Posted on 11/06/2003 7:34:45 PM PST by Heartlander
It cannot be proven false, but it is easily demonstrated to be useless.
[Abiogenesis] is only the biggest question of them all.
Oddly enough, Darwin barely touches upon abiogenesis. The article you have just read also pays scant attention to the subject. The questions of whether the first life had a truly non-miraculous, non-designed orgin and whether all current life on earth shares a common ancestry are easily separated. The second of the two, as the article (or even a reading of the evidence available to Darwin) demonstrates, is very easily answered.
Your definition in #312 was fine by me:
[to VadeRetro:] In your own words, the building blocks of our universe consisted of “certifiably mindless” material, a non-uniform gas. There was neither an actuality nor a potential for self-awareness in any of those particles. Nothing even close, I am confident in saying. And yet, the very definition of consciousness is self-awareness, the ability not just to have a mind, but to “step out” of it.
Scientifically speaking, it does not exist, because it is not observable - it cannot be located anywhere or as the result of the combinations of anything
Of course consciousness is observable. We see that other species show some signs of abstract thought, and (most) others show no evidence of such at all. We see that a person with a brain that's damaged in certain ways doesn't show signs of consciousness. We see certain parts of the brain are active while the person is engaging in different components of conscious thought.
[continuing with #312:] The problem is that you can’t get here from there. Those dots do not connect. Materially speaking, as long as the building blocks of the cosmos are mindless, unconscious atoms, then piling on block after block only gives you more mindless, unconscious atoms, but it categorically cannot give you consciousness.
Speaking of what's observable & what's not, what's not observable is the Ideal vitalism liquid or magic pixie dust that God pours/sprinkles into the atoms inside the brain that makes them "conscious atoms" so that the brain as a whole can achieve consciousness.
Incidentally, one of the productive areas of research in recent years has been the differences in genes between humans & the other primates, and what their subtle effects have been on development of the brain, ears, eyes, vocal systems, etc. It's another line of inquiry to answer the question of what structural differences, exactly, give humans the capacity for abstract self-contemplation & why others don't have it. Again, this has everything to do with how the components of the brain work together to achieve a synergistic result beyond a simple addition of qualities of its components. Exactly like water's fire-suppression capability being nowhere near a simple addition of the fire-suppression capabilities of its component atoms, because that capability comes from how those flammable component atoms interact.
Yes, I'm here. Those "assumptions that make science possible" are known as axioms. Axioms are never proven. If they could be proven, they'd be theorems. At the base of all rationality are the axioms you listed (some not quite rigorously enough. For example -- "that our minds inform us about reality," isn't correctly stated. The axiom involves the validity of sensory evidence for information about reality.
Anyway, such axioms are taken as true by necessity. If, for example, our senses gave us useless information, we'd all be hopelessly in the dark (so to speak) and we'd have no source of information -- other than what some swami claimed to have received from what he claimed was a superior source. We'd essentially know nothing, which would rule out science altogether.
By questioning the basic axioms upon which science rests, you are actually challenging reason itself. It's your right to do so. But don't then come in here and attempt to use reason to persuade us of the logic of your position. You can't use the tools which you have chosen to reject.
Let me take your exact quotes and now state that Darwin is arguing for creation:
“I further believe that these slow, intermittent results accord well with what geology tells us of the rate and manner at which the inhabitants of the world have changed."Is Darwin arguing for ID? Is Darwin arguing for the Democratic platform? Heck, with these quotes I could say that Darwin predicted microwave popcorn…“But I must here remark that I do not suppose that the process ever goes on so regularly as is represented in the diagram, though in itself made somewhat irregular, nor that it goes on continuously; it is far more probable that each form remains for long periods unaltered, and then again undergoes modification.”
"It is a more important consideration ... that the period during which each species underwent modification, though long as measured by years, was probably short in comparison with that during which it remained without undergoing any change."
“Widely ranging species vary most, and varieties are often at first local, -- both causes rendering the discovery of intermediate links less likely. Local varieties will not spread into other and distant regions until they are considerably modified and improved; and when they do spread, if discovered in a geological formation, they will appear as if suddenly created there, and will be simply classed as new species.”
”The evidence against the standard view is contained in a lack of evidence. If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, Dr. Eldredge argues, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them. If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory. The alternative theory is called (regrettably) "punctuated equilibrium" or "punctuationalism." According to this, the diversity of life has come about as a result of sporadic adaptations by small, well-defined groups confronted by a new environment, interspersed with long periods of little or no change. “Is gradualism being critiqued here?
