This is a follow up to my previous OP Is Cosmic Consciousness responsible for reality?
There seems to be some confusion regarding the causes of collapse of wave function(which seems to creates reality) whether a conscious observer can collapse the wave function ONLY or can a designed robot/computer perform the same role. Instead of pointing out the facts, I’d like “the seekers of truth” to do it for themselves. Since apparently ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’, I attach 2 videos that cover 2 breakthrough experiments in the understanding of well known double-slit experiment and the implications of collapse of wave function by an observer on the nature of reality…
Things to watch for in the second video: At 13 min and 15 min mark the experiment identifies the difference between robot/Linux systems and humans’ effect on the double-slit experiment. At 32 min mark we can see the implications of the experiments on reductive materialism and materialistic philosophy as well as why the obvious change is necessary that resisted by the scientific community…
Things to watch for in the first video: At 2:30 min mark it is explained what exactly causes the collapse of wave function. Does an act of observing alone cause the collapse of wave function? Or rather, does the knowledge of which path determined by a conscious observer or knower do that?
The last part of the second video talks about implications of the experiment that are so mind boggling that I’m going to leave them out for another OP. For those who have curious minds, please pay a close attention to “behavior” of 2 entangled particles which either involves their knowledge of the future or we fully do not understand the concept of time…
NASA have done quite a lot of work regarding the origin of life and the genetic code. For example: https://nai.nasa.gov/seminars/archived-seminars/origin-of-life-seminar-series/2012/3/6/the-physics-and-chemistry-behind-origins/
It’s a series:
https://nai.nasa.gov/seminars/archived-seminars/origin-of-life-seminar-series/
There are literally 100’s I could link to. Is there a single thing you could link to that supports your claim that “design” is a superior explanation for the genetic code?
You not linking to anything even remotely at the level of detail of the talk I’ve linked to will be the answer to that I suppose. And NASA have many others.
I’m willing to give this “superior explanation” if you are willing to explain where it can be found!
Corneel,
I am not asking for detail just what caused the change. Without cause you don’t have a theory. We now know a new animal family requires more then a few bits of new DNA. The only viable explanation is design for any quantity of new code to occur. Blind and unguided cannot generate more then a few bits of new code; it will most likely destroy it.
Have you read gpuccio’s last post at UD?
OMagain,
What is your explanation for the cause of new code?
Do you think that I am the first to claim that design is the best explanation of the genetic code?
A cause that that you yourself cannot supply from your “superior” explanation!
Then what is the cause behind design? God? Aliens? Invisible pink unicorns? Uri Geller?
You don’t get to use “we” when you are in the fringe. Any and all research you might link to as support for this claim simply won’t say what you hope it will say.
If it needs more then a few bits of new DNA, then how many new bits and how do those new bits come about? If you cannot answer this then in what sense is “design” a superior explanation?
That’s an “explanation” in the same way that Santa Claus is an “explanation” for how there are presents under the tree.
It’s funny how IDCists depend on this as the crux of their argument but whisper it in an aside, hoping it won’t be questioned.
Why don’t you demonstrate the gradual destruction of code then? What can you point to illustrate that? Perhaps you could take something with a fast generation time, such as bacteria, and watch it evolve over time, taking samples to sequence as you go.
If there was such an effect, it would be noticed right? How would you design an experement to demonstrate your claim colewd? And as you can’t actually point to where this is happening why do you believe it in the first place at all?
Odd, very odd…
Take a guess.
Nice deflection. What’s that got to do with anything? You can either support this claim of “superior” or stop making it, right?
If design is the best explanation, what is that explanation? Did the designer design it on earth like an alien would have, or was it built into the universe at creation itself by a deity? That’s kind of the most basic simple question we could start with, right? If design is a “superior” explanation then it has to actually explain something at some point, right?
Have you ever heard the idea that the more something explains, the less use it is?
The origin of life? Design
The origin of the genetic code? Design
The origin of flight? Design
The origin of lungs? Design
Design “explains” things the same way Santa is keeping track of the naughty and nice. I.E. neither thing is actually happening.
You might well say that you could replace “design” with “blind and unguided” but and we’d be equal. But, as demonstrated by your choice to deflect rather then simply support your claim of “superior”, you know that I can replace “blind and unguided” to actual scientific research and support for the claim that the origin of biological life did not require design. Plausible pathways will have to suffice, for the reality based community as it’s unlikely we’ll ever know the exact origin.
But you’ve already decided, atoms are designed, right?
Did the changes required for the bacteria to successfully traverse the plate in the video you were linked to require “new code” or not?
A simple question.
