Existence

[autonomous_unit]

...

My argument is simply this:

1. Metaphysical speculation is a waste of time

2. Take a “leap in the dark”, preferably in something close to your own traditions – but this is not important – if you look hard enough you will find the right one.

3. Within these parameters work hard at learning to live with yourself and relating to others as equals.

4. Through these actions and often because of them we will slowly become aware of essential truths rarely available in the cold, rationality of “atheistic knowledge”.

5. These truths cannot be measured or weighed, but only demonstrated by the quality of our actions as observed by others.

6. In the final analysis though, only our intentions are of any value.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, I think we agree on most of these. I am not sure metaphysical speculation is always a waste of time, in as much as it can help hone critical thinking and show us our limits (just as with the "sound of one hand" exercise did for its recipient). But it is probably ineffective to repeat Descarte's attempt to deduce the nature of reality from his own belly-button.

I only would add that it is useful to remember which way you leapt in the dark, so you can fumble back to the starting point if you seem to be hitting a wall. One thing though: I am not advocating atheistic knowledge (just another form of faith) but rather agnostic uncertainty. Also, you might be discounting some interesting essential truths found in cold rationality, just as I may discount some found in ritual and tradition. Do you have any opinions on whether our preferences come from different experiences, upbringing, or fundamental natures?

Also, intention is important but probably not the only value? Is a father rushing home to help his child less at fault if he happens to be drunk, and kills someone on the way? Hmm, perhaps I should have spent the time trying to fold that around into some timeless, Zen koan.

[meom]

We perceive Life through our senses of touch, sound, sight, hearing and smell. We hear sounds and see sights that are not sounds and not sights, they are just the brains interpretion waves of various frequencies from light waves bouncing off substances, or sound waves bouncing on the ear drum... both are then changed into electrical impulses.

Let's assume a baby is born and science is able to keep it alive while blocking all it's senses.

Does this baby have a thought and if so where does it come from?

[Thomas_Merton]

I only would add that it is useful to remember which way you leapt in the dark, so you can fumble back to the starting point if you seem to be hitting a wall.

A sort of leap in the dark with a megalite, a land-line and two pre-paid return tickets? ...Eh...this is not quite the level of adventure spirit I was looking for.

... Do you have any opinions on whether our preferences come from different experiences, upbringing, or fundamental natures?

I am afraid my opinions are more than often in inverse proportion to their rectitude, and almost certainly not PC. However, I will say, we must all find our own way, never forgetting there is little value in being led.

Also, intention is important but probably not the only value?  Is a father rushing home to help his child less at fault if he happens to be drunk, and kills someone on the way?

Less at fault than someone who kills as a result of drunken joyriding? I do hope so.

[lional6]

This is a great thread.

liona16, If you were brought up on a desert island, with no form of technology and walking along the beach one day... you find a quartz driven Divers watch. It is still ticking away and working perfectly.

What are your thoughts on this watch? Did the watch arrive on the beach by 'happy accident' or was it 'designed' and made by a being?

My logic tells me that the watch could not possibly have come about by an interaction of heated sand, tide hammered metal fragments, etc etc etc whatever happy accident or freak conditions we like to name. We now know the quartz driven Divers watch has 'evolved' from a stick in the sand causing the shaddow of the sun to move in time with the earths rotation... now evolved all the way to atomic clocks and time measured in milliseconds or less.

Let us assume that Life started by certain 'conditions' of heat, water, distance from the sun etc etc etc. Then 'something' caused that life to 'evolve'. That 'something' caused life to evolve in a certain way and to balance all life on this planet... the food chain... the seasons... the ebb and flow of the tides... the solar system... all working together like the Divers watch. Take away any one of the elements and the Divers watch, or Life, fails to work.

Whatever our 'beliefs' it seems to me that Life is governed by certian conditions. Life on earth exists because of these conditions. Mars, Jupiter etc do not have the same conditions, therefore cannot sustain Life. (At least Life as we understand it to be.) The conditions also cause Life to 'evolve'. The evolving is controlled by Laws, survival of the fittest etc etc. These Laws and Condtions are akin to a Program. They may in fact BE a Program. As in a program, if one part is not working correctly it will malfunction... as in the case of the Divers watch, or the balance of Life.

We could say that Life is governed by the Laws of Nature. But, even those Laws must have been 'designed', unless we are to believe they also came about by happy accident.

The only way (at this moment in time) I can see Life as having no designer, is as I said in a previous post... ALL is a result of Pure Mathematics. Mathematics having no sentiment, no feeling for Life of any kind, creating only because it must create.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

One thing about your argument though... As an atheist shouldn't you believe that all religions are invalid? I guess I am just going by the definition of athiest:

One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.

That's correct, I do believe that all religions are invalid. I find the thought of going to Heaven or He11 after my death as believable as crocodiles being Gods.

As for the universe continually expanding, from what we know at present, there is nowhere near enough mass in the universe to slow the expansion down enough to produce a Big Crunch. There are many reasons why a "super" blackhole would not create a Big Crunch. For a start, the Blackhole would eventually run out of material within it's gravitational influence and would start to dissipate it's mass in "Hawking radiation".

