There is no claim that there is no mind, There is only assumption that a metaphysical mind hasn't been demonstrated. You have not demonstrated it.

nature - the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.

That is all we mean by natural. We are making no metaphysical claims.

I don't believe so. The way I'm reading it is as a "placeholder". That is, we all know we have minds but we aren't going to say it. Too much is at stake. — Rich

You are misinterpreting what they meant then. What they mean by naturally is that how it could change (depending on conditions of the cell) without them manipulating the histone for experimental reasons.

The phenomena we refer to when we say the natural laws of physics are there. It is demonstrable, testable, noncontradictory. That is what science does, to create models to understand our universe. If you reject this, then you are a hypocrite for using all the technology you use that was created using the principles of physics. Our understanding of this is what we refer to as the law of physics. And you also believe in the practicality of this phenomena. In fact if you didn't, you wouldn't have any problem jumping off of a cliff. But you know better.

The claim of determinism seems to me more like a claim that has to do with metaphysics and is something that can't be demonstrated. I don't really see the purpose of claiming it's true or not when it clearly can't be demonstrated.

What we do have is a scientific model of how the universe works. We don't know why, but we know it does. And it's important that we understand it. We know that if you drop an apple, it falls. We know that if you react certain chemicals together, they react the way we predict. And there's no reason make metaphysical claims about the Mind whatever you even mean by it that are somehow beyond the material brain and cause and effects.

That's the important word. That's the substitution word for the action of the evolving Mind.

Natural Laws
Natural Selection
Natural Occurring changes

All are the Mind. — Rich

The way they are using naturally there is the same way they'd say if you drop an apple, it naturally falls. Physics is the way it is and we don't know why it all turned out the way it did. But there's no necessary reason to rename it the Mind, whatever that even means. Didn't we already try to have a discussion where I was refuting your claim that determinism is impossible? And rather than addressing it you said "well you can't prove determinism" even though I was never even asserting for determinism. You want to have the same discussion again? lol

All they were doing in that experiment was change the histone in a way that is similar to how the histone could change without their interference (depending on the conditions), and see if that change would persist in the histones of the next generation. They found that it does. That's all that is happening there

This is the key phase. Ones eyes and ears should always perk up when "natural" is used. Just think Mind. — Rich

All it is saying is that naturally occurring changes can be passed on through generations. Natural changes can happen for many reasons depending on the conditions. And the researchers tried to mimic the changes that would naturally occur to see if they could get results. Meaning they simulated the conditions of the cell. There's nothing special about this lol

I've already in previous comments talked about how genes are regulated and other parts of the cell will affect genes. No one who has taken an upper biology class thinks today thinks that it's only the sequences themselves that matter. The presence of proteins, other enzymes, alternative splicing effects, etc. all affect how the genetic code is expressed. And it is pretty well established that environmental conditions do affect genetics.

Science itself is not a religion. Some scientist have a hard time parting with a theory they've been working on for 30 years of their life. Does that really surprise you? We are human and some scientists have trouble letting go of what has been their whole life. It's a coping mechanism. However the nature of science is always changing to accommodate new information. And as long as we are honest, science is good.

I actually read most of the article. He criticizes the central dogma of Watson and Crick because they didn't account for alternative splicing. We don't learn the central dogma today as Watson and Crick understood it. We have already accommodated alternative splicing, in fact that's what I was talking about in the previous comment. And it goes on to talk about other complexities that are important to understand the way genes really work.

Really all the article is saying is that the Human Genome Project was a failure because it's approach to understanding genetics was way too simplistic. He's saying that the project doesn't take into account alternative splicing and all the other things in a cell that influence it. That may be true, I don't know the details of the genome project. But I did not see anything said that contradicts the way we learn about the central dogma and biology today. When we learn the Watson and Cricks central dogma, we assume that it is just a model to understand genetics in a basic way, but that there is way more complex stuff happening in the cell.

What book was it?

The central dogma is a model that we created based off of what we understood. Just because genetics is confusing and we have a hard time with it, does not refute the central dogma. It may make it more shaky, but it definitely doesn't refute it.

If you have any other sources feel free to post them because I have never heard of this.

I didn't read the full article, but from the quote you posted that is absolute nonsense. Science has well established that many are responsible for one trait. Combinations of codes matter. And there is such a huge amount of combinations of sequences it's mind blowing. On top of that, genes are regulated as well. And it would actually be ridiculous to think that we could have understood all of these complexities by now. It sounds like the author of that article is refuting his understanding of genetics after he learned about punnet squares in his highschool biology class.

