Irreducible complexity exists - cannot be refuted

[Viker]

There are plenty of lame attempts at refuting irreducible complexity - but that is all they are - attempts.

Many vague reasons as to why certain structures evolved but not how they all happened to be put together as a complex whole. Take the Bombardier beetle for example -

Also the Arch theory - that even more complex designs came about by chance and then just magically morphed into a simpler one by chance.

It's about time someone came up with some real answers to evolution or at least accept that there is way more to it than Darwin.

Meet Ken Miller

[youtube]K_HVrjKcvrU[/youtube]

 

[doppelganger]

what does it mean then?

"Chance" is not (and cannot be) a statement about the implicit state of things. It is necessarily a statement about the state of the observer's knowledge about a thing or sequence of things.

So no thing occurs "randomly" or "by chance." A given observer/processor lacks sufficient information to completely understand every minute intricacy of the infinite causal web that brings about any observed phenomenon, thus making predictions uncertain.

So "chance" and "random" are not statements about the world outside of thought. They are statements about the state of our knowledge about the world and how we are using that information.

What you mean to say when you use "random" and "by chance" I suspect, is that there is an absence of personality of the Universe by which cause and effect facilitates a magical "will".

Theists are those who, when the Void stares into them, can't help but imagine that it seductively winked at them.

 

[idea]

What you call "will/mind/intelligence/spirit/conscience" is nothing more than patterns within the matter and energy which make up our brains. We cannot exist separate from our bodies any more than a painting can exist separate from the pigments it is made from.

a painting exists within the mind of the artist before it is ever on canvas.

 

[idea]

Honey, you are in dire need of an education...

Here is a physics forum discussion on the existence of randomness if you would like to read through an educated discussion on it...

Does random exist?

nothing just randomly happens, or randomly moves around.

 

[camanintx]

a painting exists within the mind of the artist before it is ever on canvas.

A pattern within another pattern? I see an infinite regress problem here unless you can explain why the initial pattern doesn't require intelligence to create it.

 

[idea]

So "chance" and "random" are not statements about the world outside of thought. They are statements about the state of our knowledge about the world and how we are using that information.

Thank you. When scientists use things like Gaussian distributions to describe complex systems, they are not implying that the system is actually moving randomly.

There is no such thing as an undirected process. Everything follows the direction of laws and order, cause/effect.

... waving your hands in the air, and saying "it just randomly happens" is not a valid scientific explanation for anything

 

[idea]

A pattern within another pattern? I see an infinite regress problem here unless you can explain why the initial pattern doesn't require intelligence to create it.

I think intelligence, and information is conserved - just as mass and energy are. Nothing comes from nothing, so yes, an infinite regress - no beginning to any of it... everything is eternal (including us).

Where does the cause/effect chain start? the Big Bang? what caused the Big Bang?

http://panspermia.org/thebegin.htm

"Nor is anything gained by running the difficulty farther back.... Our going back, ever so far, brings us no nearer to the least degree of satisfaction upon the subject. — William Paley (1) How did life begin in the first place? It's a natural question. Yet we have no idea how life began in the first place. Science is nowhere near the answer to this question. In fact, the question may be flawed. Maybe there was no beginning. This possibility cannot be logically ruled out.

[SIZE=-1]Helmholtz[/SIZE]​

This possible consequence of Cosmic Ancestry is not new. In 1873, the great German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz said, "if failure attends all of our efforts to obtain a generation of organisms from lifeless matter, it seems to me a thoroughly correct scientific procedure to inquire whether there has ever been an origination of life, or whether it is not as old as matter..." (2). Contemporaneously with Helmholtz, Louis Pasteur wrote (3):

[SIZE=-1]I have been looking for spontaneous generation during twenty years without discovering it. No, I do not judge it impossible.... You place matter before life, and you decide that matter has existed for all eternity. How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists... to consider that life has existed during eternity and not matter?​

eternal life...
[/SIZE]​

 

[camanintx]

I think intelligence, and information is conserved - just as mass and energy are. Nothing comes from nothing, so yes, an infinite regress - no beginning to any of it... everything is eternal (including us).

You do realize that in general the more intelligent a system is, the less information it contains?

 

[doppelganger]

Thank you. When scientists use things like Gaussian distributions to describe complex systems, they are not implying that the system is actually moving randomly.

There is no such thing as an undirected process. Everything follows the direction of laws and order, cause/effect.

... waving your hands in the air, and saying "it just randomly happens" is not a valid scientific explanation for anything

Your thinking is so precise on the issue, it still surprises me that you went off on a tangent about free will and choice. Seems like you know better.

 

[idea]

You do realize that in general the more intelligent a system is, the less information it contains?

I think our capacity for learning, reasoning, and understanding increases with information, but information does not necessarily lead to learning (a dictionary has a lot of information, but it is a book - books do not learn/grow/reason)... just because something has information does not mean that it is intelligent, but intelligent beings tend to gather information, if that is what you mean?

 

[Dirty Penguin]

Meet Ken Miller

[youtube]K_HVrjKcvrU[/youtube]

I presented this one along with another.....I got no reply from him...YET..!!!

 

[idea]

Your thinking is so precise on the issue, it still surprises me that you went off on a tangent about free will and choice. Seems like you know better.

