Order from Chaos
Order from Chaos
In Lord of the Rings, one of the hobbits knocks a bucket down the well. It clatters and bangs on its way down. It is soon answered by drum beats. We know immediately this is a lifeform responding. There is order – repetition of pattern - mathematics to the response.
Life is an order of moleculo-chemical processes that arises out of chaos. The self-repeating pattern of life seems discontinuous with the quantum world beneath.
However, perhaps it is not as strange as it may sound. I could imagine a stone falling though an infinite field of bells, bouncing from bell to bell. It would be extraordinarily cacophonous, however, due to the nature of affinity, we can imagine a time in which order arises from the sound. The sound creates a lovely purposeful – mathematical – melody.
It is the case of the 1000 monkeys typing on typewriters for a thousand years to produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The problem of the evolution of life from molecules seems settled.
The problem with both of these analogies though is that order would fall back into chaos. It would not last. The next words the monkeys typed after typing Shakespeare would be gibberish. The harmony of the bells would continue to fall back into a discordant cacophony.
It could be argued that in this pattern there are large stretches of chaos punctuated by transient sections of mathematical order.
Life however, in its 3 billion odd years that we know of its existence, has not passed out of its order. It makes adjustments for the purpose of maintaining its order. It seems to try to survive and keep the melody of life ringing. Not only this, but it seems to build on this melody, turning it into a mathematical symphony.
One would expect, given the millions if not billions of random moleculo-chemical events occurring within life, that at some point the whole system should have all drifted sideways and fallen out of existence – this seems especially true as complexity increases and the necessity for tight constraint at the base becomes ever more crucial. The likelihood of catastrophic collapse increases with each new emergent layer.
The fact that not only has life occurred and been sustained through billions of years, but that complexity has increased without causing a drift into chaos goes against what we would expect of order collapsing into chaos.
Surely the evolution of complex life from such a perfectly formed base of molecular and then cellular interaction points to intelligent design.
In Lord of the Rings, one of the hobbits knocks a bucket down the well. It clatters and bangs on its way down. It is soon answered by drum beats. We know immediately this is a lifeform responding. There is order – repetition of pattern - mathematics to the response.
Life is an order of moleculo-chemical processes that arises out of chaos. The self-repeating pattern of life seems discontinuous with the quantum world beneath.
However, perhaps it is not as strange as it may sound. I could imagine a stone falling though an infinite field of bells, bouncing from bell to bell. It would be extraordinarily cacophonous, however, due to the nature of affinity, we can imagine a time in which order arises from the sound. The sound creates a lovely purposeful – mathematical – melody.
It is the case of the 1000 monkeys typing on typewriters for a thousand years to produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The problem of the evolution of life from molecules seems settled.
The problem with both of these analogies though is that order would fall back into chaos. It would not last. The next words the monkeys typed after typing Shakespeare would be gibberish. The harmony of the bells would continue to fall back into a discordant cacophony.
It could be argued that in this pattern there are large stretches of chaos punctuated by transient sections of mathematical order.
Life however, in its 3 billion odd years that we know of its existence, has not passed out of its order. It makes adjustments for the purpose of maintaining its order. It seems to try to survive and keep the melody of life ringing. Not only this, but it seems to build on this melody, turning it into a mathematical symphony.
One would expect, given the millions if not billions of random moleculo-chemical events occurring within life, that at some point the whole system should have all drifted sideways and fallen out of existence – this seems especially true as complexity increases and the necessity for tight constraint at the base becomes ever more crucial. The likelihood of catastrophic collapse increases with each new emergent layer.
The fact that not only has life occurred and been sustained through billions of years, but that complexity has increased without causing a drift into chaos goes against what we would expect of order collapsing into chaos.
Surely the evolution of complex life from such a perfectly formed base of molecular and then cellular interaction points to intelligent design.
Comments (205)
Perhaps what you want to do is defend your faith against a perceived threat. What I see is a reductio that shows the frailty of belief in god.
Good post Mike. You are in good company.
I hope someone figures it out before I die, because I'm very interested in the answer!
I think the puzzles you keep running into, Mike, come from an image of the lone organism, a person, struggling heroically against their environment. Now you've even taken to treating Life as if it were a single entity doing stuff like adapting and surviving. It's not. There's not a single rock falling down the well but trillions. Evolution is a statistical phenomenon. It's all about populations. What evolution makes clear is how relative invariance arises, or relative "lock in" of change (usually advantageous in one way or another related to survival or reproduction).
Apokrisis has been going around saying our impulse to order here is to dissipate heat, to increase entropy. At the molecular level, under certain stable conditions (an energy source, heat bath) matter orders itself to dissipate more energy and this puts the upward trend of evolution of matter into motion.
How much heat are you dissipating?
It brings new meaning to the saying: If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.
That's because he's an emotionless kyubey that lacks hope!
Why doesn't the image thing ever work?
Clip the URL data after the jpg.
Omg, I did it!
Monkeys can't even type. If you had a 1000 monkeys, and typewriters, I think you would get a whole lot of broken typewriters with shit on them - no actual output. But then, if you wanted to simulate it, it would be quite easy to write a program which could endlessly produce random strings of characters. The odds of it producing even a sentence must be astronomically slight, I would have thought.
The narrative of life arising 'by chance' is one of the guiding memes of modernity. Until about the mid 19th Century, it was simply common knowledge that God created the world and everything it. Even scientists thought that, Newton and his contemporaries always thought that their discoveries 'shewed the handiwork of the Lord'. It was in the subsequent centuries that the thought really began to dawn that the Lord hadn't done it.
But there's a lot going on in the background. There was the Copernican revolution, and the abandonment of the 'medieval synthesis' based on Ptolemy and Aristotle. Then of course there was Darwin, and the dawning understanding of the reality of deep geological time.
So homo modernicus emerges blinking into Pascal's 'appalling abyss of space', the realisation that the whole of existence might be a cosmic crapshoot and our existence mere fluke. That sentiment animated a great deal of literature, drama and philosophy throughout the 20th Century. Read Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship for one of the canonical statements. Another is Jacques Monod's 1970 book Chance and Necessity:
What 'the kingdom above' is, I am not really sure, but I'm pretty sure it means Progress - perhaps culminating in space travel, literally 'going to heaven' in physical form (which seems the presiding mythos of technological culture.)
This, in any case, is the narrative underwriting the 'culture war': between godless evolutionary materialism on one side, and superstitious religious fundamentalism on the other.
However there are many more nuanced accounts of the issues, from both scientific and philosophical perspectives, which accommodate both the scientific and the spiritual. A couple of the books that I have found useful from a philosophical perspective, include
Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley:
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False Thomas Nagel
Another of Nagel's essays that I have found helpful is his Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament. (pdf) Nagel is a professed atheist philosopher, in the rationalist tradition, who nevertheless draws out many of the deep perplexities in what he sees as the dogmatic materialism of secular culture.
I don't think 1000 monkeys could type Shakespeare in 1000 years. I think the proper example is that is a monkey were given an infinite amount of time it would type Shakespeare. But this only exemplifies the absurdity of allowing that there could actually be an infinite amount of anything.
The question is how much of Monod's "only" can we chip away...
That Shakespeare could type is pure speculation, since he predated the typewriter by, I think, several years. How do you answer that, evolutionist scum?
(And, BTW, excellent point.)
I don't see this phrase as helpful.
I'm not good with probability but isn't the analogy that it is an infinite amount of time? So eventually there will come a time when you get Shakespeare again and again ect, like rolling two dice and getting a 12 after a 12 and so on.
The OP merely highlights the obvious. Exactly how many miracles are permitted per faith. Materialists apparently feel they are entitled to an infinity. Most religions are content with a handful.
Every biologist. Lots of people can nod in the direction that it doesn't, but name any actual text on the subject that isn't ripe with teleological language. Even Dennett uses "free floating rationality". You can't talk about biology without teleology.
Hey, I gave that lots of people can say it doesn't... but people can say many things that they can't actually do.
Suppose you're a curious youngster with internet access and you look up "Evolution" on the Wikipedia. Here are the first two paragraphs you'll read:
We've got "shaped" there, looks a little intentional, so you check to see if either speciation or extinction are the sorts of things that have intentions. Nope.
So if you start from scratch, and just learn from Wikipedia, you should be fine.
I'm going to guess that you just don't know... https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/
Sorry guys, I'm getting a bit pulled about at the moment, so haven't had time to sit down and respond.
Quoting CasKev
My OP suggests large stretches of chaos until the mathematics falls into a recognisable harmony, and then slowly drifts back out again. There is no reason that the harmony should continue, let alone become an increasing complex mathematical melody through time.
This OP suggests that if we buy into the premise that life arose out of nothing, we must also accept that because there was no intent, life should also drift out of existence just as easily. To not accept this position is to negate your own argument.
And yet the facts of what we know about life do not support the argument that life has drifted out of existence, thus contradicting the premise. So how do biologists reconcile this fundamental conflict in their own theory? This places the burden on them. If it hasn't drifted out, then it could not have drifted in.
As to the monkey analogy, it is not mine of course, I just borrowed it for this OP to illustrate my point.
Read it closer, and not just cherry pick out the things that you believe only supports your position, and miss the point, before saying too much? That's what I'd do.
So although this has the form of an argument about biology, it is more an argument about magic sky people.
It seems more honest, and cuts to the point.
I just showed that that is clearly not true. Basically all moderns are totes against teleology, and all over explaining it away in biology, and theorizing about a biology devoid of teleological language, and explaining it away, but none of that has actually happened. Biology is still ripe with teleological language. Even Dennett and Dawkins address their frequent uses of it, and attempt to explain it away, and rationalize it, but still do it.
What next?
You mean that you say that they don't use teleological language? You're just uninformed then. You can posture against facts all you like, if you're just after persuasion, that may work for some.
So why did you need to switch?
Where we could go, and it would be more worthwhile, would be to talk about how underpinning beliefs determine what evidence we consider relevant.
I didn't know what you meant by you saying that they do, and me saying they don't. I wasn't purposefully misinterpreting you. I switched the dos and don'ts, because I thought that I was saying that people do stuff... I don't know what I said that people don't do.
Nah, I don't like to talk about things in a removed fashion, as if doing so renders me immune. We're all biased, and acknowledging that doesn't in any sense render us less so.
If we suppose all kinds of monkeys typed away at random for who knows how long, then they might produce Much Ado About Nothing after a good long while (21157 words). They might equally produce all the same letters and punctuation in some other order, rendering gibberish in English, or maybe even something syntactically correct in some other language. And they might produce whatever other poetry or nonsense or a scientific masterpiece for that matter.
Yet, beforehand, each of all those productions had equal probability of being produced by the monkeys. It just so happens that we like Shakespeare (well, some do), and so we attribute some special significance to that particular production (which presently has a probability of 100% of existing). Of course Shakespeare wrote in a more specific context than our hypothetical monkeys. It's easy enough to find nonsense produced by humans as well.
