• The American Gun Control Debate
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    That doesn't tally with my understanding of it. I know for instance that Switzerland has high gun ownership and low homicide rates, but then, they also have strict requirements for gun management in the home (and besides, they're Swiss).

    But in the USA, it's well-known that there's a clear correlation between high rates of gun ownership, generally, and high rates of gun deaths including homicide. I checked with ChatGPT who came back with some sources.

    Q: Do you have any figures on relatonships between rates of gun ownership and homicide in the USA?

    ChatGPT: Research indicates a significant positive association between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates in the United States. This connection is critical for informing public health policy:

    1. A study cited on SpringerLink noted that the U.S. has high rates of firearm homicides and high gun prevalence, with a significant positive association historically observed between the two. The study used more elaborate estimates of gun ownership across the 50 states to analyze this relationship​​.

    2. According to Phys.org, an econometric study conducted by economist Karim Chalak and his colleagues focused on the U.S. gun ownership rate and its correlation with homicide rates, underscoring the importance of this relationship​​.

    3. Research summarized by the British Medical Journal's Injury Prevention publication showed that state-level gun ownership is positively associated with firearm homicide rates. This research incorporated a newly developed proxy measure that includes the hunting license rate and the proportion of firearms​​.

    4. A Rutgers study reported by ScienceDaily found that concealed guns significantly impact homicide rates and public safety, with an observed increase in homicides correlating with the number of concealed carry weapons​​.

    5. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center summarized scientific literature on the relationship between gun prevalence (levels of household gun ownership) and various forms of violence. The literature concludes that higher levels of gun ownership correlate with more gun suicides, total suicides, gun homicides, and total homicides​​.
  • Does Religion Perpetuate and Promote a Regressive Worldview?
    This then being an utterly different goal-directed drive: one oriented at becoming selfless, this in contrast to the, well, selfish drive to hold on to the cherished aspects of one’s own empirically known self eternally. — javra

    :100: Like I said, I'm sure much of the imagery in sci-fi and super-hero movies is grounded in the longing for immortality. In traditional culture, the folk stories imparted such wisdom against a religous background where there was a tacit acceptance of spiritual immortality, but with its rejection, all such grounding is lost and the stories become complete fantasy (except that now with the advent of technological transhumanism, people are beginning to believe that they might be real!)

    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    I moved my question and your response about correlation of gun ownership and homicide to The American Gun Control Debate.

    As a side note, there is some good evidence that refugee settlement works better in rural areas (Kentucky, Bosnians, Maine, Somalians), despite these places being more insular and conservative. It's an interesting phenomena. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    There's a recent story about a Muslim city council in Hamtramck Michigan which banned pride flags. There's definitely a tension between Islam and gay rights, it has also surfaced here in Australia from time to time. It's discomfiting to progressives, who often champion both refugee rights and LGBTQ rights, to discover that re-settled Muslims will often denounce gay rights in strident terms.

    In short, I don't happen to find anything particularly "progressive" or "positive" about a society that results in true Nuclear holocaust where the entire planet becomes incapable of sustaining life, even if we do get to watch it all on our little iPhones or smartwatches before we succumb to radiation sickness — Outlander

    :clap:
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Tom Storm
    The Jan 6th trial is the big one. If Trump is convicted for election interference you’d think it’ll have to drive the 14th Amendment stake through his heart.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Tom Storm
    He rode a wave that’s for sure but it’s well and truly broken. (And if Bannon’s appeal against his contempt of congress conviction fails, he’s going away for four months, with another felony trial due May for a donations scam).
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    It is very telling of how bad the US democracy is built if Trump is sentenced and he still wins an election. — Christoffer

