I did clearly not deny that short and local, simple islands of patterns emerge from the chaos of entropy every now and then. I am pointing out to you that these are completely different from the kind of order and stability exhibited by life.
Is that so? Are snowflakes not fractally structured? Are living things not also typically symmetrical? Both snowflakes and humans are the products of the gradual accumulation of complexity according to simple rules, against constraining factors (heat and humidity in one case, food scarcity and predation in the other).
As a side node, a 14th/15th century or so Islamic philosopher whose name I keep forgetting once put minerals in a row before plants, animals and humans in an early version of evolution theory.
I've heard of that! It's interesting there were people making those connections even back then.
Clearly, a "crystal force" from inside the universe itself causes the snowflakes to happen, a superposition of well-studied and generally understood molecular forces.
Similarly, I claim a "life force" from inside the universe itself causes life to happen, and that this force has not been recognized yet.
If snowflakes can form just because of well studied and generally understood molecular forces, why does evolution require something different and special to occur?
In other words, you were attacking a strawman.
Or that you have retreated somewhat from that position. Probs it will turn out to be semantic nitpicking though.
...emanating from chaos and static noise. That is why I say a form of energy is required to exert that force all the way out of the entropy around it.
I'm a determinist. I don't think anything is truly random, but ultimately is the way that it is because of the initial starting conditions of the big bang. Everything then proceeded from there in a (at least potentially) predictable cause and effect manner.
I might tell you when crystals start procreating, metabolizing, getting up, looking around them and asking the question "why am I here?"
Irrelevant difference. What's relevant is that crystals exhibit the same fractal structuring and symmetry found in living organisms. Not because of evolution obviously, but because of what evolution has in common with crystallization in a mathematical sense.
Our ability to ask and discuss question such as these. Our love for beauty. They are maybe just a biochemical, neurological trick our DNA devised to keep the procreation process going for a materialist. For me, they are an indication that the original rule set is the result of purpose and intent.
Beauty is just pleasurable sensory input. We may not currently know much about why the human brain finds certain ratios and color combinations pleasurable, but we do understand the evolutionary reasons why (for example) sugar tastes good to humans, why feces and decaying flesh smells bad, etc. It stands to reason there are similar explanations for all sensory preferences.
That sounds pretty eschatalogical. How can the mindless, cartesian, deterministic process of evolution have more of a "goal" or a "meaning" than the process of burning have the "goal" to burn the wood log and turn it to heat and ashes if you deny the very existence of an intent and purpose, i.e., some form of "supernaturality" behind it?
Because it is a kind of intelligence, in a manner of speaking. Just a very simple minded and short sighted kind. Evolution can be conceived of as a kind of computer, like any optimizing process.
The data that goes in one end is the genome of the species it's acting upon. This is modified according to the secondary data, environmental conditions. The output is the genome modified in a way which makes the species better adapted to those conditions.
There is nothing supernatural or conscious about this. It's just a whole lot of trial and error. Extinction clears away the errors, what's left is every solution that worked.
I did. I named life itself.
This assumes your contention that life is in some way supernatural is correct. You have not demonstrated that to be true. Until that time, it is not a valid example.
Your premise is a dualistic one, mine is, I think, monistic, so I cannot answer the question within that framework.
No, it isn't dualistic. If you believe that, you have either misunderstood me or are deliberately misrepresenting me.
But think of it this way: how does "immaterial" electromagnetic radiation interact with my "material" loudspeakers when I turn on the radio?
Electromagnetic radiation is not immaterial.
Frank J. Tipler proposes an interesting mechanism, where the "material" parts of the mind serve as antennas and amplifiers for the "background noise" of the universe.
I have discussed this view in a prior article. Sufficed to say the brain is structured very much like a computer, and is altogether more complex than it needs to be if in fact it's only a signal receiver.
A purely rational and deterministic donkey would starve from death facing two equally big and tasty stacks of hay trying to make the best decision. A donkey that can tap into such a source of randomness picks any, eats and lives.
That doesn't sound rational to me. But I also don't think the fact that our brains are capable of making arbitrary decisions proves that we are in fact immaterial spirits controlling our brains from a distance or living within them.
The way I remember it, I said "it seems 'remote viewing' has some empiricism behind it. Also looking forward to the outcome of Lucien Hardy's take on the Bell experiment (whatever the outcome)."
I understand you think so. I disagree. I have dug into this subject deeply in the past. I found a layer of superficially convincing stuff. Then under that, fraud upon fraud, like a tidal wave of skeletons toppling out of a closet once the door is opened.
Not that I wish you are. But you'd surely understand better why I advocate a more Socratic approach to claims of "supernaturality".
You seem to have missed or ignored the point I made about trusting peoples' firsthand reports of paranormal experience.