Quoting Wayfarer
:D Comment made my day.
Hi Srap Tasmaner. Thanks for your reply.
The point you put forward is that we, at present, have so many variants and instances of life that at least some of them will continue to ring a mathematical harmony for billions of years as they fall. Some lifeforms drift out of mathematical harmony and are lost from existence, while others continue to randomly correct the drift and propagate. It's a strong evolutionary position to take.
I will try and use evolution and statistical phenomenon to reply.
If life arose out of nothing, unless the suggestion is that it did not have a single source origin, then in order to get to the point where there is a field of balls falling through a field of bells, quite of lot of population growth and differentiation had to happen. Life would have to pass through a long and sustained bottleneck of survivability due to a lack of variance, population, and refined systems.
A single arrow of life has been shot through time, not many. A system of molecules that just so happen to replicate themselves have formed a mechanical system so elaborate that not even the finest 'watch maker' on earth could match it for complexity.
The amount of successful and very difficult and often simultaneous steps required for this first lifeform to form are so numerous that even in the face of proof to the contrary, we would think that rational scientists should steadfastly refuse to believe in life’s existence, based on nothing more than statistical magnitude of improbability of this first step occurring.
If we grant that life did evolve naturally, and overcame the bottleneck of invariance, population and lack of exact specificity to the environment, so that it was perfectly adapted, then as the initial reactants that were driving life fell, life should have drifted out of existence. The system sustaining the initial populations should have disintegrated and returned to random motion. The statistical likelihood of such a response is extremely high.
To use an illustration: If, in our laboratory, we had a system of finely calibrated molecules dependent on each other and on a reactant we are adding to their environment, then we would not expect that removal of the reactant would cause a conformational or biophysical change in the molecules so that they now started using the glass of the test tube as the reactant in order to sustain their cycle.
However, such a change did occur, and more. Instead of drifting out of existence once the reactant was used up, a very fortunate coincidence, at this very instance in the evolution of lifeforms, occurred. Copying errors in the DNA underpinning their creation meant that flagella and chemoreceptors popped up and that allowed the ‘search’ for new reactants to occur. Life diversified.
Further mutations to the metabolic processing cycles and the specificity of transmembrane proteins as well as second messenger cascades, also allowed for an adjustment to new chemical environments.
All of this occurred without the primary molecular cascades being disrupted (for that would be death).
Statistically, there are several separate things to consider. The likelihood that such random mutations would give rise to such elaborate features, AND the statistical likelihood that such mutations would then occur at the exact time they were needed AND that these huge mutations and metabolic shifts did not destroy the initial chemical cycles that were defining life.
AND Of course, even before that is the statistical improbability that life would arise in the first place. Remember, there is no intentionality to life. It is all random.
And then there is the mathematical statistics I opened this OP with. Without intentionality or some type of invaginated terrain over which life is running, then mathematically speaking we would expect to see disorder punctuated every so often with order. This order would be nothing more than the expected anomalies from an underlying random motion – the monkeys on typewriters. Life, even if it did blow wide open for a while, should have narrowed and ultimately disappeared in the billions of years of its repeating pattern. Life should not have survived.
If we now move to the science of physics we see that life is statistically very improbable because it depends on the locomotion of a system through space to source reactants to support a system that is anti-entropic and dependent on random mutations matching precisely against a changing environmental terrain in order to sustain and propagate itself. Such a system is surely facing massive selection pressures against its existence. Survival of the fittest suggests that life should not survive.
But, when we look close enough, we find both chaos and order, and whatever in between, in the universe. Universality is a great example of a kind of emergence, with no particular intervention or guidance as such.
Still, we're not nature-omniscient. Atoms, for example, are not idealized bouncing billiard balls. We don't know atoms or whatever exhaustively.
Teleological evolution seems a bit like predestination (though more than 99% of all species ever having walked the Earth are now extinct). I find it oddly self-elevating to think of (what we know of as) life, or consciousness (as we know it) perhaps, as some sort epitome or pedestal of what might come about naturally in the universe. Why...?
I find your arguments the most convincing I've heard so far with regard to there being intelligent design in the universe. Do you have any thoughts as to the form and nature of that intelligence? Here is something I posted in another thread, as a rough possible description of whatever force exists:
"OK, so what if a semi-aware consciousness pervades all living things, and receives input from each entity's experiences, which it then uses to decide on periodic evolutionary changes to genetic programs? Genetic code is its programming language, but unlike computer code, it has a natural degree of chaotic behaviour, especially when subjected to various environmental factors (explaining things like cancer). The consciousness has a general sense of what is possible, and puts forth program changes that enable its entities to adapt to the ever-changing environment. Add to this a desire to expand its population of entities, a sensitivity to pleasure and pain, and a deep yearning for its children to achieve the limits of physical existence. With the evolution of humans, and seeing how they can be so self-destructive, it questions the benefit of introducing further evolutionary changes until the humans can get their act together. Voila! An explanation for everything that is evolution. :) "
In this scenario, environmental factors like gravity are constants - whether they were pre-existing (the computer hardware), or were programmed as such (the operating system).
I have been thinking about this question lately as well. It's certainly one of the things that have been on my mind, especially with regards to philosophy.
What does order from chaos mean? How could order arise from chaos?
Quoting MikeL
I think repetition and pattern don't really get to the essence of order. Repetition and pattern are only one kind of order, more specifically the order that arises by having separate things arranged in such and such a way. But, essentially, order is a determination. This means that absolute disorder or absolute chaos must be impossible, for it entails the absence of any determination, and the absence of any determination is just non-being, nothing.
You may think of absolute chaos as two balls moving in empty space absolutely chaotically, without any rhyme or purpose. But that too isn't absolute chaos, because the balls are still determined in-themselves as balls, and also in relation to one another. So all that we're dealing with in reality will be different degrees of order - we can never deal with infinite chaos, for such a thing is incoherent - the negation of all determinations is its own negation.
The table is black. There is order. The table is not white. This seems to be a negation, but every negation is ultimately an affirmation, for nobody actually saw a table that is 'not white'. They saw a table which has some determination with regards to color - but it wasn't the color they expected - so they say it's not white. This "not white" is an underhanded way of affirming its real color. Thus, there is no pure negation. Determination is always prior to negation.
Quoting MikeL
Surely this "chaos" from which life arises cannot be absolute chaos, by the considerations that we mentioned before. Rather this "chaos" is a lower degree of order compared to the order that we call life.
Quoting MikeL
You see, for example this scenario presupposes that the monkeys will be typing in the first place. Something needs to constrain them, they should be typing, not smashing the keyboards, eating, etc. So even this simple system requires some kind of order for the works of Shakespeare to be produced.
Quoting MikeL
Yes, agreed. Without a teleological end that directs occurences towards the production of increasing complexity and order this would be impossible.
Quoting MikeL
Yes, the existence of this world does require an intelligence.
What utter nonsense. I think the reason behind this, is we have a vested interest in the belief that it is crapshoot. We're conditioned to think that way, as something that 'science has revealed'. Actually science has 'revealed' no such thing. It simply must put aside questions such as 'intentionality' and 'purpose' because they're not in scope for the scientific method. But the ideological commitment to the notion of the Universe being purposeless, is now intrinsic to the Western worldview, when it's not a scientiific hypothesis at all, and can't be. It's simply a mind set.
Both of these two premises are contradictory and false and entail ultimately that something can come from nothing.
It is nothing but the preparation for the great darkness that is to befall the Western world. The West seems to be in the phase of its senility. It is too old, tired, and has lost all desire for life. This loss is expressed by the belief that everything is crapshot - otherwise you could not sleep well at night with who you are. But if everything is crapshot, that is now a justification for yourself.
Every judgement presumes an order. Without order, science and reasoned inference couldn't even get out of bed. The conceit of science is that it can or might explain that order, when it first must assume it, to do any work whatever.
That is why evolutionary theory produces so much crap metaphysics - when it goes beyond its remit, which is, 'a theory of the evolution of species' - it then tries to apply those principles to questions it was never intended to solve. That is how it reduces so many issues of philosophy and ethics to banal just-so stories about 'how trait x helps survival'.
Sure, but you realise that this doesn't solve much of the problem. Namely, the second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law. The real question is why are things (the universe) such that statistically, they will tend towards the fastest dissipation of energy? To say because there is a law is nothing more than to say that opium causes sleep because it has sleep-inducing powers - a tautology. And even worse, because this isn't even a law, it's just a statistic.
If Crapshootism were an effective sleeping aid there would be whole shelves dedicated to it in the self-help section.
I'm not sure what the problem is exactly. Maybe someone could state it in a single sentence for us cognitive plebeians. Intelligent design just gives us an infinite regress.
The chaos and order scheme hasn't been addressed or worked out at all. No one knows what this means.
Folks are talking about improbability of life but what are these claims or speculations really grounded in (Fermi Paradox?).
So you can say that 'life arose spontaneously on an early Earth', but the conditions which enabled that to happen go back a long while before that - right back to the emergence of the Universe from the singularity. That in any case is the basis of the various arguments from natural theology, as they will then say that the conditions for the emergence of life were woven into the fabric of the Cosmos, which they take to be the evidence of a higher intelligence.
However experience shows that no such arguments are ever convincing, otherwise there would be nothing to debate.
Quoting Wayfarer
With no indisputable argument or proof presented amongst all of the great minds in this world, there must be a missing element or two that humans either haven't yet discovered, or will never be capable of understanding.
There has to be a truth that solves the paradox of creation and existence - i.e. If we were created by some intelligent force, what created the intelligent force? What created the structure within which its thoughts are processed? If we were not created by some intelligent force, how did something come from nothing, or how could something have always existed?
There has to be a truth that solves the problem of infinite space and nothingness - i.e. How can there be no end to space? If there is an end to space, what is on the other side of that border? Nothingness? What is nothingness?
But what is a statistic except the canonical example of order emerging from chaos?
And could even an omnipotent God make a world that lacked the intelligibility of evolution as a general statistical principle - the inescapable logic of stating that what works is what survives?
Remember the lesson of Socratic humility - 'all I know is that I know nothing'. The whole problem with trying to prove a 'first cause' is that this is a hubristic attitude, and I do find that amongst the ID proponents. That is why I think agnosticism is a pretty good attitude - but not a kind of apathetic, shrugging 'what do we know' agnosticism, so much as a real sense of un-knowing, being alive to the mystery. Both scientists and the religious can have that sense, and there's no reason they should be in conflict. That's why there can be, and are, religious scientists.
