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…
I thought we were talking about the wings of birds.
Yep. He just wants anthroposophy to be true because it’s comforting to believe that human beings have a privileged place in the cosmos. Just like J-Mac wants to believe that quantum mechanics provides us with compelling evidence for Berkeleyian idealism, because he just knows that “materialism” is a metaphysics bereft of hope, value, significance, and kittens. They know these things, and they can’t be wrong, and it doesn’t matter how many times their elementary errors in reasoning and basic reading comprehension are pointed out to them.
Thanks. That made my day. An Experiment on the Evolution of Chicken Wings.
And yet all these “rules” are broken in actual practice and efficiency is rarely how things come to be. So I question your design analogy. 🙂
It does not seem to matter to them either that if they were in fact right they would occasionally do something that benefits humanity as a whole. Discover something new. Some new idea. Some new theory that can be tested. Advance the mark a notch. Raise the watermark.
Their lack of productivity is their greatest clue they are on a unproductive track, and yet that never seems to deter them. If the average length of a doctoral thesis is 200 pages, I wonder how many PhDs Kariosfocus has been endowed with by the university of UD for his mind-bogglingly long and repetitive comments. He thinks he’s changing the world. He’s just wasting elections. Luckily there is a plentiful supply.
OMagain,
When anything and everything shows evidence for design it then appears the universe is designed. All gaps filled:-)
All that being said, protein sequences are hardly everything.
Atoms aren’t either.
They’re quite a bit, though, especially of the visible universe.
Glen Davidson
By perceiving through thinking he demonstrated to himself that they exist, and that is really all that matters.
All that matters to you and Goethe, anyhow.
Unless you’re trying to advance knowledge.
Glen Davidson
Corneel,
If you wish to talk about birds in general would you say that ostriches are a typical representation? Why do you use an extreme case when Poppelbaum was obviously talking about birds in general? Have you heard of the saying, the exception that proves the rule?
I’ll see your ostrich and raise you one flamingo 🙂
Yes generally speaking bird wings are limbs which support the body when flying and the flight muscles are for the most part contained within the body. Which is as he described.
Compare the muscle mass, bones and tendons in the average bird wing with those in an average terrestrial mammal.
CharlieM,
Wow. Poppelbaum seems quite as loony as Steiner. Anthroposophy sure throws out some interesting cases.
Oh, come now, walto. Everyone knows that if you can imagine something to yourself and it seems really, really real to you, then you’re completely justified in treating as if it’s real and everyone else should respect your beliefs and if they don’t it’s they are dogmatic close-minded intolerant materialists/atheists/liberals who are just unhappy and mean and angry at God.
So you believe that Goethe’s extensive studies of the natural world had nothing to do with advancing knowledge?
I replied to Corneel
Do you agree that this Goethean way of thinking about a rose is closer to reality than the picture I posted?
Must you always insist on stating the obvious?
So? Can’t he still be a good person?
Whatever work they did happened a long time ago. They’ve added nothing to scientific knowledge for over 100 years.*
They still make you feel good, though. I guess that’s something.
*{ETA: Almost 200 years, actually}
Sure. A good crackpot.
And why did you change the tense of the verb from present to past? I didn’t change the tense myself, because while you’d mentioned what Goethe did, you ended up saying “and that is really all that matters.” But that is not all that matters, because it apparently doesn’t do much (if anything) to advance knowledge today (Poppelbaum seems to exemplify the point).
I don’t know if Goethe advanced knowledge with his archetypes, but I would say that he did in some areas. But you not only changed the tense from present to past, you totalized the matter where I did not. I was merely saying that Goethe’s demonstration to himself that his archetypes exist is not all that matters if you’re interested in advancing knowledge. You shifted that into the suggestion that I may think that Goethe wasn’t advancing knowledge at all.
That’s not even close to what I was saying.
Glen Davidson
Geez, for once I accept the design analogy and then this. I can’t win this, can I? Still, I wonder how many IDers are willing to accept an inefficient Designer, who just keeps building on top of old designs?
