Here is an informative little video by a guy named Steve Mould who does a lot of “science” videos on youtube. Its all (ostensibly) about how simple little processes can make “meaningful” structures from stochastic processes-and he uses magnetic shaped little parts to show this. Its a popular channeled followed by millions, and is often referenced by other famous people in the science community-and his fans love it.
And hey, it does show how meaningful structures CAN form from random processes. Right? So you can learn from this. Wink, wink. Nod, nod. And all the skeptics will know exactly what he is really saying. Cause we are all part of the clique that knows this language-the language of the skeptic propagandist. I mean, he almost hides it, the real message, it is just under the surface, and the less skeptically aware, the casualist, might even miss it. The casualist might not learn as much about Steve Mould and what he is trying to say here-but the skeptic knows. “See, atheism is true! Spread the word!” Steve has given the wink. The same wink used by DeGrasse Tyson, and Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, Brian Greene, and on and on. You know the one.
And for 95% of his viewers, whether they know it or not, they got his message. I mean, look, its plain as day, right? He just showed you, that is certainly a meaningful structure that arose from random processes, isn’t it? Its defintely meaningful, its a, a, a , well, it’s shape that, we have a, a name for…that’s kind of…anyway, defintely random, I mean other than the magnets and the precut shapes, and the little ball with nothing else inside, and the shaking only until its just right then stopping kind of way…That’s random kind of right???
But there are 5% percent of his viewers that spotted his little wink and nod, and said, hold on a second. If you want us to believe that your little explanation about how simply life can form from nonsense without a plan, how blind exactly do you want us to be? 95%, they are hooked, you got them (Ryan StallardThere are so many creationist videos this obliterates. Especially 4:18.). But some likeGhryst VanGhod helpfully point out: “this is incorrect. the kinesin travels along fibres within the cell and takes the various molecules exactly where they need to be, they are not randomly “jumbling around in solution”. https://youtu.be/gbycQf1TbM0 ” and then you get to see a video that tells you just a few more of the things that are ACTUALLY happening which are even more amazing if you weren’t already skeptical (the real kind).
And if you go through some more of the comments you will notice a few more (real) skeptics, not the wink and nod kind, and you will start to notice why the wink nod propogandist skeptics everywhere you look in modern culture are a very puposefully designed cancer on knowledge and thought.
Is there a publication with the method and results for an experiment involving double-slit apparatus? We could look at that. Incidentally, what do you think the implications of some mental force influencing the path of, say, electrons would be? I would have thought it would be Earth-shattering, if true.
Here you go again, phoodoo, making claims that I am dismissing evidence without the rather important, in my view, first step of presenting any evidence.
Your Bermuda Triangle performance is a classic.
Seems to me the iconic Bermuda Triangle story is the disappearance of Flight 19. I’ve read the Wikipedia article about the event and there is no indication of anything supernatural. Seems to me either you are just gullible or think everyone else is.
Tell me what is supernatural about the loss of Flight 19 and support that story with actual evidence for a change. Go on, surprise me for once.
I am pointing out the different ways particles and fields are dealt with in physics.
Think of the relationship between the etheric and the physical as the same as the relationship between the ideal triangle and a physical representation of a triangle.
The ideal triangle is not governed by any measurement in space and its laws remain constant for all times. Any physical triangle is transient and amenable to measurement.
Goethe’s archetypal plant is of the nature of the etheric. Any physical plant is a representative of the archetype.
Well it’s there if he decides to examine it.
CharlieM,
All you provided so far is a list of publications. Which one do you find convincing and why?
I did enjoy the appearance of the Bermuda Triangle almost as much as I enjoyed the appearance of dear Rupert Sheldrake (who was brought up by William J Murray and ridiculed by me before phoodoo ever mentioned him…)
Strange that PSI effects almost all live in those phenomena which are most famous for confirmation bias — mysterious disappearances, telepathic dogs, someone calls you right when you are thinking about them, and (my personal favorite) the sense of being stared at.
Dean Radin is rather interesting in that his primary research does produce clear departures from random expectation, but always rather underwhelming effects detected with very sensitive and noisy measurement equipment (GSR machines or photon detectors), requiring some fairly heavy duty data massage. He is reduced to arguing that human minds can affect Random Number Generators. Most of his audience is comfortable with the backwards causation explanation, but they baulk at the multiverse as an explanation for backwards causation.
Awkwardly, his double slit experiments have been shown to be reproducible under sham conditions. He does not appear to understand the difference between random and systematic error.