@Caskev - Incidentally if you want to read what I consider to be a very good essay in philosophy of religion, have a careful read of this and it's second part http://biologos.org/blogs/archive/rediscovering-human-beings-part-1
All self-help is crapshootism ;)
Yes I've worked it out here:
Quoting Agustino
Quoting Nils Loc
The problem is the apokrisis-like attempts at the problem are "resolving" the problem with a restatement of the problem in different words. Intelligent design doesn't give us an infinite regress, it says that there must be an intelligence at work which can account for increasing order.
Unfortunately for theists and their claims of higher intelligence, the Cosmos turns out to be fundamentally a process of disordering. It is a cooling/spreading bath of radiation. So it is a misdescription of nature to talk about its order except as the least amount emergently needed to organise the most efficient entropic flow.
Says you.
Well we have to be careful how we define those terms. Chaos and order are not opposite terms, since there is an asymmetry between the two. Chaos is a relative term. Something is chaotic in comparison to a higher degree of order. But absolute chaos, as I've mentioned in my first post in this thread, is incoherent. A minimum of order is always necessary.
So the real question is how do higher degrees of order emerge from lower ones?
Quoting apokrisis
That's not the question. Of course what works is what survives. But why do higher degrees of order work better than lower degrees of order?
Quoting apokrisis
The end of the Universe is itself speculative. It's not sure that it is like that. And even if so, homogeneity isn't necessarily disorder, nor is this necessarily final, for we do not know what will happen once this occurs. Maybe quantum fluctuations would re-create the Big Bang.
Yes, it is a continuous exploration and experimentation via creative will. As we, and all life forms, are evolving we are learning and also trying out new things. When I learn to dance or a new Tai Chi form, or singing, or playing piano, I am actually experiment and training my whole body, all of my cellular intelligence, to do new things. This is the process of evolution. It is neither chaotic nor determined. It is exactly as we are experiencing it, a process of creative evolution.
How did the designing intelligence arise? and was it intelligently designed?
The designing intelligence is a required element to account for reality as we perceive it, but we have no grounds to that would require the designing intelligence to "come about". That's why it is "First cause". Now you will say why can't universe be first cause? That still doesn't change the fact that this first cause needs to be intelligent.
Calling something 'First cause' is ignoring the paradox of creation and existence, not solving it.
Of course the analogy from Tolkien will lead to intelligent design. By their choice of analogy shall ye know them. I'm puzzled that it's 'materialist' to think i.d. is bollocks, but there you go. Wouldn't just a healthy dose of scepticism drown the quasi-Christian beast?
The solution is that something is a brute fact since non-existence is impossible.
What's the difference? If the designing intelligence doesn't require a designer then why would anything else.
I certainly agree with that. But it points to a "first moment" that is a vagueness, an utter lack of determination.
Once you accept the basic relativity of all metaphysical categories, then already you are accepting emergence as being what it is about. You are offering the best argument against intelligence design. Any "God" must now be a form of immanent pantheism at best, not some supernatural deity with a grand purpose in mind.
Quoting Agustino
Who says they do? Surely it is more logical that the degree of order would be the least possible to do what needs to be done?
Again, another strong argument against a supernatural creating deity. If you want to talk about "the divine" in a rational way, there is a reason why "God" gets diluted down to a pantheistic vague striving tendency.
Quoting Agustino
Well in fact it is well constrained by observation now. We know - because of dark energy - that a de Sitter state Heat Death is pretty much looking inevitable. And anyway, we are not even 3 degrees away from absolute zero right now. So we know a hell of a lot about the outcome, even if most of this knowledge is less than a century old.
Quoting Agustino
What, now you are appealing to emergent chance? Not God descending in chariots of fire to reboot the Heat Death cosmos?
Talk about consistency. :s
Quoting praxis
So that is the 'who made God' argument. 'If you say God made everything, then who made God?' The answer to that question is not easily explained in the context of modern philosophy, as the cultural background has changed so much. But the answer, in terms of the history of ideas, is that there is an heirarchy of causes, within which composite or made things are at the lowest level, and simple or unmade things are nearer the source, as they are not subject to change. Atoms were supposed to provide that, as they are unchanging and indivisible, thereby providing a way for the 'unchanging' to appear in manifest forms (which is the subject of the classical prose poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, a canonical statement of materialism.)
So, consider this question - why does 2 plus 2 equal 4? Of course, it's a nonsense question, but in this case, it illustrates the principle of the 'terminus of explanation'. It is no use looking for an answer beyond '4' to the question, 'what does 2 and 2 equal'? The 'uncaused cause' is comparable to that although obviously on a far greater scale, being necessary truth, or the answer to the question 'why does anything exist?' And I'm not preaching here, I'm trying to provide an account of the argument from a generic philosophy of religion perspective.
So the way to get rid of a stain on the carpet is to disguise it with a bigger stain?
Great thinking Batman! Wrap your mystery in a bigger mystery. Pretend something useful was said.
Somewhat missing in these discussions is that science is the one that has demonstrated the Universe had a beginning. The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago.
If you want to talk about Creation these days, it means something pretty precise and physical. That should be a clue as to how helpful a bunch of religious folk tales gathered from various random 2000 year old cultures are going to be.
A natural theologian could easily point to the 'six numbers' which are said to be indispensable for the existence of anything whatever, and ask 'why those? Had it been all a matter of chance, then nothing would exist at all. And those values don't appear to "fall out" of the equations of physics - hence the "naturalness problem"
You can quite reasonably answer that it is unknown whether those values are in any sense intentional, but I don't see how you can prove it.
Quoting apokrisis
Bronze-age sheep farmers! What could they know? They didn't even have telescopes, let alone computers!
Why do you persist in misrepresenting the science? Thermodynamics says life must exist if it raises the local rate of entropification.
Science has measured this claim and found it to be true. Stick a thermometer in the air, and yes - thanks to all this human "order" - the planet is warming nicely. :)
But what was the motivation behind the question in the first place? Why did 'negentropy' become a factor of consideration? It was because it appeared anomalous, in an analogous way to altruism appearing anomalous to natural selection, until Hamilton came along with his mathematical rationalisations. So there's a motivation here, or a theoretical axiom, which is brought to bear on the question, namely, the requirement to conform to physical laws. What beats me is why you say your philosophy allows for final causes.
We look at the Universe. We understand that to have lower degrees of order lead to greater degrees of order, there needs to be an intelligence at work. That's where we're at. That's what the intelligence explains. If you have lower degrees of order leading to greater degrees of order by itself that is contradictory - it's the same as having something come from nothing.
Now when we reach the first cause, we have no reason that requires us to go back. There's nothing else that needs to be explained.
Utter lack of determination is a logical contradiction, for it aims to be a determination itself and fails. Your vague potential is nonsense. A logical impossibility that is the equivalent of absolute chaos. Every lack of determination observable in the world is actually a masked determination. My argument is laid out very clearly here:
Quoting Agustino
Quoting apokrisis
Not necessarily, but this is not the point here. We're arguing about a first cause now, which must have certain characteristics. That's all. So we didn't yet reach the point of discussing pantheism, immanence, etc. We didn't even reach the point of calling this first cause God or separate from the Universe for that matter. The question whether the first cause is "immanent" - what does that even mean? - hasn't been addressed (it would also presuppose that there is something which contains the first cause, otherwise, the first cause cannot be immanent ;) ).
Quoting apokrisis
You. That's what your argument entails. It entails that statistically, lower degrees of order will lead to higher degrees of order. And that's precisely what is under the question. You take that as a brute fact, while it clearly asks for explanation as shown by the OP first of all.
Quoting apokrisis
LOL! No, the scientists themselves are not that sure. We don't understand dark energy very well. We can't even predict what the weather will be in 5 days very accurately, you think we can predict what will happen to the Universe in many billions of years? :P In addition, all our predictions assume that the laws of physics will stay the same, and we just don't know that they will.
Quoting apokrisis
It's simply called limiting myself to proving one thing and allowing everything else as possibilities. Otherwise I'd have to write you a book.
Quoting apokrisis
No, you didn't understand it. The intelligent designer solves a problem. There is no problem that is required to be solved in order to postulate a designer for the intelligent designer himself. So why would we do it? That would be irrational. As irrational as not postulating the intelligent designer in the first place. It seems you like dwelling in irrationality though :P
And also, please do acknowledge how cynical this statement is. (If those reading don't understand the cynicism behind this apparently glib statement I will be pleased to offer an interpretation.)
Bleeding hell. The "problem" for science is that those fundamental constants do seem to be "chance numbers".
Everything else about the Standard Model is Platonic-strength maths. The particles are what they are due to the unbreakable regularity of symmetry maths. It is a case of 1+1=2 in that out of maximal disorder arises fundamental invariance. Symmetry maths says when every permutation is permitted, what emerges is the realisation that some arrangements can't be randomised out of existence.
So it is in the face of this fact - disordering creates deep order, the very order that accounts for the formal properties of the discovered constituents of nature - that the material constants of nature seem a strange accident.
The metaphysical questions raised by fundamental physics thus begin at a very clear and specific question now. Can the material constants be reduced to formal arguments. Can they be explained the same way as mathematically emergent necessities or invariances? Or are the material constants "just chance" - contingent facts? And that makes sense as that accepts chance or spontaneity to be a basic fact of existence too. It is metaphysically logical that there would be this dialectical or dichotomistic division at the root of things.
So the foundational question is clear enough. We actually know what needs to be explained. And then the debate within physics gets divided over how the contingency of existence is modelled.
Some go back to ensemble thinking - crisp possibility. For every possible value of a material constant, a world expressing that will exist. That leads to multiverse stories.
I prefer a unitary story where our Universe must be the best of all possible universes. In evolutionary terms, it must have the optimal balance for persisting existence. It out-competed all the other possibilities to become "the one".
It doesn't really matter which of these two choices is correct. The point is that science has arrived at some very clear questions. And done that in less than a century.
That makes a joke of theism that has waffled for thousands of years and got nowhere. World religions couldn't even make up their mind if the Cosmos was born, or was eternal, or recycled endlessly.
And now we have folk stamping their feet impatiently, saying why hasn't science cracked the final mystery? Yet these same folk seem to have no understanding of the very focused and particularised questions that science is now tackling, let alone the metaphysical implications of what now counts as strongly supported knowledge.
No knowledge with regards to the very far future and the very far past counts as "strongly" supported. You cannot just assume that you can extend your graph indefinitely and the same relations will hold.
I don't get it. You are complaining because science presumes that "anomalies" have rational explanations?
The requirement is not to make nature conform to some particular law. It is to discover the laws by which nature is ruled.
Thermodynamics has had to be rewritten because it was realised that the early set of laws did not explain the counter-action of negentropic structure. Prigogine got a Nobel for getting the rewrite going.
So as usual, you are complaining about science being a process of rational enquiry rather than sticking to its prejudices come what may.