OMagain,
The evidence is that major transitions take millions of bits. The bit change is most likely from a design change.
No, it is an explanation like present wrapping and delivery.
It will say exactly what I want it to say. The only known source of functional information is a mind.
All over the current pub med publications. CANCER.
Simple. Disable the DNA repair mechanism from a bacterial population and see how quickly and repeatably it dies.
OMagain,
No, were not equal. Design explains new functional information where blind and unguided does not.
Why, I use the analogy from design, of course. As a rule, we do not produce watches with five clock-hands, only to remove three of them later. We do not build cars with six wheels, only to remove two of them later. It’s just not efficient to build stuff that way.
I am pretty sure that’s incorrect, but just show me the five digits of an avian forelimb to prove me wrong.
The introduction and fixing of novel genetic variants caused it. Mutation, selection, drift. This you know already. Why pretend evolution has no known causes?
Corneel,
DNA or information change does have a known cause: Intelligence and or consciousness. Without the addition of significant amounts of genetic information you cannot explain diversity.
Your attempt at explaining this with selected random changes is duly noted but I think you might be mistaken:-).
Hunh. Just like you’ve been saying!!!
Writ here
Remind you of anyone?
Although it’s very charitable to characterize ID as having an argument.
Glen Davidson
Billy Bob, Billy Bot, beep bop…
I think the time came for you to take your “polarized glasses” off, Glen. I’m not sure you want to though. I’m just trying to help you, Glen.
Seems empirical to me. Let’ catalog it.
Thanks Glen! You never fail my predictions…
Depends on the ability of the designer.
HE must be into something…
Fortunately geneticists have known for almost 70 years a natural process which adds significant amounts to new genetic information to a genome.
IDiot science hasn’t quite made it to the 20th century yet. 🙂
There is a difference between what you want to believe and what the evidence is…
Do you have a preference?
You wouldn’t know actual evidence if it hit you in the belly.
Moved a post to guano.
Moved a post to guano, in fulfillment of my obligations.
Moved several more to guano.
You forgot the most important obligation.. You can’t possibly guess, can you?
GlenDavidson,
Don’t let JTard get under your skin, Glen, not worth it.
Well he’s not really, but one can’t just let rule-breaking lying vicious attacks always pass, either.
God knows the moderators haven’t bothered holding J-Mac to the rules, or most of his comments would be in Guano.
Glen Davidson
That is of course your choice, but your claim that evolutionary theory lacks a causal mechanism is baseless. Also, the fact remains that certain aspects of avian wing development betray its ancestral (five digit) condition. Not a big deal to anyone who accepts common descent of birds and other tetrapods (you are still uncomfortable with it, I note). Of course, as an IDer you’d need to accept that the Designer is not very keen on rewriting developmental programs, but prefers to dump new information on top of existing code.
Hey, the Designer really is like a human software developer 🙂
And since we thoroughly derailed J-Macs thread already (sorry J-Mac), how exactly did you envisage that new animal families originate? Not by recurring splitting of lineages?
This one? How is it relevant?
No it wouldn’t be Richard Owen’s vertebrate archetype. Owen actually made a drawing of what he considered to be the archetype, Goethe’s archetype could never be demonstrated in this fashion.
And Darwin equated the archetype with a progenitor from which specialised forms were derived. In chapter thirteen of The Origin, Darwin wrote:
This is not the archetype understood by Goethe.
In Form and Cause in Goethe’s Morphology, Ronald H. Brady goes into detail to explain the contrast between what Goethe meant by “archetype” and what Owen and Darwin meant by it.
As he said, “Goethe used other criteria.”
He quotes Goethe:
Do me a favour and produce for yourself a mental picture of a rose. Is it similar to the image displayed below? Well Goethe’s mental picture of a rose was much more full and closer to reality than this image because it included the processes from seed to seed and everything in between, the growth and decay, the expansions and contractions, the transformations. To approach Goethe’s archetype this is how we must proceed.
By chopping it off at the stem we bring on the death of the rose flower. And by imagining a static image of a rose to be an actual rose we kill our conscious processes that allows us to see the reality of the plant. We move from static, dead thinking to living thinking which is a higher form of consciousness.
One problem is that you really don’t understand “cause” in science. Cause is detailed. More to the point, it’s specific. It is not general, like you make it out to be.
That’s why you don’t have a cause, “intelligence” may theoretically be capable of changing dinosaurs into chickens. But science (or courts, for that matter) cares about specific causes. Do you have a cause that can account for dinosaurs turning chicken? No, you don’t. You don’t even have any candidates for such an intelligence. You have no cause. It doesn’t matter if somewhere there could be an intelligence able to make a chicken, we need an intelligence that existed at the time and that would do such things. And there is nothing of that sort known at all known at that time and place (you give it a total pass, however, because you believe in an omnipotent God).
