And yet always just as far off:
In 2006, in a debate with Stephen Meyer, evolutionary paleontologist Peter Ward observed that, “Harvard University just put a hundred million dollars into a center for the origin of life,” and predicted that because origin of life research is “one of the hottest scientific areas in the world we will have artificial life I predict in a decade.” Ten years later, in 2016, also in a debate with Steve Meyer (and Denis Lamoureux), physicist Lawrence Krauss promised “We’re coming very close” to explaining the origin of life via chemical evolutionary models. We’re now 15 years out from the Meyer-Ward debate and nearly five years past the Meyer-Krauss-Lamoureux event. How are these promises of origin-of-life research faring?
At the end of last year, an article in Nature titled “The Water Paradox and the Origins of Life” admitted that there are still major problems facing some of the most basic steps in the origin of life: explaining how the first biomolecules arose in a prebiotic world. The article begins with the tagline: “Water is essential for life, but it breaks down DNA and other key molecules. So how did the first cells deal with such a necessary and dangerous substance?” The article then recounts origin of life theorists on different sides of a debate: some believe that life originated in an ocean, and others believe that life formed at the surface of the earth. What comes through clearly is that the field can’t even agree on the environment where life originated, a disagreement that stems directly from deep problems facing each proposal.
Casey Luskin, “Nature Article Admits Unanswered Origin-of-Life Questions, Exposing Broken Promises of ID Critics” at Evolution News and Science Today
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – origin of life What we do and don’t know about the origin of life.
Chuck at #9
I have no association with the Discovery folks, but I can read the relevant material. The literature clearly suggests that a set of constraints was organized to establish a medium, and that medium was used to describe both the set of constraints and the processes required to have them persist over time — otherwise, we would not be here to ask the question.
Re: Dr. Tour’s presentation, Episode 3:
Absolutely brilliant!
-Q
Querius @15
indeed, 3/13 Episode was brilliant!
I liked the following part explaining how Darwinian OOL-researchers imagine prebiotic chemical synthesis: “…and the resultant solution degassed for 15 mins”,
Dr. Tour ‘s sarcastic reaction: “… how you going to degass on an early Earth ? To do degassing you need a vacuum pump …….. No vacuum pumps on early Earth”
:)))))
PS: this example perfectly illustrates how Darwinians oversimplifying things… they have been doing it for 150 years…. but every lie sounds convincing when you are an uneducated Darwinian layman :)))
Promises, promises. I wouldn’t accept a check as payment from that dude.
Martin_r: Lets imagine, that Jesus Christ returned to Earth.
How could you be sure it was him?
As to: “How could you be sure it was him?”
Well, according to scripture, there will be no doubt,
JVL cites Dr. Tour’s article on Intelligent Design in which Dr. Tour states,
I suppose that by ‘canonical tools’ Dr. Tour is referring to scripture. And while I would disagree with Dr. Tour, (and others who are of the Theistic Evolution stripe), that the scriptures are ambiguous in this area, I would, instead of debating scripture, like to focus in on the science at hand.
To repeat what Dr. Tour stated, “All I can presently say is that my chemical tools do not permit my assessment of intelligent design.”
And indeed Dr. Tour’s focus is strictly on the chemistry at hand. And rightly so. That is his field of expertise by the way, where he is regarded as one of the top ten synthetic chemists in the world.
And in regards to chemistry and the OOL, Dr. Tour is not nearly so cautious as he was to his overall scientific inference to Intelligent Design . In regards to the current state of OOL chemistry, Dr. Tour has stated,
Needless to say, that is certainly NOT antagonistic to the overall scientific inference to Intelligent Design.
But, as Dr. Tour points out, chemistry can only get you so far as to the inference to Intelligent Design, i.e. “my chemical tools do not permit my assessment of intelligent design.”
But I hold that our science, in areas other than chemistry, (such as in thermodynamics and quantum mechanics), does allow a much stronger inference to Intelligent Design than Dr. Tour is willing to make from chemistry alone. As Dr. Tour himself stated, “I do not know how to use science to prove intelligent design although some others might.”
And indeed, in Dr. Tour’s preliminary video to the current lecture series he is doing, Dr. Tour mentioned all the topics that he would be discussing in his lecture series.
The one topic that Dr. Tour said he would NOT be discussing in his present lecture series was thermodynamics. For that topic he referenced his interview with Dr. Brian Miller, who has a Ph.D. in physics from Duke University.
In the preliminary video to the lecture series, Dr. Brian Miller also offered this critique of ‘Professor Dave’s’ current take on thermodynamics and the OOL,
And, from the thermodynamics perspective, (not from the chemical perspective), and as Dr. Miller states in this fairly recent article, “The only plausible explanation for the origin of life is intelligent agency.”
But to make Dr. Miller’s inference to Intelligent Design even stronger.
To repeat what Dr. Miller stated in response to “Professor Dave”, “No system without assistance ever moves both toward lower entropy and higher energy which is required for the formation of a cell.”
