h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I encountered "complexify" while a student in Academia. I don't think Bush ever had a complex thought in between his ears did he?

Don't complexify, simplificate.

Is this purpose and direction of life and evolution we've been cracking on about supposed to be internal or external to them? I've forgotten.

Noggin

The thing about complexity is that it is made up of lots of simple things; the art is putting them together so that a higher order emerges.

Simplification mathematically results in an equation, expressing relationships between given quantities, known or unknown; ultimately it is an assignment of values to all the unknowns so that all of the equations are true.
Politics is neither simple nor complicated, therefore you never get a true statement, more Bull S**t, excuse my French.

As to whether things are “internal or external”, external is that which you think you observe, internal is that which is manufactured beyond ones known control and then demonstrated momentarily later as a conscious expression

Taliesen and others, though your comment (#30098) is interesting content wise, its function is to evade a straight forward question (see #30097).

Clive and others (including Taliesen?) have been asserting that “evolution is directionless and without purpose”, yet when questioned on the matter they not only refuse to answer, but claim that it would be “dishonest” of anyone to question them on their own assertion. In fact they claim it is up to others to prove the negative of their own assertion - see Taliesen #30098.

Could not #30098 be viewed as philosophical mumbo jumbo, a carefully crafted artifice, just to evade a simple question? From the outside, could not someone looking in, confuse the overall mindset on display here, with that of the most self-righteous of the religious fundamentalists?


It seems then, perhaps, this thread is not for promoting intellectual debate and expansion of ideas, but is rather a forum for letting off steam and poking fun at “young Earth creationalists” and people of faith in general - but where is the intellectual challenge in that?



#30100 winternights
“ Restarting a discussion put on hold two/three weeks ago …” here we go again “ Following the general agreement that the premise,” whose agreeing with who "


Very theatrical, but if you were really interested you would have looked over the previous comments. Clearly it was part of an evolving discussion as many would have realised from the opening line “Restarting a discussion put on hold two/three weeks ago,” but it does require a modicum of intelligence.



Anyway I apologise for any possible disturbance I may have caused to the few that remain on this thread and in future I will aim not to make such heretical queries .


If Anhaga is around I would like to say the weather is looking better. Of course, “if the weather was “not” looking better,” that would be an unchallengeable premise according to #30098.

I thought Taliesin's post *was* a straightforward answer to the question, hence the unredacted

Talking theatrically, debate is a lively form of verbal or communicative intercourse or more seriously put contention in argument, dispute, controversy and discussion.
H2G2 is no more than a drop in centre where you voice your say then bugger off and do your thing there after.
I personally do don’t visit here with a view to being educated or otherwise, if you feel your views do not receive a good reception then consol yourself in the fact that you’ve had the chance to have your say and if its not well received then whoopee do.
I personally don’t know you from Adam and would not deliberately offend you but there are those who have strong opinions and voice them so.
As for “but it does require a modicum of intelligence”, I’ve got thick skin and a good sense of humour.
Post 30098 is well crafted, if you are to make a statement then positively support it, for example, someone just cannot say there’s a god, and then expects those with differing opinion to think that they are required to prove positively otherwise, given the plausibly applied nature and questionable negative validity of the question.
So there’s no need to apologise, what other retort back to you, might just as equally, not be right but where all entitled to our opinions

"someone cannot just hey there is a god and then expect those with differeing opinions to think they are required to prove positively otherwise given the plausibly applied nature and questionable negativity valudity of the question."

Oh yes they can.
Etic Hovind and Sye Ten Bruggencate both appeared on The Magic Sandwhich show this week making exactly that claim about presuppositional apologetics.

Share and Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T06j5SApekk

>>.. From the outside, could not someone looking in, confuse
the overall mindset on display here, with that of the most
self-righteous of the religious fundamentalists? <<

This is no doubt a question that has arisen in the minds
of many who have participated here over the years. It is
even sometimes drawn as some sort of conclusive reality.
But seldom is the essence of the question articulated as
clearly as you have done.

