Judging by the title I thought it would be about past and present organism (non-living and living). But in turn this is about "rocks and stuff" vs. organic life.
What about computation completeness as in a Turing-complete vs. non-Turing-complete system as a marker of life? Morphology then can be characterized by the presence of features required for implementing computational operations.
For instance, Conway's Game of Life is a Turing-complete system.
The key point is that morphology features can be mapped to equivalent math operations. So we can build from there to formally determine whether a given object can be alive or not.
We can look at a cell as a Turing-complete bio-chemical machine. Given the right chemical substances, it produces the desired outcomes. For example, an intra-cell protein building machinery is very much an interpreter executing code (from RNA). All other stuff like replication, cognition, etc is built upon these basic cellular blocks.
> Such a thing doesn't really exist in the real world, of course
You are Turing-complete, including your consciousness and cognition. But your comment tries to prove otherwise. This situation is called logical contradiction, suggesting that your initial assumption may very well be false.
Turing-completeness requires the ability to recall an infinite number of bits, which is obviously impossible in physical reality. A Turing machine with that property removed is a pushdown automaton.
Can we unequivocally distinguish computation from non-computation in the real world? What's the difference between the physical processes inside a computer and inside a star that would let us say definitively that yes, one is computation and the other is not?
For a system to be Turing-complete, it should implement at least three operations: addition, negation, conditional jump. If there are similar processes inside a star, then yes, that star can be considered Turing-complete. "Computation" is just how we call it in math; in a star, it can be physical gas expansion, thermal convection, etc. But the outcome and its fundamental properties are essentially the same despite different forms of a particular presentation.
So are you abandoning the initial thesis that computation is a sign of life, or are you implying the sun is a computer built by some unknown form of life?
This implies that everything is alive since, like I said, we have no way to unequivocally distinguish computation from non-computation. Are the molecular vibrations in a rock actually computing something? How could we possibly tell? What's more, that rock might itself be a processing element of a larger computer and its own processing elements might themselves be computers, so in fact life exists fractally at all levels of magnification.
> Are the molecular vibrations in a rock actually computing something?
Not directly, but without them chemical reactions would not be possible. "The molecular vibrations", Brownian movement, or, more formally, temperature determines how fast the reactions could occur. It's a physical equivalent of a clock signal in a computer.
Without temperature (t=0), "molecular vibrations" do not occur, so all chemical reactions stop, making active computations based on those reactions impossible. This is a physical equivalent of a halt state in a digital computer.
> What's more, that rock might itself be a processing element of a larger computer and its own processing elements might themselves be computers, so in fact life exists fractally at all levels of magnification
This is logically wrong. Water is a chemical substance. It makes life possible, but it's not alive by itself because it does not meet the formal criteria. Just like a single transistor is not a CPU.
How can you possibly tell? Yes, Brownian motion looks random and meaningless to us, but how could you tell it does not look meaningful to someone?
>It makes life possible, but it's not alive by itself because it does not meet the formal criteria.
If you accept that the sun might be alive you must accept that water might be alive, since you can't definitively say that computation is not happening in either of them.
>Just like a single transistor is not a CPU.
I can't say for certain that a transistor is not a CPU to someone. A single atom could hypothetically be powerful enough to compute something.
Really? Let's see a natural rock formation precisely in the shape of a human being or other animal.
There are of course natural rocks capturing living forms: fossils. And a huge number of them are completely obviously from ancient life. Nobody goes to a museum and sees a T Rex skeleton and thinks, Hey, that might actually be rocks that had nothing to do with life.
The real issue - not well stated in the article - appears to be regarding single celled life, or at least small-cell-count ancient organisms. Then there's ambiguity in interpretation because of overlap with inorganic possibilities.
There are plenty of rocks with a human form. The moai for instance. They’re pretty much universally considered to be artifacts of human life.
But I think the point is that, we know the moai are human built because we know that humans are living animals and we know their form. If you don’t know the form of a living being, then you can’t tell if something was produced by a living being based on its shape.
Function follows form. No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects.
When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it.
There is a school of though that says that evolution acts on forms that arise through natural processes. One of the ideas Philip Ball is interested in is how the forms created through natural processes (say, a cloud) differs from those formed partly by evolution (say, a tree).
He has a series of three short books on this - "Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in Three Parts": "Shapes", "Flow", "Branches".
>No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects.
No, the same is true of non-living things. The shape of a rock is not arbitrary. At any given time, it's the only shape it could have when you take into consideration all the trajectories of all particles since the Big Bang. What makes the trajectories of particles of living things different from those of the particles of non-living things?
>When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it.
This is just begging the question. It presupposes both a clear morphological delineation between living and non-living and that supposed results of purely physical processes are not in fact works of art by sufficiently weird aliens. Also, necessarily life must have started at some point from non-living materials, so how is the shape a rock takes when it's struck by another rock falling on it fundamentally different from, say, a particular sequence of base pairs in your genome?
The reason you can tell a sculpture is a sculpture is that it conforms to a particular cultural language that you understand. For example, it might reference something you know, such as a particular animal. If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive?
> If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive?
Well, yes, and if you took away everything we know about the things in the world, we would not know anything about those things!
The GP used the fact that we tell apart sculptures from rocks as a key point in their argument. The fact that removing knowledge eliminates the ability to tell them apart means that there's nothing intrinsic that we're observing when we say that something is a sculpture. There's nothing about the object itself that makes it a sculpture; it's a sculpture to the observer because it looks like what they understand sculptures look like. If the observer thought sculptures look like something different they would say the object is not a sculpture, even when nothing about the object changed.
What we have here are competing over-generalizations.
There are many sculpture-like artifacts from prehistoric sites. In most cases, we have no proof that they are sculptures, just strong evidence, and there's a long tail of increasingly vaguely sculpture-like forms where no strong conclusions should be drawn.
The existence of this tail does not invalidate the strong conclusions about the clearly artificial sculptures, and the analogous conclusion follows for RagnarD's main point about the fossil record.
But, again, you are determining whether something is a sculpture or not based on your knowledge of what sculptures look like and/or where the object in question is when you find it. Without that knowledge you are not able to make that determination. Without that knowledge you can only make much more basic statements, such as tell which one is heavier or larger, or what they're each made of. That's because those properties are intrinsic to the objects, unlike whether they're sculptures. You can't change those properties without changing something fundamental about the object.
I think it's completely subjective, because it depends what degree of specificity you are edging on. In one extreme, plenty of people are convinced they see animal and even human like figures in the Martian landscape photos. On the other extreme, under a microscope, no two rocks look exactly alike, let alone like humans. That subjectivity of scope, I think, clouds our ability to grasp the complexity of the subject, and our ability to discuss it from an objective perspective.
The fossil record is not, as you put it, "completely subjective." There are some cases where the evidence is insufficient for a determination to be made, but that does not justify your sweeping generalization.
You are talking about cell count as cell is a requirement to life. Can't there be a big blob in some planet that is doing something lifelike like say waterball making copies of itself. Also is advanced humanoid who doesn't know that it is a humanoid alive?
It's fair to characterize life as a process that locally decreases entropy. Non-living processes tend to increase entropy. Even if you have a rock that looks exactly like a human being, say one of Phidias' statues, it will decay until it looks like every other rock given enough time and exposure to the elements. It rarely goes the other way around, the wind does not sculpt David out of marble.
It's probably not a sufficient criterion for life, but it's at least necessary to avoid granting life to a wildfire or some other process most would not consider living.
All true, but equally important is that life is rapidly increasing entropy in a larger, but also local, frame. It’s like a fire. So, in a closed system, living things must exhaust their source of energy and reach equilibrium with its surroundings.
This isn't a fully formed point, just a thought.. but your air conditioner wouldn't exist without a living system directing matter to form an air conditioner; at least, it's so unlikely as to be practically impossible. So an air conditioner may not be a living system, but it's the product of a living system (at some point; maybe there are other non-living systems in the pipeline, e.g. factory robots).
I don't understand a heat pump to be an inherently artificial thing, but I am struggling to think of an example of a naturally occurring heat pump. If there were natural valves and compressors (which there might be from certain perspectives) then I could see a naturally occurring heat pump being possible.
It seems strange to say process devices are the thing that make a system living or not.
>Even if you have a rock that looks exactly like a human being, say one of Phidias' statues, it will decay until it looks like every other rock given enough time and exposure to the elements.
The same is true of living things. Given enough time, anything living is reduced to a pile of oxides.
Some physical processes decrease entropy locally, sometimes by incredible amounts. That's how we have the sun. What we really take from the sun is not energy, but its stored negative entropy; energy is just the medium to move it around.
But qualifying any particular moment as "death" already implies that we've granted the thing in question the quality of being alive at some point, so it's not a useful way to distinguish living from non-living.
Sure, but the question is not about distinguishing living from dead things, but about distinguishing currently and formerly living things from things that were never alive. More specifically, about distinguishing them structurally, not comparatively. If "death" is the point where the decay into entropy of something greatly accelerates then hypothetically we could say a rock "dies" when it's melted, or alternatively we could say that it doesn't "die" because it was never alive. The distinction does not lie on the thing itself, but on which things we assign the property of being able to "die".
The argument has never been that this is a sufficient criterion for life, but rather that it is necessary and not merely accidental the same way you can be alive and not have legs.
There does not to my knowledge exist things that are considered living that don't have this property of locally decreasing entropy.
For the majority of life existence as we know it (meaning, a proton gradient separated by a membrane), living systems were immortal.
Some external circumstances could change reducing them to a pile of oxides, but the systems themselves were perfectly self-perpetuating -- i.e. time-independent, or put another way 'given enough time' is not sufficient.
Of course, before the heat-death of the universe entropy-reducing systems will break down, but that's not an interesting observation.
> Some physical processes decrease entropy locally, sometimes by incredible amounts.
I think that's the more interesting observation. How to qualify life beyond only 'local entropy reduction systems'.
My uninformed opinion is that it is both 'entropy-reducing' and 'context-dependent' systems that should be considered 'alive' (not sure though that this is sufficient). Dependence on their context means that those systems will have a feedback-loop with their environment, allowing for example non-linear causality and thus complexity to emerge.
A star radiating away their stored negative entropy is an all give and no take, no dependency, full autonomy system. Of course they can still be impacted by external effects, but sustaining their own internal processes does not require such inputs, they are incidental to them emitting away their stored energy. Once started, their schedule (when they will deplete themselves, collapse, etc) is known and predictable, thus not alive.
> Of course, before the heat-death of the universe entropy-reducing systems will break down, but that's not an interesting observation.
Excuse the snark, but it's exactly as interesting as saying that some living systems are immortal until they're no longer immortal. If a protocell or a virus stops being alive (if we grant that it's alive) when it falls into a fire then it's not immortal just because it has no metabolism.
>Once started, their schedule (when they will deplete themselves, collapse, etc) is known and predictable, thus not alive.
Actually, no. For example, a star could hypothetically fall into another much larger than it and prolong its life, if we were to say that it lives. The only reason it's predictable is because a star can't move on its own to hunt weaker stars, and because (at least at this time in the history of the universe) stars are far enough apart that they rarely fall into each other. If that was a common occurrence it would be much more difficult to predict how long until a star burns out.
>> "Some external circumstances could change reducing them to a pile of oxides"
(or some other transformations I guess in case of fire.)
That was precisely not what I was talking about (or put another way if you still require abundant explicitness): not the kind of immortality I was describing. Maybe I was not clear enough.
> For example, a star could hypothetically fall into another much larger than it and prolong its life
Well, once again:
>> Of course they can still be impacted by external effects, but sustaining their own internal processes does not require such inputs
Why not consider it alive? The same with the fires mentioned in other comments. In The Andromeda Strain (the novel, don't remember if it's in the film as well), there's a scene where the characters are trying to determine a single quality they can look for that signifies life. They come up with energy conversion, and they do consider luminescent watch hands and geologic formations. It's been a long time since I read it, I don't recall them ending with back-patting and "mission accomplished" cheers, but the point of the scene wasn't to make a definite answer for the readers nor the characters - it was that when you're looking for life, perhaps your definition of "life" will need expanded. So why do we need a definition that absolutely includes This, and absolutely excludes That and The Other? What if we settle on a definition and found out it does apply to The Other, why must we change the definition instead of changing how we categorize The Other? Both are adjusting our model to fit new evidence. Why be so determined that Life Must Be Like Us And No Other?
Generally with life we require some form of replication or it would quickly go extinct. Now, if you add in a 3D printer/assembler to the aforementioned solar-panel/battery the loop is getting rather complete for something to be considered life.
