The Heretic: Thomas Nagel

[whitecoast]

Thanks for your comments whitecoast.

Likewise. :)

By 'sideways' I mean a mutation or change in the species that is equally complex as what was before, except perhaps it is more convenient given the circumstances (like black vs white moths). 'Forward' would be a change resulting in more complexity/sophistication/organization. Of course, neo-darwinists may say that there is no distinction and what appears to be more complex is subjective. But I think this is fallacious, because how could we claim that there are no organisms of higher complexity/organization than others? A horse is not a sea snail, and a sea snail is not a microbe. Isn't the whole point of the discussion to explain how that complexity came to be?

Yeah, that's a terrible argument they're making by equating horses and snails in terms of complexity. In terms of fitness they'd be equal. Maybe their complaint is that there's often a temptation to equivocate complexity with fitness? Even though some animals have evolved highly complex eyes, many other organisms are happy with far more primitive eyes. There's also the conundrum that, as far as science knows, humans are the only civilization- and tool-building animals in the history of the planet. If such complexity was so advantageous we would see more examples of its convergent evolution in other species, but we don't.

Granted that the size of populations needs to be taken into consideration; as well as the fact that many species do become extinct altogether, i.e. they fail to adapt. However, it still seems to me that the chances of mutating soon and often enough in the right way in order to survive drastic changes is infinitesimal small, as AI explained:

A couple relevant points: for every 150-amino acid protein, only 1 in 10^74 possible sequences are functional. There are approximately 10^65 particles in our galaxy. As Meyer argues, there aren't enough 'probabilistic resources' in the history of the universe to give any reasonable chance of getting a functional protein by chance processes. But say you do have one. As you say, how many mutations before you get another of the 1 in 10^74 functional sequences?? I see only two solutions: either the genetic code is pre-programmed with certain constraints so that it will mutate in certain functional directions (Shiller hints at this, I think), or intelligence has to have a hand in every novel genetic feature (new genes, new organs, new bodies, new species, etc.). Either way, new-Darwinism isn't very realistic.

I think what the materialists keep falling back on is the Anthropic Principle: that the natural processes that give rise to us, however improbable, MUST have happened because otherwise we wouldn't be here to perceive them. And I get that it is sometimes useful. (i.e. why in the DCM did my "soul" or whatever turn me into whitecoast and not Windmill knight? Obviously because that's just how the cookie crumbles!) But in the end I think it just means the "random mutation" thing only holds until a better explanation out there. And I think the materialists are so conditioned by black-and-white thinking that they take any hint of teleology as some kind of validation of witch-burning, and so are paranoid against the notion that intelligence exists as a force in the universe. And to think these people purport to be the representatives of the highest order of intelligence!

I have thought a couple more arguments against (neo) darwinism. The first is that you can explain some changes in species facing variable external conditions, but not all. I am thinking of how we have been told that life first appeared in the oceans. At some point of evolution organisms 'jumped' out of the water and evolved to breath air. What I would like to know is how exactly did that jump take place? Did some fish mutate into having lungs apart from gills? Or did their gills suddenly mutate into being capable of processing air too? Extracting oxygen from air and water are two very different processes which require very different sophisticated organs, and the proof is that I would die if I tried to breath water and a fish would die if breathing air. How conceivable is it to think that a random mutation resulted in such a drastic and sophisticated change as growing lungs?

Very inconceivable if you think of an organism spontaneously mutating an air bladder out of nothing, but less inconceivable if you think of the lung being derived from the swim bladder of fish, which is already an inner compartment that stores air and ejects it to the environment. The only substantial changes would be increased blood capillaries near its surface for the diffusion of oxygen into the blood, etc. etc.

Here's a proposed evolution of the eye, as derived by tissue analysis of the many types of eyes other living organisms have. It gives a good example of how something exceedingly complex, like the human eye, can come about with a series of smaller changes.