Only science is founded on a method of systematically challenging its prejudices. It is designed to uncover its own errors. And after everything has been doubted, then that is why there can be confidence in what has managed to survive.
But go ahead and keep sticking up for a method of enquiry that avoids self-critical examination.
What is the first cause if not something come from nothing.
You've shifted the goalposts. I was responding to your argument of the universe being 'fundamentally a process of disordering'. I pointed out that an order might be said to exist, prior to any process of 'disordering'.
And not all mysteries exist to be solved, they're not simply fodder for science. Science is not omniscience, it is not all-knowing - and you can't expect it to be, if you think it's the product of adaptive necessity.
Quoting apokrisis
'Best' in what terms? Fastest route to non-existence? Most efficient at realising maximum entropy? Isn't that what you just said we're doing a 'great job' at, via global warming? Don't you think that's cynical?
So you just ignore the evidence of the Heat Death being all around us? And you ignore the fact that we can look out into the sky and see the start of the Universe because it takes billions of years for distant light to reach us? And you ignore the fact that we can create both the early and final states of the Universe to some degree in a particle collider or other experimental apparatus.
Is there no limit to your ability to ignore the observable so you can maintain your articles of faith?
It can well be the one and only uncaused given, for instance. You’ll note that regardless of metaphysics adopted, there will always need to be such an uncased given. For instance, logically, and not playing with words: if something emerges from nothingness, then this can only translate into nothingness caused something to be. Then, in this scenario, nothingness (defined by the absence of anything) is itself an uncaused non-entity/process-given from which something emerges.
And, as others have mentioned, the first cause need not be a deity … no more than nothingness need be a deity.
That is why you need to pay attention to the actual science. Prigogine showed how order arises emergently and so is not prior but immanent.
We know that is true from observation. So if you want to argue that order might exist prior, then it is up to you to formulate that as a particular hypothesis which takes account of emergent order as its constraint.
We have a world in which we observe order emerging from disorder (as negentropic dissipative structure) everywhere we look. Even human society/global warming is direct evidence of this natural story at work.
So if you want to posit something else in addition, then you need to provide a better motivating basis as there is so much of our actual world that doesn't need your kind of deus ex machina explanation now.
We can conclude that we don't currently know.
We can conclude that a designer designed it this way. But if we conclude this we are left with the question of whether that designer was designed, and if that designer was designed, was that designer designed, and if that designer was designed, was that designer designed...
Sign on the door says "philosophy forum".
Quoting apokrisis
In case it wasn't spelled out, Prigogine was born into a universe whose workings he studied, on the basis of which he formulated his theories. The basic order which underlies everything existed prior to Prigogine and his work.
The "immanence" argument is this: that science is able to 'reverse engineer' the 'secrets of life' by physical and mathematical analysis, by examining and disassembling the mechanisms of cells, stars, and planets. The intent of naturalism is to show that nature contains its own ground or cause. At this point, it has not.
You didn't answer the question about cynicism and climate change.
Quoting praxis
or 'who made God?', as I said. As long as you think that's a question, there is no answer.
It can simply mean that the cause is unknown.
It's a perfectly valid question. The fact that no one knows the answer doesn't make it a bad question.
Well either you believe in the relativity you advanced or you don't. Or is inconsistency OK in your metaphysics? [rhetorical question]
The very fact of determination would demand its dialectical "other" of indeterminancy. How could determination arise except as a departure from the undetermined?
You have shown you get the logic. So be prepared to follow it through in every argument. If individuation is a thing, then so is vagueness.
Quoting Agustino
I can't help it if your ability to imagine "absolute chaos" is so improverished.
Quoting Agustino
You are just prevaricating. It is clear that an evolutionary metaphysics is very concerned with "first cause". And it's standard answer (as old as metaphysics) is that the triggering event becomes indistinguishable from chance.
That is what we should expect from an acceptance of dialectical reasoning. If what emerges is the opposition of two things - here, the necessary and the contingent, or purposeful creation vs meaningless existence - then the vagueness which spawned them must be a state where we can no longer tell the difference. The first cause must look as much like one as the other. The first action must be both deliberate and accidental - and so also, the least of either.
As you would expect, science now gets it. In the theory of spontaneous symmetry breaking, it all starts with "a fluctuation". We can define "first causes of the vague kind" (sounds like a movie title, hey?) in terms that are as much a definite action as a definite accident.
So science brings dialectical precision to metaphysics. And it cashes that out in terms of the measureable.
We now actually know that there is a "quantum Planck-scale" at which definite actions and definite accidents blur into each other indistinguishably. We can give a size to "a fundamental fluctuation". And this starting point is chimeric. It is as much the one thing as the other. And so really neither, if we are being honest.
Quoting Agustino
I only argue that the degree of order is that which is matched to the degree of disordering. Thermodynamics is all about balance and equilibrium. Surely you've heard that mentioned?
So human society is negentropy that is matched by its capacity for entropification. For every city built, a matching amount of frictional heat must be produced. There are no perpetual motion machines.
It is telling that you need to misrepresent my argument to this extent to keep your religious argument going.
Quoting Agustino
What can I say? I thought you were a smarter fellow. But when you resort to arguments as weak as these, it just looks like you have run up the white flag.
Quoting Agustino
As I've argued, you have to show first there is still a problem. Science is explaining the emergence of order very nicely. The ancient metaphysics of a dialectically self-organising cosmos - metaphysical naturalism - is proving true. Exhibit A is the quantum fluctuation. Exhibit B is Big Bang cosmology.
So now the focused attention is going towards the question of "the first fluctuation". The point at which the "triggering cause" becomes indistinguishably a composite of Aristotelean final and efficient causes.
If you want to keep doing metaphysics at this stage of human history, you've got to do a better job of keeping up with the play. The question about "first cause" goes beyond the dichotomous categories you thought were fundamental.
I actually like this option as regard ultimate metaphysical beginnings: the metaphysical beginning is currently unknowable.
Still, when claiming that nothingness is a metaphysical substratum to what is, one has a clear definition of what is meant by “nothingness”.
Either way, this doesn’t address the issue of order-as-potentiality itself needing to predate (a never absolute) actuality of chaos in order for greater actualities of order to obtain from this chaos. I so far like Agustino’s arguments on this point, though I’ve here likely stated them poorly.
Apropos, as to designers and a first-cause-telos:
Odd thing is, designing requires intentions, and intentions require goals. A designer then, by logical necessity, cannot be identical to the goal(s) it is designing toward. Nor can it have created/designed these goals, for this too would require intentions with pre-set/determinate goal(s) aimed towards.
I grant this doesn’t disprove the possibility of a grand designer. Nevertheless, if the logic here is sound, it does disprove that the first cause can in any way be equivalent to a designer (OK, given that a grand designer were to be, it as psyche/deity would be intending toward this first cause more than any of us are (arguably) … but again, the first cause would be greater than this grand designer).
I'm afraid 'who made God?' is not a valid question, because 'the first cause' is by definition something that is unmade. So if the question is, who made that which was never made, then there is no answer. It is like asking, who broke that unbroken vase?
The 'first cause' is just a concept indicating a starting point.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's not the question, but the answer to this question is that no one made that which was never made.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, it's like simply asking who made the vase.
Pulling the science thing out of the bag. There is no way anyone knows what happened when it happened before any recorded history. In fact, I dare say it is impossible to say what happened an hour ago.
What scientists, who are paid some heavy bucks do, in order to justify their own existence, is to make some gross generalizations, simplifications, estimates, guesses, assumptions, and dare I say adjust observations to fit the goal, and then come up with a story which exactly mirrors Genesis sans God. Then the process of indoctrination begins under the umbrella of Science. In this way it can be taught in schools rather than churches where it really belongs.
Quoting apokrisis
More precisely, Prigogine's Mind created a story of how his Mind might have happened.
It's really difficult to get Mind out of everything we do.
All in all, observing the way you present science, actually represents the scientific process extremely well. Just make things up as required with the additional phase "science has proved". Evidence has become obsolete in the world of science where words are more than enough as long as it is what the people in charge want to hear. Makes life so much simpler.
ok then - an unmade vase, a vase which has always existed. (Of course there is no such object, but recall this is an analogy. But my objection stands.)
Just to be clear, I don't believe that for one moment. Prigogine made a genuinely novel discovery that went a long way towards showing how complex self-organising systems can arise. Dismissing it simply because you don't believe such a thing can be demonstrated might be a mere expression of prejudice, like the apocryphal story of the cardinals who refused to look through Galileo's telescope because they knew in advance that what it revealed could not exist.
An intelligent designer that has always existed?
The 'first cause' is just a concept indicating a starting point, or the limit of our current understanding.
Also there's something else I need to say here - actually two things. First is, I am not a Christian apologist or theologian - I am trying to present traditional ideas about these matters.
Second, and a recondite point - 'God' might be considered as 'real but not existing' - that is, everything that exists has a beginning and an end in time and is composed of parts. Whereas, the 'causeless cause' does not come into or go out of existence, and isn't composed of parts.
Pierce has some thoughts on the difference between what is real and what exists and the difference between them. He's one of the only people that does.
About to board a seventeen hour flight with no wifi so adios for now.
If this intelligent creator is outside of time and space, then that seems to preclude the possibility of him showing any change. The other side of seeing all the Universe in one block history fashion is that the creator's thinking or intending or intelligence would have to be frozen in a similar fashion. And can intelligence have that quality?
I mean are we crediting this creator with daydreams or boredom or the sudden realisation that he has a better idea?
Isn't it more rational to imagine a creator who sees all existence at once is instead more akin to a pantheistic universal tendency towards existence - an urge to manifest? Then having accepted such a vague notion of the divine - with is mentalistic connotations - just drop the divine part and get on with the naturalistic account?
Oh here you go again with that irrational nonsense.
Quoting apokrisis
The reason why these things appear to blend into each other is that we are lacking the capacity to distinguish them, our theories which deal with these actions are faulty, not because there is some ontic vagueness about them. The vagueness is epistemic.
Quoting apokrisis
Care to explain this? To me, it appears to say that symmetry maths says that when every permutation is permitted, then none are omitted.
According to the Western philosophical tradition the whole idea is to return to the divine, or to drop it. But speaking so glibly about such ideas - bashing hit characters on an iPad in an airport lounge - hardly does justice to the gravity of the issues.
Yes. Common vernacular would call it your mind. Most of use knew we had one until they began teaching us differently in public school. In many cases rather successfully. I'm going to start asking my friends if they think they are chemicals or whether they have a mind. Should be interesting, but then again my sample is somewhat self-selecting.
On the surface we have an interesting approach. I think that proving, as much as anyone can, intelligent design is a two step process.
The first step is to render the 'something from nothing' hypothesis so statistically improbably to be close to impossible and thus fundamentally incredulous as a theory. This OP hopes to make steps in that direction.