An extreme case? Oh come on. I can name several species of bird that can probably outrun you and there are many more species that spend quite some time foraging on the ground. When Poppelbaum characterized birds as “refusing to enter into a deeper relation to the earth and its gravity” he was sweeping the enormous diversity of birds under rug in order to pat us humans on the back; Wow look at you stand up; well done chap. Not like those birds on their withered legs.
Nothing new under the sun you say? Don’t reinvent the wheel!
I wonder how many anti-IDers are willing to accept an inefficient Designer, who just keeps building on top of old designs?
After all, the idea is to get rid of the Designer, and acceptance of any Designer, however inefficient, is hardly an option. There can be no design in Nature, not even poor design.
…provided we accept that his example demonstrates something that is relevant to protein evolution…. which I don’t.
I confess that I will need quite some convincing, but I am perfectly happy to consider your arguments for an inefficient Designer. Hey. that’s what I hang around on TSZ for. What would distinguish his/her handiwork from the joint action of mutation, selection and drift? We cannot use efficiency of design as a criterium any more.
Poppelbaum was making generalised characterisations and comparisons. He was not explaining the comparable ‘withering’ of the legs as a negative feature. (Withering is not a word I would have used.) It is in fact an extremely efficient survival strategy. And as you say many species of birds can outrun me. In fact a newly hatched pheasant chick could probably outrun me 🙂
We can see from here the way that the legs of an ostrich are constructed. How the muscle mass is raised and is so much more close to, and within the main trunk of the body than in humans. So the fact is that bones and muscles of the legs below the knee joint are comparatively reduced. It is not a criticism of the design of their legs. As we can see this is no bad thing for the ostrich to have this form of leg.
Generally speaking would you say that in comparison with the theropods that they are believed to have descended from, the legs of modern birds have increased, decreased or remained the same with regards to bulk?
Boy, he sure was.
Yes, he was. Just read the text you quoted at me:
Just count the qualifiers here, positive for humans (“advanced”, “perfectly”, “supreme”) and negative for birds (“overshot”,”lifeless”,”wither”). How can you possibly miss that?
Generally speaking, I would say that the variation in bird leg morphology has increased spectacularly in comparison to their non-avian ancestor, as they diversified and filled different niches. Perhaps it is time to let go of overgeneralisations aimed at puffing up our fragile human ego’s.
So would you say that individual species of birds have become more specialised and the more specialised they are the less able they will be to cope with environmental changes?
Let me ask you a few simple questions which maybe you could give direct answers to. Who do you think has a better understanding of reality, you or the ostrich in keiths video? Who is more in control of their destiny? Which one of you is more able to look into the past and the future? Which one of you is more uniquely creative?
I would say we are looking for non-random and non-algorithmic patterns in the data but that is just me.
peace
How does it build would be my question.
Why would anyone do that? Is there any reason that’s a good explanation?
What’s inefficient about a swallow?
The fact is that evolutionary algorithms, like evolution itself, are not an inefficient “designers” per se, they’re simply limited in certain ways that are quite unlike the limitations of known designers. Evolution is rather good at honing forms into efficient shapes (say), but not good at choosing “basic designs.” Humans tend to be the other way around, capable of the rational leap to a better “basic form,” not as good as evolution at exquisite perfection of existing structures
No, the idea is to explain, which a designer doesn’t.
A stupid “designer” that acts like evolution does, without brains enough to make rational leaps yet oddly proficient at honing the shapes that do exist, is hardly an option. It’s just an apologetic mess that people come up with to save their a priori beliefs.
Poor design by a Designer that invented life in the first place and that engineered the extreme complexity of life? It’s an oxymoronic claim born of the biases of IDists. It’s a supposed Designer that acts like evolution (aside from its abiogenesis of life in the first place). Why should we look at apparently evolutionary results and assume “design,” other than that the pseudoscientists will try to save ID against all evidence to the contrary?
Glen Davidson
Corneel,
You’re dealing with the same mathematical structures between proteins and languages. You can certainly speculate that proteins require less sequence integrity then language but his example shows how difficult it is to move from paragraph A to paragraph B with selectable random change. Loosening up the integrity appears to be of little help.
