AristotlesAdvance

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  1. If getting at the truth of a something were the most important thing to me, why would I waste time on an Objectivist message board? My goal is strictly altruistic. I'm merely trying to save a few seriously lost and benighted souls. Isn't that nice of me?
  2. Our lack of knowledge of particular causes does not entail "indeterminacy It's the other way around. Built-in metaphysical indeterminacy entails our necessary lack of knowledge. As I have said before, probability is subjective (epistemological), not objective (metaphysical). Nope. Rand was wrong. You are wrong. Indeterminacy -- I prefer Popper's term, "propensity" -- is metaphysical. After a specific event, such as abiogenesis, has occurred , Surely we can't just assume at the outset the very thing we intend to prove! Isn't that called "begging the question"? This is the case with coin tosses. And my previous post dealt with that. I'll explain it again, though I warn you: I may have to use words of more than 2 syllables. You are saying that BEFORE the coin toss, we get to say "there's a 50/50 chance of the coin's landing heads or tails". Presumably because we don't know what causes will appear to determine the actual outcome. But AFTER the toss, when the coin has actually landed, e.g., heads, we can change that statement and say "It wasn't 50/50 after all; the "heads" was pre-ordained to land that way with a probability of 100%." And, by your lights, we'd say the same thing had the coin landed "tails." So if we already know that the result of a single toss must be either heads or tails, and if we already know that any result must have occurred with complete deterministic certainty of 100%, instead of the current way of describing the situation, which is something like "the probability of a coin landing heads or tails is 50/50, Smithian mathematics would change the expression to something like "the probability of a coin landing heads or tails is 50/50, but the result is 100% / 100%. Once it actually lands one way or the other, we know that it MUST have landed that way because of a network of forces -- the knowledge of which is irrelevant. As I have said before, probability is subjective (epistemological), Yes, you certainly have (though Rand, you know, claimed that epistemology was objective, not subjective, but I'll put this down merely to a forgivable senior moment on your part). So, the original 50/50 appraisal made BEFORE the toss was, by your lights, a little bit of epistemological subjectivism, which then, upon reflecting on the matter, becomes an objective certainty of 100% AFTER the toss, when we actually have either heads or tails. You enjoy living in alternative universes and posing hypotheticals, right? Good. Suppose, instead of simply blowing off the causes for a coin's landing heads or tails on a given toss, we actually had knowledge of those causes BEFORE the toss and could predict the result (let's say "heads") with 100% certainty. Nothing wrong with that assumption: if, as you say, the coin HAD to land "heads" given the existence of certain causes, there's certainly nothing preventing us from discovering the relevant causes in principle. I understand your profound point, i.e., we NEED NOT know these causes to claim that the result was preordained to happen with 100% certainty. But suppose, like you, we had nothing to do except investigate subtle causes for small events like a coin toss. And further, let's assume that we have the technological means for discovering these causes. Also, let's take the human element out of it. Let's assume we have a machine that can toss a coin with precisely the same amount of force each time, in exactly the same position (straight upward). So, BEFORE a given toss, we discover a slight increase in air density a few inches above the tossing machine that we know MUST cause an object to bias toward "heads." We perform the toss, and -- completely as expected -- the coin lands "heads." 100% certainty for the outcome. We are about to perform a second toss, and this time we discover the dense pocket of air has disappeared and that, instead, there are some very subtle ground vibrations that we can say with complete confidence will slightly alter the machine's normal operation in such a way as to necessitate a result of "tails." We perform the toss and -- completely as expected -- the coin lands "tails". 