Science and Freethinking

_{Gil Dodgen

September 23, 2011

Intelligent Design}

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Everyone has a religion, a raison d’être, and mine was once Dawkins’. I had the same disdain for people of faith that he does, only I could have put him to shame with the power and passion of my argumentation.

But something happened. As a result of my equally passionate love of science, logic, and reason, I realized that I had been conned. The creation story of my atheistic, materialistic religion suddenly made no sense.

This sent a shock wave through both my mind and my soul. Could it be that I’m not just the result of random errors filtered by natural selection? Am I just the product of the mindless, materialistic processes that “only legitimate scientists” all agree produced me? Does my life have any ultimate purpose or meaning? Am I just a meat-machine with no other purpose than to propagate my “selfish genes”?

Ever since I was a child I thought about such things, but I put my blind faith in the “scientists” who taught me that all my concerns were irrelevant, that science had explained, or would eventually explain, everything in purely materialistic terms.

But I’m a freethinker, a legitimate scientist. I follow the evidence wherever it leads. And the evidence suggests that the universe and living systems are the product of an astronomically powerful creative intelligence.

Comments

Liz, "I think Einstein has it the right way round" You mean Einstein ripped off Galatians 3:28. Changed Jesus --> universe. Einstein: "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe" Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."junkdnaforlife_{October 8, 2011
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Elizabeth, I don't think there's any climbing up this slope. If the conditions in the experiment are exactly like those on early earth, that changes nothing. We have results deliberately produced in specified conditions. We can infer that they could have come about naturally, but that they can be intentionally produced is demonstrated, not inferred. Big difference. Then factor in that we're not quite sure about those early earth conditions. That adds doubts to the inference but not to the demonstration.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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heh :) Thanks for the interesting conversation, Scott. In answer to your question: because if the conditions are those that are likely to have pertained on early earth, then we are in a completely different ball-game as to the probability that those conditions should have come about somewhere in the universe, or indeed that the conditions in our universe should have come about. More interesting questions :) Cheers LizzieElizabeth Liddle_{October 8, 2011
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BTW Petrushka, here's an even better question. You're the CEO and Szostak is the engineer. He tells you he's working on finding out how to originate life. (I'm not making that part up.) It might not be exactly like ours, but the goal is self-reproducing life. It's your company, stocks, and stockholders. Will you invest in it?ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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Petrushka, "If you use selection, you are using evolution." Are we talking about Darwinian evolution? Forgive my ignorance, but I thought that Darwinian evolution meant RV+NS, where NS is natural selection, i.e. one unaided by intelligence. If I am using selection with at least minimum analysis it ceases to be purely natural. Am I missing something?Eugene S_{October 8, 2011
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Petrushka, Why are you asking me? This is Szostak's research. Why don't you ask him if he thinks it's feasible? If you don't OOL research might feasibly lead to something just say so.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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Elizabeth, You are making my point for me.
Merely noting that human beings could intend to bring about conditions in which life would spontaneously form does not allow us to infer that an unidentified being could both intend and actually bring about those conditions.
Then why does it allow us to infer that it could happen without the human beings who "brought about the conditions?" (Which makes it sound like setting the thermostat. I'm pretty sure it takes years of education, and lots of planning to 'bring about the conditions.') You can't have it both ways. If intelligently designing something doesn't support intelligent design then how on earth does it support spontaneous formation? If my inference is wrong then what is yours? If this research doesn't support my position, it supports theirs even less. That's my evil plan and so far I'm getting away with it.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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61.1.1.1.19 DMullenix, "Since rests on belief... - Nonsense". If you show me how you can rationally disprove solipsism, I will call you a greatest philosopher since Socrates. Are you prepared to take up the challenge? I am all curiosity.Eugene S_{October 8, 2011
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Although for the sake of argument I've allowed that OOL research supports both abiogenesis (as it was meant to) and design, it becomes less plausible as I reason on it. Intelligent agents start with a goal, life or something like it. You can't research OOL without at least some definition of L. They analyze the goal to see how achieving it might be broken into steps. They then formulate testable hypotheses to determine whether they can carry out such steps. If they find success, they must then determine how to perform these steps in sequence to achieve a result. This would be laudable achievement, to say the least. And I'm the last person to say it's impossible. But who am I kidding if I say that all of this could plausibly demonstrate what might happen on its own? It would be the reverse engineering and reproduction of life. Why would anyone think otherwise? If anyone ever gets close they're going to drop the OOL pretense in heartbeat and call it what it is - the synthesis of self-reproducing life. Having performed this demonstration of the capability of intelligent agency, true abiogenesis would be a whole new field of research - scientists attempting to remove themselves step by step from the process until it can happen without them. My guess is that they'd much rather play with their new sea monkeys. I would.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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This is incorrect. OOL research does not merely suggest what processes might have been involved. In each case it demonstrates how an intelligent agent might initiate them. In each case there was an intelligent agent. Why postulate? These are people with names. They actually did this stuff.