    My bet is he’s not on a winning trajectory even in the absence of convictions. The story my quote was drawn from was castigating the media for not speaking out more strongly about Trump’s obvious malfeasance and corruption. There’s this kind of massive hype bubble around the so-called inevitability of Trump’s return to the White House, when in fact since his solitary win, Republican candidates have lost 5 electoral round on the trot. The next one will be a complete wipeout for them and for Trump personally. His single solitary ability is to convince large numbers of people of bullshit, it’s the only thing he’s ever done in life.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    What are experiences? At its most primitive, isnt this concept just about immediate distinctions we can make as observers - experiences are or have information in thesense that we distinguish or recognize or can differentiate them. When I see something, experience something, it is a subjective distinction I have made. — Apustimelogist

    The capacity for experience is not itself an experience. The capacity for experience is an attribute of sentient beings. In addition to that basic capacity, rational sentient beings, such as ourselves, can reflect on experience and ask what is the meaning of this or that experience, or what experience means, generally. But anything that has the capacity to experience is in some sense a subject of experience. At its most primitive, that is the description of a very simple organism.

    Any attempt to account for the qualitative dimension of experience that does not take into account that attribute will fall foul of the hard problem argument in my view. It’s pointing to an inherent limitation of objective analysis. (Have a read of the beginning of this column as an illustration.)
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    @@Apustimelogist - I moved your last comment to a thread on the hard problem (as that is the topic it belongs under) and replied there
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    I've read a lot of metaphysics, and I've never seen magic in the repertoire. — Metaphysician Undercover

    I’ve noticed a classic sociological text on the Routledge book stands, A General History of Magic, by Marcel Mauss, apparently a very good book. I was amused to see a reader comment on the Amazon edition, ‘this book is crap. I bought it and it doesn’t contain a single trick’.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    ↪Apustimelogist
    Um, no. I interpret qualia to refer to experiential qualities, which are exclusively the attributes of subjects. Although that said I also regard ‘qualia’ as an unfortunate piece of jargon, which is only ever encountered in discourses pertaining to a clique of American academic philosophers, mainly materialist in orientation.
  • Quantum Physics, Qualia and the Philosophy of Wittgenstein: How Do Ideas Compare or Contrast?
    so non-physicist Kastrup — 180 Proof

    Non-physicist Kastrup’s first job was at CERN. He’s quite conversant with physics. But plainly you’ve missed the whole point of the article so I won’t labour it.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    As has been noted already in this thread by myself and several others, the concept of entropy, and indeed of information, in Shannon’s theory, is really specific to the transmission of information via a medium. It ought not to be made into an all-purpose metaphor and then extended to encompass vague ‘theories of everything’.

    I’ve often made the point that there is a well-known meme from Norbert Weiner, founder of cybernetics, often quoted on the internet, to wit ‘information is information, not matter or energy.’ This has been seized on in such a way that information is regarded as a kind of updated or more sophisticated form of matter-energy, or that by substituting the concept of information for that of matter, a more adequate metaphysics can be developed. The problem is that information is not a metaphysical primitive in the sense that matter or energy were thought to be. There is no such thing as information per se, it something that is always output or derived. Hence treating information as a metaphysical ground of being, akin to how materialism regards matter, is complex and controversial.

    The complexity arises because information, unlike matter or energy, doesn’t exist independently of interpretation and context. Information requires a sender, a message, and a receiver, and its meaning is shaped by the context in which it is created and received. This relational and contextual nature of information makes it a concept that’s not easily pinned down as a fundamental substance in the same way as matter or energy.

    The idea of information as a metaphysical foundation also runs into challenges when we consider the diversity of what can be classified as information. For instance, the genetic information in DNA, the information contained in a book, and the information in a computer program all have different qualities and roles. This diversity suggests that information might be better understood as a property or behavior of systems, rather than a fundamental entity in its own right.