100% certainty for the outcome. All you've done is to push the original 50/50 uncertainty that you'd normally assign to the outcome of a coin toss to the next set of causes: each coin toss was 100% determined by its particular cause, but the causes making the determination themselves only have a probability of 50/50. If you discover the 2nd order of causes which completely determine the outcome of the 1st order (i.e., those causes whose effects, 100% of the time, are either small, dense air pockets, or subtle ground vibrations), then you've pushed the 50/50 probability back another step to those 2nd order causes. Ad infinitum. To know -- or even to claim without knowing -- with 100% certainty the entire causal chain of any event will obviously require that you push this process back forever; either you have an infinite regress, or you arrive at some First Cause. Either way, it implies omniscience. It makes no difference if you discover and then objectively demonstrate what these 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order causes are, or if -- as in your typical procedure -- you merely assume things axiomatically. If a certain effect -- the actual result of a coin toss -- is discovered or assumed to be the 100% certain result of a set of causes in link 1, then we say "the effect -- heads or tails -- happens 100% of the time, given a 50/50 probability of either an air pocket appearing or subtle ground vibrations appearing" . . . we can't say which will actually make an appearance." Whether you actually discover or merely assume that the events in link 1 are completely determined by prior causes in link 2, then we can say "air pockets or ground vibrations happen with 100% certainty given a 50/50 probability of earlier causes -- e.g., certain weather conditions or certain plate tectonic conditions. Whether you actually discover or merely assume that the events in link 2 are completely determined by earlier causes in link 3, you can say "certain weather conditions or certain plate tectonic conditions occur with 100% certainty given a 50/50 chance of either solar flares occurring or slight magnetic changes to the Earth's nickel-iron core." So, the causal chain so far looks like this: A coin toss landed "heads." That result was 100% specified by the prior cause of a dense air pocket. The dense air pocket was 100% specified by the prior cause of a certain weather condition. The weather condition was 100% specified by the prior condition of a solar flare . . . . .. but the solar flare itself only had a 50% chance of occurring! The other 50% represents the alternative chance of the Earth's core affecting the Earth's tectonic plates; the planet's plate tectonics causing ground vibrations of a specific kind (100% certain), which vibrations will cause the coin tosser to yield a result of "tails" (100% certain). The probability is now "Given a 50/50 chance of either a solar flare occurring or a slight anomaly in the planet's magnetic core, either a "heads" will appear with 100% certainty or a tails will appear with 100% certainty. You've removed the uncertainty from the coin toss and "redistributed" it outward to a wider, and earlier, set of causes . . . whose probability is still 50/50. To get rid of that probability, you have to push things back to link 4, then link 5, etc. Whether you actually discover the causes by doing research, or only assume the causes axiomatically by mindlessly reciting mantras like "in a deterministic chain, the probability of every event is 100%" makes no difference: like brushing dust under a carpet, then moving it into a corner, then putting it into a dustpan, then finally throwing it into a plastic bag . . . you can move the 50/50 probability of a coin toss around to prior causes, but you can't get rid of it entirely without claiming knowledge -- even by means of axiomatic assumption -- of the entire causal chain. That claim -- even by means of axiomatic assumptions such as "In a deterministic chain, the probability of every event is 100%" -- is a claim to omniscience. Conversely, to get rid of the omniscience, you have to end the causal chain somewhere and admit that the link that comes before the one you're stopping at is uncertain. Actually, the only way to expunge the omniscience error is to assume that the probability is not a lack of knowledge but a fact of reality, i.e., probability and indeterminacy are metaphysical and objective, not epistemological and subjective. Regarding the previous example of a protein appearing by chance: If a 300-residue protein with a specific sequence of amino acids is calculated to have odds of 1 in 10^600, and if you show that each amino acid, each peptide bond, each optical isomer HAD to appear just where it did with 100% certainty due to certain forces acting on amino acids, then you've simply pushed the probability of "1 in 10^600" back a step to those causal forces: they only had a 1 in 10^600 chance of appearing (once they did, of course, the outcome -- the protein in question -- was 100% given). Etc.
  3. What on earth is the purpose of your questions here? Isn't that funny!!! I've been asking you the same question for the last few posts! I'll try a different a question: If you're OK with questioning the age of the universe as a whole -- merely as a hypothetical -- is it acceptable for you, or someone else, to question the age of something within the universe -- also as a hypothetical?
  4. All of the above are kinds of neural activities. This can be verified with MRI scans and PET scans. (I have had both done to me and I have "seen" my self think). Not quite. Neural activity correlates with thoughts. "Correlation" is not "identity." A whale swimming beneath the water causes the top of the water surface to form certain shapes: waves, vortices, etc. The waves and vortices correlate with the activity of the whale. But they are not the whale.