Oh that's good, I like that one! But a counterpoint for fun: weather is a system. I wonder if we can find a rule that seems sane but would classify an inert gas as alive? Imagine defining life and someone rebuts with "Argon."
> It's fair to characterize life as a process that locally decreases entropy
I would characterise life as a process that copies its information into the future.
Maybe the idea of copying and that of decreasing entropy are closely related. It's interesting that life needs digital codes to evolve, they seem a requirement for both maintaining low entropy and copying.
The article says “fossils of single celled organisms can easily be confused for rocks”. But the title says does not make the same claim, so the parent comment is refuting the title not the article.
The title implies something like “for any biological process of a living being, there exists a non-living version”. Which is clearly false
First of all it's only talking about FOSSILS, so that's a big thing. Secondly, it's only talking about single celled life. In this narrow context, the title is correct.
> These little tubules can also show periodic cycles of ascent and descent in the liquid due to the buoyancy of an oxygen bubble and its release at the surface.
You can observe something like this in macroscale with lemon pips in tonic water. The pip sinks to the bottom of the glass, as it does so, bubbles of CO2 come out of solution and stick to the pip, ferrying it back up to the top. And on it goes!
> You can observe something like this in macroscale with lemon pips in tonic water.
Why, that's interesting, I have never observed this. Do you think having previously added gin to the tonic water solution may have had something to do?
This might sound humorous, but in all seriousness, it is a perfect chance to do some interesting armchair science with a gin and tonic in your hand. Try various lemon seeds, a gradient of tonic-to-gin ratios, maybe a control with water and/or plain soda, measure the oscillation rate (or lack thereof). Break out the statistics and see if there's correlation with the percentage, and whether it's significant and how large the effect size is.
Write it up and publish it on arxiv for bonus points.
"Inorganic" is not the same as "non-living" but even taking your use of "inorganic" to mean "non-living", what was the change that distinguished the living from the non-living before it?
Makes some sense if you consider that the essence of life (the genetic pillar) needs physico-chemical processes to express itself - in fact it is practically "invisible", is more informatin than matter and has limited material footprint without them.
Inverting that map, that is, proving that a certain physico-chemical process must have been coordinated and catalysed specifically by genetic processes seems quite non-trivial. But maybe not impossible, at least in a probabilistic way, taking into account some objective measures of entropy or something similar.
It’s tempting to apply Kantian idealism as an explanation for the evident lack of morphological difference between living and non-living entities. However, if it were true—if the perceived physical entity were more of a simplified apparent manifestation/map of the underlying living entity, and there were nothing special in it that was the “cause”—then presumably we would never be able to create life (or sentience, for that matter) artificially, merely by arranging physical particles in a certain pattern. Have we been able to do that, as opposed to growing more life from already living things?
I think this is not about morphology but about entropy. If we divided organisms on entropy basis we would have the viruses classified as non-living, as they tend to increase entropy.
However, I've never grabbed onto Dawkins atheism as much as come to believe that the ways things "live" is much more diverse and amazing than we can even imagine.
> However, I've never grabbed onto Dawkins atheism as much as come to believe that the ways things "live" is much more diverse and amazing than we can even imagine.
What has atheism to do with the "ways things "live"?
many religious interpretations of "living" is that it's magic and beyond the grasp of science. it basically boils down to if you believe that life is an inherent property of matter or if you believe that some magic entity makes things live. i know there's a huge gradient in between for most people, but at least for me, i think that might be the root cause (besides a gazillion other reasons) of being an atheist.
Not only religious minds, but modern philosophers too, hold onto dualism - David Chalmers and his "hard problem" of consciousness is a case in point. Here, "hard" signifies what science can't touch, suggesting a distinct domain.
Likewise, philosophers such as Giulio Tononi with his Integrated Information Theory are edging towards panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness. This, too, is a somewhat religious stance.
I personally see no hard problem and believe only certain systems harbor consciousness. The magic element is simply evolution. Evolution, an open-ended optimizer, crafted everything in a singular run.
Consciousness exists to safeguard the body and ensure self reproduction, it is the inner optimization loop, the outer one being evolution. That's the link I see between them, they work together and each one is creating/supporting the other.
I believe that GP was talking about dualism in the philosophy of mind context. In that context dualism basically means that there is a mind and a brain and that in some sense those are two radically different kinds of things.
Yes. The burden is proof is supposed to be on the person making a claim that breaks the known pattern.
We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data.
If we are to accept that we ourselves have experiences, which we must lest we go down a fun pathway to madness (that I highly recommend for those excited by the prospect of existential crises), then there is no reason to accept that "lower" life forms do not also have experiences.
This chain of reasoning follows down, down, down, into what we may think to be simpler and simpler experiences of being. Down to the insects, and then the microbes.
There comes a point where whether something is alive or not becomes more about its ability to create cogent copies of itself, which certainly does not feel like a requirement of having an experience.
Beyond that lies the Earth, the wind, the rain, the basic elements our ancestors have respected and reverred for millenia in societies that did not invent the patriarchal dichotomy between subject and object that teaches us the unfounded "fact" that there are some things called "objects" which have no experience of reality, that we the "subjects" may control entirely.
Get deeper into intuitive practices, and one may have experiences of interacting with so called "objects" in ways that suggest a deep union between subject and object.
A union that precludes the separation our hectic monkey minds have been taught.
It is as if every particle of this universe is "alive" in its own writhing way, at different scales. All feeling the subtle vibrations of others.
The burden of proof is on those that say that consciousness "stops" at some point and the entity becomes an object, yet a mechanism has never been found.
The belief in fully unconscious objects, is then, faith based.
The "hard" problem of consciousness is only a problem when you want it to be.
> We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data.
If you interpret the word that way, it becomes completely uninteresting and, as you explore, makes us no different from some germ or collection of molecules.
And is this such an issue? Does the world have to be a fancy lights show in order to be palatable? Isn't there enough wonder in the galaxies and the specks of dust, do we really to invent the almighty to make humans feel... special? because I guess that's what it all is, fragile egos can't take being anything less than The Chosen. Which explains also religious wars - this town is not big enough for two chosen.
I just meant that "experiencing bits of data" is a meaningless description of human consciousness, not that human consciousness is a divine phenomenon.
That's only true if the supremacy of your self and your conscious experience is the lens through which you find things interesting. It's also kind of reductive.
We are a collection of germs and molecules. We share a lot of commonalities with the units we are composed of. That doesn't make us "no different" than them, when taken as a whole. It certainly doesn't have to make us or the world uninteresting.
Everyone who does serious work on consciousness defines it that way.
It's only naive, over-confident people jumping into conversations they don't understand who define it as something else.
We can also talk about cognitive abilities, sentience, etc., but these are distinct concepts from consciousness and it's extremely valuable to maintain that distinction if you want to have productive discussions.
> Everyone who does serious work on consciousness defines it that way.
What? As "experiencing bits of data"? That's ridiculous, a stone experiences bits of data as scratches on its surface. You could say that it "experiences its environment", but that's semantics and has almost nothing to do with human consciousness - or at least with the interesting parts of it.
Experience as phenomenological subjective experience. I.e., to experience "the color yellow" rather than just the physiochemical processes associated with incidence of photons of a particular wavelength, or "sour" rather than just interacting with certain kinds of acids.
Philosophy of mind scholars have been very consistent about this for the longest time. I would recommend reading some of the literature they have produced to become more acquainted.
However "interesting parts of human consciousness" as you put it are still outside the realm of consciousness per se, and can be more adequately described as "cognition", "awareness", "agency", "sentience", etc. Each concept is distinct (but related) from the others and it's unproductive at this point in our collective development of theory and study to lump them all under a single umbrella term.
Consciousness is a relatively boring question when limited to this definition, but that just means you need to change your language to remain comprehensible, not to redefine words that already have very precise meanings.
I can give you my personal thoughts on the matter, they may align more closely to yours than you may initially assume. As a quick note, complex systems are interesting primarily because they encode features of their environment in their physical makeup, kind of like your rock example. Rocks can't really "do" anything with that information except roll and crack differently than if they didn't have those scratches, but when you really drill down into this phenomenon, there's no bright line between the encoding of scratches on rock surfaces and slightly more complicated systems like river deltas changing the path of water in response to upstream flows (a kind of analog computer encoding the history of its "experiences") or even more complicated systems like lineages of organisms encoding their experiences in DNA via natural selection based on the history of its (the lineage -- not each individual organism) interaction with its 4D environment. None of this really has anything to say about what rocks or river deltas or organisms or whole lineages are experiencing according to the definition of consciousness above, and it seems impossible to access any kind of scientific evidence one way or the other, which is most of the reason that scholars (Chalmers) came up with the "hard problem of consciousness" to at least acknowledge and refine the difficult questions still facing us in this field of study.
I believe in the beginning of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawkings, he mentions a similar problem where it's equally difficult to imagine a universe that always exists as a universe that was created by "something" that always existed.
I'm sure I'm butchering something about this interpretation in the decades since I've read it.
My point is this seems to be a similar problem where it's equally difficult to imagine that consciousness is something that arises from sufficiently complex systems, as it is to imagine its inherent to all systems.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I'm not certain you're right. I can see it either way.
I find the phrasing of the hard problem very strange. It's fairly obvious to anyone that has done a bit of meditation, that consciousness is simply attention to autonomous actions that your brain performs i.e. the compilation and discrimination of data from disparate systems. If you stop being attentive you start performing actions less consciously.
This aligns fairly closely to what happens when we train ANN's utilizing attention based learning. We see that new emergent capabilities arise. We simply haven't built attention based multimodal training courses yet. I hope we never will.
> panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness
What I find hard about that is that it would seem that consciousnesses are discrete -- mine is distinct from yours. I'm also probably the main consciousness in my body (or I wouldn't be able to type this). But "everything" isn't discrete.
If the sea is conscious, what about every individual liter of water in it? What about every drop? If the drops end up in my body, does it still have consciousness?
I’m not a proponent of this theory, but I don’t see why it’s unreasonable that if the ocean has some sliver of consciousness, then the water in your body has about 1 / 10^-17 that much.
Panpsychism posits that every atom harbors some non-zero level of consciousness, and that by arranging bits of consciousness in certain ways, you can amplify it's effect. Its important to consider that consciousness is likely a scale, with different beings experiencing different levels and types of consciousness.
It may seem that way, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is that way. After all, our brains do an incredible amount of filtering and modulating to deliver our conscious experience such as it is, unified and discrete. If it is as fundamental as the panpsychists believe (and I don't count myself firmly among them, but I have to entertain the possibility), it seems possible, if not likely, that there is a good deal of fuzziness and overlap in and among systems of consciousness.
Another example has to do with what we could call the “hard problem” of existence itself: why does the universe exist, and why this universe in particular?
Plenty of theories have been proposed. Maybe the universe expands and contracts again and again, each time with slightly different cosmological constants. Or maybe there are infinite universes and, unsurprisingly, we happen to exist in the one which was suited to our existence. Or maybe everything is just one giant simulation.
What I find fascinating is that, once you remove the culture-specific veneer, these questions and our tentative answers are part of the same pursuit that centuries ago would have taken the shape of philosophy or theology.
The universe might not exist objectively, but it gains existence only in our eyes. For example, natural numbers is an abstraction that has no meaning by itself, but each number can be interpreted as a state of the "game of life" and a sequence of numbers - as an evolution of that game. This meaning is a fiction that arises when abstract number are seen thru our consciousness. When the same numbers are seen thru another consciousness, the game of chess is brought into existence. So the universe might be such an abstraction that could be anything, but only when its seen thru a particular consciousness, it appears as the universe we know. Taking this idea further, the entire game of life is still too complex, so smaller consciousnesses filter that complex reality into smaller realities and so on.
As the story goes, Dr. Samuel Johnson challenged the claim that all of reality was just an illusion by kicking a rock while proclaiming "I refute it thus."
I can't agree with that. Maybe our brains are not big enough, or complex enough yet to really understand what is going on with such complex systems.
Evolution may be the mechanism these complex systems exist, but it doesn't explain how they work.
Even the simplest artificial evolutionary algorithms have created integrated circuits with features we can not understand or explain.
And part of the reason is physical properties of materials, and quantum stuff. The evolutionary algorithm doesn't understand those things, just puts them in some working configuration by chance.
Anyway, my point is that we can't also use evolution as a catch-all explanation. Complex things are complex, and they require proper understanding, an engineering understanding, not just the handwaving arguments of philosophers.
About consciousness: hardest problem ever. I don't think we will be able to understand it, because we have it and it becomes a kind of strange loop.
It's fairly easy to "understand it" if we don't try to explain it away. Look, no matter what you hold as true, you reach a point where you have to pick your ontological primitive. An as such, you can't "explain it away". It will be your given of nature, in function of which you'll explain everything else.