So exactly how does ‘nature’, all by its lonesome, move toward lower entropy and higher energy in order to form a cell?
Well it doesn’t! It would clearly be a violation of the second law of thermodynamics if it ever did. And if you think the second law can be violated by nature, well, to put it mildly, you might as well believe in perpetual motion machines.
it is only by an Intelligence imparting (positional) information into ‘nature’ that we are able to move toward lower entropy and higher energy at the same time in order to move towards what it would take to form a cell.
As the following 2010 experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment demonstrated, it is knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position that converts information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
In short, it is immaterial information that is imparted by an Intelligence into nature that allows life to be in a state that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e. that allows life to be in a state of “lower entropy and higher energy” at the same time.
As Andy McIntosh, professor of thermodynamics and combustion theory at the University of Leeds, stated, “Information has its definition outside the matter and energy on which it sits, and furthermore constrains it (the polymers of life) to operate in a highly non-equilibrium thermodynamic environment. This proposal resolves the thermodynamic issues and invokes the correct paradigm for understanding the vital area of thermodynamic/organisational interactions,”
Moreover, classical sequential information, (such as is encoded on DNA), is shown to be a subset of quantum, (i.e. positional), information by the following method.
In the following 2011 paper, “researchers ,,, show that when the bits (in a computer) 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 (in quantum information theory) an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.”
As well, and as the following 2017 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.”,,,
These experiments go to the heart of the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design debate and completely blow the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, (presuppositions about immaterial information being merely ’emergent’ from some material basis), out of the water.
In other words, directly contrary to Darwinian presuppositions, immaterial information, particularly ‘positional quantum information’, is now experimentally shown to be its own distinct physical entity that is a product of an ‘observer who describes the system’. And although it can interact with matter and energy, (interact in a ‘top-down’ manner; see George Ellis ‘Recognizing Top Down Causation’), it is still shown to be its own independent entity that is separate from matter and energy and, moreover, this immaterial information has a quote unquote ‘thermodynamic content’ that can be physically measured.
In other words, Intelligent Design, and a semi-direct inference to Intelligence that is necessary in order to explain why life is so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, has, for all intents and purposes, achieved experimental confirmation via these recent experimental realizations of the Maxwell demon thought experiment.
And just how much information is required to be imparted into ‘nature’, via an Intelligence, in order to explain why a living cell is so far our of thermodynamic equilibrium, is touched upon in the following article.
The information content that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be around 10 to the 12 bits,,,
,,, Which is the equivalent of about 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
Thus since Bacterial cells are about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells.
And since there are conservatively estimated to be around 30 trillion cells within the average human body,
Then that gives us a rough ballpark estimate of around 300 trillion times 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Or about 300 trillion times the information content contained within all the books contained in all the largest libraries in the world.
Needless to say, that is a massive amount of immaterial information that is present within our physical bodies.
As the following article states, 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.
As should be obvious to even the most metaphysically blinded Darwinist, it is impossible for the sequential information on DNA to account for this massive amount of ‘positional information’ that is somehow coming into a developing embryo and building ‘a human infant, atom by atom’.
As Doug Axe states in the following video, “there are a quadrillion neural connections in the human brain, that’s vastly more neural connections in the human brain than there are bits (of information) in the human genome. So,,, there’s got to be something else going on that makes us what we are.”
And at about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Jonathan Wells, (who specializes in embryology), using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, ‘positional information’ must somehow be coming into the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method, in order to explain the transdifferentiation of cells into their multiple different states during embryological development.
As well, the preceding finding that information must be coming into a developing embryo for the ‘outside’, fits, hand in glove, with William Dembski’s and Robert Marks’ previous work establishing the principle of ‘conservation of information’
In order to establish that the Intelligent Designer who creates, and sustains, life must be God, it is first necessary to point out that “quantum information” is now found to be ubiquitous within life:
What is interesting about finding quantum information to be ubiquitous within life (and finding sequential information to be a subset of quantum information), is that quantum correlations are a ‘non-local’, i.e. beyond space and time, affair that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its effect.
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,”
As well, it is also important to realize that quantum information, unlike classical sequential information, is ‘physically’ 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.
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, 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.”
I have a question for ‘Professor Dave’ and other atheists,
It is also very interesting to note how all of the preceding evidence fits, hand and glove, with John 1:1-4 in the New Testament:
That John 1:1-4 should fit, hand and glove, with what was only recently discovered via our most advanced science, (i.e. via our advances in quantum information theory and quantum biology), is nothing short of completely amazing.
To further drive the point home I offer this following quote,
In a world where Christianity would be given a fair hearing from most scientists, (since Christianity did indeed give us modern science in the first place), this ‘prediction’ of John 1:1-4 about ‘information’ being foundational to life should count as a rather dramatic ‘scientific’ confirmation for the truth of Christianity.