    The fact that information is always derived or output and always contextual is crucial. It indicates that information is deeply intertwined with the physical and social worlds, suggesting that any metaphysical consideration of information must account for these ties and cannot treat information as an isolated or simple concept. This perspective aligns more with a holistic or systems-oriented view, where information is one aspect of a larger, interconnected reality.
  • Quantum Physics, Qualia and the Philosophy of Wittgenstein: How Do Ideas Compare or Contrast?
    those advocating Empirical Philosophy, typically define Metaphysics as religious nonsense. — Gnomon

    That’s more characteristic of positivism, really. There is a school of thought called ‘constructive empiricism’. Constructive empiricism is a philosophical perspective on the nature of scientific theories proposed by Bas van Fraassen in his 1980 book "The Scientific Image." It contrasts with scientific realism in important ways. Scientific realism holds that science aims to give us true descriptions of the world, including unobservable phenomena. Constructive empiricists, on the other hand, argue that the goal of science is not to find true theories, but rather to develop theories that are empirically adequate.

    Empirical adequacy, a key concept in constructive empiricism, means that a scientific theory is successful in accounting for observable phenomena. Constructive empiricists maintain that a theory can be empirically adequate without necessarily being true, especially in its claims about unobservable entities or processes. Therefore, they focus on how theories relate to what we can observe and test, rather than committing to the true existence of entities posited by those theories.

    This stance has significant implications for how we understand scientific progress and the role of science in explaining the natural world. It suggests a more modest, but still rigorous, understanding of what science can achieve..

    Constructive empiricism, while sharing the emphasis on empirical adequacy with positivism, doesn’t take such a hard line against metaphysics. Instead, it simply refrains from making metaphysical commitments about the reality of unobservable entities. Bas van Fraassen posited that science doesn’t need to make claims about the true nature of reality beyond what is observable; thus, it sidesteps many deep metaphysical debates, whilst not necessarily being dismissive of them. This is more of a suspension of judgment than a dismissal, reflecting a more open, albeit cautious, attitude towards metaphysical questions compared to the more dismissive view of logical positivism.
  • The American Gun Control Debate
    We have plenty of areas of the US where gun ownership is extremely high and gun violence is extremely low. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Is that so?
  • Quantum Physics, Qualia and the Philosophy of Wittgenstein: How Do Ideas Compare or Contrast?
    Carlo Rovelli's highly expert and deeply thoughtful popularizations are, no doubt, excellent though. — 180 Proof

    Kastrup on Rovelli

    It may be a missing aspect in Daniel Dennett's materialistic take on this. — Jack Cummins

    Dennett says that there’s basically no difference between human beings and computers, that we’re ‘moist robots’.

    “I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?” — Daniel Dennett
  • Does Religion Perpetuate and Promote a Regressive Worldview?
    I consider the idea that our culture’s quest for interstellar travel is really the sublimated longing for immortality. Having substituted material progress for spiritual liberation, only by ‘slipping the surely bonds of earth’ is freedom to be found (pace Elon Musk’s desire to populate Mars).
  • Does Religion Perpetuate and Promote a Regressive Worldview?
    Why would we think otherwise, given the utter dominance of religion for centuries? — Tom Storm

    Not all religious cultures gave rise to the idea of progress, and considering the title of the OP I thought it significant.
  • Does Religion Perpetuate and Promote a Regressive Worldview?
    Actually something that might or might not have been mentioned in this thread already, is that there’s a school of thought amongst historians that the entire ‘idea of progress’ was very much a consequence of the Christian expectation of ‘the second coming’. It grew out of the narrative that history was determined by the period between the incarnation and the second coming, This perspective suggests that the Christian eschatological belief in a future event where Christ returns underlay an idealized future which provided the impetus for the original concept of progress. This idea of progress is characterized by a continual improvement over time, contrasting with cultures that idealize a past Golden Age, leading to a more conservative and backward-looking philosophy.

    In many ancient and non-Western cultures, the concept of time and progress was by contrast often cyclical or regressive, focusing on a lost era of perfection. The idea of a ‘Golden Age’ in the past, from which humanity has declined, is found in various cultures, including Greek, Roman, and Hindu mythologies.

    The Christian eschatological view, in contrast, introduces a linear conception of time, which has a definitive beginning and an end. This view posits that history moves towards a specific goal, the Second Coming of Christ, where a new, idealized state of the world will be established. This forward-looking perspective has contributed to a cultural and philosophical environment in the West that favors progress and continual improvement in contrast to the cyclical or regressive views of time and history found in other cultures. This left its mark even when secular culture abandoned the original impetus.

