Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 166
August 23, 2021
At Mind Matters News: Quantum physicist shows how consciousness may create reality
Arthur Schopenhauer in 1859In his argument against physicalism (physical nature is all there is), Tim Andersen draws from the 19th-century philosopher Schopenhauer the concept of Will as the basis of all reality:
Tim Andersen, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech in general relativity and quantum field theory and author of The Infinite Universe: A First Principles Guide (2020), offers a riff on the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). He argues, with Schopenhauer, that Will is the basis of reality:
“The key to understanding Will is in examining our own sense of consciousness. We have, in a sense, two levels of consciousness. The first is of experience. We experience a flower’s color and smell. Therefore, we are conscious of it. The second is that we are aware of our consciousness of it. That is a meta-consciousness which we sometimes call reflection. I reflect on my awareness of the flower. It is this second level of consciousness that gives rise to all art and poetry, for direct experience is simply awareness of a thing. Reflection on that experience internalizes awareness and makes it Representation.
PWill is unconscious without Representation. Only through Representation does Will become conscious of itself. Likewise, only by measuring the quantum particles and reflecting on those do we become aware of the will we exerted upon the universe.” Tim Andersen, Ph.d., “Consciousness May Create Reality” At Medium (July 8, 2020)
Schopenhauer, according to the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, “was among the first 19th century philosophers to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place.” It is governed by Will, the direction in which things move. Anderson explains …
News, “Quantum physicist shows how consciousness may create reality” at Mind Matters News
Takehome: Arthur Schopenhauer is not to all tastes. The main thing to see here is: While reflections on a universal Will or universal Mind (Bernardo Kastrup’s view) will seem far out to many, it’s helpful to realize that quantum mechanics, among other things, has made simple materialism, including physicalism, increasingly untenable. So curious minds look at alternatives. And Schopenhauer, a very influential philosopher in his day, was bound to come up, even if Will appears to many of us to be an inadequate substitute for mind.
You may also wish to read: Bernardo Kastrup argues for a universal mind as a reasonable idea. The challenge, he says, is not why there is consciousness but why there are so many separate instances of consciousnesses. He tells Michael Egnor why his view, cosmopsychism, makes more sense than panpsychism.
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana
August 22, 2021
Kirk Durston on evolution and faith
What if you found out that one of the most frequent reasons that people have abandoned their faith was itself looking very sketchy indeed? I’m talking about evolution and its consistent failure to verify its most important prediction — without which it is dead in the water, as it were. The Darwinian theory that the full diversity of life evolved from a single primitive cell. (August 18, 2021)
You may also wish to see: Kirk Durston On Science’s God of the Gaps
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana
At Mind Matters News: Is a science writer John Horgan’s “agnosticism” a futile pursuit?
Horgan, a creative thinker and able writer, is agnostic about quantum mechanics, consciousness, and God. But let’s look at the bases for that. For example,
“Quantum mechanics Introducing consciousness into physics undermines its claim to objectivity. Moreover, as far as we know, consciousness arises only in certain organisms that have existed for a brief period here on Earth. So how can quantum mechanics, if it’s a theory of information rather than matter and energy, apply to the entire cosmos since the big bang? Information-based theories of physics seem like a throwback to geocentrism, which assumed the universe revolves around us. Given the problems with all interpretations of quantum mechanics, agnosticism, again, strikes me as a sensible stance.” – John Horgan, “What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have in Common” at Scientific American (August 14, 2021)”
Well, a scientific approach to anything must hold all known past discoveries in tension with unknown future discoveries. The reason quantum physicists have not been able to eliminate the conscious observer from quantum mechanics (quantum physics) is not that they didn’t want to. It was that they couldn’t. Observation created their measurements. See, for example, “In quantum physics, reality really is what we choose to observe. Physicist Bruce Gordon argues that idealist philosophy is the best way to make sense of the puzzling world of quantum physics.”
Now, we don’t have to be idealists. But we should see that the physicists who report on quantum mechanics are simply recounting their observations. It is not clear what we should be “agnostic” about, apart from the need to respect the fact that we do not know all things. We make reasonable decisions all the time about what to believe, despite not knowing all things.
News, “Is a science writer’s “agnosticism” a futile pursuit?” at Mind Matters News
Takehome: The agnosticism Horgan espouses sounds like hoping indefinitely for answers that conform to a materialist view of the world.
