From ENV:
As the news hammers home to us, young people are especially vulnerable to poisonous, Internet-mediated messages. That’s one reason Discovery Institute has teamed up with a gifted cinematographer who wanted to create a new video series, Science Uprising, that would be relevant to viewers in their thirties and younger. The series will launch on June 3, with new episodes to be released weekly through July 8.
An Edgier Style
The new series will have an edgier style than anything we have produced in the past. What does that mean? Take a look at the trailer…Science Uprising is premised on the idea that a majority of us share a skepticism about the claims of materialism — the claims that people are just “robots made of meat, with a really sophisticated onboard guidance system,” lacking souls, lacking free will or moral responsibility, having emerged from the ancient mud without purpose or guidance. And yet, however skeptical we may be, the media labor intensively to correct our skepticism. Popular science spokesmen like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson insist that people are anything but designed children of a loving, intelligent creator…
Each episode features a masked narrator. Why? Because much of the burden of resisting materialism falls to scientists and others in the universities who have been made to fear speaking out in favor of the design hypothesis.
Scientists and scholars who have spoken out, pulling the mask off materialist mythology, share the truth with viewers. From episode to episode, they include chemist James Tour, philosopher Jay Richards, neuroscientist Michael Egnor, biochemist Michael Behe, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, physicist Frank Tipler, and others.
So even granting that (which I don’t), the abiogenesis researchers have absolutely little reason to hype up their ideas as if they’ve solved anything. That’s exactly one of the problems Tour has with the who abiogenesis enterprise.
He didn’t have issue with research, he had issue with the hype that is misleading. That’s not science, that’s hype.
If you don’t grant that it is not possible to ‘calculate the probability of molten iron’, I’d be interested to see you back that up and show how you’d do it – it should be easier here, since we do know the conditions under which it happens.
As Rumraket has already mentioned, nobody claims to have solved anything. Perhaps you could link to a particular paper as an example of the windmill at which you and Tour tilt?
The claim that there is hype is itself hype. Let’s see some evidence.
The mouse could be Turing reproducible.
Another example, say some spiritual force constructed Windows. Windows is Turing reproducible, i.e. there is a bootup program that generates Windows when you turn on the computer. So, the fact a spiritual force constructed something does not tell us whether that thing is Turing reproducible or not.
“Spiritual construction” is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a material object not being Turing reproducible.
It’s not about some particular simulation, but about simulatability. The point is “simulatable on a Turing machine” is a bound for what we can expect from the physical laws. So anything not “simulatable on a Turing machine” likewise cannot be the product of physical laws. The source of its actions must come from beyond the physical universe.
Thus, if animal behavior cannot be “simulated on a Turing machine” then whatever makes them do their thing must be non-physical.
Easy! If you don't know, you grant for the sake of argument generous conditions, and if even under generous conditions it fails, one should expect that under more plausible conservative conditions it should not succeed!
So, let's grant homochirality and alpha peptide bonds and polypeptides. Do you think something as coordinated as a homo hexameric helicase can form? Nope. Just think of the necessary interfaces to make the hexameric connections just right so the blasted thing will connect and work vs. forming random complexes because it connects to the wrong thing or just as bad doesn't connect to any other polypeptide at all.
Ok so invoke an RNA world, what's the probability a protein world will emerge because something as complicated as a helicase is needed. How about Okazaki fragment processing. Etc. We don't have to know the exact conditions, all we have to know is that even under generous conditions a class of events is a priori improbable from a large spectrum of possible conditions. Not to mention we need transmembrane proteins!
What you're trying to argue is akin to saying if a tornado passes through a junk yard, we can't assert a 747 is improbable unless we know all the conditions of the tornado and junk yard. So let's be generous and make the junkyard full of 747 brand new parts and lets assume the tornado won't destroy any of the parts — well, it will hardly get a screw in the right hole, right?
Good science will say, "we can't even imagine what the right conditions would have to be, so many things have to be right." In fact, someone said something similar:
Although Crick qualified it and said he believe there was a solution and then argued for space aliens sometime later.
If someone wants to accept it happened in a way that didn’t violate A PRIORI probabilities, they are welcome to, but that is a faith belief, not one that is justified by any science.
An A PRIORI probability is something like expectations based on Gibbs free energy, etc.