I am reminded of the machine I used in the ’70s to measure the piezoelectric behavior of uranium oxides (yeah, back in the day I worked for the military). Every morning, around about 10:00, it would start reporting a small sinusoidal signal with a period of a couple of minutes. Whether or not there was any uranium in it. By about noon, the oscillation would go away. We never came up with a plausible explanation for was causing the signal, so I just avoided doing experiments in the late morning. Clearly, the signal was caused by Rupert Sheldrake thinking about morphic resonance!
Finally, an explanation!
Oh, but I am.
In my experience it is the other way around. The archetype usually turns out to be a representative of all organisms that you mentally group, like “plants”. And what may those be? It’s all that green stuff, innit?
DNA_Jock,
The evidence for strange happenings in the Bermuda Traiangle are the same as the evidence for the existence of Wilhelm Walys (Or Wallis or Uallas..). All you have is someone telling you it is so.
I guess you must have some confirmation bias to believe one more than the other.
Heck, Alan knows what he believes before he has even heard of it.
Alan does not know a whole lot of stuff. Alan has reached an age where he has forgotten a whole lot of stuff that he used to know. But Alan remains convinced that facts come before opinions and that arguments about facts (how many teeth in a horse’s jaw) are pointless. Facts can be investigated, verified, quantified. Then there can be a fruitful discussion with opinion informed by facts.
The constituents of the materials that make up the body are in a large part provided by the genes. The morphology of an organism is dependent on the way in which genes are expressed. Two of Aristotle’s causes are the material cause and the formal cause. The structural gene products conform to Aristotle’s material cause and the formative forces conform to his formal cause.
The only thing that these experiments demonstrated was that the means by which the materials needed to build tissues was passed on through DNA and not proteins. DNA is used to produce the material in the form of proteins. If it was primal in producing form then it would need to be different in each cell type.
By containing the attractors which govern the bioelectric fields with in turn lay down the patterns that the materials follow. The fact that it’s not sense perceptible is no reason to deny its existence.
Oh. This does explain a lot.
There are plenty of links at Neotic.org including this one. But I only have access to the abstract below.
He supplies a lot of info from these experiments, including details on the apparatus used, in his videos and replies to critics which are available online.
Yeah, I already thought you misunderstood. Fact is, the people at the Levin lab use drugs to block ion channel function, or they use genetic mutants, or they make cells overexpress ion channel and gap junction genes by transduction with a viral vector, as described for example here:
Emphasis mine. Michael Levin explained all this after the ~24 minute mark of the video you linked to. I believe this deep-sixes your argument.
Charlie, you must see that to consider whether Radin’s double-slit experiment succeeded we need to know the methods used, the data collected and the results shown. Anything less is blurring fact and opinion; especially to be avoided when the genuine demonstration of a paranormal effect would be, as I said, Earth-shattering.
This suggests that phoodoo doesn’t understand the difference between “there was some guy walking by the park” and “I took a ride in a flying saucer.” If you believe that some guy could have been walking by the park you must also believe that some guy took a ride in a flying saucer. Same amount of evidence!
Some guy said it this way: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. However, to you, expectations in terms of evidence should be identical. Why then aren’t you convinced of everything we say, yet you believe there’s magical beings in the sky? I guess you must have some confirmation bias to believe one more than the other.
Entropy,
I was going to mention Sagan and his “there’s a dragon in my garage” example but…
… was posting on my phone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
Of course he understands the difference. He’s just pretending not to.
CharlieM,
‘The way in which genes are expressed’ is also, ultimately, a genetic phenomenon. It’s genes all the way down. That’s why clones resemble each other more than they do distant relatives. The increasing genetic differences aren’t simply coincidental.
This whole ‘etheric’ stuff seems an unnecessary layer of explanation, raising more questions (to me) than it answers.
Well, he either misrepresents or misunderstands his critics.
You tell me, Charlie, why do you think that Walleczek and Stillfried are wrong?
Or are you okay with the fact that Radin’s effect sizes can be replicated in a sham experiment?
Oh please. You same people who are claiming THERE MUST BE SOMETHING WRONG with Radin’s methods accept anything anyone ever says about evolution as being no problem at all. “Oh, I guess that really is how a giraffe got a long neck, the shorter necked giraffes never could reach the fruit, so they couldn’t mate!”
