need not more than note something BA77 pointed to, UV is notoriously actinic radiation, something that is damaging to cell processes. This illustrates how opening up a system to uncontrolled energy and/or material dumps is so often ruinous. Foreign object damage is a jet engine killer, for just one illustration. In short, we must be sensitive to systems architecture. That is, yes, some simple systems can occur spontaneously, but others that are FSCO/I rich are going to require an information and work generating engineering source. Where, incrementally filtered lucky noise -- thanks to search challenge -- is simply not a credible source. No, the system is open, does not adequately explain FSCO/I based function. Ask a certain Mr Whittle or a certain Mr Tesla. KF PS: Nigh on 50 years ago, Orgel -- it is high time due note was taken:

living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity . . . . [HT, Mung, fr. p. 190 & 196:] These vague idea can be made more precise by introducing the idea of information. Roughly speaking, the information content of a structure is the minimum number of instructions needed to specify the structure.

[--> this is of course equivalent to the string of yes/no questions required to specify the relevant J S Wicken "wiring diagram" for the set of functional states, T, in the much larger space of possible clumped or scattered configurations, W, as Dembski would go on to define in NFL in 2002, also cf here, -- here and -- here -- (with here on self-moved agents as designing causes).]

One can see intuitively that many instructions are needed to specify a complex structure. [--> so if the q's to be answered are Y/N, the chain length is an information measure that indicates complexity in bits . . . ] On the other hand a simple repeating structure can be specified in rather few instructions.  [--> do once and repeat over and over in a loop . . . ] Complex but random structures, by definition, need hardly be specified at all . . . . Paley was right to emphasize the need for special explanations of the existence of objects with high information content, for they cannot be formed in nonevolutionary, inorganic processes [--> Orgel had high hopes for what Chem evo and body-plan evo could do by way of info generation beyond the FSCO/I threshold, 500 - 1,000 bits.] [The Origins of Life (John Wiley, 1973), p. 189, p. 190, p. 196.]

kairosfocus

JVL @17 "how would you research the origin of life on Earth? What sorts of experiments would you carry out? What particular questions would you focus on first?" i am glad you asked.... Dr. James Tour answers your questions in the final 13/13 part of his OOL-lecture. Here you go, just click this URL, the video starts at 20:40, (you don't need to FF) https://youtu.be/71GTCHkId6M?list=PLILWudw_84t2THBvJZFyuLA0qvxwrIBDr&t=1242 Let me know what you think...if does it make sense ... but i doubt you will understand a single word unless you are a chemist. I have to admit, I am not a chemist, but i am pretty familiar with what Dr. Tour is talking about, because i do study ... martin_r

Moreover, to show that it is God who is imparting this massive amount of immaterial information into the first life, as well as imparting it into each individual human, (in order to ‘locally’ circumvent the second law with immaterial information), I can appeal to advances in quantum biology. Specifically, Quantum Entanglement/Coherence, and/or Quantum Criticality, is found to be ubiquitous within life. It is found within every important biomolecule of life. As the following 2015 article entitled, “Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules”, stated, “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” and the researchers further commented that “finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,,

Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules – Mar. 6, 2015 Excerpt: “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” they say. That’s a discovery that is as important as it is unexpected. “These findings suggest an entirely new and universal mechanism of conductance in biology very different from the one used in electrical circuits.” The permutations of possible energy levels of biomolecules is huge so the possibility of finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,, “what exactly is the advantage that criticality confers?” https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life-and-the-hidden-role-of-quantum-criticality-ca4707924552

And as this follow up article in 2018 stated, “There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,,”

Quantum Critical Proteins – Stuart Lindsay – Professor of Physics and Chemistry at Arizona State University – 2018 Excerpt: The difficulty with this proposal lies in its improbability. Only an infinitesimal density of random states exists near the critical point.,, Gábor Vattay et al. recently examined a number of proteins and conducting and insulating polymers.14 The distribution for the insulators and conductors were as expected, but the functional proteins all fell on the quantum-critical distribution. Such a result cannot be a consequence of chance.,,, WHAT OF quantum criticality? Vattay et al. carried out electronic structure calculations for the very large protein used in our work. They found that the distribution of energy-level spacings fell on exactly the quantum-critical distribution, implying that this protein is also quantum critical. There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,, http://inference-review.com/article/quantum-critical-proteins Gábor Vattay et al., “Quantum Criticality at the Origin of Life,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 626 (2015); Gábor Vattay, Stuart Kauffman, and Samuli Niiranen, “Quantum Biology on the Edge of Quantum Chaos,” PLOS One 9, no. 3 (2014)

As well, DNA itself does not belong to the world of classical mechanics but instead belongs to the world of quantum mechanics. In the following video, at the 22:20 minute mark, Dr Rieper shows why the high temperatures of biological systems do not prevent DNA from having quantum entanglement and then at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper goes on to remark that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it.

“What happens is this classical information (of DNA) is embedded, sandwiched, into the quantum information (of DNA). And most likely this classical information is never accessed because it is inside all the quantum information. You can only access the quantum information or the electron clouds and the protons. So mathematically you can describe that as a quantum/classical state.” Elisabeth Rieper – Classical and Quantum Information in DNA – video (Longitudinal Quantum Information resides along the entire length of DNA discussed at the 19:30 minute mark; at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper remarks that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it) https://youtu.be/2nqHOnVTxJE?t=1176

The interesting thing about quantum coherence and/or quantum entanglement is that it is a non-local, beyond space and time, effect that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its existence. As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”

Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory – 29 October 2012 Excerpt: “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,” http://www.quantumlah.org/highlight/121029_hidden_influences.php

Darwinian materialists simply have no beyond space and time cause to appeal to. Whereas I, as a Christian Theist, do readily have a beyond space and time cause that I can appeal to. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Moreover, quantum information, like energy, is conserved. As the following article states, “In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.”

Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time – 2011 Excerpt: In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed. This concept stems from two fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics: the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem. A third and related theorem, called the no-hiding theorem, addresses information loss in the quantum world. According to the no-hiding theorem, if information is missing from one system (which may happen when the system interacts with the environment), then the information is simply residing somewhere else in the Universe; in other words, the missing information cannot be hidden in the correlations between a system and its environment. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-quantum-no-hiding-theorem-experimentally.html

The implication of finding ‘non-local’, (i.e. beyond space and time), and ‘conserved’, (i.e. cannot be created nor destroyed), quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious. That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, “the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”

Leading Scientists Say Consciousness Cannot Die It Goes Back To The Universe – Oct. 19, 2017 – Spiritual Excerpt: “Let’s say the heart stops beating. The blood stops flowing. The microtubules lose their quantum state. But the quantum information, which is in the microtubules, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed. It just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large. If a patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says, “I had a near death experience. I saw a white light. I saw a tunnel. I saw my dead relatives.,,” Now if they’re not revived and the patient dies, then it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.” – Stuart Hameroff – Quantum Entangled Consciousness – Life After Death – video (5:00 minute mark) (of note, this video is no longer available for public viewing) https://radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/10/life-after-death-soul-science-morgan-freeman/

Verse:

Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul?

Supplemental note:

Darwinian Materialism vs. Quantum Biology – Part II – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSig2CsjKbg

bornagain77

Gordon, simply put, these recent experimental realizations of the Maxwell demon thought experiment, as well as advances in quantum information theory, have directly falsified your belief that “intelligent designers cannot overcome the limitations of the second law”. In short, it is possible for intelligent agents, via imparting immaterial information into a system, to locally circumvent the second law of thermodynamics in order to bring a system out of thermodynamic equilibrium to a state that is of lower entropy and higher energy. As the following 2010 experiment found, “they coaxed a Brownian particle to travel upwards on a “spiral-staircase-like” potential energy created by an electric field solely on the basis of information on its location. As the particle traveled up the staircase it gained energy from moving to an area of higher potential, and the team was able to measure precisely how much energy had been converted from information.”

Maxwell’s demon demonstration (knowledge of a particle’s position) turns information into energy – November 2010 Excerpt: Scientists in Japan are the first to have succeeded in converting information into free energy in an experiment that verifies the “Maxwell demon” thought experiment devised in 1867.,,, In Maxwell’s thought experiment the demon creates a temperature difference simply from information about the gas molecule temperatures and without transferring any energy directly to them.,,, Until now, demonstrating the conversion of information to energy has been elusive, but University of Tokyo physicist Masaki Sano and colleagues have succeeded in demonstrating it in a nano-scale experiment. In a paper published in Nature Physics they describe how they coaxed a Brownian particle to travel upwards on a “spiral-staircase-like” potential energy created by an electric field solely on the basis of information on its location. As the particle traveled up the staircase it gained energy from moving to an area of higher potential, and the team was able to measure precisely how much energy had been converted from information. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-maxwell-demon-energy.html

As Christopher Jarzynski, who was instrumental in formulating the 'equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information', stated, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”

Demonic device converts information to energy – 2010 Excerpt: “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,” says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information2; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. “This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale,” says Jarzynski. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=demonic-device-converts-inform

The Maxwell demon thought experiment has now even been extended to build a refrigerator that is powered by information. The implications are immense. As the following 2016 article states, "Recently came the most startling demonstration yet: a tiny machine powered purely by information, which chilled metal through the power of its knowledge. This seemingly magical device could put us on the road to new, more efficient nanoscale machines, a better understanding of the workings of life, and a more complete picture of perhaps our most fundamental theory of the physical world."

New Scientist astounds: Information is physical – May 13, 2016 Excerpt: Recently came the most startling demonstration yet: a tiny machine powered purely by information, which chilled metal through the power of its knowledge. This seemingly magical device could put us on the road to new, more efficient nanoscale machines, a better understanding of the workings of life, and a more complete picture of perhaps our most fundamental theory of the physical world. https://uncommondescent.com/news/new-scientist-astounds-information-is-physical/

In short, advances in science have shown us that, "information, entropy, and energy should (now) be treated on equal footings."

Information: From Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser – Lutz and Ciliberto – Oct. 25, 2015 – Physics Today Excerpt: The above examples of gedanken-turned-real experiments provide a firm empirical foundation for the physics of information and tangible evidence of the intimate connection between information and energy. They have been followed by additional experiments and simulations along similar lines.12 (See, for example, Physics Today, August 2014, page 60.) Collectively, that body of experimental work further demonstrates the equivalence of information and thermodynamic entropies at thermal equilibrium.,,, (2008) Sagawa and Ueda’s (theoretical) result extends the second law to explicitly incorporate information; it shows that information, entropy, and energy should be treated on equal footings. http://www.johnboccio.com/research/quantum/notes/Information.pdf J. Parrondo, J. Horowitz, and T. Sagawa. Thermodynamics of information. Nature Physics, 11:131-139, 2015.

