Ah! Leibniz's questions! There are actually two main ones, and they are (IMHO) absolutely fundamental, in that they root or ground all human knowledge:
(1) Why are things the way they are, why not some other way?
(2) Why is there anything at all, why not nothing at all?
Question (1) cannot be answered if one presupposes that "all that there is" is the product of random development. Randomness does not have any principle that can tease "matter" into existence as particular lasting things — for the same reason that we do not find an astronomical number of "transitional species" in the fossil record....
Question (2) cannot be answered on the presupposition of randomness either. For to say that something is "random" implies the existence of something that is not random in nature. If something actually exists and persists, it seems clear to me it cannot be "random."
At this point, Christians have no trouble whatsoever in assigning the cause of specificity and lastingness, and first and final causes to God.
But Richard Dawkins — a certifiable maniac — goes ga-ga anytime anyone would suggest such a thing.
It came to my attention recently that the infamous Jeffery Skilling, of Enron fame, was a hard-core Darwinist who literally "culled" one-fifth of his employees every year to (in effect) prove Darwin's maxim of "survival of the fittest." He is also a major "groupie" of Professor Dawkins....
We can all see what Mr. Skillings has wrought.... NOT a good example to follow, IMHO FWIW.
But the attraction of Darwin for Mr. Skillings, I gather, is that Darwin is promulgating a totally amoral "sociobiology."
Thank you so much, TS, for your excellent observations!
Truly Leibniz' questions "root or ground all human knowledge."
I will explain later if I need to why this fits on an evolution thread...
But for right now, I’m gonna take a short nap.
I have been thinking about writing this for a while, but it is only in the last week or so that it has taken on enough internal consistency. It may add to the discussion.
It is going to be quite lengthy.
TOE, or why physicists should play more horseshoes
Much of the things that we see or feel our colored by the slippery slope of syntax and the meanings of words and concepts, so I have thought about it alot to try to have some sort of a firm foundation.
Everyone, or at least most, hears about TOE. Theory of Everything. It is a model that physicists are trying to put together to explain why things are the way they are and (if possible) what is the meaning.
The one thing that proves is that most physicists are really, really, really bad epistemologists!
I’m going to use four or five examples here to explain what I think is going on.
First. Legos. We are going to take a big bag, a huge bag. We put a large number of regular legos in the bag, of whatever type/flavor legos come in, the important thing being that we put them in individually.
Now, we shake our bag. We shake it a bit more. Then we pour our legos out.
What do we see?
Well, assuming for our discussion that the legos are unbreakable, and that’s not necessary and is somewhat immaterial to the results, but just an assumption so that we don’t find broken legos, we find the following.
Most legos still come out individually.
But a SMALL! number of our legos have connected! For the purposes of the discussion, we assume that all the connected legos are simply two-fers.
We can then put them all back in the bag, being careful to not disconnect any connected (by randomness) legos, and keep shaking.
Everyone should be able to see where this example is going, as time goes on, we will find more and more complex patterns. It will have a hyperbolic distribution, the number of single legos will always vastly outnumber the connected sets, the two-fers will a;ways be way more plentiful than the three-fers, etc.
The point of the legos example is that it is not surprising at all that simple atomistic non-living items can be arranged by random forces in complex patterns.
Second example. Someone knocks on my door and I answer it, he’s standing there with a brick in his hand and asks “What can I do with it?”
I think to myself I could throw it at my neighbors cats, then a tractor trailer drives up and the back is full of bricks, so I got more bricks than I ever need!
I could build a walkway.
I could build an outdoor fireplace.
I could build a miniature model of the Taj Mahal.
Instead, I decide to build a model of a small hummingbird that lives nearby.
Now as part of my research, I decide to call ALL the physicists and architects of the world. I tell them the shape and details of the brick and ask them what I could build
None of them, not a single one, says a hummingbird.
According to TOE, shouldn’t it be obvious that I make a hummingbird? Well, not really. Because the simple properties of something don’t tell you what patterns you can make from it.
So I decide instead to build a model of the Taj Mahal, and move on.
Example three, in explanation
I and a couple buds used to play horseshoes. Summer days, a couple brews, the ladies hanging out with shorts and halter tops, that kind of thing. Now as you play horseshoes, you learn more about it, and have some fun. We all thought we were way better than we really were, but that’s not the point.
Somewhere on the planet, there are some real super duper horseshoe players. And they will be able to tell you details of the game and past experiences playing that you could not even dream about! Here is the point: The really good players who have invested a lot of time and study in the game will start to come to a conclusion.
They will conclude that there are parallels between horseshoes and life. I know it sounds crazy, but it is simply inevitable that some will conclude this.
Why would this happen?
It’s easy to understand but will take probably one of the longest sentences I ever wrote to explain it.
Any process or system of large complexity when studied in sufficient detail WILL BE SHOWN to be able to be mapped to other systems of large complexity, so that parallels, allegories, and metaphors can be drawn.
Saturday morning rolls around. Husband asks the wife what she plans on doing. She says she will bake a cake. He says he has to work on the transmission.
Neither one of them really understands what the other will do, but let’s look closer:
She gets her stuff ready, the mixing bowls, the spoons, turns on the oven.
He gets his craftsman tools close, his jacks, his flashlight.
They both have a place that they work, she works in the kitchen, he works in the garage.
They both have timelines to follow and steps that must be done in order to be succesfull.
There are a great many more similarities, but my point is that what they are doing actually might not be that different.
This is an example of how models can have parallels and be mapped to each other. This is PART of what we mean when we say “meaning”.
It happens because of two things: our human understanding and the way we try to make sense of the world and the actual process of modeling things.
SO now we can look back at our legos. Is there what we might call “meaning”?
I would say no.
We would find all sorts of examples of things get put together by the randomness. But that’s all it is. Yes, we might even some day empty out our bag and find a nice little model of the Taj Mahal. But for every Taj Mahal we find, we will find many, many more complete sentences that say the following:
E=MC CUBED
One attributes divine wisdom to it at his own peril.
See what I mean? It is simple randomness.
The last example.
People have been looking for meaning and knowledge for years without a good description of it. And they ask “What does it mean to have knowledge and communicate?”
One of the representations of knowledge goes something like this: our brains are like these boxes that have switches. My switches are set in a certain position, and when we communicate, that sets your switches in a similar position.
Why does this matter? Because NONE of the forces in nature (I mean the fundamental forces studied by physicists) can explain WHY I, as a collection of atoms, should do something that makes you, as another collection of atoms, have your switches re-arranged. Because I mentioned the Taj Mahal earlier, I tweaked peoples switches!
If our collection of legos in the bag were to do something even close to this, the physicists would be forced to admit “Hey. There is something going on here that we cannot explain.”
The expert horseshoe players above see similarities between horseshoes and life, even between horseshoes and the universe.
The physicists see the same between their studies of atoms and quarks which might be nothing more than another kind of lego. Admittedely, the ohysicists are closer than the horseshoe players, but NEITHER is sufficient.
Ultimately, the processes that happen during life are not due to the material things that humans and legos and the Taj Mahal are made of, but a result of the PATTERNS that make life. If there is an emergent field of science I think is needed, it is the study of patterns and geometry. Conway’s Game of Life is a good example, as many simple patterns can be constructed that have properties that are totally unpredictable from what we know at the start.
So what is the Taj Mahal REALLY made from? Is it made out of bricks? Is it made out of legos?
It is actually made out of imagination.