Failing to do so will put you in an infinite regress of finding lower-level explanation forever, which in turn would explain precisely nothing.
Even hardcore materialists do this epistemic step: the quantum foam is the given of existence, made out of nothing else other than itself, and whose excitations give rise to the fundamental particles.
So, given that we are already committed to such epistemic step, what would be the problem of choosing another ontological primitive and see how we fare?
What is the logical argument by which consciousness ought not to be chosen as an ontological primitive?
I don't think panpsychism is really a religious stance, it's just a logical solution to the problem of qualia. It certainly isn't testable and there are a lot of people who come to views that are loosely called panpsychism through less rigorous and more spiritual routes, but I would suggest those are quite different and shouldn't dilute the core reasoning behind panpsychism.
The hard problem, in essence, deals with the question of how qualities emerge from quantities. Until we have explained this, then holding materialism is religious. That is, assuming as true something that we have no access to, no explanation for, and no reasons to believe it.
I am not sure why you think that panpsychism would be a religious stance? What's religious about assuming that the only _given_ of existence is in fact fundamental? And I'm not even arguing for panpsychism here, since I don't find it tenable. But at least it's not materialism, which I would argue is the maximum form of abstraction and therefore religious in nature.
Whether we know what "living" is or whether we solve the hard problem of consciousness is logically distinct from atheism (or theism, for that matter). Unless you think that our ignorance justifies theism, in which case you commit to a logical fallacy.
If you have the concept of a soul or spirit as a metaphysical thing, you can nicely sidestep the question of what constitutes a living being by simply saying "the things that are alive are exactly those that have a soul".
Not all theistic belief systems do this (I don't think Christianity has a widespread belief that plants have a soul, for one example), and believing in a God indeed does not prevent you from questioning the physical world with a scientific mindset. And even many atheists believe in souls (you don't need to believe in a God to believe in the metaphysical after all).
But still, the two concepts aren't entirely orthogonal. Certain religious worldviews are mutually exclusive with certain interpretations on life. And if your interpretation of life conflicts with the locally prevalent religion that might cause you to become an atheist.
Uh, this seems like a turtles all the way down problem as faith has just pushed the problem over to this nebulous soul thingy that has no strict definition or means of identification. How do you falsify what a soul is or isn't?
But it’s a belief about epistemology, not a bunch of specific affirmations about the thousands of deities and mythical creatures that humans have proposed. The agnosticism/atheism dichotomy is pretty silly once you think in terms of epistemology, particularly if you believe in fallibilism or even philosophical skepticism.
Only religious people care about distinctions between agnosticism and atheism.
Religious people can't even agree on what this God concept is supposed to be, but they can make fine distinctions in the ways people don't share their belief in it.
of course atheism doesn't need a root cause, but you can still justify this default by trying to dive down into why it actually is the default and to me personally when i boil the whole thing down this is sort of the root of why.
Dawkins had something to contribute when it comes to the claims of creationism, specifically the biological evidence for common descent. But when it comes to the question more generally, he is not a good source for counter-apologetics. He simply has little background in theology to make informed, nuanced claims.
There are others (like agnostic Bart Ehrman) who have the education and decades of study to comment on this history of religious thought.
That's a bit like claiming that an astrophysicist needs to understand astrology to make informed nuanced claims. That is obviously absurd, it is the people making outlandish claims with zero concrete evidence that need to prove their claims.
Just because religion and credulity have been with us a long time does not give them any special status with regards to truth or proofs.
I'm not saying that Dawkins is wrong, I'm saying a lot of what he wrote was not compelling to anyone who disagrees with him.
It has been years since I read his books, but let's say he says, "We all know it is extremely unlikely that a dead person came back to life, much less physically ascended into heaven? Where is this place heaven?" That might sound cutting to someone on the side of Dawkins, but to those who are religious he sounds like a simpleton, as if their religion hasn't already given them an answer to such elementary questions.
On the other hand, people steeped in religious tradition know all the arguments and counter arguments and can contest religious claims in a way that has a greater chance of breaking through. For instance, it is 100% obvious and undeniable to most Christians that Jesus claimed to be God and that his disciples also believed that. Bart Ehrman has an entire book [1], based on historical precedents and writing contemporary to early Christianity, as well as having spent years reading the Gospels in its original Greek, which shows that that "obvious" narrative was alien to early Christians.
The interview Dawkins had with the Indian metaphysician (I forgot the name) made me realize how blinded Dawkins is by his material-reductionist belief system. Dawkins appeared to have no idea what the man was talking about because his belief system could not compute the meaning of what the man was trying to explain to him. Sapolsky's Harvard lectures on human biology in particular the fractal nature of the visual cortex changed how I think and understand, what stands out most from those lectures are of the problems reducing a complex system..
Sapolsky has a new book coming out literally today called "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will".
Obviously I haven't read the book (yet) but here's the NYT promo interview https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/free-will-sapolsk... : In his latest book, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Dr. Sapolsky confronts and refutes the biological and philosophical arguments for free will. He contends that we are not free agents, but that biology, hormones, childhood and life circumstances coalesce to produce actions that we merely feel were ours to choose.
And believe it or not, that decision was shaped by your environment as well. Which is why most people give credit when credit is due.
It can also be a self-reinforcing behavior, as giving credit can also in turn benefit you later.
Again, just because everything is predetermined doesn't mean there aren't complex dynamics in motion, ones which greatly influence behavior and the chances of making a decision. Understanding these dynamics can also influence how you behave in the future.
Edit:
It seems that I am saying "if you kick a raccoon, it will run away". And you are saying "whether I kick the raccoon or not has already been determined".
In this case, my analysis is helpful/useful while yours isn't. My analysis can influence your future behavior (e.g. if you run into a menacing raccoon in the future, it will increase the chances that you will be able to defend yourself properly), especially if you didn't know this before, while your analysis probably doesn't affect behavior (except to promote apathy perhaps, which is likely even detrimental).
[ Disclaimer: I know nothing about raccoons, it was just an example ]
It doesn't mean you are wrong, it's just that saying "everything is predetermined" is not a useful way of looking at the world. It's like saying "white paint is white", which is not very surprising.
Strictly speaking, it's not even quite correct: quantum mechanics tells us that, even though the universe has (deterministic) physical laws, it also behaves randomly at a fundamental level. However, that does not change the fact that we don't have free will (since we have zero control over the randomness).
But it's conceivable that some of our decisions might be affected by quantum randomness (this is even obvious in some contrived, but realistic Schrödinger's-cat-like scenarios).
(Based on what I've read, it makes sense to me that) we're not. A coin toss outcome seems random only because / as long as some of the initial conditions are unknown.
This is an absurd argument because it inconsistently moves the value of giving credit outside of the realm of determinism. Since everything is determined then the concept of credit would become meaningless. It is not meaningless because it exists within the subjective world created from determinism.
Just like you can't say a criminal is not guilty of a crime without free will, because the concept of crime exists within the same subjective context as the experience of the criminal choosing to commit a crime. Choice and will still exist, they are just not "Free" in the sense of being determined by something outside of physics and its resulting emergent systems.
It would be like arguing that a waterfall does not exist and is not beautiful because if you look closely enough at it all you see are numbers representing the states of molecules and velocities.
Meaning does not require "free will", and the very concept of a will being "Free" is absurd since a resulting choice is either completely random (And thus not really anyone's will) or is determined by prior states and circumstances (the things that make you you) and is thus not really "Free".
Whenever I see some one denying the existence of free will, I feel like punching him in the face, then saying "Why are you so angry at me? According to you, I couldn't help it!"
That's silly. A NOT gate will change state when stimulated by a logic signal. Neither the signal nor the gate have "free will" in any meaningful sense but it happens anyways.
Arguably, you're disproving your own point by eliciting a reaction that's not rational according to someone's belief system.
Whether or not you have free will, punching someone in the face is likely to have consequences. That is your reason to consider whether or not to do it.
If we assume you have free will, it provides you with the opportunity to actively make the choice that will get you the best outcome.
If we assume you do not, then that won't alter the outcomes, nor the reasons to prefer one choice over the other, the only thing that has changed is whether or not the choice you made was a genuine choice or would always play out the same way if we somehow was able to rewind time.
That the outcome would be the same given the same input and same state of your mind does not mean there was no reasons not to act a given way, only that you had no agency in which outcome you actually end up with. But the state of your mind would be a factor in that, and a belief that your decisions has no effect on your future outcomes so it doesn't matter what you choose to do certainly would make you less likely to end up with good ones. Whether or not "rewinding time" would let you make different "choices" does not alter that.
At a high level, the argument is that free will is an illusion that is highly constrained by your environment. In fact, your own example of punching him in the face only serves to support their case. You’re not free to randomly punch people in the face in most places on earth.
> If they have no free will, there is absolutely no justification for punishing them.
This presumes a very specific sets of views on morality. One might argue that it makes whatever reaction you feel like justified, because it was not a choice. Certainly if we can't punish you for hitting someone, we can't punish the person you hit if they hit back.
Others would argue that while it would remove the moral justification for retribution, free will or not does not need to affect the moral argument for punishment as a means to reduce the chance of reoffending or even general effects on the rest of the population.
Free will only affects whether or not you had any immediate control over what you did, not on the effects it had on society, nor to what extent you pose a future risk or whether failure to punish you affects the future risks to society from others, all of which are factors in peoples views on the extent to which punishment is moral.
Who cares if you could help it or not. I can still be angry you are a bad machine with bad programming.
I dont give my water-heater a pass for staring fires because "it cant help it". The water-heater is the problem and fully to blame. It should be fixed or replaced.
> I can still be angry you are a bad machine with bad programming.
By what metric would I be a "bad machine". And who put you in charge of deciding what "bad machines" are?
> The water-heater is the problem and fully to blame.
Nonsense. Water heaters are not sentient beings with free will and cannot be "blamed" for anything. Perhaps the designer can be blamed, or perhaps the homeowner who didn't maintain the water heater can be blamed, but the water heater itself, having no free will, can't be blamed (or punished) for any behavior it exhibits.
I mean, you don't see people putting defective water heaters in prison, right? Why not? Because they have no free will, and are thus deemed incapable of committing crimes..
>By what metric would I be a "bad machine". And who put you in charge of deciding what "bad machines" are?
My metric is machines that punch me in the face are bad, and I put myself in charge of deciding it. If enough people agree with me, we can make rules and hire cops to stop the machines behavior we don't like.
>I mean, you don't see people putting defective water heaters in prison, right? Why not? Because they have no free will, and are thus deemed incapable of committing crimes..
I'm not proposing putting it in jail, just repair or replacement. On the other hand, people don't ignore their water heater starting fires because "it was designed that way" or "it is a product of its environment and mistreatment".
I saying it is irrelevant if the water heater has choice or not. It is simply a problem that needs to be delt with either way. Blame isnt mutually exclusive. The water heater could have a defective design, poor maintenance, and as a result be defective itself.
I don't have to believe it has choice or there is a tiny man inside it to go about fixing it and stopping it from burning down my house
> My metric is machines that punch me in the face are bad, and I put myself in charge of deciding it.
If you don't have any free will, you're not "deciding" anything. "Deciding" implies that you have choices, and that is just what you do not have.
Right?
> On the other hand, people don't ignore their water heater starting fires
Of course they don't. But they don't blame it in the same way they'd blame a person who intentionally set their house on fire, or even a rat that chewed wires and caused a fire. The person would be imprisoned, and the rats would be exterminated. Neither of those makes sense unless there's free will involved.
>If you don't have any free will, you're not "deciding" anything. "Deciding" implies that you have choices, and that is just what you do not have. Right?
Not in the free will sense. It is a decision in the sense that when presented two or more options, I take and action and select one based on my preferences. Free will isnt required to take an action when presented options. I can program a robot to go towards the light, and then put it in front of a light and dark hallways. It doesn't need free will so select/choose/decide to go down the one with the light.
>Of course they don't. But they don't blame it in the same way they'd blame a person who intentionally set their house on fire, or even a rat that chewed wires and caused a fire. The person would be imprisoned, and the rats would be exterminated. Neither of those makes sense unless there's free will involved.
I think that depends a lot on the person assigning blame. I think both of those make perfect sense. If the rats were robots with no free will, I would still want them exterminated because they are destructive robots that chew wires. If some arsonist lit my house on fire, I might still want them improsoned. Not because they chose to commit arson, but because they are an arsonist. They are just another destructive robot, like the rats, or the water heater. Fix, replace, and sometime make an example for the other destructive robots.
This is not valid logic. "Making an example" changes the state of the world, part of which form inputs to us whether we are "robots" or not.
