Arguments for intelligent design

[Francis777]

Sounds like alien consciousness is just a hyper aware unlimited lucid dream to me.

Accessed through collapse of all human dream limits.

 

Edited October 10, 2023 by Francis777

[LastThursday]

On 10/10/2023 at 10:16 AM, Leo Gura said:

The odds of randomly stringing together even one correct protein is like 1 in a trillion, trillion, trillion. And one protein by itself does nothing.

A protein is neither correct or incorrect. Either it improves the survival rate of the organism-as-a-whole or it reduces it. A protein's structure could be sub-optimal but still improve the organism's chances. For example maybe a protein helps as an anti-freeze to stop an organism's blood freezing solid. The protein gets mutated (say just one amino acid), and now it works 0.1% better than before. The protein now confers a better survival advantage, even if it's very slight.

One protein by itself can indeed do something. Most chemicals react given the right environment. It could even catalyse its own production - auto-catalysis is a thing and this sort of thing is being investigated as a potential precursor to life. For example, oxidation (fire) can catalyse its own production (more fire).

Although I would probably agree that life probably started out with a soup of many proteins and other chemicals and freely floating amino acids. But probably the proteins were very short and fairly ineffective at catalysing reactions. But over time, evolution mutated them, and cut away the chaff, to leave the more effective proteins.

This fixation on just randomly throwing together flagella and proteins by intelligent design enthusiasts, doesn't take the whole picture into account. It's a misrepresentation of what evolution says: big numbers and lots of time and the mechanisms of death can produce complexity. And it does it in tiny incremental steps. If you're looking for intelligence in evolution, then they are the complexity of environments, and the "design" of atoms.

 

On 10/10/2023 at 10:29 AM, Leo Gura said:

Evolution and proteins are just a fiction at the level of Alien Consciousness.

I would add that all explanations are fictions. The question is whether the fictions are useful in some way. I'd say evolution is a more useful fiction than intelligent design. But if something more useful than evolution comes along, I'd happily believe that.

Saying that, in terms of explaining reality itself, evolution doesn't cut it and probably ID has a better chance there. But some have tried to apply evolutionary ideas to multiverses.

 

On 10/10/2023 at 9:54 AM, MuadDib said:

What if I make it cold. Like really cold. Like really really cold. Like as cold as is inetellectually possible. Would all matter emit and absorb light then?

The coldest temperature you can have is absolute zero at -273 degrees Centigrade (zero Kelvin). The emission and absorption of light is done by electrons which don't care about the temperature as such. Temperature is related to the movement of the atoms (kinetic energy). However, movement can interfere with the structure of a material, which can affect its ability to interact with light. Less temperature equals less kinetic energy and less movement of atoms, which can change a material's properties. Kinetic energy of atoms can and does transfer into its electrons absorbing that energy and they in turn can emit light. The structure of the material is more important than it's temperature in terms of light.

 

On 10/10/2023 at 9:54 AM, MuadDib said:

What about a black hole? I watched a movie and the main actors said that light never leaves gargantua. I mean sure its not a real place but I really FEEL like the concept has a ring to it.

This has more to do with gravity than matter per se. Gravity bends space, more gravity more bending. Space can get bent so much that light can't move fast enough to escape the curvature - and an event horizon gets formed. The event horizon is the boundary where the curvature gets too much for light to escape. The upshot is that no light can get out from beyond the event horizon and you get a "black hole".

Although, you can get Hawking radiation which does escape the event horizon. This is probably mostly photons of low energy light. It happens because you get virtual pairs of photons being produced (they're produced all the time due to the uncertainty principle). One of the photons in the pair is on one side of the event horizon, the other on the other. So one photon can escape (and become real) and the other it trapped. The photon that escapes is Hawking radiation.

 

 

[MuadDib]

On 11/10/2023 at 9:25 PM, LastThursday said:

I would add that all explanations are fictions. The question is whether the fictions are useful in some way. I'd say evolution is a more useful fiction than intelligent design. But if something more useful than evolution comes along, I'd happily believe that.

I would argue that truly getting to this point of understanding is a challenge for most scientists and science as a whole in its current state of evolution. One should ask, however, if usefulness i.e. survival value equates to Truth.
Thanks for playing, you're intelligent.
 

 

Edited October 13, 2023 by MuadDib

[LastThursday]

1 hour ago, MuadDib said:

Thanks for playing, you're intelligent.

I appreciate your compliment.  Thanks.

Scientists can suffer from groupthink (like any other group). This can be both good and bad. There's a fine line between just accepting any old hypothesis and accepting none. Science needs a certain amount of inertia so that it moves smoothly towards some sort of truth or at least useful fictions. Groupthink is like a shock-absorber. However, too much groupthink can create too much inertia and that causes stagnation. In any group most will toe-the-line but you'll always get mavericks who break the rules: you just need a good balance of both.

Usefulness is usefulness, it's largely dependent on context. In the context of science usefulness would be predictive power. For example is the predictive power of the idea of evolution better than the predictive power of intelligent design? For an everyday guy, usefulness would be something like "does this allow me to live a more comfortable life?". 

If a scientific theory has good predictive power, then you could say it maps onto truth more closely than one that doesn't. Where scientists can go wrong is believing their useful fictions to be the thing itself. For example the universe is clearly not made of mathematical equations, but I've seen some scientists say exactly this. 

