My Beliefs- GDR

Science.You keep using that word.I do not think that this word means what you think it means.

Do they? How do you know? How do you define "consciousness?" If the distinction between life and non-life is obvious, surely you should be able to define that distinction. Please be specific. Why, specifically, do you think that conclusion is more reasonable than alternative hypotheses? From what I can tell, you think that the fact that we are capable of curiosity is by itself indicative of intelligent design; is tht correct? If so, why? Please be specific as to why the existence of curiosity in the human mind, the capacity to question our own origins, is indicative of anything beyond "mindless" processes. Is there some specific mechanism caused by an intelligent agent that results in curiosity, that would not exist without the intelligent agent? Why do you think this, and how do you think you know it?

Airplanes and submarines are alive? Are birds and dolphins self-aware? What about other animals? Plants? How do you know? So is Tom made up of cells?What if, someday, we encounter alien life - it can talk to us, it is self-aware, it can build complex machines like we can, it has culture and so on. What if that life form does not have cells? Would we exclude intelligent self-replicating crystal structures from being "alive" simply because they don't have cells? Even if they meet every other definition of "life?"Do biologists define "life" as "that which is made of cells?" If not, why do you think that is? That's not an answer, GDR. That's simply repeating yourself. I asked why you think that A suggests B....and you just repeated that you think that A suggests B. Why? Why would we not be curious, even if we evolved from lifeless elements?I'll point out that we did evolve from lifeless elements, you're made of lifeless elements that happen to be arranged in a pattern conducive to the complex self-replicating reactions we identify as "life" (or, to put it in your own terms, you're made of cells that are made of water and carbon and nitrogen and so on). That's not really in question. What's in question is whether an intelligent Tom made it all happen.Please be specific in your answer - why would you expect our relative curiosity about our origins to be different depending on whether we are the result of intelligent design or mindless evolution? I'm well aware that's what you believe, GDR. I was asking what you think that mechanism might be, and why you think it exists.You've outlined precious little over 367 posts in this thread. Most of what you've done is repeat yourself, or respond to specific questions with high-level, nonspecific answers - much like in Message 1033, to which I am replying.There's a reason I'm asking these specific questions, GDR. When I ask you "do you think there is some mechanism causing this," I don't want an answer of "yes." I want you to tell me exactly what you think is going on - there should be a reason that you think A is more likely than B, and yet so far all I can get you to do is to repeat that you think A is more likely than B.We're far beyond personal opinion here, GDR. It's not jsut a matter of "well I think blue is better than red." We're talking about actual possible worlds here - different worlds, different hypotheses, and each of us thinks that the real world is different. And yet there is only one reality, only one objective world, and so one or both of us must be wrong.If you cannot answer why, if you can only repeat your conclusions, that's a rather large red flag that your beliefs are based on wishful thinking and fantasy, and not any sort of careful analysis of the real world.

