The problem knowledge poses to atheism

[charlou]

Mind

definition of mind: an immaterial force that can compel a number of bodies to move in a certain direction

Sounds more like gravity.

I may come back and shred this properly when I have more time.

Please do ... I remember your debate with that "philosopher" at RDF .. Oh yes indeedy, you are a good ride.

It's like .. you know me ...

[Toontown]

The verbose monstrosity is enormous. Certainly the least time-consuming approach is to pick a vital spot, and strike there.

There is another problem that randomness is faced with: it can destroy actually quite easily, it can construct only the crudest mechanisms.

Oh really?

I'm aware that you threatened to "define" randomness. I'm also aware that you utterly failed to do so. You attempted instead to define what randomness cannot do, and failed at that as well, as I shall demonstrate further downpage.

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues ... resource/4

"Why is it hard to make randomness? The fact that maintaining perfect order is difficult surprises no one; but it comes as something of a revelation that perfect disorder is also beyond our reach. As a matter of fact, perfect disorder is the more troubling concept—it is hard not only to attain but also to define or even to imagine."

The American Scientist article goes on to do a far better job of not quite defining randomness than your lame attempts.

And now, on to the final destruction of your lame claims as to what randomness cannot do:

http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/h ... aintro.htm

"Pragmatic researchers see evolution's remarkable power as something to be emulated rather than envied. Natural selection eliminates one of the greatest hurdles in software design: specifying in advance all the features of a problem and the actions a program should take to deal with them. By harnessing the mechanisms of evolution, researchers may be able to "breed" programs that solve problems even when no person can fully understand their structure. Indeed, these so-called genetic algorithms have already demonstrated the ability to made breakthroughs in the design of such complex systems as jet engines."

Yeah, you read that right. Randomly generated computer code, generated within an environment simulating the features of genetic mutation, variation, heredity, and selection, has produced computer algorithms that humans could not write or even fully understand.

It has also been shown that randomly generated code can fix bugs in existing code faster than human programmers can - less than a minute on average. That's mainly because computers can generate and test random code at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than human programmers can think or engage in trial and error.

So much for the backbone of your hypothesis about how randomness can't produce anything orderly or complex.

John Holland is one of the first PHD's in computer science.

[spinoza99]

By the mid-1960's I had developed a programming technique, the genetic algorithm, that is well suited to evolution by both mating and mutation. During the next decade, I worked to extend the scope of genetic algorithms by creating a genetic code that could represent the structure of any computer program.

To evolve classifier rules that solve a particular problem, one simple starts with a population of random strings of 1's and 0's and rates each string according to the quality of the result. Depending on the problem, the measure of fitness could be business profitability, game payoff, error rate or any number of other criteria. High-quality strings mate; low-quality ones perish. As generations pass, strings associated with improved solutions will predominate.

As you can see in the above, an intelligence designed the computer code. So you have not proved that species can arise at random.

Furthermore, the mating process continually combines these strings in new ways, generating ever more sophisticated solutions. The kinds of problems that have yielded to the technique range from developing novel strategies in game theory to designing complex mechanical systems.

I saw no where in the article where the author claimed that he created a computer like Hal 9000. All he did was write an innovative code. He did not create a computer that has knowledge about reality and power to manipulate reality and the desire to manipulate reality.

[Eriku]

Alright spinnie... I want your take on language.

Our evolution and our cutting tools, fire to cook meat, etc, as well as our upright position enabled us to manipulate air into a vast repertoire of sounds... Now I assume you don't think that language came about thanks to linguistic committees, it was just a bundle of phonemes which we slowly managed to attach meanings to and over time an unconscious concordance was acquired.

How could this happen, unthinking engineering into the richness of morphology, syntax, grammar and our ability to unify as a species?

To me it's evidence of the analogous evolutionary process at work in the memetic world.

[spinoza99]

Natural Selection can only delete a defective being, it can't do the required coordination and engineering needed for complex design. It's like in the free market. The free market enables faulty products by the maxim: you produce a bad project you go out of business, but it is human ingenuity that creates the products. To design the proteins the body needs you need to beat odds greater than one in 10^150, roughly speaking.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Natural Selection can only delete a defective being, it can't do the required coordination and engineering needed for complex design. It's like in the free market. The free market enables faulty products by the maxim: you produce a bad project you go out of business, but it is human ingenuity that creates the products. To design the proteins the body needs you need to beat odds greater than one in 10^150, roughly speaking.

You say that, but you can't prove it.

Anyway, you don't have time to discuss this, you have DEFECATION to answer to. Yep, that shit again.

[spinoza99]

Alright spinnie... I want your take on language.

