I see said the blind man

@sonhouse said
You keep forgetting I am a cleanroom hardware expert not genetics which is why I read about it.

I’m not a genetics expert by any stretch of the imagination, and I have worked in clean rooms as well, testing next-generation CPUs, so I am not totally clueless about the relationship between hardware and software. You should grasp that relationship between the two as well; these must be put together well, bad hardware design or piss poor coding will produce nothing but grief.

Most of my time troubleshooting was spent identifying the root cause of the issues we were seeing: a hardware malfunction, a device issue, or an engineer or operator’s mistake? If English was the Engineer’s second language, or did they not phrase something correctly in the instructions for their experiment?

You know that in order for work to be done, it must be between V high and V low, or things can go wrong, shorts and opens. Design is a major part of any highly complex system for operational excellence, and yet you accuse me of looking at the principles of these things as if they were brain-dead religious nonsense. Starts and stops, and level checking are built-in functions to ensure that things work well when they are working, so blood pressure, glucose levels, and blood clotting are not things that can be added later by undirected chemical reactions moving towards life. Those things require forethought!

@KellyJay said
I’m not a genetics expert by any stretch of the imagination, and I have worked in clean rooms as well, testing next-generation CPUs, so I am not totally clueless about the relationship between hardware and software. You should grasp that relationship between the two as well; these must be put together well, bad hardware design or piss poor coding will produce nothing but gr ...[text shortened]... ter by undirected chemical reactions moving towards life. Those things require forethought!

Hint hint

@sonhouse said
Hint hint

I believe life and the universe are both designed for a purpose. I am not at all attempting to be cryptic about this, you getting all worked up about the very idea of design reveals your thoughts too. I can defend mine, you change the subject.

@KellyJay said
I believe life and the universe are both designed for a purpose. I am not at all attempting to be cryptic about this, you getting all worked up about the very idea of design reveals your thoughts too. I can defend mine, you change the subject.

Since there is no proof one way or the other you cannot 'defend' your god did it stance. It is opinion and nothing more.

@sonhouse said
Since there is no proof one way or the other you cannot 'defend' your god did it stance. It is opinion and nothing more.

Proof is in mathematics, we have evidence that we need to evaluate looking for the best possible explanation. All truth seeking is the same no matter the object, if there is a claim about this or that.

Eventually every truth statement is based on some explanation, which is based on some truth statement, till we hit a point of faith or another explanation based on some truth statement.

If you claim creation isn’t true that requires an explanation just as those who claim it is true. What makes them different, since they cannot both be true at the same time? Which is the more reasonable when it comes to evidence that cannot be true at the same time.

Your bottom line is based upon what, feelings?

@KellyJay said
Proof is in mathematics, we have evidence that we need to evaluate looking for the best possible explanation. All truth seeking is the same no matter the object, if there is a claim about this or that.

Eventually every truth statement is based on some explanation, which is based on some truth statement, till we hit a point of faith or another explanation based on some ...[text shortened]... to evidence that cannot be true at the same time.

Your bottom line is based upon what, feelings?

My bottom line is watching the results of the latest science. You are still just loaded with opinion since you have zero way of proving anything.

@KellyJay said
Proof is in mathematics, we have evidence that we need to evaluate looking for the best possible explanation. All truth seeking is the same no matter the object, if there is a claim about this or that.

Eventually every truth statement is based on some explanation, which is based on some truth statement, till we hit a point of faith or another explanation based on some ...[text shortened]... to evidence that cannot be true at the same time.

Your bottom line is based upon what, feelings?

What do you mean when you say "Proof is in mathematics?"

What is your definition of "creation"? Do you mean specifically the proposition that physical reality was conjured with conscious intent?

Whether the universe was created with or without a conscious, deliberate intent seems to be the question here.

You have stated many times that you believe it improbable, even impossible, that life could have arisen through mindless processes. As a metaphysical idealist I would agree, if only because metaphysical idealism views reality as existing entirely in consciousness. Nothing exists outside of consciousness.

But intent is extra. It takes consciousness of a more sophisticated, more structured sort for intentional action to be possible. Intentional action requires deliberation and planning. Take away someone's ability to deliberate and plan, and they will still be aware of existing, and still be capable of having experiences. Take away any conscious entity's capacity for metacognition, and even the ability to self-reflect, and there is still a basic awareness—a sense of being. Stripped to its core, we find that consciousness retains one essential (we might say defining) quality: the ability to experience. This ability lies at the foundation of every conscious entity, and such ability to experience is identical in all living things when all contents of mentation (memories and such) are stripped away. Now we see that all living things are connected by virtue of being part of a greater whole, that whole being what we might call Mind with a capital M.