  5. and that when all the necessary and sufficient conditions are present, the probability of the outcome is 100 percent. The standard you've imposed of "All necessary and sufficient conditions", for a determinist, will, by necessity, result in an attempt at -- if not an outright claim of -- omniscience. That's easy enough to show. A coin toss has a probability distribution of 50/50 (50% heads, 50% tails). If you manage to discover "all necessary and sufficient conditions" that determine a heads or tails outcome with a probability of 100%, then you've merely pushed the indeterminacy back one step to the initial conditions. For example, if the "necessary and sufficient" causes of toss 1 ("heads") included the existence of a small air current causing the coin to land "heads", and the "necessary and sufficient" causes of toss 2 ("tails") included the existence of a small bit of skin oil on the tosser's fingers that affected the energy and spin of the toss so that the coin had to land "tails", then the problem is merely pushed back one step: for now you are merely saying that the probability distribution of small gusts of air appearing just at the right time and small bits of skin oil affecting a toss are themselves distributed in the world with a probability of 50/50. If you discover the deterministic causes of small gusts of wind (let's say certain weather conditions) and excess skin oil on one's fingers (let's say certain physiological changes that always occur at a certain time), then, although small gusts of wind and additional skin oil on one's fingers have been completely explained with 100% certainty, we have the same probability distribution of 50/50 applicable to those certain weather conditions and physiological changes. This is obviously an infinite regress, each prior set of initial conditions showing the original 50/50 uncertainty that we originally attributed to the coin toss itself. Therefore, to know "ALL necessary and sufficient conditions" so that probabilities disappear and every event can be predicted with 100% certainty, one needs to know all necessary and sufficient conditions for each link in the causal chain stretching back indefinitely. Sounds like a claim to omniscience to me. The fact that you didn't initially recognize it as such -- and, perhaps, didn't intend it -- doesn't change the fact of what it is. (Oh, and needless to say, everything I posted above about simple coin tosses applies just as much to other events that have probability distributions, such as the appearance of life.)
  6. The very fact that Dawkins acknowledges that some "cheating" is involved in this particular case indicates that he is not depending on it to make his entire case. He goes on to argue that evolution requires no such predetermined goal. Then for the sake of keeping his demonstrations relevant to the point he is trying to make -- sound pedagogy, after all -- he should run a computer simulation that's actually like the evolutionary process he wants us to believe in. Run a simulation without a target sequence, and without a "filter" selecting letters by the standard of the target sequence, and see how far you get. Dawkins already admitted how far he'd get: nowhere. His demonstration showed us that Darwinian processes work great in the presence of teleology: desired end-goals and a designed filter that accepts or rejects things according to the standard of the end-goal. No surprise there. He needs to demonstrate that intelligible end results can be achieved without teleology -- without building into the experiment what the desired end goal ought to be, and without specifying to a filter what things it ought to accept and reject. He demonstrated no such thing. He showed us a bunch of illustrations of eyes, simple and complex, and would somehow have us believe that in the absence of The Big Dawkins In The Sky instructing evolution to use As I have noted before, you have ruled out all controlled experiments in this area, including artificial simulations, because all such experiments are designed to some extent. Nah. I've only ruled out dishonest experiments -- or (to put in a positive light) I've ruled out engineering feats that masquerade as experiments. There are designed experiments that fairly permit the squirrel to attempt to cross the superhighway without helping him along at each step; if the critter manages to dodge traffic on its own and make it to the other side, then the experiment fairly demonstrates that "It can be done.". Conversely, if the critter gets squashed, then there's your answer: "it cannot be done." The point of an experiment is to try to establish the truth of the matter one way or the other. The Michaelson-Morley experiment is an example of that. Then there are designed experiments that unfairly do not permit the squirrel to attempt to cross the superhighway without helping him along at each step: the researchers from the start are highly doubtful that the critter will manage to dodge traffic, so they help it along across every lane of traffic, employing clever engineering artifice to do so. When the critter makes it to the other side, the most you can validly say is "In the presence of cleverly designed engineering artifice, a squirrel can happily cross a busy multi-lane superhighway." That's it. You cannot leave out the "cleverly designed engineering artifice" bit because it obviously affected the outcome of the experiment (it didn't merely "affect" the outcome of the experiment, but pretty much determined it). The researchers must certainly not say "Proven: squirrels can cross multi-lane superhighways without getting hit by a car." At best, it's a lie by omission. The truism that "all experiments are designed" doesn't mean the researcher gets to stage-manage events in a such a way so as to get the outcome he desires, and then claim his experiment was a success.