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I read Hawking's "The Blind Watchmaker". Very interesting... but... when he explained 'evolution' being a simple matter... putting a 'Y' into a random generating program to build anything and everything by chance... I lost faith in his explanation.

In my previous post, I touched on this idea of a program. My argument with Hawkin would be: If nobody had 'created' the random generating program, the 'Y' would never change into anything. It would remain forever a 'Y'. For the 'Y' to change... somebody, or something, must first make the Program.

Evolution, it seems to me, is governed by 'something'. Hawking and Darwin call it 'Natural Sellection'. Evolution and Natural Selection are PROGRAMS.

Before a program can be designed, it must first be an 'idea'. Ideas come from 'mind' whether yours, mine, somebody elses, or Universal mind.

It is not enough to simply say, "Life evolved." "It is Natural Selection." In my opinion, Hawking, while trying to disprove a creator, did the oposite. He proves the 'need' for a creator, in hs random generating program.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The finding a unknown object on a beach the divers watch to someone that had never seen one would be mystical event and would most likely treat it as a gift from the gods and worship it as a Cargo Cult. That doesn’t probe it came from a god only that what we don’t understand is treated as the provident of a god.

My analogy of a gift from the gods is the Chocolate Banana Rum Torte. The ingredients were available on this planet at least 1,000 years yet until all were brought together, then trial and error it was finally created. This was not the act of divine intervention it was Random chance Pure Mathematics

Now is there Evolution? Yes it’s real and very basic, survive or die is a simple as it gets, and on the way evolve to smarter faster best equipped to survive.

We all have our beliefs and opinions that are yours to pursue and live your life and follow and nobody should make you change them. That’s only for you to decide.

[autonomous_unit]

...

I have to agree entirely with this post, other than the last sentance. I think the search for knowledge, as in truth, IS the human condition. As a child my father nick-named me "Why". It is our very nature to 'question'.  And you Mr. autonomous_unit have obviously done an awful lot of questioning yourself... 

...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, as a kid I was the one all the other kids turned to when they wanted to know "why". The way I see it, I knew it all when I was 13, and now I know a lot less at 31. At this rate, I can hopefully know nothing at all by the time I am ready to retire!

I agree the human condition is to seek out truth. But I also think the human condiiton is to not be able to accurately recognize it when we find it. It's that old catch-22... nobody ever said life was going to be easy.

What I meant about the human condition is that our senses, and even our logic, are not very reliable. I spent formative time caring for the mentally ill and at the same time having buddies who got a bit too recreational in their use of chemicals (San Francisco Bay area, yaddah yaddah). Spend enough time talking to people in altered states, and you realize just how weakly we are bound to reality! It is a rare and moving event when someone in a delusional state somehow reflects on that and decides to trust their caretaker or buddy more than their own sense of reality.

And then there are the "normal" folks who are often so easily convinced by a bit of charisma or well-placed marketing. The prevalence of cults, fashion, fads, and political "cycles" only emphasizes to me that the human condition is to be at constant risk of being bamboozled. The frightening part, for me, is that we can do it to each other without there necessarily being some clever director to coordinate everything according to a malicious script.

I think "The Lord of the Flies" unfolds much more frequently than Jonestown...

[autonomous_unit]

This is a truly interesting question. From what I read about some experiments done on babies, I think it was in the 1950's or 60's, when they were only fed and cleaned, but not touched or talked to in any other way. They all died. The experiment was stopped immediately.

But if we imagine your scenario here... I should say 'try' to imagine... The baby, having no reference to 'self' would probably not become self-aware. The brain needs 'information', just as a computer needs information. It is not enough just to have an 'operating system'. The child would have an operating system, but no Audio Card, no Word Program, no Graphics Card... etc etc. Therefore thoughts may never occur in the infant brain that is denied all means of input. Much like being in permenant 'coma'. Thoughts are manufactured by the brain. Such a brain would have no means of manufacturing thoughts.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The first comment above sounds like a likely urban legend to me. The only "experiments" I know of that were anything like that were a large number of Soviet Bloc orphanages, but this was due to neglect rather than scientific inquiry. Kids were malnourished emotionally and nutritionally. I am not sure how often it leads to infant death versus ongoing neuroses. It is quite terrible, however. As I understand it, the problem has more to do with basic emotional development than abstract thought: the children become extremely detached, because we are social animals who develop most of our personality after delivery. More disturbing, the staff often played favorites, so the children who showed signs of sociability got more reinforcement, while the withdrawn children became ever more isolated.

(I did not study this directly, so I do not know how much it was distorted by the authors reporting it to the laymen's venues where I must have seen it. Some might say that this "experiment" continues in slums around the world.)

