Dear Patrick, you have totally inverted my entire position on the “part-to-whole” problem which I have long been maintained here, as recently as my post of May 29th, “The Cosmos as Hologram.” You have stood my position on its very head, subjecting it to a 180-degree turn, to make me say what I never said. If you missed this article the first time around, you can read it here if you want to know where I stand on this matter:
My entire point in that exercise is that, if one could identify and examine all the parts constituting a given whole, and know absolutely everything about all the parts, still one would not know the properties of the whole of which they are constituting parts.
Which is precisely to say that any whole is more than the simple sum of its parts. Indeed, I have been jumping up and down, and screaming out loud in recent times, to draw attention to precisely this understanding.
Stephen Jay Gould’s (may he rest in peace) language of “emergence,” of “nonlinear” or “nonadditive interaction,” is exactly what I’m talking about in that essay.
There is no “category error” here.
If you and I have a “communication problem,” as seems likely, it seems to me it boils down to this:
Because I'm a Christian, a believer in God, you feel that nothing I say can be trusted -- because I'm "brainwashed."
What you fail to understand, however, is that I see science and religion as two separable enterprises. Still, it's true I do see science as the “junior partner” in this scenario; for there is more to universal truth than what science discerns.
But IMO FWIW science is absolutely necessary to human progress. It stands alone in its own field of expertise, and doesn’t “need” theological additions in order to be true in its own field. And shouldn’t have such additions – its method rules them out, in fact. (Thank you, Niels Bohr!!!)
But science is a “part” of a larger epistemic “whole.” The trick for the thinker is to understand the ways in which science and theology are “separate,” within their own respective fields of expertise – and to keep them separate for their respective purposes. Science analyzes existent reality; religion has a different purpose altogether, one that can be summed up under the head of transcendent reality.
Yet in the final analysis, together science and theology – Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft -- conduce to form – as parts – the larger whole that we human beings experience as Reality.
Thanks for writing, Patrick – even though in so doing you have stood everything I have ever argued at Free Republic on its head.
These arguments get difficult because so much is riding on them. You might have no trouble convincing anyone that a tapeworm is a cleverly designed piece of biological machinery, as long as in admitting it they weren't required to go to the next logical step and wonder how it came to be so cleverly designed. At that point half the audience must deny that there is anything clever about it at all. Its just a collection of natural processes cleverly put together, no, strike that, serendipitously put together and it works.
Every one of the natural processes that allow it to live are natural in nature, and the fact that they work together in such a way as to sustain its life is interesting, but not clever.
I find the existence of biological firmware, the little control algorithm built into any cell, to be absolutely astonishing. Any organism depends on its own little information system for its survival, but we must agree that its little control system is interesting, but not clever.
The ones I design are clever, mind you. I use naturally occurring materials and processes, and organize them into such a fashion as to make my little mechanism functional. We could almost design a tapeworm, they're pretty simple, and if we manage to do it, I assure you we would qualify as clever, as would our design. But the real ones naturally occurring in nature, having assembled themselves from soup wtih no plans at all, these are not cleverly made, merely interesting.
In similar fashion the electrical pulses and magnetic variations that make this communications possible all exist in nature in some form or other. We might say that these natural phenomena have been utilized in combination with an injection of intelligence to make them work together in a specific combination; any one piece missing and the computing network fails. We could imagine materials and forces coming together to form a cable, and others coming together to form a router, others somehow forming themselves into a satellite, separately, but serendipitously coming together over the eons to make our little network possible, or we could imagine a guy, or a host of guys, injecting their bit of intelligence and work to make it possible.
Believing in natural processes and believing in geeks are not mutually exclusive. And believing in both requires little faith, since we know thats how it works. Believing in either one exclusive of the other requires much more faith, really.
I really didn't miss the mark, BB. I said:
"You are assuming, incorrectly I think, that the whole is nothing more than a collection of its parts, and cannot naturally have properties which are different from them separately." [Emphasis in my original post.]The emergent properties of large-scale entities can be greater than, and unpredicted by, their component parts, and this is the case whether we're discussing cells versus their individual molecules, or a jellyfish versus its individual cells, or a human brain versus its component neurons. Emergent properties are -- according to Gould -- natural consequences of the complex structure.
I skipped a step or two when I assumed you didn't accept this, and that you were commiting a category error by asserting that such properties couldn't exist unless they had some source other than the natural world. I may have leaped to unwarranted conclusions about your argument; and at the very least I didn't leave many clues about my thought processes.
