Posted on 04/05/2009 8:10:35 PM PDT by betty boop
If your definition of life includes messages from Beyond and Mary the mother of God it is not a scientific theory.
It can in no way project its findings from inside that box onto the outside "all that there is" which it declined to consider in the first place, e.g. to posit an answer to "What is life?"
Mathematics (in this case, Shannon's theory) has no artificial boundary. Likewise, here, that biology is not a "special case" of physics:
Or to put it another way, one can break a cell apart to examine its components like he would a machine, but he cannot put the parts back together again and have a functioning cell. Information (Shannon, successful communication) is not a physical part.
Concerning life, the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.
The following is a fallacy and therefore is illogical: “You have proof hell doesn’t exist? Lol. Just keep thinking somethign doesn’t exist.”
Below is the kind of fallacy you have set up (BTW, I am not calling you ignorant, it truly is the name of this particular fallacy):
Wikipedia Definition: Argument from ignorance
The argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam (”appeal to ignorance” [1]), argument by lack of imagination, or negative evidence, is a logical fallacy in which it is claimed that a premise is true only because it has not been proven false, or is false only because it has not been proven true.
The argument from personal incredulity, also known as argument from personal belief or argument from personal conviction, refers to an assertion that because one personally finds a premise unlikely or unbelievable, the premise can be assumed to be false, or alternatively that another preferred but unproven premise is true instead.
Both arguments commonly share this structure: a person regards the lack of evidence for one view as constituting proof that another view is true. The types of fallacies discussed in this article should not be confused with the reductio ad absurdum method of argument, in which a valid logical contradiction of the form “A and not A” is used to disprove a premise.
—end—
Religious folks would do themselves a huge favor if they could just tolerate others who are different and if they could set aside this ‘need’ to convert others. I have to admit, it’s really annoying. AND I would be annoyed by anyone trying to push whatever opinion they have on anyone.
Doesn’t that bug you, too? Pushy people?
You should feel good in your faith regardless of what others believe or don’t believe. I don’t organize with any other atheists at all and certainly not in a way that should threaten you.
I don’t believe in hell and I think you know exactly why— whether you agree or not: No one has been to hell and come back, nor has anyone made contact with anyone in hell to ask them about it. There have been no traces of ‘hell matter’ discovered by anyone I know of. In other words, all of my senses that I have used my whole life to discern this from that, reality from fiction tell me that hell appears to be only a story at this point in time, not verified by anyone at this moment and passed on throughout history mainly by western civilizations.
Your ‘feelings’ about God & Hell are appreciated by me, but they are not ‘evidence’ of anything.
The Spiritual Paradigm may be a "dimension"..
That would/may explain semantical allusions to the spirit in the bible..
What a spirit is may be beyond current considerations by humans..
The next stage in evolution..
So it's not circular reasoning, it's not reasoning at all.
Then think of it like joy. If joy is your goal you won't find it. If you lose yourself then you have found it : )
Of course not, metmom. On the other hand, it is the "thing itself" — universal truth, or more precisely the idea of universal truth — that motivates and "draws" the "action," i.e., the quest of/by a lover of Truth.
Or so it seems to me. It really is difficult to speak of such things. Plato, however, was superb on such issues. He characterized the "drawing action," the helkein, as divine action, as "divine 'pull'," to which human nous (i.e., mind, consciousness) can respond. That's when the zetesis, i.e., quest, can begin.
Natural Law embodies such ideas. It posits relations between two fundamental domains, the natural world and our formal models of it. Or as Robert Rosen put it, there is a modeling relationship between "causal entailment in a natural system and syntactic entailment in a formal one"; e.g., a scientific theory or model. Or to put it yet another way, Natural law asserts there is a fundamental relation between the "ambiance" (i.e., the natural world) and the cognitive self:
Natural Law makes two separate assertions about the self and its ambience:The ambience is ever changing; plus our observational position is finite. Thus "complete" knowledge of the ambiance can never be attained. Thus the poignancy of the quest....