These recent experimental findings are simply devastating for reductive materialists who believe immaterial information is simply ‘emergent’ from some material basis. How much information is needed to explain the origin of a ’simple’ cell? Well, the information needed to be imparted into a system, by an intelligent ‘observer’, in order to bring the system far enough out of thermodynamic equilibrium in order to sustain life, is found to be immense. The information content of a 'simple cell' when working from the thermodynamic perspective is found to be on the order of 10^12 bits,

Molecular Biophysics – Information theory. Relation between information and entropy: – Setlow-Pollard, Ed. Addison Wesley Excerpt: Linschitz gave the figure 9.3 x 10^12 cal/deg or 9.3 x 10^12 x 4.2 joules/deg for the entropy of a bacterial cell. Using the relation H = S/(k In 2), we find that the information content is 4 x 10^12 bits. Morowitz’ deduction from the work of Bayne-Jones and Rhees gives the lower value of 5.6 x 10^11 bits, which is still in the neighborhood of 10^12 bits. Thus two quite different approaches give rather concordant figures. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18hO1bteXTPOqQtd2H12PI5wFFoTjwg8uBAU5N0nEQIE/edit

,,, Of note: 10^12 bits is equivalent to 100 million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And while we are on the subject, how much information is required to build a human? Well, "the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000."

In a TED Talk, (the Question You May Not Ask,,, Where did the information come from?) – November 29, 2017 Excerpt: Sabatini is charming.,,, he deploys some memorable images. He points out that the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000. Later he wheels out the entire genome, in printed form, of a human being,,,,: [F]or the first time in history, this is the genome of a specific human, printed page-by-page, letter-by-letter: 262,000 pages of information, 450 kilograms.,,, https://evolutionnews.org/2017/11/in-a-ted-talk-heres-the-question-you-may-not-ask/

bornagain77

Gordon Davisson states,

For example, do you consider ultraviolet light to qualify as “assistance”? Because if you don’t, then the formation of ozone (O3 gas) in the upper atmosphere is a counterexample, since O3 has both higher energy and lower entropy than the O2 it forms from. On the other hand, if you do consider UV light to be “assistance”, then it’s hard to see how this is relevant to the origin of life.

GD, I suggest that you write Dr. Miller, via the Discovery Institute, and get into the specific details with Dr. Miller to see why Ozone formation, like water freezing or soap molecules forming micelles (e.g., spheres or bilayers), does not represent a system moving towards ‘lower entropy and higher energy.’ As Dr. Miller noted in refuting the Darwinian claim that water freezing or soap molecules forming micelles represented a 'local' violation of the second law, the entropy decrease was always 'paid' for:

"More specifically, the process of freezing releases heat that increases the entropy of the surrounding environment by an amount greater than the entropy decrease of the water molecule forming the rigid structure. Likewise, soap molecules coalescing into micelles represents a net increase of entropy since the surrounding water molecules significantly increase in their number of degrees of freedom." - Brian Miller

Gordon, you stated that "it’s hard to see how this is relevant to the origin of life." Yet by the same token, it is exponentially harder to see how Ozone formation is remotely relevant to the origin of life (OOL). As the following site points out, Ozone itself is very thermodynamically unstable. To quote the article, "most of the O3 generated in the stratosphere is constantly destroyed."

"Hence most of the O3 generated in the stratosphere is constantly destroyed". "O3 in the stratosphere is constantly being formed, decomposed and reformed during daylight hours by a series of reactions. Rates of these reactions differ depending upon altitude." "Ozone effectively absorbs the most energetic ultraviolet light, known as UV-C and UV-B, which causes biological damage" - Stratospheric Chemistry: The Ozone Layer - January 2013 • UV radiation and its impact • Chemical reactions induced by light • The Ozone Layer • Review/Thermodynamics Principles https://www3.nd.edu/~pkamat/pdf/lecture2.pdf

Ozone being constantly destroyed, as should be needless to say, is certainly not indicative that material processes have the capacity within themselves to overcome the second law in order to explain why life is so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium. If anything, constant ozone destruction clearly reiterates the point that they don’t have the capacity within themselves. However your discussion with Dr. Miller turns out, (if you even decide to honestly ask him about the thermodynamics of ozone formation, and see if it really does present a challenge to his claim that “No system without assistance ever moves both toward lower entropy and higher energy which is required for the formation of a cell.”), it seems to me, as a layman, that it is highly disingenuous for you to point to such a thermodynamically unstable particle as ozone and say, basically, "Aha, you see thermodynamics does not present any difficulty for naturalistic OOL scenarios at all.” If anything, your example of the highly unstable ozone molecule highlights the extreme difficulty facing OOL researchers. i.e. Exactly, how do you get a thermodynamically stable system, i.e. 'simple' life, that represents both a dramatic decrease in entropy and an equally dramatic increase in energy? But anyways, be that as it may, Gordon goes on to state that, "perpetual motion is entirely possible if there’s an external source of nonequilibrium energy." Gordon I mentioned the requirement for a constant source of energy in order for perpetual motion machines to be theoretically feasible in post 3. But I also pointed out in post 3 that you, as a Darwinist, also believe, in effect, that unguided material processes, all by their lonesome, can construct highly sophisticated perpetual motion machines, that greatly outclass anything man has thus far created in terms of machines, and that these highly sophisticate perpetual motion machines can then go to create even greater and more sophisticated perpetual motion machines, and on and on, ad infinitum. If you do not see even a minor problem with that Darwinian scenario, might I suggest that you go try to build, via your own intelligence, a simple mechanical perpetual motion machine. Once you have done that, multiply the difficulty you experienced in building the device by at least a million. Then you will have a small inkling as to the impossibly of unguided material processes, all by their lonesome, ever creating a 'simple cell'. The simplest life ever found on earth, even the simplest realistically feasible life on earth, is far, far, more complex than anything man has ever built.