My whole objection to your earlier posts was that you claimed that complex structures contained "information" which somehow demonstrated that more than chemistry was going on. What I was clumsily saying is that "information" is no more than an emergent property, and thus doesn't indicate any non-natural activity. So my last post wasn't all that off-point. At least in my mind it's very much related.
I did a Google on "emergent properties" and I discovered that there are wild debates raging among philosophers on this topic. That's not surprising, because it's really the same old stuff, but very nicely packaged in scientific terms. And frankly, the precise means by which emergent properties actually emerge is an open question, and the fact that such properties are largely unpredictable is also intriguing.
Well done! Those words should have come out of my computer long ago, but you came to the wording I was looking for.
This gives no method for deciding which "universal truth" one should accept. There are many anti-science systems. They don't necessarily agree except in their alliance against scientific inquiry.
Indeed, what PatrickHenry attributed to you was by all appearances the exact polar opposite of what you have been saying for so very long!!!
However, in post 884 he attempts to explain his objection – which is, as you suspected, that he has presumed that you have presumed a supernatural cause for the information in biological life. This is a bit odd, since you have always openly evaluated alternatives, including the natural, such as the sun as a possible source of information in post 543!
On post 715 I draw the same type of objection wrt to the side of scientific materialism, that the answers given to my challenge both presumed a natural, biochemical, cause for a non-physical phenomenon. The challenge was this:
This is a serious question before science at this time, more specifically the question is before physicists, information theorists and biologists who are engaged in “information theory and molecular biology”. And even when we allow that information (Shannon paraphrased as successful communication) is likely heritable - it remains the central question to be answered in “origin of life” theories.
For that reason, in terms of error, I would point to PatrickHenry’s claim:
Personally, it seems very clear to me, that the fact of a beginning clearly points to God as Creator – and therefore, first communicator. The beginning of time and the origin of information are IMHO two halts for scientific materialism and metaphysical naturalism.
OK, I will post a few thoughts.
I was originally going to post to the Information Theory thread, but it fits here as well.
Information theory is in a sense in a conundrum like cosmology. Cosmology has the problem of merging the big (The cosmological theories) with the small (the quantum size of things)
Until the theories are merged, then it cannot ever be said we have a complete, consistent view of the universe. Perhaps they never will.
On the infomation side, we have two competing doctrines.
On one hand, we have the pure infrmation theory mathematicians. Shannon, Weiner, Von Neuman(sic) and others. This side is concerned about data transmission, it's content and reliability. Looking at one of the diagrams, you will see a big mess in the middle, with all sorts of references to logarithms, etc, error correcting, etc.
The ones who are actually doing the sending and receiving are almost relegated to being footnotes, casual, tiny boxes on either end. It is a tenet of mathematical info theory that the message actually contains some kind of real, relevant data, some type of universal absolute.
On the other hand, you have the cognitive theorists. Piaget, Gardner, De Bono (his work is very enlightening), and others. To these people, the important part is the persons, things, or events involved. They are deeply debated about the meaning of knowledge, how much can we trust our perceptions, and questions about whether or not our internal representations of the world can be said in some sense to match the actual world. The cognitive folks are not so interested if you get a message by letter, phone, or carrier pigeon.
Now the cognitive folks cannot stand up to the rigors of the information folks. The information folks cannot see the subtleties and apparent possible contradictions of the cognitive side.
But the cognitive folks have provided a model that can at least start to reach a middle ground.
According to them, each human brain is made up of a huge number of switches. Say, for example, you have a switch in your brain for "It's raining outside". The switch is either on or off.
Now the act of communication is defined. It is when one brain has it's switches set in a particular manner. There is then an intentional act of some type to set the switches of somebodiy elses brain in the same manner. So if I tell you "It's raining outside" and you trust me, then your switch gets set.
This is imho the part of the theory that is needed to complete it. And we have stumbled on something that gives definition to a part that is normally fluid and hard to pin down.
Meaning.
Not it can be said that there is in fact no actual content to a message propagated, no matter how complex, no matter what the information theorists say. If you put me into a room with, say, a Chinese man, and he starts reading, I have not a clue what it means, or if it's actually gibberish.
The information throy folks would say that doesn't mena the message is void, they would blame it on me for my lack of understanding.