There are far too few human genes to account for the complexity of our inherited traits or for the vast inherited differences between plants, say, and people. — Rich

This is a very very simplified view that does not understand the complexity of genetics. It's not "this code accounts for this trait, this code accounts for this trait." Many codes combined account for different traits and it's all very regulated. When and where transcription happens matters. Yes we don't fully understand genetics. That's not surprising, it is extremely complicated. But to assume the genetics don't account for traits because there are not enough genes is just nonsense.

I'm gonna need some more sources before I throw out what I've learned in college about biology. Sadly, a 2003 article on a farmers website that could easily be propaganda won't do.

Regardless, even if that was true, all that would mean is that we don't understand it. It doesn't mean that we conclude there is some immaterial force that leads to why living organisms are the way they are that goes beyond our knowledge of how atoms work.

DNA is made up of smaller parts which themselves carry out directed activity. Biologist have not found the bottom.

Why don't you address the logic of my reply rather than referring to some conflicting opinion which you hold? — Metaphysician Undercover

I was addressing the logic.

DNA is made up of nucleotides. It is biochemistry which is just chemistry that is more directed towards biology. Chemical reactions happen. It can go down all the way to the atom, and we try our best to understand how and why molecules and the atoms they are made of react the way they do. Up to this point, it makes sense for the most part why particles do what they do. Beyond that when getting into subparticles and quantum mechanics, it gets confusing. But just because we don't know doesn't mean we never will.

At some point we could ask why physics is the way it is. We may never know. But how do we go from asking that to assuming there is an immaterial soul inside of us? And then we would ask is there then a soul in other animals? In plants? In bacteria? In viruses? In atoms? Where do we draw the line, after assuming there even is an immaterial soul inside of us?

Just to clarify, is your argument that there has to be an immaterial formula for physics?

Hmm. This seems quite odd to me. The British during the early years of the second world war using quite obsolete radar technology were able to get a very accurate position on their bombers flying over Germany on night raids without using the clocks on the bombers. The only clocks that were needed were the clocks at the ground stations back in England. That was over 75 years ago. Today. much of the world is not covered by GPS, due to a lack of ground stations. This GPS clock claim is repeated over and over by thousands of people, but original sources are very few. There are as far as I can tell about an equal number of people in the field who challenge this claim, but rarely ever referenced. I wonder if popularity gets in the way of actual information transmission. Technologically speaking, there is no reason that necessitates a clock on any GPS satellite. — curiosity in action

I can't really speak to much about this because I don't know it very well. The reason relativity has to be applied to GPS is because the satellites are very very high up where it matters. Did the radar technology involve something that high up? If it was only as high as a plane, it might be negligible.

It seems to me that this may be true when trying to measure time. To me, it still makes sense to say some sort of unmeasured absolute time passes at the same rate for all things all of the time. To illustrate, consider two human beings born at the same time in the same location. One travels to a far away place in space, and returns 20 years later (local time). Even if their watches measured a different amount of time, they have still existed for the same amount of absolute time. — CasKev

I'm not an expert at this, but this is from what I've read from interest. Time is relative. An absolute time doesn't make sense to me. We could use Earth time as a reference to measure other time just to have a standard, but we have to remember that our Earth time is affected by the curvature of space and the speed that we are traveling in space. I don't see how time could pass without space, since spacetime is one thing. This stuff is very complicated though, and we can only speculate what it would be like. We still don't have an equation to explain the universe, and probably have a long way to go if we ever get there.

I disagree with this because DNA is the formula that directs biology. This can be seen at all levels of life: human, other mammals, reptiles, plants, bacteria, and to some extent viruses as well (even though they are considered nonliving).

Here’s an application of relativity showing how time and space are connected, just in case you hadn’t come across this. I copied and pasted this from a website.

“Because an observer on the ground sees the satellites in motion relative to them, Special Relativity predicts that we should see their clocks ticking more slowly (see the Special Relativity lecture). Special Relativity predicts that the on-board atomic clocks on the satellites should fall behind clocks on the ground by about 7 microseconds per day because of the slower ticking rate due to the time dilation effect of their relative motion [2].

Further, the satellites are in orbits high above the Earth, where the curvature of spacetime due to the Earth's mass is less than it is at the Earth's surface. A prediction of General Relativity is that clocks closer to a massive object will seem to tick more slowly than those located further away (see the Black Holes lecture). As such, when viewed from the surface of the Earth, the clocks on the satellites appear to be ticking faster than identical clocks on the ground. A calculation using General Relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by 45 microseconds per day.