As for the computer analogy, you might find Helen Keller's biography interesting, if you haven't read it already. She was born deaf and blind in early America, and did not acquire any language until adolescence, when a heroically persistent teacher taught her a modified sign language. It's been a long time, but I recall that she describes her cognitive world leading up to the breakthrough where she first understood that the teacher was communicating using symbols. Of course, such powerful stories are risky in the sense of all anecdotal evidence; we cannot be sure how much reinterpretation has gone into the records based on Keller's or her peers' prevailing attitudes towards cognitive development.

[somtaamgaiyang]

A good book to explain this and evolution and all those science things you wondered about but were too afraid to ask is 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson.  It is written in Bills usual witty, easy to read style, although it still gets deep at times.  Good introduction for the layperson.

For Astrophysics stuff only you could try 'A Brief History of Time' by Stephen Hawking.  He does a good job of simplifying very complex ideas, but it is still a harder read than Bill Brysons' and doesn't cover any other sciences.

Or you could read the Bible, Qu'ran, Torah etc for an alternative view (don't want to offend any Creationists out there!!) 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks StateSix

I've read all stephen Hawkings books, good but hard on the 'ol noggin!

I'll pick up that Bill Bryson book as I've seen it in asia books.

Tried reading the Bible on more than one occasion, unfortunatly I end up alternativly crying with laughter or ranting to myself a few pages in!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Get Bill Bryson's book, excellent reading!

[doctorstrangelove]

This is a truly interesting question. From what I read about some experiments done on babies, I think it was in the 1950's or 60's, when they were only fed and cleaned, but not touched or talked to in any other way. They all died. The experiment was stopped immediately.

Not quite correct.

The study just showed that children in ICUs who are physically held and cuddled gained weight much faster than children that are simply cared for.

Children will not all die if not held.

[Thomas_Merton]

This is a truly interesting question. From what I read about some experiments done on babies, I think it was in the 1950's or 60's, when they were only fed and cleaned, but not touched or talked to in any other way. They all died. The experiment was stopped immediately.

Not quite correct.

The study just showed that children in ICUs who are physically held and cuddled gained weight much faster than children that are simply cared for.

Children will not all die if not held.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The book (which is still available) and studies I think you are refering to is this:

Bowlby, J. (1951) Child Care and the Growth of Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

This book was effectively an abridged version of a report written for the World Health Organisation (1951). Following on from Konrad Lorenz`s discovery of imprinting in Geese and other precocial animals, John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst, was asked by the World Health Organisation to look into the effects of separation of infants from mothers.

Bowlby studied the cases of 44 juvenile delinquents. He found that 17 had been separated from mother for some time before the age of 5. This was signifant compared to the control group (also of 44). He concluded that maternal deprivation could seriously effect the child`s mental health. He came up with the theory of monotrophy for humans, similar but different to animal imprinting. He proposed that a young infant forms attachment with mother during first 6 months of life. He assumed that the mother-child relationship was qualitatively different to others. Two of his subjects had very little social conscience. He described this as affectionless psychopathy. Argued that attachment failure resulted in failure to develop social conscience.

`What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment`.

[autonomous_unit]

You missed my point I think. The watch would indeed be thought of as a mystical event and I think the finder would have to decide that the watch had been 'created' by somebody, or something... not just a very strange pebble on the beach that got there by some accident/s of nature.

...

I think 'man' created Chocolate Banana Torte. It was not found in a pot on any beach that happened by natural causes or Pure Mathematics. No?

...

Yes, but 'what' is it that 'dictates' this evolution? Where did the Life come from to evolve in the first place? What wrote the genetic code? Program?

I think this part of the thread has more to do with Existence than the knowledge and belief part, which was steering back towards that Do Dogs Think thread.

I took the point about the torte as: the idea of the torte emerged out of the environment as a new combination of ingredients and did not require divine intervention to impart a recipe on man. This is an awkward analogy because the environment is human culture and we're talking about evolution of recipes. It's sort of one foot in, and one foot out.

Ravisher, rather than your watch on a beach, imagine you found an opening in the ground and crawled through it to find a chain of immense caverns, each lined with brilliant crystals and towering stalgmites and stalagtites. Do you think to yourself, "hmm, I wonder where I can find the architect and interior designer who did this?" Or do you think, "hmm, I wonder what physical processes caused all of this interesting structure?" Each of us can contrive loaded questions here...

Evolution isn't a program or template, i.e. there is not a gene that says, "evolve". Evolution is considered to be an essential truth of populations competing for limited resources until they reach some kind of equilibrium, just as game theorists can mathematically distinguish good and bad strategies for individuals and populations in an abstract game or economy. The participants don't have to be programmed with the theory for it to accurately model their statistical outcomes. Futhermore, it is not really "survival of the fittest" but "differential development of the good enough."

Those of us who think evolution could explain Existence are assuming (or waiting for) an explanation of processes to boot-strap the complex organic chemistry to the point where the simplest single-cell organisms began. It has already been shown how amino acids can form "spontaneously" in a stew of simple organic chemicals, heat, and electricity as might have existed in primordial (geological) earth.