    Not by any means the only factor in the debate, but one worth mentioning. Another re-framing is provided by David Bentley Hart in his book Atheist Delusions. He highlights the significant impact of Christianity on social reforms and cultural transformations throughout history. His argument is that many social norms and values now taken for granted in the modern world, particularly in Western societies, have roots in Christian principles that were quite radical compared to the prevailing norms of the culture into which they were introduced.

    Some of these included:

    1. Value of the Individual: Christianity emphasized the intrinsic worth of every individual, which was a departure from the class-based or hierarchical value systems prevalent in many ancient cultures.
    2. Charity and Care for the Needy: The Christian emphasis on charity and caring for the poor, sick, and marginalized was a notable shift from the more limited forms of social welfare that existed in the pagan world.
    3. Concepts of Forgiveness and Redemption: These were also relatively novel in a world where honor cultures often demanded retribution and where a concept of personal redemption was not as developed.
    4. Transformation of Family and Sexual Ethics: Christianity brought new ideas about marriage, chastity, and family life, often challenging existing practices and norms.
    5. Universalism: The Christian message was universal, aimed at all of humanity, transcending ethnic, national, and social boundaries, which contrasted with the more localized religious practices of the time.

    Much of this has been absorbed into the rubric of Western culture in such a way that their specifically Christian origins are obscured or forgotten, but for an example of a culture that developed without them, consider the People’s Republic of China, where the idea of the sovereignty of individual rights is completely absent, with often dire political consequences.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Since Biden took office the US economy has added a record 14m jobs while his list of legislative accomplishments has earned comparisons with those of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson … Trump, meanwhile, is facing 91 criminal indictments in Atlanta, Miami, New York and Washington DC, some of which relate to an attempt to overthrow the US government. — The Guardian

    Regardless, Trump is leading in many polls.
  • Quantum Physics, Qualia and the Philosophy of Wittgenstein: How Do Ideas Compare or Contrast?
    I dabble with "paths" or contours all the time in complex analysis and find this statement valid but vapid. — jgill

    Taken out of context it looses much of ifs cogency but there’s a limit to how much of the original text can be copied here. It was in a chapter on the discovery of uncertainty and Heisenberg’s debate with Einstein about the interaction of observation and theory. When I read it, I was struck by Heisenberg’s observation that what appeared as a path was not what it seemed. And recall that the context was the discussion of what had hitherto been understood as the fundamental building-blocks of physical reality and Einstein’s rejection of the probabilistic nature of quantum theory (which he maintained throughout his career).
  • Quantum Physics, Qualia and the Philosophy of Wittgenstein: How Do Ideas Compare or Contrast?
    While Heidegger and Derrida has much to critique in Husserl’s work, they kept his discovery that the extended object at the heart of logic, mathematics and the empirical sciences is an illusion, or more accurately, a constructed idealization. — Joshs

    Very interesting observation! There’s a passage in Manjit Kumar’s book I mentioned above which touches on a similar concept.

    In the case of an atomic electron ‘orbiting’ a nucleus, a gamma ray photon is energetic enough to knock it out of the atom, and only one point in its ‘orbit’ is measured and therefore known. Since the uncertainty principle forbids an exact measurement of both the position and velocity that define the path of an electron or its orbit in an atom, there simply is no path or orbit. The only thing that is known for certain, says Heisenberg, is one point along the path, and ‘therefore here the word “path” has no definable meaning’. It is measurement that defines what is being measured. There is no way of knowing, argued Heisenberg, what happens between two consecutive measurements: ‘It is of course tempting to say that the electron “must have been somewhere between the two observations and that therefore the electron must have described some kind of path or orbit even if it may be impossible to know which path.’ Tempting or not, he maintained that the classical notion of an electron’s trajectory being a continuous, unbroken path through space is unjustified. An electron track observed in a cloud chamber only ‘looks’ like a path, but is really nothing more than a series of water droplets left in its wake.