1. The succession of events or phenomena that we perceive in the ambience is not entirely arbitrary or whimsical; there are relations (e.g., causal relations) manifest in the world of phenomena.Science depends in equal parts on these two separate prongs of Natural Law. The first, which says something about the ambience, asserts that it is in some sense orderly enough to manifest relations or laws. Clearly, if this is not so, there can be no science, also no natural language, and most likely, no sanity either. So it is, for most of us at any rate, not too great an exercise of faith to believe this.2. The relations between phenomena that we have just posited are, at least in part, capable of being perceived and grasped by the human mind, i.e., by the cognitive self.
The scientist's quest is to bring the two domains of Natural Law into correspondence. A philosopher might say he is seeking a vision of the Logos, a Christian, an epiphany of God. At bottom, all three are motivated to search for the Truth of reality according to their best lights.
To me, the "best lights" criterion is simply honest response to the divine pull.... FWIW
[[argument by lack of imagination, or negative evidence,]]
This is where you are wrong- it is not imaginary- IF you have proof it is, then present it- but again- you are speaking from ignorance on the issue and YOU simply beleive it doesn’t exist- YOUR belief that somethign doesn’t exist has nothign to do with hte reality of it’s existence- just as in the ice example I gave
[[Religious folks would do themselves a huge favor if they could just tolerate others who are different and if they could set aside this ‘need’ to convert others.]]
We tolorate it just fine- it’s when htose hwo don’t bweleive start insinuating that those who HAVE experienced God’s reality are living a fantasty that we are within our rights to defend our position by pointing out hte one makign htose accusations is arguing from ignorance- never having experienced what we have-
[[No one has been to hell and come back,]]
Yes we have- both in the bible, and in my own NDE experience which I’ve explained on FR before- here again, you simply assume noone has despite evidence that people have indeed bween, and despite hte bible relating just such a reality by the rich man who was allowed to speak with those on the other side, and which was recorded- Again- your statement doesn’t represent the reality of hte matter
Well said.
Atheists sometimes remind me of those who deny reality just because they haven’t experienced it. Much like a blind man who might insist that light doesn’t exist because he can’t see it.
But the thing is we CAN put the mechanical parts back together and have life that is completely indistinguishable from life that wasn’t taken apart and put back together.
Life as a physical phenomenon has no mystical component.
The physical mechanisms of life are both necessary and SUFFICIENT for there to be life.
I would never begrudge you or anyone your reality. I have no doubt that you have all the faith in the world.
But, I don’t know you and forgive me if I can’t take your word for it.
What I believe/or not should not insult you as I am not insulted by your belief in God in any way.
*We tolorate it just fine- it’s when htose hwo don’t bweleive start insinuating that those who HAVE experienced God’s reality are living a fantasty that we are within our rights to defend our position by pointing out hte one makign htose accusations is arguing from ignorance- never having experienced what we have-*
The scientist's quest is to bring the two domains of Natural Law into correspondence. A philosopher might say he is seeking a vision of the Logos, a Christian, an epiphany of God. At bottom, all three are motivated to search for the Truth of reality according to their best lights.
To me, the "best lights" criterion is simply honest response to the divine pull....
Sorry LG, but the wing is not the pump. The engine is the pump, and the wing is a fixed passive reactor. Ultimately, the force of lift comes from the combustion chamber of the engine. (or in a glider, from the combustion chamber in the tow plane)
Yep! That's the problem for all these 'scientific' religion deniers; their gods are way too small.
Or as Athel Cornish-Bowden put it in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (2006)
If we ask similar questions about metabolism, for example why glucose 6-phosphate is produced by most organisms in glycolysis (catalyzed by the enzyme hexokinase mentioned earlier), then initially the argument runs in parallel to that for machines. If the answer is that glucose 6-phosphate is produced because glucose and ATP are available then that is the material cause; if we answer that it is produced as a result of the action of the enzyme hexokinase, then that is the efficient cause. So far so good, but when we ask where the hexokinase comes from there is no final cause: it certainly does not come from outside the organism, so it must be produced from within. We can trace back material and efficient causes for that, but we never reach a final cause. This is what it means to say that organisms are closed to efficient causation. In admitting it to be true, however, we are stepping outside everything that we know about machines, and everything we can derive from classical philosophy.
