Author Archives: Elizabeth

Does intelligence violate the 2LoT?

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Granville Sewell’s argument that evolution does so, therefore evolution must be caused by intelligence, rests on the odd assertion that intelligence (our own, for instance) does violate the 2LoT.

Bruce David, a UD poster I have a lot of respect for, writes:

I realize that to say that something, anything, violates the Second Law is an anathema to most people who have had a normal scientific education. And I have had the experience on these threads of explaining Dr. Sewell’s point in what I thought was very clearly reasoned prose to people like Elizabeth Liddle, who is intelligent, a scientist, and generally does give her fellow commenters a respectful hearing, only to get the terse response, “Nothing violates the Second Law.”

However, Dr. Sewell’s point, as I understand it, is that both life and human activity in fact do violate the Second Law, and in the case of humans it is clearly our creative intelligence that does this. And if ID is correct, then it is only intelligence that does this. Personally, I think it is a point worth making, even if it falls on deaf ears most of the time. And also, I think that precisely because it contradicts one of the most respected principles of science, and because of the implications for the nature of intelligence and thus the nature of human beings, that it has massive implications for science, philosophy, spirituality, and religion, and therefore, again, needs to be brought to light.

Yes indeed.  If ordinary human intelligence regularly violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that would indeed have massive implications, for all kinds of things, not least our energy requirements.

hmmm.

Conching

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The problem of consciousness is, notoriously, Hard.  However, it seems to me that much of the hardness is a result of the nature of the word itself.  “Consciousness” is a noun, an abstract noun, derived from an adjective: “conscious”.  And that adjective describes either a state (a person can be “conscious” or “unconscious” or even “barely conscious”) or a status (a person, or an animal, is said to be a “conscious” entity, unlike, for example, a rock).

But what must an entity be like to merit the adjective “conscious”?  What, properties must it possess?  Merriam-Webster gives as its first definition: “perceiving, apprehending, or noticing with a degree of controlled thought or observation doing, or be capable of doing”.  In other words, the properties of a conscious thing refer to its capacity to do something.  And, indeed, it is derived from a latin verb: the verb scire, to know.   In other words, “consciousness” may be better thought of as an abstract noun derived not from an adjective that describes some static attribute of an entity, but from one that implies that that entity is an agent capable of action.

And so, I will coin a new verb: to conch.  And I will coin it as a transitive verb: an entity conches something, i.e. is conscious of something.

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Good arguments and straw men

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We seem to have quite a number of posters here who are happy to defend  ID, as well as a number (myself included) who are happy to defend evolutionary theory.

I’m posting this as a kind of straw poll for people to state what they think the major claim of their own position is, and why they find it persuasive; and also what they think the major claim of the opposite position is, and why (if they do) they find it flawed.

It might be interesting to count the straw men standing by the end 🙂  More to the point, it might stop us talking past each other quite so much, and perhaps understand the other side’s position a little more.

Full disclosure: I don’t think myself that the two positions are symmetrical.  But I am constantly brought upn short by the realisation that ID proponents also perceive an assymmetry, but see it as the mirror image of mine.  So I wait enlightenment 🙂

Upright BiPed’s Semiotic Argument for Design

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In a post here at Uncommon Descent, Upright Biped makes what he calls his Semiotic Argument for Design, which he has been challenging me to refute for some time now, but which I have been struggling to understand.  So it was good to see it summarised in one place, and I’d like to take a look at it piece by piece, and with your help, try to figure out what he’s getting at (I’m assuming he’s a he, which I don’t normally do, but I think he said something once that implied he was).

It’s a response to Larry Moran who dropped by from his Sandwalk blog to talk about onion genomes, but we don’t have to worry about onions too much, I don’t think, as UBP is making a more fundamental claim.

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Honeys, I’m home!

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Thanks for keeping the site warm for me 🙂

Gotta lot of threads to catch up on, by the looks of things.

Still a bit gobsmacked by the number of Christians on Uncommon Descent who seem to think that William Lane Craig’s apologia for the divine command to genocide has any merit, and it’s left me somewhat sick of heart, but reassuring that Timaeus, and some others also find it abhorrent.

The idea that any action is good if you think that God commanded it seems to me so self-evidently dangerous that I simply cannot imagine how anyone can entertain it for a moment.  And that’s only one of the problems with it.

For those out of the loop,  the hoohah started here:

Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig

I think Dawkins’ excuse rings hollow, myself, but his link to Craig’s essay on the genocide of the Canaanites made my blood run cold.

 

 

Remainders

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Ilion, a regular poster at Uncommon Descent, linked to an argument for God that he makes on his blog, here. I found it interesting because it was exactly the argument (though more succinctly expressed, I think) that kept me a theist for most of my life):

The reality of minds in a material world (thus, every human being who has ever existed) is proof that atheism is false. If atheism were indeed the truth about the nature of reality, then we would not — because we could not — exist. But we do exist. Therefore, atheism is not the truth about the nature of reality.