I wouldn't bash science too much though. Our very existence and survival depends on it in modern society. And without it, we wouldn't be on here.

[MuadDib]

1 hour ago, LastThursday said:

If a scientific theory has good predictive power, then you could say it maps onto truth more closely than one that doesn't.

I know right! I've been telling everyone for years the earth is flat. I mean you can't beat the predictive power of the Ptolemaic model with the Copernican one when looking at the position of stars in the nights sky, and even if you can it takes much greater computational power than is needed.

Edited October 13, 2023 by MuadDib

[LastThursday]

Even when Ptolemaic epicycles "maps onto truth" in some way. Kepler's ellipses maps onto truth even better. And Newton's gravitational attraction even more so. And Einstein's general relativity predicts the motion of Mercury more accurately and on and on.

Occam's razor only applies in the case where you have two competing theories of equal predictive power. But it's a heuristic only.

All this talk of epicycles brings this video to mind:

 

[MuadDib]

@nuwu True (ish)

@LastThursday scientific theories are heavily reliant on an underlying assumption of causality, be it deterministic or teleological or some other form. Predictive power doesnt necessarily have anything to do with Truth. What is the value of prediction if not for its utility? Flat Earth theory had much more robust predictive power in the early phases of technology, even when the Copernican model came into being it could not be beaten for some 100 years until widespread adoption of the telescope made observable phenomenon more readily predicted by 'round earth' conspiracy theorists.

Predictive power is only ever relevant to a narrow context and so, we could say that all theories are equally untrue, just more or less useful.

How could science explain an acausal reality, if that were the ultimate truth?

 

Edited October 17, 2023 by MuadDib

[LastThursday]

1 hour ago, MuadDib said:

scientific theories are heavily reliant on an underlying assumption of causality,

I would agree.

1 hour ago, MuadDib said:

be it deterministic or teleological

I would say teleology is not science. Determinism is though. And pure randomness (acausal non-patterned) seems to be accepted in quantum mechanics.

1 hour ago, MuadDib said:

How could science explain an acausal reality,

I would say science can't do that, since it deals in causalities. Something other than science would have to explain an acausal reality. It's not a failing of science, it's just outside its remit. Science has its limits.

1 hour ago, MuadDib said:

an acausal reality, if that were the ultimate truth?

But is it though?

If you were to try and do it scientifically you would ask the question "is reality acausal"? That's the hypothesis. So how could you test that hypothesis? One way is to "look" for events and happenings without cause. The pure randomness accepted in quantum mechanics is one place. Somewhere else you might look is for is events that have no possible explanation (i.e. after all possible explanations have been exhausted).

But there's a huge amount of uncertainty in performing such experiments.  Namely, that you can never know if there is a potential cause that you're missing or unaware of (i.e. you can't measure yet or have no theory for). Science would just keep on looking for causes and say "we have more science to do yet, our models are incomplete". 

 

1 hour ago, MuadDib said:

we could say that all theories are equally untrue

Yes. That's the "fiction" part of my "useful fictions". The map is never the territory, even if the map gets more and more useful over time. i.e. useful fictions map onto truth but are not truth itself.

 

I would flip the idea of acausality on its head though. If reality is indeed acausal, then why is science even possible? Why is the illusion of causality present at all? What maintains that illusion and why is it overwhelmingly present? More generally if acausality rules, then why is there a strong semblance of order and pattern to it? Why not meaningless chaos?

[MuadDib]

29 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

If reality is indeed acausal, then why is science even possible? Why is the illusion of causality present at all? What maintains that illusion and why is it overwhelmingly present? More generally if acausality rules, then why is there a strong semblance of order and pattern to it? Why not meaningless chaos?

Maybe for the same reason it was possible for religion to form and be possible before science even though humans have had acces to the same set of circumstances for 100,000 years (according to science) ... intellignece or lackthereof.

Also, it gets tricky to answer with language because our very language is structured around causality, the flow of time, symbols frozen in time etc.

One answer might be mu.
Another might be 5meo dmt applied to anus.
Another might be smacking with a zen stick.
Another might be neti neti until silence, i.e. all possible explantions are exhausted and all you have left is reality.

Im off to bed because I have more wood to chop and water to carry in the mornin'

[LastThursday]

@nuwu I would like to reply to you, but I didn't understand a single thing you wrote. Or is that your point?

[LastThursday]

@nuwu you seem to be referring to a fractal structure.

In terms of life I would say that a fractal accurately captures its essence. It's self-similar in that every generation is similar to the last. But it's also self-similar in that different forms proliferate, i.e. there are many bacteria that are similar, many people that are similar. So life is fractal both temporally and spatially. Each generation is like zooming into the Mandelbrot set, and the entire biome is part of the same fractal.

In terms of reality itself, then that is a bit more difficult to apply. I agree that reality is self-similar in that there are aspects of it that are unchanging (i.e. similar). Reality doesn't generally change its nature radically from moment to moment. There is also a sense in which reality "unfolds" from moment to moment, each moment similar in nature to the previous moment. There are also structures and forms and laws that proliferate in reality, repeatedly.

The idea of random chance is that of an un-pattern. So it represents a type of chaos which seems to go against the patterning of a fractal. I suppose a fractal can be chaotic in nature and could be said to be (pseudo-)random. I don't know, randomness is a very slippery concept to pin down.

 

Edited October 21, 2023 by LastThursday