  7. LOL. Assume the roads are in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota in non-urban areas. ROFL!! Now try actually observing reality. If the superhighway that real researchers confront when trying to move their critters from one side to the other were like an empty one in North Dakota, why must they always resort to intelligently-designed artifices for every lane to help the critters to the other side? In reality, most natural forces are completely hostile to the formation of life. Even Francis Crick claimed that the gap between non-living chemicals and the simplest living organism was far greater than the gap between the simplest living organism and man. He understood that the superhighway that needed crossing was more like a 100-lane one with constantly moving, hi-speed traffic. Advice to Objectivists: try to stop fantasizing about alternate realities where all physical forces are good, benign ones, that push along non-living matter into complex living organisms. Doesn't happen. Though I expect very soon on this board to witness a resurgence of the old fallacy of spontaneous generation.
  8. 7 minutes in, Dawkins admits that the genetic algorithm for "Me Thinks It Is Like A Weasel" is cheating (and by "cheating" he means "employing DESIGN for the sake of arriving at a predetermined goal"). He calls it "looking into the future." Everyone else calls it "teleology" or "deciding on a goal" ("goals" are all in the future). Sure. Just identify what force, or what entity, in nature functions as the designed computer algorithm specifying the desired target sequence of "Methinks It Is Like A Weasel" and I'll be happy to grant that a Darwinian process of "blind search" -- plus the ability to REJECT those options that don't conform to the desired target sequence -- can lead to structures that appear to have been designed by intelligence, and do it in a relatively short amount of time. Ain't teleology wonderful? Since Dawkins already admitted that his program is an instance of cheating -- employing a predetermined goal, and a program that would know which letters to retain in furtherance of the goal, and which letters to reject -- it is obviously irrelevant for abiogenesis, in which we know that the universe does not give chemicals a predetermined goal to move toward. Dawkins is simply a bit sneakier than Sagan, who (most charmingly) simply waves his hand and blows off the whole problem of creating life from scratch. Dawkins first shows a computer program that might appear to the uninitiated that random choices can lead to complex and intelligible results (and it isn't until the end of the demo that he admits, coyly, that he's cheating by implanting the future goal -- the target phrase, plus the program -- toward which everything has been preordained to move), and then blows off the major problems in evolving a functional eye. He's hoping that his audience -- especially naive materialists and gullible types like you -- will unconsciously assume that if the "random" computer program that Dawkins has falsely claimed is "Darwinian" can arrive at a structure like a phrase from Shakespeare, then the same "Darwinian" process in nature can just as easily arrive a complex structure like a functioning eye. The truth is that the bottom row of numbers on his monitor -- the one labeled "Random" -- is much closer to a true Darwinian process of random mutation. The middle row -- the one he labeled "Darwin" -- is supposed to be his version of "Natural Selection", but you can see immediately (and, again, Dawkins admits at 7 minutes) that such "selection" only works if it has an idea of what its goal is supposed to be. How did the middle row know what goal to move toward in selecting random numbers from the bottom row? Dawkins supplied it. Like all such examples, it is always the experimenter who provides the predetermined goal toward which the model is desired to move. It's just pure stolen concept and intellectual dishonesty. I'm not surprised you're impressed by it.
  9. No, Chatzaf, I was unaware that arguments regarding scientific theories are decided "true" or "untrue" in courts of law. When did that trend start? Part of your malfunction is that you spend zero time reading primary sources with which you suspect you already disagree on an ideological level, and too much time reading trashy secondary sources like "The New Yorker." Too busy? Or too afraid that you simply have no rational replies to a number of thorny problems in origins-of-life research that cannot be solved by invoking mathematical miracles?