To Model the Simplest Microbe in the World, You Need 128 Computers – July 2012 Excerpt: Mycoplasma genitalium has one of the smallest genomes of any free-living organism in the world, clocking in at a mere 525 genes. That’s a fraction of the size of even another bacterium like E. coli, which has 4,288 genes.,,, The bioengineers, led by Stanford’s Markus Covert, succeeded in modeling the bacterium, and published their work last week in the journal Cell. What’s fascinating is how much horsepower they needed to partially simulate this simple organism. It took a cluster of 128 computers running for 9 to 10 hours to actually generate the data on the 25 categories of molecules that are involved in the cell’s lifecycle processes.,,, ,,the depth and breadth of cellular complexity has turned out to be nearly unbelievable, and difficult to manage, even given Moore’s Law. The M. genitalium model required 28 subsystems to be individually modeled and integrated, and many critics of the work have been complaining on Twitter that’s only a fraction of what will eventually be required to consider the simulation realistic.,,, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/to-model-the-simplest-microbe-in-the-world-you-need-128-computers/260198/ Minimal Cell Challenges Naturalism – March 26, 2016 Excerpt: “If we’re already playing God, we’re not doing a particularly good job of it,” Elfick says. “Simply streamlining what’s already in nature doesn’t seem very God-like and, if anything, is a very humbling exercise.” Venter also felt the humility vibes, according to Live Science: “We’re showing how complex life is even in the simplest of organisms,” said Craig Venter, founder and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), where the study was completed. “These findings are very humbling in that regard.” http://crev.info/2016/03/minimal-cell-challenges-naturalism/

Are you beginning to get a small inkling as to just how impossible the problem facing OOL researchers actually is Gordon? Gordon concludes his comment with this claim,

And BTW if you did manage to show a conflict, it wouldn’t point to intelligent design, because intelligent designers cannot overcome the limitations of the second law. In fact, that’s how the second law was discovered — people designing things like steam engines found that there were limits to the efficiency of their engines that they just couldn’t get past, no matter how clever their designs were.

Funny you should mention that, I read a Quanta article yesterday in which they said, in effect, that Maxwell’s demon, (i.e. a causal agent), can locally violate the second law as long the Maxwell’s demon does not erase the information he used to 'locally' violate the second law. It is only when the demon erases the information that he used to violate the second law that the second law is ‘paid for’.

How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists - April 2021 Excerpt: A thought experiment devised by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 stumped scientists for 115 years. And even after a solution was found, physicists have continued to use “Maxwell’s demon” to push the laws of the universe to their limits.,,, In 1982, the American physicist Charles Bennett put the pieces of the puzzle together. He realized that Maxwell’s demon was at core an information-processing machine: It needed to record and store information about individual particles in order to decide when to open and close the door. Periodically it would need to erase this information. According to Landauer’s erasure principle, the rise in entropy from the erasure would more than compensate for the decrease in entropy caused by the sorting of the particles. “You need to pay,” said Gonzalo Manzano, a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna. The demon’s need to make room for more information inexorably led to a net increase in disorder.,,, Then in the 21st century, with the thought experiment solved, the real experiments began. “The most important development is we can now realize Maxwell’s demon in laboratories,” said Sagawa. In 2007 scientists used a light-powered gate to demonstrate the idea of Maxwell’s demon in action; in 2010, another team devised a way to use the energy produced by the demon’s information to coax a bead uphill; and in 2016 scientists applied the idea of Maxwell’s demon to two compartments containing not gas, but light. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-maxwells-demon-continues-to-startle-scientists-20210422/

In fact, theoretically the information used by the demon to locally violate the second law can be erased without using any energy at all. As the following article explains,“theoretically, information can be erased without using any energy at all.,,,Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”

Scientists show how to erase information without using energy – January 2011 Excerpt: Until now, scientists have thought that the process of erasing information requires energy. But a new study shows that, theoretically, information can be erased without using any energy at all.,,, “Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”, Vaccaro explained. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-scientists-erase-energy.html

In fact Gordon, such experimental realizations of the Maxwell demon thought experiment, as well as advances in Quantum information theory, have forced researchers to realize that entropy is a property of an observer, not of the system. As the following article states, "when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer”

Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy – June 1, 2011 Excerpt: The new study revisits Landauer’s principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. When the memory content is known, it should be possible to delete the bits in such a manner that it is theoretically possible to re-create them. It has previously been shown that such reversible deletion would generate no heat. In the new paper, the researchers go a step further. They show that when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer. Applied to the example of deleting data, this means that if two individuals delete data in a memory and one has more knowledge of this data, she perceives the memory to have lower entropy and can then delete the memory using less energy.,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm

And as the following article states, “James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,, quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,, Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,

The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017 Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.” In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,, Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/

To repeat that last statement, “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.” bornagain77

Martin_r: Just curious . . . how would you research the origin of life on Earth? What sorts of experiments would you carry out? What particular questions would you focus on first? JVL