The origin of genetic information problem is not going away.
Hi everyone,
To gpuccio’s latest elegantly written post over at Uncommon Descent, titled, Isolated complex functional islands in the ocean of sequences: a model from English language, again, I have a very brief response: Functional information is not the same as semantic information. The constraints on the latter are much more severe than the constraints on the former. For more, see my review of Dr. Douglas Axe’s Undeniable (see the section, “Why life is nothing like alphabet soup.”)
It was a criticism, and it was quite wrong.
Fast-running animals generally have “withered” lower legs, because it is inefficient to move muscles the distances that lower leg muscles would be moved while running. It’s our muscles in the lower legs that are the worse design (at least for speed), because all of that mass has to move quite a distance with each stride. A horse, an ostrich, a chicken, these move minimized masses in their lower legs, because the muscles remain higher up while power is transferred by bones and tendons.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
I did wonder, why are our legs muscular lower down, since it’s one limit on our running speed and efficiency.
And I suspect that an answer is that primates evolved so that grasping is important. I assume that tendons could power our grasping hands from a long distance, but I wonder about how fine the control would be when the muscles are so distant.
Of course one good reason is that our ancestors generally weren’t selected for speed of running on the ground. By the time we were stuck walking around the ground the majority of the time (not knocking our ability for climbing, which can be important, but not our typical way of moving), our leg muscles didn’t have enough time and selective pressure to move the muscles upward to keep stride costs down. Foot control would likely be better with closer muscles as well, but I’m not sure that would be important enough to keep our lower legs more massive.
Anyway, we’re not specialized for speedy running, not like antelopes, rheas, and roadrunners.
Glen Davidson
vjtorley,
How would you support this claim? Look at the ubiquitin system that gpuccio reviewed as an example. Bacterial enzymes are hardly representative of the problem.
According to gpuccio, the Designer engineers sequences neutrally. So given enough time there’s nothing impossible if you know what your doing, no design is unreachable from any given starting point. So all the claims about resource management issues and all those rationalization of the evidence for “poor design” are not compatible with Puccio’s ID: If God wanted, he could design birds with five fingers, or three independent ones.
Maybe he’s just a clueless hack and indeed, has no idea what he’s doing
How could we ever know?
Glen Davidson
You’re right that I haven’t really addressed Dean Radin’s parapsychology experiment, but I’ll take a quick stab at it. First, I think it’s clear that if the result is real would probably have huge implications. But that’s true of a lot of of fringe/crackpot stuff, and they have a tendency not to hold up under close examination. If you read his wikipedia page, he’s been pretty roundly criticized for all the usual sorts of crackpottish problems. Now, I haven’t actually checked into any of this, so I can’t claim an informed opinion, but my prejudice is that he’s probably just plain wrong. Your opinion may of course be different.
But let’s set that aside for the moment, because based on what he says in the video I think it’s clear that whatever’s causing his results, it’s not observation (via meditation) collapsing the photons wavefunctions as they go through the two-slit apparatus. First, because the participants don’t actually know which slit each photon goes through. They’re asked “to imagine, in their mind’s eye, that they could see which of the two slits that the photon went through”, but there are far too many photons coming through too fast for anyone to possibly register any sort of knowledge about individual photons, So the conscious-knowledge-causes-collapse option is not viable here.
(Actually, he says the participants don’t even necessarily imagine the photons and slits; they’re given some sort of feedback signal — via a sound, a graph on a webpage, gently glowing Buddha, whatever — of how well they’re doing. That, not the photons, is what they’re observing. And that signal they’re observing is based on the interference pattern, not which slit photons are going through.)