  10. The "chances" that things with a certain identity will function in a certain way under certain conditions are 100%. Sure. If only we were omniscient. So let's see: One presumed Objectivist claims life would definitely arise from abiogenesis if only there were infinite time. Now another presumed Objectivist claims we would see the truth of the above statement if only we had infinite knowledge of all possible conditions necessary for it to arise by means of abiogenesis. The first is wishful thinking, similar to "if pigs had wings"; the second is naive determinism. If you throw a few relevant elements in a test-tube setup and mix water and heat, you start getting building blocks of life. That was established in the 1950s. Google the Stanley Miller experiment. As I posted earlier, the geochemists refuted the conclusions of the Urey-Miller experiment in the 1950s quite soon after the results were published, which is why this experiment carries no weight today in origins-of-life research. The sort of "reducing atmosphere" that Miller assumed existed in the early atmosphere, in fact, never existed. When Miller repeated his experiments using the sorts of gases that geochemists were certain comprised the early atmosphere, the results of the experiment were nil: instead of getting amino acids, he got sludge. Moreover, even if you had a pond full of pre-existing amino acids, and found some clever way to make them aggregate together into chains (normally, that is done by the ribosome in the cell), you still have the probability problem I've broached earlier: standard length for a protein that actually functions and does something critical for a living organism is about 300 amino acids, and those amino acids have to be in a certain order on the chain; like letters in a word, a random order won't do. Additionally, the bond between one amino acid and the next must be a peptide bond, and each amino acid must be of the left-handed variety. We've already seen that the odds of any specific functional combination of those variables occurring is 1 in about 10^600. I can tell that you still don't get it. The problem in abiogenesis is not one of chemicals. The problem is not "how can we account for the existence of amino acids?" The problem is: given the existence of amino acids, how did they happen to form just those specific sequences that form functional useful proteins? How did those amino acids manage to circumvent the far greater number of useless combinations? Biochemist Michael Behe has an amusing chapter in his first book "Darwin's Black Box," titled, I think, "Road Kill" which illustrates the typical methodology of origin-of-life experimenters. His analogy, IIRC, went something like this: Imagine a busy 8-lane superhighway. Imagine a squirrel on one side of the highway whom researchers "tag" for the purpose of determining if this squirrel can manage to get from one side of the highway to the other (without, of course, getting squashed by an oncoming car). We assume the superhighway is busy at all times of day and night. Now, the way most origin-of-life researchers go about their experiments would be similar to the squirrel researchers doing the following: To prevent the squirrel from "aggregating" against an oncoming car (i.e., getting flattened) in the first lane, they put in a special inclined ramp the cars would travel on for a few yards before ramping back down to the highway; this permits the squirrel to crawl under the ramp as the cars "loop" over him, allowing it to get to the second lane. At this point, the squirrel researchers are greatly encouraged, because this seems to prove that "under certain conditions, it IS POSSIBLE for a squirrel to get to the second lane intact." Yeah . . . but only because the researchers circumvented the actually existing forces present in the given environment that obviously would have prevented the desired outcome. The researchers then notice a problem: in trying to get the squirrel from lane 2 to lane 3, the poor squirrel had a tendency to stay put out of abject but understandable FEAR of getting flattened under a tire of a car moving at 70 mph. Hmmmmm. They hadn't thought of that. So they had a helicopter come in and drop down some heavy concrete dividers that forced all oncoming traffic in lane 2 into lanes 1 and 4. Aha!!! What joy!! They noticed that when they did this, the squirrel "effortlessly" crossed lane 2. They immediately sent out a press release: Under "certain conditions" we have found that after "successfully negotiating" the route across lane 1, the test subject was able to move with little difficulty across lane 2. This undeniable fact proves that "it can be done." For each lane, the researchers exercise their wonderful ingenuity in solving the following problem: how do we get the squirrel across the next succeeding lane without his getting squashed by oncoming cars? They were especially proud of this one: To cross lane lane 4 to lane 5 -- which was on the other side of a concrete divider -- they "repurposed" the helicopter that had been brought in earlier: they cleverly attached a harness to the squirrel and had the helicopter lift the critter up, across lane 4; in fact, they discovered that they could drop him right onto lane 7, thus greatly "amplifying and accelerating the process" of getting the squirrel from one side to the other. News was spreading quickly of their success. They finally managed to get the critter completely over to the other side by setting up a wooden pole at the border of lane 8 and tying a long string to the top. They then "tethered" the squirrel to the string and had him swing past lane 8, Tarzan-like. Admittedly, they did have another researcher waiting on the other side, ready to catch the squirrel and untether him -- a decision that the researchers fear will be interpreted by those nasty, nasty, creationists and ID people as "making use of design within the experiment" but which the researchers are quite sure will not be taken seriously by anyone outside of the Squirrel Research lobby in academia. For the conclusion of the experiment is now writ large: Even the most cynical skeptic will have to admit that it is possible for a squirrel to cross a busy 8-lane superhighway without getting hit by oncoming cars. In fact, "given the right conditions," it is a virtual certainty. When the critics point out that design was not merely employed in the final step, but at practically EVERY step, by