Gordon D, you mentioned Dr. James Tour. I took the time and watched all 13 parts of his lecture on OOL research. 13 very entertaining hours, because Dr. James Tour is a very good teacher/lector, moreover, i like his style, passion and sarcasm (i wish i had such a teacher/professor when i went to my university) Anybody, who is SERIOUSLY interested in OOL should watch these lectures. I always knew that Darwinists are fraudsters and have been misleading lay public for 150 years. But after watched Dr. Tour's lecture i realize how fraudulent Darwinian OOL-research is. Among other things, these researchers use purchased (premade, stabilized, out-of-freezers) chemicals, extracted from LIVING!!! organisms to simulate blind unguided process of origin of life on early Earth ... This is absurd ... It is like in some mental hospital.... is this called science??? (not to mention these Darwinian researchers use various man-made tools during experiments, e.g. vacuum pumps for degassing the environment etc.) Darwinists cheat and lay public should know that... fortunately for Darwinists, these things are so complex, that lay public will never understand that Darwinists cheat ... Darwinists have been cheating and misinterpreting the evidence for decades... martin_r

Gordon D, i understand that you wanted to point out something different, but using UV light as an example in regards to origin-of-life was very unfortunate. UV light kills cells by destroying DNA and other life's molecules as well. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-ultraviolet-ligh/#:~:text=Ultraviolet%20(UV)%20light%20kills%20cells%20by%20damaging%20their%20DNA.&text=The%20resulting%20thymine%20dimer%20is,nucleotides%2D%2Dis%20fairly%20efficient. Another very unfortunate example would be water. It is called the WATER PARADOX. You surely heard from Darwinists like 1000 times - look for water you will find life. But Darwinists somehow ignore the fact that water destroys DNA molecule and other life's molecules as well. They know that, but keep repeating this WATER-OOL non-sense. Here you go, published in NATURE: https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-020-03461-4/d41586-020-03461-4.pdf martin_r

BA77 @ 8:

[...] No system without assistance ever moves both toward lower entropy and higher energy which is required for the formation of a cell.” – Brian Miller, Ph. D. – MIT – Episode 0/13: Reasons // A Course on Abiogenesis by Dr. James Tour https://youtu.be/71dqAFUb-v0?t=1434

I haven't looked at Miller and/or Tour's argument much, but if this is an example, it's pretty bad. The claim here is either completely false or completely irrelevant. For example, do you consider ultraviolet light to qualify as "assistance"? Because if you don't, then the formation of ozone (O3 gas) in the upper atmosphere is a counterexample, since O3 has both higher energy and lower entropy than the O2 it forms from. On the other hand, if you do consider UV light to be "assistance", then it's hard to see how this is relevant to the origin of life. (I should maybe clarify that the formation of ozone actually occurs in two steps, each of which individually conforms to Miller's claim: In the first step, a UV photon hits an O2 molecule, splitting it into two oxygen atoms, which increases both energy and entropy. In the second step, the two oxygen atoms attach to other O2 molecules, forming O3, which decreases both energy and entropy. But the energy increase in the first step is bigger than the decrease in the second, and the entropy increase in the first is smaller than the decrease in the second, so the overall process winds up increasing energy and decreasing entropy.) This doesn't violate the second law, because it's driven by an outside source of nonequilibrium energy (the UV from the sun). The second law still applies to systems with incoming nonequilibrium energy, but it has very different implications. For instance, perpetual motion is entirely possible if there's an external source of nonequilibrium energy. Take winds in the Earth's atmosphere as an example of that. They may get stronger and weaker from time to time and place to place, but they don't run down overall; the Earth's atmosphere is perpetually in motion. Thermodynamically, this is totally normal, because the winds are powered by nonequilibrium heat from the sun. If you want to claim that there's a conflict between the second law and evolution and/or abiogenesis, you need to show a conflict with the actual second law, not some misunderstood or imaginary version of it. And I've never seen anyone do that. And BTW if you did manage to show a conflict, it wouldn't point to intelligent design, because intelligent designers cannot overcome the limitations of the second law. In fact, that's how the second law was discovered -- people designing things like steam engines found that there were limits to the efficiency of their engines that they just couldn't get past, no matter how clever their designs were. Gordon Davisson

Seversky: ">Complexity can emerge from simplicity.... stunning beauty of fractal patterns. " Seversky, as EDTA asked you, for how long have you been with us? With you Darwinists it is always the same ... you keep repeating these stupid arguments ... Fractals, snow flakes and other non-sense... Seversky, you misunderstand as much as a Darwinist can .... ID DEFINITION OF DESIGN/COMPLEXITY = thousands of parts working together for a purpose Now Seversky focus and explain to us, in what way are fractals and snow flakes complex? martin_r

Sev, >Complexity can emerge from simplicity. Even mathematicians should be able to see that in the stunning beauty of fractal patterns. You have been with us how long? Fractals appear complex, but the rules for generating them are simple. And they don't do anything on their own. They would have to be instantiated in matter to be capable of anything. They are not evidence that life can form spontaneously. EDTA

johnnyb's first link available in its entirety here: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94.171&rep=rep1&type=pdf EDTA

150 years of Darwinism and there is a zero progress in origin of life research. A typical lay Darwinist e.g. Seversky will reply - ahhhh, what are 150 years, give us more time and blah blah blah..... so how much longer do you need Seversky to accept that life was created? Thousands years? Ten thousands of years? I bet that if we give Darwinian scientitsts 1 Mil years and there still wont be any success in OOL research, Seversky would say- ahhhhhh, the universe is 14 billions of years old, one million years for OOL research is nothing, give us more time.... martin_r

All one needs to do is realize that if a solution were found, we would have proved something obviously false, ... Is this really a valid proof? It seems perfectly valid to me, as I cannot think of anything in all of science that can be stated with more confidence...

I haven't studied mathematical logic for a long time, so is this a Proof by Assertion or Proof by Incredulity? Bob O'H

From a thermodynamic perspective, the origin of life is impossible. as Dr Brian Miller stated, "No system without assistance ever moves both toward lower entropy and higher energy which is required for the formation of a cell.”