What I find really interesting is that "negative entropy" could take sand from the beach and turn it into an intelligent robot to play the role of 3D beings. Why didn't it? I think that it hints at some kind of budgeting of intelligence in the living system. It could make robots, but it takes less intelligence to find an organism on the planet with potential to carry out abstract thinking and just steer its evolution through a few directed mutations. Why do some species develop a fully complex eye with iris, cornea, etc., while the humble nautilus gets by with a pinhole eye? And suppose there are two potential species that could potentially evolve intelligence and fill the role of 3D beings in the cosmic ecosystem. How would DCM decide? Is it first-past-the-post in terms of letting the probable pasts duke it out until the one with the highest probability (however infinitesimal, as Approaching Infinity elaborated) receives the infusion from above and becomes more-than-a-dream-of-the-past?

A major criticism I hear about the ID crowd from neo-Darwinists is that, although they do point out flaws in mechanistic evolution, they are less prepared to offer a coherent alternative world-view. Whether that is true or not, the kinds of questions I asked in the previous paragraph will need to be answered by the ID's improved theory of evolution.

I have a friend who has got a PhD in genetics and he was once explaining Darwin to me. He mentioned that Darwin got his idea of natural selection from economics. In other words, free market, which in theory contends that unregulated markets will 'evolve' naturally and prosperously as the fittest enterprises grow and survive. Similarly, in the natural world no one directs the process and the fittest survive and 'evolve'. However - and this is my second argument - both processes are not comparable in the terms that Darwin pretended, because while strategies of survival in the natural world would be the product of random mutations, in the economic and social world all strategies are more or less rational. Because they are the product of beings with brains, i.e. entrepreneurs.

Yeah, it seems that a lot of neo-Darwinists have rejected the notion of material agency in the prime substance of the system (DNA in living, people in economic). That could indicate they are pulling the teeth out of something Darwin knew, or simply that they thought he was using a sloppy analogy, FWIW :)

Hope what I said makes sense...

 

[Sol Logos]

I'm not sure if I can offer much with this, but I was reading that post today and thought about the idea of artificial intelligence is one way to look at it.

Basically the question would be can you get more intelligence out of a machine than the intelligence you put into it? Think about all the people working on say the closest we have to real artificial intelligence in a computer, you've got a huge team of programmers, engineers, mathematicians etc. On top of that you've got all the theories, findings and work done by others before them say just in computer sciences that this team is developing on top of, not to mention all of these people collectively are working on top of ideas from all sorts of fields that makes the sum total of their experience and education to get to where they are with their best AI.

So imagine you could quantify that - all that intelligence inputed into the creation of the most advanced AI yet developed to date. There would be a huge amount of intelligence banked up, if you put that to use it would be an extreme super brain, capable of God knows what superhuman mental feats.

So that's the intelligence put in and if you compared that to the intelligence coming out of this AI, well the best AI machines as far as I'm aware have difficulty just mimicking human walking movement. So not a lot of intelligence coming out by comparison to the vast amount needed to be put in and create it.

So say we look at the atomic energetic soup that was the base material for our universe. There's not much intelligence there put in. But it randomly produced complex beings that get inspired, have feelings and can ponder all this stuff we're all pondering about.

The randomness of that ever happening is just for me unfathomable, it's like saying if I threw a bucket of matches in the air enough times eventually it would fall into place making a toy sized house rather than just a pile of matches.

For me anyway, the material reductionist view seems to be the most spookiest.

 

[Ben]

[quote author=whitecoast

]Very inconceivable if you think of an organism spontaneously mutating an air bladder out of nothing, but less inconceivable if you think of the lung being derived from the swim bladder of fish, which is already an inner compartment that stores air and ejects it to the environment. The only substantial changes would be increased blood capillaries near its surface for the diffusion of oxygen into the blood, etc. etc.

[/quote]

Several families of fish exist which breathe air, either through the modified swim bladder, gills which are able to retain water is some way, or an organ called the labyrinth in Anabantid fish. The lungfishes are the classic example drawn upon by darwinists - with their ability to breathe air at the surface and their modified fins for 'walking' along the bottom. Add to this the existence of species with vestigial limbs and even organs and you have a compelling case for physiological change of animals over time, with DNA mutations as the mechanism. Some people don't dispute this, but instead ask 'Why?', what is the purpose of this system? Doesn't the fact that this process is even possible require a more complex explanation?That is the difference between the truly scientific approach and the belief of neodarwinists, in my opinion.