It shows nothing of the sort.You;re trying to make the argument that compelxity implies design, and it flatly does not. For an example all you need do is look at a snowflake, or any crystal - complex, ordered structures that occur without the involvement of any intelligent agency.An even better example is the pulsar - a stellar phenomenon so structured that scientists hypothesized that they might actually be intelligently generated. Until they discovered their true nature - they're spinning dead stars emitting radio and other radiation from their poles, like a cosmic lighthouse.There is a very strong difference between intelligent engineering and the sort of thing that evolution and other natural processes result in. All of them can bear the appearance of design...but in fact only one subset was actually designed. If you admit that you don;t know that your dogs are self-aware, you don;t know what's going on in their heads, and you don;t even know how anyone would ever obtain that information, how can you even say that they appear self-aware?Let me make an analogy. I have no idea who committed the murder, and I have no idea how we could possibly learn who committed the murder. But it looks to me like Jim did it.You're making massive logical leaps, GDR. You're reasoning based on gut feeling and personal preference, but you can't actually identify why you think you know things. This is, again, a major red flag that your conclusions in these arenas are baseless. More than half of your definition of "life" is "that which is alive," or "that which is not dead." That's not a definition - you couldn't possibly use such a definition to actually distinguish whether a subject is alive or not, if you were uncertain in the first place. The biological definition is closest to "c" - "an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction."And yet there are things that seem to blur the distinction between life and death. A virus cannot procreate by itself, it does not grow, it does not metabolize...but it does reproduce when infecting a host cell, it does pass heritable information, and so on. It's NOT and answer, GDR. Not even a little. It might be the closest you can give, but it's not an answer to the question.You;re saying that A suggests B. In order to make that claim, ever, there has to be a reason that A suggests B.For example, if I say that the presence of gun residue on Jim's hands suggests that he recently fired a gun, there is a reason for that connection. When you fire a gun, chemical residue from the combusting cordite winds up on the clothing and hands of the person who fired the gun. That residue is specific and only comes from burning the cordite used in ammunition, and it is deposited in a specific pattern that we can recognize after test-firing many guns in laboratories. Because it is extremely unlikely that Jim was covered in that saame chemical residue in that same pattern by any means other than by firing a gun, the residue is strongly suggestive that he has, in fact, recently fired a gun.You should be able to give me a similar explanation for why you think that the mere existence of curiosity about origins is suggestive of an intelligent agent's involvement in those origins. You should be able to show me, as I did above with gunshot residue, why that specific curiosity would be less likely in a world where no intelligent agent was involved in our origins, but more likely in a world where one was.The fact that you can't even sufficiently understand the question beyond "I think A suggests B" is itself strongly suggestive that your reasoning is completely baseless.I expect that any intelligent species, regardless of its origins, would be curious about those origins. Yet "opinion" is not a justification for irrational argument, GDR. The logic you describe as driving you to your conclusions is terrible. It's inconsistent, and usually just outright incomplete.What appears to be happening in your head, GDR, is that you have already pre-established what you believe, and now you're going back and trying to fill in the reasons. Those reasons are incomplete and inconsistent because they didn't exist until recently - they're post-hoc rationalizations being used to justify a pre-existing belief.You;ve written down your conclusion, "humanity is the result of intelligent design," at the bottom of the paper, and now you're going back up to the top and filling in clever reasons that ought to be true - reasons like "we're curious, and that is suggestive of intelligent design."But that's not how rational thought works, GDR. Rational thought can only ever be used to decide which position to take int he first place - it cannot be used to go back and justify one that already existed. As soon as you wrote down "human beings are intelligently designed," that conclusion was either right or wrong, and all your clever post-hoc justifications are irrelevant.When you notice that you cannot fully answer a question like "why does A suggest B," the proper response is not to continue repeating that A suggests B, or to say "well it's just my opinion," The former is just stubborn irrationality, and the latter would only be appropriate if we were discussing favorite colors.The proper response when you are unsure of why you believe a thing is to question that belief.If you hold a belief, any belief about the way the world really is, and you cannot determine the real root causes for that belief, or if your root causes are falsified, the proper response is to give up that belief, or at least to hold it under suspicion pending additional evidence.And yet this is not what you do.You've already written your conclusion. You have no intention of changing it - there is no argument that could ever exist that would cause you to change that belief, as it stands today - rational argument and logic are used by you only to create those clever post-hoc justifications, but the simple fact is that you refuse to change even if it is appropriate to do so. In that stubbornness, you refuse to ever hold a more accurate view of the world than the one you hold today. Every improvement is a change; every time we embrace a more accurate view of the real world, we change our old, less accurate beliefs. And you've drawn a line and said "I'm not changing this one."That's the real bottom line of this thread, GDR, 1000+ messages in. You believe that life is intelligently designed. This conclusion is not at all the result of careful consideration, logical reasoning, or examination of evidence. You don't even honestly consider alternate hypotheses, you don't have any internal conception of relative probabilities, and you really don't even care whether you're right or how you would ever know that. Because your belief is not based on rational thought, rational argument cannot dissuade you.