The second step is the putting forward of the something from nothing hypothesis as a credible theory. When rivalled against the much weaker something from nothing theory, if, as science likes it to be, it is a winner take all scenario until the next best theory, then intelligent design can trump something from nothing.
It seems that the something from nothing people are not defending their theory, but rather attacking the second step, which has not been formally put forward in this OP. Is there a defence that can be mounted in support of the something from nothing hypothesis that has some real weight?
At best some nucleic acids and amino acids have been produced in laboratory conditions trying to simulate what life on earth might have been like. That is a far step from proving something from nothing. That just shows that the reactants that we use to sustain our life can be created - which is a no brainer. There is no strong directionality to the argument of life arising from nothing - to show I can make bits of rubber does not explain how the racecar appeared.
There is a bit of an issue here. The mind is designing and initiating such experiments. There is creativity and intent introduced by experimenter. Such an experiment must spontaneously self-create. Now, should such a matter actually occur, indeed it would put the miracle of Genesis to shame.
I'm sure you're now about to reference the part of quantum theory which supports your assertions here. Any minute now...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Huh? If different permutations have the same outcome, how many different outcomes would you count?
Stating that the evidence isn't conclusive isn't the same as ignoring it. Yes 'heat death' is a possibility, certainly. A possibility that we don't actually even understand that well either.
We don't see the very start of the Universe. Our understanding of physics breaks down at that point. We see very close to it, and that's all assuming that the laws of physics remained the same through the 13.8 billion years going back. We infer this beginning and we may very well be wrong. We don't know yet. We probably never will.
No we cannot create the early and final state of the Universe within a part of the Universe. I think you realise that is absurd. We can create situations which may resemble particular situations from the early or final state of the Universe, however this is again to assume that the laws of physics which give rise to what we observe today were the same 13.8 billion years ago and would give rise to similar things. That, again, we do not know. It's certainly possible, but we don't know it.
The funny thing is that the story you always love to paint is just as much an article of faith as anything else. It too is just a story made up of a few facts we do have, which may be the wrong story. And you do defend it tooth and nail, and glee over how your opponents are crushed by it and so on so forth. The hilarious aspect is that you do not realise how much alike your opponents you yourself are.
Quoting apokrisis
I think you should re-read the relativity I've advanced a little bit more carefully.
Quoting Agustino
Quoting Agustino
The point I'm advancing above is the same point Aristotle advanced. Namely that order and chaos aren't a symmetrical dichotomy the way you'd want them to be. They don't both arise from an X which is both ordered and chaotic. Rather the whole point is that order is primary and chaos is secondary and relative to order. This is what Aristotle sought to show with the primacy of act over potency and form over matter. The point being that your infinite potential - your vagueness from which everything emerges - is incoherent. Your vagueness by itself is inert - in fact, non-existant. There cannot be any such vagueness - nor, if there ever was such a vagueness - could anything ever "emerge" from it. But there is something. Hence why we need a First Cause, which is entirely act and not potency.
Quoting apokrisis
Determination in the sense we're discussing it here does not "arise". Some degree of determinacy is properly basic, it is the first cause. This is the Aristotelian primacy of act over potency.
Indeterminacy is an epistemological concept that you've smuggled into ontology.
Quoting apokrisis
I am absolutely prepared, I ask that you also be prepared to do the same.
Quoting apokrisis
It's not my ability to imagine "absolute chaos" that is defective, but rather that absolute chaos is a chimera - it doesn't and cannot exist.
Quoting apokrisis
Dialectical reasoning as practiced by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle has nothing to do with this Hegelian version of dialectics that you're proposing here. The problem with Hegel is what the first trio critiqued way before him - he assumed that negation has an equal standing with determination, and that's false.
Quoting apokrisis
Again this is just a rationalisation, the equations certainly don't "blur into each other". Furthermore, our physics breaks down when we reach the singularity. We just don't know what happens. You are speculating that a quantum fluctuation gets caught into the rapid inflationary period which effectively accounts for everything that exists in the Universe today. That's possible, but it still wouldn't account for the origin - why is there a fluctuation in the first place?
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, you're playing the same trick here that I've mentioned before. You're just telling me you solved the problem by restating it in different words. Our initial problem was why lower degrees of order statistically lead to higher degrees of order over time. Your answer is that the fastest entropic gradient is the one that produces negentropic structures which decrease their internal entropy while increasing the entropy of the external environment much more. See what you've done? You told me that the entropic gradient (ie lower degrees of order) is such that it will lead to the formation of negentropic structure (ie higher degrees of order). But you haven't answered the question - you just restated the problem under different terms. Now the question becomes why is it that the fastest entropic gradient is the one that produces negentropic structures? Why do negentropic structures maximise the degree of entropy? We're back to square 1.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm just pointing out that you making the dogmatic statements that you do make requires a much greater degree of certainty and evidence than we have available. If we can know how the Universe started 13.8 billion years ago, why can't we know what the weather will be like in 5 days? It's a bit far-fetched to claim we have such degree of certainty over billions of years based on data we extract today.
Quoting apokrisis
Science is not in the business of "explaining" but rather establishing mechanisms via which order can arise. It cannot tell us why order arises in the first place. That's the business of meta-physics to decipher.
As for the ancient metaphysics of dialectically self-organising cosmos - metaphysical naturalism - that isn't an accurate portrayal at all. By many accounts, Aristotle was a metaphysical naturalist as well. He did not believe in a dialectically self-organising cosmos, but quite the contrary, he thought that act is prior to potency and there must be a First Cause which is actual and not merely potential.
Quoting apokrisis
You have yet to show that the two dichotomous categories - act / potency or order / chaos - are really dichotomously symmetrical, because if they are not, then one of them has primacy over the other. Remember - my disagreement with you is not over your physics, but over your metaphysics, and your physics, whatever they are, have no bearing on these metaphysical issues we're discussing. I'm merely pointing out that your metaphysics is incoherent as it stands - it's self contradictory.
Your starting point - absolute vagueness - is a chimera of the intellect, it cannot be actual, it is actually impossible.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see how that's relevant. I am asking you what you mean by this statement:
Quoting apokrisis
Care to explain? For example, what does "arrangements" refer to, and what does "randomized out of existence" mean?
Are you saying, that in symmetry maths, when every possible combination is considered to be an ordered arrangement, then it is impossible that there is a random combination?
Hi Jorndoe, I don't think teleological evolution is synonymous with pre-destination. Knowing the attributes of the elements in a system does not mean you will know how they interact against the environment or themselves. The outcome is uncertain, but a telological property could be argued to set some expectations for the outcome of the game. Maybe atoms will remain inanimate, or maybe the combination will spark into life and that life will grow into increasingly unpredictable things as the game evolves. God as a poet observer I find an interesting idea, but don't but forward an argument in support of it.
Quoting CasKev
CasKev, I think this is similar to what you were suggesting in this piece.
Quoting Agustino
Yes, without an imperative that affixes life to environment, a 'perfect' system would just as easily drift out of perfectness as it did into it. While the atoms would go on to rearrange themselves into other interesting combinations 'life' would have ended. Evolution suggests that the intrinsic movements of the evolving lifeform will somehow always match the changing environment, thus blindly - coincidentally perpetuating the populations - for over 3 billions years.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, rather than defending the obvious vulnerabilities in their own theory, believers in life arising from the random interaction of chemicals take the position that creationism is being argued and attack such a position, when creationism is clearly a subsequent step beyond the one being discussed.
Quoting Nils Loc
Yes, I think the contention is that life is handy for freeing trapped energy configurations that otherwise may take much longer to dissolve. To say that matter is ordering itself for the purpose of dissipating energy is like saying clouds are there so it can rain.
Well said.
We are all aware that there is a reason we don't walk off cliffs- to preserve our life. That the same 'life preservative' force pervades life at the organism level and not just the molecular or cellular level is outstanding. That an emergent phenomenon such as 'preservation of life' is repeating itself at each layer of complexity, regardless of the form that complexity is taking is something worthy of note.
In semiotic language this is a flashing signal that pervades the entire system regardless of how deep into it you delve.
Hey Rich, is this an argument of the telos as the fundamental element, arranging itself into surprising and unpredicted states as it emergences?
As a total aside, on Netflix you might be interested in 'Unacknowledged'.
I agree Rich. My brother made an interesting point only yesterday when he talked about the dots on a butterfly's wings. He said science looks at the dots and says they're there because they look like eyes and that scares away predators. But they have no way of knowing that. It is a story and in the absence of a better story it is adopted as the 'truth' by science - maybe not science on the cutting edge, but certainly the layers of believers beneath it.
Sure, this is similar thinking to Wayfarer when he said:
Without order, science and reasoned inference couldn't even get out of bed.
It is our own sense of directionality in life and purpose that makes us question if there is any directionality and purpose to life.
The curious thing is that the notion of an ever existing designer is counter to the notion that existence requires a designer.
Don't confuzzle knowledge and certainty.
To know something you don't have to know that you know that something (ad infinitum?).
Seems a bit impoverished to turn to Last Thursdayism as an argumentative device. :)
In return don't confuse storytelling with science.
(Y)
Since I just posted this elsewhere, here's a (really) brief summary:
These days we have some pretty good cosmological models.
The methodologies carry no promise of omniscience.
How many random starting configurations does it take to get this self-replicating machine (or a Universal Constructor)? Or is this something that necessarily requires an intelligent designer?
Isn't it interesting how theists are quite happy to take so much of what they believe on faith and yet as soon as it is science, nothing ever meets their requirement of being "absolutely proven".
Shows both a personal inconsistency and a failure to understand the epistemic basis of science.
Quoting Agustino
So you are pointing out that science has facts. And facts can always be disputed. And somehow that is a "problem" for scientific inference. Therefore you conclude science is "no better than faith" - faith not even having facts.
You are a card.
Quoting Agustino
If order and chaos are a dichotomy, then the claim is that they arise from an "X" that is neither ordered, nor chaotic, as this X is a vagueness, and order and chaos - being a complementary pair of limits - are crisp or definite.
And putting your scholastic version of Aristotle aside for the moment, the modern physical view is that energy rather than matter enjoys primacy. What is fundamental is not inert prime matter but (quantum) action itself.
I am taking an emergence approach where both material cause and formal cause are .... causes. Neither is passive when it comes to individuation. Both are active players. And they form a complementary pair. Material cause has the mode that it comes to construct. Formal cause has the mode that it comes to constrain.
To argue against my position, you need to understand that passiveness or stability or limitation is what emerges at the end as the fundamentally dynamical becomes self-regulated or tamed.
Quoting Agustino
Well we know from modern physics that Aristotle didn't work out so well in important respects. Starting from Galileo/Newton, it was shown that the world is not a story of things at passive rest and always needing to be pushed into motion. Inertial motion is instead the baseline condition.