“‘Professor Dave’ argues that the origin of life does not face thermodynamic hurdles. He states that natural systems often spontaneously increase in order, such as water freezing or soap molecules forming micelles (e.g., spheres or bilayers), He is making the very common mistake that he fails to recognize that the formation of the cell represents both a dramatic decrease in entropy and an equally dramatic increase in energy. In contrast, water freezing represents both a decrease in entropy but also a decrease in energy. More specifically, the process of freezing releases heat that increases the entropy of the surrounding environment by an amount greater than the entropy decrease of the water molecule forming the rigid structure. Likewise, soap molecules coalescing into micelles represents a net increase of entropy since the surrounding water molecules significantly increase in their number of degrees of freedom. No system without assistance ever moves both toward lower entropy and higher energy which is required for the formation of a cell.” – Brian Miller, Ph. D. – MIT – Episode 0/13: Reasons // A Course on Abiogenesis by Dr. James Tour https://youtu.be/71dqAFUb-v0?t=1434

And as Dr. Miller also stated in this fairly recent article, “The only plausible explanation for the origin of life is intelligent agency.”

Thermodynamic Challenges to the Origin of Life – Brian Miller – March 27, 2020 Excerpt: The thermodynamic barriers to the origin of life have become decidedly more well defined since this book’s first publication. The initial challenges described in the original edition still stand. Namely, spontaneous natural processes always tend toward states of greater entropy, lower energy, or both. The change of entropy and energy are often combined into the change of free energy, and all spontaneous processes move toward lower free energy. However, the generation of a minimally functional cell on the ancient Earth required a local system of molecules to transition into a state of both lower entropy and higher energy. Therefore, it must move toward dramatically higher free energy. The chance of a system accomplishing this feat near equilibrium is astronomically small.,,, The only plausible explanation for the origin of life is intelligent agency. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/03/thermodynamic-challenges-to-the-origin-of-life/

And as if the second law of thermodynamics was not bad enough for Darwinists in regards to explaining the origin of life(OOL), Dr. James Tour, one of the top ten synthetic chemists in the world, recently (March 2021) gave a tour de force lecture on the many insurmountable problems facing OOL researchers.

James Tour PhD. A Course on Abiogenesis - video playlist (March 2021) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-RvMStTkx4&list=PLILWudw_84t2THBvJZFyuLA0qvxwrIBDr Topics covered 0 – Reasons for this Series: 1 – Introduction to Abiogenesis: 2 – Primordial Soup: 3 – Hype: 4 – Homochirality: 5 – Carbohydrates: 6 – Building Blocks of Building Blocks: 7 – Peptides: 8 – Nucleotides: 9 – Intermediate Summary & a Call to Colleagues: 10 – Lipids: 11 – Chiral-induced Spin Selectivity: 12.1 – Cell Construction & The Assembly Problem, Part 1: 12.2 – Cell Construction & The Assembly Problem, Part 2: 13 – Summary & Projections:

In a nutshell, the main insurmountable problem, (impossibility), facing OOL researchers is information. Specifically, the origin of immaterial information from material processes. Only immaterial minds have ever been observed generating immaterial information. Darwinists, with their 'bottom up' materialistic processes, are approaching the problem of generating immaterial information from the completely wrong conceptual level. As the old joke goes, 'you can't get there from here!'

John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

bornagain77

Haven't had time to watch the video, but a proof along the lines that Sewell seems to be indicating has actually been peer-reviewed. Biological Function and the Genetic Code are Interdependent. You can also see an engineering perspective in this three-part series: Developing Insights into the Design of the Simplest Self-Replicator (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) (find it in print) Finally, another information-theoretic approach which gives a maximum bound on the probability: The Possibility of Spontaneous Generation of Self-Replicating Systems johnnyb

BA77

The belief that life will someday be proven to come from non-life, (i.e. spontaneous generation), though directly contradicting known science and the law of biogenesis as laid out by Louis Pasteur and others,,

Just a small correction. Pasteur did not prove that life could not arise from non-life. He proved that complex life already found on earth cannot arise from non-life. But I do agree that the origin of life is an unprovable question. Even if scientists find a natural way in which life can arise, and demonstrate it, we will never know if this is how life on earth arose. paige

Sev, you don’t seem to understand your own position very well Sev. This is not surprising, because if you did understand it, you probably would stop espousing it. Let me sort it our for you. GS: The claim that “a few (four, apparently) fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into” Apple iPhones is provably unprovable. Sev: I agree, but then that is not what is being claimed, is it? The claim is that life-forms arose from inanimate chemical precursors and they evolved into increasingly complex creatures that could eventually design and build Apple iPhones. Let me clue you in Sev. That is exactly what is being claimed. It is nothing short of astonishing that after having debated in this area for many years, you don’t seem to understand that under materialist principles there is no fundamental ontological difference between “inanimate chemical precursors” and the “animate chemical products” that evolved from them. Guess what Sev. With the words “I agree” you just gave away the entire evolutionary store. BTW, the next time you get the urge to call someone arrogant, maybe you should check yourself, because in this instance you wound up looking like a buffoon when it turned out GS understands the basic proposition on the table and you do not. Barry Arrington

seversky:

The claim is that life-forms arose from inanimate chemical precursors and they evolved into increasingly complex creatures that could eventually design and build Apple iPhones.

That claim is right up there with leprechauns and a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. So I understand why you would accept it even though there isn't any evidence to support it nor is there a way to test it.

