In the ‘decisions’ thread walto made this comment:

‘Hard problem’? Hah! Piece of cake. Everything is instantiated! Well, you know what sorts of things can be instantiated? Look it up.

When I suggested that I’d not be doing that Mung noted:

Translation: don’t bother me with facts.

Which implies to me that there is a verified list of what can and cannot be instantiated in matter (chemicals and the like). I.E. Facts.

This is contrary to what I had originally assumed, hence my reluctance to bother looking it up. So I’ve changed my mind. I am interested in ‘looking it up’. I’m always willing to learn. So the floor is yours Mung, walto.

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This is a thread to allow discussions about how those lucky enough to have free will make decisions.

As materialism doesn’t explain squat, this thread is a place for explanations from those that presumably have them.

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1. Do not give opinions or advice unless you are asked.
2. Do not tell your troubles to others unless you are sure they want to hear them.
3. When in another’s lair, show him respect or else do not go there.
4. If a guest in your lair annoys you, treat him cruelly and without mercy.
5. Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal.
6. Do not take that which does not belong to you unless it is a burden to the other person and he cries out to be relieved.
7. Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.
8. Do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself.
9. Do not harm little children.
10. Do not kill non-human animals unless you are attacked or for your food.
11. When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him

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“The reason a bike lock works,” explains Meyer, “is that there are vastly more ways of arranging those numeric characters that will keep the lock closed than there are that will open the lock.”

Most bicycle locks have four dials with ten digits. So for a thief to steal the bike, he would have to guess correctly from among 10,000 possible combinations. No easy task.

But what about DNA? Well, in experiments Axe conducted at Cambridge, he found that for a DNA sequence generating a short protein just 150 amino acids in length, for every 1 workable arrangement of amino acids, there are 10 to the 77th possible unworkable amino acid arrangements. Using the bicycle lock analogy, that’s a lock with 77 dials containing 10 digits.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/10/eric_metaxas_on_1100261.html

I believe this is what Mung has been talking about. I asked Mung: Continue reading →

Can it be established using the tools of modern science that evolution is guided and has purpose and that the only tinkerer is not just blind uncaring indifferent forces and collisions?

If so, how?

If not what does that mean for ID, if anything?

This is a temporary post so I can discuss the design tool with fmm, as trying to have a conversation across multiple threads is impossible.

Upright Biped has announced the launch of his site via this UD post: Writing Biosemiosis-org

All of the unique physical conditions of dimensional semiosis have already been observed and documented in the scientific literature. It is an intractable fact that a dimensional semiotic system is used to encode organic polymers inside the cell. The conclusion of intelligent action is therefore fully supported by the physical evidence, and is subject to falsification only by showing an unguided source capable of creating such a system.

http://biosemiosis.org/index.php/a-scientific-hypothesis-of-design

Discuss!

What punishment should be meted out to those who slaughter innocents?

Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere Triggered by Research on the Role of Conspiracist Ideation in Climate Denial

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Is there such a thing as a fair die?

A long time commenter at UncommonDescent gives his opinion on ID’s position with regard to common descent:

The design inference is compatible with common descent and with universal common descent; a certain Michael Behe is a case in point on this. Common descent all the way up to universal common descent, is compatible with intelligently directed configuration of first life and of major forms thereafter including our own.

Yet in all my time learning about ID it’s never been clear to me, if that’s the case why are there not specific predictions from ID about what we will find in the fossil record?

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Scenario A)

I harken to Barry’s call for Materialists Everywhere to Stop Equivocating. All materialists do. Everything changes, we enter a golden age of just, well, superness all round. It carries like that on for the entirety of human history.  Continue reading →

Some considerable time ago I created a toy example of fixation based on the MandM example given by Allan Miller. For various reasons that stopped working (argh, browsers!) so I’ve re-created a slightly different version.

http://mandmcounter.appspot.com/
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At UD StephenB stakes his claim:

Support the claim that one must always understand the context of a message in order to know that it is, indeed, a message.Describe a specific context, the absence of which would make it impossible to know if a meaningful message consisting of 100 characters was designed by an intelligent agent.

 

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At UD this claim was made:

Neither rocks nor human brains dream. Only the mind/soul dreams. The human body is a diving suit, specifically designed to be operational by conscious/subconscious intent – meaning, an individualized consciousness (mind/soul) can use it to functionally operate in the physical world. A rock has no such capacity for service.

I have to wonder how what this video depicts can be squared with that.

Hypoxia – 4 of spades

During hypobaric chamber, or altitude chamber training, #14 displayed symptoms of hypoxia, after exceeding his time of useful consciousness (TUC).

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