Namely, all of this evidence further drives the point home that Jesus, as demonstrated by His resurrection from the dead by God the Father, truly has life, (and more particularly for us personally, has the gift of ‘eternal life’), contained within Himself.
Supplemental note:
#10 Whatever…
#14 I have no idea what you are talking about….
#11 It’s all about “telling” us what happened, i.e. is a hypothesis (a prediction about the world) supported or not supported by the data, be it relativity, natural selection, planetary formation, geotropism, etc. Or in some cases, like Dr. Schweitzer, something new and unexpected comes from the data which requires a re-thinking, rejection or modification of our hypotheses. Are paleontologists and evolutionary biologist all running to now claim that dinosaurs co-existed with man because some preserved collagen was found in a dinosaur femur (as some interpret Schweitzer’s findings)? No, they are rethinking the preservation qualities of the site where the femur was found, i.e., that the environmental conditions where the bone was found is a more robust preservative than encountered before. This has happened before in findings of intact mammoths and other megafauna. And, analysis of the collagen shows (ala natural selection) that dinosaur bone anatomy and physiology is remarkably similar to that found in current fauna, particularly reptilian anatomy and physiology, exactly as one would hypothesize. The data “tells” us, if we care to listen, that there is a remarkable continuity in the fossil record “that seem[s] to be leading” us to a deeper understanding of natural selection.
Natural selection is just a process of elimination. It is impotent with respect to universal common descent. In over 150 years since Darwin wrote his trope no one has been able to validate his claims. A deeper understanding of natural selection says it is nothing more than contingent serendipity.
Continuity in the fossil record? Are you daft? The vast majority, >95%, of all fossils are of marine invertebrates. Yet in that vast majority there isn’t any evidence for universal common descent.
CD claims:
“that there is a remarkable continuity in the fossil record “that seem[s] to be leading” us to a deeper understanding of natural selection.”
HUH???? Forget scientifically correct, is that even grammatically correct?
Bornagain77,
Thanks for the references in 8 and 9. I didn’t know about “quantum cooling” and “quantum no-hiding” being experimentally confirmed.
Also, it looks like I’ll need to back off any statements about if our bodies were democratic, we’d be considered a bacteria colony that evolved our bodies as a sort of exoskeleton. 😉
CD,
Have you even looked into how much shielding hemoglobin provides against background radiation? The idea is absurd to anyone who was taken any classes in radiation safety. Plus, the bones themselves are radioactive. The presence of significant amounts of C-14 also indicates that the dinosaur tissue is much younger than previously imagined:
https://www.newgeology.us/presentation48.html
But I guess, you’re not interested in “following the science” or are you?
-Q
Dr Tour’s next lecture tonight is on Homochirality, which is certainly NOT a small problem for naturalistic OOL scenarios
Episode 4/13: Homochirality // A Course on Abiogenesis by Dr. James Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqbpd3CmBgE
Living cells can overcome the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics because they exist in an open system where outside energy is available. This outside energy is a “necessary condition” for life.
However this only works if there also is a mechanism that can capture and harness the outside energy. As an analogy, a manufacturing plant can reduce local entropy using electricity to power machinery to produce finished products. The machinery is a mechanism to harness and use energy.
If a large bomb is detonated in the manufacturing plant, it will increase entropy (disorder) because there is no mechanism to capture and harness that energy. Therefore although outside energy is a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient condition.
Which leads to a quandary: before the advent of life, how did the quite complex mechanisms to capture and harness energy come into existence in contradiction to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?
Chuck,
I assume this comment was directed to me.
You asked (from a design perspective) “what happened” at the origin of life. I answered your question. The abbreviated description I gave was originally predicted from logic, and ultimately confirmed by experimental result. The key observations involved are fundamental to the origin of any open-ended self-replicator (i.e. life/evolution). Consequently, they are all well-documented in the literature, and are not even controversial. The details are both accessible and coherent. However, if these things make no immediate sense to you, then perhaps you should stay silent until you can get a handle on the matter. If you would like, I can give you a brief rundown on the scientists, dates, and discoveries involved.
ET @11
you have mention natural selection.
I assume, you have heard of the movement of mainstream scientists called ‘The third way of evolution’.
Look what they say about natural selection (from their official website):
“… Moreover, some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis.”
:)))) funny, to hear something like that from mainstream scientists… they have a disclaimer on their index page: “We intend to make it clear that the website and scientists listed on the web site do not support or subscribe to any proposals that resort to inscrutable divine forces or supernatural intervention, whether they are called Creationism, Intelligent Design, or anything else. ”
Here it is source of the quote (in the red text area):
https://thethirdwayofevolution.com/
Thanks, Martin. At least some scientists are interested in facts and science.
Intelligent Design doesn’t require the supernatural. ID just requires TELIC processes.
BA77 said:
Perhaps reword this? What does it mean for something immaterial to be it’s own distinct physical entity?