It is also conceivable (to proponents) how single cell organisms would evolve given the kinds of mutating processes that biologists have observed within and among such organisms. There are many avenues for swapping and editing of genes, as well as wholesale theft of larger structures. For example: some suggest that our mitochondria might have begun as separate parasitic organisms which entered into a symbiotic relationship with larger hosts; producing excess energy and not needing to develop their own defense mechanisms. Umpteen generations later, they are inseparable parts of our cellular machinery yet they still have oddly asexual reproductive quirks compared to the rest of our genome.

I don't think anyone has explained how the first self-contained organisms got these chemicals working sufficiently to get a metabolism and the ability to reproduce its macroscopic structure. One school of thought is that geological processes of crystallization, precipitation, erosion, etc. (much like those that produce caverns) might have formed an "organized" substrate in which these processes could develop.

[Thomas_Merton]

The BBC are running on their website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4387563.stm

an interesting article by Brian Walden.

It raises some additional points to these discussions:

Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone.

Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job.

He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn't yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: "It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria."

It may well be that this vision of the future leaves you unmoved. After all, six billion years is an almost unimaginable length of time. On top of that, the death of the Sun isn't going to be a jolly business and I suppose that if we're able to summon up any feeling on the matter it ought to be gratitude that there aren't going to be any humans around to suffer when it happens.

These seem sensible arguments and ought to console me - but they don't. This is Easter and I can't help contrasting the Christian promise of my youth with what science expects to happen.

Bashfulness

There's a long established British tradition that in general conversation religion isn't discussed. The great Whig essayist, Joseph Addison, writing in the early 18th Century said: "We have in England a particular bashfulness in every thing that regards religion." That was in an age when belief in God was well-nigh universal. If it wasn't thought to be tactful then, it must be far worse now, in a secular age when Christian belief has declined and other religions are widely practiced.

But it's for that very reason that I think we ought to talk to each other more about the central mystery of life. Widespread agnosticism and the place in society of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism ought to mean that the climate of opinion is tolerant. Nor do we need to be expert to discuss science and religion, providing we have the humility to learn.

Like many others, I eventually accepted the scientific explanation of the origin and destiny of mankind. But, also like many others, I have no hostility to religion and, in particular, no contempt for Christian faith; quite the contrary. Indeed, at Easter, I confess plainly that I miss the consolations of Christianity.

I had a Pakistani friend, who died after a long illness. As he weakened physically, the subject he most wanted to discuss was the reconciliation of Islam and science. After a time, worried that he might be distressed, I said, very foolishly, that perhaps he could be at peace because Islam involved faith and he was a believer, whereas science operated in a different dimension collecting data, experimenting and seeking to confirm knowledge.

This distinction made him angry. "Have you the slightest idea how close we are to the end of humanity?" he asked. "I'm a scientist and I'm afraid. Only from the morality inside us can we learn restraint and that morality must come from religion."

Unpleasant surprise

I admit I thought he was exaggerating, but I listened and went away and consulted one of the works he'd suggested. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover exactly what my friend was talking about. It wasn't possible nuclear accident, or climate change, but the hypothetical threat posed by technological advances in genetics, robotics and nanotechnology.

Genetics; in that we might intentionally or accidentally create a plague; robotics, where we shall be able to download human consciousness into machines and nanotechnology where a nano-machine might turn the biosphere into dust in a matter of days.

Having heard a fair amount of doom-mongering in my time I'm resistant to it and disinclined to believe that the worst will happen. Nevertheless, lacking the scientific knowledge to judge whether there was a real threat, I asked some of those who did know.

They were amused by my ignorance, but confirmed that without proper constraints the technology is a distant threat. Then somebody told me that not only was I not up to speed scientifically, but that some philosophers, well aware of the scientific facts, were discussing their moral implications. So nothing that I'm saying has the least originality, but neither is it freakish.

Human life

A growing number of people believe that we need a fresh dialogue between science and religion. I mean religion in its widest sense - a belief in the value of human life. Apparently the direction of scientific progress means that we have to make moral judgements about what's permissible and what isn't. We need a moral consensus.

Most emphatically, I don't mean that we need to create a sort of blancmange morality that wobbles about, containing a bit of God, a bit of physics, a dash of Catholicism plus a smattering of Buddhism and a few sprigs of well-meaning atheism. That kind of ethical coalition wouldn't survive, and we need something that will. What we all need is to acknowledge our interdependency.

The hostility between science and religion stemmed from the 18th Century Enlightenment when science was forced to contradict some of the assertions of the Christian churches, particularly the Roman Catholic Church about the history of humanity.

Political liberals had their own quarrel with the Catholic Church, regarding it as a reactionary influence in politics and wanting it separated from a secular state. So the liberals joined the argument on the side of science and we got what became the familiar division of liberal thought and science against religion, though naturally individual liberals and scientists were sometimes believers.

This classic alliance between science and liberal thought in which the opinions of both are mutually reinforced, or the classic opposition between religion and scientific progress no longer operates across the board.