At its ground, Mind is just experiences. But, being an experiencing agent, Mind will have an innate sense of volition. Mind will have urges, will grope about, and have experiences in the form of thoughts and emotions in patterned ways. Mathematics, I would say, is something like a Jungian archetype at the level of Mind itself. That is, mathematics is an organizing principle of Mind as a universal consciousness. Mind flows, because its innate sense of volition seeks experiences that are ordered and lend themselves to narratives and stories. Meaning arises from connecting thought forms into a flow that tells a tale. This is the bread and butter of cognitive associations, which may assemble into mental complexes capable of more sophisticated modes of mentation (like hunting for prey or conceiving of Euclidean geometry).

Here's my point: reality is not mindless, and life did not arise through mindless processes, and that is because all things arise within a universal consciousness. There is nothing "outside" Mind. Nonetheless Mind itself has not the ability to deliberate, plan, or act with intent. It is structured, and we humans inherited its structured thought patterns and formalized certain aspects of it, whence comes language, logic, and mathematics. But the universe around us also arises from Mind, and therefore it is eminently amenable to mathematical description. Humans and the universe both arose from Mind, are within Mind, and so it should come as no surprise that human thought is naturally able to make much sense of the universe's dynamics—its story—using human language and mathematics.

But see what is missing here: intent. The universe, and all life within it, arose from Mind, which is innately structured and has volition, but there is no intent at its ground. Mind does not wholly understand itself, and without any sense of a beginning it cannot conceive of an end. There is no intent in what it does, but rather has experiences patterned according to volition. The patterns can become exquisitely complex (creating such things as central nervous systems) as narratives are woven together in an instinctual pursuit of understanding, but there is nothing truly random about any of it. We say data is random when we can perceive no pattern in it—that is, no story.

The origin of life may appear to be random, but as a metaphysical idealist I would say it arose through processes so complex we cannot discern the story at the most granular level. Since everything is connected in Mind, nothing can be a truly isolated and random event, except as conceived in a thought experiment or hypothetical argument.

Now, once intent is found to be unnecessary in a cosmogenic model, the need for a personal God immediately vanishes into mist. At the very least, recognizing intent as not being a fundamental property of Mind should lead one to conclude that your idea of "creation" (if it really coincides with the notion of intelligent design) is rather superfluous. You want an explanation for the origin of life, and state that it can not have evolved through mindless processes. However, while invoking a God may have superb explanatory power, the model lacks what philosophers call parsimony. Processes that are not mindless are not necessarily driven according to an intent. Pure volition, a basic ingredient of intent, is sufficient to explain the origin of the universe and all life within it.

@Soothfast said
What do you mean when you say "Proof is in mathematics?"

What is your definition of "creation"? Do you mean specifically the proposition that physical reality was conjured with conscious intent?

Whether the universe was created with or without a conscious, deliberate intent seems to be the question here.

You have stated many times that you believe it improbable, ...[text shortened]... ic ingredient of intent, is sufficient to explain the origin of the universe and all life within it.

Reality does not cease to exist when you sleep, does it? Our perception of it does not make reality; it isn’t its maker. How we perceive it is merely the use of some of our body’s features to grasp reality around us. The radio we use for communication does not create the messages it transmits or receives; it is designed to capture both.

In review, we know the radio does not create the messages it transmits or receives; it also did not create itself. Something outside the radio does the thinking, putting it together, and dialing it to the fine point of sending and receiving at the proper frequencies out of all those available.

@sonhouse said
My bottom line is watching the results of the latest science. You are still just loaded with opinion since you have zero way of proving anything.

You are loaded with opinions on what you are calling the latest science.

@KellyJay said
You are loaded with opinions on what you are calling the latest science.

You clearly distrust ANY science. When I said 2 +2 =4 you would doubt that.

@KellyJay said
Reality does not cease to exist when you sleep, does it?

Reality, or more specifically the parts of the universe not correlated with biological metabolism, and that we experience as perceptual forms (and this includes all the five human senses), may be characterized as representations of mental activity occurring in the part of universal consciousness from which we, as individuals, are cognitively dissociated.