The idea that information is “encoded” in a material system has been disproved by the evidence: there is no “matter” upon or within which information can be “encoded.” Physical objects can only be experiential representations of arrangements of information which can only be experienced by an observer. Depending on the observer, the available information in what we call the physical representation can (and has been) experienced not only differently from observer to observe, but as a contradictory experience between observers.
Not only is entropy determined by the observer, that is also where the principle of non-contradiction ultimately lies: in the experience of the individual observer.
The origin of life is not different from the existence of life, at least not in terms of a biological framework. AS IF the “origin” of biological life is somehow more a significant or mysterious event than the fact that our biological bodies maintain “life” at any moment. Where is that information coming from? What is directing it? DNA is not nearly enough, not by a long shot.
The processing power and informational reserves to maintain a moment of what we call biological life is, for all intents and purposes, unimaginable. It takes enormous energy and computing power just to generate a CGI facsimile of a living creature; imagine what it takes to actually compute and process an entire 3D living being with tens of trillions of cells each with virtually countless highly organized, functioning, interdependent parts?
Each of those sub-cellular parts are themselves, at the quantum level, organized representations of information being processed into an experience by the observer – even at the entropic level. Even at the “physical law” or “chemical interaction” level. We now know these are all observer-collapsed representations of information.
How can the necessary information for a thing be encoded in the thing itself if the thing doesn’t even exist as such until an observer looks at it? What is the observer “looking at?” If matter doesn’t exist outside of an observational experience, what are we “encoding” when we put music on a CD?
The only rational and scientific answer is: we are encoding our own experiences in mind. That is the only place information can exist. That is the only place “encoding” can occur, which is the process of using one set of information to structure another set of information. That is the only place that experiences of such information can occur.
Well WJM what I wrote means pretty much exactly what I intended for it to mean. Counterintuitive to what we would presuppose, and although information is immaterial, it is, none-the-less, shown to be ‘physical’, i.e. to be ‘real’, in the sense that it is shown to have ‘top-down’ casual effects upon material substrates.
In my post, I cited the recent experimental work that confirmed the Maxwell demon thought experiment down to the atomic/quantum level. Work that has now shown that immaterial information has a quote unquote ‘thermodynamic content’,,, but, in order to get my point about the immaterial, yet physical, nature of information across more easily, I could have just as easily cited George Ellis’s paper recognizing the ‘top-down causation’ of software, i.e. immaterial information, on the computer hardware, i.e. on the material substrates.
Another way to clearly, and perhaps more easily, demonstrate that immaterial information is its own distinctive physical entity that, although being immaterial, can still physically interact in a top-down manner with material substrates is with quantum teleportation:
As the following article states, “,,, it is only the information that gets teleported from one place to another.”
And as the following article states. “,,, information,,, is transferred from one place to another, but without traveling through any physical medium.”
Thus WJM, what I wrote means pretty much exactly what I intended for it to mean. “immaterial information, particularly ‘positional quantum information’, is now experimentally shown to be its own distinct physical entity that is a product of an ‘observer who describes the system’.” i.e. Immaterial information, although being immaterial, is, none-the-less, now experimentally shown, (all the way down to the atomic/quantum level), to be physically real in that it now shown to have ‘top-down’ causal effects upon material substrates.
To repeat George Ellis’s definitions of ‘causal effect’ and ‘existence’
Bornagain77,
Good quotes, but I’m afraid it doesn’t make a dent to Darwinian fundamentalists.
Take the quote:
Here’s yet another completely clueless assertion without any references. Gosh, and to think that I’m relying on information encoded magnetically as “bits” on my hard drive. And my body is grown, maintained, and repaired by information encoded as base pairs in my DNA, not to mention the overlapping codes present as epigenetic data. All this has supposedly been “disproven.” Really? By whom and when?
If this is an appeal to QM, then information is encoded in the patterns of wavefunctions. What physicists working in the field have concluded is that information and conscious observation is a substrate to material reality. It doesn’t mean that material reality doesn’t exist or that information cannot be encoded in it.
-Q
LIVE AFTERSHOW | Professor Dave Gets Annihilated On Abiogenesis – Open Mic
https://youtu.be/J98Edtq5ePk?t=148
Next lecture tonight is on Carbohydrates
Episode 5/13: Carbohydrates // A Course on Abiogenesis by Dr. James Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdqd_EvpsZM
It’s scheduled for tomorrow night, Bornagain77.
So far, Dr. Tour’s commentary and critiques have been amazing! As a participant said in the aftershow, it’s wonderful that Dr. Tour took the time to thoroughly analyze one of the referenced papers and one of its references to expose the missing information and then exposed the deceit.
People who write such papers should not conceal extremely low yields and claim to have solved one step in abiogenesis. It’s unethical to claim that “we’re closer than ever” to solving abiogenesis when one has debatably made an inch of progress toward a goal 100 miles away. That’s hype at best and deception at worst.