As for complexity emerging from simplicity, in Big Bang cosmology the four fundamental forces are thought to have emerged from a unified state in the very early stages of expansion.

The universe and those fundamental forces were intelligently designed. There isn't any evidence that they just happened to happen. Evolutionary biologists cannot support the claims of evolution by means of blind and mindless processes. And thanks to evolutionary biology no one knows what determines biological form. Biologists can't even answer the basic questions of life. That said, scientists will have an easier time showing how Stonehenge arose via blind and mindless processes than they will showing the same for life. ET

The belief that life will someday be proven to come from non-life, (i.e. spontaneous generation), though directly contradicting known science and the law of biogenesis as laid out by Louis Pasteur and others,,

Law of biogenesis Excerpt: The law of biogenesis states that life only comes from already established life. This very important and fundamental scientific law can be credited to the work of Louis Pasteur and others. The findings rooted in repeated scientific experimentation and observation can be summarized as follows, Omne vivum ex ovo, which is Latin for, "all life is from life." https://creationwiki.org/Law_of_biogenesis Louis Pasteur on life, matter, and spontaneous generation - June 21, 2015 "Science brings men nearer to God.,, Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.,, I have been looking for spontaneous generation for twenty years without discovering it. No, I do not judge it impossible. But what allows you to make it the origin of life? You place matter before life and you decide that matter has existed for all eternity. How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists to consider that life has existed during eternity, and not matter? You pass from matter to life because your intelligence of today cannot conceive things otherwise. How do you know that in ten thousand years, one will not consider it more likely that matter has emerged from life? You move from matter to life because your current intelligence, so limited compared to what will be the future intelligence of the naturalist, tells you that things cannot be understand otherwise. If you want to be among the scientific minds, what only counts is that you will have to get rid of a priori reasoning and ideas, and you will have to do necessary deductions not giving more confidence than we should to deductions from wild speculation." [en francais, Pasteur et la philosophie, Patrice Pinet, Editions L’Harmattan, p. 63.]

,,, The belief that life will someday be proven to come from non-life, though directly contradicting known science and the law of biogenesis, seems to be an irrational belief that is unique to Darwinists. After all, physicists, mainly due to the laws of thermodynamics, no longer believe in perpetual motion machines.

The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rckrnYw5sOA

Yet, Darwinists essentially believe wholeheartedly in perpetual motion machines, in that they believe unguided material processes, as long as they have access to energy, can generate all the information necessary to overcome the second law of thermodynamics in order to have life in the first place,

Molecular Biophysics – Information theory. Relation between information and entropy: – Setlow-Pollard, Ed. Addison Wesley Excerpt: Linschitz gave the figure 9.3 x 10^12 cal/deg or 9.3 x 10^12 x 4.2 joules/deg for the entropy of a bacterial cell. Using the relation H = S/(k In 2), we find that the information content is 4 x 10^12 bits. Morowitz’ deduction from the work of Bayne-Jones and Rhees gives the lower value of 5.6 x 10^11 bits, which is still in the neighborhood of 10^12 bits. Thus two quite different approaches give rather concordant figures. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18hO1bteXTPOqQtd2H12PI5wFFoTjwg8uBAU5N0nEQIE/edit ,,, 10^12 bits is the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica.

Moreover, Darwinists also believe that unguided material processes, (again as long as they have access to energy), can, all by their lonesome, continue to generate the information in order to create all life on earth,

The information content of the human body,,,,,"the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000." In a TED Talk, (the Question You May Not Ask,,, Where did the information come from?) – November 29, 2017 Excerpt: Sabatini is charming.,,, he deploys some memorable images. He points out that the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000. Later he wheels out the entire genome, in printed form, of a human being,,,,: [F]or the first time in history, this is the genome of a specific human, printed page-by-page, letter-by-letter: 262,000 pages of information, 450 kilograms.,,, https://evolutionnews.org/2017/11/in-a-ted-talk-heres-the-question-you-may-not-ask/

And Darwinists also believe that unguided material processes can continue to generate the information for all future life on earth and the universe into perpetuity (again, as long as unguided material processes have access to energy).

The Future of Human Evolution in Space August 2, 2020 What will humans look like in the distant future? The future of human evolution in space could mean both biological and technological changes for our species. https://thecosmiccompanion.net/the-future-of-human-evolution-in-space/ Sage Against the Machine By Tunku Varadarajan - Aug. 31, 2018 Excerpt: if you believe that “machines can re-create new machines in a steady cascade of greater capabilities that are beyond human comprehension and control, you really believe that’s the end of the human race.” Mr. Gilder rejects the premise. “Machines can’t be minds,” he says. “Information theory shows that.” Citing Claude Shannon, the American mathematician acknowledged as the father of information theory, Mr. Gilder says that “information is surprise. Creativity always comes as a surprise to us. If it wasn’t surprising, we wouldn’t need it.” However useful they may be, “machines are not capable of creativity.” Human minds can generate counterfactuals, imaginative flights, dreams. By contrast, “a surprise in a machine is a breakdown. You don’t want your machines to have surprising outcomes!” https://www.wsj.com/articles/sage-against-the-machine-1535747443

In effect, Darwinists believe in a form of perpetual motion machines that make all of the other absurd claims for perpetual motions machines look sane in comparison. , Darwinists not only believe that unguided material processes can, (all by their lonesome), create perpetual motion machines in the first place, but they also believe that these perpetual motion machines can then create, (again by completely unguided material processes), even greater and more complex perpetual motion machines, which then go on to create, (again via completely unguided material processes) even greater and more complex perpetual motion machines,,, and on and on ad infinitum. (again, just so long as these unguided material processes have access to energy) It is a virtual perpetual motion machines, making other perpetual motion machines, making other perpetual motion machines, madhouse that Darwinists live in! :) Willy Wonka would be amazed and in awe! Might it be too obvious to suggest that Darwinists, rather than basing their assumptions on any known science, are actually living in a "Alice in Wonderland" of pure poppycock? Darwinists, directly contrary to what their, apparently, unrestrained imaginations are willing to believe, simply have no evidence whatsoever that unguided material processes can generate the immaterial information that is necessary for life to overcome the second law of thermodynamics.