The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time.”

It doesn’t really make sense to me how time could exist if there’s no space since they are in a sense the same thing. But humans still have a long way to go to understanding the universe.

Society can decide whatever they want to be morally right. The acts have to be similar by being consistent with the presupposed values that society has decided upon, or else the acts by society’s own definition wouldn’t fit the term morally right. So i think we are in agreement here as well.

It's not your assertion that "murder of innocents is wrong" derives from the values of a particular society that I object to, It's your assertion that this is in some way categorically different from "the earth is flat", which, in exactly the same way, derives from a particular society's opinion about what 'flat' means. Neither come from some outside source, but neither are entirely subjective either, anyone trying to argue that a ball was flat could be countered by showing that a ball is unlike all the other things which we agree are flat; someone trying to argue that murder was good could be countered by showing how murder is unlike all the other things we call good. — Pseudonym

The reason I was comparing flat and morally right is because flat is a word that describes a concept and unless you change the word, it will be true. As you've pointed out, that is what happens with morality as well and I don't disagree. Saying that something is morally right is dependent upon presupposed value and it's ambiguous. People have different values so people disagree on what is morally right. As as you acknowledged in a previous comment, what society as a whole considers morally right can change as values change. So what is morally right is subject to change depending on what people find important and/or desire, and practically there are a lot of differences between cultures and periods of time. I was just using that distinction to point out that people define what is morally right differently depending on their values and I don't see how there are "better" values, people just find different things important and therefore define morality differently. Though I think you made some good points and I don't disagree with what you've said.

It's not your assertion that "murder of innocents is wrong" derives from the values of a particular society that I object to — Pseudonym

When a person murders, what makes it wrong is that he committed an act in a group of acts that society has defined as morally wrong based off of society's values. I have no reason to think there is something "wrong" about it that goes beyond that. That's the main point of this thread and it seems as though you don't disagree, so I think we are on the same page unless I've misrepresented you.

I'm saying that in ordinary language, physics and in mathematics, to determine something is to make a comparison. So it only makes sense to employ the concept when relating states of affairs or parts of the universe to each other. It doesn't make sense to describe the universe as a whole as being determined or undetermined. — sime

If you're saying it doesn't make sense to describe the universe as a whole as being determined or undetermined, it sounds like you aren't a determinist. Determinism means all events. Meaning decisions you make (which are events) are also then dependent on causes.

Murder is principally wrong because it goes against the nature of life itself. This can't be demonstrated as if it was a scientific fact, but can be demonstrated on other ways. Doesn't the fact that societies around the globe progressively traveled from allowing killing in many situations towards universal ban on killing tell you something? — Dalibor

All this tells me is that as societies have become more sophisticated, they have as a whole come to value not killing. This could be because attitudes have changed, because it is useful for cooperation purposes, safety, etc. Probably a combination of many reasons.

My main point is that when someone does something that others consider morally wrong, essentially what happened is that the person did something that goes against the values (what they find is important and/or desirable) of the majority in the absence of an objective morality. Until you can demonstrate some objective morality that goes beyond an expression of what the majority values, I have no reason to think that a murderer is doing anything other than being morally wrong in the sense that he is going against what the majority of people value, who have defined the term morality based off of that.

By 'they' I assume you mean definitions of morality in common usage? Haidt and Graham for example identify five common threads; Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, but others such a Bernard Gert list them as avoiding being the cause of death, pain, disability, loss of freedom, loss of pleasure, in that order (i.e, you might unavoidably be the cause of the later ones on the the list in order to avoid being the cause of the earlier ones). — Pseudonym

What is the reason for labeling this group of acts as morally right? Is the term morally right a label used for this group because it is a useful way to express the values of the majority of society (like care, fairness, etc.)? Meaning what is important and/or desirable to the majority of people in that society?

You were comparing two things.
1) The roundness or flatness of the earth.
2) The rightness or wrongness of killing. — charleton

The reason I was comparing those two things is because people have been arguing that the killing is wrong as if it is objectively true yet that's what I have been refuting. I'm not the one saying 2 can be true like 1. I'm saying that has to be demonstrated, and that's what many people in this thread have been trying to do.