Free will / choice, self-causal, is an interesting thing, don't you think? With a bouncing ball, we can measure the coef of restitution, and predict the height it will bounce to... the ball is not alive, does not think, has no free will, cannot make a choice in where it wants to bounce, or how high it wants to go...

one of the defining characteristics of life is our ability to choose - to act without being acted upon. Nature and nurture play a part in it, but there is a third component in there - we are more than just who our parents were, and more than the neighborhood we grew up in.

 

[doppelganger]

one of the defining characteristics of life is our ability to choose - to act without being acted upon. Nature and nurture play a part in it, but there is a third component in there - we are more than just who our parents were, and more than the neighborhood we grew up in.

Yeah, that still contradicts what you've otherwise said in this discussion.

 

[camanintx]

I think our capacity for learning, reasoning, and understanding increases with information, but information does not necessarily lead to learning (a dictionary has a lot of information, but it is a book - books do not learn/grow/reason)... just because something has information does not mean that it is intelligent, but intelligent beings tend to gather information, if that is what you mean?

Intelligence tends to gather information and organize it, thus reducing it's total information content. One only need look at the full spectrum of intelligence exhibited by living organisms to see how they started out disorganized and unintelligent and have become increasingly organized and intelligent over time.This implies that the initial state of the universe was infinitely disorganized and unintelligent, the exact opposite of any definition of a divine cause.

 

[idea]

Yeah, that still contradicts what you've otherwise said in this discussion.

is this the offending post?

...
We are more than just matter and energy, rocks have matter and energy. We have a will to survive, we have a will. Our will/mind/intelligence/spirit/conscience - call it what you will - this is what sets us apart from the rocks, and directs our paths. Unlike a rock, we can get up, choose where to live, choose who to mate with, choose what food to eat - we have the ability to choose.... call it "artificial selection" instead of "ID" but it is the same thing. We are endowed with intelligence, intelligence exists within us, and within the universe, and intelligence is capable of designing things. It is a silly thing to deny the existence of intelligence, and to deny the influence that it has.

do you agree that we have a will? that intelligence exists? How do you define this entity, where do you think it comes from, and what influence within the physical world do you think it has?

I think that is the main thrust of this thread - are complex systems created through impersonal laws (although where do these laws come from?) are are they thought out, a result of intelligence... intelligence exists (with or without attaching it to the Judas-Christian ideologies) ...

ID - we design and build buildings
we choose who to mate with and in so doing design the DNA of our offspring
we choose where to live, what to eat, how much to exercise, which also effects our bodily make-up
placebo pills work...
it is an intelligently directed process - call the intelligence God, or confine it to our own intelligence, but there is something called intelligence that exists, and influences evolutionary progress...
life is not a purely materialistic system...

 

[Viker]

I think intelligence, and information is conserved - just as mass and energy are. Nothing comes from nothing, so yes, an infinite regress - no beginning to any of it... everything is eternal (including us).

Where does the cause/effect chain start? the Big Bang? what caused the Big Bang?

The Beginning. by Brig Klyce





eternal life...
[/SIZE][/INDENT]

If everything is eternal, so is the universe. If eternal is infinite, there is no beginning or end point.

A clap of thunder did not just happen. It happened in a chain reaction in a course of turbulent events.

The big bang is similar. Just like thunder it needed no intelligence behind it. There has always been something. Something can only come from something else.

 

[camanintx]

Free will / choice, self-causal, is an interesting thing, don't you think? With a bouncing ball, we can measure the coef of restitution, and predict the height it will bounce to... the ball is not alive, does not think, has no free will, cannot make a choice in where it wants to bounce, or how high it wants to go...

one of the defining characteristics of life is our ability to choose - to act without being acted upon. Nature and nurture play a part in it, but there is a third component in there - we are more than just who our parents were, and more than the neighborhood we grew up in.

The fact that our choices can be detected long before we are aware of them would seem to indictate otherwise.

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft - Unconscious decisions in the brain

 

[Viker]

I presented this one along with another.....I got no reply from him...YET..!!!

Sorry if you posted first, I saw the OP and rushed to posting Ken. lol

It totally crushes i.c.

 

[doppelganger]

do you agree that we have a will?

I know that the rules of grammar that govern our language presume a will, but that this is contradict by the logical notion that "you" and "I," live in a causal universe. Mysticism and the Copenhagen Interpretation give clues to the resolution of that disconnect. And things like "E-Prime", General Semantics, and Zen meditation techniques try to correct for it.

that intelligence exists?

I don't know how to make any real sense of questions about whether some thing "exists".

How do you define this entity, where do you think it comes from, and what influence within the physical world do you think it has?

These are questions I have for you actually, given your otherwise precisely logical understanding of the epistemology behind science. You have an unexplainable homunculus lurking in your logic. And it seems to be making a mess of the place. :yes:

 

[idea]

Intelligence tends to gather information and organize it, thus reducing it's total information content. One only need look at the full spectrum of intelligence exhibited by living organisms to see how they started out disorganized and unintelligent and have become increasingly organized and intelligent over time.This implies that the initial state of the universe was infinitely disorganized and unintelligent, the exact opposite of any definition of a divine cause.

and here I thought entropy was increasing