So that switches things around. Action is basic. The interesting causal question becomes what negates or constrains this freedom to change?
Quoting Agustino
Of course it is a metaphysical rationalisation. The equations themselves would break down. The point is to explain why this is the case.
Quoting Agustino
Again, I was laying the metaphysical ground for a general approach to "primal fluctuations", not speaking to any particular physical theory. I was talking about the maths of spontaneous symmetry breaking. That doesn't apply to a quantum mechanical model of the Big Bang, but it is hoped that it would be the basis of a quantum gravity theory.
Quoting Agustino
It is not about being having a faster velocity but about producing a local acceleration. Subtle difference.
Quoting Agustino
Hmm. Do I really have to explain the difference between linear and non-linear calculations?
Quoting Agustino
Science challenges some metaphysics and supports others. I've shown how the evidence conflicts with any metaphysics that presumes nature to be fundamentally passive or static. So you need instead a metaphysics - like Peirce - which speaks to the development of constraints on freedom.
I don't believe this is correct. Socrates' method of dialectic consisted in showing what something (Justice, the Good, or whatever) cannot, contrary to what his interlocutors might think it is, be. This is done by revealing inconsistencies that negate the proposed definitions. It is really a logical practice of negation.
Hegel's idea that "Omnis determinatio est negatio" is acknowledged by Hegel to come form Spinoza. Consider this:
"With regard to the statement that figure is a negation and not anything positive. it is obvious that matter in its totality, considered without limitation, can have no figure, and that figure applies only to finite and determinate bodies. For he who says that he apprehends a figure thereby means to indicate simply this, that he apprehends a determinate thing and the manner of its determination. This determination therefore does not pertain to the thing in regard to its being, on the contrary it is its non-being. So since figure is nothing but determination and determination is negation, figure can be nothing other than negation, as has been said."
Excerpted from Spinoza's letter of June 2 1674 to Jarig Jelles as quoted in '“Omnis determinatio est negatio”: Determination,Negation, and Self-negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel' by Yitzhak Y. Melamed
It is not a matter of negation being prior to determination or the opposite: determination just is negation; and identity consists in difference, just as difference consists in identity.
Which ones, for instance? The one that is said to only be able to account for 4% of what must be 'out there'? Or the one which posits infinite multiverses beyond any hope of detection? Or the one that posits infinite parallel worlds? Were any of them the ones you had in mind? (Incidentally, the word 'cosmos' originally meant 'ordered whole'. I think the fact that this definition is now contested, actually mitigates against your claim.)
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There's always a huge amount of 'talking past' in regard to this particular question - it might be beneficial to reflect on why.
The 'seeker types' (of which I regard myself as one) are not especially interested in scientific accounts of the Universe. Might be, might not be. The reason they're drawn to philosophy is not necessarily to research the latest ideas on how matter is organised, or how life might have started in the biological sense. What they might be seeking in philosophy is more along the lines of principles to live by. Now, sure, scientific practice might provide some of those: scepticism, methodical rigour, questioning assumptions (all of which, incidentally, grew out of the Western philosophical tradition.) But the underlying assumption of science is that the Universe simply is, it has no inherent meaning, direction or purpose. So from the viewpoint of those seeking the ethical dimension through philosophy/s of various kinds, that's not especially useful. (Furthermore, the frequent assumption about 'directionless-ness' is that this is itself a scientifically-established fact, when I think that is highly contestable.)
I think among those who exemplify this kind of attitude to philosophy are, for example, Robert M Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), Pierre Hadot (scholar and historian of philosophy) and more recently Jules Evans ('Philosophy for Life'). They are all about principles you live by, that are also in some sense embedded in the fabric of the cosmos - dharma, Tao and logos, being some key words associated with such an orientation. This approach wants to see philosophy as being 'love~wisdom', which is how it was originally defined. Wisdom has literally a sapiential element.
Whereas those of a more scientific bent are generally less interested in the first-person, experiential aspects of philosophy (might be, might not be). But in keeping with the grand theoretical projects of the European Enlightenment, they're broadly concerned with Capital P Progress, the development of science, understanding scientific and natural principles, and so on.
(That's not even taking into account religious apologists, of whom there aren't that many on this forum anyway, and leaving aside the fact that the 'seeker types' often appear to be religious apologists to the 'science-and-engineering' types.)
And the final thing that ought to be recalled is the fact of the so-called 'culture war'. Evolutionary theory is one of the especially-contested subjects in this matter, perhaps because it ultimately does bear upon humankind's account of itself, and is strongly ideological for that reason. This is especially so in the light of the divisive arguments between 'new atheism', on the one side, and mainly American Protestant fundamentalism, on the other. Again, not really much of that here on the forum, but there are often echoes of that conflict.
Just thought it might be useful to bring some of these points to the fore.
So a simple way to describe the Universe is that - entropically - it is digging the hole that it is falling into. Yes, we can say it is running down an entropy gradient - cooling. But it is doing this by expanding. It is dissipating its Big Bang energy into a heat sink it is creating.
The normal way to understand entropification is that energy or order is dispersed into the larger world via friction or disorder. The wider world grows messier, not larger. But the Universe instead stretches light by its expansion, redshifting its frequency and so lowering its relative temperature, or ability to do work.
The baseline condition of the Universe is adiabatic. It begins in thermal equlibrium and changes smoothly in a fashion that entropy - measured in terms of the indistinguishabilty or homogeneity of microstates - does not change its count. There is no entropy production, relatively speaking, due to the cooling/expansion.
Yet of course something is happening as we can see from wanting to say that the heat of the Universe diminishes in exact proportion to the increase in its spatial extent. There seems a conversion of something into something else in some sense.
That is why entropy accounting has switched to an information theoretic approach - the holographic information content of event horizons. You can track the progress of the Universe in terms of the current Hubble radius. The Heat Death is now defined by that radius arriving asymptomptically at a fixed steady state width. The quantum information content of the cosmic event horizon will arrive at it physical maximum.
So two take-homes.
The Universe is different in that, entropically, it is falling into a hole that it is digging. The creation event had to involve the discovery of the possibility of the making of a cosmic heat sink.
Then entropy counting is not a simple art when it comes to the holistic view of creation. It is no longer regular thermodynamics as taught to deal with Boltzmann ideal gases or other standard models of statistical mechanics.
Ordinary entropy modelling just presumes the existence of a heat sink. More advanced models (and metaphysics) is required to understand a self-organising cosmic heat sink.
But isn't your 'metaphysics' fundamentally a function of physics? There is no reason for life to evolve, save as a consequence of the working out of the inexorable laws of thermodynamics. What appears to be creativity, the exuberance of nature, some might say, is really an accidental by-product of an essentially mindless process.
Earlier in the thread, there was this exchange:
Quoting apokrisis
I challenged that point, on the grounds of it being cynical - no reply. So let me spell out what I think you're saying, and why I think it's cynical.
I think you're saying that anthropogenic global climate change, and the other consequences of massive population growth, might really result in the extinction of a large number of humans, or even the species - even the end of life on earth.
If that is so, then it illustrates the sense in which 'entropification' can be understood to be achieving its end - which is 'maximum entropy'.
Hence your remark about 'the planet warming nicely'.
True or false? Is that what you're driving at?
That death is inevitable, and unconquerable, eternal, and the ultimate reality is quitter talk.
It is fundamentally constrained by the physics that has resulted from the past 500 years in particular.
I hope you see the difference.
Quoting Wayfarer
Them's your words, not mine. No matter how regularly you try to insert them in my mouth.
Quoting Wayfarer
If you say something really dumb and ad hom that, its like a fart. It seems more polite to pretend you didn't go there.
Quoting Wayfarer
As if you don't understand sarcasm. Nice one.
Hi.
What if this involves the limits of human reason? What is it to understand something? Is it to have a feeling of satisfied curiosity? Is it the ability to do something new? What if some explanation made us feel good but didn't allow us to predict something new or change things somehow? (I just joined this forum because I didn't see anyone mention that kind of idea.)
Thanks for the kind welcome! This is a great thread. I read it all and just had to jump in.
What if many random patterns were somehow generated and some of them happened to be self-reproducing? If the patterns are subject to wear and tear, then eventually would we not have only those that are self-reproducing? For me the strangest or most mysterious aspect is the very beginning. My current thesis is that we cannot escape brute fact at some point, whether we call this brute fact "God" or something more metaphysical as opposed to theological. To be clear, I think this is brute fact for us, as a function of human cognition.
Nice point. This is where I'm coming from. How is a creator an explanation? How is a creator not just one more part of the creation, ultimately? As soon as we add this creator object to our notion of all that exists? It seems that any answer to the question has to be a disappointing answer. It makes me question the question. On the other hand, answer candidates obviously have emotional relevance. So that suggests that what is going on is debate over grand narratives, a clash of visions about man's place and purpose (if any) in the universe.
This seems like a very accurate description of our most immediate experience as human beings. Whatever else is going on, creative evolution is here now.
That would be fine. Conceptually, I have no problem with the idea that life might have originated through random patterning. The point though is that the random patterning continues to alter through time. This is evolution. The problem is that the pattern of life has no reason to cling to the pattern of the environmental landscape in order to survive. It should randomly drift out of life, just as it drifted in. According to the theory of life, in the 3 billions plus years since life began, this hasn't occurred even once. Why shouldn't life have evolved and de-evolved at least several times by now?
Quoting t0m
Yes, but can you see what happened though to your possibilities. They narrowed. What is there to ensure that those self-reproducing lifeforms continue to survive through time when they and their environment are both subject to change? If we had a winning combination for life, then random drift through environmental change and mutation should have knocked it out by now. Instead the opposite is true. There appears to be a contradiction at work.
Quoting t0m
A lot of us feel the same way and talk about it quite a bit. Certainly saying there was a beginning does not negate the possibility of a creator for that beginning.
I think that infinite regress pre-supposes increasing complexity. It may not be the case. In which case regress would not be infinite and we can close our loop.
But what if something is a brute fact simply because of the way we reason as humans? Also, why is non-existence impossible? Respectfully, does "non-existence is impossible" have a sufficiently unambiguous meaning in the first place?
Interesting question. I'm no expert, but my conjecture/understanding is that most mutations are "bad" and do cause that particular organism's pattern to drift away. Or rather "bad" is nothing but this pattern's "unsuccessful" relationship with its environment. Other mutations are compatible, and that allows for increased complexity. No doubt this is counterintuitive. To be frank, I take it on trust, just as I take lots of specialized knowledge on trust. But, indeed, it's no small assertion to say that human beings emerged from muck over billions of years. It's hardly absurd to question such a narrative.
As far as the process not starting again, that is an interesting point. I vaguely recall scientists working with primordial soup to see if they could manage non-biogenesis. A layman might think or hope that this could be done. This would be more impressive than cold fusion. I'm assuming it hasn't been done. Surely it would cause a commotion.
