You tell people that they "believe" in something preposterous and you
fear that they will "criticize" you?
The list owner could decide that discussion of evolution was not
useful here. But he hasn't, AFAIK. What was a problem was the
hijacking of a thread on tritium and NiH LENR, and you were not solely
responsible for that. Here, the thread is about "Darwinian Evolution,"
whatever that is.
My own interest is ontology, and how we choose (or fall into) what we
"believe," as distinct from what we experience (and remember of
experience, as distinct from what we made it mean.)
There is a whole family of pseudosciences based on fallacious post-hoc
estimation of probability. In this case, an argument is invented with
a pretense of objectivity, when it is clear that the conclusion is
incorporated in the assumptions.
This is not about whether or not there is "intention" behind the
phenomena of life. Rather it is about whether or not functional
complexity beyond some level is a proof of intention. Your argument
has, in fact, been circular.
It's not that I deny intention itself. It is rather that discerning
the purpose of life, the intention, if you will, requires stepping
outside the normal machinery of thought and stepping into direct,
unmediated experience. You will never get there through firm adherence
to any belief. Faith can take you there, but only a faith in reality
itself, which, again, I distinguish from collections of words,
crystallized as meanings we prefer.
Faith in reality, I'll assert, underlies genuine Science.
Sent from my iPhone
On May 28, 2012, at 5:42 AM, Jojo Jaro <jth...@hotmail.com> wrote:
Once again, I hesistate to respond to you cause that will cause
people to roundly criticize me for starting a long off-topic
thread. You bring up several points that need a response, to set
your fallacies straight. Can you suggest a forum where we can do
this? Let me know and I'll show up.
Otherwise, there is nothing much I am willing to do in this forum.
Jojo
----- Original Message ----- From: "Abd ul-Rahman Lomax" <a...@lomaxdesign.com
>
To: <vortex-l@eskimo.com>; <vortex-l@eskimo.com>
Sent: Monday, May 28, 2012 7:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Vo]:Darwinian Evolution (Was Tritium in Ni-H LENR)
At 09:11 AM 5/27/2012, Jojo Jaro wrote:
I am unsure about your point or what you are asking.
What exactly is your discussion point or what exactly is your
question?
Of course,there are strong inference. For example, if you find
the presence of Information in DNA, that is an inference for
Intelligent Designer, not Darwinian Evolution based on randon
chance mutations. Random processes never create Information,
because information is "Order", the exact opposite of Randomness.
The conclusion is being assumed. It is easy to demonstrate
information in random output with or without output selection.
"Information" is not defined here, and I suspect that the
undisclosed definition again incorporates the conclusions.
There is order in the non-living, presumably mechanistic, universe,
by any reasonable definition of order. We associate very high
levels of order with life, normally, for life organizes material,
it can be one of the definitions of life.
For instance, the assembling of random letters into a coherent
sentence requires the input of an Intelligent being.
Easy to demonstrate otherwise. Make a random sequence generator,
then select the output which makes sense. Humans actually do this
detection well, almost too well, sometimes, we will indeed "make
sense" of random combinations. And then people will insist that the
sense that they make from this stuff is "intended," a "code" that
proves something or other. Like that the Torah is from God ("Torah
Code") or the Qur'an from Allah ("The Miracle of the Nineteen.")
Gambler's Fallacy is a phenomenon related to this.
If your throw a bunch of Scrabble letters on the ground, the
following 2 sentences have equal chance of occuring.
"There is a God"
"ethresi da Go" - (No, this is not a foreign language.
This is a random mixture of the same letters above.)
Yes. But if you have a Scrabble set tossed to make random words,
but you have a setup which rejects what is not in a dictionary, the
second set is impossible, it will not be kept. There is *not* an
equal chance as you assume.
The genetic code is not randomly mutated, in the sense you think.