 

[ajseph 21]

Hearing about the left to right microevolution from Windmill knight reminds me of polarizing between STS and STO and the tree of life image Laura produced. It also brings to mind religious imagery of the right/left hand of God and how the right are preserved (positive harvest?) and the left are burned (comet fire?). If we picture a knight's movement on a chess board we can see a choice of avoidance of danger (adaptation) followed by progression (evolution) ie. right then forward. Random mutation can't explain animal adaptation, let alone give a reason for a reasonable being who chooses order. For us to be able to choose goes against entropic forces so if the neo darwinists would look at themselves they would see their theory has no substance. And after reading the C's and G about how Earth is a star to be, it seems they haven't even considered planetary evolution as viable. In short their narrow minded which isn't scientific.

 

[Muxel]

Why do some species develop a fully complex eye with iris, cornea, etc., while the humble nautilus gets by with a pinhole eye?

How about: the nautilus is an extremely archaic animal whose ancestors go all the way back to the Cambrian period, and as a species must have survived many great extinction events on this planet, and its evolutionary success means it did not need to diverge much from the "prototype", so to say? Of course, this is still "the way the cookie crumbles", only I've tried to explain it with historical narrative. (But history is a big part of the lesson of this reality!)

And suppose there are two potential species that could potentially evolve intelligence and fill the role of 3D beings in the cosmic ecosystem. How would DCM decide? Is it first-past-the-post in terms of letting the probable pasts duke it out until the one with the highest probability (however infinitesimal, as Approaching Infinity elaborated) receives the infusion from above and becomes more-than-a-dream-of-the-past?

Am I right to assume that this forum agrees upon a combo of reductive teleology and reductive divine intervention? If so,

Some possible futures will be more eligible than others, namely the ones that lead to more complex systems (the goals) even further on in the future. These 'in-between' stages (i.e., not yet conscious) would have to have a higher probability of coming into being than they would simply based on chance physics and chemistry. They'd be more probable simply because they are on the path toward a certain outcome, since they have a higher 'velocity' to the end goal.

where the end goal is hyperdimensional, beyond our reach. Maybe we can also say that the present is an end goal for everything that has happened before, so everything that has happened, happened in order for you to have this present experience

A teleological answer, on the other hand, would say that "life is a necessary condition of the instantiation of value, and ultimately of its recognition." In other words, in order to produce something capable of recognizing value in the world, life is a necessary step. Conscious beings, like animals, are necessary 'intermediate stages' to a being capable of recognizing value and acting on it. First the universe needs beings with an innate tendency be motivated by value (pain and pleasure), which higher beings can then use as the basis for more complex moral reasoning. Nagel writes, "In brief, value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value."

no matter how improbable scientists have estimated it to be. In fact, aren't all "absolute" (for lack of a better word) probabilities one-in-infinity anyway? There are infinite universes already existing, and the one you inhabit is dependent upon you-the-quantum-observer.

 

[Windmill knight]

[quote author=whitecoast

]Very inconceivable if you think of an organism spontaneously mutating an air bladder out of nothing, but less inconceivable if you think of the lung being derived from the swim bladder of fish, which is already an inner compartment that stores air and ejects it to the environment. The only substantial changes would be increased blood capillaries near its surface for the diffusion of oxygen into the blood, etc. etc.

Several families of fish exist which breathe air, either through the modified swim bladder, gills which are able to retain water is some way, or an organ called the labyrinth in Anabantid fish. The lungfishes are the classic example drawn upon by darwinists - with their ability to breathe air at the surface and their modified fins for 'walking' along the bottom. Add to this the existence of species with vestigial limbs and even organs and you have a compelling case for physiological change of animals over time, with DNA mutations as the mechanism. Some people don't dispute this, but instead ask 'Why?', what is the purpose of this system? Doesn't the fact that this process is even possible require a more complex explanation?That is the difference between the truly scientific approach and the belief of neodarwinists, in my opinion.
[/quote]

You guys are right, a 'leap' out of the water is conceivable if critters developed proto-lungs in the first place, which they could use now and then for convenience, stepping out of the water more and more, until after many generations they don't go back into the water and breathing it becomes useless. However, we still don't have an answer about how that could happen by chance, which is essentially what those guys are saying. As you say Ben, 'why?'

