Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 53

July 17, 2022

Just for fun: Sabine Hossenfelder on games played by quantum mechanics rules

Which might teach the player how it works:

It’s difficult to explain quantum mechanics with words. We just talked about this the other day. The issue is, we simply don’t have the words to describe something that we don’t experience. But what if you could experience quantum effects. Not in the real world, but at least in a virtual world, in a computer game? Wait, there are games for quantum mechanics? Yes, there are, and better still, they are free. Where do you get these quantum games and how do they work? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Quantum Games — Really!” at BackRe(Action) (July 9, 2022)

One can, in theory, learn quantum mechanics while having fun.

You may also wish to read: At Scientific American: Does quantum mechanics kill free will? Physicists take sides. Sabine Hossenfelder thinks superdeterminism enables quantum mechanics to do that; George Ellis disagrees. Horgan’s arguments against superdeterminism work quite well but they require a world in which the human mind really exists. Is he prepared to go there?

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Published on July 17, 2022 20:15

At Mind Matters News: Why some life forms are smarter than others is still a mystery

Brains are not simple so many “just common sense” theories have fallen by the wayside. Michael Denton takes up the question in The Miracle of Man (2022):

Neuroscience researcher Michel Hofman, who describes the human brain as “one of the most complex and efficient structures in the animated universe,” Denton, noting that a cubic millimetre of human brain features sixty times as many synaptic connections as a 747 jetliner has components, goes on to say: “Many authors have concluded that it may be very nearly the most intelligent/ advanced biological brain possible. That is, its information-processing capacity may be close to the maximum of any brain built on biological principles, made of neurons, axons, synapses, dendrites, etc., and nourished by glial cells and provided with oxygen via circulation. For example, Peter Cochrane and his colleagues, in a widely cited paper, conclude “that the brain of Homo sapiens is within 10– 20% of its absolute maximum before we suffer anatomical and/ or mental deficiencies and disabilities. We can also conclude that the gains from any future drug enhancements and/ or genetic modification will be minimal.” Hofman concurs: “We are beginning to understand the geometric, biophysical, and energy constraints that have governed the evolution of these neuronal networks. In this review, some of the design principles and operational modes will be explored that underlie the information processing capacity of the cerebral cortex in primates, and it will be argued that with the evolution of the human brain we have nearly reached the limits of biological intelligence.” (p. 193)” If Hofman, Cochrane and colleagues, and Denton are right, recent proposals to increase human intelligence “within a decade” via genetic engineering are doomed.

News, “Why some life forms are smarter than others is still a mystery” at Mind Matters News (July 14, 2022)

Takehome: Genetic engineering probably wouldn’t make humans smarter because, as biochemist Michael Denton notes in Miracle of Man, our brains seem to be optimally organized now. That would seem to support a design hypothesis.

You may also wish to read: Ever wish you had total recall? Ask people who do… Recall of every detail of one’s past works out better for some people than for others. Just why some people can recall almost everything that happened to them is a mystery in neuroscience, in part because they are few in number.

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Published on July 17, 2022 19:39

Jerry Coyne weighs in against Steve Meyer in Newsweek

Caspian noted that Steve Meyer, author of The Return of the God Hypothesis, had a recent piece in Newsweek on that theme.

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne was less than thrilled:

Meyer has managed to con the right-wingnuts at Newsweek into publishing the article below, which list three scientific discoveries that, says Meyer, point directly to God. They’re apparently the subject of his new book (published by HarperOne, the religious wing of Harper), Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Discoveries that Reveal the MInd Behind the Universe. If you go to its Amazon site, you find it highly lauded by those looking for any reason to believe in God. Since that is most Americans, these books usually get high ratings and sell respectably.

But,in truth, Meyer’s “Discoveries” have been long known, and have been debunked insofar as there are more plausible, naturalistic, and non-Goddy explanations for all of them.

Jerry Coyne, “Stephen Meyer in Newsweek: Three scientific discoveries point to God. As usual, his claims are misleading.” at Why Evolution Is True (July 15, 2022)

Coyne couldn’t prevent it but he can at least trash it. We like this state of affairs.

You may also wish to read: Jerry Coyne fires back at Egnor and Luskin. Having stated that he wouldn’t engage in a dialogue (which he would presumably be doing if he responded), Coyne conceded shortly afterward that “I may be forced by the laws of physics in making a few remarks.” And he makes more than a few. But he presses on: “one more before I grow ill.” Physics is a harsh master.

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Published on July 17, 2022 19:25

At Mind Matters News: Our sense of smell may have declined in recent millennia but it is sharper than we think

When tested, human noses turned out be pretty sensitive:

One factor we might be overlooking is that humans derive a great deal of information from symbolic language as well as from our senses. When a dog sees a visitor who is acting suspiciously, he may sniff him out and study his movements to determine if he poses a threat. A human can ask around about the man’s reputation — and maybe find out if he has a criminal record… Perhaps, over time, we have tended to discount our senses as “subjective” in comparison with, say, a rap sheet.