    i.e. ‘a constructed idealization’ ;-)

    — Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar
    https://amzn.asia/aVPeoPp
  • Quantum Physics, Qualia and the Philosophy of Wittgenstein: How Do Ideas Compare or Contrast?
    I am writing this thread based on reading 'The Wittgenstein Reader' by Anthony Kenny and 'Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey Into Quantum Gravity' by Carlo Rovelli (2016). The specific issue which I am wondering about, although it may be comprised of many philosophy problems is the question of the nature of reality and what may lie beyond perception. — Jack Cummins

    They’re an odd combination of books. I don’t think Wittgenstein had anything to say about physics, and would probably have demurred if asked. Philosophy and physics come at the issue from separate perspectives. A key point of philosophy, I would assert, is that it is grounded in rational contemplation of the human condition. It ought not to overly rely on science, except perhaps insofar as scientific discoveries impact the human condition. But Wittgenstein himself said that “even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”

    I think philosophy is not really concerned with the nature of reality in the sense that physics and cosmology is, and that a better way of expressing it would be concern with the nature and meaning of being. The difference in emphasis is that we ourselves are, of course, beings, whereas the objective sciences’ primary concern is what is amenable to objective analysis.

    As for the philosophical implications of quantum physics, the philosophical implications are clearly profound, but they’re also perplexing - precisely because they concern problems of meaning, i.e. what do these discoveries entail or imply? That perplexity is easily exploited by the unscrupulous in pursuit of the gullible - ‘change your life through Quantum Healing Crystals’ or some such nonsense, and there’s a lot of it. But there’s also a genuine mystery there. The first generation of quantum pioneers to grapple with that, including Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, and Schrödinger, were highly philosophically sophisticated thinkers (probably in part because of European, as distinct from American, culture and education. See this brief article for a good account).

    I’m not going to offer much comment on that, other than to point to the titles of three of the better popular books I’ve read about it - Quantum, Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar; Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science by David Lindsey; and What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker. Notice that each of those titles refer to the debate about the nature of reality or ‘the soul of science’ - which comes into sharp focus in the 30-year debate between Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein (who advocated a staunch scientific realism). So whatever conclusions one may draw from those, don’t let anyone tell you that it’s been resolved or that the answer to that conundrum has been ‘worked out’ or ‘solved by more recent science’, because it’s not so. At the same time, it takes a lot of effort to get a handle on what issue is, and, as I said, it provides a lot of scope for obfuscation on that account.

    So - keep reading up on it!
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    ↪LuckyR
    No, metaphysics ain’t magic, nor is it simply ignorant conjecture. I don’t have expertise in the subject, but I know enough to understand that it is a real subject. The focus of metaphysics and its explanatory metaphors shift over time but it’s still very much a live subject.
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    Thousands have been killed in Gaza, with entire families wiped out. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Palestinian neighborhoods to expanses of rubble, while doctors treat screaming children in darkened hospitals with no anesthesia. Across the Middle East, fear has spread over the possible outbreak of a broader regional war.

    But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’s leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, they say: It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel.

    It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

    Since the shocking Hamas attack on Oct. 7, in which Israel says about 1,400 people were killed — most of them civilians — and more than 240 others dragged back to Gaza as captives, the group’s leaders have praised the operation, with some hoping it will set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them.

    “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.     — Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    The 2018-2020-2022-2023 trend is very blue (anti-MAGA) heading into 2024 — 180 Proof

    My view is that DJT is leading the entire MAGA cult off an electoral cliff, lemming-like, and that his lead in the polls will basically amount to giving them enough rope to hang themselves (scary though it might seem in the meantime :yikes: )
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    Seems a good outcome for Democrats. Particularly Andy Beshear in Kentucky who had a solid win in a nominally Red state. Hopefully a harbinger for next year.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    Plasma or something is not nothing. — wonderer1

    damn close. No stars, matter or living beings, and certainly nobody to converse about it with.

