Posted on 07/16/2013 11:44:20 AM PDT by Heartlander
“... seeking the Truth of Reality.” And so would any good Scientist admit, for they too are seeking the truth of reality, the how. Many of us seek the why, also, and the corollary, Whom. ‘To know Him is to be like Him.’
No, I don't think that. (And conversely, I hope you don't think I'm pursuing a proof for the nonexistence of God.)
At the same time, you have posted that
a living system — an "open" system — cannot "emerge" from a causally closed system as defined by physical, material, or mechanical presuppositions. Something else is required for life. And as increasingly recognized these days, that something else is information — which is not a tangible, material thing.
And my impression is that you contend that the information must have been supplied by an agent outside the system, which may not be a proof of God but is evidence for some First Cause. Right now, I'm just exploring whether the impossibility of a material basis for the emergence of life is necessarily as impossible as you've stated.
No, I don't think that!!!
You wrote, "...my impression is that you contend that the information must have been supplied by an agent outside the system, which may not be a proof of God but is evidence for some First Cause."
YES: I suspect that the information must have a cause "outside" the system, because I strongly doubt it could have arisen by "natural causes"; i.e., from "within" the system. But I'll keep an open mind if someone can show me why this isn't true.
And you nail me on "First Cause." Yep — I do believe that a First Cause very likely had to be involved. But here I'm thinking in Aristotelian terms.
You'll remember Aristotle's First Cause, a/k/a/ the Uncaused Cause, a/k/a/ the "Prime Mover." The reasoning goes like this: If the Universe had a Beginning — which if the Big Bang Theory is correct, it had — then logically, there could be nothing "before" it. This looks to me like an "ex nihilo" situation — a something that comes out of a nothing, or "No-thing."
But really, we can know nothing by way of science that can "verify" or "falsify" this. Indeed, the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang, science doesn't even "work": There is no Planck Time, no Planck Length; science is simply inoperable under conditions where space and time haven't even kicked in yet.
So we can't even get back to the Beginning, let alone conjecture what "preceded" it — which if it was in fact the Beginning, nothing did.
And then, don't forget the Singularity. I think all the "initial conditions" of an evolutionary universe were specified there, all at once. This Singularity may well contain the "information," or "instruction set," that guides universal evolution, and orders it.
Well, that's how I'm thinking through these issues. FWIW.
HHTVL, I got a reply from my friend, AG. It was totally lovely. I'd share it with you instantly; but then recalled I hadn't asked his permission to do that.
So I wrote back and asked for permission!
If he gives it — I expect he will — I'll send it right along to you.
Best wishes to my gracious correspondent, HHTVL!
I didn't see a "video." I have a PhD in physics, and although I am no longer a practitioner, I keep my hand in avocationally. You are correct that we will agree to disagree. But your arguments are with Vilenkin and not with me. He does not make the extrapolated claims for the theorem that Christian Apologists do.
I hope this will further clarify matters.
It would, if it were true. But it isn't; it is objectively false as stated. The correct statement is: CLOSED Physical systems cannot produce more information at their output than was present at their input.
It is nothing more than an information theory version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and does not represent anything new.
Please give an example of an OPEN physical system?
Also, it has been remarked that there is no known "natural" cause of information. What do you make of a statement like that? How would you contradict it if you think it incorrect?
Must go out to tend to "elder care" this afternoon. But I'll be back later.
“Please give an example of an OPEN physical system.”
The Earth, for one. Energy, in the form of sunlight and starlight and radiation, comes in continuously; additional material arrives in the form of meteorites and cosmic dust by the tens of thousands of tons per year.
The jello you are seeking to nail to the wall will switch from a local system to the system that is the known universe as it suits the rejection agenda. The truth of it is that neither side has all the data possible so neither side has sufficient data to prove an ultimate claim thus both sides are based on faith not proof.
So is the Earth.
In information systems to which entropic proofs apply, computer networks (the network proper) is a closed system, whereas computers themselves generally are not (because they are connected to both sinks and sources of information.)
When you make the claim that entropy must increase, you must be talking about either a) the entire universe or b) a system which cannot effectively lose or gain energy from outside. There is no requirement in physics that the entropy of open systems must always increase. It is in fact quite typically the case that the entropy on one side of an open system decreases.
Also, it has been remarked that there is no known "natural" cause of information. What do you make of a statement like that?
It is objectively false.
How would you contradict it if you think it incorrect?
I would point to my own brain, which like the trees and stars, is a part of nature.
That was the "big picture" I was trying to get at, looking at the universe as a single, unified system. At this level of observation, it looks to me like it's a closed system, for the reasons you give, dearest sister in Christ.
At this level of description, running imaginatively backward in time, eventually we have to grapple with the "ex nihilo" condition ... by virtue of which there are no sinks or sources that the universe as a material system can be open to.
Unless its Source is God.
But that's not a scientific statement and thus is not credible with some of our correspondents.
Thank you so very much for writing, dearest sister in Christ!
Why do you believe it is "objectively false" that there is (as I suggested) "no known 'natural' cause of information?" If all of nature — the natural world — supposedly "supervenes on the physical" and/or material, how does such an intangible, immaterial, yet utterly necessary thing as information come about in the first place?
Is my inference correct that you regard your brain as a "natural" cause of information? Which would seem to entail the idea (if you are a materialist or physicalist) that mental processes — and mind itself — are caused by atomic activity in the brain? That mind is merely the epiphenomenon of physico-chemical brain activity, to which it reduces, and nothing more?