means of circumventing the normal lethal forces that would be arrayed against the creature's crossing the highway through the use of clever artifice -- i.e., design -- and, moreover, that in the absence of such artifice, it is ALWAYS the case that squirrels get squashed by cars when attempting to cross always-busy 8-lane superhighways, the researchers pretend that they have no idea what the critics are talking about -- "What do you mean? We just showed that UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS not only can a squirrel cross an 8-lane busy superhighway but that it is quite easy for it to do so, and that its chances of doing so -- UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS -- are practically 100%. After all, a famous Objectivist wrote that The "chances" that things with a certain identity will function in a certain way under certain conditions are 100%. Isn't it part of the squirrel's identity to scamper? And another Objectivist -- this one not so famous -- wrote something like "the critics are as dense as osmium, for ALL experiments employ design." Sure. But valid experiments do not employ design for the purpose of excluding precisely those influences, forces, and conditions that would normally undercut the desired outcome, in the absence of the intelligent intervention of the experimenters. Michaelson did not design his experiment in such a way that he could "help things along" until he got a desired interference pattern from the "lumineferous aether." He set up his experiment in such a way that a negative result -- failure to find a pattern indicating an aether wind -- would be considered a valid and fair outcome. (He was so shocked by the outcome of his first experiment, that I believe he even repeated it, with better, more expensive, and more sensitive equipment -- and it still came out negative. When that happened, he didn't claim that "more research needs to be done to establish the existence of an aether wind." He realized that science had to abandon the idea of an aether). Szostak's experiment does zero to establish the existence of a putative "RNA World" creating both proteins and DNA in one fell swoop. He and his team performed an designed engineering feat, and then mistakenly (or dishonestly) imputed that ability to nature itself. Without the intervention of Szostak, et al., even synthesized RNA becomes roadkill -- nature kills it. The normal result of a squirrel trying to cross a very busy 8-lane superhighway is a flattened squirrel. The normal result of Szostak's RNA experiment is warm ponds of cross-linked, precipitated, stringy, useless RNA. (And RNA also has to be synthesized; it isn't found in nature.) If the squirrel researchers wish to make claims about the high probability of a squirrel crossing an 8-lane superhighway, they ALSO must show that, left to its own devices, unaided by intelligent researchers, the squirrel itself, or nature itself, would provide something very similar to up-and-down ramps for the squirrel to get past lane 1, cement roadblocks to get past lane 2, helicopters, harnesses, wooden poles, sturdy rope, and a solid steel screw eye to attach the rope to. Szostak, et al. have to do the same in their research. For without those intelligent interventions by the researchers themselves, both squirrel and RNA will be nothing but roadkill.
  11. You don't seem to understand that your theory has not been presented as a falsifiable proposition, which makes it self-invalidating. That's because it isn't a theory. I'm stating simple matters of physical fact and performing a 7th-grade math calculation in probability on that basis of those facts. I'm not theorizing about anything. You've committed a simple category error. Anyway, Karl Popper -- the originator of the idea that a true scientific theory differentiates itself from other sorts of discourse (such as religious doctrine, psychological analysis, aesthetic opinions, etc.) by being falsifiable -- was careful to make clear to his readers that this does not mean that STATEMENTS in the non-sciences (religion, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, etc.) that might not be amenable to falsifiability are not, by virtue of that fact, necessarily false. The issue for Popper was not "true statements vs. false statements" in which the former is coextensive with science; the issue for him was the so-called "demarcation problem": i.e., how to differentiate "science" from "all other branches of knowledge." He wasn't claiming that any non-falsifiable statement in the latter had to be false.
  12. Given sufficient time, do you think abiogenesis would be possible? Given enough time, do you think that lots of monkeys typing randomly on lots of laptops could manage to create "Atlas Shrugged"?
  13. Imo MSK meant to say: Maybe 'matter' "always was", which would mean that the universe was not created ex nihilo. Thinking of matter as eternal does not automatically imply that one has to assume a "steady state" universe. The accepted Standard Model of the Big Bang theory is that the original "singularity" that birthed all matter -- the sum total of all matter in the universe, compressed to a mathematical point -- itself arose ex nihilo. To claim that "matter always was" is to accept something other than the Standard Model -- perhaps an "oscillating universe" model. This, however, is simply one particular version of Steady State. This doesn't answer my original question. Is MSK asking this out of ennui? Or is he simply maintaining a kind of healthy intellectual skepticism over certain claims by scientists? My question has to do with the motive of his question, and not with any particular nuance in its meaning. There is no contradicton. For when I speculate about something: "Can it be that possibility X exists?" it implies that I don't know. It also implies skepticism toward those who do claim to know. For if I knew, there would be no need to speculate anymore. Outside of mathematics, we rarely, if ever, conclude things and act on the basis of 100% certainty. If the best science today is quite certain -- not 100% certain, but so what? --- that the entire mass of the universe was, at some time in the past, compressed into a point, and that this point itself arose ex nihilo -- what would be the motive for doubting this? 1. A desire to "keep an open mind" about things for the sake of keeping an open mind? or 2. A "healthy skepticism" toward confident claims by scientists?
