Someone suggested a discussion thread for KN’s new book:
So I’m starting such a thread. My Kindle copy arrived shortly after the turn of the month to November. According to Kindle, I have read 5%. The readability is pretty good (but I already have disagreements).
Open for comments.
I think that popular consensus is that it *is* designed. Let’s look at the design detection tools on offer (both ID and conventional) and see which were used in this particular design inference.
Open for comments for a while before I add my two penneth.
UD commenter Andre has a bad case of PCD OCD.
PCD stands for “programmed cell death”. Andre is convinced that it is the death knell not only of cells, but of modern evolutionary theory. He has been spamming the “bomb” thread at UD in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade us of this. (112 mentions of PCD in that thread, but no intelligible argument from Andre.)
Rich suggested that we set up a thread for him here, which I think is a great idea.
Here you go, Andre. Tell us why PCD is an unguided evolution killer, and be prepared to learn why it is not.
Let’s discuss Amie Thomasson’s paper A Nonreductivist Solution to Mental Causation. I’ll save my thoughts for the comment thread.
I’m still trying to push ID forward as science. I previously suggest Bendford’s Law might be a fruitful avenue for ID research, but there were no takers I know of. Recently I came across Compressed Sensing, and I think this might also be a concept IDist want to explore. Here is the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing
See also:
http://authors.library.caltech.edu/10092/1/CANieeespm08.pdf
It seems to be able to recreate structured datasets with surprisingly high fidelity from very low samples. Could it be used to find a hallmark of design?
So, Barry@UD – time to stop the apologetics wagon and do some science. Unfortunately you’ve banned the brightest minds at UD but a couple of the regulars might want to have a crack at this?
We have folks on both sides of this question, so it should make for an interesting discussion.
(I’m a ‘yes’, by the way.)
He raises the question in the New York Times Sunday Review:
I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do…
How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong…
The assertion has been put forth that I said I would never post here at TSZ again.
Alan Fox:
Welcome back, mung. Didn’t you say that you would never darken our door again? By your moral compass, don’t you have to call yourself a liar, now?
I’ve been searching for the post in which I made a statement that I would never post here again. I do recall being excessively miffed about something that petrushka wrote about me that I thought was egregiously false. Something about animals being meat puppets. But I haven’t yet been able to locate my response to that post.
What post is Alan is referring to?
Barry Arrington should stick to what he’s good at — banning blasphemers.
Instead, he has disinterred the corpse of the “natural selection is a tautology” argument, propped it up in a chair, and is now attempting to engage it in conversation.
Trust me, Barry – that corpse is dead, dead, dead. Among the coroner’s findings:
Rupert Sheldrake obviously thinks so. (I have no idea myself, but would be interested in comments on his piece by those who do.)
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The hypothesis of morphic resonance proposes that memory is inherent in nature. The laws of nature are more like habits. Each species has a collective memory on which all individuals draw and to which they contribute.
1.How many of you have a song or some other piece of music “playing” in your head, right now?
2. During roughly what percentage of your waking time do you have “mental music” playing (that is, when you’re not listening to an external source of music)?
3. How much voluntary control do you have over the music playing in your head? If a song you don’t like starts to “play”, are you able to replace it with something you like better, or do you get stuck with “earworms” – songs that you can’t get rid of despite trying?
We interrupt all this philosophy for a brief announcement: I have written a critique of the arguments William Dembski used in his talk on 14 August at the Computations in Science Seminar at the University of Chicago, which can watch on this Youtube video. These were based primarily on the Conservation of Information (CoI) argument of William Dembski and Robert Marks, and these were in turn based on their earlier Search For a Search (SFS) argument. Neither those arguments nor my response are new, but I hope that the new post will explain the issues clearly.
The critique will be found here, at Panda’s Thumb.
I suspect that most of the discussion will occur at PT but I will try to respond here as well.
Alan Fox:
Both Feser and Torley are both staunch Catholics, a religion that I find pretty objectionable (above all for it’s interference in private life and thought, the readiness of its leaders to tell others how to behave, oppression of women and minorities…).
Q1: Are these objections not all moral?
Q2: Are there other unlisted objections, and are they not also moral objections?
Q3: Is there any religion Alan Fox does not find objectionable?
Q4: Is there an objective basis for Alan’s objections?
I don’t know if anyone is still following the Uncommon Descent blog, currently owned by lawyer Barry Arrington. It is supposed to be a blog dedicated to “Intelligent Design” – the idea that evolutionary theories are unable to account for the diversity of life on Earth. However, interest in ID has been on the wane since its peak around December 2005 (the run-up to the decision on whether ID is genuinely scientific).
Hat-tip – Rich Hughes
The subject of obscure writing came up on another thread, and with Steven Pinker’s new book on writing coming out next week, now is a good time for a thread on the topic.
Obscure writing has its place (Finnegan’s Wake and The Sound and the Fury, for example), but it is usually annoying and often completely unnecessary. Here’s a funny clip in which John Searle laments the prevalence of obscurantism among continental philosophers:
John Searle – Foucault and Bourdieu on continental obscurantism
When is obscure prose appropriate or useful? When is it annoying or harmful? Who are the worst offenders? Feel free to share examples of annoyingly obscure prose.
I saw this photo at Jerry Coyne’s place a couple of days ago and laughed out loud. It’s flippant, but the question actually deserves genuine, serious consideration.
To the theists reading this: When you’re stranded on the throne, why doesn’t God poof a roll into existence for you? He’s surely powerful enough to do it, with less effort than it takes you to lift a finger, so what holds him back?
If your spouse, child, or even a roommate that you didn’t particularly like were in a similar predicament, you would surely be kind enough to rescue them by fetching a roll and placing it outside the bathroom door. Why doesn’t God do the divine equivalent?
Is it for the same reason that he never restores the limbs of amputees?
Question for discussion:
Is mathematics more fundamental than logic, or vice-versa? Neither? Or is it more complicated?
This post arises out of an exchange between me and one Matt Sheean at Ed Feser’s blog. I got involved there because there have been some exchanges, at times quite amusing and colourful, between Feser (assisted by some of his regular commenters) and Vincent Torley, well known to UD readers as perhaps the less unacceptable face of ID, in that he comes across as a nice guy on a personal level. Both Feser and Torley are both staunch Catholics, a religion that I find pretty objectionable (above all for it’s interference in private life and thought, the readiness of its leaders to tell others how to behave, oppression of women and minorities.. but I digress). In an earlier post at Uncommon Descent, Vincent Torley kindly transcribed some of Feser’s presentation (admittedly to a young, lay audience) of his version of Aquinus’ “First Way”. I was asked to summarise my impression of the video and agreed. Hence this post. Continue reading
In a variant of the hoary old ‘ungrounded morality’ question, Barry Arrington has a post up at Uncommon Descent which ponders how a ‘materialist’ could in all conscience take a position as clinical ethicist, if he does not believe that there is an ultimate ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of clinical ethics. In contrast to daily usage, ethics here is not a synonym for morality.
I can understand how a theist who believes in the objective reality of ethical norms could apply for such a position in good faith. By definition he believes certain actions are really wrong and other actions are really right, and therefore he often has something meaningful to say.
My question is how could a materialist apply for such a position in good faith? After all, for the materialist there is really no satisfactory answer to Arthur Leff’s “grand sez who” question that we have discussed on these pages before. See here for Philip Johnson’s informative take on the issue.
After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.
I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” is ultimately meaningless.