Initiate - as in will - them, yes. But execute? No. In the case of the OOL researchers, they are indeed people with names, and, most importantly, hands. Not only that, but they have lab apparatus, books of knowledge, buildings, etc. Merely noting that human beings could intend to bring about conditions in which life would spontaneously form does not allow us to infer that an unidentified being could both intend and actually bring about those conditions. For that, we'd need to postulate, as I keep saying, and actual physical mechanism. gpuccio has suggested one. Would you go along with his?
How do they know which questions to ask and which experiments to perform? Is it not by analyzing the finished product (which now becomes the goal or target) and intelligently breaking its formation into plausible steps?
No, it doesn't work like that, because the theory we have is a stochastic one. Should life forms spontaneously in an lab, there is no guarantee at all that the "winning" variants in any generation will be the same as the "winning" variants in our own ancestry. We can predict that an acorn will grown into a tree, but we cannot predict how many branches it will have, how many twigs on those branches, or where they will end up. Same with the tree of life - starting from even the same "seed" is massively unlikely to result in the same "tree". Conversely, starting at a twig, we can trace a unique path to the trunk, but starting at the trunk we cannot aim at any particular twig. There is no "goal" in evolution, and the only goal in OOL research is to find the conditions underwhich our common ancestor might have emerged from non-life. Reproducing our own line of descent would be impossible, even if we can infer it from the twig backwards, as it were.Elizabeth Liddle_{October 8, 2011
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So pretend you are an engineer and I'm the CEO. You come to me with this great new product idea, call it iLife. Show me your feasibility study.Petrushka_{October 8, 2011
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One more important reason why this research supports design even more than it supports unassisted processes: How do they know which questions to ask and which experiments to perform? Is it not by analyzing the finished product (which now becomes the goal or target) and intelligently breaking its formation into plausible steps? Intelligence is required not only to perform the experiments, but to determine even a potential sequence of steps leading to a result.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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Elizabeth,
all they, as intentional “designers” need do to get simple forms of life started on a Darwinian path is to provide the necessary non-replicating starting molecules and environment, then the argument that we can infer a Designer from the complexity of life forms is undermined.
That's all good. They are demonstrating how an unknown agent or unknown process (I'm deliberately not elevating either) might initiate self-replication.
OOL research, if it succeeds, may well tell us what sort of physico-chemical processes were involved in the transition from non-life to life, but it won’t tell us how your postulated intelligent agent was involved.
This is incorrect. OOL research does not merely suggest what processes might have been involved. In each case it demonstrates how an intelligent agent might initiate them. In each case there was an intelligent agent. Why postulate? These are people with names. They actually did this stuff.
I’ve simply noted that the objection, raised by IDers, to non-ID theories is often that there is no evidence for OOL!
That's funny, because looking back I realize that. My conclusion is that regardless of how one views this research, as significant or trivial, it supports design just as it supports unassisted processes. The edge goes to design because the experiments are deliberate and repeatable, not fortuitous observations of unassisted events.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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Show me a human designer that does not have catalogs of materials that list their attributes, strengths, costs, and so forth. All that information was acquired by testing and put into tables and books. Show me in principle where the designer of life looks up the attributes of coding sequences. How was this knowledge acquired? Give me a thought experiment that illustrates how this could be done.Petrushka_{October 8, 2011
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Elizabeth, I am agreeing with most of what you say.
:)

if, in a lab … you observed self-replicating proto-organisms emerge and start to evolve … the argument that there must have been a designer … would be refuted, wouldn’t it?
Without a doubt. But you distract by referring to what has never happened. I am talking about real tests and real data. They have already occurred. And we are both agreeing that they offer some degree of support for the idea of abiogenesis.
Excellent :)
Now, back to the point. Many, including yourself, have compared ID unfavorably to abiogenesis research on the basis that ID offers no mechanisms. (It is not the business of ID to do so, but I’ll leave that aside.) I am stating, again, that those comparisons are refuted. Abiogenesis research is design research whether it wants to be or not.
Well, I haven't compared OOL research unfavorably with ID - I've simply noted that the objection, raised by IDers, to non-ID theories is often that there is no evidence for OOL! As you say, there is. And if your view of ID is that science can shed light on how life was put together, fine. But it seems to me that you are still missing rather an important point that I was trying to make: if OOL researchers manage to demonstrate (which they have not yet done) that all they, as intentional "designers" need do to get simple forms of life started on a Darwinian path is to provide the necessary non-replicating starting molecules and environment, then the argument that we can infer a Designer from the complexity of life forms is undermined. We would know then that the Designer didn't have to code by hand a complex genonomic sequence, rather that these appears spontaneously given simple household ingredients as it were. You can still, if you like, credit a designer with having assembled those ingredients, placed them in a bowl, and cooked them at an appropriate temperature perhaps, but that is a rather different skill set than those of the übernerd inferred from, for example, the existence of the ribozome!