Note: Horgan’s book, Mind–Body Problems is available free online at the link.
You may also wish to read: Why did a prominent science writer come to doubt the AI apocalypse? John Horgan’s endorsement of Erik J. Larson’s new book critiquing of AI claims stems from considerable experience covering the industry for science publications. Horgan finds that, despite the enormous advances in neuroscience, genetics, cognitive science, and AI, our minds remain “as mysterious as ever.”
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana
Next Issue of Communications of the Blyth Institute Available
Volume 3 Issue 2 of Communications of the Blyth Institute is now available. I’ll probably be making posts for each of the articles individually, but the table of contents is below.
Contents:
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana
On a lighter note: Maybe that sea snake mistakes you for a mate
Weighing in on why some types of sea snake approach humans uncomfortably closely,
The animals have been known to swim right up to an unexpecting person and lick them, and they’ve even pursued people who’ve attempted to flee—behaviors markedly different from those of their land-based kin. Marine ecologist Tim Lynch and his colleagues may have figured out why: based on data from Lynch’s firsthand experience with sea snake encounters, the researchers concluded that the animals simply get confused and mistake divers for fellow sea snakes or other marine life.
Christie Wilcox, “Sea Snake “Attacks” Are Cases of Mistaken Identity: Study” at The Scientist (August 19, 2021)
Okay, but if humans were mistaken for orcas (killer whales, who must eat something like 225 kg of animal life forms per day to survive), the outcome might be different. More relevantly:
More than 25 years later—at the urging of a professor who assessed his PhD, Macquarie University’s Rick Shine—Lynch dusted off his binders of data to ask a different question: Why are olive sea snakes so diver-friendly? Indeed, as he dove with the animals for his graduate work, he recorded dozens of instances where the animals actively approached him and even licked him before swimming away. The analysis, published today (August 19) in Scientific Reports, suggest the majority of cases involve lustful male sea snakes unaware that divers aren’t extra-large females. “We were gonna call it Dangerous Liaisons, but they wouldn’t let us,” Lynch says.
Christie Wilcox, “Sea Snake “Attacks” Are Cases of Mistaken Identity: Study” at The Scientist (August 19, 2021) The paper is open access.
It’s all funny — except that the olive sea snake has a “highly venomous bite.” An interview with Tim Lynch follows.
Along those lines:
Scientists based in Germany and Austria found that western diamondback rattlesnakes (Crotalus atrox) quickly ramp up their rattling frequency when a potential threat appears to be getting closer to them. The sound produced by the switch to a higher-frequency rattle is perceived by human listeners as being louder, tricking them into thinking the snake is closer than it really is.
“I think this is a really cool study,” says David Pfennig, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was not involved with the research. Pfennig says the observations are an example of phenotypic plasticity, or the ability of organisms to change their features in response to their environment. The snakes don’t just rattle at a set frequency, he says. “They can modulate that. And they can change that frequency depending upon their current environmental circumstances—in this case, the perceived distance from the threatening organism to them.”
Annie Melchor, “Snakes on a Plain” at The Scientist (August 19, 2021) The paper is open access.
So, basically, snakes can be stupider than we think and smarter than we think at the same time. Except, around here, we don’t think that the “smartness” stuff is the snakes’ own. They got that from the design of the universe. Otherwise, they would be coiling around the stock market too. And they aren’t.
You may also wish to read: Yes, even lizards can be smart. (And so can snakes.) If you catch them at the right time. But can we give machines what the lizard has by nature?
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana
Colin Patterson: A key late twentieth-century establishment Darwin skeptic
Of Colin Patterson (1933–1998) of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington — then the British Museum (Natural History), Nature’s obituary says this:
Colin Patterson, who died in London earlier this year at the age of 64, will be remembered for his part in the cladistic reform of palaeontology. This was the period in which the traditional method in palaeontology, the search for ancestors, was abandoned in favour of the search for the sister group — of evidence of the nearest relative.