It’s really tempting to write a satirical paper on how a modern computer was able to “evolve” by a succession of natural steps, including photos of a sandy beach as a source of silicon and geological formations that musta acted as molds for naturally synthesized plastic and so on . . . and then claim that we’re closer than ever to a solution. A living cell is thousands, perhaps millions of times more complex than a modern PC.
Incidentally, the older term for abiogenesis was spontaneous generation, but that was dropped apparently because it can no longer be claimed that life still emerges continuously and spontaneously everywhere.
-Q
Querius said:
Encoded by what?
Does “material reality” exist without information or observation?
BA77,
I think you are unnecessarily conflating “physical” with “real.” Information is real. It is immaterial. It is not physical. It affects what we call “the physical world.”
Now tell me: how can physical matter be affected by immaterial information?
Let’s explore this line of thougt further.
What does it mean to say that information and observation is the “substrate” of material reality?
Is it analogous to a painting, where the canvas is immaterial observation interacting with immaterial information, and the paint on the canvas is analogous to “material reality?”
What then is the paint made of? Is the paint made of “matter?” No, the paint is also made of immaterial information directed by, or interacting with, immaterial intent and observation.
Calling the immaterial information and observation a “substrate” obfuscates the fact that it’s “information and observation” all the way up and down. There’s literally nothing else to work with, in, or on.
Semi-materialist views like this needlessly add a hypothetical extra domain that adds absolutely nothing of value. Why insist a material reality exists when it is (1) utterly unnecessary, (2) cannot ever be evidenced, even in principle, and (2) inserts an unsolvable domain interaction problem into the mix?
The only way mind and “matter” interaction can be explained is via the immaterial information/observation substrate at the quantum level. It supposedly “collapses” the immaterial quantum state into a particular, real, “matter” state.
Unfortunately, further quantum experimentation has show this perspective to be false. The particular states of matter are not being collapsed “out there” into a particular physical state in some objective, extra-mental world because two factually contradictory states of the same thing have been shown to simultaneously exist in the experience of two different observers.
This clearly shows that “factual” states of what we call “matter” only exist per observer. One observer does not collapse the system into a particular state for all observers.
So, what then is “material reality” is it is not even universal for all observers?
WJM since immaterial information is shown to have real and tangible effects on what we regard as being the material world, i.e. matter and energy, then I hold it to be a physically real entity.
The distinction I am making in calling immaterial information ‘physical’ is fully intended so as to specifically convey that ‘counterintuitive’ fact..
I know you want everything to be mental.
I am sympathetic but not as enamored as you are with your ‘everything is mental’ model.
IMHO, Something is getting ‘lost in translation’ with your mental model.
WJM,
While I partly agree with some of your assertions about QM, the fact that wavefunctions have shape, location, and movement, and that they can interact with each other, that particles can become entangled, and so on, doesn’t obviate that there are observable physical effects, that wavefunctions can collapse, and that there effects transcend the conscious observational/measurement choices of any single individual.
I think what Bornagain77 is trying to communicate to you is that quantum realities manifest themselves as physical realities as well. Here’s my analogy. The fact that atoms and molecules exist doesn’t mean that the objects built from those atoms and molecules don’t exist. This bits recorded on my hard drive and observed by no one else, will certainly be accessible after I’m dead.
How is this possible in your scheme of things?
-Q
Bornagain77/21
This is incoherent. In one sentence, you contradict yourself by describing information as both “immaterial” and “physical”. It can’t be both, so which is it?
Also, as has been pointed out many times before, you haven’t defined what you – or the researchers you are quoting – mean by “information”. To be fair, you’re not alone in this. We all talk about it as if it’s an monolithic concept that we all have in common. But is it? Remember that William Dembski quoted a researcher – who’s name, I’m sorry to say, I can’t remember – who had compiled a list of around 40 different usages of “information” and “complexity”. Some of those may be duplicates but that’s still a lot of opportunities for equivocation.
Is the information a dendrochronologist infers from tree-rings about the history of the tree the same the same as the information we are exchanging now or the information that appears to move instantaneously from one point to another in quantum teleportation or the information that makes up WJM’s information universe?
Another question, if information can be neither created nor destroyed, then all information must be eternal, must it not? This means that, Big Bang Theory notwithstanding, this universe – or the information that describes it – must always have existed and will continue to exist forever.
And if something – be it a universe or information or a deity – exists forever, can it be said to have a point or purpose? A purpose implies something that can be achieved and that achievement is the end-point. So, while there may be an infinite number of smaller purposes that can be fulfilled can there be any ultimate purpose to it all?
Seversky states,
In so far as it is incoherent it is incoherent in that it is ‘counterintuitive’ to what we would presuppose. And it is especially counterintuitive for Darwinists who presuppose that reductive materialism is true. i.e. who hold that immaterial information is merely emergent from some material basis.
Yet immaterial information, contrary to the presuppositions of reductive materialists, is now shown, via the experimental realization of the Maxwell demon thought experiment, to be its own independent entity that is separate from matter and energy. A independent entity that has a quote unquote ‘thermodynamic content’ that enables immaterial information to interact with matter and energy.