For what? Generous conditions for what? You don’t know what the earliest stages of life were like, or what is even possible. All you know is life as we know it.
How do you know that the earliest form of life used or depended on hexameric helicases?
For what? What’s it needed for and how do you know?
For what? How do you know we need transmembrane proteins?
No that’s YOU arguing that. It’s YOU saying the origin of life was a random assembly of all the constituents of a modern bacterium, but you have no idea that any of these things are actually required for some form of life.
And in this case Francis Crick was in the same position you are, he also had no idea what the first forms of life were like, and was speaking only about the spontaneous assembly of a modern bacterium from some dilute set of chemicals or monomers.
But nobody actually believes or suggests life arose like that. Creationists are obsessed with trying to make it seem like that is how it had to happen. But they dont’ know whether there was some long gradual increase in complexity until we got to the modern bacterial stage. Instead they keep trying to make the problem appear as if, well ironically as if life was created de novo from a soup. God zapped the soup with his magic wand and then all the chemicals magically through occult mechanisms assembled themselves into life in an instant.
It would be extremely unlikely to just happen, so a God instead made it just happen.
That’s just contradiction. I paid for an argument.
John Harshman,
No you didn’t.
Eric,
Are you suggesting that animals possess non-physical souls?
Have you ever considered a possibility that animal behavior is operating at quantum level? Maybe you should look into quantum Turing machine…
John Harshman,
John,
I would like to congratulate you on your deep and thorough biblical knowledge!
I was very impressed reading some of your comments at PS. Have you studied the bible with evangelical Christians or on your own?
It’s off topic. Sorry
When, or if, intelligent scientists finally get the conditions right and RE-CREATE LIFE, then, and only then, they will have the unwavering proof that RANDOM PROCESSES are responsible for the origins of life…
Due to this oxymoron, I am not even a creationist…
EricMH:
The word “generates” seems out of place here. Booting doesn’t “generate” Windows — it runs Windows, which has been pre-generated by the folks at Microsoft.
The relevant question for this discussion is whether a Turing machine could (in principle) do what they did.
My research program was simple. I read the book.
You mean you read the bible?
J-Mac, to John:
Do you mean “which translation”?
ETA: I see that J-Mac has edited his comment.
The interesting thing is that quantum Turing machines are not more powerful than deterministic Turing machines. So, if something cannot be simulated with a deterministic Turing machine then it cannot be simulated with a quantum Turing machine.
In that sense of generate, then yes, generating Windows is not Turing reducible.
EricMH:
How do you know?
J-Mac,
Yep.
Quantum computers are definitely more efficient.
There is enough evidence that animal brains use quantum effects, such as quantum entanglement and quantum coherence.
Quantum consciousness in humans is disabled each time someone is under general anaesthesia. If human consciousness were a soul beyond subatomic level it should not be disabled by anaesthetic gases…
I admire your patience.
I’ve tried to read the bible many years ago and then again recently. I had to use different translations to figure out what it is written there…
Unike ancient mythologies, the bible discreption of how the earth was transformed to accommodate life is impressive to me….
Sorry. I was going to ask that too…
Still not seeing any numbers.
Nor, indeed, a link to a paper making a hyped up claim.
I’m happy to say a tornado could not even turn a single screw, if it blew for all of eternity. Nor can it do welding. It was a stupid analogy when Hoyle coined it, and gets no less stupid with endless repetition.
Trying to sound sciency, and failing. I’m happy to agree that any solution must be energetically favourable. I’m not making any appeal to special physics.
Allan:
Speaking of which, “poof” seems energetically unfavorable to me.
Yup. “I’m” was implicitly italicised! Although it occurs to me that ‘special physics’ is just as valid as ‘Creator God’, if one is stepping outside the workaday norms. Once in a while, there’s a fluctuation in the Universal Improbability Field, and the impossible becomes actual for a nanosecond. If that impossible thing happens to be a replicator, and you don’t have bug spray handy, it can rapidly get out of hand.
Nah, too unscientific – let’s stick with the greatly preferable Conscious Being!
Why?
And Revised Standard edition.
More efficient, yes. More powerful, no. DTMs can compute everything a QTM can compute.
Windows is not random, so per Levin’s independence conservation, is not expected to be created by any combination of randomness and computation. Something outside the Turing world had to intervene for its creation.