I think what the materialists keep falling back on is the Anthropic Principle: that the natural processes that give rise to us, however improbable, MUST have happened because otherwise we wouldn't be here to perceive them.

Yes, I've heard that one before. It sounds to me like a circular argument, though: 'we evolved through natural selection because we evolved through natural selection!' Or: 'the natural selection/random mutation explanation must be true because no other explanation is conceivable!' Which is a huge lack of imagination. Or: 'if natural selection did not explain evolution we would not be here!'. Which is to assume that the premise you are trying to prove is true already, and then pretend that this is what proves it true.

And that thing that Richard Dawkins says, that life (born of random processes) must be improbable, but not so improbable that it cannot happen - and which is basically the same circular argument as above - fails to consider that it was not one lucky shot that happened once when life appeared in the primal soup. Rather, it has been a very, very long chain of lucky shots, one for every time there has been a functional, successfully adaptable random mutation. Which makes it even more improbable.

The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to think that random processes are even less believable as an explanation than fundie religion - and I don't think very highly of fundies. ;)

 

[Windmill knight]

In terms of fitness they'd be equal. Maybe their complaint is that there's often a temptation to equivocate complexity with fitness? Even though some animals have evolved highly complex eyes, many other organisms are happy with far more primitive eyes. There's also the conundrum that, as far as science knows, humans are the only civilization- and tool-building animals in the history of the planet. If such complexity was so advantageous we would see more examples of its convergent evolution in other species, but we don't.

This is a good point, and it suggests the question: If evolution does not favor complexity, but fitness, shouldn't the only species alive be bacteria and viruses (if we consider viruses as living)? Shouldn't any other species of more complexity be mere accidental anomalies that perish as soon as they appear, and therefore cannot develop any further into more complexity? I suppose a counter-argument could be that any organisms above the level of bacteria are indeed accidental rarities in terms of the hundreds of thousands of years of planet Earth - but, can we really say that?? Many such species do perish after some time, but they seem to keep popping up in different versions and we and others have made it to quite a high degree of complexity compared to bacteria. So again, the question is 'why?'.

 

[LQB]

So again, the question is 'why?'.

What better way for the Universe to experience itself? How would it know the outcome if it didn't try a spectrum of forms?

If all is consciousness, might the goal (in 3D and beyond) be for consciousness to know itself in all forms? To test/learn/experience with every (supposed) fragment of itself?

If this is what ID points to, then the means must be nearly infinite.

Just some thoughts ...

 

[whitecoast]

It sounds to me like a circular argument, though: 'we evolved through natural selection because we evolved through natural selection!' Or: 'the natural selection/random mutation explanation must be true because no other explanation is conceivable!' Which is a huge lack of imagination. Or: 'if natural selection did not explain evolution we would not be here!'. Which is to assume that the premise you are trying to prove is true already, and then pretend that this is what proves it true.

And that thing that Richard Dawkins says, that life (born of random processes) must be improbable, but not so improbable that it cannot happen - and which is basically the same circular argument as above - fails to consider that it was not one lucky shot that happened once when life appeared in the primal soup. Rather, it has been a very, very long chain of lucky shots, one for every time there has been a functional, successfully adaptable random mutation. Which makes it even more improbable.

It doesn't matter how improbable life is, as long as it's not impossible, and there is a lack of other suitable explanations for the origin of species. A priori whatever is left over must be true. But I DO get what you're saying about materialists not realizing that, since Intelligence is a force in the universe, it must also influence life's development. Authoritarians and OPs will be authoritarians and OPs, I guess.

But if we are honest with ourselves we should admit that we do not believe in intelligent design because we see signs of it in the development of life; all those can be explained away as random mutations like the materialists are doing. We believe in intelligent design because of what we know about physics and the paranormal (am I wrong about this?). It is obvious from digging into THOSE subjects that there are many higher forces working in and through matter and living things. It is then a no-brainer to propose that those influences extend to the development of life. Without that metaphysical background though... it kind of looks like provocation in the eyes of the materialists (and even those who are sincere in searching for truth but haven't found evidence of the paranormal in their lives, or haven't done the research).

So again, the question is 'why?'.