Our evolution and our cutting tools, fire to cook meat, etc, as well as our upright position enabled us to manipulate air into a vast repertoire of sounds... Now I assume you don't think that language came about thanks to linguistic committees, it was just a bundle of phonemes which we slowly managed to attach meanings to and over time an unconscious concordance was acquired.

How could this happen, unthinking engineering into the richness of morphology, syntax, grammar and our ability to unify as a species?

To me it's evidence of the analogous evolutionary process at work in the memetic world.

I'm glad you bring this up. The number of correct sentences a human can utter are roughly infinite, as well as the number of uncorrect sentences. You can't program a computer to speak language because you have to program every input and output. If the human brain is just an input/output device then there isn't code large enough to write the code needed for language since the number of outputs are over a googolplex. The human brain is not an input/output device. You need a mind which knows which neurons to fire and has the power to command those neurons to fire.

Natural Selection can't construct language because one, species can get by without language, (natural selection only deletes that which is defective, it does not delete that which is mediocre), two, natural selection does not even know what language is.

[spinoza99]

Gawdzilla, I have to confess that yours is the best avatar I've ever seen.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Proving God by proving Mind
The Mind/Body Problem
The Problem of Coordination

Proper response.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Gawdzilla, I have to confess that yours is the best avatar I've ever seen.

Meh, I have done better.

[klr]

Gawdzilla, I have to confess that yours is the best avatar I've ever seen.

Does it prove the existence of a higher being?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Gawdzilla, I have to confess that yours is the best avatar I've ever seen.

Does it prove the existence of a higher being?

The guy who made it was high. I know him.

[FBM]

definition of mind: an immaterial force...The dualist position, which is the one I support, is that there exists a mind that can compel a limited number of bodies to obey its will.

Sorry, but physics has catalogued the natural forces available to human knowledge. If you want to posit mind as some sort of transcendental, conscious 'force' outside those known to science, you've got your work cut out for you. The process of human-scale consciousness is perfectly explicable within the domain of electromagnetism. This "immaterial force" is simply redundant.

Redundant until you find some evidence for it that can't be more efficiently explained by the existing model. If you could find something like that, then your dualistic notions would still have to compete with other explanations, i.e. ones that are based on observation rather than hopeful speculation.



(Too late to edit that post, so I just had to quote myself. I feel kinda dirty. )

[Eriku]

Alright spinnie... I want your take on language.

Our evolution and our cutting tools, fire to cook meat, etc, as well as our upright position enabled us to manipulate air into a vast repertoire of sounds... Now I assume you don't think that language came about thanks to linguistic committees, it was just a bundle of phonemes which we slowly managed to attach meanings to and over time an unconscious concordance was acquired.

How could this happen, unthinking engineering into the richness of morphology, syntax, grammar and our ability to unify as a species?

To me it's evidence of the analogous evolutionary process at work in the memetic world.

I'm glad you bring this up. The number of correct sentences a human can utter are roughly infinite, as well as the number of uncorrect sentences. You can't program a computer to speak language because you have to program every input and output. If the human brain is just an input/output device then there isn't code large enough to write the code needed for language since the number of outputs are over a googolplex. The human brain is not an input/output device. You need a mind which knows which neurons to fire and has the power to command those neurons to fire.

Natural Selection can't construct language because one, species can get by without language, (natural selection only deletes that which is defective, it does not delete that which is mediocre), two, natural selection does not even know what language is.

Just because we've evolved a large enough brain to actually stop and consider several factors, memory, intent, what have you, doesn't mean it's divinely granted. Our consciousness is probably an illusion. People object to this, but we're routinely fooled by our own senses. I recently read a paper talking about people's perceptions, and they asked some (American) football players to kick a ball between the two post, but before and after they were to give their own estimations of the distance between the posts. Those who managed a low conversion rate were fooled by their brains to think that the posts had a smaller gap than those who'd done better.

We often get things wrong in a lot of ways, it's just that our thought patterns have served us well in other respects. I wouldn't trust concepts like irreducible complexity merely because the grandiose claims of evolution is counter-intuitive. A lot of things in science that IDers and others wouldn't refute are even more counter-intuitive, and yet explains things elegantly.

We live in a big fat magical seemingly paradoxical universe. Get over your own estimation of your senses and intuitions and acknowledge that every time the religious point to a darkened room hypothesising what may be in the dark, science has come along and provided far better explanations which also benefit other darkened rooms. There's no shortage of gaps in our knowledge, but they don't prove the theistic position likely.

[Rob]

I don't understand... are you trying to claim that life cannot arise form non-life? Is that your position?