Evolutionary Computation: A Perpetual Motion Machine for Design Information? By Robert J. Marks II Final thoughts. Search spaces require structuring for search algorithms to be viable. This includes evolutionary search for a targeted design goal. The added structure information needs to be implicitly infused into the search space and is used to guide the process to a desired result. The target can be specific, as is the case with a precisely identified phrase; or it can be general, such as meaningful phrases that will pass, say, a spelling and grammar check. In any case, there is yet no perpetual motion machine for the design of information arising from evolutionary computation. https://web.archive.org/web/20080429222714/http://www.4truth.net/site/c.hiKXLbPNLrF/b.2903953/k.26C8/Evolutionary_Computation_A_Perpetual_Motion_Machine_for_Design_Information__Apologetics.htm Top Ten Questions and Objections to 'Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics' - Robert J. Marks II - June 12, 2017 Excerpt: There exists no (computer) model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. Period. By “model,” we mean definitive simulations or foundational mathematics required of a hard science.,,, We show that no meaningful information can arise from an evolutionary process unless that process is guided. Even when guided, the degree of evolution’s accomplishment is limited by the expertise of the guiding information source — a limit we call Basener’s ceiling. An evolutionary program whose goal is to master chess will never evolve further and offer investment advice.,,, There exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. Hard sciences are built on foundations of mathematics or definitive simulations. Examples include electromagnetics, Newtonian mechanics, geophysics, relativity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, optics, and many areas in biology. Those hoping to establish Darwinian evolution as a hard science with a model have either failed or inadvertently cheated. These models contain guidance mechanisms to land the airplane squarely on the target runway despite stochastic wind gusts. Not only can the guiding assistance be specifically identified in each proposed evolution model, its contribution to the success can be measured, in bits, as active information.,,, Models of Darwinian evolution, Avida and EV included, are searches with a fixed goal. For EV, the goal is finding specified nucleotide binding sites. Avida’s goal is to generate an EQU logic function. Other evolution models that we examine in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics likewise seek a prespecified goal.,,, The most celebrated attempt of an evolution model without a goal of which we’re aware is TIERRA. In an attempt to recreate something like the Cambrian explosion on a computer, the programmer created what was thought to be an information-rich environment where digital organisms would flourish and evolve. According to TIERRA’s ingenious creator, Thomas Ray, the project failed and was abandoned. There has to date been no success in open-ended evolution in the field of artificial life.5,,, We show that the probability resources of the universe and even string theory’s hypothetical multiverse are insufficient to explain the specified complexity surrounding us.,,, If a successful search requires equaling or exceeding some degree of active information, what is the chance of finding any search with as good or better performance? We call this a search-for-the-search. In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we show that the search-for-the-search is exponentially more difficult than the search itself!,,, ,,,we use information theory to measure meaningful information and show there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.,,, ,,, if the fitness continues to change, it is argued, the evolved entity can achieve greater and greater specified complexity,,, ,,, We,, dub the overall search structure 'stair step active information'. Not only is guidance required on each stair, but the next step must be carefully chosen to guide the process to the higher fitness landscape and therefore ever increasing complexity.,,, Such fine tuning is the case of any fortuitous shift in fitness landscapes and increases, not decreases, the difficulty of evolution of ever-increasing specified complexity. It supports the case there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.,,, Turing’s landmark work has allowed researchers, most notably Roger Penrose,26 to make the case that certain of man’s attributes including creativity and understanding are beyond the capability of the computer.,,, ,,, there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. According to our current understanding, there never will be.,,, https://evolutionnews.org/2017/06/top-ten-questions-and-objections-to-introduction-to-evolutionary-informatics/

Verse:

John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

bornagain77

All one needs to do is realize that if a solution were found, we would have proved something obviously false, that a few (four, apparently) fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into libraries full of science texts and encyclopedias, computers connected to monitors, keyboards, laser printers and the Internet, cars, trucks, airplanes, nuclear power plants and Apple iPhones. Is this really a valid proof? It seems perfectly valid to me, as I cannot think of anything in all of science that can be stated with more confidence than that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could not have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones.

I agree, but then that is not what is being claimed, is it? The claim is that life-forms arose from inanimate chemical precursors and they evolved into increasingly complex creatures that could eventually design and build Apple iPhones. As for complexity emerging from simplicity, in Big Bang cosmology the four fundamental forces are thought to have emerged from a unified state in the very early stages of expansion. As the universe cooled, hydrogen formed and from that simple start the 94 naturally-occurring elements formed and everything else we observe has formed from them. Complexity can emerge from simplicity. Even mathematicians should be able to see that in the stunning beauty of fractal patterns. And if the claim is that biologists make poor mathematicians then the counter-claim is that mathematicians make poor biologists but make up for that short-coming with, in some cases, a well-earned reputation for arrogance. Seversky

Yup. Like the origin of the entire universe, both are untestable and unquantifiable. Not worth bothering about. polistra