Indeed the present abortion quarrel in Britain is a striking example of a new pattern. Professor Stuart Campbell took photographs of foetuses at between 12 and 24 weeks' gestation and he admits that it never entered his head that the pictures would touch off a national debate. But the photographs were taken by a new technique showing foetuses younger that 24 weeks looking far more developed than had previously been accepted.

The photographs changed some people's minds about late abortion, including Professor Campbell's. He now thinks that "24 weeks if the baby is healthy is too late". The wider significance of this episode is that the Catholic Church, which opposes abortion, finds that science has done something which helps the Church and not necessarily liberal opinion.

Tolerance

Of course Professor Campbell doesn't share the Church's view on abortion. He supports abortion, but not as late as 24 weeks, pointing out that "science has moved on". So has the relationship between science and religion in my opinion. It would be sloppy thinking to claim there are no tensions and ridiculous to suppose that a common agreement can be arrived at.

There can be no agreement, but there can be tolerance. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, leading a secular party in an increasingly secular society, on Tuesday asked Britain's churches to play a bigger role in national life.

Not just Tony Blair, but many contemporary politicians, want society to get what help it can from both science and religion.

Now, in a spirit of tolerance can I do justice to the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, who alarmed me by predicting a future species as superior to humans as we are to bacteria? Well Sir Martin has a dedication to humanity and shares Albert Einstein's view that we need a perspective that's global, humanistic and long term. He can't be expected to share the scientifically illiterate prejudices of somebody like me.

Anyway Sir Martin doesn't rule out a place for humanity. He thinks spaceships launched from Earth might spawn new oases of life elsewhere. You see the interdependent, tolerant world doesn't have to be intellectually dull.

Edited March 28, 2005 by Thomas_Merton

[autonomous_unit]

I hardly think the two compare. Types of rock, stone, crystals and a watch?

I think your example is too extreme, so I was trying to show some structure or order coming from the other extreme... to primitive societies, however, I wonder if caves could have seemed like divinely supplied shelter?

As for evolution being a program or not, I mean it is no more a program than gravity, thermodynamics, or conservation of mass. It is understood by proponents as a mathematical (statistical) property of large systems.

The entire universe might be a program, running on some god's home computer. Or it might all be running in your head, or mine, but I do not think speculation of that form will get us anywhere.

... You believe that these accidental mutations created a code that instructs another mechanism how to produce the particular 100,000 different proteins that are essential for life, and you believe that these same accidents made all of this information retreivable, such that upon the demand for a particular protein the retreival mechanism singles out the precise1/100,000th of the molecule needed, copies it and then produces the particular molecule. This molecule is perhaps smaller that 1/1000 of the size of one of the pixels on your computer screen.

Does this not rather stretch reason and credulity to argue that all of this came about through an unobserved process of chance and dying animals? Or did 'something' code it?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It is not difficult for me to imagine the development of more complex organisms from simpler ones, particularly considering the huge timescales and the much shorter reproductive cycles of the primitive microorganisms where much of the hard chemistry had to be resolved. I am an expert in computation and information sciences rather than in biology. The idea of complex, yet structured information developing via mutation (under the influence of basic chemistry "laws") does not bother me, though I leave it to chemists and biologists to examine the potential for organic chemistry to support such incremental developments.

I do not have a strong belief in how the "genesis" of the very earliest microorganisms happened; In the meantime, I am willing to allow for the possiblity of random genesis because of two things: viruses and prions demonstrate how non-living chemical assemblies can reproduce at different levels of complexity beneath the cellular, and I do like the simplicity of such a system if it could be possible (Occam's razor).

I also am intrigued by the fact that many "primitive" animals and microorganisms have extremely large genomes. By modern accounts, the human genome is extremely concise for all the complexity of our physiology; we actually seem to be the product of much refinement and weeding out of useless junk compared to some preexisting "solutions" to the life problem. The ability to selectively express genes, and even to recombine them in different recipes within a cell, seem to be tricks acquired later after a large hodge-podge of genes were already available.

Again, because of my profession I find this as reinforcement of the evolutionary theory. There are randomized search techniques which are applied in many engineering disciplines where the problems are otherwise intractable: simulated annealing is a process of randomly perturbing one or more solutions and selectively retaining or discarding them based on their consistency to some underlying constraints (laws) and their relative efficacy according to some metrics (fitness). The logical extension of this is a research area called genetic programming, in which a sexual reproductive model is used to combine aspects of different solutions (as if by gene mixing) to produce the next generation of possible solutions. By comparison, simulated annealing uses an asexual mutation model.

These searching programs serve to simulate an abstracted form of evolution in order to tune solutions to problems such as integrated circuit layout, and it is interesting to note that they will sometimes produce qualitatively different solution structures that still have similar fitness for purpose. Also, the annealing process will yield crude solutions or finely tuned solutions depending on how long you let it run. These behaviors were not completely engineered into the algorithms, but are emergent properties of the mutation and selection process.

[penelope]

Then why this thread?