Gareth Nelson, “Colin Patterson (1933-98)” at Nature (August 13, 1998)
The paleontologist is credited with starting a “revolution.” But then the tenured fossils struck back:
Revolution provokes counter-revolution. Readers may remember an appalled Beverly Halstead and his thundering commentaries in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which with editorial blessing later became directed towards cladistics as reflected in Halstead’s “Museum of errors” (Nature 288, 208; 1980). The target was the exhibits on dinosaurs and humans, then on display at the Natural History Museum, with explanatory texts providing interpretations according to cladistic principles. For Halstead these “present[ed] the public for the first time with the notion that there are no actual fossils directly antecedent to man. What the creationists have insisted on for years is now being openly advertised by the Natural History Museum.” Creationists took notice, but the sky neither trembled nor fell — except upon Little Essex Street, then the site of Nature’s editorial office, in the form of vigorous responses from Patterson and many others.
Gareth Nelson, “Colin Patterson (1933-98)” at Nature (August 13, 1998)
Now here’s what you don’t read:
One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this [evolution] stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That’s quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. Either there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with Evolutionary theory. Naturally, I know there is nothing wrong with me…
Colin Patterson, “unpublished transcript of a 1981 address” at Clear Thinking
Uploaded at YouTube Feb 28, 2019, in two segments:
Part One (first hour)
1981 lecture before the Systematics Discussion Group at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City.
“It’s true that for the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been kicking around non-evolutionary or even anti-evolutionary ideas. I think always before in my life, when I’ve got up to speak on a subject, I’ve been confident of one thing – that I know more about it than anybody in the room, because I’ve worked on it.
Well, this time that isn’t true. I’m speaking on two subjects, evolutionism and creationism, and I believe it’s true to say that I know nothing whatever about either of them. One or the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, or let’s call it non-evolutionary, was last year I had a sudden realization that for over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. Then one morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. That’s quite a shock, to learn that one can be so misled for so long.
So either there was something wrong with me, or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally, I know there is nothing wrong with me, so for the last few weeks, I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people.
The question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff in the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar at the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time, and then eventually one person said, “Yes, I do know one thing. It ought not to be taught in high school.” [laughter]”
Part Two (final 41 minutes)
The blurb is repeated there.
Here’s the transcript of the talk.
If you have ever wondered whether a lot of establishment thinking was blithering nonsense, spare a kind thought for Colin Patterson…
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana
Rationalist skeptic comments on the manipulative arguments for Darwinism
University of Durham humanities prof Neil Thomas, a skeptic and member of a rationalist society, came to see Darwinism as more ideology than biology. Many have tumbled to that but his story stands out because he went on to write Taking Leave of Darwin (2021). Here’s part of an excerpt (more at the original post (OP):
When Darwin makes the attempt to explain the crucial point of The Descent of Man, humankind’s supposed descent from ape-like ancestors, he speculates somewhat vaguely on the question of whence we as a species got our superior brains: “The mental powers of some earlier progenitor of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing ape, before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use; but we may confidently believe that the continued use and advancement of this power would have reacted on the mind itself, by enabling and encouraging it to carry on long trains of thought.”
A Just-So Story
The passage has the disconcerting tone of a just-so story. How, one might legitimately ask, did one ape “happen” to get its superior cognitive capacities? What was the vera causa of its braininess? And how did this cognitive superiority trigger correlated changes in the brain? In the light of present-day scientific advances, these seem like shallow assertions, inadequate to account for what we know about those labyrinthine co-adaptive changes necessary for the process he describes to function effectively.
On another point, this passage and many others like it would be a gift to linguistic specialists in discourse analysis or to those whose specialty is in the deconstruction of advertising propaganda. Darwin’s reiteration here and elsewhere of the phrase “we may confidently believe” veils the tenuous truth-value of what he proposes, which is finally little better than a guess. This mode of assertion is uncomfortably reminiscent of the wearisomely repeated phrase of the ex-PR-man turned Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron: “Let us be clear” — which you just knew was going to be the rhetorical prelude to his making a partisan point vulnerable to all those objections he was trying to head off.
Nothing New for Darwin
Such rhetorical legerdemain was nothing new for Darwin. He had recourse to it more than a few times in the Origin. We find it in evidence, for example, where he seeks to persuade us that the eye was not designed but somehow fell into place as the result of a myriad of chance selections over time:
Neil Thomas, “In Darwin, the Descent of a PR Man” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 19, 2021)
Science historian Michael Flannery, among others, has often noted this style of Darwinian argument.