How much scrutiny goes on here about claiming a “new” novel funtion was developed by Lenski’s experiments. You guys will suck up anything that furthers your God hate.
BTW KN, I am still waiting to hear if you believe teleology exist in biology-and by teleology I mean what your authors your referenced are talking about, not your perverted defintion of teleology. You know (even when you pretend you don’t)- Goal oriented.
Rummy quakes in his boots having to answer this one. Alan says he doen’t know what teleology means at all. Jock says says they must not mean what you think they mean, and so what if they. And Allan says that’s just what physics does-nothing to see here. This is the skepticism of the skeptic. Its a pink unicorn.
I sense a bit of equivocation here about what “biology” is intended to mean. Do organisms have goals? Sure, I doubt anyone will deny that even bacteria have goals – to eat and reproduce. But do genes have goals? I’d say genes have goals the same way water has the “goal” to run downhill. The need to eat and reproduce is, I would say, a genuine purpose and motivation.
This is always amusing. I suspect few people here can work up much hate for a figment of your imagination. But did Lenski’s experiments produce a “new” novel function? Well, his bacteria developed the ability to do something they never could previously. Is this a new function? My take is, the concepts of new and novel can be stretched or shrunk as much as required to fit a foregone conclusion.
Epigenetic modifications affect the rate of spontaneous mutations in a pathogenic fungus
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26108-y
There are a zillion of these studies that use all kinds of wording which promotes their conformation bias, but for which there is no evidence at all. They talk all about how mutations are random, but most are deleterious but the ones that are good get selected for, and on this bullshit they build their paradign-even if it makes zero sense at all. Where are the skeptics? They are out having conferences talking about how mean God is.
How can you “alter” evolutions trajectory if it has no trajectory?
No that’s what they do, that is not a goal. Unless you believe they have a goal-welcome to design.
Uh, no they didn’t. You must be a skeptic-you will believe anything anyone tells you.
That is not the word goal that anyone who uses English means when they speak of having a goal. If you want to bastardize the langauge we are communicating in to mean anything you want, save that for your fireside chat with the other skeptics. That’s not what normal people mean by goal, nor what any author who speaks of goals means. Because if they did, the people buying their books would throw them out. No one says when someone steps on a patch of ice and slips and falls and breaks their hip, they had a goal of breaking their hip. This is not how English works. We don’t change words to mean something else and expect all others to accept it.
Yes, it’s a goal. They do it deliberately, with a purpose.
From what I read, yes they did. There is not even any ambiguity. They developed a new ability.
Yes, that was exactly my point. Water does not have goals. Goals require the capability to have some intent, some motivation. What I’m trying to convey is that intentions and goals are something possessed, and acted on, by entire organisms but not by parts of that organism. When you eat, your arm and hand don’t have the goal of getting food to your mouth, YOU do. Genes have no such goals.
Why has positive feedback suddenly become “bullshit”? Could it be that you don’t understand positive feedback loops? Or, more likely, could it be that you WILL not understand positive feedback when it works to produce something you CANNOT will yourself to grasp?
To paraphrase an old quote from Upton Sinclair, it is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his religious faith depends on him NOT understanding it.
With religious faith ,you already understand all you need.
The old lady might not have the goal to break her hip , but it must be part of the designer’s plan. Unless undesigned stuff occurs .That would complicate things . We been told the world is not designed to be whipped cream. Bad stuff has to happen, hips breaking, cancer occurring ,occasional tornadoes .
Absolutely not, if one believes in free will.
But some here get mad at a God who would have a world which has free will. They want a world with everything already decided for them, so that they can go bungee jumping without a bungee, and can shoot people with bullets that don’t hurt. You know, Cool Whip bullets. Wouldn’t it be great to stop having to care for your children, your wife or anyone-just do nothing?
Tell Kn, and his authors. They disagree.
The skeptic’s creed.
Oh dear. You have this backwards. In the (hyporthetical) clockwork universe, they cannot “go bungee jumping without a bungee”: they cannot do anything except what they are predestined to do. In the universe with phoodoo’s version of free will, there are (per phoodoo) no limitations whatsoever on their behavior, they can fly unscathed through the sun or go bungee jumping without a bungee. We have pointed out this problem with phoodoo free will previously.
I did like the bit about equivocation of “goal” though, that was inspired.