That is my point. The objection that ID has no mechanisms, while misguided and irrelevant, is nonetheless refuted.
OK, here is another remaining point of disagreement. First of all, it is not refuted, because when we ask for "ID mechanisms" we are not asking for the chemical interactions required. What we are asking for is, if you like, the test-tubes and bunsen-burners. OOL research, if it succeeds, may well tell us what sort of physico-chemical processes were involved in the transition from non-life to life, but it won't tell us how your postulated intelligent agent was involved. This is why the question is, in fact, relevant. You raised earlier the analogy of arson. If we can show (as was the case with Cameron Todd) that a fire site has the pattern of deliberate fire-setting, we could conclude that a human being was responsible for it. But it we can also show that a similar pattern can also be found in non-arson fires, then the only way of distinguishing between the two cases is by looking for evidence not merely of the pattern of destruction of the fire, but the patterns that indicate how it was set up, e.g. was any gasoline bought in unusual quantities by anyone recently, what were the patterns of movement of people near the house at the time, did anyone have a motive, etc. If OOL researcher succeed in demonstrating the transition from non-life to life, yes, they have shown that it is possible when set up intentionally by human beings in a lab, and may well also have shown that it is possible given conditions that prevailed on early earth. But to show that it the conditions on early earth were set up by the equivalent of human beings in a lab, then you have to start looking for evidence of that lab activity! They would have shown that the pattern alone is not enough to distinguish between spontaneous generation and deliberate generation. Hope that makes some sense :) Anyway, nice to get on to less contentious terms! Cheers LizzieElizabeth Liddle_{October 8, 2011
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Petrushka, From the top: Surely, seeing the result, we must agree that something is capable of producing it. What observed entity or process meets that criteria? None. So do we want to look for an explanation or not? That criteria, applied consistently, eliminates everything. We can regard it as neutral or eliminate the possibility of our own existence. Observed instances of action - see the above. What is this I keep reading about possible functional sequences and storage spaces? It makes no sense. Which is on your hard drive - every sentence you've ever typed or every sentence you could ever type? Do you see that one requires an incomprehensible amount of storage while the other fits on your hard drive? We've addressed how this information is acquired. There's no shortcut to figuring out whether a sequence of folds in paper results in a swan, flower, or anything else interesting. If that's how people approached anything there could be no origami. As gpuccio said, that's why we're intelligent. We have better ways of solving problems, like starting from a goal and working backwards. Both abiogenesis and evolution are plagued by holes and inconsistencies. But you prefer to interpret these as "gaps." Right now there is no detailed explanation from anyone of how everything got here. But you exhibit preference. On one side you see fatal flaws and on the other you see gaps. And I really don't think you can even see it.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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Thanks,gpuccio!
Elizabeth: Well, leaving aside how good NDEs are of out-of-brain phenomena (I’m not convinced), descriptions of them suggest that the out-of-body person can see and hear (but not, oddly, touch) the world. So what do you think the brain is doing when we see and hear – if the disembodied mind can do both, surely we don’t need our visual and auditory systems, yet we seem to have them. Also they often mislead us. How can this be, if the mind is in control of the brain, and has its own perceptual faculties? In fact, how, in your model, can we account for mental illness, or neurological disability? The mind in the human state is strongly connected to its physical interface. Therefore, it vastly has to be influenced by the interface itself. Seein or hearing inputs from the outer world needs inputs for the outer world, and those inputs are received and processed through the brain. In NDEs, like in mystical experiences, the mind is partially or completely freed from its connection to the body and brain. Therefore, it can easily perceive other things.
But in NDEs, apparently the mind does receive inputs from the outer world. In fact, the people who are most convinced that NDEs are evidence of a disembodied mind actually point to how veridical the experience is, and that actual mundane objects - a random number, a stray comment - are experienced and remembered. And that is what I am trying to probe: if the disembodied mind has its own direct inputs from the world, why does it need a brain? It seems to me the brain is not so much serving as a computer, but as blinkers, blocking the better reception of the world-signal that is available to the disembodied mind! That's why I keep asking: what does the disembodied mind use the brain for? And why? Especially when that brain malfuctions and reports illusory signals from non-existent world-sources?