Now, that doesn’t completely rule out some other sort of consciousness-mediated perturbation causing the effect. Even a weak interaction that just changed the photons’ wavefunctions a little could mess up the interference pattern. But that’s ruled out by the anomaly he describes starting at 16:34 in the video. In the online version of the experiment, they got indications of a decrease in the interference pattern during 2013 (as he expected), but in 2014 the effect reversed. He attributes this to a change in their web interface for participants, which inverted the participants’ feedback. Essentially, a change in the web interface encouraged the participants to increase, rather than decrease, the interference effect — and they did, to about the same extent they’d decreased it before.
But that doesn’t make any sense at all in terms of the proposed explanation! Decreasing an interference pattern is easy and can happen in any number of ways. Increasing it is generally really difficult. He suggests there’s some sort of “active” effect, like a quantum Zeno effect, but a quantum Zeno effect would require a strong and very precise sort of interaction. If the participants were capable of doing that, they should’ve been able to get a much much stronger effect when asked to decrease the interference. Whatever was influencing the results was symmetric, but anything at all like the quantum effect he’s claiming should’ve been highly asymmetric.
So something else is causing the results. I don’t know what. I suspect it’s some silly problem in the experiment design that’s of no actual consequence, but of course I don’t actually know that. In the meantime, though, I don’t see how this experiment is any sort of evidence for a connection between consciousness and quantum wavefunction collapse.
I believe J-Mac said that the experement was so simple it could be replicated by his children and as such I await his video of such with baited breath.
Are we still talking about biodiversity or are we trying to establish whether ostriches will ever be able to get a university degree? You are smarter than a bird, Charlie, if that is what you want to hear, but I fail to see that ability carries more weight than other abilities from a biological point of view.
So what exactly do paragraph A, paragraph B, the 3rd paragraph of A and paragraph P represent in his example? gpuccio didn’t make it explicit and I could not think of a proper match for this analogy in protein evolution, but it appears you could.
Ostriches aren’t especially wunderkinds when it comes to intelligence, however, pound for pound, the intelligence of birds like corvids and parrots appears to surpass our own. As one article notes:
https://tinyurl.com/y9ggg7gv
I’m not pretending that parrots or ravens are going to outsmart us someday, of course, I’m just noting that brain efficiency seems to be higher in some birds than in mammals, even primates, whose brains appear to be more efficient than those of most other mammals. There’s no question that birds haven’t mastered intelligence in the manner that humans have, but it’s remarkable what they can do with their relatively small brains.
It is possible that the main reason birds haven’t won the intelligence game is that most of them continue to fly, so cannot grow their brains very large (but then that may also be why their brains are rather intelligent per ounce). Efficiency matters, but to have intelligence like ours requires a good-sized mass of brain tissue as well.
The point being that evolution hasn’t really left birds behind in the matter of intelligence, with birds ending up with greater intelligence per brain mass. With the anthropocentric thinking of Steiner and your other favorites, this particular advantage that birds have could easily be forgotten. For whatever reasons (probably including the need for flight keeping down the size of most birds), birds never evolved to the point of having speech with all of its benefits (and problems), however, evolution produced greater intelligence per mass in birds.
This suggests once again that something like intelligence is simply a matter of evolutionary contingency. If placental mammals, along with nearly all other bird predators, went extinct, large flightless parrots and corvids would seem to be about the best candidates for evolving intelligence akin to our own.
Glen Davidson
Well, except for one problem, which is that birds no longer have hands that function at all like our own. It seems fairly unlikely that the rigid, fused hands incorporated into bird wings could ever evolve back into functional hands, either, despite the fact that claws still appear on wings of several birds during development (and in juvenile hoatzins).
It is hard to imagine birds making things like we do with beaks and feet. Give them hands and make them large, and they might rule the world.
Glen Davidson
Pretty good.
Not exactly the Antikythera Mechanism, however.
Glen Davidson
You are thinking here of conscious knowledge mediated by the senses but transferred to the atomic level. But this is precisely not what they are trying to demonstrate. What I would say is that there is a different type of consciousness involved where the time and space of ordinary sense derived consciousness does not apply and likewise your criticism of viability does not apply.
Why I am not a fan of Ken Miller
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/biologos-pushes-dubious-science-why-the-evolution-of-humans-was-not-inevitable/