Arguing that changing these inputs can't make any difference without free will is equivalent to arguing the output of a deterministic function can't change if its input changes.
Here is an example of a function for which that is wrong:
f(x) -> x
It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.
It sounds like you are starting to get it. No free will means there's no choice. You will do what you're going to do. What you do will change what other people do. What other people do will change what you do.
> And? If there's no free will, there's no choice about "changing the state of the world", either.
There is no choice involved, but what is the current state of the world over time still changes. You don't even need mutable state to model this, just the progression of a calculation where the output of one step becomes the input of the next.
> > It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.
> Not if there is no choice about the value of x.
Here is a program using the earlier definition of f:
result = f(1)
result2 = f(result + 1)
This program is purely deterministic, yet the value of x in the application of f is different at two different points during the execution, and so the output it produces is different at different points in time. Furthermore it also shows how output in a purely deterministic manner can affect subsequent input, and so affect the output again.
This is what is meant above with "yet its output changes with its input". Perhaps you're struggling with the use of "changes" to apply to multiple different executions of the function.
The point is the same: If you assume a purely predetermined universe, it by no means means behaviours can not be different at different points in time, because inputs to a given process are different because of what has gone on before.
No change or choice in the sense you're using it is required.
Being a robot isn't the same as being blind to feedback and the world.
If I put shade in front of my light seeking robot or a plant, it will change what it is doing.
For that matter, a soccer ball doesn't need free will to move when I kick it. It goes from being at rest to in motion because something new happened to it.
That you had no choice does not affect whether or not a statement is nonsensical.
You seem to assume that a lot of judgements we make of actions require that the actions have been made "freely". But we judge things that we all agree does not have free will behind them all the time. E.g. we judge the weather.
> Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings.
None of them go out the window. The morality of how we approach some of them are affected. E.g. I do strongly believe that any judgement of peoples actions morally should account for their lack of ability to act otherwise, and that this e.g. makes punishments or reactions based out of a desire for vengeance entirely immoral, and that punishment in general should be based on an assessment of how to minimise the harm to society as a whole - and that includes taking into account harm to the person you're punishing, but that does not remove the need for judging criminals because criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions.
It does mean that from my point of view a punishment is only justified if you can show that the harm from imprisoning someone sufficiently mitigates risks of harms to society that sufficiently outweigh the harm we do to the person we imprison, and that would certainly affect how you deal with those you imprison, and when you use prison sentences, but it would not end imprisonment.
And we are just puppets on a string. I feel comfortable making that statement firmly, because nobody has ever even come up with as much of a definition of "free will" that isn't compatibilist (that is, an illusion over predetermination, though many compatibilists would get irate at me describing it as an illusion) or otherwise does not in any meaningful way make actions "free", much less posited any remotely testable hypothesis for what such "free" decisions even would be that would let our minds influence them without any cause and affect that isn't some mix of deterministic and randomness that we have no meaningful influence over. The burden is on those who believe in free will to, for starters, define it in a logically coherent way other than just arguing in the negative by insisting we're somehow different from all other matter and energy we've observed.
If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so.
> criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions.
That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
> If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so.
Irrelevant. We don't put every human we judge in jail or make them pay a fine, or indeed have them put in front of a court either. Most of the time we either just glare at them or tell them off or otherwise express our disapproval.
> That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
This is blatantly absurd. What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. You can disprove that by flicking a light switch and observing that the light comes on. The light has no free will, and the process is deterministic, and yet the output is different when you apply a different input.
In a fully deterministic universe, you were always going to flick that light switch, and so seeing it as a "change" is a point of view not an actual argument for agency. But when you do the light did not have a choice to remain off. With an entity - like a human - with more state, the relationship is not always remotely as predictable, but the notion that changing an input can't produce a different output than would have been produced if the input hadn't been changed given a deterministic universe is equally absurd.
[If we add space for actual randomness as one of the inputs or state, we may not be able to say it was "always what was going to happen" but we would be able to say it'd always be what was going to happen given the same set of randomness (and randomness does still not help with the free will argument, so that distinction is not particularly relevant to this subject)]
> What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process.
I am arguing nothing of the sort. If there is no free will, there is no choice about the value of the input.
> The interview Dawkins had with the Indian metaphysician (I forgot the name) made me realize how blinded Dawkins is by his material-reductionist belief system. Dawkins appeared to have no idea what the man was talking about because his belief system could not compute the meaning of what the man was trying to explain to him.
I did not see that at all on the above fragment, maybe at the end a little. It was mostly two men having an interesting conversation albeit at different metaphysical levels and, especially Dawkins, trying to find a common ground.
The video is called "Satish Kumar schools Richard Dawkins" which is ridiculous and leading.
All debate videos on YouTube are like that now to get views. Declaring X won before you even watch. Usually it's video of Ben Shapiro awkwardly reciting some argument he remembered wrong, while the commenters make disparaging remarks about the other parties hair color.
Debate's have become less about who made good points etc and more like a pokemon battle of debate tactics.
100% of recent posts I've seen discussing reductive approaches have slammed them, so it's time for a reminder about why we do it.
Truth. Falsifiable truth.
Everyone knows that reductive approaches are limited. It's in the name. They are a tradeoff. Obviously the world is complex and so intuitively you want to embrace complexity, but the more you do this the more your theories become non-falsifiable and therefore not even wrong, severely limiting their scope because most important truths about the world are falsifiable. This is why spiritualism, mysticism, and religious metaphysics failed so completely to discover the wondrous scientific truths underlying our world, even though these things were supposed to be in their weelhouse. The temptation of the non-falsifiable was a poison apple. Once eaten, the plausible overwhelmed and crowded out the true, and they were never able to build physical knowledge reliable enough to stack, let alone stack high enough to discover that we are all made of star stuff and other such wonders. Truth turned out to be stranger and more beautiful than fiction -- the real conceit was in handing the reins to our imaginations when the world around us exceeded our imaginations so thoroughly.
> most important truths about the world are falsifiable
I think it depends on what you deem "important". There are many truths that I relied on just this morning alone which aren't "falsifiable" in the like Popper-derived sense. In my own head I call these "contingent truths", things which are true of the world by mutual convention or by the accumulation of human history. For example, my name or the name of my spouse; the designation of the gravel patch on the corner of our block as an area for my dog to pee off-leash; the presence of paint on the road which keeps my bike separate from cars. In some sense these are all material truths, properties of things in the world which have a falsifiable flavor (like "color" or "mass"). But I do think that their contingent nature, the fact that they are products of human decision making, taste, and history, gives them a different character than what most people keep in mind when they say "falsifiable truths" (scientific statements about the world). On a cosmological sense the latter type of truths are definitely "more important", but on the scale of things that actually determine the quality and shape of my life it's contingent truths which dominate. Spiritualism and mysticism proliferate in part (IMO) because they promise a bridge between the two scales, they reconcile the personal and the cosmic. I feel like Dawkins-era materialism has failed to have similar dominance because it only plays on the cosmic domain, and more often than not scoffs at modern attempts to explore the world of contingent truths (I don't meet many Dawkins-ites who are interested in the modern approach to sociology, which I think has done a pretty creditable job trying to deal with the contingent nature of social dynamics). Moreover, contingent truths are rapidly becoming an important area for multiple fields: many modern problems of engineering and science have contingent faces (infrastructure, big tech, medicine, AI). Being unable to provide guidance for negotiating, or even really a basic vocabulary of, social reality is an enormous hole.
I say all this because I do consider myself a material-reductionist, or at least have been aggressively so in the past, but have been left kind of cold by how the movement has developed. It seems too shell-shocked by the culture wars of the 80s-00s and is unable (or no longer able) to act with the sense of openness or curiosity that I think is required by genuine truth-seeking. This is why I'd imagine you see so much criticism of it recently, not because the ideology is fundamentally wrong, but because its standard-bearers are no longer able to push it forward in a way that the meets the needs of the moment.
Well, the world is not beautiful. It just is. Claiming that physics or neuroscience is beautiful is just trying to take the place of the mystic. Science only gives you the tools to know when you're wrong. It is not some revelatory cult that you join to be one with the world in a mystical union of knowledge and wisdom. Or whatever.
You are either a scientist, and live in the perpetual darkness of never knowing anything for sure, only occasionally pierced by a pale ray of weak light of uncertain knowledge; or in the land of the mystics who conquer the god-given truth with their every breath. Make your choice.
And stop bragging for dog's sake. We haven't got a clue how the world works. And we are busy destroying it so fast we'll never know.
Dawkins is a great evo biologist, but his atheism (outside of arguments from biology) is always kinda layman. I say this as an atheist. Selfish gene is great book. The God delusion is just ok.
When he tries to argue about metaphysics or argue through religious arguments on god he's only just ok at it and loses because he's doesn't have the home team advantage he has in biology.
I read most of The Greatest Show on Earth and it felt weak but moreso because it felt obvious.
It might have been more interesting in a time/culture bubble where evolution wasn't taken for granted or the belief in God wasn't known to come with a lot of cognitive dissonance baggage. A bit of cool trivia here and there but overall it felt like a celebratory piece written for the already converted.
Which, ironically, feels a bit like someone releasing a determinist book today.
I find him to be more of a sort of 'scientific theist'. He's so actively belligerent towards religious people, the way he spreads the gospel of science is very similar to some of the (to me) less palatable proselytising parts of Abrahamic religions.
Somebody described his brand of atheism as essentially an Anglican heresy, since he shares most of the same moral and sociocultural views, as well as the same burning desire to bring people “out of the dark and into the light”. He just happens to disagree on the theology.
Haha yes the irony is palpable. Maybe 'scientific theist' is pretty unfair actually, plenty of theists that I meet don't force their beliefs on other people, it should be 'scientific missionary' or something.
The Root of All Evil had a profound impact on me. I read it when Reddit, /r/Atheism and /r/science were still young and cool. It led me to read a lot of Dawkins other works, but perhaps more importantly led me to read folks like Suzanne Blackmore's work on memetics.
Well, all Earth life involves a lipid membrane with a significant potential across it due to a proton gradient. But of course these exist in non-living contexts too or else there wouldn't have been any way for life to evolve. And we can't be sure alien life would also use this.
When watching single-celled nematode embryos under the microscope as a PhD student, I was often struck with a sense of the cell and its innards (microtubles, for instance) being very much like a crystal growing.
Anyone who likes this kind of thing might find Freeman Dyson's paper A Model for the Origin of Life [1] interesting. It's a purely statistical model, dealing with the most abstract properties of the component molecules. The summary from the paper:
A simple statistical model is constructed, describing the transition from disorder to order in a population of mutually catalytic molecules undergoing random mutations. The consequences of the model are calculated, and its possible relevance to the problem of the origin of life is discussed. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the model allows populations of several thousand molecular units to make the transition from disorder to order with reasonable probability.
I got on to this from the bit of his Web of Stories interview talking about it [2]. I listened to the whole interview recently, and highly recommend it.
so the logic implication is this implies we don't/didn't need a divine creator to create man right? Like the molecules were capable of it all by themselves?
The church has been using logic in the study of religion for thousands of years. This is no different. One way or another asking questions and thinking about problems is OK.
Answering the scientific questions brought forward by religion is not the study of religion.
The post you responded to didn't say "did" but "could". Science hasn't disproved "someone created stuff" only "humans came first" and "the Earth is a few thousand years old".
Science has said that "someone didn't have to create stuff" which is an important distinction here.
Geological evidence goes back a few billion years.
The theory of evolution is pretty well documented and similarly human remains only go back so far.
Science doesn't say it did. Science said it could.
Science assumes it did because it is the most "likely" answer. In the absence of contrarian evidence you assume the only possible answer.
Religion is not in and of itself contrarian evidence.
Also I will note that an alternative is an asteroid dropped the building blocks onto Earth, it isn't the primary because our understanding of the maths involved says organic molecules surviving in outer space for billions of years (the average time expected to go from interesting place to earth via asteroid) is less likely than it randomly occuring in the early very active earth.
> Geological evidence goes back a few billion years.
What "evidence" is this? Are you referring to the radioactive dating data that must first assume that radioactive decomposition happens at a fixed rate across all time (unverified and unverifiable), and that we even know what the "original" isotope breakdowns of various elements were (unknown and unknowable)? Or is there some geological evidence I am not aware of that does not require first assuming the desired conclusion.
> Science doesn't say it did. Science said it could.
Ok fine, with what evidence does science support the claim that things could go from not existing to existing with no outside intervention?
> it is the most "likely" answer
Only if you explicitly exclude the idea that a higher intelligence created the universe with life more or less as we know it (explaining the great holes in your "fossil records"/etc.). If you refrain from artificially excluding that explanation, you will see that no answer is any more likely than precisely it.