  14. Since you asserted the truth of a statement ("Mind is not an emergent property of matter"), the burden of proof falls on you. No it doesn't. I merely denied what others have asserted as true without evidence. If you assert "John F. Kennedy was assassinated by agents of the Federal Reserve because of his desire to reintroduce hard money into the economy" and I reply "Not so", I am not the one tasked with the burden of proof; you are. If you claim "Matter has an independent existence prior to mind, and mind emerges from matter as one its properties" and I reply, "Not so," again the burden of proof is not my responsibility but yours. Matter can exist without mind, as in a stone. Is that a fact? First ask: in what sense is the stone said to exist in the presence of mind; then ask, what remains of the stone when you remove mind completely from consideration. You'll find there's no stone. what can be observed is that mind cannot exist without a material substance How does one observe the non-existence of something? The fact is this: we observe that minds associate with brains. That's our common experience. There is no way to move from that fact of experience to the conclusion, "Ergo, minds cannot exist without brains." It's simply an invalid conclusion. So what IS mind then in your opinion? What IS matter? We don't know. We can say, of course, that one cannot be reduced to the other, and that if we try to do so, we run into philosophical difficulty. For example, to claim that mind is a product of matter is to deny the complete detachment from material forces of mind and its products -- e.g., statements and theories. If statements and theories are therefore, indirectly, "emergent properties" of matter, then that rather knocks our beloved notion of Objective Truth into the proverbial cocked hat. "My material substrate" causes my mind to accept something as true; "your material substrate" causes your mind to accept as true the contradiction of what I believe. If mind simply emerges from matter, then two contradictory statements can both be "true": one truth emerged from the material substrate of your brain; the other truth emerged from mine. Obviously, there's no way to establish which truth is "really true." The concept of the "really true" requires that the thing arriving at the truth, or grasping the truth -- the mind -- be independent from any causal influence of material nature. If it's independent from ANY causal influence of material nature, it follows that it cannot be an "emergent property" of matter. "Properties" flow from a thing's identity, which includes the sorts of effects the thing can have on other things. Products of mind -- statements, hypotheses, theories, imaginings, etc. -- are not effects of the physical properties of brain tissue.
  15. Am I willing to ask this question about the universe as a whole? Yup. Then you are willing ask if the universe has been around for an infinite amount of time, despite the fact that it was been definitely established to be no more than about 12 billion years old, and having had a definite beginning? Do you have any reasons for asking this question at all? Is it a matter of "keeping an open mind"? Healthy skepticism? Regarding common sense: It's a necessary though not sufficient cognitive tool and guide to action, especially in philosophy, and far more reliable than rereading "Introduction Objectivist Epistemology." Rand herself was a great admirer of common sense. So was Aristotle. You are not? Actually, you did not read very carefully. I basically said, "I don't know." You have a short memory. This is what you said: Why can't there just be an "always was/is/will be"? Doesn't sound like an "I don't know" to me.
  16. Oh believe me, I’ve been calm the whole time. You confuse brain death with calmness. Understandable.
  17. If it is, then all this business about the Big Bang, insufficient time, and statistical probability is little more than an intellectual shit-storm that obscures a more fundamental argument. Take a stress pill, man. You gotta calm out. I've said nothing about irreducible complexity. The discussion, to date, has centered on the following ideas only: The impossibility of constructing a meaningful sequence of 300 characters by Chance alone (in this case, amino acids that form a functional protein, though the argument is just as valid for strings of letters that form meaningful sentences in English) given the physical constraints of the universe as it actually exists (the physical constraints providing the total probabilistic resources that we have to take into consideration when deciding whether something is probable or not -- "probabilistic resources" answers the question "Probable? By what standard?" ): i.e., no more than about 10^80 fundamental particles; no event occurring over a time period smaller than 1/10^45th of a second (Planck Time); and no event taking longer than our best estimate of the age of the universe, i.e., 12 billion years. Interesting that you hypothesize infinite time instead of 12 billion years. Had you been really clever, you could have, instead, hypothesized an infinite number of fundamental particles instead of only 10^80; or assumed that physical events can occur over an infinitely small time period, instead being constrained to 1/10^45 second. I think Objectivists are simply aesthetically attracted to the idea of a Steady State universe. Must be a religious thing.