But, indeed, all power of representation, including seeing and hearing, is ultimately of consciousness, not of the brain. The brain passes to consciousness what will be represented, and the flow of information from ouer reality is soi strong that usually cosnciousness cannot perceive other realities.
But what of the conflicting messages, both received from the world, one by the brain, one by the mind? OK, I've got an answer - the disembodied mind is free to roam, but when the brain and body are off-line, it has to switch off its own sight/sound faculty, otherwise it will give erroneous information to the body about where that body is located in space. When at home, the disembodied mind needs a reliable GPS which it can only get from the brain. When away, it doesn't need a body-centred GPS, because it doesn't need its body. hmmm. The disembodied mind has sight, hearing, no touch, but, apparently, proprioception, but only Point-of-View centred, not body-centred. It can also perceive, when away from home, realities unavailabe to it when at home. OK then here is my next question: if the disembodied mind has all these properties, including some properties shared by the brain (receiving world sight and sound signals, computing spatial coordinates), and we have excellent accounts of how the brain does these things, and we also only ever (and of course only can) hear about NDE experiences once the disembodied mind is back in residence and has access to these brain computations, why should I, as a skeptic, think other than that the brain is simply computing the experience post-hoc? It seems quite a clunky theory at this point! Is it not more elegant, and parsimonious, to posit that what we call, and experience as, the mind is not the sum of the data-gathering, forward modelling, backward modelling, re-entrant looping and decision making that we know it can do? That consciousness simply arises logically once the neural circuitry that enables a brain-bearing organism to parse itself as a responsible decision-maker in the landscape in which it sits?
A consciousness strongly connected to the brain is strongly limited in its representations when the brain is damaged. That does not mean that its potentials are forever compromised.
So the brain, is, at best, a limiter that adds a few additional features, such as touch information, and at worst, a serious block to right-perception?
OK, let’s take a neuron, firing stochastically. Every time it fires, it slightly changes the polarisation of the post-synaptic neuron. For that post-synaptic neuron to fire, many depolarising signals need to be received from a whole population of other neurons within a certain time-window. And let’s say, that at quantum level, the disembodied brain nudges certain electrons so that an ion travels in direction x instead of direction y, thus tipping the balance of one of the presynaptic neurons into firing a fraction earlier than it would otherwise have done, thus just making the critical time-window of the post-synaptic neuron and causing it to fire when it would not other wise have done. In this way, a tiny quantum nudge by the disembodied mind is amplified, just like the butterfly in Peking, into a cascade of neural events and behaviours that would not otherwise have happened, but which is the intended output of the disembodied mind. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind?
Yes! You said it very well. Thank you for the cooperation :) .
Thanks :) But it's an argument I've made myself many times :) I no longer think it works though, so I don't make it. I do understand it though :)
For the remaining discussion, you should probably read some of my older posts about free will, but I have not the link now, nor the time to write it all again for the moment. In brief, just to start the discussion, I believe that free will is always present as the possibility of reacting differently, sometimes very slightly differently, to the existing outer and inner conditions at every moment. IOWs, whatever our instant situation, we can always react differently. Sometimes that difference is only inner, sometimes it can change our outer actions. The free choice is based on an inner intuition of the moral value of the different possibilities, however tiny the difference may be. IOWs, consciousness has always an inner connection, totally intuitive, with a “moral field”: some reaction to the present condition are “better” (morally), others are “worse” (morally). The cumulative effect of our moment by moment use of free will influences our future conditions (IOWs, determines to which situation, inner or outer, we have to react). We usually call “freedom” the range of possibilities that our free will can access, at a certain moment. We can have greater freedom or lesser freedom (that is a preexisting condition at each moment), but our free will is always there to be exerted for good or for bad. However, if we posit (as I do) that mind is what the brain does, there is no such difficulty. We make our decisions based on the data we collect from our sensory organs, parsed by the brain into objects, and people, and goals, and abstractions, and act on the basis of that information, simulating the likely results of our action, and feeding back those results into the decision-making process.
Well, that's quite neat, and again, I've made similar arguments myself. But here's my question: if the disembodied brain can do this when embodied, as it were, on what basis can it make decisions when the brain is offline? Where does the data come from in that case?
In strong AI, there is no true I, no true consciousness. There is no true free will, because we don’t choose anything.