You;re just falling for infinite regression again - turtles, or in this case "designers," all the way down. If I were to prove to you that the processes were not designed, then you'd move the goalposts back further and claim design of the Universe itself.The simple answer is that we can see snowflakes form, we can model the mechanisms behind that formation with high accuracy, and there does not appear to be any designer involved. Ice crystals (and indeed all crystals) form due to the molecular structure of their constituents, in this case water. Water ice crystals, salt crystals, sugar crystals - devoid of a mold forcing them into a specific form, they will grow in specific shapes. The process happens by itself. Nobody carves out the sugar crystals, nobody specifically places each piece of the snowflake, the formation of crystals is a consequence of basic chemistry and physics.Since you're trying to move it farther back and claim the design was performed on the natural laws themselves...well, that's just yet another of your many logical leaps. We know the laws of physics exist. We even know what some of them are to a degree of accuracy sufficient to develop advanced technology.But there's no reason at all to presume that some intelligent agency specifically made those laws of physics. "Laws" in this sense aren't the type made up by conscious beings in a legislative body, or edicts from a king - they're the consistent, generalized behaviors of the Universe itself. We make up these "laws" to represent those behaviors to the best of our current understanding.Yes, this Universe happens to have the correct conditions to allow for human life...at least on one planet.But That doesn;t really mean much. And in fact, if the Universe was made just so in order to make it habitable for human beings, well...the "designer" did a really shitty job. Humans have a hard time surviving in most of the environments on this planet, let alone anywhere else in the Universe.If I were a designer trying to make up natural laws so that intelligent life would form, I wouldn't make the vast majority of the Universe empty space. If I wanted humans specifically to form, I'd make a lot more planets like Earth and a lot fewer binary and trinary star systems, super-Jupiters, supernovae, and so on. If I could just make up the root behaviors of the Universe itself, I wouldn't even bother with evolution - why waste all that time? Just pull the "I dream of Jeanie" method and poof them into existence.It just doesn't add up.But even if we were speaking from absolute uncertainty, GDR, the basic proposition of a designer would still be irrational from the perspective you're taking. You're violating Occam's Razor, the Principle of Parsimony, just for a start. More nonsense about the validity of opinion. Nobody "knows" much of anything, GDR. Certainty is denied us, as we can only know what we observe, and our observations and even our memories are easily fooled.But reasonable is the absolute opposite of your line of thinking. It's simply irrationa, full stop. It's a matter of logical leaps and fallacies, nothing more. You tried.I specifically said in my analogy that I have no evidence, and that I have no way to gather evidence. By definition I cannot have any "good reason" to believe Jim did anything. I have exactly as much "good reason" to believe Jim committed murder in that scenario as I do that magic fairies push the Earth around the Sun. That was the point of the analogy.You compeltely missed the point.The point of that section was that I was showing you specifically why observation A suggested hypothesis B. I was showing you the causal and probabilistic justification for why B was the hypothesis most likely to be accurate. I wasn;t talking about murder in this case - this was separate from the analogy above. The hypothesis said nothing about murder - only that we hypothesize that Jim recently fired a gun. That was all.The point was to show you what I was asking for from you. I can show you in great detail specifically why a given observation increases the probability of a given hypothesis.I was trying to get you to do the same. You've said that the observation of human curiosity over origins increases the probability that humans were designed. I've tried, repeatedly and at length, to get you to explain just how you get from A to B in that statement.WHY, specifically, does the observation that humans are curious about origins mean that we are more likely to be designed? Why does that observation positively affect the probability of that particular hypothesis? Why do you think that observation does not also increase the probability of competing hypotheses, such as the hypothesis that human beings were "designed" only by natural selection, and not any intelligent agent? 100% of the intelligent species we have observed are curious regarding their origins.The sample size is small, but when that's the only relevant evidence in existence, it's all you can use as a basis for a hypothesis.So the question really is "given that every single intelligent species we've ever encountered has been curious regarding it's own origins, why do you think that species that was not intelligently designed would not also have the same curiosity?"I can't think of a reason. Can you? You;re creating aa specific exception for your theistic beliefs where none should exist.Your theistic beliefs are a subset of the total set of beliefs you hold regarding the way the Universe actually is. These are not "opinions" on the level of personal preference, like a favorite color. You simply give your theistic beliefs special immunity, while your nontheistic beliefs, which have less emotional connection, are denied that special immunity.But that's irrational, GDR. Our beliefs are the sum total of our personal models of the way the world actually is - our internal maps of the single, objective territory. When you observe territory you can update your map - and yet you are creating maps of regions you've never observed, and refusing to update other regions after you've observed that the territory is different.It's not a matter of "rights." You have every right to believe that the Sun is made of swiss cheese.But when it comes to logical validity, your theistic beliefs are simply invalid Even after having the logical fallacies pointed out to you, you still insist otherwise. Your beliefs are irrational.Given your responses I can only conclude that your arguments are post-hoc rationalizations of your pre-existing beliefs. You didn't arrive at your theistic beliefs by observing the Universe and then making careful, logically consistent extrapolations.Which is why this conversation is nearly pointless. There is no argument, no observation, no matter how accurate or provable, that would dissuade you from your present conclusion that humanity is the result of an intelligent designer. Oh, you might shift around a little - you might change where you think the design took place - from the genetic code itself, to the evolutionary process, to physics and chemistry, or even to the Universe itself. But nothing will dissuade you from the root conclusion of design itself.Because rational thought cannot be used to justify a given position; it can only be used to determine which position to take in the first place. A conclusion arrived at rationally can be changed through the introduction of new evidence or argument. But rationalization doesn't seek to improve accuracy - the point of rationalization is to find excuses to maintain belief.And that's all you're doing here.