..and still vastly different from the strawman you beat up when you said "What I meant when I said that they laughed at Columbus, but also Bozo, is that the fact that certain historical luminaries were mocked in their day does not mean every guy with an unpopular idea is an uncelebrated genius destined to be recognized as such by future generations."
Yup, semantic nitpicking. Alright, make the small change from "every guy" to "whoever currently has your fancy". There is no predicting who will be the next vindicated crackpot except that if their claims violate extremely fundamental laws of physics, they have worse odds than somebody whose claims don't do that.
There's also the matter of whether or not their claims are identifiably structured like a known scam, as in my Nigerian prince example. Many radical claims in the field of alt energy fit into this category, like the supposed "water powered car" and compressed air powered car.
These are at least red flags a responsible person should look for when evaluating remarkable claims, no?
No true scotsman?
No, that would be if it was perpetrated by scientists, but I claimed that they were not true scientists because of some aspect of how they conducted themselves. What you're doing is blaming an outsider hoax on science itself.
It is hard to imagine modern chemistry and physics without alchemy.
That does not mean that chemistry is simply the modern alchemy and has not demonstrated 100% superior capability to produce verifiably true findings. What you did was to suggest that chemists are just modern alchemists and are just as mistaken to feel sure of their findings as alchemists were.
Actually, the challenge works the other way round. It's not easy to find that many that are not :)
When something like that seems strange to me, rather than assume scientists are idiots or frauds, I assume there's something which makes it reasonable that I don't yet know about. So far it's always proven to be the case.
As I said, I'm not a gambling man, but it seems there are simply not that many real fossils so they fill their museums with plastic replicas and robotosaurs to have something to show.
Why is the real American constitution not openly displayed in a museum, but instead replicas of it?
I think it's not that beneficial to produce tons of toxic waste nobody knows what to do with and then bury it in the hopes nobody accidentally digs it out within the next 50,000-500,000 years or so when there are cleaner, safer, and more sustainable alternatives.
Do you know what thorium is?
...that occur how often?
Once every 26 million years, though smaller impacts are more recent. Do you recall the meteor which exploded over Russia in 2013?
If this is some meme, enlighten me.
Maybe. Firstly, I think science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. And secondly, I think that if it disagrees with experiment, it doesn't matter who you are, how smart you are or what your name is, it's wrong, for experiment is the key to science.
I agree. The same general sentiment is in my next article actually. But I don't think you're abiding by it.
Actually, it's more like this... I think that it would be a mistake to take the current state of knowledge, the "scientific consensus" or the "laughter of the majority" as the last word and keep an open mind for possibilities that look as much as crackpottery now as the Wright's endeavours did before they took off.
You say this as if supernaturalism is something new and cutting edge. It isn't. It's very old. Waiting for science to advance to the point where it can prove spirits exist is like waiting for it to prove the existence of griffons and centaurs.
I also think that, according to Goedel's incompleteness theorem, science, as a system, cannot prove its own validity, except if it's incomplete.
Not in a vacuum, but I would contend that something like a computer constitutes a tangible validation of science. For computers to work, our understanding of how electrons behave has to be accurate to a staggering degree of precision. That understanding came from science.
All technology is just applied science, and all instances of working technology are demonstrations of the accuracy of the scientific findings they're based on. There exists no equivalent tangible demonstration of the correctness of any supernatural claims.
So you could say I see science not as a monolithic entity where truths are carved into for all eternity, but as a continuous, ongoing process of trial and error, of being "less wrong" with every step taken, and I am looking forward to the ways it'll take us unto.
Agreed. Science makes no claims to absolute truth, that is an unattainably high standard. Science deals instead in probabilistic truths which have been confirmed by experiment over and over, to a point of diminishing returns.
I personally get the impression that, as you carefully agree, such ideas as peace, health, abundance, prosperity and justice should and could be considered to be within its wheelhouse and assist all attempts at getting lot closer to these goals.
I think science has a lot of useful things to say about how best to design societies to maximize desirable attributes like comfort, safety, opportunity, fulfillment and so on. But then only because humans desire those attributes. Much of how we design societies is simply down to arbitrary human wants.
Only then will it make any sense, in my mind, to continue the costly pursuit for "god particles" (yes I know, it's a pop science term coined by the press) and life on other stars and similar speculations without any useful application for 99.99% of humans.
We don't know what will prove useful. We didn't know splitting the atom would be as useful as it turned out to be. We're groping in the dark here. Sometimes we stumble onto incredible treasures. Sometimes it's just a new kind of barnacle or some shit. There is no cheat sheet, we have to brute force it by exploring everywhere we can in a boringly meticulous way. Them's the breaks.