And there is where I utterly disagree :) I see no reason why the "I" of our theoretical strong AI robot - our philosophical zombie if you like - should not be a "true I". Why should it not be, if it does everything that a "natural" I would do? How could it even have an "I" if it were not conscious of itself? Or, if you are saying that it could not have an "I", then it is certainly possible, even now, to make robots that know where "they" are, in relation to where other things are, and to where they need to be to accomplish some goal; to simulate the results of two possible courses of action, and feed that simulation into the decision-making process that determines their course of action, in other words, they choose, based on learned experience of what actions tend to produce what results. Now, I'm not saying these robots are conscious in any sense we would recognise because their repertoire of decision-making is, as yet, circumscribed - they are not free, or, at least, not very. But we know, mathematically at least, that once you introduce non-linearities into a decision-making system you can reach a tipping point at which the possible decisions are completely unknown in advance, and possibly infinite. At that point, I'd say the robot was "free" - any decision is possible, and the only agent making those decisions is the robot. It certainly isn't anyone else, because, just as in evolutionary algorithms, while the starting population might be intelligently designed, the final populations are novel, and often ingenious.
Compatibilism is a gross fraud. If everything is determined, either by outer or inner conditions, there is no free will, and we cannot in any way change our destiny. Our destiny is already written by “forces” that we cannot control. Indeed, we ourselves don’t exist.
I disagree :) I mean, I don't think we do live in a deterministic universe (or, at least, current evidence seems to suggest, as you do, that quantum uncertainty is real) but I don't even think it's a crucial point. "We" control our decisions because "we" are, in my view, the decision making-apparatus, or, at least, we are if we take ownership of it, which I do. As Daniel Dennett says: the act of taking moral responsibility is a self-defining act. You are right, IMO, in one sense: if we define ourselves as entirely the resultant of material forces outside our control for which we have no responsibility, we define ourselves out of existence. But if we define ourselves as the nexus of decision-making that, intuitively, we think of ourselves as being, then we define ourselves into existence. That self-defining act is no more an illusion than any parsing of the world into objects, whether autonomous or inanimate. i.e. not.

Without a brain, I don’t see how moral and creative decisions can be made, or, if they can be, what is all that moral and creative decision-making machinery in the brain for, and why, when it goes wrong (as it often, sadly, does), does our disembodied mind not simply over-ride it?
The brain does not “decide”. The brain elaborates. Some output, indeed many of them, are simply elaborated, and consciousness has no real control on them. But, if a true decision is made, it is made by cosnciousness through free will, in the context of the possibilities elaborated by the brain. A purely compulsive output of the brain is not a decision (although it is often called that way).
Well, that's interesting :) My own field, as it happens, is the neuroscience of decision-making, specifically of impulsive (and compulsive) decision-making as opposed to more considered "executive" decision-making. And yes, I would agree that a highly impulse response is scarcely a "decision" (although one can make a considered decision to make future decisions impulsive, as a soldier does who trains himself to shoot first, think later, or, more benignly, a musician who trains herself to sight-read fast music). And we have reasonably good neural accounts of this kind of decision-making. But we also have good neural accounts of "executive" decisions, that may require the postponement of a response until further information becomes available, or the consideration of other actors. I see no reason to think that the brain only responds reflexively and some non-brain force is responsible for considered, controlled, decision-making. Indeed, we can even treat impulsiveness pharmacologically :) You might (or might not) be interested in a paper by me and my colleagues here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02333.x/abstract If you'd like a copy, contact me at The Skeptical Zone and I'll email you one. Let me end with this lovely passage by Einstein:
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
I think Einstein has it the right way round :)Elizabeth Liddle_{October 8, 2011
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Which attributes? Be specific, and explain why each attribute of such a designer is relevant to the concept of ID. Otherwise your objection is irrelevant.
1. Capabilities and limitations. 2. Observed instances of action. Actions that can be discerned as standing out against a background of regular and consistent physical processes. Regarding capabilities, I would like to see some discussion, in principle, of how and where the proposed designer stores and accesses the database of functional coding and regulatory sequences that would be required to design and update living things without using evolutionary algorithms or evolutionary processes. ID proponents commonly speak of something on the order of 10^500 possible coding sequences. If one in a trillion trillion are functional, that leaves something like 10^470 functional protein coding sequences, and an indefinite number of possible regulatory sequences. Where does the designer store these, since these numbers are greater than the number of particles in the universe. How was this information acquired? ID supporters like Douglas Axe are on record that there is no shortcut to figuring out how a sequence relates to a fold. And there appears to be no shortcut to knowing whether a particular fold will be functional. Other than selection.Petrushka_{October 8, 2011
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Petrushka, You are misapplying this rule of thumb in two ways.
one should not invoke unnecessary entities to explain things. In order to justify a designer other than evolution, one must demonstrate that known mechanisms of genetic change cannot supply the observed changes.
First you omit OOL. In light of your statement you cannot separate it from evolution. Second, the principle is that we shouldn't invoke entities unnecessarily. To say that such an agency is unnecessary is begging the question, assuming that 'known mechanisms of genetic change can supply the observed changes.' If they can supply such changes than no other agent is necessary (once you get the trivial OOL details worked out.) If they cannot, then that is exactly why another explanation is necessary. IOW, you're just begging the question.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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Petrushka, It's one thing to say that something is lacking. You must explain why that lack is relevant.