We are still far from full and satisfying answers to the questions that Rosen asks about what makes a living organism alive. In general terms his view of the essential difference between a machine and an organism was foreshadowed by John Locke more than three centuries ago, but his detailed analysis is mathematically very demanding. It has been followed up by few other authors, and asserting that the organization is circular is not the same as the same as explaining exactly how the circularity is achieved. The essential point is to recognize that there is a real problem: as he said, the questions are real, and will not go away by virtue of not being addressed—so it is not sufficient to say that we do not like Rosen’s answer. If we regard it as unsatisfactory or just wrong we need to propose an alternative; we cannot pretend that there is no question to be answered. In summary, the classical reductionist approach to science can be understood as a way of understanding the functioning of a whole system in terms of the properties of its parts, but now we must learn to understand the parts in terms of the whole (Cornish-Bowden et al., 2004). To make Rosen’s ideas more easily intelligible to biologists they will need to be put in the context of current knowledge of biology, and the limits within which his interpretation of the circular organization of living organisms can apply need to be specied (Letelier et al., 2006).
[[Much like a blind man who might insist that light doesn’t exist because he can’t see it.]]
That’s a much better analogy than my ice one- that’s pretty much spot on, and describes htose hwo are on the outside, looking in and telling those on the inside that they aren’t really experiencing what we say we are, then tryign to convince eveyone else that God isn’t real- then patting us on the back and stating “I respect your choice to beleive in fantasy, IF that’s what makes you feel better about yourself”-
The silly hting is that they’d know instantly that what we are talkign about is infact very real IF they’d just take God at His word and ask for salvation- but refusing to do so, they think they are liberating htemselves by ‘freeing themselves from fantasy’ by refusing to Take God at His wor4d and finding out first hand God really is who He says He is- It’s just like hte blind man insisting light doesn’t exist, and hte fact is many who have their sight have i nfact experienced the reality of light first hand
let me just add- that IF the blind person were offered their sight back, but refused the operation becajuse of hte fear of hte pain of hte operation. They refuse the sight restoring operation, and STILL insist that light doesn’t exist, and STILL try to convince htose hwo have indeed seen hte light, that light could not exist, because hte blind person making the claim hasn’t persoanlly experienced the light fisrt hand.
A-G: Just in time for the arrival of the baby boomers, the funeral homes can now shutdown because allmendream purports knowledge of how to bring dead bodies back to life.
Good grief, allmendream, but that is precisely what we CAN'T do! On Alamo-Girl's "rocks and rabbits" analogy, once you "reduce" the rabbit — that crittur's done for. You have absolutely no way to "put it back together" as the living system it was before you "reduced" it to its components.
That is why the entire reductionist, mechanistic approach of contemporary science cannot tell us much about living systems. For reductionism loses all the system entailments — but it is system entailment that expresses everything we need to know about the organizational configuration of the living system— i.e., how all the parts or components work together for the benefit of the whole living system — which is astronomically more complex (i.e., has an astronomically greater number of causal entailments of various kinds) than mechanisms or machines. Plus all entailments which are efficient causes are "inner" to the organism; unlike in the case of mechanisms or machines, they are not injected by the environment.
As Rosen put it, "a material system is an organism if, and only if, it is closed to efficient causation." This statement to me is not as transparent as it needs to be. For there's plenty of efficient causation going on within the living system, as Rosen clearly recognizes. His point is that there is no efficient cause from outside the system. But a hasty reading of his statement might lead one to surmise that Rosen is saying there is no efficient causation in living systems period (e.g., they are "closed" to it). Yet seemingly they are only "closed" in this sense to efficient causes rising from outside of themselves — that is, in the environment.