It’s pretty clear he’s not gonna answer my question because I think he and everyone else knows what will follow when he responds. At this point he is clearly just trolling. Though he probably was from the start and I got baited. But its okay i had fun

Okay you win this argument via excessive use of misdirect and intellectual dishonesty. I am now converting to nonbeliefism. I hope everyone else sees the light too.

Are you theistic? — ProgrammingGodJordan

Another misdirect. I’ll ask this one more time. If you still refuse to clarify your position by ignoring my question then you’re being intellectually dishonest and be notorious for being a troll on this forum. Your response to this comment right here will determine that.

If you see a chair in front of you and I asked you "Is there a chair in front of you?" what would you say?

Here is an answer:
Whether or not anybody believes it, gravitational theory obtains — ProgrammingGodJordan

That doesn’t answer my question. In case you forgot, here: If you see a chair in front of you and I asked you "Is there a chair in front of you?" what would you say?

So then how do we decide if things are similar enough in to be in the group of morality? What do they even share in common that makes them similar?

The OP won’t answer my question :(

I like the points tou’ve made. I’m still a little unclear on your position.

Are you saying that determinism requires something transcendental? and if so, what is this transcendental thing?

Or are you saying that determinism doesn’t require transcendental? And if not, then what allows the universe to be determined? It just is?

Back in the day it was morally acceptable to stone homosexuals. That behavior was not in the “in group” for what is morally wrong by definition of the societies in the past that did it. Yet now we consider that morally wrong. Is this because we have redefined the word morality to mean a different group of actions where now that act would be considered morally wrong even though it wasnt in the past?

If it is something which can arguably be shown to be similar to all the other behaviours already in the group "moral behaviour", then it is a reasonable argument. Others might disagree, but we can have such a discussion based on arguments about similarity. If, however, the culture tries to claim that something belongs in the group which is entirely dissimilar from everything else in the group, and provides no argument as to what it is about this behaviour which they consider similar, then they are objectively wrong, just as wrong as they would be if they decided to just randomly call thing 'car' based on no similarities at all. — Pseudonym

When you say that it is a group that is similar, similar in what way? (Non harm causing, helping, stablizing society, etc.)

Anyway until he answers my question and clarifies his position, we can’t become nonbeliefists since we don’t fully understand it.

reckless. chill lol

I'll rephrase it like this to make it more simple

If you see a chair in front of you and I asked you "Is there a chair in front of you?" what would you say?

If there are two groups of people in the world and one groups say that cars are modes of transport with four wheels and the other say they are small swimming things that live in rivers, how do we decide whether the thing I'm driving to work is car or not? It's the same question, morality isn't special in this regard. The reality is we don't have two such cultures so the issue does not arise. — Pseudonym

The difference here is the word morality still means the same thing in both cultures. It means what is right or wrong. So now we have to define those two words. What is a "right" act and what is a "wrong" act. The words themselves mean the same thing in both cultures, however it has gotten blurry what each culture should consider to be right or wrong. So is what one culture considers to be right whatever they want to be right? Is that what you're saying? I'm just trying to understand your position better.

Do you detect that you shall demonstrate your point to be valid, regardless of whatever answer I return? — ProgrammingGodJordan

Maybe, maybe not. We won't know till you answer right? So answer the question

If you see a chair in front of you, would you make the statement there is a chair in front of me, or make the statement there is likely a chair in front of me?

Or are you gonna be intellectually dishonest and refrain from clarifying your position to someone who's trying to understand?

If there are only 2 cultures that live separately in the world. One culture says it is wrong to needlessly kill and the other culture says it is morally acceptable to needlessly kill. How do we decide which culture is right? Is it only dependent on the presupposed values that each culture uses to establish a definition of the word "morality"?

Do you mean the same way I showed your recent idea (which was bundled with that query) to be false? — ProgrammingGodJordan

That's irrelevant to the point I'm about to make. You are the king of misdirect. If you keep misdirecting then you'll be seen as someone who is intellectually dishonest. You wouldn't want that would you? So answer the question.

If you see a chair in front of you, would you make the statement there is a chair in front of me, or make the statement there is likely a chair in front of me?

That query is in the same realm of your recent idea, which has been shown to be invalid. — ProgrammingGodJordan

Just answer the question and I will show you why it's relevant when you answer it.

I'm doing this so you can clarify your position for me because I still don't fully understand it. And if you refuse to clarify your position then you are being intellectually dishonest in this discussion. So answer the question.

If you see a chair in front of you, would you make the statement there is a chair in front of me, or make the statement there is likely a chair in front of me?

I try my best