If you want to learn more about possible ways for life to have started, I recommend the books by Nick Lane, especially "The Vital Question" and "Transformer."
We have several hypothesis about the origin of life, and none of them require a divine creator. It turns out non-equilibrium systems dissipating energy will create complexity, as complexity is more efficient at dissipating energy. There is a natural selection pressure for building complexity!
There is a very old joke which I will try to paraphrase. A scientist is having a debate with God and he says "I have discovered the recipe for how life is created, I no longer need you". God says "Oh, really, please explain it to me". The scientist says "Well, first you take hydrogen atoms ..." and God interrupts him asking "from where do you get those hydrogen atoms?"
That is, there is some property of the material of the universe that makes complex life possible. It's a bit like saying "I know how to build a computer" because you can buy parts online and put them together. There is a sense in which what you are saying is true - but without TSMC you are not going to be able to build a computer.
It's not a circular argument, the argument isn't "God exists because he gave that answer". It's not really presenting an argument at all, it's merely a framing device for something like "God created everything natural".
The argument is, "You can't prove to God that he doesn't exist."
The argument wouldn't exist if you weren't already proving something to God. The presence of the God character in this story has no foundation other than the presence of the God character in this story.
> it's merely a framing device for something like "God created everything natural".
That is the very position that the God character in this story takes. In order to support this position, the God character points out that he exists in the story.
The story itself does nothing to prove for or against the existence of God, but it clearly intends to leave the reader believing in the existence of God.
The story would be no different if the scientist was talking to a priest, and neither would its message be. The point is that for logical arguments, about matter or philosophical, you must always start with some set of a priori content to work off of – axioms in logic and the universe in physics. Any physical process by definition can only work when given a universe to work in, you can't possibly derive the universe from nothing because all scientific models by definition describe how the world evolves, and a lack of the world can't.
A naïve person would then argue that hydrogen must have been created by their God, that the existence of the universe must be the doing of their God and that proves that their God must exist. A scientist would interject, as that's a whole load of assumptions which are untestable and the simpler theory, that the universe just exists as an assumption in itself, is a much better one. A less religious person, however, would argue that God is that abstract fact of pre-existence, a pre-existence that all the scientific investigation in the world could never get rid of.
All philosophy of science starts with the set of assumptions known as materialism: the world exists objectively, and its phenomena can be measured and explained. We can't possibly ever escape the assumption that the world exists with any scientific theory and therefore must accept some kind of pre-existence.
The argument does not actually support the existence of a conscious, material God any more than just saying that you believe in him. It simply argues that science can never explain the existence of the universe, just its development. Intelligent design is pretty much excluded.
There is absolutely no reason to assume God as an axiom.
God is not a priori. God only exists after being declared to exist.
To contrast, the ground under my feet existed before I started writing about it just now. It existed before I looked at it. It existed to other people. It existed to the objects that were dropped on it. It continues to exist under experimentation.
There is nothing wrong with the argument - alone - that science cannot prove the origins of life. We already know that it hasn't proven any yet.
But bringing a God character into that argument is just as absurd as claiming that science has found the answer.
> The argument does not actually support the existence of a conscious, material God any more than just saying that you believe in him.
Bullshit. To say that you believe something exists, but it doesn't really exist to other people, is to blatantly and directly contradict yourself.
I find it a little difficult to discuss with you? That's not what I was saying. The argument says that there will always be some pre-existence, which you could call 'God' if you liked. Or you could call it 'the universe just existing', as I do.
The argument doesn't say that a specific God exists. It says that there will always be some pre-existence, and in saying that the argument is valid. That is the point.
This argument is known as God of the Gaps [0] and it has serious logical and theological flaws.
> Detractors argue that this perspective is problematic as it seems to rely on gaps in human understanding and ignorance to make its case for the existence of God. As scientific knowledge continues to advance, these gaps tend to shrink, potentially weakening the argument for God's existence. Critics contend that such an approach can undermine religious beliefs by suggesting that God only operates in the unexplained areas of our understanding, leaving little room for divine involvement in a comprehensive and coherent worldview.
It's not even that, it's a call to enter a never-ending recursion. How is it that that god is permitted to exist without reason where the hydrogen atoms somehow needs an origin?
Please assemble your god or accept my eternal hydrogen.
They don't really shrink. They simply move the goalpost. The unknown is infinite, so we can recursively explain something in terms of something else which is more fundamental, but we simply don't know where/when the rabbit hole ends. It's not that the discovery of quantum mechanics shrinked anything, on the contrary expanded it beyond our understanding.
So we are faced with 2 choices:
- we keep on playing this game forever. Effectively, we have explained nothing, but provisionally everything works due to theoretical models. We have tech, we have understanding and ability to interact with scales that are enough for human life and progress, everything is merry but we have _truly_ explained nothing. We don't know if the next "level down" will completely wrap around our understanding. And the next "level down" might as well be God, we won't know.
- we consciously pick an informed primitive. The "one free miracle" philosophers (and scientists) blabber about. Now, _if_ we can build a consistent model out of that assumption, _then_ we might have a chance to actually explain something. And there God is not really needed. Nature is obviously what nature is, why can't we accept that something simply is without being created? The very question betrays an entrapment in a space-time mentality where "there must be a before where nothing was, hence divine intervention" but we already know, form physics, that that is not the case.
Your assumptions seems to be that there is a limit to what is knowable.
Picture a spotlight shining down on an infinite field.
The surface which is lit up by the spotlight represents our collective knowledge about reality, and the further up you move the spotlight, the more of the field you will light up, and thus know about.
Except, how much is it left to know about outside of circle that the spotlight lights up?
With that said, I think it's pointless to speak about God in the realm of science, because there is no way of scientifically proving that he's real or not. In the realm of science, we have to abide by the rules thus set, and how we define what is knowable. The rules are quite good, and they have served us well thus far, so there is no need to question it's validity or usefulness outside of strictly philosophical limits. And under those rules, God is not knowable. Thus you may believe in God, the Universe or only in the things you can scientifically prove; it matters not, because you still exist and perceive. Hopefully!
> we don't/didn't need a divine creator to create man right?
We never did. Of all the Gods of all religions that have had a creation story, not a single one of them is available right now, and for some reason, all chose to speak through a chosen elite.
Religions are children stories used for political power.
The reason ideas like Intelligent Design don't get any traction is because the people who promote those ideas never provide any details. If you make an assertion that a process can't work without divine intervention, the burden of proof is on you to explain at what specific point the intervention occurred, and what kind of event that was, and what did it do exactly. You would think that people who believe in the wonder and miracle of God's creation would be overflowing with ideas like that, but for some reason they always dry up when challenged.
It's like when you watch a show like Ghost Hunters. I mean I'd be the first one to express delight if they ever come up with something that was genuinely novel and interesting after all the years they've been on TV. But even if they did, it wouldn't prove the existence of the afterlife, it would be something else. And it would need to be investigated by people who aren't invested in any particular outcome.
So it ends up being a paradox. If you want to prove the truth of a religious assertion, you have to approach it from a neutral place and look for all the possible falsifications. And since religious people never want to do that, we find ourselves back at the place we started, saying that religion is a manifestation of human culture, which is different from a thing that defines a method for explaining novel phenomena.
If you are interested in reading more about it, the keyword is "abiogenesis" -- or, as was the case in the books I read 2 decades ago, "prebiotic". Reading about it, it is quite obvious that it is hard to think draw up a straight frontier between living and non-living, except for some fairly arbitrary definitions that tend to be wrong in many edge cases. I'm not sure it adds much more to it except that "this is the current scientific consensus".
For those wondering, this article is about the difficulties of distinguishing genuine fossils of single celled organisms from similar looking inorganic features. It has nothing to do with the defining what life is or recognizing forms of life fundamentally different than our own.
Our models of science are all going to be slightly wrong if there actually is a divine being that intervened in the events of history and changed or updated the laws of nature six distinct times during the genesis of the reality we know and experience scientifically. If this actually happened and we don't account for it, but try to answer questions with the incorrect assumption that the laws of nature have always been static and immutable, we're going to derive incorrect inferences.
If you begin with materialistic[0] premises, it's little wonder that life becomes elusive. Indeed, life becomes meaningless as the concept cannot be accounted for within materialism. Now, if you begin with the common sense view that a rock is not alive, but a cat is, and then switch to a materialistic mode of explanation to try to find the reason why one is alive and the other isn't, you won't get anywhere in answering that question. Methodologically speaking, it should lead you to at least suspect your materialistic premises.
I would say that physical living things will need to have morphologies that serve the functions they possess. This much is obvious: I cannot see without the right morphological features to enable sight. But there is no morphological difference between a living eye and a dead eye, so to speak. A dead eye isn't even an eye, because to be an eye is to function as an eye. So morphology is insufficient.
The language of materialism is simply too poor to talk about such things. It is too poor for morphology itself.
[0] Before anyone responds with indignation, please understand that "materialism" has a technical meaning in philosophical and metaphysical contexts. It doesn't follow that non-materialists are people who believe in ectoplasm or believe life requires ghosts. In short, materialism is the position that all that exists is res extensa. Given the Cartesian view of the world, subtract res cogitans and you have materialism. No one lives completely as if this were true, but if some measure of intellectual assent is given to it, it can lead to very stupid conclusions.
There is a morphological difference between a dead eye and a living one that adequately explains the difference in function. The morphological difference is that the living eye has oxygenated blood pumping through its live cells.
If I can't tell the difference between a cat and a rock re: life, I just suspect my language premises, or my definition of living, not my materialistic premises. Life should be an elusive concept, it's an arbitrary, unclear and problematic abstraction.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadInteeresting.
For instance, Conway's Game of Life is a Turing-complete system.
Such a thing doesn't really exist in the real world, of course, so discussing it outside of the realm of pure math is not useful.
You are Turing-complete, including your consciousness and cognition. But your comment tries to prove otherwise. This situation is called logical contradiction, suggesting that your initial assumption may very well be false.
It does not. The number of available bits just determines the maximum complexity of the system that can be built.
Not directly, but without them chemical reactions would not be possible. "The molecular vibrations", Brownian movement, or, more formally, temperature determines how fast the reactions could occur. It's a physical equivalent of a clock signal in a computer.
Without temperature (t=0), "molecular vibrations" do not occur, so all chemical reactions stop, making active computations based on those reactions impossible. This is a physical equivalent of a halt state in a digital computer.
> What's more, that rock might itself be a processing element of a larger computer and its own processing elements might themselves be computers, so in fact life exists fractally at all levels of magnification
This is logically wrong. Water is a chemical substance. It makes life possible, but it's not alive by itself because it does not meet the formal criteria. Just like a single transistor is not a CPU.
How can you possibly tell? Yes, Brownian motion looks random and meaningless to us, but how could you tell it does not look meaningful to someone?
>It makes life possible, but it's not alive by itself because it does not meet the formal criteria.
If you accept that the sun might be alive you must accept that water might be alive, since you can't definitively say that computation is not happening in either of them.
>Just like a single transistor is not a CPU.
I can't say for certain that a transistor is not a CPU to someone. A single atom could hypothetically be powerful enough to compute something.
Random generator is not a CPU either.
>A single atom could hypothetically be powerful enough to compute something.
I agree. But if we cannot extract the useful effect, that potential power is diminished to zero.
There are of course natural rocks capturing living forms: fossils. And a huge number of them are completely obviously from ancient life. Nobody goes to a museum and sees a T Rex skeleton and thinks, Hey, that might actually be rocks that had nothing to do with life.
The real issue - not well stated in the article - appears to be regarding single celled life, or at least small-cell-count ancient organisms. Then there's ambiguity in interpretation because of overlap with inorganic possibilities.
But I think the point is that, we know the moai are human built because we know that humans are living animals and we know their form. If you don’t know the form of a living being, then you can’t tell if something was produced by a living being based on its shape.
When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it.
Something like a field of basalt columns sits the junction. They look like a living thing carved them, but that isn't what causes them.
There is a school of though that says that evolution acts on forms that arise through natural processes. One of the ideas Philip Ball is interested in is how the forms created through natural processes (say, a cloud) differs from those formed partly by evolution (say, a tree).
He has a series of three short books on this - "Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in Three Parts": "Shapes", "Flow", "Branches".
No, the same is true of non-living things. The shape of a rock is not arbitrary. At any given time, it's the only shape it could have when you take into consideration all the trajectories of all particles since the Big Bang. What makes the trajectories of particles of living things different from those of the particles of non-living things?
>When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it.
This is just begging the question. It presupposes both a clear morphological delineation between living and non-living and that supposed results of purely physical processes are not in fact works of art by sufficiently weird aliens. Also, necessarily life must have started at some point from non-living materials, so how is the shape a rock takes when it's struck by another rock falling on it fundamentally different from, say, a particular sequence of base pairs in your genome?
