Monday, April 14, 2008

Archive...

ID is just a plea for special consideration of some peoples religious beliefs that they wish to privilege as science, when convenient, and privilege as religion at otherwise.

I wouldn’t doubt that many people will shift from high epistemic standards (”science”) to low standards (”religion”) based on convenience. That is the way of the world, all need reformation. Currently the established orthodoxy which purports to define knowledge/science in academic settings is Darwinism and it is clearly sorely in need of reformation, so what difference is it to me if there are some rabble rousers? They are typically necessary after all.

Note that Darwinists already shift from high epistemic standards to low: "We now know that the earth revolves around the sun so it’s obvious that we will inevitably progress towards a similar form of knowledge about the origin of life forms."
On the one hand a basic empirical fact is cited, then shifted seamlessly into a claim that may well be nonsense. What if sentience actually doesn’t reduce to the laws of physics as currently known?

“The theory of evolution is just like the theory of gravity.”

That’s just ignorant and only reveals the ignorance or charlatanism of anyone who makes such an argument.

“We have observed insecticide resistance, therefore we have a knowledge of the origin of all specification and form found in living organisms.”

Etc. Biologists are generally stupid enough to make such arguments, apparently. But what is to be expected of those who believe that intelligent selection based on sight and sentience is actually an illusion of blind, inanimate processes?

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Archive...

Most recently I've been learning about the molecular evidence for evolution.

Are the illusions of pattern recognition which are too typical to Darwinism a reason to believe that everything you say here reduces to natural selection operating on an ancient population of worm-like creatures? Is intelligence an illusion which you imagine yourself to have explained away based on biology? Does natural selection govern your brain events? If not and you can make intelligent selections at present then why should one imagine that past events "cause" and determine all that we know in the present?

If you want to imagine a little creation myth that seems natural to you, as most biologists do, then let us imagine that what you say here has more to do with brain events which reduce to natural selection operating on the excretory and reproductive organs of ancient ape like creatures than anything rational, intelligent and intelligible. After all, you seem easily overwhelmed by imaginary events so you should be convinced that what you write here has more to do with excrement in the past than sentience and knowledge at present. In fact, it seems that any symbols and signs of intelligence which you write may as well be excrement.

Archive....

So now biologists deny “sentience” and mathematicians don’t??? That’s news to me…

Biologists are trained to imagine the transphysical nature of information away in a way that mathematicians are not. Note that various mathematicians from the Wistar conference on have worked to educate biologists with respect to the importance of information as a reality which cannot be imagined away, apparently with little success. To the purely biological “mind”/brain it seems that nothing is improbable, so it may always imagine that it can get something for nothing. Yet what do biologists mean when they talk about things coming about by “chance” or being “random”? It would seem to be nothing really because saying that something is random or comes about by chance is a statement of ignorance that will progressively be refuted by logic and a science of cause and effect. People who have knowledge of cause and effect do not say that something came about by “chance,” yet that is what Darwinists have a long history of saying even as they claim to speak for knowledge and science.

regarding dawkins wrt determinism, i don’t think it is understatement to say that there are a plurality of views of what it means to be alive.

Yet the established orthodoxy (as Dennett, Dawkins, etc. point out) is that any meaning to be found in life is ultimately an illusion rooted in mindless processes such as a natural “selection”/culling of organisms which are rooted in further events that seem “random” to biologists. Dennett says the illusion of meaning is the result of algorithms, Dawkins has said that it’s metaphorically “selfish” genes and so on. Yet on the other hand, if we accept our experience of sentience as a form of knowledge then we have to ask how something we know to be a valid and natural part of our nature influences other natural processes which we have knowledge of based on science, including natural “selection”/culling. After all, it’s science and knowledge that cannot exist without sentience and not the other way around. It’s already known at this point that sentience may have some impact on the observable world. It’s curious that those who speak of a Blind Watchmaker claim to be speaking about knowledge even as they claim to know that its only known basis is an illusion.

The history of eugenics is splattered with the residue of christianism.

Of course, it is linked to Darwinism and there are links between Darwinian reasoning and Christian theology, usually rather orthodox. The story of the provincial fundamentalist who goes on a journey and finds his answers to his religion in the Darwinian creation myth is so common that it is provincial itself. Apparently a residue of Christianity remains with its apostates. As I’ve pointed out before, even the blogs you refer to are named after theological arguments like the “panda’s thumb.” Yet the theological arguments typical to Darwinists seem to be rather puerile and shallow: “God wouldn’t make a panda’s thumb like this because we all know that the Bible says that creation is perfect or somethin’.” Perhaps that’s because they typically leave their original faith as an ignorant schoolboy and so on.

We don’t know of designers of fracterial blagella or clud blotting cascades. We have some dusty old books that make extravagant claims that may be interpolated to this argument but no explicit formulations or empirical evidence.

The problem with your argument is that extravagant claims about things which are not known to exist are already being made in the name of science and conflated with basic scientific facts. In many instances all that a Darwinian argument consists of is imagining past events which are assumed to “cause” the biological world that we now live in. Some of the same people who deny essential truths because they apparently cannot be observed empirically also seem to think that imagining past events which cannot be seen can be advanced as an explanation for the “cause” and origins of biological form as we know it.