One might say that it relies on the public’s willingness to be persuaded of the proposition far more on the innate intellectual value of the proposition.
You may also wish to read: One day, a longtime agnostic suddenly realized that Darwinism couldn’t be true
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana
August 21, 2021
Online (mainly) Spanish ID conference September 11–12, 2021
As a friend writes to say, it is called “I Congreso Iberoamericano de la Teoría del Diseño Inteligente”:
It is an online event in Spanish. There will be 12 talks, including Steve Meyer and Casey Luskin (with translation ) The others will be Spanish-language profs from Spain, Argentina, and Chile — and, of course, Brazil (Marcos Eberlin)
That “Emperor moth” logo is a nice touch. The moth with fake owl eyes. Right up there with the monkey face orchid in stuff that the life form did not think up by itself.
You may also wish to read: That day Marcos Eberlin, author of Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose, was chased out of Portugal.
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana
August 20, 2021
An utterly serious look at origin of life claims
Well adapted to the believability of mainstream claims:
We’re often told that origin of life experiments have simulated the production of life’s building blocks under conditions that mimicked the early earth. Or at least that’s what many textbooks say. But is this really true? This video shows how origin of life researchers “cheat” by using purified chemicals that don’t reproduce actual natural conditions. Another dirty little secret is that prebiotic synthesis experiments often don’t report the bulk of the product: toxic garbage that destroys the building blocks’ ability to form more complex molecules. Watch this video to appreciate how origin of life experiments don’t come anywhere close to accounting for the vast complexity of biology. This is the first of several episodes about the origin of life presented as part of the Long Story Short series.
Rob Stadler, “Tonight, New “Long Story Short” Video Delivers a Dose of Reality for Origin-of-Life Researchers” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 17, 2021)
The thing to see here is that origin of life is history, not science. That point is often missed. Science is about how laws act in nature; history is about the details of what actually happened.
If you want to know how life originated, you want to know history. It may or may not be accessible. We might never know how life originated for the same reasons as we may never know whether Neanderthal man had a religion. Anything anyone says on the subject is conjecture or ideology, not evidence.
You may also wish to read: Microbial fossils found at 3.4 billion years ago at the sub sea floor level. It’s not entirely clear that these were life forms but if they were, it’s further evidence that life got started pretty much when the planet cooled and not, apparently, as a result of some long, slow, Darwinian process.
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana
Coppedge: Arabian artifacts undermine current human evolution model
The Out of Africa one. It might not have been quite that simple because Arabia was not always a desert.
Commenting on evidence that early humans were active in once-lush Arabia (8000 years ago), which science writer Michael Marshall offers, at New Scientist, “The other cradle of humanity: How Arabia shaped human evolution,” at Creation-Evolution Headlines, Dave Coppedge summarizes:
So how wrong was the old story? Let us count the ways:
Humans did not bypass the interior of Arabia; they went right through the middle of it.
People groups stayed in Arabia for substantial periods of time, building monuments.
The monuments they built showed evidence of complex social structures, just like all people groups exhibit.
The monuments, Darwin dated at 7,000 years, are older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.
Arabia was not a place without human history. Recently-found artwork and petroglyphs prove it.
The interior of Arabia is nearly uninhabitable today, but was a good place to live a few thousands of years ago.
Hippo bones have been found in former lake beds under the sand. Hippos need permanent water meters deep.
Evidence of fertile grasslands, abundant wild game, elephants and water birds has also been found.
Stone tools are found in Arabia resembling those in deep Africa.
All the “hominins” were people. “My guess is we’re going to be looking at a whole variety of potentially different hominin species, almost all of whom could probably interbreed,” says another Darwin bigot. If they could interbreed, they were all part of the human species.
David F. Coppedge, “Arabian Artifacts Undermine Human Evolution Narrative” at Creation–Evolution Headlines (August 19, 2021)
Yes, that human “species interbreeding” stuff nags at some of the rest of us too. But maybe a Darwinist needs to think that way.
Anyway, Arabian sands may preserve many of our ancestors’ artifacts. We always say, keep digging.
You may also wish to read: Human evolution at your fingertips
Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana
Michael J. Behe's Blog
- Michael J. Behe's profile
- 219 followers
