Without the information that holds us together, we would just be dust floating around the room.
Tag: Robert J. Marks
At Mind Matters News: Why just anything can’t happen given an infinite sum of universes
Marks: It can be shown mathematically that the infinite does not exist in reality, only in our minds. Thus an infinite number of universes cannot exist.
At Mind Matters News: If extraterrestrials didn’t fine tune Earth, maybe there is a God
In the face of a grab bag of ideas like creation by ETs or countless universes (some run by cats), why does the idea of a Creator seem far out?
At Mind Matters News: In an infinity of universes, countless ones are run by cats…
Robert J. Marks points out that, in reality, even 10 to the 1000th power of universes would only permit 3,322 different paths. Infinity is required but unprovable.
At Mind Matters News: Our Universe Survived a Firing Squad and It’s Just an Accident?
Ola Hössjer: According to the Weak Anthropic Principle, we should not be surprised to live in a universe that harbors life. But I should add that, in our paper, “Cosmological Tuning Fine or Coarse?,” we compute or give an upper bound for the probability of a randomly generated universe to have a certain constant of nature, ending up within its life-permitting interval. We take the Weak Anthropic Principle into account — and still we come up with small probabilities for certain constant of natures or certain ratios or constants of nature.
At Mind Matters News: Could advanced aliens have fine-tuned Earth for life?
As Robert Marks, Ola Hössjer, and Daniel Díaz discuss, some prominent atheists/agnostics have chosen to substitute advanced extraterrestrials for God.
At Mind Matters News: Is life from outer space a viable science hypothesis?
Currently, panspermia has been rated as “plausible but not convincing.” Marks, Hössjer, and Diaz discuss the issues.
At Mind Matters News: Can there be a general theory for fine-tuning?
Swedish mathematician Ola Hössjer, who is working on a general theory of fine tuning, sees the beauty of mathematics in the fact that seemingly unrelated features in cosmology and biology can be modeled using similar concepts.
At Mind Matters News: Life is so wonderfully finely tuned that it’s frightening
A mathematician who uses statistical methods to model the fine tuning of molecular machines and systems in cells reflects…
At Mind Matters News: Fine-tuning? How Bayesian statistics could help break a deadlock
Bayesian statistics are used, for example, in spam filter technology, identifying probable spam by examining vast masses of previous messages.
Could artificial intelligence change the mind–body problem?
Angus Menuge: I don’t see any reason from these amazing enhancements of the complexity of these [computer] systems to think that the systems would move from not having subjective awareness to having it or from moving to true intentionality about anything beyond themselves.
Robert J. Marks: How materialism proves unbounded scientific ignorance
Mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that there is an infinite number of truths that are provably unprovable. That’s bad news for scientism, though not for science.
Gregory Chaitin on why human creativity is not computable
Creativity is what we don’t know. Once it is reduced to a formula a computer can use, it is not creative any more, by definition.
Math paradoxes show us that the world we live in is not and cannot be purely naturalist
Robert J. Marks sometimes uses the paradox of the smallest “uninteresting” number to illustrate proof by contradiction — that is, by creating paradoxes
Gregory Chaitin on the dead hand of bureaucracy in science
Chaitin: I have a pessimistic vision which I hope is completely wrong, that the bureaucracies are like a cancer — the ones that control research and funding for research and counting how much you’ve been publishing. I’ve noticed that at universities, for example, the administrative personnel are gradually taking all the best buildings and expanding. So I think that the bureaucracy and the rules and regulations increases to the point that it sinks the society.