Posted on 01/31/2003 11:43:00 AM PST by CalConservative
he, he - you can probably tell where my interests lie.
It is rational to assume that all probabilistic natural-system behavior is intelligently designed and an intelligent agent decides upon the occurrence or non-occurrence of each physical event. Thus, an intelligent agent is associate with all claimed "random" behavior and such behavior is neither lawless nor without guidance, when a science-community's theory is extended to include these new features.It's so easy for some people to get carried away. Why doesn't he limit himself to the evidence, by saying: "It is rational to assume that all probabilistic natural-system behavior is
If everything is designed, then everything is following a script, and free will is a designed illusion (and even the recognition of the illusion is designed, and the conversation about the recognition of the illusion is designed, ad infinitum.)
So, what good is this idea? Oops, never mind, I was designed to ask that... ;)
I stopped reading after this nonsense. Given any arbitrary but finite sequence of numbers, there is an infinite group of algorithms that can be constructed to produce it.
Then again, maybe they are.
Do you have any evidence for your supposition?
I'm afraid Herrmann's contribution doesn't count, it's just armchair philosophizing, based on no evidence at all, just his own personal prejudice that "it can't be random, it can't, not even things that don't matter squat like Brownian motion, they can't be just random!"
That's an interesting viewpoint, but it hardly counts as evidence one way or the other, even when it is stretched out into a several-hundred-line long ramble.
Herrmann's mental state appears even more questionable when you read his book, which is available online. He says it's not published because people are "afraid" to publish it, but a more likely explanation seems to be that it's pure twaddle. For example:
What in the "world" is an ultraword? If you've read any of my older writings in this subject, then an ultraword is a more consistent term for what I've called previously a "superword." This fact, of course, doesn't explain what the term means. Indeed, I'm sure I can't explain its complete meaning since many of its properties are intuitive in character and, except in a negative comparative sense, have no corresponding Natural language properties.Ooookay...
His book is a long-winded (and windy) advocate of his personal "MA-model", which boiled down to its essentials is a minor variation on the old philosophy class teaser, "if the world was created last Thursday, and so were you along with 'memories' and artifacts (driver's license, etc.) of a past which never existed and so on, how could you tell?"
Well you couldn't, of course, but the even aside from the question of why would God (or aliens, or whomever) play such a trick on us, and aside from the philosophical question of if you can't tell does it matter, the fact remains that the most straightforward (and therefore probably correct) explanation for our current situation and memories is that we really *have* been here for a while, we *were* born and grew up, a zillion shark teeth in the ocean floor means that there really were a lot of sharks in the past who dropped them, and so on.
And likewise for Herrmann's song and dance about randomness. Sure, some "Intelligence" might be steering each and every particle, but not in a way that can be distinguished from actual randomness, but then why bother? If the results are indistinguishable from randomness anyway, then a) why presume a driver in the first place, and b) why would they waste their time?
Note that if the "driver of randomness" were actually nudging things to produce preferred non-random results, this would be noticeable by statistical analysis. Since this is the case, why play around with dice and why not just take an active hand since you're going to get caught loading the dice anyway?
Herrmann is obviously exercising his philosophical preferences, not providing any actual support for what he'd like to believe. He's just indulging in the old philosophical refuge nicknamed "the God of the Gaps". He thinks he's being original, but he's following well-trod ground.
Finally, it's not like "randomness" isn't understood in most cases. Herrmann ties to paint it as something unknown and mysterious (and thus maybe God is hiding in it, making it work), but more often than not "randomness" is just the name applied to the large-scale statistical effects of *deterministic* processes. There's nothing mysterious about it -- if you cared to observe the processes up close, you could watch the small-scale effects at work, in their predictable manners.
How about intelligent design?
How about it?
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