Mind you, it has often been difficult to discern in some
cases if we weren't being befuddled by irony rather than
just being confused by the reflective nature of argument.

There are obviously as many levels of understanding what
constitutes an imaginative argument as there are gods or
angels posing on pinheads.

The argument for god and a purpose to life will never die;
it is one of the Immortals. And perhaps now in this new age
of the End Of Days we should remember what we learned from
Douglas Adams; ie: The end of the world won't necessarily be
the end of the whirled.


~jwf~

@ stone art:

It snowed just a little today.

And,

No. I'm not around.

Direction and purpose?

My journey to work has direction and purpose.
My job has direction and purpose.
Teaching evolution to children has direction and purpose.

'Direction' in the above examples has the literal or metaphorical meaning of 'begin at A and deliberately head towards B'.
'Purpose' meanwhile has the meaning 'aim to achieve a desired outcome'.

If evolution has direction and purpose the question must be asked as to what are the both intended destination 'B' and the desired outcome and also who or what has the intention and desire?

Specifically, direction and purpose implies deliberate intent on the part of evolution itself or on some agency for which evolution is a tool. I suggest that anyone claiming that evolution does have direction and purpose needs to state clearly where those properties originate.

In my opinion 'direction and purpose' implies no less than 'intelligent design' and falls down for the same reasons creationist ID does: the clear paucity of intelligence and lack of design.

F.

“What has the intention and desire?”

“Survival” that strange quintessential commodity that life requires, built in into ever fibre of every living thing, secretly encoded into DNA that performs tasks beyond human comprehension.
Can you imagine a world where you had to consciously think of everything that your body needed to do to function i.e. breathing, every breath, every minute of the day, you would need massive computative powers that ran simultaneously and at what point is this function taught to you so that it can then be used.
We are so lucky that a lot of life’s functions are taken out of our hands yet most don’t often stop to think as to what this driving force is all about and if they do they have disagreements in what to call it and whether it is of some sort of divine intervention or natural causation.
A loose analogy, we human beings are not dissimilar to the universe in which we habit, as with the universe we have Quantum and large scale reality, there are those who search endlessly to unify them and end up with a coherent single operating theory. Yet they are separate entities and operate perfectly well at there own scale. Human beings are the same, the Quantum DNA side of us works endlessly to ensure we function as a being, allow us then to engage in the large scale reality which we call life.
Science and philosophy are not the best of partners, one deals we the practicalities and the other lets us think about it, next time you look at a tree, ask yourself at what point does it become one , for it has roots, a trunk, branches, twigs and leaves. All theses are large scale entities then you have the smaller scale intricacies of chemistry that allows it to function, we all now about chlorophyll and leaves changing colour yet we some how dismiss all these collective components and their functionalities and unify it by calling it a tree.
Oh and does it know that it’s a tree, intention and desire, something’s are best left to do what they do best whilst we fumble around trying to make sense of it

I don't know. Is that a good answer?

No it's not.

How can the answer to "what has the intention and desire" be "survival"? Survival may be a desirable outcome from the perspective of the species or individual but it doesn't prove intent. After all many species have evolved yet failed to survive.

F.

Artificial, man-made DNA has the ability to evolve!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17769529

That'll make Dawkins sit up and listen.


~jwf~

Failing to survive is an indication of a species inability to adapt, in time, most probably to environmental change. Evolution is no more than an expression of the scale of change across successive generations, governed by heritable characteristics which once written into DNA influence the characteristics of species which then permeate into successive biological populations.

Intent is an agent, which demonstrates a specific purpose in performing an action or series of actions as with computer programmes, the purpose of programming is to create a set of instructions that computers use to perform specific operations or to exhibit desired behaviours, “survival” is a desirable behavioural trait so therefore is an agent of intent which is contained as an instruction within DNA.

As for “No it's not”, please support your statement with a positive as against to just applying the negative to my post.