Indeed, as I have referenced in this thread, it is the imparting of ‘positional information’ into matter and energy, by an Intelligence’, that allows life to operate in a state that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium.
And since immaterial information, via the experimental realization of the Maxwell demon thought experiment, is now experimentally shown to have thermodynamic, i.e. ‘physical’, effects on matter and energy, then it is indeed ‘physical’ in the sense that it does indeed have detectable physical effects. This ‘thermodynamic’ effect on matter and energy simply would not be possible if immaterial information were not ‘physical’ in some real and meaningful sense.
And indeed, the following researcher stated, “”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.”
And as the subtitle of the following article further explained, “Running a brain-twisting thought experiment for real shows that information is a physical thing,,,”
And as the last line in this following video (which was referenced in the preceding article) stated, ‘it (information) is the thing that converts the random chaos of gas in a box into something useful. Kinda like how the information in DNA is the thing that makes a bunch of random molecules into a squirrel. Information,, can bring order out of chaos. If it (information) is not real then neither are we’
In short, immaterial information is now shown to be a ‘physical thing’ in that it it is now shown to bring about real, tangible, i.e. thermodynamic, effects on matter and energy, (i.e. bringing order out of chaos). Again, this thermodynamic ‘physical effect’ that immaterial information has on matter and energy simply would not be possible if immaterial information were not ‘physical’ is some real and meaningful sense.
Seversky also states “if (quantum) information can be neither created nor destroyed, then all information must be eternal, must it not? This means that, Big Bang Theory notwithstanding, this universe – or the information that describes it – must always have existed and will continue to exist forever.”
Well I can see why Seversky, (who foolishly defends atheism day in and day out), would put the caveat of “Big Bang Theory notwithstanding” in his statement.
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Yet the Big Bang violates the first law of thermodynamics in the most spectacular way possible in that all the energy of the universe was instantly brought into being at the creation of the universe approx. 14 billion years ago. (As well space-time itself was brought into being at the creation of the universe)
Thus clearly the first law was spectacularly ‘violated’ at the beginning of the universe by something, or SOMEONE, who is beyond all the space-time matter-energy of the universe. Likewise, the conservation of quantum information holds ONLY for the universe itself and does not hold for SOMEONE who exists outside the confines of this physical universe.
i.e. God, being transcendent of, and the foundation of, all the space-time matter-energy of the universe, can impart as much quantum information into the universe as he see fits, when He sees fit.
And indeed HE does see fit to impart (quantum) information into the universe every time HE created life, created a new species, or currently imparts quantum information into developing embryos.
To repeat part of post 8, “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.”
Verses:
Querius @24
OOL-researchers: “we’re closer than ever”
Actually, the exact opposite is true, as Dr. Tour stated several times,
the OOL-researchers are FARTHER AWAY THAN EVER !!!
The whole OOL-research is a fiasco…
A Darwinian layman has no idea how desperate this research is …
Since the MULLER-UREY experiment (70 years ago), NO PROGRESS IN THIS FIELD, and Darwinian laymen think that OOL-question have been solved – it is like in some mental hospital ….
i just watched Dr. Tour’s 5/13 lecture on Carbohydrates. After this lecture, i see, that the problem with DNA-carbohydrates is gigantic, especially the part how carbohydrates are hooked together (there are many options how carbohydrates can be hooked together) … i did not realize that before …. . who understands this topic, and still claims that all that happened just so, the right way, not once, but over and over again, such a person must be insane …
also, another take-home-lesson from Dr. Tour lecture on OOL-research is, that all these Darwinian OOL-researchers using PURCHASED! chemicals to do their experiments… these guys don’t create it from scratch!!! What is even more ridiculous, these purchased chemicals come from living organisms !!!!! The suppliers extract/isolate these chemicals from nature, from cells!!!, and then sell it to who ever it needs, e.g. a Darwinian OOL-researcher :))) So even these purchased products have not been developed from scratch !!!!!!!!!!! This is insane !!!! How could an Darwinian OOL-researcher look in the mirror….
the whole Darwinian OOL-research is a bluff, a delusion, a deception …
Martin_r,
Yes, researchers are actually farther in that they are “barking up the wrong tree.” They synthesize some things from artificial ingredients in artificial environments in with artificial processes and then claim that all this proves that it coulda happened this way somehow and therefore in absence of any other naturalistic method, it thus musta happened this way. They claim they’re just missing a few intermediate steps that will inevitably be found.
Note that this is similar to all the missing fossils, missing in-between evolutionary steps, and missing processes that can realistically explain the overwhelming complexity of all the chemistry of interlocking chemical cycles and a credible path to get there.
No, they’re not even close to being close, plus they’re heading in the wrong direction.
-Q
Querius,
what i don’t understand is, where all the Darwinian self-confidence comes from…
Not only in regards to OOL-research, but in general. Every new Darwinian scientific paper on evolution starts with a statement that it is “other than thought, earlier than thought, more complex than thought and so on … “.