But there is a part missing that they need to consider. If I hear something and say "I understand that", even if it is a simple binary piece of info like "It's raining outside", the message caan be said to be only a very small part of the actual message.
Because for me to understand, I need to know what rain is. I need to have a spacial sense of what is "inside" and what is "outside". Lacking these elements, then the message is gibberish.
This particular part is described well by the ideas of symbology and language, and in particular, the computing ideas of Backus-Naus Form, where successive simple definitions can lead up to extrordinarily complex models and structures.
So, in order to have "MEANING", we need both camps! We need the info theorists telling us about the content and symbology of the message. We need the cognitive theorists with their ideas of perception, knowledge, and experience.
So much for the preliminaries.
Imagine:
In some universe, for some reason that doesn't matter now, a series of radio pulses occur. They are the first 100 prime numbers in binary. The pulses repeat over and over.
Is there a message?
Here is the caveat. It's a dead universe. No life, no radios, nothing but rocks and stars and gas.
With that caveat in mind, I ask again, Is there a message?
With the subtleties and definitions, I would probably say that in this case, there IS a message, but there is NO MEANING.
Let us extend the analogy a bit more. Imagine in the same sense that this is occurring in the jungles of the Amazon, where instead of radio pulses, a Yanamamo tribesman hears the pulses as far off, distant drumbeats.
He finds it curious. But as someone who knows only "One", "Two", "Three", and "Many", he cannot make any sense or purpose of the drums.
We observe the tribesman and chortle about his ignorance.
We sit here and pat ourselves on the back, with our Nobel prizes, and our treatises, and our grants, and our glorious dinners. Our colliders, and impressive college campuses, and libraries.
I'm almost done, and not nearly as cynical as this.
Given that we maintain how we know something that the por tribesman doesn't, we are forced to face the conclusion that HE KNOWS MANY THINGS WE DON'T.
And we would be vain indeed to decry and maintain that all of his ideas about the universe and his particular brand of theology are only superstitions of a prehistoric man.
I would love to expand on this and know I left our some points, perhaps later.
We are the transmitters.
We are the receivers.
We, with our sciences and theologies, ARE THE MESSAGE.
One final thought. Betty says she has always mainteined the difference between science and theology. I have also held this to be true. Science is a valuable, but incomplete part of the whole.
Everybody gets, in my mind, way to wrapped up about intelligent design. Intelligent design implies knowledge, intent. A kind of husbandry.
But there are very good reasons to realize that time, as we normally think about it, does not exist. That the entire universe, spatially and temporally, is here, right here in my hand, right now.
And if that is so, as some super-universal being might see it, then WE ARE THE PURPOSE. WE ARE THE DESIGNERS. FOR GOOD OR EVIL, WE POSSESS THE INTENT.
Thanks for the ping… I just returned from a much needed vacation (hiking in the Smoky Mountains)… and I see the philosophical debates continue.
Because I'm a Christian, a believer in God, you feel that nothing I say can be trusted -- because I'm "brainwashed."
I think you should actually state that, “Because RM&NS made me a Christian (LOL), a believer in God, you feel that nothing I say can be trusted -- because I'm a teleologist in regard to science. It seems a non-teleologist (or naturalist) must also deal with this axiomatic problem but refuse to deal with the problem from its actual beginning and prefer to look at it after the fact from an ironic intelligently designed perspective. The fundamental questions of ‘where we came from’ are ignored because ‘we have the benefit of being here’.
So… If the naturalist only assumes the axioms which are necessary for naturalism we must ask, ‘what is greater and what determines this value?’ The ant developed its social structure long before we did… Is our social structure “better”? What is “better”? Let naturalism deal with; ethics, morality, consciousness, life, and intelligence from the beginning until the here and now.
The answers you may receive of, “naturalistic science will figure it out” are not just unfulfilling – they are empty when truly we look at our existence for this perspective.
Right, wrong, and justice – all ‘man made’, and ants have the evolutionary advantage… Don’t they? If human justice is made by man than ant justice is made by… nature? Is there no justice in nature and only what ‘we’ created without design or purpose? If we came from purely natural origins then we emerged from chaos without order, design, or purpose.
I guess an ant should regard and struggle for its life in the same non-teleogical manner science says about our life. But should we trust a naturalist because they are a believer in axiomatic naturalism and refuse to see design in regard our lives?