    The other point is that those constants and their estimated statistical likelihood may just represent human understanding and may not correspond to anything real beyond that. — Janus

    Your relativism is showing again. Have you no faith in science :brow: ?

    What is your favoured implication; that these constants were somehow established from "outside" of the universe prior to its existence? — Janus

    It's that naturalism doesn't go 'all the way down'. Naturalism starts with the empirical facts, and discerns causal relationships that give rise to them. But when it comes to such questions as the origin of the cosmic constraints, naturalism can't make such assumptions, because at the point of the singularity all laws break down. What that is taken to mean is then up for debate - natural theology is inclined to argue that the laws are pre-ordained by God. But then Martin Rees, in his book Just Six Numbers, never would make such an argument. He says elsewhere:

    I was brought up as a member of the Church of England and simply follow the customs of my tribe. The church is part of my culture; I like the rituals and the music. If I had grown up in Iraq, I would go to a mosque… It seems to me that people who attack religion don’t really understand it. Science and religion can coexist peacefully — although I don’t think they have much to say to each other. What I would like best would be for scientists not even to use the word “God.” … Fundamental physics shows how hard it is for us to grasp even the simplest things in the world. That makes you quite skeptical whenever someone declares he has the key to some deeper reality… I know that we don’t yet even understand the hydrogen atom — so how could I believe in dogmas? I’m a practicing Christian, but not a believing one. — Martin Rees

    Me, I'm inclined to a traditionalist view of the 'harmony of the Cosmos'. Call me a romantic but I think it's part of my cultural heritage, and one that I'm not at all wanting to be rid of.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    No, not constraints in the absence of which nothing would exist. — wonderer1

    Not according to the book cited, Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees, the UK's astronomer royal (and 2011 Templeton Prize winner, as it happens.) Were any of the six fundamental constraints different in very small ways, matter would not form, 'the universe' would comprise plasma or something. Review here.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    Not as a result of pre-existing "laws" but from the unfolding of the potential inherent in the simple elements that is enabled by the chance evolutionary inception of suitable conditions. — Janus

    But that’s where the cosmological constants and fine-tuned universe arguments come into play - Martin Rees' 'six numbers'. They themselves might not amount to laws, but they're constraints in the absence of which nothing would exist (see also 'naturalness problem').

    I also didn't mention the potential for bias that might influence the Templeton Foundation in its support for this thesis. But over several years, I have not found signs of its support for any particular religious doctrine. If anything, the foundation seems to lean toward philosophical interpretations of scientific evidence. — Gnomon

    I've been aware of Templeton for years, I've often read works by and about Templeton Prize winners, including Paul Davies, Bernard D'Espagnat and others. I think they do attempt to be objective but their attempt to connect science and spirituality makes a lot of people suspicious. (That saying 'the hermeneutics of suspicion' seems apt. There was a link provided above purporting to show their financial support of climate-change denial organisations, but the evidence doesn't seem clear-cut to me.)

    . What I fail to understand at bottom is how this new principle or law or whatever it is is something other than the law of entropy. Energy dissipates, disorder/information increases. — Gnomon

    From what's been said above, that doesn't necessarily follow at all. There's a very interesting Wikipedia article on Entropy and Life, which talks about this. I think the key idea is that organisms are able to utilise and channel available energy to create greater degrees of order in the form of (drum roll) information, namely, DNA. But I don't think that 'energy dissipates therefore information increases' follows from that. In the non-living universe - from what we know the vast majority of the cosmos - there's no such 'increase in information' at all. Only occurs when organisms enter the picture, and why that should be still remains an open question, doesn't it? ('Warm little pond', anyone?)