Consider someone with dissociative identity disorder who has multiple "personalities" living in their head. In extreme cases these personalities have lives of their own, and each has a dissociative "boundary" that allows it to function as an autonomous conscious agent. This scientifically observed and well documented psychological phenomenon we may naturally extrapolate to Mind itself (i.e. universal consciousness). We are each an alternate personality of Mind, with our sense of self deriving from an illusion of being separate from others.

Thus, in my metaphysically idealistic view (originated by Bernardo Kastrup), there really is an objective reality "out there," outside our respective dissociative boundaries, irrespective or whether we are sleeping or not. We do not create this objective reality wholesale, as individuals, though our individual actions may influence how that reality unfolds (such as by throwing a rock through a window). We are autonomous beings operating within an all-encompassing field of consciousness that is fundamentally whole and indivisible from an ontological perspective.

What we can do is dream, where dreams are realities we weave for ourselves within our dissociative boundary, and therefore cannot be directly experienced by other conscious agents operating outside our boundary. A dream is a "reality of one," though that may be overly simplistic, because studies show that what we call the "self," even in neurotypical individuals, may be comprised of multiple mental complexes that operate at least semiautonomously.

By the way, even when sleeping but not dreaming, there is neural activity going on what suggests that experiences are still occurring for the sleeper. The sleeper simply forgets the experiences, or else is dissociated from them. Think of the experience of driving from home to work on a regular route. Your mind may wander, and when you arrive at your destination you have no recollection of experiencing red lights and stop signs. Yet you stopped at those all the same, the experience merely occurring in a manner that is psychologically dissociated from the center of your attention. It is well documented that humans can have experiences that they are unable to report to themselves, not merely because the experiences were forgotten, but because the experiences occurred "subconsciously."

@KellyJay said
Our perception of it does not make reality; it isn’t its maker. How we perceive it is merely the use of some of our body’s features to grasp reality around us. The radio we use for communication does not create the messages it transmits or receives; it is designed to capture both.

I agree with this. And in my view, the brain does not generate consciousness, it processes it. A brain is a mental complex that evolved in universal consciousness to a high degree of sophistication. It processes sensory inputs and codifies them into forms that we call sights, sounds, tastes, and so on. The forms are woven together to create what we call "the world": a place where things happen, and narratives are told.

If you want to ascribe a "purpose" to the universe, then I would say it is this: it is a stage for story-telling, with the stories consisting of sensory forms that are metaphors for underlying mental activities of Mind itself. The stories, when one quiets the noise in one's head and really pays attention, may be found to point to transcendent truths about the nature of consciousness itself that cannot be conveyed with language or logic. As for language and logic (and by extension mathematics), they are fantastic tools for the intellect in identifying patterns in sensory forms, but the patterns cannot themselves convey transcendent truths; rather, they "point to" those truths. Yet Mind cannot ever fully understand itself in one great, revelatory swoop, as that would require stepping outside Mind as a whole in some fashion and examining Mind as an object separate from the observing subject—which is impossible, because the subject is necessarily a part of Mind.

@sonhouse said
You clearly distrust ANY science. When I said 2 +2 =4 you would doubt that.

You spend a lot of time thinking about my thought processes as if you can read minds. I’d also be willing to bet there is more to say about 1 + 1 =2 than simply accepting it.

@KellyJay said
You spend a lot of time thinking about my thought processes as if you can read minds. I’d also be willing to bet there is more to say about 1 + 1 =2 than simply accepting it.

Of course, the uncertainty principle limits the ultimate precision of everything including math. Math is not infinitely expandable, it runs into limits but outside those limits 2+2=4. did you think that was something new?

Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the halting problem, proposing that some mathematical truths are irreducible and cannot be compressed or proven with finite axioms, suggesting a new, more practical approach to understanding mathematical limits.

@sonhouse said
Of course, the uncertainty principle limits the ultimate precision of everything including math. Math is not infinitely expandable, it runs into limits but outside those limits 2+2=4. did you think that was something new?

Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the halting problem, proposing that some mathematical truths are irreducible and cannot be compressed or proven with finite axioms, suggesting a new, more practical approach to understanding mathematical limits.

And yet you accept that the symbiotic nature found in the genetic code came about not through design but undirected chemical processes.