The thing lacking in ID is not the history of change, but the list of attributes of the agency responsible for the change.
Which attributes? Be specific, and explain why each attribute of such a designer is relevant to the concept of ID. Otherwise your objection is irrelevant. ID does not apply only to biology. Therefore in principle it has no relation to any specific artifact or designer. How then can the attributes of a designer be relevant? I don't need to know what color your hair is or how tall you are. But, you're thinking, that's not the sort of attribute you're talking about. So tell me what sort of attribute you are talking about and how it affects ID. You should be able to respond quickly and easily, because surely you wouldn't have raised the objection that ID omits attributes without thinking through which ones or why. Otherwise you'd just be striking out at random.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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There's a rather old rule of thumb in science, one of Newton's rules, that says one should not invoke unnecessary entities to explain things. In order to justify a designer other than evolution, one must demonstrate that known mechanisms of genetic change cannot supply the observed changes.Petrushka_{October 8, 2011
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That is my point. The objection that ID has no mechanisms, while misguided and irrelevant, is nonetheless refuted.
There has never been any dispute about the fact of genetic change (except possibly by young earth creationists). The thing lacking in ID is not the history of change, but the list of attributes of the agency responsible for the change. We do not have a final understanding of what "gravity" is, but we have a rather good mathematical description of it. Regarding evolution, we have rather a rather good understanding of population genetics that does not require foresight in creating variations. It really doesn't matter whether variation is truly random, pseudo-random, or nudged by a non-material designer. The results are mathematically indistinguishable.Petrushka_{October 8, 2011
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Elizabeth, I am agreeing with most of what you say.
if, in a lab ... you observed self-replicating proto-organisms emerge and start to evolve ... the argument that there must have been a designer ... would be refuted, wouldn’t it?
Without a doubt. But you distract by referring to what has never happened. I am talking about real tests and real data. They have already occurred. And we are both agreeing that they offer some degree of support for the idea of abiogenesis. Now, back to the point. Many, including yourself, have compared ID unfavorably to abiogenesis research on the basis that ID offers no mechanisms. (It is not the business of ID to do so, but I'll leave that aside.) I am stating, again, that those comparisons are refuted. Abiogenesis research is design research whether it wants to be or not. That is my point. The objection that ID has no mechanisms, while misguided and irrelevant, is nonetheless refuted.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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Yes, I know. That's what I said! Scott, you seem so convinced that I am disagreeing with you that you aren't noticing when I agree! Obviously, if you can do something intentionally, you are demonstrating that it can be done intentionally. To show that it can happen naturally you have to go further - demonstrate that your lab conditions are likely to have occurred naturally, or, alternatively, that you can do by emulating in the lab conditions for which you have evidence that they pertained at the time. However, I made a further point: that if, in a lab, by providing only starting conditions that consisted of simple organic molecules and maybe some kind of inorganic substrate, you observed self-replicating proto-organisms emerge and start to evolve, then whether or not you then concluded that a designer could have set up those starting conditions, the argument that there must have been a designer because life can't emerge spontaneously from non-life, and life is too complex to emerge by Darwinian mechanisms, would be refuted, wouldn't it? We'd know that no lab technician was tinkering with the evolving genomes (or at least we could insist that this was verified), and that all that had been "designed" was the provision of naturally occurring ingredients in an environment.Elizabeth Liddle_{October 8, 2011
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No, the idea is different. Consciousness interacts with the outer world through the brain (and the body). That’s correct. It collects information, processes it, and outputs actions, and all that goes through the interface. Without the brain activity, cosnciousness remains active, but will represent and cognize other things. That rarely happens clearly in the cosncious state, because consciousness is so focused on brain acticity. I have given you the example of NDEs as a model for conscious activity not connected to brain activity (I know you will dispute that, but I am absolutely convinced that it is the truth). I give you another model: the experiences of the mystics. Here, again, we have experience of an inner world usually not accessible to common experience, and completely independent of connections with the outer world.
But I think you've missed my point. Let's accept NDE experience for the sake of argument now: as reported they are not of "other things" but of every day worldly things - the operating theatre, the child in the room next door, the window ledge outside etc. All things that brains normally collect and, in your model, present to the disembodied mind. So, if the disembodied mind can see, and hear, when the brain is offline, what it that the brain does for it when it is online? As far as I can see, the one thing the brain does do is provide touch sensation (the disembodied mind seems unable to touch the world); however, apart from that advantage, it seems mostly to restrict the mind - tethers the point-of-view (literally) to the body, instead of letting it roam free. So why does the disembodied mind even bother with the body? And what about that duplication of sensory input?