Many mutations would result in copying failure, for starters. Many
more mutations would result in organism failure. In complex
organisms, many more mutations would not be viable. Even more might
be temporarily viable, but would not survive to reproduce. Or might
only last a few generations, either by accident or because of loss
of survivability.
And many mutations are irrelevant, have no effect on the function
of the DNA, so the DNA behind a particular functional part of an
organism is, in fact, a family of patterns, not a single one.
That "junk DNA" can be mutations waiting to become, through some
further process, something active. It might represent something
that was active in the past but which is no longer active, that
mutated out of activity but caused no damage because any necessary
function was also carried elsewhere.
This is all just how DNA functions. It proves nothing about
"creation" one way or another. What is the real issue here?
What is the difference between the 2 sentences above. Nothing as
far as randon chance is concerned.
The first sentence *might* have been created by random chance and,
in fact, I could demonstrate this if I thought it were important.
The key is that I'd set up an algorithm using random letter
selection. "There is a God" is short enough that I could get this
result with fairly little computer time, and that's why web sites
advise more complex passwords!
What you have shown, Jojo, is that your own selection process is
not "random chance." This proves?
It *certainly* does not prove that random chance cannot produce
sensible words, but you seem to think so, which demonstrates what?
Are you familiar with the Torah Code? See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code
Yet for an Intelligent Entity, there is a huge difference.
Sure. That is, to an Intelligent Entity, which you assume yourself
to be, of limited intelligence. A *huge* difference. Which the
intelligent entity made up. That's what intelligent entities, in
fact, do, they make up meaning. It's a useful process, often. Not
always. Gambler's Fallacy.
What differentiates the 2 sentences? It is Information of course.
That's debatable. What information? What I see in the first
sentence is grammatically correct, but "information" is actually
supplied by the reader. You *say* that the second sentence is not a
foreign language, but that is your *assumption.*
In the end, both sentences are assemblages of letters, and whether
or not they mean something is dependent upon the *reader* -- or
reading device.
What is *meant* by "God"? Indeed, what is "meant" by any of the
words, most especially "is"? Is what, is where, is how? All these
are supplied by the reader, in "making sense" of the sentence. You
may say that there is an *intended* meaning, which *assumes* an
author, someone with the intention. But two people saying that same
sentence may intend quite different meanings. You are imagining
that there is one. Your meaning.
And then someone else says "There is no god." And you might
imagine, then, that this is contradictory to your sentence and your
sentence, and, gain, you would be making this up.
There is no *intrinsic contradiction*, and I'll demonstrate this by
pointing out that "There is no god" is the preface to the
affirmation of faith in Islam, "There is no god, but the God." It's
usually stated as "but Allah," but "Allah," very likely, merely is
"god" with the definite article, "the," i.e., a *specified* object
of the appelation, implying unity. "Al-ilah," contracted. "god" in
the first half is "ilah."
And when we look underneath that, it is all an affirmation of
unity, since "God" is equivalent, at least in Islamic theology, to
"Reality." There is only one reality. You might well disagree, or
not. Do you agree or disagree?
We make up our own agreement and disagreement. None of this exists
in reality, which is not captured by words.
There is information in the first sentence that conveys an idea?
And Ideas are the purvue of Intelligent Beings.
Again, you are assuming the conclusion. Can you see that?
Now, do this with 4 letters and create a sentence 600,000 letters
long; you might begin to understand the complexity and the
remarkable presence of Information in our DNA.
The information is supplied by the reader, the reader is the
cellular process that reads the DNA and creates proteins according
to the patterns, and the living thing behaves according to those
proteins, as well as a whole other level of "information," for
humans and some other living things that can learn, as most animals
can. DNA is, in fact, only part of the cellular process.
There is no doubt that life is complex, though "complex" is a human
interpretation. It's possible to create measures of complexity, but
they are somewhat arbitrary.
Jojo, you are presenting assumptions as if they were a logical
proof. You will not convince *anyone* with this. Why are you
pushing it here?