"Why" used in a teleological sense (not the causal sense) implies a motivation in the part of the subject, and therefore agency. So when you ask "why does life exist" you're assuming there's an agent responsible for bringing it about. Going on that "why" alone, without factoring everything else, seems to be circular in and of itself since you're asserting the mystery of evolution requires an agency, but you're presuming the existence of an agent in order to ask questions like "why" to steer the reader towards the possibility of there being agency. (Sorry for the word salad - is that sort of cogent?)

In terms of fitness they'd be equal. Maybe their complaint is that there's often a temptation to equivocate complexity with fitness? Even though some animals have evolved highly complex eyes, many other organisms are happy with far more primitive eyes. There's also the conundrum that, as far as science knows, humans are the only civilization- and tool-building animals in the history of the planet. If such complexity was so advantageous we would see more examples of its convergent evolution in other species, but we don't.

This is a good point, and it suggests the question: If evolution does not favor complexity, but fitness, shouldn't the only species alive be bacteria and viruses (if we consider viruses as living)? Shouldn't any other species of more complexity be mere accidental anomalies that perish as soon as they appear, and therefore cannot develop any further into more complexity? I suppose a counter-argument could be that any organisms above the level of bacteria are indeed accidental rarities in terms of the hundreds of thousands of years of planet Earth - but, can we really say that?? Many such species do perish after some time, but they seem to keep popping up in different versions and we and others have made it to quite a high degree of complexity compared to bacteria.

Well, when I said complexity and fitness are not equivalent, I didn't say they are mutually exclusive either :). Some complexity serves fitness and some doesn't. As always, the devil's in the details. This brings me to another question: in the case of unfit complexity, can you categorically state that it was one of those accidental mutations, or part of some infusion of intelligence from above? And how would we go about proving it either way? What about the intelligence that gives rise to humans, in spite of our being used to destroy so much other life now? Is that intelligence or negative-intelligence? STO or STS?

I've been thinking a little more about "random mutation" versus "intelligent design", and I've come to realize that, on the gene level, neither is empirically falsifiable when it comes to explaining the development of more complex life. Since you never can travel back in time look at a gene and actually watch the X-rays or intelligence faeries tinkering around down there. You may be able to demonstrate harmful radiation causes mutations, but you can't definitively say that ALL mutations since life's origin have been similarly haphazard or undirected.

On the other hand, there are many elements in biology and anatomy that point to a lack of intelligence in certain respects. The endocrine system for example. It's located over all sorts of organs in quite a disorganized fashion. It would be much more efficient if the organism had completely centralized the endocrine system the way it did the nervous system in the brain. HPA axis is the closest thing that comes to that. So what are the fast-and-hard rules that govern where and how intelligence influences or governs development? Because evidence shows it doesn't play a role all the time.

 

[Laura]

It doesn't matter how improbable life is, as long as it's not impossible, and there is a lack of other suitable explanations for the origin of species. A priori whatever is left over must be true. But I DO get what you're saying about materialists not realizing that, since Intelligence is a force in the universe, it must also influence life's development. Authoritarians and OPs will be authoritarians and OPs, I guess.

Well, one problem is that, according to the "rules" that the materialists claim are "established", life is not just improbable, it's impossible. That is, 2nd law of thermodynamics counterposed to the idea that things could "evolve" prior to the emergence of life so as to produce life.

But if we are honest with ourselves we should admit that we do not believe in intelligent design because we see signs of it in the development of life; all those can be explained away as random mutations like the materialists are doing. We believe in intelligent design because of what we know about physics and the paranormal (am I wrong about this?).

Well, that's not really the case for me. For me, it is in observing the dynamics of life and our reality, its intelligent dance, etc. Because the fact is, those things cannot be explained away as the consequences of random mutations or random 2nd law of thermodynamics controlled matter bumping around in space.

The facts seem to demonstrate that the very fact that those "random bits of matter" even exist is inexplicable by the materialist assumptions which amount to little more than a form of creationism. The don't - and cant' - explain that, they start their explanations AFTER the total acceptance of matter, space and time as ex nihilo components.

That will not do. It's cheating as much as saying "God did it".

 

[whitecoast]

Well, one problem is that, according to the "rules" that the materialists claim are "established", life is not just improbable, it's impossible. That is, 2nd law of thermodynamics counterposed to the idea that things could "evolve" prior to the emergence of life so as to produce life.