A whole inner life can be experienced which arises from the depths of human consciousness, and of its relationship with the divine. And that relationship, even at simple or low level, is beautiful, harmonious, cognitively satisfying, simple, and full of love.
Oh, I agree. I just don't think the apparatus that allows all that is "disembodied".
Believe me, the disembodied mind is everything but blind, deaf, and anaesthetised.
I was thinking of anaesthetised as in local anaesthetic, not general. NDEers seem able to float through solids, not engage with them. As for blindness and deafness - I repeat: if the disembodied mind is neither blind nor deaf, what purpose does the brain's visual and auditory systems serve it? (That question is in my other post, so perhaps you are dealing with it there :))
You will probably try to explain all that with some smart strong AI concoction. OK, who cares? :)
Well, I could try, but I won't :) I'm just trying to probe the implications of your model right now :)Elizabeth Liddle_{October 8, 2011
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Elizabeth: Well, leaving aside how good NDEs are of out-of-brain phenomena (I’m not convinced), descriptions of them suggest that the out-of-body person can see and hear (but not, oddly, touch) the world. So what do you think the brain is doing when we see and hear – if the disembodied mind can do both, surely we don’t need our visual and auditory systems, yet we seem to have them. Also they often mislead us. How can this be, if the mind is in control of the brain, and has its own perceptual faculties? In fact, how, in your model, can we account for mental illness, or neurological disability? The mind in the human state is strongly connected to its physical interface. Therefore, it vastly has to be influenced by the interface itself. Seein or hearing inputs from the outer world needs inputs for the outer world, and those inputs are received and processed through the brain. In NDEs, like in mystical experiences, the mind is partially or completely freed from its connection to the body and brain. Therefore, it can easily perceive other things. But, indeed, all power of representation, including seeing and hearing, is ultimately of consciousness, not of the brain. The brain passes to consciousness what will be represented, and the flow of information from ouer reality is soi strong that usually cosnciousness cannot perceive other realities. A consciousness strongly connected to the brain is strongly limited in its representations when the brain is damaged. That does not mean that its potentials are forever compromised. OK, let’s take a neuron, firing stochastically. Every time it fires, it slightly changes the polarisation of the post-synaptic neuron. For that post-synaptic neuron to fire, many depolarising signals need to be received from a whole population of other neurons within a certain time-window. And let’s say, that at quantum level, the disembodied brain nudges certain electrons so that an ion travels in direction x instead of direction y, thus tipping the balance of one of the presynaptic neurons into firing a fraction earlier than it would otherwise have done, thus just making the critical time-window of the post-synaptic neuron and causing it to fire when it would not other wise have done. In this way, a tiny quantum nudge by the disembodied mind is amplified, just like the butterfly in Peking, into a cascade of neural events and behaviours that would not otherwise have happened, but which is the intended output of the disembodied mind. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind? Yes! You said it very well. Thank you for the cooperation :) . For the remaining discussion, you should probably read some of my older posts about free will, but I have not the link now, nor the time to write it all again for the moment. In brief, just to start the discussion, I believe that free will is always present as the possibility of reacting differently, sometimes very slightly differently, to the existing outer and inner conditions at every moment. IOWs, whatever our instant situation, we can always react differently. Sometimes that difference is only inner, sometimes it can change our outer actions. The free choice is based on an inner intuition of the moral value of the different possibilities, however tiny the difference may be. IOWs, consciousness has always an inner connection, totally intuitive, with a "moral field": some reaction to the present condition are "better" (morally), others are "worse" (morally). The cumulative effect of our moment by moment use of free will influences our future conditions (IOWs, determines to which situation, inner or outer, we have to react). We usually call "freedom" the range of possibilities that our free will can access, at a certain moment. We can have greater freedom or lesser freedom (that is a preexisting condition at each moment), but our free will is always there to be exerted for good or for bad. However, if we posit (as I do) that mind is what the brain does, there is no such difficulty. We make our decisions based on the data we collect from our sensory organs, parsed by the brain into objects, and people, and goals, and abstractions, and act on the basis of that information, simulating the likely results of our action, and feeding back those results into the decision-making process. In strong AI, there is no true I, no true consciousness. There is no true free will, because we don't choose anything. Compatibilism is a gross fraud. If everything is determined, either by outer or inner conditions, there is no free will, and we cannot in any way change our destiny. Our destiny is already written by "forces" that we cannot control. Indeed, we ourselves don't exist. Without a brain, I don’t see how moral and creative decisions can be made, or, if they can be, what is all that moral and creative decision-making machinery in the brain for, and why, when it goes wrong (as it often, sadly, does), does our disembodied mind not simply over-ride it? The brain does not "decide". The brain elaborates. Some output, indeed many of them, are simply elaborated, and consciousness has no real control on them. But, if a true decision is made, it is made by cosnciousness through free will, in the context of the possibilities elaborated by the brain. A purely compulsive output of the brain is not a decision (although it is often called that way). Well, I have no more time now. I will be back.gpuccio_{October 8, 2011
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Elizabeth, You have it precisely backwards.
