The gist of my argument is that the process "life", both its genesis and its evolution, is infinitely more complex and "purposeful" (remember you said it has a "goal") than the process "crystallization".
Crystallization also has a ‘goal’ in the same sense that evolution does. Both are just optimizing processes, which always optimize for a particular quality, or set of qualities.
I don't deny that they share similarities. I understand why you conclude that the absence of a sculptor in one case indicates the absence of a so far unknown energy source in the other.
That’s progress I suppose.
My argument is this: both a bush fire and my TFT monitor emit light. It does not follow that my TFT monitor could be the result of a lightning strike, that would be a "jump to conclusions".
Sure, but I don’t know what that has to do with anything. It is not remotely analogous to anything I have said. The structure of a monitor is identifiably not the result of natural formation. It cannot reproduce itself and so there exists no plausible way for it to originate except deliberate engineering. That is not the case for living things.
Because, as you must admit, there is a huge gap to bridge between the process of crystallization and the process of abiogenesis and evolution. They share similarities. But the differences are clearly non-trivial.
No, I don’t “admit” that, because it doesn’t follow. The differences are trivial.
Less assumptions. I never held the position that just because humans can recreate natural processes, these processes cannot occur naturally, and nothing I wrote indicates that.
You did indeed write something which implied that.
But that may be because my English is so poor.
Your English is fine.
My argument is that the amount of work and thought and intent and intelligence and design that goes into recreating some of those processes even on the most simplicistic scale are an indication for the probability that these processes are not merely small islands of order in the sea of universal entropy, but part of a superconscious scheme that goes way beyond the measly misunderstandings of today's "scientific consensus".
No, because 99% of the work is just recreating the conditions in sim. It is not in dispute that the necessary conditions for abiogenesis and natural selection to occur can come into being by natural processes. Astronomers have produced photographs of planets naturally forming around distant stars by way of gravitational accretion, and of new stars being formed by a similar process within nebulas.
De gustibus non est disputandum. I think this is the core of our differences, if we leave all the other bickering and name-calling and insinuations aside. I'm skeptical about the "Big Bang" religion, I see it as a fancy way of replacing white-bearded deities with another unexplainable, unprovable, esoteric, occult mystery, shrouded in the learned words of scholars' speculations and debates on their exegesis.
If you have trouble distinguishing science from religion then indeed that is a core difference between us and explains many of our other disagreements.
And as I indicated, I'm not a fan of cartesianism and determinism, and I really don't think either of us can prove either way, it's mostly a matter of taste and definitions. Maybe we can make this the crystallization point of a different debate one day.
No, I’m content to have it out right now. I know I am on firmer footing.
Above paragraph also goes for this part of the debate. I disagree strongly. I think it is the way the cosmos communicates to us that it is more than an extremely complex Babbage machine and part of the force that makes us keep "falling upwards" against entropy.
All you have said here is that you disagree. You’ve not explained why your alternative explanation better fits the observable evidence.
So we do have common ground!
Keep reading.
Precisely what I'm saying.
No, you seem to be saying it’s a supernatural force with a conscious mind which causes it to occur.
The program coded itself?
It was never coded. It doesn’t exist in a tangible sense. You cannot hold evolution in your hand. It is a process. It exists only as relationships between organisms, their environment, and their genes.
Turtles all the way down.
You keep saying this randomly to stuff it doesn’t apply to.
Butbutbut you said
Yes, and? Those two things do not contradict one another. Mistakes which impede the ability of organisms to survive long enough to reproduce and wean children are cleared away by the extinction of those variations on the overall species.
Mutations which do not impede survival, reproduction or weaning are not cleared away because they do not cause the extinction of the subset of the species which has them. Even if they cause no noticeable effect, they can persist so long as they are at least not harmful. This is what ‘genetic drift’ is.
Ah, forget it, I'm just being a scamp for funsies ;)
I imagine you were a very frustrating student to many of your teachers. You seem to misidentify holes in your own understanding of a theory for holes in the theory itself, under the assumption you already know everything there is to know about it. Case in point, the above misunderstanding you misidentified as self-contradictory because you (apparently) didn’t know about genetic drift.
I'm trying to, you're just bending over backwards to rationalize all indications away with speculation of all different sorts. Just the way we dislike dogmatic religious fanatics for.
No, that’s what you’re doing.
To clarify: my contention is that the process of life, the underlying "code", so to speak, is evidence of a "supernatural" form of energy in the sense that it so far defies discovery and recognition of the contemporary "scientific consensus". Life is a part of nature. Uni- verse. All is one, and one is all.
It doesn’t, though. Evolution is very well understood.
1600 AD: "A force that cannot be grasped with our senses, that you need complex machinery for to detect, yet can be used to do material work, even lift tons of weight, with a mere flick of a finger? Go away! Vade retro, satanas!"
I hope you get what I'm getting at.
Yes, you’re assuming for no good reason that your belief system is comparable to scientific findings that have been verified to be true (your beliefs have not) and that I am akin to a simple preindustrial peasant who is mystified by your inexplicable futuristic knowledge.
This is also the attitude of absolutely every crank ever to promote a supposed free energy machine, natural remedy for cancer, orgonic concentrator, lawsonomic flow equalizer, cloudbuster, crystal energy channeler, etc.
It is irritatingly egotistical. You constantly shit all over people much smarter than you are, comparing them to priests of a scientific religion because they do not affirm your retarded fantasies.
I don’t approve of that. They are the people actually doing the heavy lifting of discovering what is true, and what you know about their fields is like a raindrop in the ocean of what they know.
Less assumptions. I never said it's only a signal receiver.
That is a necessary implication of your position.
I said one of its many functions could be to tap into and amplify the cosmic background "noise" to allow for free will despite the cartesian nature of the deterministic processes that then happen on the material scale.
If so, there is no point to its staggering complexity or computer-like structure. You don’t get to say “Okay well, it looks like a computer but it ALSO channels consciousness from elsewhere!”
This is like saying that while it appears that germs cause disease, that doesn’t mean disease isn’t also caused by evil spirits. There is already an adequate naturalistic explanation.
I don't know how familiar you are with the intricacies of cryptography, but a formidable problem is to generate unpredictability (commonly referred to as "randomness") for encryption purposes (OTP, for example). Since computers are deterministic, as you contend the universe is, there can be no randomness. These software generators are called "Pseudorandom Number Generators", PRNGs. So there are devices dedicated to the generation of "True Randomness", TRNGs, which provide the computer with "noise"; some of which are as simple as a "bad" resistor. Think of it this way, if you will.
Okay, thanks for sharing.