As the creator of the thread, I must confess..I had a hidden agenda. I wanted to see if it was possible for a fruitful discussion to develop and proceed on this forum without resorting to petty insults, slagging, and other general childishness. I chose the subject of "existence" because ,being answerless, it would promote a long thread and given the nature of the topic being rather detached from inter-personal battles it would satisfy my "test".

[Thomas_Merton]

As the creator of the thread, I must confess..I had  a hidden agenda. I wanted to see if it was possible for a fruitful discussion to develop and proceed on this forum without resorting to petty insults, slagging, and other general childishness....

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

(...in Farang Pub - fun, food, entertainment and Expat life?)

Please, Miss, did we pass, Miss?

Edited March 29, 2005 by Thomas_Merton

[penelope]

As the creator of the thread, I must confess..I had  a hidden agenda. I wanted to see if it was possible for a fruitful discussion to develop and proceed on this forum without resorting to petty insults, slagging, and other general childishness....

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

(...in Farang Pub - fun, food, entertainment and Expat life?)

Please, Miss, did we pass, Miss?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, with flying colors That would be Mr. (my nick also has a slight hidden agenda of trying to illicit blatantly obvious/presumed replys as opposed to a more objective process of determination)...i find the psychology of impersonal forms of communication fascinating and use my "research" in various practical software projects I am involved with.

[autonomous_unit]

...

Apparently there are laws of 'cause and effect'. 'Something' causes the 'organization'. Some law/s, or program/s, or mixture of, 'makes' the basic building blocks of Life 'organize' themselves in order to survive. For the whole Life system to work, 'some' Amoeba and single celled animals must remain Amoeba and single celled animals and 'cause' them not to evolve, in order to keep the food chain in tact. It would therefore seem that ALL life is 'organized' in some way.

It is, I think, irrefutable, that Life is 'organized'. That human brains and memories are 'organized'. It would seem that 1,000,000,000,000,000 ‘organized’ and "hardwired" electrical neurological connections within the brain would be sufficient to provide for memory of a lifetime. But research has shown that is far too small a number. Trillions of electrical connections are minuscule in comparison to what occurs in memory.

Where are these memories? How do you find them? What magnificent 'design' can provide for the recording of sensory perception, thought and logic into particular molecules - and then index them for instant retrieval?

How does 'organization' come from random mutations? At what stage did randomness, 'decide' to 'organize' itself? Or is the alternative... a creator... out of the question?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, I think you are getting my point and I yours. I think you are calling the universe itself a "program", i.e. made up of all the natural laws that govern motion, chemical reactions, nuclear reactions, etc.

There are folks who worry about how these natural laws came to be... how many dud universes must have sputtered out with the wrong balance of equations such that everything burned up in a flash or froze solid, or went poof and ever got to go beyond some exotic matter stage. I am not one of these people... I simply think it is unknowable how our universe came to be, because we (by definition) are trapped within it and cannot observe or understand anything that is beyond it.

So, if you take for granted that gravity, and time-space, and energy, and all that funs stuff just Are, then we can talk about how evolution, the quintessential self-organizing process, might have developed things from "primordial ooze" into the rich state they are in now. When we consider evolution to be a possible (or likely) explanation, we still have to explain the genesis of the first self-replicating chemicals of life... the best story I have heard (from the reductionist side of town) is that through brute force of having countless planets throughout the universe, ours was lucky enough to have the right mixture of raw materials, geology, temperature, etc. to get things over that hump.

I don't preclude there being a creator, as I am an agnostic. But neither do I preclude there _not_ being one. My work predisposes me to accepting the viability of self-organizing systems. Such systems do not have to "decide" to organize, but rather they are compelled to by their underlying, self-reinforcing structures. Just as a small amount of kindling can induce a blaze by firing its own draft. The meta-stability of organic chemistry, combined with our Sun and seasons, allows a multitude of reactions to occur which pump energy around without violating thermodynamics... life converts one form of order and structure into other forms, but overall it does work and must increase entropy (disorder) in the form of waste heat, etc. What keeps us going is the steady stream of sunlight that supplies temperature gradiants (ordered energy) in our biosphere, and heat loss out the night side of the Earth that keeps us from just getting hot and dead. There are nearly disjoint undersea ecologies driven by the latent geothermal gradient, e.g. volcanic vents fed by the cooling process that the Earth 's interior has been experiencing since it fell together from clouds of space dust.

As for the amount of memory we have---I think some research in areas like situational awareness demonstrate that our memories have a lot less information in them than one might expect. People often think they remember all the sensations of a past experience, but in fact they seem to remember a very small number of key facts and the brain reconstitutes the memory using these facts and a template or formula for filling in the details. Even worse, suggestibility means that people can manufacture convincing memories for events they never experienced!

This is pure speculation, but my feeling is that much of our dreamscape comes from this inherent ability... our brains regenerate an entire experience full of abstraction, symbols, and meaning out of scant few sensory details. I cannot tell you the number of times I've incorporated alarm clocks or other senses into a dream story that had little to do with the original signal...

[autonomous_unit]

... [moth color adapting to environment during Industrial Revolution]...