The reason you can tell a sculpture is a sculpture is that it conforms to a particular cultural language that you understand. For example, it might reference something you know, such as a particular animal. If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive?
Well, yes, and if you took away everything we know about the things in the world, we would not know anything about those things!
There are many sculpture-like artifacts from prehistoric sites. In most cases, we have no proof that they are sculptures, just strong evidence, and there's a long tail of increasingly vaguely sculpture-like forms where no strong conclusions should be drawn.
The existence of this tail does not invalidate the strong conclusions about the clearly artificial sculptures, and the analogous conclusion follows for RagnarD's main point about the fossil record.
It's probably not a sufficient criterion for life, but it's at least necessary to avoid granting life to a wildfire or some other process most would not consider living.
It seems strange to say process devices are the thing that make a system living or not.
The same is true of living things. Given enough time, anything living is reduced to a pile of oxides.
Some physical processes decrease entropy locally, sometimes by incredible amounts. That's how we have the sun. What we really take from the sun is not energy, but its stored negative entropy; energy is just the medium to move it around.
A man is alive, has a fatal heart attack, then he is not alive.
I don't think anyone would argue he was never alive, or is still alive after having gone cold.
Studying this transition from life to non-life, or vice versa should be most informative in distinguishing the two states.
There does not to my knowledge exist things that are considered living that don't have this property of locally decreasing entropy.
Some external circumstances could change reducing them to a pile of oxides, but the systems themselves were perfectly self-perpetuating -- i.e. time-independent, or put another way 'given enough time' is not sufficient.
Of course, before the heat-death of the universe entropy-reducing systems will break down, but that's not an interesting observation.
> Some physical processes decrease entropy locally, sometimes by incredible amounts.
I think that's the more interesting observation. How to qualify life beyond only 'local entropy reduction systems'.
My uninformed opinion is that it is both 'entropy-reducing' and 'context-dependent' systems that should be considered 'alive' (not sure though that this is sufficient). Dependence on their context means that those systems will have a feedback-loop with their environment, allowing for example non-linear causality and thus complexity to emerge.
A star radiating away their stored negative entropy is an all give and no take, no dependency, full autonomy system. Of course they can still be impacted by external effects, but sustaining their own internal processes does not require such inputs, they are incidental to them emitting away their stored energy. Once started, their schedule (when they will deplete themselves, collapse, etc) is known and predictable, thus not alive.
Excuse the snark, but it's exactly as interesting as saying that some living systems are immortal until they're no longer immortal. If a protocell or a virus stops being alive (if we grant that it's alive) when it falls into a fire then it's not immortal just because it has no metabolism.
>Once started, their schedule (when they will deplete themselves, collapse, etc) is known and predictable, thus not alive.
Actually, no. For example, a star could hypothetically fall into another much larger than it and prolong its life, if we were to say that it lives. The only reason it's predictable is because a star can't move on its own to hunt weaker stars, and because (at least at this time in the history of the universe) stars are far enough apart that they rarely fall into each other. If that was a common occurrence it would be much more difficult to predict how long until a star burns out.
>> "Some external circumstances could change reducing them to a pile of oxides"
(or some other transformations I guess in case of fire.)
That was precisely not what I was talking about (or put another way if you still require abundant explicitness): not the kind of immortality I was describing. Maybe I was not clear enough.
> For example, a star could hypothetically fall into another much larger than it and prolong its life
Well, once again:
>> Of course they can still be impacted by external effects, but sustaining their own internal processes does not require such inputs
I guess one of the rules of life will be "It's not an object, it's a system"
I would characterise life as a process that copies its information into the future.
Maybe the idea of copying and that of decreasing entropy are closely related. It's interesting that life needs digital codes to evolve, they seem a requirement for both maintaining low entropy and copying.
Article is saying that chemical/physical properties can be mistaken for life and the line is thin.
You seem to be trying a version of the argument, "if evolution exists then why the heck do we still have monkeys?"
The title implies something like “for any biological process of a living being, there exists a non-living version”. Which is clearly false
First of all it's only talking about FOSSILS, so that's a big thing. Secondly, it's only talking about single celled life. In this narrow context, the title is correct.
You can observe something like this in macroscale with lemon pips in tonic water. The pip sinks to the bottom of the glass, as it does so, bubbles of CO2 come out of solution and stick to the pip, ferrying it back up to the top. And on it goes!
Why, that's interesting, I have never observed this. Do you think having previously added gin to the tonic water solution may have had something to do?
Write it up and publish it on arxiv for bonus points.
Inverting that map, that is, proving that a certain physico-chemical process must have been coordinated and catalysed specifically by genetic processes seems quite non-trivial. But maybe not impossible, at least in a probabilistic way, taking into account some objective measures of entropy or something similar.
Nevertheless quite interesting set of ideas conceptually
I really like this quote from Sean Carroll. Kind of inspirational as well, for me.
However, I've never grabbed onto Dawkins atheism as much as come to believe that the ways things "live" is much more diverse and amazing than we can even imagine.
What has atheism to do with the "ways things "live"?
Likewise, philosophers such as Giulio Tononi with his Integrated Information Theory are edging towards panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness. This, too, is a somewhat religious stance.
I personally see no hard problem and believe only certain systems harbor consciousness. The magic element is simply evolution. Evolution, an open-ended optimizer, crafted everything in a singular run.
Consciousness exists to safeguard the body and ensure self reproduction, it is the inner optimization loop, the outer one being evolution. That's the link I see between them, they work together and each one is creating/supporting the other.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p0BjA8mvU4
We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data.
If we are to accept that we ourselves have experiences, which we must lest we go down a fun pathway to madness (that I highly recommend for those excited by the prospect of existential crises), then there is no reason to accept that "lower" life forms do not also have experiences.
This chain of reasoning follows down, down, down, into what we may think to be simpler and simpler experiences of being. Down to the insects, and then the microbes.
There comes a point where whether something is alive or not becomes more about its ability to create cogent copies of itself, which certainly does not feel like a requirement of having an experience.
Beyond that lies the Earth, the wind, the rain, the basic elements our ancestors have respected and reverred for millenia in societies that did not invent the patriarchal dichotomy between subject and object that teaches us the unfounded "fact" that there are some things called "objects" which have no experience of reality, that we the "subjects" may control entirely.
Get deeper into intuitive practices, and one may have experiences of interacting with so called "objects" in ways that suggest a deep union between subject and object.
A union that precludes the separation our hectic monkey minds have been taught.
It is as if every particle of this universe is "alive" in its own writhing way, at different scales. All feeling the subtle vibrations of others.
The burden of proof is on those that say that consciousness "stops" at some point and the entity becomes an object, yet a mechanism has never been found.
The belief in fully unconscious objects, is then, faith based.
The "hard" problem of consciousness is only a problem when you want it to be.
If you interpret the word that way, it becomes completely uninteresting and, as you explore, makes us no different from some germ or collection of molecules.
We are a collection of germs and molecules. We share a lot of commonalities with the units we are composed of. That doesn't make us "no different" than them, when taken as a whole. It certainly doesn't have to make us or the world uninteresting.
It's only naive, over-confident people jumping into conversations they don't understand who define it as something else.
We can also talk about cognitive abilities, sentience, etc., but these are distinct concepts from consciousness and it's extremely valuable to maintain that distinction if you want to have productive discussions.
What? As "experiencing bits of data"? That's ridiculous, a stone experiences bits of data as scratches on its surface. You could say that it "experiences its environment", but that's semantics and has almost nothing to do with human consciousness - or at least with the interesting parts of it.
Philosophy of mind scholars have been very consistent about this for the longest time. I would recommend reading some of the literature they have produced to become more acquainted.
However "interesting parts of human consciousness" as you put it are still outside the realm of consciousness per se, and can be more adequately described as "cognition", "awareness", "agency", "sentience", etc. Each concept is distinct (but related) from the others and it's unproductive at this point in our collective development of theory and study to lump them all under a single umbrella term.
Consciousness is a relatively boring question when limited to this definition, but that just means you need to change your language to remain comprehensible, not to redefine words that already have very precise meanings.
I can give you my personal thoughts on the matter, they may align more closely to yours than you may initially assume. As a quick note, complex systems are interesting primarily because they encode features of their environment in their physical makeup, kind of like your rock example. Rocks can't really "do" anything with that information except roll and crack differently than if they didn't have those scratches, but when you really drill down into this phenomenon, there's no bright line between the encoding of scratches on rock surfaces and slightly more complicated systems like river deltas changing the path of water in response to upstream flows (a kind of analog computer encoding the history of its "experiences") or even more complicated systems like lineages of organisms encoding their experiences in DNA via natural selection based on the history of its (the lineage -- not each individual organism) interaction with its 4D environment. None of this really has anything to say about what rocks or river deltas or organisms or whole lineages are experiencing according to the definition of consciousness above, and it seems impossible to access any kind of scientific evidence one way or the other, which is most of the reason that scholars (Chalmers) came up with the "hard problem of consciousness" to at least acknowledge and refine the difficult questions still facing us in this field of study.
I'm sure I'm butchering something about this interpretation in the decades since I've read it.
My point is this seems to be a similar problem where it's equally difficult to imagine that consciousness is something that arises from sufficiently complex systems, as it is to imagine its inherent to all systems.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I'm not certain you're right. I can see it either way.
This aligns fairly closely to what happens when we train ANN's utilizing attention based learning. We see that new emergent capabilities arise. We simply haven't built attention based multimodal training courses yet. I hope we never will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_(machine_learning)
What I find hard about that is that it would seem that consciousnesses are discrete -- mine is distinct from yours. I'm also probably the main consciousness in my body (or I wouldn't be able to type this). But "everything" isn't discrete.
If the sea is conscious, what about every individual liter of water in it? What about every drop? If the drops end up in my body, does it still have consciousness?
It may seem that way, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is that way. After all, our brains do an incredible amount of filtering and modulating to deliver our conscious experience such as it is, unified and discrete. If it is as fundamental as the panpsychists believe (and I don't count myself firmly among them, but I have to entertain the possibility), it seems possible, if not likely, that there is a good deal of fuzziness and overlap in and among systems of consciousness.
Plenty of theories have been proposed. Maybe the universe expands and contracts again and again, each time with slightly different cosmological constants. Or maybe there are infinite universes and, unsurprisingly, we happen to exist in the one which was suited to our existence. Or maybe everything is just one giant simulation.
What I find fascinating is that, once you remove the culture-specific veneer, these questions and our tentative answers are part of the same pursuit that centuries ago would have taken the shape of philosophy or theology.
I can't agree with that. Maybe our brains are not big enough, or complex enough yet to really understand what is going on with such complex systems.
Evolution may be the mechanism these complex systems exist, but it doesn't explain how they work.
Even the simplest artificial evolutionary algorithms have created integrated circuits with features we can not understand or explain.
And part of the reason is physical properties of materials, and quantum stuff. The evolutionary algorithm doesn't understand those things, just puts them in some working configuration by chance.
Anyway, my point is that we can't also use evolution as a catch-all explanation. Complex things are complex, and they require proper understanding, an engineering understanding, not just the handwaving arguments of philosophers.
About consciousness: hardest problem ever. I don't think we will be able to understand it, because we have it and it becomes a kind of strange loop.
Failing to do so will put you in an infinite regress of finding lower-level explanation forever, which in turn would explain precisely nothing.
Even hardcore materialists do this epistemic step: the quantum foam is the given of existence, made out of nothing else other than itself, and whose excitations give rise to the fundamental particles.
So, given that we are already committed to such epistemic step, what would be the problem of choosing another ontological primitive and see how we fare?
What is the logical argument by which consciousness ought not to be chosen as an ontological primitive?
I am not sure why you think that panpsychism would be a religious stance? What's religious about assuming that the only _given_ of existence is in fact fundamental? And I'm not even arguing for panpsychism here, since I don't find it tenable. But at least it's not materialism, which I would argue is the maximum form of abstraction and therefore religious in nature.
Not all theistic belief systems do this (I don't think Christianity has a widespread belief that plants have a soul, for one example), and believing in a God indeed does not prevent you from questioning the physical world with a scientific mindset. And even many atheists believe in souls (you don't need to believe in a God to believe in the metaphysical after all).
But still, the two concepts aren't entirely orthogonal. Certain religious worldviews are mutually exclusive with certain interpretations on life. And if your interpretation of life conflicts with the locally prevalent religion that might cause you to become an atheist.
In practice, people who identify as atheists - such as Dawkins - affirm that there is no god. That's a belief.