While written in a simple language, for obvious reasons, the creative periods described in the bible seem to fit the fundamental scientific facts…
I know we could quibble whether the luminaries were created when the heaves were created first and then became visible on the earth later on etc…
But the fundamentals are impressive, such as the beginning of the universe…
Do you remember the time when Antony Flew claimed that the universe had always existed and had no beginning? People were making fun of those who claimed that the bible is always right…
The age of the universe has recently been adjusted by mere a billion years…While we both know the universe will never turn out to be 6 000 years old, science is, and supposed to be progressive; subject to revision…
Do you know any ancient mythologies that get even close to the established, scientific facts when it comes to the origins of the universe and the life on the earth?
That’s true but DTMs are not as efficient and no match for the human or even simple animal brain… Do you know how many operations per neuron per second they would have to process? There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain with each neuron “..with roughly 109 tubulins per neuron switching at e.g., 10 MHz (107), the potential capacity for microtubule-based information processing is 10 ^16 operations/s per neuron…”
I know that you think that proves the existence of an immaterial soul, but proving it is going to be very difficult, if not impossible. Proving the existence of a “quantum soul” or rather consciousness is more like it…
On the other hand, it seems like people consciously process information extremely slowly compared to even pretty modest computers. So, something very odd is going on.
https://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/brain.html
“The human body sends 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second? It appears that a tremendous amount of compression is taking place if 11 million bits are being reduced to less than 50.”
EricMH, quoting from basicknowledge101.com:
That last sentence is silly, because it assumes that all of the information makes it into consciousness (in compressed form).
EricMH:
keiths:
EricMH:
That doesn’t make sense. Non-random sequences are routinely produced algorithmically. It’s truly random sequences that are difficult to produce that way.
That’s interesting… I guess the information filtration process is very selective so as not to overwhelm us with unnecessary information…
It seem this system is more selective in men and that’s why women spend more and more money on their outer appearance, so that men with the very selective information filtration systems would notice their hair-highlights, new shoes or designer whatever…😊
You’re not making sense. If being physical meant (it doesn’t) that it should be “simulatable,” then, whether something physical was made, or not, by a magical being in the sky, it would either way be physical, thus “simulatable.”
And you insist on not making sense.
Physical laws are equations we produce for representing some gathered instances of some phenomena, hoping that other instances of the phenomena will behave the same way. They’d be “simulatable” by definition, given that they’re equations. So, you’re mistaking the physical for our representations of the simplest of the phenomena we’ve studied.
I see now why you think this is not contradictory. You think that the origin of an object is what determines if it can be simulated, rather than its nature. So, you think that if some physical entity was originated by magic it won’t be “simulatable,” while the one originated by the physical universe would be. But that would assume that once the magical being in the sky produces something physical, it infuses it with some magical “non-simulatable” elements. But if the object is physical, then it would work physically by definition. By your messy conceptual framework, it would have to be “simulatable.”
Sorry, but no. If animal behaviour could not be simulated in a Turing machine, then it would mean that there’s something we might be missing about how the physical works, and about the relationship between our concepts about phenomena and the phenomena themselves. You’re engaged in excessive reductionism and excessive confidence in our conceptual frameworks and knowledge of the physical.
Now, let’s think about it a bit more. Randomness is the closest I can think of as being “non-simulatable.” Yet, we manage to produce things that resemble randomness. There’s a gap between actual randomness and these attempts. Yet, we’re still simulating randomness, even if imperfectly. Does that mean that randomness is “simulatable” or that it isn’t? If it isn’t, then randomness would qualify as made by a magical being in the sky by your “methodology.” Right? Te whole ID industry would spin on its head. They had it all wrong, and they have to prove that randomness is the key element in the origin of life, the universe, and everything. Since I doubt you want to promote randomness, you might want to say that those gaps between our simulated randomness and actual randomness are acceptable.
Now, careful with that answer. If the problem of simulating randomness weren’t enough, even for non-random phenomena we have problems. Take Newton’s law of gravitation, which worked all right with some objects, but failed with some others. This shows that there’s gaps between our laws and the phenomena they represent. Yet, you’re holding to these bound-to-be-imperfect “laws” to distinguish the physical from the magically-produced. Simulations attempt to put a lot of these together, and thus, those gaps are bound to collide with one another. Our simulations of natural phenomena, therefore, when pretending to be predictive, require corrections, twists, changes, re-settings, etc.