And yet as British biologist J. B. S. Haldane remarked (1927): “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”
You wrote:
In information systems to which entropic proofs apply, computer networks (the network proper) is a closed system, whereas computers themselves generally are not (because they are connected to both sinks and sources of information.)While your observation may be true, it completely overlooks a highly inconvenient question: Where did the information come from that was needed to build the computer and program its operations in the first place? Did the atoms of which it is composed do all this?
Such questions might strike you as simply dumb or tendentious. But really, all I'm doing by asking them is trying to figure out what your beliefs are....
Here's the situation as I see it:
No evolutionary theory can succeed without confronting the cell and the word. In each of the some 300 trillion cells in every human body, the words of life churn almost flawlessly through our flesh and nervous system at a speed that utterly dwarfs the data rates of all the world’s supercomputers. For example, just to assemble some 500 amino-acid units into each of the trillions of complex hemoglobin molecules that transfer oxygen from the lungs to bodily tissues takes a total of some 250 peta operations per second. (The word “peta” refers to the number ten to the 15th power — so this tiny process requires 250x1015 operations.) — George Gilder, "Evolution and Me," 2006.And that's just one process. An astronomical number (from our perspective) of other processes are also occurring simultaneously, all of which must act together to preserve an organic system in a living state. Are we to suppose that "clever atoms" are responsible for the organizational information indispensable for achieving his result?
We started out quibbling about whether Kahre's Law applies to "open" systems in nature, or only to the "closed" ones. [Please allow me to correct a mistake I made; I realized it was a mistake from reviewing an old article I wrote on this subject, back in 2005: The "law" under question here isn't Kahre's, it's Ashby's.] You suggested this "law" of information theory applies only to closed systems. Which I tend to associate with non-living systems in nature, though that may not be technically accurate.
It seems evident (to me anyway) that biology cannot be reduced simply to physics ("matter in its motions" as described by the physicochemical laws, given initial and boundary conditions), leading to "random" mutations whose fitness value will be "rewarded" or punished by the environment — since the genetic, algorithmic, and symbolic information content of living organisms is much greater than the information content of the physical laws. Biology "uses" physics and chemistry, but does not reduce to physics and chemistry. "More" is needed; and that "more" is information.
Chaitin pointed out that the laws of physics have very low information content, since their algorithmic complexity can be characterized by a computer program fewer than a thousand characters in length. In 2004, in a private communication to a colleague, Chaitin wrote: “My paper on physics was never published, only as an IBM report. In it I took: Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s laws, the Schrödinger equation, and Einstein’s field equations for curved spacetime near a black hole, and solved them numerically, giving ‘motion-picture’ solutions. The programs, which were written in an obsolete computer programming language APL2 at roughly the level of Mathematica, were all about half a page long, which is amazingly simple.”
How does the complexity of living organisms increase if its main driver is the physicochemical laws, estimated to have an algorithmic complexity of only 103 bits? Certainly, the observed flow of environmental information is enormous, and tellingly, it is morphological information. But what is the source of the enormous environmental information flow?
Now Ashby’s Law (Ashby, 1962) states that “The variety of outputs of any deterministic physical system cannot be greater than the variety of inputs; the information of output cannot exceed the information already present in the input.” In accordance, Kahre’s “Law of Diminishing Information” reads: Compared to direct reception, an intermediary can only decrease the amount of information (Kahre, 2002, 14). Moreover, it is a widely held view nowadays that the chain of physical causes forms a closed circle. The hypothesis of the causal closure of the physical (Cameron, 2000, 244) maintains (roughly) “that for any event E that has a cause we can cite a physical cause, P, for its happening, and that citing P explains why E happened”. Therefore, not only Ashby’s and Kahre’s laws but the causal closure thesis is in conflict with the complexity measures found in physics and in biology. Now if the algorithmic complexity of one human brain is already around I1~1015–1017 bits, the information paradox consists in the fact that the information content of physics is I(physics)~103 bits while that of the whole living kingdom is ... I(biology)~1015–1017 bits. Taking into account also that physics is hopelessly far from being able to cope with the task to govern even one human person’s biological activity ~2*1021 bits per second, it becomes clear that at present, modern cosmological models’ algorithmic complexity is much less than the above obtained complexity measures characterizing life. — A. Grandpierre, "Complexity Measures and Life’s Algorithmic Complexity," 2005.Lots of questions, my friend. Your thoughts?
INFORMATION... where does it come from.. looking for the ultimate source..
The infinite question... a very sticky question like fly paper..
Even parsed with lawyerly tricks still sticks its head up to say “HI!”..
Its Poison to hip shot judgements, and mealy mouthed diversions..
Its like a toddler that says WHY?... and then WHY? and then WHY?...
It even defeats long screeds that make you forget what the original question WAS...
***
Truly, space/time does not pre-exist but is created as the universe expands. There was a beginning of real space and real time.
No physical cosmology theology obviates creation ex nihilo - and only Tegmark's Level IV cosmology is closed.
The excerpts are also very informative!
There is no known origin for information [Shannon, successful communication] in the universe. Ditto for space/time, inertia, autonomy, etc.
Indeed, discussions of abiogenesis often arrive at the observation that a successful answer to to the origin of information also answers the origin of life. (Pattee, Yockey, Rocha, et al)
yes, and furthermore, liberals are irrational and oddly anti-intelligence.
Precisely. Hence, the manifestation of intellectual poverty.
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