(The Guardian Weekly, 26 Nov 1978, vol 119, no 22, p. 1)
Eldridge, N., and Gould, S. J., 1972, Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism, in Schopf, T. M., ed., Models in Paleobiology: San Francisco, Freeman, Cooper, & Co., p. 82-115; 250 pp.
Or here?
1972, Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism, in Eldridge, N., ed., Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (1985): New York, Simon and Schuster, p. 193-223.
Or here?
Gould, S. J., and Eldridge, N., 1977, Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered: Paleobiology, v. 3, p. 115-151.
Let me spell it out… g-r-a-d-u-a-l-i-s-m….
Please excuse me now as I am making some Darwinian microwave gradual popcorn… This may take a long time (Hee hee – pat-pat) as predicted…
Even if you believe evolution as the ‘cause for all’ - induction/information/knowledge must be present. Is this induction/information/knowledge from mindlessness or the programmer of the actual chess game/program?
You look at and observe information from (what some consider) a mindless universe and it actually means something to you. I cannot tell you ‘absolutely’ what it means to me but you know exactly what it means to you. This information must come from an outside source.
A NAND gate can neither add nor subtract, yet a cluster of such gates can solve differential equations, play chess, and factor large numbers.
What does this mean without some intelligence to decipher?
If everything is anything, then nothing is anything. However, Darwin never mentioned microwave popcorn. What he did say was made clear. If Gould and Eldredge had to reinvent some of it later, Origin is a long work and very out of date. Probably not Gould or anyone he was arguing with had read it recently. Still, it's there for all to see and it says what it says.
The Full Text of the 6th Edition is available online. Talk Origins has made The First Edition similarly available. I have a bound copy of the 6th Edition in the Great Books of the Western World set and personally remember encountering in context most of the quotes bandied about on these threads. Darwin is talking about what most people think he's talking about. In no case is he just emitting cryptic verbiage for any fill-in-the-blank thing that Heartlander can stretch and mangle in one of his hissy-pissy screeches.
On that other matter, it's not enough to put funny demarcations (which might or might not be correctly interpreted) on text which you have lifted from somewhere else. You're supposed to give the real author full and clear credit. In a real paper, that's done with footnotes but on the net it's mostly done with links and optionally a mention of the author's name. But not by creationists so much. It must be another consequence of being allowed to disregard what is true and real.
Actual scholarship is not a "Twist and Shout" game. Besides, crediting the real author would be the Christian thing to do.
I think you are conflating intelligence and consciousness. I am becoming increasingly certain that some of us or our children will see intelligent machines, but I doubt we will consider them conscious. By intelligent, I mean that general purpose computers will be able to evolve their own methods to solve new problems. They will expand our problem solving abilities in the same way machines expand our physical strength.
That, and he has not so much replied to the content of Doctor Stochastic's post as changed the subject. The original point is still unanswered and still true. A computer, like so many things in life, violates Descartes's "Causal Principle." That is, it does so to the extent that you can tease a real-world prediction out of the wording provided by PDerna at all. The whole has attributes never present in the components, which would seem to be forbidden but happens all the time everywhere.
Huh? Where did you show this?
I'd say that the only things that are axiomatic for reason are:
But you are putting words in my mouth. Worse, they are words I don't speak, or write. I have no desire to be given credit for your imaginings. The glory, or ignominy, is entirely your own.
I do, however, say that a proposition with no verifiable evidence isn't a subject for scientific concern. There is no inconsistency here. You've failed to score.
If you believe in science at all, then you already believe in a number of things that have no scientific evidence, so why not this [the Creator]?
That's the saddest example of an argument I've seen today. Maybe all week. And around here, that's sad indeed.
You are incredibly confused. Consider the two axioms mentioned by jennyp earlier in post 375:
1. The evidence of our senses can basically be trusted; the world isn't trying to lie to usYou say there's no evidence to support these propositions? None at all? Well, yes, that's what you're saying. I just quoted you. I don't know how you manage to get through each day without those two axioms at the base of everything you think and do, but that's for you to worry about.
2. Logic works; there are no contradictions
If it will be any help to you, I'll repeat something I said earlier: axioms aren't proven. They can't be or they'd be theorems. This is not the equivalent of saying that they are lacking in evidentiary support. Indeed, in your entire existence I'll wager you've never encountered a single instance of anything which contradicted those axioms. Yet somehow you say ... ah, never mind.
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