Dearest sister in Christ, thank you so much for the "chuckle," above! It's so nice to know that allmendream knows how to keep me out of a funeral home. :^)
LOL I think we are carrying this analogy a little too far : )
I am truly amazed at the power of the combustion chambers in the tow plane yesterday! I dropped off at the end of Heber's runway yesterday, probably 800' AGL and yet I managed to ride a wave to 30k. I think I will have to congratulate the designer of that perpetual motion machine, he single handedly has solved the energy crises : )
That’s some draft!
It occurs to me I ought to share a few more excerpts from Athel Cornish-Bowden's article to underscore the difference. Rosen's book makes the point exquisitely by mathematics, it cannot be escaped. But Athel's brief description here may be kinder to the reader:
Yet that is what a living organism does. Not only does it make itself (something no existing machine can do), but it also monitors the working state of all of its parts, and replaces those that need replacing, all of this being done from within. As we know, in good conditions a human being typically lives for about 70 years (even without the intervention of modern medicine, which is, of course, external), while containing necessary components with lifetimes in the range of minutes. This is a discrepancy of well over six orders of magnitude in the lifetime of the organism compared with that of its parts. Proteins vary considerably in their lability, and in many cases they are degraded as a result of specific catalyzed processes and not just by being worn out, but, even if this is ignored, none survive completely unchanged for decades. Some proteins, such as the crystallins of the vertebrate eye, are never replaced, and remain in use for 90 years or more, but this does not mean that they remain in perfect condition and suffer no damage. On the contrary, cataract is just the most obvious indication that crystallins do not survive unchanged for decades. The difference for crystallins is that the organism can survive without repairing the damage, whereas the overwhelmingly more usual case is that damage needs to be repaired at a rate essentially the same as the rate at which it occurs.
Understanding how this maintenance is achieved is a huge problem, and even if we restrict attention to the purely chemical part of what it means to be alive, that is to say to metabolism, it is still a huge problem. The chemical reactions that constitute metabolism require enzymes to catalyze them, and these enzymes survive for periods that are several orders of magnitude shorter than the period in which the metabolism continues to function normally. They therefore need to be replaced. (Rosen referred to "repair" rather than replacement, but that was an unfortunate choice of term, especially now that we know of many examples of genuine repair of nucleic acids, and a few examples of repair of proteins.) The enzymes themselves must therefore be regarded as metabolites, i.e. products of metabolism, and other enzymes are needed to catalyze the replacement process. However, these other enzymes also have finite lifetimes, and also need to be replaced, in processes catalyzed by yet other enzymes, which also need to be replaced, and so on for ever unless there is a way to close the circle. We therefore need a way of conceiving that the organization of metabolism is circular, so that at no point do we need to rely on any external help.
For almost all modern organisms a small amount of external help does exist, in the sense that apart from strict chemotrophs we are all parasites, as we need some of the products left by other organisms in order to survive. However, this dependence on other organisms solves only a tiny part of the problem, even for the most thoroughly parasitic of organisms, and it cannot even have solved a tiny part for the first organisms, which needed to survive in a world with no others to parasitize. Even the first organisms, of course, required some inorganic nutrients, just as all modern organisms do, so of course no organism is closed to material causation (and Rosen did not suggest that they were). This statement of the problem is probably clearer and easier to understand than the proposal of circular organization as a solution to it.
Or to put it another way, under the mechanistic, reductionist, contemporary view everything physical is a machine and can be analyzed and synthesized. That is the Newtonian paradigm. But it cannot admit that which has not yet occurred, i.e. final cause, the reason for which a thing is.
The one exception to this in the mechanistic paradigm is when the future is expressed in the present, such as in the Fibonacci series. But Rosen closes the causation by his circular model which entails much more and features encoding and decoding in the "chasing" (read Shannon here.)
In sum, biology is seen as a "special case" within the mechanistic worldview. And is generally ignored under the presumption that it must also be mechanistic because the paradigm works so well for physics, chemistry, etc.
But in reality, biological systems actually anticipate and thus Rosen steps away from the mechanism and instead models the organization without appeal to any outside causation. And thus the time issue disappears.
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