The second law only applies to closed systems, as far as I know. The living system is an open one, so it can theoretically decrease entropy in local areas as long as the total entropy of the universe (the actual closed system) is increasing. Scientists think the universe began in a low-entropy state, so I think it's reasonable (or at least not impossible) that an enclave of reduced entropy like earth develops for a period of time, given enough time/space.

Maybe part of the Achilles heel is assuming it was a low-entropy state, though astrophysics isn't my forte. I came across a theory awhile ago (don't remember the author or its name unfortunately) that proposed that the universe was already AT maximum entropy, but (since the 2nd law is a statistical argument) at maximum entropy the entropy can only decrease. A bit of free energy for work is produced here and there over millions of years. But then in an outlier event the entropy goes low enough for a universe to begin (or, at least, low enough for an intelligence to form that "thinks" it's living in a full universe) before it decays into void again. Maybe consciousness acts as an attractor to sort of magnetize those random fluctuations in entropy to simulate a continuous universe or biosphere. G's comments on the illusion of continuity in life made me think about this scenario also... fwiw.

Well, that's not really the case for me. For me, it is in observing the dynamics of life and our reality, its intelligent dance, etc. Because the fact is, those things cannot be explained away as the consequences of random mutations or random 2nd law of thermodynamics controlled matter bumping around in space.

Fair enough. Because they don't account (or don't see how to account) for why information/intelligence exists at all, or why/how truth and objective reality exist.

 

[Laura]

Whitecoast, have you read Alister Hardy's book "The Living Stream" and Shiller's "The 5th Option"?

 

[Approaching Infinity]

The second law only applies to closed systems, as far as I know. The living system is an open one, so it can theoretically decrease entropy in local areas as long as the total entropy of the universe (the actual closed system) is increasing. Scientists think the universe began in a low-entropy state, so I think it's reasonable (or at least not impossible) that an enclave of reduced entropy like earth develops for a period of time, given enough time/space.

_http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/04/how_the_scienti059011.html

Worth reading, imo. Here's the last paragraph:

If you want to show that the spontaneous rearrangement of atoms into machines capable of mathematical computation and interplanetary travel does not violate the fundamental natural principle behind the second law, you cannot simply say, as Styer and Bunn and so many others do, sure, evolution is astronomically improbable, but the Earth is an open system, so there is no problem as long as something (anything, apparently!) is happening outside the Earth which, if reversed, would be even more improbable. You have to argue that what has happened on Earth is not really astronomically improbable, given what has entered (and exited) our open system. Why is such a simple and obvious point so controversial?

 

[Approaching Infinity]

It doesn't matter how improbable life is, as long as it's not impossible, and there is a lack of other suitable explanations for the origin of species. A priori whatever is left over must be true.

Using chance to explain such improbable events (events that would not have a good chance of occurring, even given all the probabilistic resources of the known universe) is basically a way of saying "we don't know what the cause is." In other words, it's no explanation at all. A good explanation, like Nagel points out, has to show why an improbable event was in fact probable - what conditions made it likely to occur when given what we know about chance and the way the universe works, it shouldn't have happened.

But if we are honest with ourselves we should admit that we do not believe in intelligent design because we see signs of it in the development of life; all those can be explained away as random mutations like the materialists are doing. We believe in intelligent design because of what we know about physics and the paranormal (am I wrong about this?).

Well, I'm not so sure that "all those" can be explained by mutation and selection, but even if they were, the big question is the origin of life in the first place, that is, the origin of specified information that makes up the genetic code and the sequence of functional proteins. With such information, the only known cause is intelligence. Shiller calls it the Universal Dogma of Information Flow: “Design must derive from information; information must derive from intelligence; intelligence must derive from intelligence;…”

Stephen Meyer justifies this by the criterion of causal adequacy. In other words, we know intelligence can cause the given effect. In fact, it is the only known cause of such an effect. That makes it the best hypothesis. Until another one comes around that can also explain the origin of specified information, intelligence will remain the best explanation.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

_http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/04/how_the_scienti059011.html

Worth reading, imo.

Here's a video where the author of the above paper explains the hassle he received trying to get it published: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRLSwVRdNes

It's kind of technical, but he makes some good points, and it really shows how corrupt the scientific journals are...