I think many of us are forgetting key characteristics of evolution. Just because an animal has developed a trait does not mean it is beneficial to the species. Pure chance dictates any genetic mutation within a species, only pure chance allows that trait to be inherited, passed on, and spread. Only through vast stretches of time will the beneficial traits to the species at the time they occurred be beneficial to the species as any genetic mutation will provide a slightly smaller chance for that animal to pass on its genes and vice versa. Genetic mutations do not occur because someone wanted them to happen. I don't know anybody who in their womb strived to be autistic or to have some genetic mutation to make them immune to Aids.

I've always thought that the only way for their to be any sort of purpose or goal to evolution, and the only saving grace for religion, was that God set up the universe in such a way that would run in such a way that man would evolve. Creationism is stupid because why would God set up a universe governed by natural laws and go about willy nilly breaking them? The only way to disprove such a notion would be to indefinitely proving that it is impossible to set up any mathematical formula to predict the outcome of billions of years of cosmic and biological evolution and I do not believe there would be anyway to prove such a notion.

*oops the genetic mutation over time that is beneficial will provide slightly better chances to pass on traits and a detrimental trait, slightly smaller chances.

>>I think many of us are forgetting key characteristics of evolution. Just because an animal has developed a trait does not mean it is beneficial to the species.<<

Exactly because evolution is just change and inheritance of change over time.

It is really only retrospectively when you look back in time at how evolution has been working at adapting species to an environment that you can see some semblance of purpose through the reflexive act but it's a fiction and one that wasn't ever present at the time. It's just variation and survival on the small scale, leading to change over time and descent with modification on the large scale.


>>Creationism is stupid because << ...fill in the blank.



>>I've always thought that the only way for their to be any sort of purpose or goal to evolution, and the only saving grace for religion, was that God set up the universe in such a way that would run in such a way that man would evolve.<<

It does seem peculiarly myopic even solipsistic, doesn't it? Wait this whole shebang was so we could turn up?

Take the exodus - the real one - when humans left Africa in the wave of migration, I forget the exact number so if someone corrects more on a specific I'll not mind - but it's been worked out that the genetic bottleneck in terms of population size was on the order of a few thousand.

As a species that's the probably the closest we've ever come to extinction and joining the other 99% of all things that have ever been born, lived and died never to be born again.

Some design! As Christopher Hitchens used to say.

My usual retort when in conversation with the hopelessly deluded on this matter is that if god made this then he did so really slowly and it to a very long time.


>>why would God set up a universe governed by natural laws and go about willy nilly breaking them? <<

Ah but he's god - he can do anything and anything he does is good and true and logical by definition.

Are you not convinced?

Winternights:

"As for “No it's not”, please support your statement with a positive as against to just applying the negative to my post"

I did - I supported my response with a question.

"Intent is an agent, which demonstrates a specific purpose in performing an action or series of actions as with computer programmes, the purpose of programming is to create a set of instructions that computers use to perform specific operations or to exhibit desired behaviours, “survival” is a desirable behavioural trait so therefore is an agent of intent which is contained as an instruction within DNA."

So: survival is an agent of intent which is [itself] an agent which demonstrates a specific purpose?

Does not 'intent' imply some form of choice? Or does a dropped ball (other objects are available) have intent when it falls? As a species evolves in response to environmental pressures - for example a bacterium develops resistance to an antibiotic - is evolution making a deliberate choice or is it simply responding to that pressure in the way evolution does; only those bacteria which are fortunate to survive get to pass on their genes to their offspring? If none of the bacteria survive the pressure (from the antibiotics) then evolution (for that population) stops right there, as it has done for countless species in the past. There is no guiding hand which says 'ah, antibiotics we need to develop resistance'. Survival depends on pure chance.

F.

The other day I saw some frost on the grass, in the shadow of a large box. The rest of the frost had disappeared in the sun. Does that mean the intent of frost is to find shade? Or just that the stuff on the shade tends to last longer?