    @apokrisis ....if you're around, this thread could really use some input from you....
  • Joe Biden (+General Biden/Harris Administration)
    ↪jgill
    Yes, the January 6th coup attempt is still underway.
  • Does Religion Perpetuate and Promote a Regressive Worldview?
    In conclusion, my answer to the question “Does religion perpetuate and promote a regressive worldview?” is “Yes.” — Art48

    If indeed you hold to a stereotyped view of religion and of what the word means. Of course, you won’t have any trouble identifying many examples which confirm your prejudices pre-existing beliefs, but there are examples which will contradict it.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    ↪Gnomon
    Did you notice the origin of the link between information and entropy that I provided above? In Shannon’s information theory, the term “entropy” is used in a different sense compared to its use in thermodynamics, though there is a conceptual link between the two. Shannon adopted the term with the encouragement of the mathematician John von Neumann because of the mathematical similarities between his formula for information entropy and the thermodynamic entropy equation.

    In the context of information theory, entropy represents the amount of uncertainty or information content in a message, rather than the loss or absence of information per se. It quantifies the average amount of information produced by a stochastic source of data, or in other words, the potential information that might be received from a signal. The higher the entropy, the more information the message potentially contains because it is less predictable.

    When a signal is transmitted, information theory also considers the concept of “channel capacity,” which is the maximum amount of information that can be reliably transmitted over a channel. If the information transmitted has a higher entropy than the channel capacity, there can be a loss of information due to the need for compression or due to errors in transmission, which is often measured by another concept known as “mutual information.”

    So in Shannon’s framework, entropy isn’t about the loss of information per se, but rather a measure of the amount of information and unpredictability in a message before it’s transmitted. The loss of information in the process of transmission due to various factors (like noise in the channel) is dealt with separately within the theory.

    But caution is indeed required when comparing the concept of entropy in information theory with its use in thermodynamics or other contexts (let alone in this context where it is being discussed in a philosophical sense as a measure of the overall information content of a given system). While both concepts deal with a statistical measure of disorder or unpredictability, the implications and applications of entropy in these fields are quite different:

    - In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the disorder of a physical system, with higher entropy indicating more disorder and lower energy availability for doing work. It's a fundamental concept that helps explain the direction of spontaneous processes and the flow of heat.

    - In information theory, entropy measures the uncertainty or the average information content in a message. It's a concept that helps in understanding communication systems, coding, and data compression. High entropy in this context means the source emits a very unpredictable signal, which can carry a lot of information.

    - In the context of the article which is subject of the OP, there is also the concept of ‘information density’ as a measure of the increased complexity (and therefore development) of various kinds of systems both organic and inorganic. It is in that context that I was arguing that higher degrees of order implies lower entropy (as information is necessarily ordered). I think it’s in that context that living systems have been described as ‘negentropic’.

    These different uses of the term "entropy" rely on the underlying mathematics of probability and statistics, but they should not be conflated without careful consideration of the context in which they're being applied. (Tip of the hat to ChatGPT for help with this summary.)
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    ↪wonderer1
    Disappointing but not entirely surprising, regrettably. Although note the caveat “Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizations, not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.”
  • Joe Biden (+General Biden/Harris Administration)
    There's a reason Biden is losing to Trump in numerous polls. — RogueAI

    I wonder if Americans GOP voters know that their likely presidential candidate has said, on the record, and out loud, that he will suspend the constitution and sack all his antagonists in the public service if he's elected. Do they know what they're voting for? Do they care? Do they understand? I think the answer is 'no' on all counts.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    ↪Janus
    ↪unenlightened
    All that said, I looked at the video summary (crappy because of the low-quality computer-generated voice and editing glitches) and I can really see how eyes might roll at this presentation - particularly its bankrolling by the Templeton Foundation. They’ve got wads of cash to give away to those who produce material favourable to their syncretist worldview. (Not that they’re all wrong on that account, past winners include Paul Davies, who’s a favourite of mine, and they do produce some interesting ideas.)

    As anyone will know, I’m fiercely opposed to physicalist reductionism, but for some reason this paper doesn’t ring true for me. I suppose, from a philosophical perspective, a critique of reductionism needs to be much simpler than trying to prove a kind of ‘law of increasing complexity’ operating throughout the Universe. Can’t quite put my finger on why yet, but that’s my feeling at this point.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    ↪Janus
    Yes I’ve encountered Steps to an Ecology of Mind before but didn’t read much of it.