I definitely don't think it's absurd to close our loop. We can just hypothesize that the origin transcends human intelligence. I suppose my view is something like that. But for me this is not an explanation but rather a strategic retreat inspired by a questioning of the question. On the other hand, a final explanation doesn't make sense to me. So perhaps I'm a "theist" of brute fact. If I can understand God metaphysically (according to my current understanding of understanding), then I don't see why I couldn't ask after His nature. Why wouldn't the nature of God Himself also be contingent? In other words, why would God have exactly that nature?
But this also seems to apply to metaphysical and physical theories. Is (ultimate) contingency necessary? Is necessity necessarily local or only between entities? I ask these questions from my current understanding of my own understanding (to understand is to find or postulate necessary if probabilistic relationships). If there is radically different kind of experience in God, then the whole issue leaves metaphysics behind. I'd like to say that I'm open to that. It's scary, of course. I'm used to being alone down here at this point. Death is the devil I know in the sense that I'm used to the idea of my mortality.
But what if this "quitter talk" is used within a larger strategy for success? Do individuals who frame themselves or even the species in these tragic terms necessarily quit or fail? What if these dark visions are the dissonance in the music or aggressions against ideologies understood as restraints?
First, great post. Also, for background, I relate to this "seeker" type. Principles to live by. Yes.
Quoting Wayfarer
Is this uncontroversial? I think of it as a method. Ideally (as I understand it) it offers testable predictions. Maybe Popper oversimplifies, but I understand it as falsifiable prophecy. Expect this measurement at tis time and place. Also, doesn't thermodynamics deal with direction? The arrow of time? Aren't the postulated "laws" themselves inherent meaning? So is the problem perhaps the assumption that scientific meaning is the only important meaning? On quantifiable matters, science seems trustworthy. But not all objects of human interest are quantifiable. I think of the intelligibility (ordinary world, language) that we are thrown into. Science emerges from that and helps us deal with that --along with other cultural accumulations.
Quoting Wayfarer
Very good point. For many this is a hot subject. On the other hand, the first-person richness that is already here and undeniable arguably deflates that issue, at least for some. If I discover that I am not in fact mortal, that's a game changer. If the world suddenly becomes utopia, that's a game changer. But if the world is going to stay the same and I'm going to stay the same, then our mysterious source doesn't matter much, if at all. Only subjective experience matters here. If "God" is a word I use for the order I find in things, for instance, why bother with the metaphysical assertions? Perhaps as art or piety. Perhaps for political reasons. I get that. Is metaphysics science, poetry, religion or something else? It's seems deeper than all three in some sense, at least in its ambition. That's how I fit it into the "seeker." It wants to get behind or under other forms of knowledge or questioning.
Well, that would be if we only consider dialogues like Euthyphro where no positive conceptions are left standing. However, in other dialogues, like Republic, it is shown more clearly that dialectic is a technique of logical critique that is meant to create the right hierarchy of ideas in the soul, and thus bring the soul in harmony with itself.
Quoting Janus
So much more than this, I would say it's a logical practice of seeing into the nature of things, which involves negation of appearances as much as it involves the affirmation of reality.
Quoting Janus
Yes, but just as obvious is that matter cannot be "totalized" or considered in its totality, for there is no actual infinite. Spinoza's philosophy is a philosophical attempt at totalization.
Quoting Janus
Yes, this is certain. At the same time, there can be no infinite bodies, as per above.
Quoting Janus
See here's the difference for me. Figure is indeed nothing but determination, however determination is not negation. If we take particular examples, when we say "the table is white", then we don't really mean that all colors apart from white are negated. We rather affirm the being of white. "Not white" cannot exist. You could say that determination implies negation, but negation never has being. If I say "the table is not white", then I don't really mean there is such a thing as "not white" that I see. I never see "not white" - rather I see another color, so my saying that it's "not white" really means that I expected it to be white, but alas it was a different color.
The problem is that Hegel (and Spinoza) invert the Platonic/Aristotelian conception of desire. Here:
This leads Hegel later on to conceive of self-consciousness not as longing for any external object, but rather as longing for its own self-certainty, where what is external becomes merely a means of self-affirmation. This desire is conceived as a nothingness - a void - that seeks to make itself actual or objectified in the external world. This conception of goodness as a mode of desire/thought is the sign of modernity par excellence.
But the Platonic conception of desire situates goodness in the external object that the soul longs for. Goodness is not a function of the will, but rather of eros, erotic longing. This is lost in modern thinkers.
Our beliefs effect our attitudes and behaviors, and I think probably the inverse as well.
Relativity, inflation, Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams, ...
(I'm not big on appeal to etymology.)
Now you are getting it. "It just happens". Remember this for all as scientific explanations for everything. Just remember to write a few hundred scientific words before and after this phrase so it looks really scientific, and you are set. Key words are thermodynamics, cosmic, inertia, entropy, endropisticoloical.
Do you have a purpose in your comments, Rich, or are you just trying to stir everyone one up? What's going on with you?
Just underscoring that "It just happened" is no better or worse than "God did it". Neither have any evidence and both are a based upon a certain faith. It is a matter of taste. Nothing special with either explanation and I believe that it doesn't require much to believe in either. Whatever.
I imagine there are those who believe in either consider it to be the Truth.
In my view, "it just happened" is the only "ultimate" explanation, which is to say that the system as a whole must be "unconditioned." Not that he's an authority, but this is also my understanding of Hegel's logic. Explanation can only function "within" the "system," where this system is the conceptual vision or narrative of reality as a whole.
If one says "God did it," then "God" becomes part of the system or the narrative. So instead of "there just was nature," we have "there just was or is a God who created nature." God himself, in other words, must be revealed as contingent to the impious mind that wants to understand. In my view, the projection of personality on God obscures this contingency. I don't claim that this disproves God. I only claim that God cannot function as a "logically" satisfying explanation. One can of course believe and accept the mystery. Similarly one can believe that science is ideal for determining conditions "within" the necessarily unconditioned system.
*I have yet to hear a good argument against the necessity of ultimate contingency. But maybe I'm just stubborn.
It's not an explanation. It's a punt. Zero discovery because of zero effort. I guess with the time now available one can watch some TV. It's fine. Exploring and understanding nature is not for everyone. Philosophy seems to have become sci-fi story telling.
You're right. It's not an explanation. It reveals the quest for or the question about the "ultimate ground" to be a fool's errand or a pseudo-question. As far as zero-effort is concerned, I think you're quite wrong there. Passionate thinking about this issue led me to this realization on my own. I then discovered that Hegel, for instance, also (for all his rationalism) left the Idea itself unconditioned. Or rather it "conditioned itself in perfect freedom," having no outside.
In some ways we agree. I think there is faith at the basis of every position. We have to at least assume some method for finding the truth and even the existence of a universal truth in the first place.
Not at all. It takes lots of time, patience, and development of keen observation. But who wants to spend their life exploring and discovering? Far easier to just make up stories.
Who wants to? Scientists and philosophers, of course. I happen to work in science myself, though I'm more passionate about philosophy. It may be that philosophy or the philosopher discovers that "making up stories" is something like the human essence. One such story might be the ultimate story, the objective story, the story not-to-be-revised. The philosopher may, as a finale, put his own chosen role in doubt.
While it is easy to make up stories, it's not so easy to make up the stories that become tomorrow's common sense.
You didn't respond to my notion of the necessity of "brute fact" at the origin of any cosmic narrative.
If I may ask, how do you see yourself here? Are you anti-science? Pro-science? A theist? What's your story? What are you trying to say? I ask sincerely.
Exploring the observations of others and myself that reveal patterns in nature.
I am an explorer of life and nature.
I can relate to that. I still maintain that the largest pattern that contains all smaller patterns within it must be a "brute fact." The largest pattern just is. To prove otherwise would be to include this "largest" pattern in a still larger pattern. This new largest pattern simply becomes the brute fact. In short, "brute fact" or "it just is" must be the "outside" of any system of patterns. This is not to say that this system cannot grow, but only that it will remain "haunted" by an ultimate contingency. As I see it, this applies to science, metaphysics, and religion.
There definitely is. Now to explore the is.
Is that an acknowledgement of the contingency of the is?
Speaking of such exploration, one of the patterns I've noticed and enjoying thinking about is the "fundamental pose" of a personality. These poses vary, but the existence of the pose is something that I find again and again. One of the reasons I like forums is to observe the "wildlife," the other human beings projecting themselves as intellectual personalities. Experimentation is even possible. We "inject" the personality with symbols and see what kind of symbols they will omit in turn. Of course I too am part of the "wildlife," and others "experiment" on me in the same way.
"It just happens", is not exploration. It is nothing.
Within the system we do indeed find causes and relations. Perhaps we even find a TOE. But this TOE would have to explain its own existence to be a theory of everything. What it can be is the global pattern from which local patterns can be deduced. It itself cannot be deduced from a higher theory, since it is itself the highest theory by assumption.
That's already the ideal situation. Most human beings (as I see it) have a "tool belt" of maxims or job-specific principles that do not perfectly cohere. We have vocabularies for different aspects of life that are no commensurate. One definition of philosophy might be to make these vocabularies as commensurate as possible -- to understand how all the little patterns fit together into one harmonized "master" pattern.
If there is a master pattern, then (by definition) it is simply the notion of the real. It is the nature of essence of human experience. By definition there is nothing outside this pattern, so it just is what it is. One can very well argue that no master pattern is stable. This is itself a sort of master pattern and therefore problematic. But, again, you really haven't addressed my arguments for ultimate contingency. To sum up, the exploration of exploration itself is what reveals this contingency.
While it is true that in our practical life we often accept a given framework as given, it is not true that the philosophical argument for necessary contingency is "lazy common sense." Indeed, it's a fairly abstract thought. It may even be offensive or terrible to those who think they can explain this brute fact. For instance, some people think that God, as they conceive him or it, is such an explanation. I'm saying that God cannot function this way, that God is not an explanation.
Explanation is local, never global. That's my thesis. This itself, however, can be understood as a vision of "God" as brute fact. Indeed, what is a first cause but brute fact in the first place?
It's lazy.
Philosophy needs patience and insatiable curiosity. Or the other way around.
Storytelling is not a life time of exploration and observation. Patience comes with experience.
So here's how I read you. You understand yourself to be an especially patient, curious, and experienced student of the patterns of life. Great. The implication, however, may be that others here are not. You are welcome to that belief. In my experience, lots of guys think they are the smartest person they know. I know I do.
So of course I'm not exactly dazzled by your bare assurances. You haven't responded to my ideas with sufficient detail or thought to even convince me that you understand them. That's OK. We're on stage, are we not? I'm contributing to a dialogue that others can read for what I hope is their amusement. Anyway, I wish you well and will probably move on for now.
