I tend to prefer the term ‘arrange’, rather than ‘assemble’. I don’t think there’s necessarily a pre-determined purpose or reason for things to be brought together a certain way. But I do think there is an underlying logic.
— Possibility
As I don't hold to physicalism, I am sceptical of the effort to explain living things in terms of physical laws. I'm sceptical of the idea that the increase in order that we see with the evolution of life and the development of technological culture is literally balanced by an increase of entropy in the universe generally. As I mention below, I don't see how this is conceivably testable as an hypothesis. — Wayfarer
The related question I have is that, just as there is 'the arrow of time', there at least seems to be an 'arrow of complexity' i.e. more intelligent and self-aware beings have developed over time. However, this belief is rejected as orthogenetic by mainstream science.
I would like, for example, to at least entertain the notion that the evolution of intelligent beings fulfils a natural purpose - that there is an inherent tendency in nature to evolve towards greater levels of self-awareness. However this too is rejected as taboo in evolutionary science on the grounds that it is teleological, it presumes a purpose when there can be no purposes with an intelligent agent. And the only intelligent agent that science knows of is h. sapiens. — Wayfarer
What if nothing eventually can win against entropy? Does it then make everything meaningless? — niki wonoto
If only a certain kind of evidence is properly admissible in a court, why is it disingenuous to exclude that which is impermissible in that court? — tim wood
And never mind disingenuous, it is a necessary obligation and job of the judges of the court to keep what is impermissible out, for the which in real courts judges are supplied with whatever they need to accomplish that, and properly so. Agreed?
It is people who willy-nilly under the swell and sway of belief cannot stand the fact that the world does not operate on the basis of their belief, and so try to impose it. Belief is the murderer in the world, not science.
Belief the jealous, envious, green-eyed monster that what it cannot eat, it strives to kill. — tim wood
If you mean the misunderstanding that theology (for example) is not and equally significantly cannot be any kind of science, to the end of trying to have religion (for example) understood as a science. Then amen. Is that it? — tim wood
Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern [evolutionary] synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of biological thought, he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’
The idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry, but can we prove it? Perhaps the strongest argument in support of this claim has come from Hubert Yockey, one of the organizers of the first congress dedicated to the introduction of Shannon's information in biology. In a long series of articles and books, Yockey has underlined that heredity is transmitted by factors that are ‘segregated, linear and digital’ whereas the compounds of chemistry are ‘blended, three-dimensional and analogue’.
Yockey underlined that: ‘Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences’.
Yockey has tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution. This is therefore, according to Yockey, what divides life from matter: information is ontologically different from chemistry because linear and digital sequences cannot be generated by the analogue reactions of chemistry.
At this point, one would expect to hear from Yockey how did linear and digital sequences appear on Earth, but he did not face that issue. He claimed instead that the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable. This amounts to saying that we do not know how linear and digital entities came into being; all we can say is that they were not the result of spontaneous chemical reactions. The information paradigm, in other words, has not been able to prove its ontological claim, and that is why the chemical paradigm has not been abandoned.
Because on the assumption that it originated somehow not on earth or of or from earth, still, it arose somewhere, somehow. And that's the underlying challenge, it seems to me. It's all science, though not all the answers yet known, or it's all supernatural and inexplicable - which latter case in no way obviates a need for sense and science. That is, even if it's God, that really solves no problems — tim wood
Point being that more people have killed more people on religion's account than anything else — tim wood
"Thought is the only thing that can cause matter/energy to deviate from its inevitable chemical path". — Gary Enfield
And thought and reason grounded in a material process itself grounded in a material - a brain — tim wood
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