This, like just about everything else you say, is an unfounded assumption, in this case based upon your ignorance of both neurology and computer science twisted by post-hoc rationalization."Software" is not always something that "runs on" hardware. We make programmable computers because it is convenient for us - but even inside of your computer much of the actual processing and the algorithms that are processed are hardware.You're drawing a distinction where there is none, and for no reason other than trying to fit the square peg of evidence into the round hole of your irrational assumptions.

You are confused because you don;t understand the connection between neurology and behavior, and the other effects besides physical neurology that affect behavior. Because you don;t understand these things, you're inserting your own external factor, when simpler explanations exist that are backed by solid research and evidence.The brain is incredibly complex, and yet the mechanisms that generate that complexity are remarkably simple. The instruction set for the brain to grow is, essentially, a probabilistic recursive fractal - a simple set of instructions for a process that simply repeats itself in a pattern and generates incredible complexity.Take a look at the Mandelbrot Set. It's a fractal - an iterative equation that generates infinite complexity. THis is the equation: And this is some of what it creates when graphed: Take a look at the Wiki page for more. Infinite complexity is generated by simple, repeated iterations of a very small mathematical equation.Physiologically, including with regard to the brain, we are all virtually identical. There is a reason that a smile is a universal signal, and that you can tell when a person is angry even if they're from a completely different cultural background and speak a different language.Now, the brain does not grow as perfectly as a computer can draw a graph. A genetic mutation can cause the code for that iterative process to differ slightly; a few sick or faulty neurons during development (and sometimes even after) can cause major repercussions, the neurological equivalent of a butterfly flapping its wings and generating a distant hurricane.But more than that, the brain is not static.In a computer, the processor and the RAM do not physically rewire themselves to handle new programming.The brain does. We can even watch it happen with modern imaging technology. When your brain records a memory, it physically changes, establishing new connections between neurons (and it's not like a video player; it's more of a series of associations of regions that represent abstract concepts - when you remember a memory, you are in effect recreating the memory each time within your imagination, including filling in missing details, it's why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable).Because your brain is not a programmable device running abstract software, it has to actually reconfigure physically to perform new tasks. This is what we actually observe, it's not an opinion or a shaky conclusion, we can watch it happen.We've even been able to copy the physical structure from one brain to another, transplanting memories. I linked to that experiment earlier in this thread. You ignored it because it doesn't fit with your beliefs.So we start with virtualy identical brains. We all, every human being, has certain behaviors that are identical. We all start out with instincts to grasp with our hands and to suck with our mouths, while we all have to learn to walk.We all instinctually smile to express happiness, and we all have an ability to simulate the feelings and experiences of another - empathy (which has itself been extensively studied from a neurological basis - even in other primates, when Primate A sees Primate B do something that Primate A has done before, the neurons in Primate A's brain fire in exactly the way they would if Primate A were the one experiencing the event, rather than Primate B).But since our brains reconfigure to learn, differences develop based on what our brains learn while we mature. Our experiences, including much of our moral fabric, is learned and based on our environment, from immediate family to our larger surrounding cultural norms. These things change over time as well.So while we all have some of the same foundation for morality, like empathy, we don't always reach precisely the same moral frameworks. We all tend towards preferring fairness over unfairness; we care about what happens to people we can empathize with, and we have greater difficulty feeling that empathic impact when the suffering of others is more abstract, or related to experiences we don't have personal memories of sufficient similarity to significantly relate with. Depending on what our culture has reinforced, we may differently prioritize concepts like mercy, vengeance, punishment, rehabilitation, greed, charity, compassion, and so on.The nature vs nurture debate is not actually mutually exclusive. The answer in the case of morality is "both," to varying degrees. But in no case is there any requirement for either a "designer" or some great external objective standard of morality. Human morality is very well understood and explained from a biological, neurological, and social standpoint without unfounded leaps in logic.

GDR consistently throws around the word "objective" inappropriately. He keeps using that word...I do not think it means what he thinks it means.Why, just a few posts ago, he said:

quote:

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We know that there is a distinction between right and wrong. We know those things objectively.

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And we know that there is no objective difference between "right" and "wrong." Those are subjective labels applied by intelligent beings; just like a stop sign, they lose all meaning without intelligent minds to apply subjective meaning to them.

To a point. We can objectively measure certain statistics (population growth rates, how long the societies last, etc) about various societies for comparison, and compare those societies with some version of the Golden Rule against those without.Not sure how many societies would not have some Golden Rule analogue, simply because empathy is a basic human trait, like the ability to see or hear or think abstractly. But the results of such a comparison would be objective - they would be true even if no intelligent observer were around to measure them.