Finally, how could we even know if something can or cannot be simulated by a Turing machine? By the current standards in computing? By imagining a future standard? By checking what was once thought to be non-simulatable and now is being simulated? By the boundaries of what computers can do today? How exactly?
From the above, I’d venture that, philosophically and scientifically, “simulatable by a Turing machine” would be a very poor approach for determining the difference between magically made and physically made. You’re essentially trying to prove a universal negative (it cannot be simulated by a Turing machine), over-estimating our understanding of the way natural phenomena work, and mistaking concepts for their referents.
Being naked would get them more noticed. Perhaps it is more an indicator of wealth and status just like a flashy sports car or the latest toy.
I don’t see how anything that edgy could be wrong.
Entropy,
Information-rich post. Thanks.
Sorry, but no. All you have pointed to so far is that things have a beginning, and just about every mythology does that. If you look closer, the creation story is nonsensical.
Isn’t it baffling that even most outrageous mythologies got the beginning of the universe right, unlike science up until 1920, when Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding and therefore had beginning?
What, “something created it”? And how do you know they got it right after all?
When do you think what we call “science” today actually began? And is it correct that a giant eagle laid the universe as an egg then? Is it also correct that the sneeze of a god created the universe? How can these things be correct same time?
So everything that exists had beginning? Or just expanding thing? Does that include your deity that you presumably think beginning the universe? If not, why not? If not, where begin deity? How begin deity?
Also, convenient much?
“Phys.org) —The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.
Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.
“The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.
Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end.”
newton,
Looks like the cherry picking season has arrived early in newton’s neck of the woods…😎
You missed the best parts of the article:
“Using the quantum-corrected Raychaudhuri equation, Ali and Das derived quantum-corrected Friedmann equations, which describe the expansion and evolution of universe (including the Big Bang) within the context of general relativity. Although it’s not a true theory of quantum gravity, the model does contain elements from both quantum theory and general relativity. Ali and Das also expect their results to hold even if and when a full theory of quantum gravity is formulated.”
They try to reconcile QM with GR. Nice try…
This is interesting though:
“I physical terms, the model describes the universe as being filled with a quantum fluid. The scientists propose that this fluid might be composed of gravitons—hypothetical massless particles that mediate the force of gravity. If they exist, gravitons are thought to play a key role in a theory of quantum gravity.”
I personally think that quantum fluid, or eather, will be replaced with dark energy…
BTW: Regarding models of the universe, I’ve recently read that one cosmologists modeled the universe in such a way that geocentric view would be true and the math will add up… This is the only model that could explain the axis of evil….
Thanks for reading.
I’ve always felt that trying to force-fit a fascinating universe into some interpretation of bronze age mythology, diminishes that fascination while handicapping any understanding of it. It’s like reality is a book of complex puzzles with the answer at the back of the book – one single answer, and that one wrong. The effort to find that every puzzle has the same answer, which must fit the wrong one provided, can be both interesting and discouraging to watch.
I don’t think anybody is interested in your opinion.
Perhaps if anybody is they could say?
It’s easy for me to believe that you believe that the earth, and by extension, you, are at the centre of the universe and that everything revolves around you.
It’s both funny and a bit sad.
In the effort to be brief, I figured all that is required is the word “ quantum”.
What is old is new again
Any link to that?
Yes. I think that Vince’s humongous OPs are great examples of that. I look on them with wonder and even some admiration. Seems like such a waste. But WTHDIK? All life to some degree reflects the last words of Beckett’s “Unnamable”:
It’s not really new…
It’s George Ellis’ statement:
“People need to be aware that there
is a range of models that could explain
the observations, Ellis argues. For instance,
I can construct you a spherically
symmetrical universe with Earth at its
center, and you cannot disprove it based
on observations. Ellis has published a
paper on this. You can only exclude it
on philosophical grounds. In my view
there is absolutely nothing wrong in
that. What I want to bring into the open
is the fact that we are using philosophical
criteria in choosing our models. A
lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250803533_Thinking_Globally_Acting_Universally
Quantum or subatomic…
It’s the foundation of matter as far as we know…like it or not.