Posted on 01/08/2004 7:21:37 AM PST by Scenic Sounds
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:45:24 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
How old is the Grand Canyon? Most scientists agree with the version that rangers at Grand Canyon National Park tell visitors: that the 217-mile-long chasm in northern Arizona was carved by the Colorado River 5 million to 6 million years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Quark is so popular in Germany that half the cheese eaten in German is quark. And "muster" means sample in German.
Interesting - the context is the Tristan/Isolde story, after all. Finnegans Wake is a hell of a thing, is all I can say ;)
God excepted, I presume...
No, of course not, js1138. What I am asserting is that the technic of science cannot address certain types of problems because its scope is too narrow, too limited for the purpose -- i.e., limited to the physical aspects of reality. There are problems that are not premised in the physical.
BTW, how would you design an experiment where the subject possesses free will? How would you "control" for that?
Hello A-G! I really think that Wolfram may have a valid point WRT "pseudo-randomness." To explain why I think that may be the case, I'll borrow Tegmark's "frog-and-bird" analogy.
The view of both the frog and the bird is conditioned by their respective observational positions. The frog, being close to the ground, sees only what is near him. He might think he is looking at perfectly random behavior of events within his field of observation. However, the bird, operating out of a much broader perspectival vista, might look at the same thing that the frog is looking at, from "on high"; and would see that what is apparently random to the frog really does give evidence of a pattern or order -- because the bird can see more of the relevant elements than the frog can from his point of view.
In orther words, what looks random to us, from our point of observation, may not be random at all, if viewed from a more inclusive, comprehensive perspective: You can see more from the mountain top than you can from down in the valley.
A lot of hidden assumptions in your question. If free will is an observable phenomenon then it can be studied, just as chaos, complexity and indeterminacy can be studied.
The behavior of people is complex and unpredictable, but it is bound by rules. Free will, for example, does not imply the ability to speak an arbitrary foreign language without exposure or training, nor the ability to become an expert in a technical field without training. These examples may strike you as silly, but they are meant to demonstrate that there are constraints on human will that can be studied.
In the years I've observes these crevo threads I've noticed a consistent inability of some to come to terms with complexity, and the inability of some to come to terms with a central consequence of evolution. That central consequence is that there are new things under the sun. Evolution brings into existence things that are absolute new and which have properties that cannot be predicted from first principles. In a sense, the universe itself has free will, at least in the sense of being unpredictable.
Human behavior is also evolutionary. Much of what we call thinking appears (at least to this self-observer) to be a stirring of random associations that collect around a goal. In formulating this paragraph I have an overall sense of my objective, but the process of stringing words together is not automatic. Lots of words and phrases come to the surface, but only a few get selected as contributing to the overall thought.
Human behavior is an extremely difficult problem, and our tools for studying it are inadequate. But simply asserting that it can't be studied is not going to get you anywhere in the long run.
This is probably true even for the most "random" feature of evolution -- the unpredictable appearance of mutations. It's possible that mutations only seem random, because of our imperfect information. If we really knew all the stress to which a bit of genetic material had been subject, and the radiation to which it had been exposed, etc., then what seems like a random occurence may be quite predictable. The structure of DNA is, after all, a manifestation of chemistry, so there's nothing inherently astounding about any mutation. It's just that we don't know when one will happen. But in principle, I think it's knowable, and even predictable. In this sense, mutations are probably even determined. But we don't know enough about the history of each molecule, and we probably never will, so it all seems random to us.
It's quite possible that some variation is "caused" by environmental stress. It's even possible that there are toggle mechanisms in DNA that trigger adaptive responses to oscillating environments. One could imagine, for example, an organism that has to survive alternating periods of rain and drought. One response to this is spores, but it's possible that DNA itself could undergo adaptive cycles.
I don't recall seeing any studies of this, but it wouldn't violate any known laws of chemistry. Evolution is a learning process -- a very slow motion version of learning, but quite analogous to what happens in animal learning.
js1138, I have never suggested that human behavior cannot be studied. I study it all the time.
You wrote: "The behavior of people is complex and unpredictable, but it is bound by rules." Try telling that to the late, great Jeffrey Dahmer....
You then give examples, and note "these examples may strike you as silly, but they are meant to demonstrate that there are constraints on human will that can be studied." Such "constraints" as you note may be exceedingly temporary; that is, if I decide to learn an foreign language, or to become an expert in a chosen field, with motivation and application, I could probably do these things. You seem to take man as he presently is, not in the fullness of his life and choices. Man is not a strictly "given" thing, bound to inexorably execute a program or a set of instincts, etc. Man may transcend himself in a way other biological entities do not and putatively can not. This owes to self-aware reason and free will.
You further wrote: "I've noticed a consistent inability of some to come to terms with complexity, and the inability of some to come to terms with a central consequence of evolution." I think I have come to terms with "complexity." It is quite obvious to me that the world appears to be highly complex.
However, you insist that complexity is the result of evolution, where others have suggested that complexity is the result of emergent behavior. That is, complexity isn't entirely imposed from the "outside," but may be directed by inner resources, at least in part.
You wrote: "Evolution brings into existence things that are absolutely new and which have properties that cannot be predicted from first principles." But evolution itself has no first principles. Which is why people can allege that it is a random walk.
But this random walk does not explain biological life, and it does not explain consciousness or free will.
I will have a lot more respect for evolutionary theory if it becomes able to do these things. It's just that, on the basis of the present record, I strongly doubt that it can, given its basic assumptions (e.g., matter-in-motion is everything in the Universe; it's all in the chemistry).
FWIW. I hope we can continue to disagree in a cordial manner.
So you are saying it's "all in the chemistry?" PH, I'll buy into that -- provided you can explain to me how the Periodic Table of the Elements acquired its properties. Or are we to understand that the Table is itself the product of a random walk?
I get the strange feeling that people who do not want to look at beginnings, or first causes, are like folks that come into a movie theater after the film has already started rolling; they speak and act as if they believe that the film actually began when they got there. What happened before their arrival simply doesn't matter. But in actuality, the film's entire set-up can be found in the portion of it that wasn't seen by the late-comer. Absent that set-up, it wouldn't be at all unusual for the movie goer simply to believe and say that everything he saw after his arrival was "random." He would of course strive to make sense of it; but he'd be missing information critical to a proper understanding.
'Kay, Doc; I'll be careful! Still, it appears that atomic properties are somehow related to atomic arrangements.
Yes, I'm saying that mutations are all in the chemistry. And physics. Certainly. But the causes are too varied to be predictable, given our limited knowledge.
PH, I'll buy into that -- provided you can explain to me how the Periodic Table of the Elements acquired its properties. Or are we to understand that the Table is itself the product of a random walk?
If I can't scientifically explain the "why" of each element (if there is a "why"), how does that change the underlying chemistry of mutations?
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