'Something' caused the moths to change. Something in the genetic code possibly, or something in the Natural Laws of survival (if indeed they exist?)

My question is: What 'causes' such steps in evolution? What 'makes' the moth change color in order to survive?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You're persistent. I'll keep playing the evolution fiddle for a while...

There wasn't a step where they changed color. There is always a spread of different colors in the population, much like there are spreads of different height, body type, tooth structure, etc. in human populations. It's the law of large numbers, much like what makes your casinos rake in a profit every year despite the randomness of each individual throw of the dice, etc. The overall population follows average probabilities, even though each member (or bet) shows sharp deviations from this average.

If humans were to evolve to be taller, let's say, it wouldn't be because our sperm thought it would be cool to start being tall. Rather, for some reason the taller guys and gals would have had more luck procreating, and even more luck procreating with each other. If there were sudden survival advantages to being either really tall or really short, you might find that we'd diverge into two subspecies because all the cross-breeders would have medium-build kids that usually died! This is overly simplistic, but hopefully shows the point of reproductive trends over generations...

What changed for the moths was the reproductive rates, most likely due to their variable rates of survival to reach reproductive age. The surviving moths breed and combine their coloring genes while the dead moths, poor suckers, do not. I don't know the details, but I am sure the moths reproduce at much shorter intervals, so what seems like a brief time to a human was actually many generations of successive breeding by the moths. This sudden environmental change that affected their visibility to predators is much like the exagerated impact we can have when we conduct selective breeding of plants or animals; the difference is that predators rather than our directed interference in breed pairs is what effected the selections.

These sudden pressures happen more easily in small environments, where migration patterns cannot weaken the effect by allowing individuals to "climb out of the water" instead of having to "sink or swim." This is one theory for why there were such interesting species on small islands in the Pacific instead of the same old dull ones from the Old World... interesting enough to actually inspire Darwin to ponder this question!

[buadhai]

My question is: What 'causes' such steps in evolution? What 'makes' the moth change color in order to survive?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It's simple. The moths that didn't change died before they could reproduce. The ones that did were able to survive.

But, the moth story is very atypical. The fact that genetic variation enabled them to change so dramatically in such a short time frame is very unusual.

Evolution makes sense only when change is by chance and time frames are huge.

[autonomous_unit]

I am not sure if I see the Universe as a program itself... but possibly as a set of Universal Laws. Law of Gravity, Laws of Chemistry, Physics etc etc etc. However, I still cannot in my wildest imagination, see that these laws can by happy accident, mutating, evolving, and produce Life as we know it. It seems to me that 'something' had to 'use' these laws in order to 'create' Life. I fail to see how 'organization' can come from chaos. No matter what time it takes.

Taking a stick, some sand, some carbon, metal elements and a crocodile... no matter how much time... how much happy accident... how many combinations of anything... will never, ever, by any evolution process whatever, make the watch I wear on my wrist.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I think this is a false counter-example. A watch is not a self-reproducing mechanism, so I have a hard time seeing it appear spontaneously as well. To talk about "evolution" of watches, technology, fashion, or other passive structures, we have to wink and nod and pretend they are reproducing on their own rather than being developed by an outside actor or craftsman who bases their design on experience with previous works.

If you can make this leap of abstraction, an interesting variant is to consider how many "generations" of tools it would take a craftsman to build himself modern machine tools if all he has to start with are trees (fuel), rocks (ore, abrasives), dirt (for making bricks and containers), water, fire, and willpower. A good jack-of-all-trades can do this in a short amount of time (years, not lifetimes): building primitive wood and stone tools, processing ore, refining metals, doing a bit of smithy and making more accurate and durable tools to get from the first chipper or grinder to finally having good lathes and drills made only of parts he has made from scratch. I forget the name, but somebody did this in my lifetime and wrote a book on it, just to prove it was possible. It's a sort of engineer's antidote to the post-apocalyptic vision of humans returning to the stone age for eons...

As you would say, this is because he is following a program and knows which way to go. It doesn't seem like evolution. In some sense though, the various ages of Man were the blind or spontaneous version of this: many men made small, almost random, changes and improvements and the economy and society as a whole slowly developed modern tools without any single blinding moment of insight.

The idea behind evolution as the origin of species is that the first thing to erupt was self-reproduction. Strange molecules were busy catalyzing reactions that produced copies of themselves, long before these molecules resembled anything we'd consider interesting or alive.

The biggest unanswered question is what kinds of macro-assemblies of molecules were doing this in the span from simple amino acids to complex proteins or multi-molecular structures and finally to something resembling a very simple microorganism. What sets microorganisms apart is that they carry around a little controlled chemistry environment inside of themselves, rather than depending on a perfect and nurturing environment to allow them to function.

[xyz]

When you dig deep into the questions of existance, you end up in a loop (e.g., egg came from a chicken, which came from an egg, which came from a chicken, which came from an egg, etc). You could end up in a long, complex loop (not a simple one like the egg and the chicken) with many steps and variations.

Most people resolve such questions by believing in God.