There’s been an interesting spat between Gary Hurd and Matt Young at Panda’s Thumb over an article by Jerry Coyne criticising New Zealand govt. for planning to bring Maori folk science into mainstream science classes. There’s a fair bit of point missing. I’m tempted to try an OP if I have time. Let the divine foot in the door with Maori ways of knowing and before you know… But cultural heritage and folk knowledge has value. Need they conflict?
I have pointed out previously the problem of you claiming “we” have pointed something out previously, as if in your mind you have won something in your delusional mind. Whose version of predestined are you talking about? Certainly not any version which involves free will which any religion espouses, nor one in which I have ever proposed.
No, no Jock, the religions of the world that I know of, and the version of free will I believe in suggests that you can do as you wish within the confines of the world in which you live, and there indeed will be consequences for all these choices you have made. A world without choices and consequences? That is the vat brain world which all the angry atheists wishes God would have made.
Alan Fox,
I don’t know if Jerry Coyne is a racist (it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise) but I do know for a fact, he is both a complete asshole, and a not very bright one.
And yet he speaks so well of you. Go figure! 😏
Happy to oblige. Last time around, your theodicy involved the inability of your Omnipotent Deity to prevent even one instance of child abuse without removing free will. You clearly had not thought this through. At the time I noted
The rest of that thread is an entertaining read, in particular your responses to velikovskys.
Epic!
Wrong. Spectacularly wrong. After you write such dribble, I have to debunk the REST of your nonsense??
Your proposal of a God who only intervenes sometimes, like times when Jock wants him to, but not other times, but which stills maintains consequences for one’s actions, is laughable in its toddler like philosophical musings.
I did read the initial post at PT, but I have not been following the discussion there. And I have been reading Jerry Coyne’s posts on the issue.
Personally, I do not have a problem with teaching Maori traditions. This might even be important for New Zealanders. But I would have preferred that they not use the science class for that project.
To me, Jerry Coyne’s reactions seem a tad excessive.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/independent-uk-body-says-china-committed-genocide-against-uighurs-in-xinjiang
What will be the consequences for your support of ethnic cleansing, I wonder…
And odd how you don’t believe the vast amounts of well documented evidence for these crimes against humanity but insist a dog can use PSI….
And if he stopped pretending he’d have to start to listen to the undeniable evidence that the well documented oppression is actually happening. So he won’t be doing that, not as long as they continue to pay him anyway.
How many people have you informed on personally phoodoo?
I don’t know what was supposedly “perverted” about my definition, since I was using the word exactly as Aristotle, Kant, and Hans Jonas use it — not to mention the more recent philosophers and theoretical biologists I had mentioned previously.
Kantian Naturalist,
Which one of these was that:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/teleology
Or if you prefer, Encyclopedia Brittanica:
Does biological development have a purpose, goal, end game, or function? Are there evidences of design in nature? Is there a final cause?
Hardly unless Jesus was a skeptic “ Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed.”
Most of biological development ends extinction , is extinction a goal, end game ? A final cause?
You mean like the real kind? Or the skeptic kind of skeptic?
velikovskys,
Is there teleology in biology? Are the authors KN recommended crackpots?
I think the double slit experiments are fruitful for obtaining repeatable, greater than chance results. The collapse of the wave function in itself is a mystery to modern physics. If it can be shown that minds can have an influence on the measurements of the interference pattern then that is something that should be taken seriously.
The double slit experiment carried out between 2012 and 2013 gathered a lot of data for analysis, but the results of this experiment could not be published until 2019, see here. If Radin’s analysis is correct then there is a definite effect.
They have also done some work with entangled photons which should be worth pursuing further.
In this video Radin talks about experiments with quantum effects. He gives details of a few of double slit experiments beginning at this point. Also he talks about a global consciousness projects that they instigated.
If his findings are valid in any of these research areas then he is on to something.
So if humans had never existed there would be no such things as mammals because that is just a mental group. Is that what you are saying?
I agree 100%.
I agree 100%.
Soooo, any reason to think that either of your (CYA) conditionals are correct, in light of Walleczek and Stillfried, and similar criticisms? Have you reviewed the Global Consciousness 9/11 data?
I hope you understand why linking to a video, or a meta-analysis, does not constitute a response. Only pre-specified analyses matter. Do I need to explain why?
phoodoo,
Omnipotence, u r doin it rong.
To put it another way, that is one lame-ass weak deity that you are worshiping, kid. He needs to up his game, and get back to some serious infidel-smiting. I mean, really, I should have been struck by lightning by now. 😉
There are several overlapping issues, political and scientific. I will try and put up an OP in a few days.