Yes. But if he shows that it can be done naturally, there is no reason to infer that it was done intentionally, even if it could have been.
The exact opposite has occurred. He has shown that it can be done intentionally and is inferring that it can be done naturally.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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Hi, Scott:
You are also entirely missing the point of what I am saying.
OK. It does happen, and I am trying :)
I don’t think anyone (or many people) think that the fact that something can occur “naturally” (without intention) means that it cannot occur “artificially” (by intention).
I am not suggesting that. That has nothing to do with what I am saying. I am saying, in very simple words, that by demonstrating that something can occur naturally by means of a repeatable experiment you even more conclusively demonstrate that it can occur deliberately.
Well, I'm not disputing that, at all, as I said explicitly in another post.
Before I used two sentences. That’s one. I can’t break it down any more. If a simple sentence can’t express a simple thought than an illustration is even more likely to be misunderstood. The objection is raised repeatedly that abiogenesis, even not well-defined, is supported by hypotheses and data, while no one bothers to do any such research with regard to design. My point is not to dispute the abiogenesis research. I am saying, as simply as I can, that the abiogenesis research is the design research. Let me repeat this because everyone who responds seems to seize something else and miss the central point. If I could make the font bigger I would. Abiogenesis research such as Szostak conducts is design research. While demonstrating what might occur naturally he even more convincingly demonstrates what can be done intentionally.
Yes. But if he shows that it can be done naturally, there is no reason to infer that it was done intentionally, even if it could have been. The parsimonious conclusion, absent any direct evidence of an intentional agent with the physical means to do it, is that it happened naturally.
I’ve said it perhaps ten times, and no one has objected while also indicating that they understand what I am saying.
Well, I understand that that must be frustrating. But I think people have understood it - clearly if something can be done in a lab, it can be done intentionally. But nobody that I know of is saying that it can't have been done intentionally. They are saying that it could also have been done naturally, and given the absence of evidence for an intentional agent, "naturally" is the more parsimonious conclusion. By the way, there's a good review article on OOL research in last month's New Scientist that seems to be open access: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251.300-first-life-the-search-for-the-first-replicator.html?page=1 As you imply, achieving OOL in the lab would certainly demonstrate that it could be done intentionally! To show it could have happened naturally, one would have to show that the lab conditions pertained on early earth. Nonetheless, seeing a life form start to evolve from scratch spontaneously under lab conditions would certainly suggest that no molecular level tinkering is required, just provision of the initial "Goldilocks" conditions for a Darwinian-capable self-replicator. For which an ID may well have been responsible, but the argument for a design inference from complexity would be refuted, wouldn't you say? Still, it hasn't been done yet :)Elizabeth Liddle_{October 8, 2011
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Elizabeth: No, the idea is different. Consciousness interacts with the outer world through the brain (and the body). That's correct. It collects information, processes it, and outputs actions, and all that goes through the interface. Without the brain activity, cosnciousness remains active, but will represent and cognize other things. That rarely happens clearly in the cosncious state, because consciousness is so focused on brain acticity. I have given you the example of NDEs as a model for conscious activity not connected to brain activity (I know you will dispute that, but I am absolutely convinced that it is the truth). I give you another model: the experiences of the mystics. Here, again, we have experience of an inner world usually not accessible to common experience, and completely independent of connections with the outer world. A whole inner life can be experienced which arises from the depths of human consciousness, and of its relationship with the divine. And that relationship, even at simple or low level, is beautiful, harmonious, cognitively satisfying, simple, and full of love. Believe me, the disembodied mind is everything but blind, deaf, and anaesthetised. You will probably try to explain all that with some smart strong AI concoction. OK, who cares? :)gpuccio_{October 8, 2011
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dmullenix, We're so often reminded that OOL and evolution are not the same thing. Has something changed?
You are declaring “Design!” with no trace of a Designer... while completely ignoring evolution which accounts very well for the life we find around us.
If I asked how evolution explains life ten people would jump on it and object that evolution doesn't explain life. But you boldly declare the very exact opposite for the sake of rhetoric. Here is a news flash: There is no "trace" of anything. There is just life. Show me a trace of chemical abiogenesis. Do you agree that we should stop looking for that as well? That your arguments are based on preference rather than reason is naked and exposed. That places them at a diagonal opposite from science.ScottAndrews_{October 8, 2011
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