Recently, the University of Oregon article: “… long-used approaches for reconstructing evolutionary paths are deeply flawed.”, and “…our finding casts serious doubts over literally thousands of studies that use phylogenetic trees of extant data to reconstruct the diversification history of taxa …”
I really don’t understand where all the Darwinian self-confidence comes from …
Martin_r,
Ideological poisoning. Their worldview doesn’t allow them to consider any alternatives despite the mounting evidence that Darwinism has not been a successful theory in explaining the diversity of life on earth nor the origin of the massive complexity in cells and organisms.
-Q
The next lecture by Dr. Tour just happened
Episode 6/13: The Building Blocks of Building Blocks // A Course on Abiogenesis by Dr. James Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCf-OfFpS_k
Martin, Their confidence comes from years of equivocations, lies, misconceptions and misrepresentations. There are those who actually believe it is a successful research paradigm all the while unable to say what successes were brought on by the concept of evolution by means of blind and mindless processes. So they equivocate, lie and bluff.
They will go to their graves living in denial about all that. Pathetic, actually
Bornagain77/31
So this video is arguing that “information” is the same as the chemical and physical properties of matter, including what we call the laws which regulate how they behave.?
Isn’t that different from the information you and I and everyone else here are exchanging?
If information is now shown to be a “physical thing” then calling it “immaterial” is contradictory. It can’t be both.
Is the information in the ink someone uses to write a scientific paper? Is it in the paper?
DNA codes for RNA sequences. The code is neither the DNA nor the RNA. And the DNA does not determine biological form. No one knows where that information is but no one has been able to link it to anything physical.
Bornagain77/32
We don’t know that the Big Bang violates anything. My understanding is that physics is able to describe what happened seconds after the BB but, at present, we have no way of knowing what happened before that, what conditions were like in the primordial singularity and what, if anything, came before. All we can infer is that, if it’s true that energy and information can be neither created or destroyed, then they must have existed pre-BB and for all time.
Pure speculation.
And by the First Law that must always have existed so no need for a Creator then.
The irony meter just exploded. seversky’s entire position is nothing but speculation.
That doesn’t follow.
Seversky lives in a atheistic dream world where facts simply don’t matter,
Sev states (with a straight face I imagine), “We don’t know that the Big Bang violates anything.”
Save for violating the entire Atheistic notion that the universe has always existed.
Seversky, Not that I have any hope that it will help you understand information, given your dogmatic commitment to atheism where facts simply don’t matter, but the ‘physics’ of information has come a long way over the last decade or so, to show that information is a real and tangible thing, and is not just some abstraction as materialists hold it to be.
For example, as the following article states,,, “information, entropy, and energy should be treated on equal footings.”
Seversky,
Actually, the Big Bang apparently violates everything. That’s why the multiverse idea was proposed in the first place. One has to explain how Nothing created Everything: how quantum fluctuations and probabilities existed even before space and time; how entropy started at such a low level, how everything in the universe existed as a point; where all the mass-energy came from; why there was any inflation; and many, many more questions using only the existing physics in nature, which also came into existence with the Big Bang.
So, what are your arguments against what Paul Davies says here?
https://youtu.be/a-4N0Mclb6o
-Q
To go over what Seversky stated in a little more detail.
Seversky stated that,
And as succinctly stated by Querius. “Actually, the Big Bang apparently violates everything.”
All the scientific evidence we now have tells us that matter-energy, space-time, were created at the beginning of the universe. And since the laws of physics are merely mathematical descriptions of how matter and energy behave in this universe, then it necessarily follows that the laws of physics must also have originated when matter and energy were created. (Indeed, atheists, in their desperate appeal to the multiverse, imagine wildly varying laws of physics. So obviously, even in atheistic metaphysics, there is apparently nothing sacrosanct about having unvarying laws of physics that preexisted the Big Bang).
A Belgium priest, George Lemaitre, via working out the implications of Einstein’s General Relativity, first proposed a beginning for the universe with what he termed to be a ‘primordial atom’ and/or a ‘primordial egg’.
Einstein initially resisted the idea of a beginning for the universe and, in fact, told Lemaitre, “Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.”
Moreover, Einstein himself had added an ad hoc cosmological constant to his equation that would keep the universe stable instead of the universe requiring a beginning.
When astronomer Edwin Hubble later showed that the universe was indeed expanding, Einstein admitted that he was wrong, and even later in his life Einstein ended up calling his ad hoc addition of the cosmological constant to his equation “my biggest blunder.”
Eddington also resisted the idea of the beginning of the universe and, philosophically not scientifically, found the idea to be ‘repugnant’.