 

My position was that as every one of us (I assume) has the experience I have of being aware – being a mind – and thereby of being a unique self – there must be something unique to me, that inhabits me, that is not simply a material body, which, I assumed, could carry on perfectly well, zombie-fashion, were that essential self to go on vacation for a bit. Which made an after-life perfectly reasonable: (I knew my body would cease to function, but as my self seemed to be unarguably independent of the body it inhabited, there seemed no reason to assume that it would not continue to exist independently once that body ceased to function). Continue reading →

The Two Lizzies

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I wrote this story a while back, and posted it on a couple of forums.  But I often find I need to link to it (it was written to make a point!) so I’m reposting it here.  Hoping it might generate some discussion 🙂

 

The Two Lizzies

Lizzie was a single mum, with a one-year daughter, Beth. Lizzie wanted to get back to her job in neuroscience – she’d left tantalizing data unanalyzed – but she loved her daughter, and wanted to give her a good start in life.

Lizzie heard about an experimental technique, whereby she could be in two places at once. Perfect! She thought. I can stay at home with Beth AND go back to work.

Lizzie made an appointment for the procedure. She was told that she would undergo a whole body scan under anaesthetic, and every atom in her body would be identified and located. Then a random half would be selected and displaced one meter to her left, making two sparse copies of Lizzie. Fresh atoms, identical to those missing from each copy would then be added, resulting in two identical Lizzies where there had once been one.
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Search space

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A curious couple of days for me at Uncommon Descent!

I’ve always wondered why people who are skeptical about Darwinian evolution aren’t persuaded by the power of evolutionary algorithms to find creative solutions.

There seems to me to be a deep misunderstanding of a) the nature of search space (and its structure) and b) the role a Designer plays in a GA.

The oddest objection I find is the objection that the Designer designs the fitness function.  If the ID of ID is the fitness function, then ID is the environment!  Because that’s the analog surely.

Which is nicely Earth Motherish, I guess.

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About the penguins…

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I don’t know why, but I’ve always had an affinity for penguins, and a chinstrap has been my avatar for a while at Talk Rational.  I tend to parse the chinstrap as a smile!

Anyway, when I was googling for images for this blog, I came across these beautiful argumentative chinstraps, photographed by Arthur Morris.  Check out his blog, Birds as Art  – he has some awesome photos.  It’s in the blogroll.

Atheism and moral condemnation

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In another very interesting discussion on Uncommon Descent, Chris Doyle asked:

1. Why should… a miserable atheist bother with life at all?

2. How do you dissuade an atheist from free-riding?

 

And later, in a post on another thread:

…how can any atheist condemn Breivik in terms that can be reconciled with their worldview? If life is meaningless and we face oblivion then nothing really matters – there is no wrong or right, because there is no Good or Evil: even the purpose we forge for ourselves is an act of self-deception if the atheistic worldview is true.

I’m reposting selected portions of my original response below, because, although the conversation has continued in a lively fashion since then, Chris gave me an opportunity to think though my views on this, and I thought like to invite him, or anyone else who wants to continue the discussion, the opportunity to do so in the quieter backwaters of this blog.

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Where does information come from?

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I’m starting off this blog with a post about an interesting discussion I’ve been having* on on the Uncommon Descent blog about the claim, frequently made by Intelligent Design proponents, that  Chance and Necessity  cannot generate  information;  information can only be generated by a mind.

Clearly, to either support or refute this claim, we need clear conceptual definitions of “Chance and Necessity” and “information”.

William Dembski  uses Monod’s terms, “Chance and Necessity” to characterise natural processes, and indeed, devised an Explanatory Filter, for candidate exemplars of information-bearing patterns, whereby, if Chance and Necessity could be serially eliminated, Design could be inferred as the only remaining explanation.   There are various ways of defining Chance and Necessity, but for convenience it may be reasonable to regard “Chance” events as unpredictable events (e.g. quantum events) and “Necessity” as  reliable physical or chemical laws.  In a deterministic universe,  of course, once you have a set of starting conditions, all that follows is Necessity, and the opportunities for a Designer lie in specifying the starting conditions in such a way that the willed outcome is inevitable, and/or giving things a poke with a celestial snooker cue to keep them on the willed track. So in a deterministic universe, the ID question would be easy: were the starting conditions willed or a Chance first throw of the dice and/or are the workings-out of those starting conditions left to Necessity or tweaked to suit?  In a non-deterministic universe, which it seems we have, Chance has a potentially more interesting and active roll.  So the ID question becomes: can the events we observe be explained solely a combination of Chance quantum events and Necessary consequences, or can they be better explained by positing  an Intelligent Designer who could affect the way things unfold by nudging  quantum Chance and/or the otherwise Necessary consequences?

But what is meant by “information” mean, in the context of the ID claim? On Uncommon Descent,  I made the counter-claim that I could demonstrate that Chance and Necessity could indeed generate information, for any regular English usage of the word information.

One of the regular posters there, Upright BiPed, took me up on my claim, and my response was to ask him (or any ID proponent) was to provide me with a conceptual definition of information for which he believed ID claim was true.  My plan was then to operationalise the definition to our mutual satisfaction, and then to attempt to make good mine.

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