Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
I remember blowing through proofs in a few seconds in Geometry class, so perhaps it might be so. Yet I can still hang my hat on what "useful" means, and thereby not eat it.
Arithmetic without X and / is not too useful. And pythagoreus was stumped by irrational numbers -- a suggestion that euclidean geometry -- in that clasical grade school "proof" context -- stops being useful at some point.
Me: Yours is a statement of faith (anthropic principle applied to evolution).
RWP: It looks to me like Occam's razor.
The bottom line is that to a person whose worldview of reality ("all that there is") is that which occurs in nature - the arguments are equally asserted to rationalize the metaphysically naturalist (or atheist) worldview. For instance, that God is an unnecessary hypothesis - or that physical laws and constants had to be the way they were for physicists to identify them - or that someday a physical explanation will be given for everything.
As long as it is recognized as a belief system, a religion, that is fine. But it carries no more or less weight as a scientific argument than any faith based appeal by a believer.
Again, I assert my challenges:
The challenge: I can personally accept that yours (an atheist's) is not a religious belief if you can provide plausible scientific or mathematical evidences for all of the following:
2. Prove a natural source for information in the universe and then translate it to information in biological life. This does not mean the DNA, but the communications that occur in living creatures - reduction of uncertainty of a molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state. [Shannon] It is an action, not a message i.e. a life force Possible but unexplored causes include harmonics, a universal vacuum field, geometry which gives rise to strings all of which have a Scriptural root, i.e. God speaking it all into being, Creator outside space/time.
3. Prove a natural source for the will to live, the want to live or struggle to survive that characterizes life. IOW, self-replication is not enough. In an embryo, if the cells simply self-replicated the result would be a tumor. In life, the cells are organized into functional molecular machines which communicate together striving as one organism to live. Why does the organism have a will to live? Why should the component machinery (cardiovascular, neural, etc.) cooperate to that end?
4. Explain how the incredibly delicate physical constants, physical laws and asymmetry between matter and anti-matter came to be so perfectly balanced. A slight change one way or the other and there would be no life, or no universe at all. Appeals to the plentitude argument (anything that can happen, has) will only work in an infinite past, i.e. to make that argument one would have to first answer challenge #1.
5. Explain why out of all the possible spatial and temporal dimensions our vision and mind are tuned to a particular selection of four coordinates why not three or five, etc.
6. Explain how biological semiosis arose through natural means. Semiosis refers to the language or symbols of communication in biological life - the encoding and decoding. This has two sides, the language itself (DNA, RNA) and the understanding of it. Whered it come from?
7. Explain how functional complexity arose through natural means why and how molecular machines organized around functions to the benefit of the greater organism. Of particular interest would be the functions which would not work if a key part were missing i.e. cardiovascular without the lungs, nervous system without the brain, etc.
8. Explain how eyes developed concurrently across phyla i.e. vertebrates and invertebrates and why there have been virtually no new body plans since the Cambrian Explosion. Immutable regulatory control genes is all I can think of. But why would they in particular be immutable?
9. Explain the emergence of qualia through nature likes and dislikes, pain and pleasure, love and hate, good and evil, etc. consciousness and the mind.
Note that in Pressburger arithmetic, you can multiply by any arbitrary integer, just not all integers.
Catagorical means that the axioms uniquely define the system up to isomorphisms.
Proofs of theorems are useful in keeping one from wasting time trying to compute the impossible. They also guide one into what might be interesting. (I've made a living by converting theorems into programs.)
I'm not qualified to tackle your list, but I would like to know what is wrong with the methodology of sciemce as currently practiced.
I would like to know what ongoing research should be cancelled, and by what replaced.
Your posts strongly suggest that something is wrong with the practice of science.
Mr. "Zoos for church-goers" is watching his fearful RWP. Are camps better than zoos,for your darwinite inquisition?
Thanks, 1900 blogs later...touchy issue for the old time darwin 'science' faithful.
DeltaG = -T(Ssurr+Ssys)
2. Scientists are forced into a gauntlet of peer review to publish. Einstein and Darwin neither were required to do this and several Nobel prize winners were originally rejected. (Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?) IMHO, the publications which are rejected for content need an outlet to encourage the innovative thinkers.
3. Scientists who promote their own political, social or ideological agenda should be labeled accordingly (a disclaimer) so that consumers, grant makers, alumni, etc. will know the difference. This is generally done for all scientists in the Intelligent Design and YEC ranks - but Pinker, Lewontin and Singer also come to mind.
4. There needs to be more generalists in science. Everything has become so specialized that the bark on the trees are screaming to us and yet nobody seems to be able to capture the entire forest since the early 1900s the Godels, Einsteins, Heisenbergs, etc.
5. Science either needs to quit making theological pronouncements altogether or step into it with both feet, giving equal consideration to both the atheist view and the intelligent design view.
No reply to the Dennett quote?
Maybe you didn't know how fanatical your side is...
I can't entirely disagree with you, but no one has to run a gauntlet to publish. You have to run the gauntlet if you want to publish in a gauntlet approved publication.
There will always be occasional revolutionary ideas skipped over (temporarily), but by and large science is incremental rather than revolutionary. Good data must be explained by any theory, and any new theory must explain all the data, plus suggesting new and fruitful lines of research.
Einstein was not dealt an easy hand. The Nazis tried to destroy him. "One Hundred Scientists Against Einstein" was the name of an official pamphlet. Such things can slow progress but not stop it.
Seems to me that some of the savings from streamlining the administration of grants could be used by the Feds to collect and publish articles which were previously rejected for content.
Newton destroyed the careers of many along the way to preeminence. Robert Hooke {the discoverer of the law of gravity} never recovered from the personal attack. Newton also hung over 100 men for counterfeiting. Amazing that Newton could get so much done while attending to such details.
Competition brings out the best and the worst. May the last one standing be the best. Best scientist or best something else.
Sometimes you get Copernicus who lives in his ivory tower for 30 years, sometimes you get Tycho Brahe who jumps right in with both left feet. Sometimes you get Schopenhauer who combines the ivory tower with the two left feet. Point is, there are all kinds and always have been, but most of the big contributors are essentially done by age 30 and then they become humdrum establishment fit to manage the accounts.
It can be abductively proved. Maybe somebody should take the trouble to do so as a graduate thesis.
Most everybody gets the anthropic principle backwards, and of course it doesn't actually do anything useful backwards.
Here's mine: Wikipedia: Anthropic Principle
How about nuthouses? I've heard Haldol is good for acute paranoia. Whether it cures people of compulsive lying I don't know.
Strong anthropic principle (SAP): "The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history."
Final anthropic principle (FAP): "Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out."
they take on values restricted . That is backwards. They don't take on values. They are values.
As to the proof: It is not faith if the proof is possible, even if the philosophy prof marks up the paper so it bleeds.
So is General Semantics.
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