Is that wrong?
Religious people can't even agree on what this God concept is supposed to be, but they can make fine distinctions in the ways people don't share their belief in it.
There are others (like agnostic Bart Ehrman) who have the education and decades of study to comment on this history of religious thought.
Just because religion and credulity have been with us a long time does not give them any special status with regards to truth or proofs.
It has been years since I read his books, but let's say he says, "We all know it is extremely unlikely that a dead person came back to life, much less physically ascended into heaven? Where is this place heaven?" That might sound cutting to someone on the side of Dawkins, but to those who are religious he sounds like a simpleton, as if their religion hasn't already given them an answer to such elementary questions.
On the other hand, people steeped in religious tradition know all the arguments and counter arguments and can contest religious claims in a way that has a greater chance of breaking through. For instance, it is 100% obvious and undeniable to most Christians that Jesus claimed to be God and that his disciples also believed that. Bart Ehrman has an entire book [1], based on historical precedents and writing contemporary to early Christianity, as well as having spent years reading the Gospels in its original Greek, which shows that that "obvious" narrative was alien to early Christians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Jesus_Became_God
Obviously I haven't read the book (yet) but here's the NYT promo interview https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/free-will-sapolsk... : In his latest book, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Dr. Sapolsky confronts and refutes the biological and philosophical arguments for free will. He contends that we are not free agents, but that biology, hormones, childhood and life circumstances coalesce to produce actions that we merely feel were ours to choose.
Just because you don't have free will doesn't mean your behavior is not affected by your environment.
It can also be a self-reinforcing behavior, as giving credit can also in turn benefit you later.
Again, just because everything is predetermined doesn't mean there aren't complex dynamics in motion, ones which greatly influence behavior and the chances of making a decision. Understanding these dynamics can also influence how you behave in the future.
Edit:
It seems that I am saying "if you kick a raccoon, it will run away". And you are saying "whether I kick the raccoon or not has already been determined".
In this case, my analysis is helpful/useful while yours isn't. My analysis can influence your future behavior (e.g. if you run into a menacing raccoon in the future, it will increase the chances that you will be able to defend yourself properly), especially if you didn't know this before, while your analysis probably doesn't affect behavior (except to promote apathy perhaps, which is likely even detrimental).
[ Disclaimer: I know nothing about raccoons, it was just an example ]
It doesn't mean you are wrong, it's just that saying "everything is predetermined" is not a useful way of looking at the world. It's like saying "white paint is white", which is not very surprising.
Strictly speaking, it's not even quite correct: quantum mechanics tells us that, even though the universe has (deterministic) physical laws, it also behaves randomly at a fundamental level. However, that does not change the fact that we don't have free will (since we have zero control over the randomness).
But it's conceivable that some of our decisions might be affected by quantum randomness (this is even obvious in some contrived, but realistic Schrödinger's-cat-like scenarios).
Scientific predestination? /j
Just like you can't say a criminal is not guilty of a crime without free will, because the concept of crime exists within the same subjective context as the experience of the criminal choosing to commit a crime. Choice and will still exist, they are just not "Free" in the sense of being determined by something outside of physics and its resulting emergent systems.
It would be like arguing that a waterfall does not exist and is not beautiful because if you look closely enough at it all you see are numbers representing the states of molecules and velocities.
Meaning does not require "free will", and the very concept of a will being "Free" is absurd since a resulting choice is either completely random (And thus not really anyone's will) or is determined by prior states and circumstances (the things that make you you) and is thus not really "Free".
Calvinists certainly didn't think sinning was good, just because people had no choice.
Nobody would say a robot helping you isn't better than one that harms you, simply because it makes no choice.
A machine programmed to write a great book is a good machine! Sapolsky should be credited and recognized!
Arguably, you're disproving your own point by eliciting a reaction that's not rational according to someone's belief system.
Right?
We all should do exactly as evolution encourages us to do in any situation.
What makes you think we don’t?
Whether or not you have free will, punching someone in the face is likely to have consequences. That is your reason to consider whether or not to do it.
If we assume you have free will, it provides you with the opportunity to actively make the choice that will get you the best outcome.
If we assume you do not, then that won't alter the outcomes, nor the reasons to prefer one choice over the other, the only thing that has changed is whether or not the choice you made was a genuine choice or would always play out the same way if we somehow was able to rewind time.
That the outcome would be the same given the same input and same state of your mind does not mean there was no reasons not to act a given way, only that you had no agency in which outcome you actually end up with. But the state of your mind would be a factor in that, and a belief that your decisions has no effect on your future outcomes so it doesn't matter what you choose to do certainly would make you less likely to end up with good ones. Whether or not "rewinding time" would let you make different "choices" does not alter that.
At a high level, the argument is that free will is an illusion that is highly constrained by your environment. In fact, your own example of punching him in the face only serves to support their case. You’re not free to randomly punch people in the face in most places on earth.
Now, I will likely be punished for that, but that doesn't make me incapable of doing it.
People commit crimes all the time, dude. If they have no free will, there is absolutely no justification for punishing them.
I think they are conflating free will with freedom and capability and it sounds a bit off the rails.
Even organisms that clearly lack free will (like bacteria) will respond to stimulus.
This presumes a very specific sets of views on morality. One might argue that it makes whatever reaction you feel like justified, because it was not a choice. Certainly if we can't punish you for hitting someone, we can't punish the person you hit if they hit back.
Others would argue that while it would remove the moral justification for retribution, free will or not does not need to affect the moral argument for punishment as a means to reduce the chance of reoffending or even general effects on the rest of the population.
Free will only affects whether or not you had any immediate control over what you did, not on the effects it had on society, nor to what extent you pose a future risk or whether failure to punish you affects the future risks to society from others, all of which are factors in peoples views on the extent to which punishment is moral.
Convince yourself that you actually do have free will by not feeling that urge.
I dont give my water-heater a pass for staring fires because "it cant help it". The water-heater is the problem and fully to blame. It should be fixed or replaced.
By what metric would I be a "bad machine". And who put you in charge of deciding what "bad machines" are?
> The water-heater is the problem and fully to blame.
Nonsense. Water heaters are not sentient beings with free will and cannot be "blamed" for anything. Perhaps the designer can be blamed, or perhaps the homeowner who didn't maintain the water heater can be blamed, but the water heater itself, having no free will, can't be blamed (or punished) for any behavior it exhibits.
I mean, you don't see people putting defective water heaters in prison, right? Why not? Because they have no free will, and are thus deemed incapable of committing crimes..
My metric is machines that punch me in the face are bad, and I put myself in charge of deciding it. If enough people agree with me, we can make rules and hire cops to stop the machines behavior we don't like.
>I mean, you don't see people putting defective water heaters in prison, right? Why not? Because they have no free will, and are thus deemed incapable of committing crimes..
I'm not proposing putting it in jail, just repair or replacement. On the other hand, people don't ignore their water heater starting fires because "it was designed that way" or "it is a product of its environment and mistreatment".
I saying it is irrelevant if the water heater has choice or not. It is simply a problem that needs to be delt with either way. Blame isnt mutually exclusive. The water heater could have a defective design, poor maintenance, and as a result be defective itself.
I don't have to believe it has choice or there is a tiny man inside it to go about fixing it and stopping it from burning down my house
If you don't have any free will, you're not "deciding" anything. "Deciding" implies that you have choices, and that is just what you do not have.
Right?
> On the other hand, people don't ignore their water heater starting fires
Of course they don't. But they don't blame it in the same way they'd blame a person who intentionally set their house on fire, or even a rat that chewed wires and caused a fire. The person would be imprisoned, and the rats would be exterminated. Neither of those makes sense unless there's free will involved.
Not in the free will sense. It is a decision in the sense that when presented two or more options, I take and action and select one based on my preferences. Free will isnt required to take an action when presented options. I can program a robot to go towards the light, and then put it in front of a light and dark hallways. It doesn't need free will so select/choose/decide to go down the one with the light.
>Of course they don't. But they don't blame it in the same way they'd blame a person who intentionally set their house on fire, or even a rat that chewed wires and caused a fire. The person would be imprisoned, and the rats would be exterminated. Neither of those makes sense unless there's free will involved.
I think that depends a lot on the person assigning blame. I think both of those make perfect sense. If the rats were robots with no free will, I would still want them exterminated because they are destructive robots that chew wires. If some arsonist lit my house on fire, I might still want them improsoned. Not because they chose to commit arson, but because they are an arsonist. They are just another destructive robot, like the rats, or the water heater. Fix, replace, and sometime make an example for the other destructive robots.
If none of them have free will, "making an example" can't possibly make any difference.
Arguing that changing these inputs can't make any difference without free will is equivalent to arguing the output of a deterministic function can't change if its input changes.
Here is an example of a function for which that is wrong:
It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.And? If there's no free will, there's no choice about "changing the state of the world", either.
Right?
> It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.
Not if there is no choice about the value of x.
There is no choice only doing.
There is no choice involved, but what is the current state of the world over time still changes. You don't even need mutable state to model this, just the progression of a calculation where the output of one step becomes the input of the next.
> > It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.
> Not if there is no choice about the value of x.
Here is a program using the earlier definition of f:
This program is purely deterministic, yet the value of x in the application of f is different at two different points during the execution, and so the output it produces is different at different points in time. Furthermore it also shows how output in a purely deterministic manner can affect subsequent input, and so affect the output again.This is what is meant above with "yet its output changes with its input". Perhaps you're struggling with the use of "changes" to apply to multiple different executions of the function.
The point is the same: If you assume a purely predetermined universe, it by no means means behaviours can not be different at different points in time, because inputs to a given process are different because of what has gone on before.
No change or choice in the sense you're using it is required.
If I put shade in front of my light seeking robot or a plant, it will change what it is doing.
For that matter, a soccer ball doesn't need free will to move when I kick it. It goes from being at rest to in motion because something new happened to it.
Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings.
You seem to assume that a lot of judgements we make of actions require that the actions have been made "freely". But we judge things that we all agree does not have free will behind them all the time. E.g. we judge the weather.
> Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings.
None of them go out the window. The morality of how we approach some of them are affected. E.g. I do strongly believe that any judgement of peoples actions morally should account for their lack of ability to act otherwise, and that this e.g. makes punishments or reactions based out of a desire for vengeance entirely immoral, and that punishment in general should be based on an assessment of how to minimise the harm to society as a whole - and that includes taking into account harm to the person you're punishing, but that does not remove the need for judging criminals because criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions.
It does mean that from my point of view a punishment is only justified if you can show that the harm from imprisoning someone sufficiently mitigates risks of harms to society that sufficiently outweigh the harm we do to the person we imprison, and that would certainly affect how you deal with those you imprison, and when you use prison sentences, but it would not end imprisonment.
And we are just puppets on a string. I feel comfortable making that statement firmly, because nobody has ever even come up with as much of a definition of "free will" that isn't compatibilist (that is, an illusion over predetermination, though many compatibilists would get irate at me describing it as an illusion) or otherwise does not in any meaningful way make actions "free", much less posited any remotely testable hypothesis for what such "free" decisions even would be that would let our minds influence them without any cause and affect that isn't some mix of deterministic and randomness that we have no meaningful influence over. The burden is on those who believe in free will to, for starters, define it in a logically coherent way other than just arguing in the negative by insisting we're somehow different from all other matter and energy we've observed.
If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so.
> criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions.
That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
Irrelevant. We don't put every human we judge in jail or make them pay a fine, or indeed have them put in front of a court either. Most of the time we either just glare at them or tell them off or otherwise express our disapproval.
> That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
This is blatantly absurd. What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. You can disprove that by flicking a light switch and observing that the light comes on. The light has no free will, and the process is deterministic, and yet the output is different when you apply a different input.
In a fully deterministic universe, you were always going to flick that light switch, and so seeing it as a "change" is a point of view not an actual argument for agency. But when you do the light did not have a choice to remain off. With an entity - like a human - with more state, the relationship is not always remotely as predictable, but the notion that changing an input can't produce a different output than would have been produced if the input hadn't been changed given a deterministic universe is equally absurd.
[If we add space for actual randomness as one of the inputs or state, we may not be able to say it was "always what was going to happen" but we would be able to say it'd always be what was going to happen given the same set of randomness (and randomness does still not help with the free will argument, so that distinction is not particularly relevant to this subject)]
I am arguing nothing of the sort. If there is no free will, there is no choice about the value of the input.
> The interview Dawkins had with the Indian metaphysician (I forgot the name) made me realize how blinded Dawkins is by his material-reductionist belief system. Dawkins appeared to have no idea what the man was talking about because his belief system could not compute the meaning of what the man was trying to explain to him.