  18. When you encounter terms like "suppose" and "for the sake of argument," you are probably dealing with a hypothetical question. You mean, let's pretend that the universe is other than it is? Rand frowns.
  19. Bold statment. Seems pretty clear that it is. What evidence do you have for this?
  20. Why can't there just be an "always was/is/will be"? Are you willing to apply that to the universe as a whole? Besides, the idea of a First Cause separates it from the rest of reality as a distinct form of existence--a different reality, so to speak Surely it's the exact opposite! The reality I live in has a chain of causes and effects, each cause preceding its effect. It's simply common sense to arrive at a First Cause, a starting point. It's the "always was, always will be" that exists in a different reality. And it's so easy to ask where the First Cause came from that it's almost painful to ask. But you've already granted the idea of "always was". If you apply it to a First Cause, you won't need to inquire "where" it came from. It's the First Cause that "always was."
  21. The mind is the physical effect of physical causes. All that exists is matter/energy in space/time. Ba'al Chatzaf The mind is the physical effect of physical causes. All that exists is matter/energy in space/time. That conclusion of your mind is merely the physical effect of your brain's physical causes. My brain's physical causes are different and cause my mind to arrive at a different conclusion. Isn't naive materialism sweet? You can say "bye-bye" to any notion of objective truth.
  22. Pssssssssssst. Hey, 9th Doc. Come here, I wanna tell ya something . . . I'm not the kind of guy to rub it in and say "I told you so", but remember when I posted this: (Which explains why many Objectivists, when they understand this, feel the need to drop the Big Bang model and adopt a Steady State one. They feel that this gives them almost infinite time for the "random walk" necessary to create a living thing ex nihilo. ) And you got all rattled and uppity, and when you calmed down a bit you replied with this: Name a writer who has expressed a preference for a steady state cosmological model on the grounds that evolution needs more than the billions of years available to do it’s thing, to produce beings capable of discussing the issue . . . I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even one . . . Well look what I just found: "Lastly, I have a question for you. Suppose that time was not a factor here. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Big Bang theory is wrong and that we are dealing with infinite time in which abiogenesis, by your own calculations, would be statistically possible. " (posted by George H. Smith) Suppose, indeed! I told ya so.
  23. I will respond as soon as I have reasonable assurance that I am not dealing with some 13-year-old kid who knows how to google, copy, and paste. The issue is not one of merely knowing how to google, copy, and paste; the issue is one of having enough confidence in one's own knowledge of a subject to know what to google, copy, and paste. Providing your real name is a matter of common courtesy. If we were discussing this matter face-to-face, would you put a bag over your head and refuse to give your name? If you did this, I wouldn't talk to you. You're unable to respond to my arguments without knowing my real name? Interesting. Have you tried a slightly a different strategy -- like maybe just addressing the arguments? Anyway, I see that I can't put anything over on you -- you're too perceptive. So, I admit it. You're right. My real name (believe it or not) is actually NOT Aristotle Economides. It's Aristotle Cohen. (Just like "Alyssa Rosenbaum," I changed it a bit so that I wouldn't appear too Jewish.) Feel free to post any sort of relevant response to my last post on Darwinism; even a copy/paste from an article you've googled.
  24. But what we call "mind" IS tied to some material substrate. "Tied"? I doubt it. They complement each other and are always found together, but "mind" is not an emergent property of matter. Imo claiming that there exists mind without a material substrate is as fallacious as claiming that values can exist "out there" without a valuer. And as absurd as speaking of "one who values" without also positing the existence of "values"; or of a "lover" without a "beloved." It's also fallacious to claim that "material substrates" exist apart from "perceiving and cognizing minds."
  25. The Order and Design we see in Nature is what we project. Nature makes the dots. We humans draw the lines connecting them. That's certainly the materialist's credo, I grant you that. Anyway, Kant would be very happy to hear you say this.