We, of course, do have specific causes, mutations and their positive and negative selection, along with (at the time) neutral changes–along with serious limitations in evolutionary effects possible from that mutation and selection (etc.), the sorts of limitations that are not found in very intelligent beings (the sort that could engineer a chicken, say). When evaluating causes, we look for evidence of the limits of those causes, such as the lack of really novel organs and systems as evolutionary processes entail, and what do we find? Those kinds of limits in change that evolutionary processes entail, not the sorts of limits found in any known designer.
There is much yet to be known, of course, but we follow the evidence of what sorts of causes exist, those that are not capable of seeing beyond the limits of evolutionary processes. That’s why evolutionary theory is a causal theory, while ID remains nothing but an invocation of “intelligence” (really God, but the euphemism remains). Intelligence did it is not a causal explanation in the case of ID, because IDists deliberately avoid the specifics of their favorite sort of “cause.” Partly, no doubt, because the specifics point to causes different from intelligence.
You don’t have a cause, because you won’t commit to the specifics necessary for a meaningful cause.
Glen Davidson
That’s beautiful Charlie, but I don’t see how this is giving us any useful intuition about the development of avian wings. At least Owen’s archetype laid out the commonalities among vertebrate skeletons.
CharlieM,
The real issue is, what do archetypes actually have to do with bird wings at all?
Nothing is gained by saying “archetype” is why bird wings develop from having five digits to three digits. Even if going from five digits to three is a narrowing of a more general form, why should such specialization be mirrored in bird wing development today? Indeed, why should bird wings even be made of hands, other than that evolution simply has “to use” what heredity has “given it.”
Owen had to invoke “archetypes” when he first worked out relationships of forms, because he couldn’t simply refer to ancestral forms. Darwin uses “archetype” in the quote rather cautiously, “the archetype as it may be called,” apparently because it was a term being used, while recognizing that it needn’t be called an “archetype.”
Goethe may have some impressive idea of archetypes, but he never showed that they exist, let alone have any bearing on the developmental processes of organisms.
Glen Davidson
In the various forms of the animal kingdom we see the human spread out in narrowly specialised ways, or as Dr.Hermann Poppelbaum put it:
‘Man’ (can be seen) as a Compendium of the Animal Kingdom
He writes:
Compare the anatomy of a bird’s wing with the human forelimb. For me the interesting thing about wings is their mastery of the mechanics suitable to make the best use of aerodynamic forces. The human arm on the other hand is interesting in that its construction allows us to be creatively dexterous. Our forelimbs give us the freedom that other vertebrates do not have.
It’s pointless, Corneel. He will have his Goethe and Steiner. He doesn’t care about the fact that science left them in the dust several generations ago. Their views comfort him and that’s the deciding factor.
A look at what those “withered” legs can do:
Bird wings are limbs.
Fundamental failure on Poppelbaum’s part.
Bird wings and legs vary across bird types, depending on how they’re used. Some ground birds have rather robust legs (ever eaten a chicken leg?), however the muscles are largely on the upper leg (thigh) for the sake of efficiency, while power is transferred by bones and tendons. The wild types often fly well enough for their purposes, that is, they are capable of strong flight for short periods. Others, like the hummingbirds that rely very much on flight, do indeed have not much leg strength. They don’t need it to perch.
Poppelbaum seems not to know much about these matters.
Glen Davidson
Corneel,
It illustrates the extreme isolation of protein superfamilies in sequence space.
GlenDavidson,
Cause in science can take on many forms. From the general to the specific and from single a cause to multiple causes.
What it illustrates is the IDiots’ ability to produce bullshit:
Proteins show homology and are conserved? evidence for design
Protein superfamilies don’t show homology? evidence for design too!
*slow clap*
Your post did not contain any questions. Neither did your post before that one. Nor your post before that one. So we’re down to two digits remaining.
dazz,
Why don t you think that resistance to change and a wide variation in sequences can both together be evidence for design?
No, that’s false.
Natural selection comes to mind.
You mean he wants to know why the Designer didn’t just poof bird wings into existence from nothing?
I have decided to not engage you anymore, you’re unable to understand explanations and objections, a complete waste of time,
Atoms are designed. Nuff said.
When everything and anything can be evidence for design then “design” stops really meaning anything at all. And that’s not really very interesting at all.
Ever stopped and wondered why what seems so obvious to you seems impossible to convince other people of?