I did not see that at all on the above fragment, maybe at the end a little. It was mostly two men having an interesting conversation albeit at different metaphysical levels and, especially Dawkins, trying to find a common ground.
The video is called "Satish Kumar schools Richard Dawkins" which is ridiculous and leading.
Debate's have become less about who made good points etc and more like a pokemon battle of debate tactics.
steelmanning, devils advocate, etc
Truth. Falsifiable truth.
Everyone knows that reductive approaches are limited. It's in the name. They are a tradeoff. Obviously the world is complex and so intuitively you want to embrace complexity, but the more you do this the more your theories become non-falsifiable and therefore not even wrong, severely limiting their scope because most important truths about the world are falsifiable. This is why spiritualism, mysticism, and religious metaphysics failed so completely to discover the wondrous scientific truths underlying our world, even though these things were supposed to be in their weelhouse. The temptation of the non-falsifiable was a poison apple. Once eaten, the plausible overwhelmed and crowded out the true, and they were never able to build physical knowledge reliable enough to stack, let alone stack high enough to discover that we are all made of star stuff and other such wonders. Truth turned out to be stranger and more beautiful than fiction -- the real conceit was in handing the reins to our imaginations when the world around us exceeded our imaginations so thoroughly.
Speaking of which, the neuroscientists figured out how engrams work. It's beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5trRLX7PQY
And what's there to understand? An ivory tower of connected ideas which are not falsifiable!
On the same note: I'm glad I don't understand the nuances of zodiacal signs.
Thankfully I was born an Aries so I'm rational enough to not believe in that junk.
I think it depends on what you deem "important". There are many truths that I relied on just this morning alone which aren't "falsifiable" in the like Popper-derived sense. In my own head I call these "contingent truths", things which are true of the world by mutual convention or by the accumulation of human history. For example, my name or the name of my spouse; the designation of the gravel patch on the corner of our block as an area for my dog to pee off-leash; the presence of paint on the road which keeps my bike separate from cars. In some sense these are all material truths, properties of things in the world which have a falsifiable flavor (like "color" or "mass"). But I do think that their contingent nature, the fact that they are products of human decision making, taste, and history, gives them a different character than what most people keep in mind when they say "falsifiable truths" (scientific statements about the world). On a cosmological sense the latter type of truths are definitely "more important", but on the scale of things that actually determine the quality and shape of my life it's contingent truths which dominate. Spiritualism and mysticism proliferate in part (IMO) because they promise a bridge between the two scales, they reconcile the personal and the cosmic. I feel like Dawkins-era materialism has failed to have similar dominance because it only plays on the cosmic domain, and more often than not scoffs at modern attempts to explore the world of contingent truths (I don't meet many Dawkins-ites who are interested in the modern approach to sociology, which I think has done a pretty creditable job trying to deal with the contingent nature of social dynamics). Moreover, contingent truths are rapidly becoming an important area for multiple fields: many modern problems of engineering and science have contingent faces (infrastructure, big tech, medicine, AI). Being unable to provide guidance for negotiating, or even really a basic vocabulary of, social reality is an enormous hole.
I say all this because I do consider myself a material-reductionist, or at least have been aggressively so in the past, but have been left kind of cold by how the movement has developed. It seems too shell-shocked by the culture wars of the 80s-00s and is unable (or no longer able) to act with the sense of openness or curiosity that I think is required by genuine truth-seeking. This is why I'd imagine you see so much criticism of it recently, not because the ideology is fundamentally wrong, but because its standard-bearers are no longer able to push it forward in a way that the meets the needs of the moment.
You are either a scientist, and live in the perpetual darkness of never knowing anything for sure, only occasionally pierced by a pale ray of weak light of uncertain knowledge; or in the land of the mystics who conquer the god-given truth with their every breath. Make your choice.
And stop bragging for dog's sake. We haven't got a clue how the world works. And we are busy destroying it so fast we'll never know.
When he tries to argue about metaphysics or argue through religious arguments on god he's only just ok at it and loses because he's doesn't have the home team advantage he has in biology.
It might have been more interesting in a time/culture bubble where evolution wasn't taken for granted or the belief in God wasn't known to come with a lot of cognitive dissonance baggage. A bit of cool trivia here and there but overall it felt like a celebratory piece written for the already converted.
Which, ironically, feels a bit like someone releasing a determinist book today.
If not I'd love if you could find it
A simple statistical model is constructed, describing the transition from disorder to order in a population of mutually catalytic molecules undergoing random mutations. The consequences of the model are calculated, and its possible relevance to the problem of the origin of life is discussed. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the model allows populations of several thousand molecular units to make the transition from disorder to order with reasonable probability.
I got on to this from the bit of his Web of Stories interview talking about it [2]. I listened to the whole interview recently, and highly recommend it.
[1] https://www.icts.res.in/sites/default/files/LivingMatter2018...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxlYsAzM_8I
The post you responded to didn't say "did" but "could". Science hasn't disproved "someone created stuff" only "humans came first" and "the Earth is a few thousand years old".
Science has said that "someone didn't have to create stuff" which is an important distinction here.
And with what evidence does science support the claim that things went from not existing to existing with no outside intervention?
The theory of evolution is pretty well documented and similarly human remains only go back so far.
Science doesn't say it did. Science said it could.
Science assumes it did because it is the most "likely" answer. In the absence of contrarian evidence you assume the only possible answer.
Religion is not in and of itself contrarian evidence.
Also I will note that an alternative is an asteroid dropped the building blocks onto Earth, it isn't the primary because our understanding of the maths involved says organic molecules surviving in outer space for billions of years (the average time expected to go from interesting place to earth via asteroid) is less likely than it randomly occuring in the early very active earth.
What "evidence" is this? Are you referring to the radioactive dating data that must first assume that radioactive decomposition happens at a fixed rate across all time (unverified and unverifiable), and that we even know what the "original" isotope breakdowns of various elements were (unknown and unknowable)? Or is there some geological evidence I am not aware of that does not require first assuming the desired conclusion.
> Science doesn't say it did. Science said it could.
Ok fine, with what evidence does science support the claim that things could go from not existing to existing with no outside intervention?
> it is the most "likely" answer
Only if you explicitly exclude the idea that a higher intelligence created the universe with life more or less as we know it (explaining the great holes in your "fossil records"/etc.). If you refrain from artificially excluding that explanation, you will see that no answer is any more likely than precisely it.
We have several hypothesis about the origin of life, and none of them require a divine creator. It turns out non-equilibrium systems dissipating energy will create complexity, as complexity is more efficient at dissipating energy. There is a natural selection pressure for building complexity!
https://a.co/d/aGlaDbI
That is, there is some property of the material of the universe that makes complex life possible. It's a bit like saying "I know how to build a computer" because you can buy parts online and put them together. There is a sense in which what you are saying is true - but without TSMC you are not going to be able to build a computer.
God replies: "No, I bought those hydrogen atoms from ASML."
The argument wouldn't exist if you weren't already proving something to God. The presence of the God character in this story has no foundation other than the presence of the God character in this story.
> it's merely a framing device for something like "God created everything natural".
That is the very position that the God character in this story takes. In order to support this position, the God character points out that he exists in the story.
The story itself does nothing to prove for or against the existence of God, but it clearly intends to leave the reader believing in the existence of God.
A naïve person would then argue that hydrogen must have been created by their God, that the existence of the universe must be the doing of their God and that proves that their God must exist. A scientist would interject, as that's a whole load of assumptions which are untestable and the simpler theory, that the universe just exists as an assumption in itself, is a much better one. A less religious person, however, would argue that God is that abstract fact of pre-existence, a pre-existence that all the scientific investigation in the world could never get rid of.
All philosophy of science starts with the set of assumptions known as materialism: the world exists objectively, and its phenomena can be measured and explained. We can't possibly ever escape the assumption that the world exists with any scientific theory and therefore must accept some kind of pre-existence.
The argument does not actually support the existence of a conscious, material God any more than just saying that you believe in him. It simply argues that science can never explain the existence of the universe, just its development. Intelligent design is pretty much excluded.
God is not a priori. God only exists after being declared to exist.
To contrast, the ground under my feet existed before I started writing about it just now. It existed before I looked at it. It existed to other people. It existed to the objects that were dropped on it. It continues to exist under experimentation.
There is nothing wrong with the argument - alone - that science cannot prove the origins of life. We already know that it hasn't proven any yet.
But bringing a God character into that argument is just as absurd as claiming that science has found the answer.
> The argument does not actually support the existence of a conscious, material God any more than just saying that you believe in him.
Bullshit. To say that you believe something exists, but it doesn't really exist to other people, is to blatantly and directly contradict yourself.
The argument doesn't say that a specific God exists. It says that there will always be some pre-existence, and in saying that the argument is valid. That is the point.
The story did. I explained why I would not (God is superfluous).
Beyond that, any notion of "pre-existence" is as circular as a notion of "beginning".
To present God as a part of this story only serves to present the unkown as "settled", which I find absurd.
Who cares about the origin of life, this scientist just proved that God is real and finally speaks back when addressed.
> Detractors argue that this perspective is problematic as it seems to rely on gaps in human understanding and ignorance to make its case for the existence of God. As scientific knowledge continues to advance, these gaps tend to shrink, potentially weakening the argument for God's existence. Critics contend that such an approach can undermine religious beliefs by suggesting that God only operates in the unexplained areas of our understanding, leaving little room for divine involvement in a comprehensive and coherent worldview.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
Please assemble your god or accept my eternal hydrogen.
So we are faced with 2 choices:
- we keep on playing this game forever. Effectively, we have explained nothing, but provisionally everything works due to theoretical models. We have tech, we have understanding and ability to interact with scales that are enough for human life and progress, everything is merry but we have _truly_ explained nothing. We don't know if the next "level down" will completely wrap around our understanding. And the next "level down" might as well be God, we won't know.
- we consciously pick an informed primitive. The "one free miracle" philosophers (and scientists) blabber about. Now, _if_ we can build a consistent model out of that assumption, _then_ we might have a chance to actually explain something. And there God is not really needed. Nature is obviously what nature is, why can't we accept that something simply is without being created? The very question betrays an entrapment in a space-time mentality where "there must be a before where nothing was, hence divine intervention" but we already know, form physics, that that is not the case.
Picture a spotlight shining down on an infinite field.
The surface which is lit up by the spotlight represents our collective knowledge about reality, and the further up you move the spotlight, the more of the field you will light up, and thus know about.
Except, how much is it left to know about outside of circle that the spotlight lights up?
With that said, I think it's pointless to speak about God in the realm of science, because there is no way of scientifically proving that he's real or not. In the realm of science, we have to abide by the rules thus set, and how we define what is knowable. The rules are quite good, and they have served us well thus far, so there is no need to question it's validity or usefulness outside of strictly philosophical limits. And under those rules, God is not knowable. Thus you may believe in God, the Universe or only in the things you can scientifically prove; it matters not, because you still exist and perceive. Hopefully!
We never did. Of all the Gods of all religions that have had a creation story, not a single one of them is available right now, and for some reason, all chose to speak through a chosen elite.
Religions are children stories used for political power.
It's like when you watch a show like Ghost Hunters. I mean I'd be the first one to express delight if they ever come up with something that was genuinely novel and interesting after all the years they've been on TV. But even if they did, it wouldn't prove the existence of the afterlife, it would be something else. And it would need to be investigated by people who aren't invested in any particular outcome.
So it ends up being a paradox. If you want to prove the truth of a religious assertion, you have to approach it from a neutral place and look for all the possible falsifications. And since religious people never want to do that, we find ourselves back at the place we started, saying that religion is a manifestation of human culture, which is different from a thing that defines a method for explaining novel phenomena.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
No morphological differences between players and NPCs are yet known
I would say that physical living things will need to have morphologies that serve the functions they possess. This much is obvious: I cannot see without the right morphological features to enable sight. But there is no morphological difference between a living eye and a dead eye, so to speak. A dead eye isn't even an eye, because to be an eye is to function as an eye. So morphology is insufficient.
The language of materialism is simply too poor to talk about such things. It is too poor for morphology itself.
[0] Before anyone responds with indignation, please understand that "materialism" has a technical meaning in philosophical and metaphysical contexts. It doesn't follow that non-materialists are people who believe in ectoplasm or believe life requires ghosts. In short, materialism is the position that all that exists is res extensa. Given the Cartesian view of the world, subtract res cogitans and you have materialism. No one lives completely as if this were true, but if some measure of intellectual assent is given to it, it can lead to very stupid conclusions.
If I can't tell the difference between a cat and a rock re: life, I just suspect my language premises, or my definition of living, not my materialistic premises. Life should be an elusive concept, it's an arbitrary, unclear and problematic abstraction.