I tried this argument and people said:
If [conscious agency] then [design] is true but the converse: If [design] then [conscious agency] isn't true.
What's your response to this?
If conscious agency arises in the way that all hierarchical states have arisen: from atoms to cycles to cells to tissues to systems then consciousness as an emergent hierarchical state fits right in, wouldn't you agree?
It appears that we have to justify that if there's design then there's a designer (a conscious agency) since we make that claim and arguments such as your depend on this premise being true.
Quoting MikeL
I'm not sure how this helps your argument for God.
But that's crazy. It's like looking at a rocket ship parked on the side of the road and refusing to believe it was intelligently designed because you can't locate a designer.
Quoting TheMadFool
Well, wouldn't it make sense that if God had designed us, he would want us to have an emergent consciousness so we could sense his presence?
There is no one smarter than anyone else.
Philosophy is about developing the observational skills about nature and life, the life we are experiencing. It is the only way to understand life. Developing such skills takes patience and practice as does everything else in life. Those who wish to skip the process simply become storytellers.
I'm interested in experiences of others and myself, other than the experience of creating stories. I know all about this, I read fiction all of the time.
If no one is smarter than anyone else, then why would you need to tell me this? Why would you need to explain to me, an equally smart person, what philosophy is really about? It's a performative contradiction.
Finally, good fiction tends to reveal life. It is hyper-real. Dostoevsky comes to mind.
You brought it up. Quoting t0m
Learning to observe has nothing to do with being smart. Learning to pause and ruminate has nothing to do with being smart. Learning has nothing to do with being smart.
Quoting t0m
It reveals oneself which provides clues to the nature of life, but it still requires observation and even more so intuition. It's detective work not free flowing imagination. They are different.
We can drop the "smart" theme. That's fine.
As far as I can tell, you've mostly described in vague generality how philosophy should be done. I think it's only fair to ask you for the results of doing philosophy this way. What have you discovered? What do you now know that others might benefit from knowing?
What is your vision of life? Do you trust mainstream science? Do you believe in God? If so, how do you understand or envision God? What is the purpose, if any, of life? I still don't have a picture of what you believe. Where are you generally coming from?
Having a deeper understanding of life allows one to find a healthier and qualitatively more nourishing life with broad implications. It is analogous to becoming a more skilled sailor with greater navigational abilities.
What I have learned is meaningless to you. One must learn for themselves. If I told you I understand how to navigate better, does this have meaning to you? There are no shortcuts, not for music, not for arts, not for sports, and not for the philosophy of life. To achieve this one must have desire because it takes great patience and lots of attention.
My vision for life is to explore, learn, share, care, nurture, and grow (evolve).
I thought the same too. However, look at what you're comparing the rocket to? It's ok to compare the rocket to a car or a house. This comparison seems alright if you want to make the design-designer argument.
However, comparing the universe to a rocket or a car or a plane is problematic. Only likes can be compared to likes, do you agree? If yes then the rocket-universe analogy fails because the universe isn't like anything man has created? Those who argue against the design argument for god say that the correct analogy would be a universe that is designed and has a creator to our universe. What do you think?
It makes sense to us assuming God exists and that's what we want to prove isn't it?
That the universe is designed and that's where the creator has made his mark does make a lot of sense. It is a totally mechanistic approach to life and the universe allowing life to spontaneously arise and allowing God to intervene only once, rather than twice. I have no problem with that, so long as the other side is able to explain how life originated naturally: but they can't.
I think it must be remembered that there is a huge gap - HUGE gap between the order we see inside a nucleus and the rest of the body of complex organisms and the few fragments of nucelotides and amino acids we are able to generate in a test tube trying to simulate early Earth conditions. The only arguments they can use to bridge the enormous gap is to say it was selected for - which is rubbish because simultaneous selection of two or more spontaneously arising traits is required for many systems to function. It also doesn't solve the chicken and egg paradox of DNA encoding the proteins that regulate it as well as encoding the other proteins that are needed to keep the cell cycles going. How did that happen?
I'm reading Hoffman's Life Ratchets at the moment and he's making a stab at explaining molecular formation - which is still a billion miles from the generation of specific molecules for specific tasks.
At best, scientists can recreate some of the base components used in the construction of something incredibly complex - and why wouldn't they be able to - after all it is no secret that the continuation of life requires the storehouse of these chemicals of nature. But saying that we know life arose naturally because we can form some of these base chemicals is an argument comparable to saying that we know a house arises naturally because we can get clay out of the ground and in certain conditions heat it and shape it into bricks.
Precisely. It is because we are aware of ourselves, can stare in awe at nature, and understand we are more than the sum of our parts that drives us to seek out the places where the creator may have left his fingerprint. We feel unique and transcendent above simple cause and effect relationships.
I just don't see how you get from the "haven't" we could all agree on to the "can't" you insist on.
As you're reading Life's Ratchet, keep an eye on the dates in the later chapters. An enormous amount of what we now know about the internal workings of cells is no more than a decade or two old. The paint has barely dried on the machines and techniques that produced this knowledge.
Hoffman's book gives an overview of where biology is nowadays on what life actually is, how it works. Cells, it turns out, are nothing at all like what I learned in AP Biology a hundred years ago! That means we're only now beginning to see the shape of what a theory of abiogenesis would look like. It's helpful to know what you're explaining the origin of, don't you think?
Well, it seems that we have to slide the viewing window back to the origin of the issue. We can then see that the first move in this game was made by theists. Theists argued for the presence of a creator based on design. The atheistic position is the refutation, the second move, so to speak. The ball is in the theists' court I'm afraid.
I'm agnostic. I think our knowledge is too limited and our ignorance too vast to come to any definite conclusion.
Quoting MikeL
Well, I understand the scientific position as that of remaining within the bounds of the observable and measurable. Science is descriptive - it studies phenomena and looks for patterns. Many patterns have been discovered; the so-called laws of nature. This information is used by theists to claim God's existence but, as I said above, atheists think this analogy is like comparing apples to oranges and they're right. We don't have a collection of universes governed by laws made by a creator. If this were the case then the analogy would be a good one but it isn't so it fails.
The universe is awesome in what sense? We're alive but life exists on only one planet and that too confined to certain areas on the globe. Could it be that our awe is misplaced and that we should actually rue our miniscule solitary existence in the universe?
We c are still discovering new types of life on this planet in areas we thought life couldn't exist. Have patience. The universe is quite large and there is plenty of time to explore it.
I'm enjoying the read Srap Tasmaner. I can't wait to see how close he can get to bridging the gap.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ok then, let me ask you directly. Can you?
I don't know. What do you expect to find? More life? And how does that help arguments for God?
As for God, I see no need to create something to replace my own mind. My mind is more than happy to acknowledge itself and everything it does.
This is a very weak position to take in an argument. You might as well just give up before you begin. The belief in God far outdates science. Scientists are the new kids on the block claiming its all crap. Demand them to prove it. They will respond thus:
1. It is not science's job to prove, only disprove.
2. Well at least we're trying to prove it, which is more than we can say for you.
3. Here are some fragments that might be evidence of something, which is more than you have.
4. How can you believe Noah fitted all those animals into an ark. Are you that stupid?
This is all shorthand for - we've got basically nothin' to back up our attacks on the idea of God.
Trust me, if they did, they would argue the hell out of it. They are paper tigers.
Quoting TheMadFool
That's fine. Science is a very worthwhile endeavor and I for one find the study of it fascinating and am thankful for a lot of the technological outcomes such as medicine etc. But, by the same token if the scientists (not science) that claim that God is not real haven't got the firepower to take on believers after making their claims, they should stay out of the ring and not hide behind the rules of science when we fire back. They should stick to science, don't you think?
Quoting TheMadFool
Theists try to get in the ring with scientists to defend their faith. The only language they can use to present the case is science, no other logic works on scientists. Unfortunately they often get outmatched because they simply haven't got the knowledge or understanding to draw on.
How do you know that the laws of the universe are not governed by a creator? Atoms forming into machines that run around building things doesn't seem a little fishy to you?
Also the analogy of the brick house has nothing to do with theism. It stands on its own merits as a critique.
Can I what? Explain how life arose on Earth? No.
If your argument is that I, Srap Tasmaner can't explain it, then you win, man.
If you mean that no one alive can, you probably win that one too. Maybe. People have theories. Maybe somebody's already got a perfectly good theory we just don't know it yet. I'm sure there are bars where you can't get away from the biologists sharing their theories of abiogenesis.
I took you to mean there was some reason why it cannot possibly be done, not now, not ever, not by anyone, that there is some logical obstacle that makes achieving this task impossible-- rather like Michael Behe's claim that the bacterial flagellum could not possibly be explained by evolution, that sort of thing. (Of course, he was wrong.)
It's that claim I don't understand. Especially not right now, with everything going on in biology these days. Don't you think there are more discoveries to come? Aren't you excited to see what "we" (by which I mean folks like Hoffman) learn?
Atheists don't have to prove anything. They just have to disprove theism. At least that's how it looks to me. As I said, the first move was theism and atheists have responded to theistic arguments through refutation.
As for science, it's not on any side of the debate. As I said, scientific discoveries are proposed as evidence for God - the design argument is based on the order/patterns that exist in the universe. Atheists think this argument from design is flawed.
One specific area where science actually disagrees with relgion is on the matter of creation - the Bible says the Earth is 6000 years or so old and Geology says its 4 billion years old. So, who is right? Evolution too is considered anti-religious in a similar fashion. What do you think? Is science anti-theism?
Quoting MikeL
That question cuts both ways: How do you know that the laws of the universe were put into place by a creator?
You see. Rather than answering the question it is a redirection.
Quoting TheMadFool
I agree, that is why I specified scientists, not science.
Quoting TheMadFool
Oh, they must love debates then.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes, you are right, they do. But with nothing to prove, I guess they just have to say theists are wrong to win the argument, which is pretty much what they do.
Quoting TheMadFool
I am always careful not to conflate religion and the belief in a god. A believer doesn't have to tether themselves to the Old Testament just because they sense a higher power. What do I think about the 6000 year old story? Yeah, most probably wrong, but when under attack ants will defend every grain of dirt on their anthill.
Having said that, geological dating, it is all based on fossil records and geological strata and carbon dating. I don't know the field but I have an inkling that if I did I could show you the weaknesses in that system of measurement which at least would open the possibility that it could be 6000 years old.
Is science anti-theist? No, but a hell of a lot of vocal scientists are. Even Hoffman seems to have an air of it about him in his writing, but at least he's putting his money where his mouth is, and you've got a respect a person for that.
As to evolution, is it anti-theist? Nah, not really, it's just a very cold description of nature. I'm sure there's better ones. I guess though it depends on where you want to place God in the equation.