Hoyle also resisted the idea of the universe having a beginning and coined the term ‘Big Bang’ as a point of derision for those who thought the universe had a beginning. Which is very unfortunate thing for Hoyle to do since the creation of the universe was nothing like an explosion, as is implied with the term ‘Big Bang’, but was instead a very orderly event.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and George Ellis were instrumental in refining General Relativity yet again to a point to reveal that not only did mass-energy have a absolute (singular) beginning in the Big Bang, but that space-time also itself had an absolute (singular) beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy.:
i.e. Hawking, Ellis, and Penrose proved that space and time did not even exist at the beginning of the universe! Which is a truly astonishing thing to realize.
As Stephen Meyer pointed out, “How much matter and energy can you put into zero space?, The answer is, obviously, that you can put zero matter and energy into zero space.
Thus even Lemaitre’s idea of a ‘primordial atom’ was falsified since, (via Hawking, Ellis, and Penrose refinement of General Relativity to show that space and time were created), matter and energy themselves were shown to have required an absolute beginning.
So regardless of Seversky claiming that the Big Bang did not violate the first law of thermodynamics, and regardless of him saying that “the First Law that must always have existed so no need for a Creator then”, regardless of that claim by Seversky, (and according to what our best science from General Relativity can now tell us), the first law of thermodynamics was indeed violated in the most spectacular way possible in that the science itself tells us that all the energy of the universe was necessarily created at the beginning of the universe.
Seversky likes to repeatedly claim that he is being ‘scientific’ in following his Naturalistic and/or Materialistic metaphysics, Yet, despite what Seversky might claim to the contrary, he certainly is NOT following the science where it leads but is instead letting his a priori materialistic, even atheistic, biases dictate what scientific evidence he willing to accept and which scientific evidence he is willing to, resolutely, ignore.
In short, Seversky is being VERY unscientific!
Verse
To make the irresolvable problem for Seversky, and his atheistic metaphysics, even worse, not only does Seversky, via his atheistic metaphysics, not have a explanation for the beginning of the universe, as is required by General Relativity, but Seversky, and his atheistic metaphysics, also have no explanation, via quantum mechanics, for why the universe should even continue to exist.
As Scott Aaronson put the irresolvable dilemma that quantum mechanics presents for atheists, “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!”
And indeed, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment and Leggett’s inequality have both recently shown that, “the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”
Via Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment with atoms we find that, ““It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
And via Leggett’s inequality we find that, “Leggett’s inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it.”
Moreover, to make the problem for Seversky, and his atheistic metaphysics, even worse, we find that, prior to quantum wave collapse, the photon is mathematically defined as being in an infinite dimensional state,,,
Moreover, the photon, prior to quantum wave collapse, also takes an infinite amount of information to describe properly.
Seversky, via his atheistic metaphysics, simply has no clue why a photon, prior to quantum wave collapse, should exist in an infinite dimension, infinite information, state. Whereas I, as a Christian Theist who holds that God sustains this universe in its continual existence, would pretty presuppose exactly that a photon should exist in an infinite dimension, infinite information, state prior to quantum wave collapse.
Simply put, saying something is in an infinite dimensional state to me, as a Christian Theist, certainly sounds very much like the theistic attribute of omnipresence to me. And saying something takes an infinite amount of information to describe properly certainly sounds very much like the Theistic attribute of Omniscience to me as a Christian. And being able to collapse a infinite dimensional, infinite information, quantum wave to a finite state certainly sounds very much like the Theistic attribute of omnipotence to me as a Christian Theist,
Again, Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence are some of the primary defining attributes of God,
So in conclusion, not only does General Relativity, via an absolute beginning of the universe, present Seversky, and his atheistic metaphysics, with an irresolvable problem, but Quantum Mechanics adds insult to injury and exponentially compounds the irresolvable problem for Seversky, and his atheistic metaphysics, in showing us that Seversky, via his atheistic metaphysics, can’t even explain why the universe should continually exist.
Whereas I, as a Christian Theist, have no problem whatsoever explaining why the universe began to exist, or why it continues to exist.
Indeed, thousands of years before General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were even known about, Christianity predicted that the universe was created, and continually sustained in its existence, by God.
Saying that there was a point 14 billion years ago when “time was created” is a nonsensical statement. Nothing can “create time” in any ordinary understanding of that phrase; it necessarily requires there be a “before” the thing existed and an “after,” thus “created.” There was no “before” time itself existed, so it cannot have been created. If there was no “before” it existed, then it has always existed.
Actually, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity unifies space and time into space-time. So, time and space went through at least one massive inflationary stage at the beginning of the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang there was no space and no time. They weren’t infinite, they didn’t exist.
Thanks, Bornagain77. I think I can go step further . . .
The Big Bang was the transition from Nothing to Everything–in other words, Existence came out of and was somehow caused by Nonexistence.
Now, there are a lot of things that we know have Nonexistence, for example the Easter Bunny!
Thus, we recognize that the logical equivalent of asserting Everything that exists spontaneously was formed from Nothing is that Everything that exists was formed spontaneously from the Easter Bunny! Woohoo!
Oh and probabilities and quantum fluctuations also need space-time.
-Q