[autonomous_unit]

The biggest unanswered question is what kinds of macro-assemblies of molecules were doing this in the span from simple amino acids to complex proteins or multi-molecular structures and finally to something resembling a very simple microorganism. What sets microorganisms apart is that they carry around a little controlled chemistry environment inside of themselves, rather than depending on a perfect and nurturing environment to allow them to function.

This is the one! Do you have a best guess on this? It seems like Universal Laws of Chemistry to begin with... where certain amino acids and proteins develope and make a 'mass' of molecular structure/s. etc. How do these 'masses' become 'organized' almost as if they were 'designing' themselves... and developing their own 'codes'. There are codes, genes arn't there... and genetic codes? What is it that could design and develope them?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Nope, no idea. That is probably the main thing that keeps me agnostic...

[meom]

The biggest unanswered question is what kinds of macro-assemblies of molecules were doing this in the span from simple amino acids to complex proteins or multi-molecular structures and finally to something resembling a very simple microorganism. What sets microorganisms apart is that they carry around a little controlled chemistry environment inside of themselves, rather than depending on a perfect and nurturing environment to allow them to function.

This is the one! Do you have a best guess on this? It seems like Universal Laws of Chemistry to begin with... where certain amino acids and proteins develope and make a 'mass' of molecular structure/s. etc. How do these 'masses' become 'organized' almost as if they were 'designing' themselves... and developing their own 'codes'. There are codes, genes arn't there... and genetic codes? What is it that could design and develope them?

It seems you are referring to DNA.

[meom]

Life apparently started with a single cell that divided into two identical parts. This division was triggered by DNA

The difficulty with DNA is eventhough all cells contain DNA not all cells display the same characteristics. A skin cell has a different function than a nerve cell although they both contain the same DNA. It will take a while before science fully understand these things.

[autonomous_unit]

Life apparently started with a single cell that divided into two identical parts. This division was triggered by DNA

The difficulty with DNA is eventhough all cells contain DNA not all cells display the same characteristics. A skin cell has a different function than a nerve cell although they both contain the same DNA. It will take a while before science fully understand these things.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Heh, that's the problem. Ravisher wants to know, "who put the first cell there?" This is his wristwatch on the beach. Compared to the genesis of the first cell, it is much easier to accept all sorts of amazing evolutionary changes over time... How does one get from oxygen, CO2, water, methane, hydrogen sulfide, and all those other wonderful geological compounds to actually having DNA being copied by RNA within the controlled environment of a cell?

The day science can explain or replicate that is the day I stop being an agnostic. Probably.

[meom]

The day science can explain or replicate that is the day I stop being an agnostic. Probably. 

... and be forever a winner in the Thai lottery

[jackr]

Where did the Big Bang come from? Basically a nothingness that wanted to be something in a false vacuum (a nothingness at absolute zero). This nothingness overcame it's insatiable desire to be something and elevated itself? into a singularity - a super-dense spot of heat, light, and matter (non-visible because light couldn't escape the immense gravity at the time). Once it exploded, billionths and-then-some of a second after it was formed, it later found order and anti-matter was destroyed to leave positive matter which rapidly expanded (inflation) to leave essentially, roughly, the building blocks for stars (protostars) and so on, to which there are now around 100,000 billion in a galaxy and the same amount of galaxies again. All this visible matter is not enough to halt the expansion of our universe, which is where 'dark matter' comes in to add weight to the equation and, together with light matter, will eventually stall the near speed-of-light velocity at which the universe is still expanding and bring it back in on itself to a big crunch, merging all the super black holes at the centres of all the galaxies to create one Harry the bastard primary singularity, and off again...possibly.

The life bit isn't important in respect of the OPs question and is certainly overrated in the great scheme of things, egotistical as some of us mere mortals are; but if Hawking doesn't know who roused the original singularity, or is too afraid to let us know, then one can but keep guessing. God is certainly a comforting version for many...

[medicinebox]

Therefore, I say theories like the big bang theory only have value in that they seek to confirm our existence.

But as I am, and I am here, and I know I am here: I need no further proof.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So when you are dead, you have not died, you are simply showing zero life?

The book stops there then? There is no afterlife, reincarnacion, higher form?

Hmmmmm, interesting.

[Thomas_Merton]

Therefore, I say theories like the big bang theory only have value in that they seek to confirm our existence.

But as I am, and I am here, and I know I am here: I need no further proof.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So when you are dead, you have not died, you are simply showing zero life?

The book stops there then? There is no afterlife, reincarnacion, higher form?

Hmmmmm, interesting.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I do not think he is saying, nor implying your conclusion.

IMHO looking clockwise around the circle of life has more value than looking backwards.

But the greatest value is found concentrating on the here and now.

Edited April 3, 2005 by Thomas_Merton

[jackr]

Spot on! This is your life, you're living it now not tomorrow, so make the best of every day.

[buadhai]

Spot on! This is your life, you're living it now not tomorrow, so make the best of every day.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yep, the only moment you have is the one you're experiencing right now. So, enjoy it!