    Have a look at @Gnomon’s OP, he does a good job of capturing some of the key points. Also that post from @Joshs about Kaufmann. (I bought Kaufmann’s book At Home in the Universe in the 1990’s but it contained too much heavy-duty biological science for my limited education ;-) )
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    ↪Janus
    Right. And a major part of the point of this paper is that these increases in order and information density are subject of a natural law not implied by the previously-known laws of physics. I mean, I still don’t know if they’re right about that, but it seems a significant theory to me.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    The amount of information required to specify the positions of and relations between an ordered arrangement is obviously less than the information required to specify a random arrangement. — Janus

    Again, this is against the background of information transmission and error correction.

    Aha, now I’m getting it:

    Maximal order is minimal total information — unenlightened

    That would be minimum total information required to encode and transmit that information.

    Like, if you wanted to encode and transmit white noise, you couldn’t do it, because it would be computationally irreducible, as there is no pattern or repetition to capture. You would need to send a 1:1 reproduction of that exact white noise. But, given written information, then you can reduce a very large body of text, because you’re able to assume grammar, vocabulary and syntax which can be used to represent that text. That’s what makes it compressible. That’s what Shannon’s law enabled and why it was fundamental to what came to be known as data compression (which we’re all using every second on these devices).
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    it has taken me years to really reconcile Shannon information theory with the entropy of physics in my own mind, and I have yet to come across a really clear and concise exposition. — unenlightened

    You know the famous anecdote of how the relationship between entropy and information theory was drawn, right? John Von Neumann was a professional colleague of Shannon.

    What’s in a name? In the case of Shannon’s measure the naming was not accidental. In 1961 one of us (Tribus) asked Shannon what he had thought about when he had finally confirmed his famous measure. Shannon replied: ‘My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it ‘information’, but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it ‘uncertainty’. When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name. In the second place, and more importantly, no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”

    From here.

    Unfortunately knowledge of that anecdote tends to undermine the advantage!

    In any case, Shannon’s famous information theory is specific to a context, namely, the transmission of information via a medium. It was his work, as you said, which made data compression possible. But I’m failing to see the relevance that has to the general relationship between order and entropy.

    As I understand it, entropy is a measure of the degree of disorder or randomness in a system. An increase in entropy typically corresponds to a decrease in order: as a system becomes more disordered, its entropy increases. Conversely, when a system is more ordered, its entropy is lower. This concept is a cornerstone of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time.

    So far so good?

    In information theory, the information content of a message is related to its unpredictability or its entropy (per Shannon). A completely random set of symbols contains a lot of potential information but it does not contain meaningful structure or order.

    For example, if rocks are arranged to spell out a message, the specific arrangement reduces the entropy of the system in terms of its information content because it is now a highly ordered state compared to a random pile. The ordered arrangement conveys meaning (information) to someone who can interpret the pattern of rocks as letters and understands the language. So in this context, the order is directly related to the ability to convey information.

    In summary, while high entropy (disorder) suggests high information content in terms of unpredictability, meaningful information is actually conveyed through ordered and structured arrangements that have lower entropy compared to a random state. So, greater information content corresponds with lower entropy.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    So any combination whatsoever that you see as 'random' can be read as a unique meaningful image by a computer — unenlightened

    Nothing is meaningful to a computer, though. You could program the computer to register any combination of pixels as a representation, but that would require an intentional act on the part of the programmer.
  • Proposed new "law" of evolution
    What is the case is that you are not interested in the information, but in the patterns and orders. But if you happened to be a computer, you would read that random pattern like a QR code. — unenlightened

    Can't see it. If I zero out a hard drive, then it's physically the same as a hard drive with a thousand gigabytes of information. But there is no order. A 'random pattern' is oxymoronic, as patterns are by definition not random, but ordered. A pattern is 1. a repeated design 'decorate with a repeated design.
    "he was sitting on a soft carpet patterned in rich colours"

    2. give a regular or intelligible form to.
    "the brain not only receives information, but interprets and patterns it"
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