Posted on 01/10/2002 8:12:15 AM PST by Exnihilo
Is the crystaline structure of a diamond not an inherent characteristic of carbon, given certain conditions?
Yours in Truth,
Invoking God for every unexplained phenomenon has a tendency to stifle investigation into that phenomenon. Why should we strive to learn anything if the answer is "God did it, 'nuff said?" If man just blindly accepted, based on faith, that God was behind everything, we'd still believe lightning bolts and rainbows to be mystical signs from God and not the natural phenomena they really are. The same goes for evolution. Contrary to what many creationists claim modern biology is founded upon evolutionary theory. One need only pick up a copy of Scientific American to learn that evolutionary theory is behind the great advances in the battles against diseases and cancer.
I've read some of his other papers, which share much with this one. To address the problems with his paper point by point would require a paper nearly as long.
The short version is that he "proves" mathematics primarily with analogy and anecdote rather than rigorous mathematics. He misuses information theory and must only have a passing familiarity with it. The most annoying thing is that he frequently uses the "common" definition rather than the mathematical definitions of the terms used in information theory to prove his point. As you may know, many of the core terms used in information theory have mathematical meanings that in practice are quite different than the common definitions understood by most people.
Dembski basically seems to talk a very smooth pseudo-math, and capitalizes on the fact that people don't understand the difference (or that a difference even exists) between the mathematical definitions and the common definitions of the words he uses. Since he is theoretically a mathematician and could easily look up and understand information theory in detail, I can only conclude that he is being intellectually dishonest.
Now that's strange. Maybe some big multinational corporation bought them up to suppress the product to keep their own profits up. What's also strange is, this website doesn't seem to link to anything concerning Bob Bass either. It's like Bob Bass never existed! Was Bob Bass, "one of America's best mathematicians", disappeared???
However, this page on some site that has something to do with cold fusion & other, ummmm, unjustly neglected technologies, has a bunch of his emails to other people. But not their responses. Curiouser and curiouser. What happened to those other people? And why did their emails to him disappear??? I smell a conspiracy of Gribblean proportions...
'Least that's what that little van Pelt girl told me ...
I have no clue whether or not the universe is infinite, and wouldn't claim to know otherwise.
I didn't ask if you KNEW, I asked what you THOUGHT. The reason I asked is because I value your perspective. Please critique my take on this.
Life only makes sense to me if the universe is infinite. It doesn't make sense to me that "something" can originate from "nothing" - that is a clear contradiction. So, since there is something now, there must have always been something, just in different form, always going through the intelligent process of change (which we only faintly understand).
Just as numbers exist to express the principle of mathematics, we exist to express the principle of Life. Numbers are not limited by time or space - they can be manifested anywhere at anytime. Maybe also, we are not limited by time or space and can be manifested anywhere at anytime - maybe this human experience is just one of the infinite possible manifestations. Or, maybe not - but it is a lot more fun to think it is.
There is no intrinsic difference between analog and digital hardware. Both analog and digital are an information coding format. In practice, modern digital has more real world resolution. The biggest problem with interfacing with the brain is that our man-made computational hardware format (mostly-serial clocked logic) is very different than the computational hardware format of the brain. This makes it a very difficult engineering problem, though not impossible. Some very significant improvements in silicon/neuron interfacing technologies have been made in the last few years.
All the information could definitely be captured and decoded in theory. The problem is that we aren't very good at working with that type of hardware because it is so very different from what we are used to working with. The problems are slowly being worked out and eventually it will become a reality, probably sooner than later.
I once had a heated disagreement with a fellow freeper about logical fallacies. He made a point by point refutation of my usage, but on further consideration (and some cooling off) he agreed with me that while I was not following the strictest standard definitions, better ways did not exist to describe the variations I was addressing.
Yeah, the first test of finite state machinery on the human mind was done at Bell Labs by an engineer whose name I forget off the top of my head. The thing was, I believe it was originally done as a lark (you can pull minor "impossible" feats with it for fun and profit). The significance wasn't identified until much later. By "test", there are mathematical tests that can detect "finite state machine-ness". The relevant conditions and caveats can be found with the theory; it needs to be understood to really grasp the capabilities and limitations. You can't prove that something is a finite state machine; the best you can hope for is to demonstrate ad infinitum that it can't behave as anything BUT a finite state machine.
Huh? I thought digital was meaningless unless there is an agreement between sender and receiver? Analog gives information regardless of a receiver's understanding, and so is not a "coding format." Did I miss something?
You need to hang with a better crowd. Bass is about 20 years older than I am and a pure academic type; I'm more of a generalist. The only real similarity you're noticing is that both of us write intelligently.
Diamond is an unstable allotrope of carbon. In fact, diamonds will eventually decay left to their own devices, though not soon enough to bother re-writing the "diamonds are forever" line. Diamond is more structured than graphite, and has less entropy. The "specific conditions" required to create diamond from graphite are the application of energy and pressure. Without an external energy source, graphite won't become a diamond because it would be going against thermodynamics. Only local decreases of entropy are allowed, and even then only by expending much enthalpy. Biology works the same way. Under specific conditions (the application of external energy sources) biology can decrease entropy. Absent an external energy source, biology stops working.
The problem with the common argument from the creationist/ID camp is that biology can't evolve without violating thermodynamics. However, under the conditions necessarily premised for that to be true (no external energy sources), biology couldn't even survive.
Ironic isn't it? This is exactly the path being followed by ID theorists.
No, there's a certain crackpot intensity, with zany colloquial strawmanisms and compulsive parentheticals:
Bass:
G&E faked the punk-eek diagram to look something like a bush by postulating that there are hidden horizontal jumps [shown in dotted lines] which connect the vertical straight lines! In other words, the creature goes off stage to some unseen anteroom where a Goldschmidt-Schindewolf ("hopeful monster") macro-mutation takes place. (G&S admitted that an intellectually honest student of the fossil record can only postulate that "one day a reptile egg cracked open and a bird walked out.")That last bit: I wouldn't have been surprised if he continued with, ". . . and what does that bird mate with?" Really. This guy is a distinguished academic?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.