News, “The nose really does know, it turns out…” at Mind Matters News

Losing one’s sense of smell — as with COVID — is dangerous as well as traumatic but, relative to other senses, we don’t yet know much about how it works.

You may also wish to read: Has the human sense of smell declined in recent millennia? Researchers found that people with “ancestral” genes perceived various odors as more intense. To be sure that our sense of smell has genetically declined, we would first need to see whether concerted efforts to improve it were successful.

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Published on July 17, 2022 19:12

AI promotional vid — is the AI future realistic? Is it utopia emerging? Or, dystopian?

Are they already emerging as conscious as complexity rises?

Vid:

Or, do we need to ask pointed questions about limitations of computation, oracle machines and Smithian cybernetic loops with two tier controllers [can we have an oracle there?]?

Does a fancy Si Rubber face — like those used for many years in Sci Fi flicks — make a difference?

Smith:

Or,

The Eng Derek Smith Cybernetic Model

Well, do rocks . . . even sophisticated, doped Si rocks . . . dream?

And, what does all of this tell us about the potential for design? END

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Published on July 17, 2022 10:11

July 16, 2022

Beauty and Naturalism

Physicist Eric Hedin writes:

Physicist William Pollard shares four examples in the history of physics where new physical concepts were found to match previously developed mathematics.[i] In each case, fields of pure mathematics were initially developed without their inventors having any conception that their work had the slightest connection with the physical world. Then, sometimes several decades later, physicists who were seeking to formulate equations that described regularities in the physical world found that these previously developed fields of mathematics perfectly fit and described the aspects of physical reality under investigation. The hand-in-glove fit even allowed the physicists to correctly predict new and unknown phenomena from their theories.

Among Pollard’s examples of this is the famous theory of general relativity. In formulating this theory, Einstein utilized Riemann’s mathematics of curved spaces of higher dimensions, an esoteric work developed several decades earlier. The union of elegant mathematics with Einstein’s profound physical insight produced a theory that predicted phenomenon no one had been able to describe or even imagine before then. These predictions include the warping of space near the sun, gravitational waves, and an accurate description of black holes. The mathematics of general relativity has a flawless track-record of giving highly accurate agreement between its predictions and observations. Einstein’s general relativity theory is well-deserving of the accolade, “Probably the most beautiful of all existing theories.”[ii] And its success in describing unexpected aspects of nature gives strong support to beauty as a guide to truth.

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

In a recent critique of mathematical beauty as a guide to understanding nature, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder laments that this approach has failed to bear fruit in modern theoretical physics.[iii] She asks, “Why should the laws of nature care what I find beautiful?” Why indeed? And yet it has often been so—a mystery inexplicable within the confines of naturalism.

Hossenfelder is correct that something is amiss in contemporary theoretical physics. But the problem is narrower than an appeal to beauty. The failure to make significant progress on the standard model of particle physics may stem from a misguided concept of beauty. In the last few decades, naturalism’s aversion to design has led to the assumption that evidence of fine-tuning in physical constants is “ugly.”[iv] The naturalist prefers to find a universe devoid of any distinctiveness that would seem to reflect a designer’s act of choice.

Naturalness expects that physical parameters, when expressed in dimensionless form, should only be of order unity (meaning approximately equal to one). Hossenfelder points out that this attempt at avoiding fine-tuning in physical parameters has not been productive. “Naturalness, it seems, is just not correct.”[v]

The solution is to discard scientism’s aversion to evidence of fine-tuning. Such evidence isn’t ugly, something to be explained away. It’s fascinating, and a whisper perhaps of a deeper reality, a sign that before there was matter and laws of matter, there was mind. That conviction was crucial to the birth of science. And we have no good reason to regard it as verboten now, precisely when the discovery of fine-tuning has given us a powerful additional reason to consider it.

Excerpted from Eric Hedin, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See, (Discovery Institute Press, Seattle, 2021), pp. 200-201.

[i] Pollard, “Rumors of Transcendence in Physics” (1984).

[ii] Landau and Lifschitz, quoted in the title of S. Chandresekhar, “The General Theory of Relativity: Why ‘It is Probably the most Beautiful of all Existing Theories’,” Jnl. Astrophys. Astr. 5: 3–11, 1984.

[iii] Hossenfelder, Lost in Math (2018).

[iv] Hossenfelder, Lost in Math (2018), 38.

[v] Hossenfelder, Lost in Math (2018), 39.

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Published on July 16, 2022 11:47

July 15, 2022

At Newsweek: How Science Stopped Backing Atheists and Started Pointing Back to God

Stephen Meyer, Director of the Center for Science and Culture, writes:

Headlines lately have not been encouraging for the faithful. A Gallup poll shows that the percentage of Americans who believe in God has fallen to 81 percent—a drop of 10 percent over the last decade and an all-time low. This accelerating trend is especially pronounced among young adults. According to a Pew Research Center poll, 18-29 year-olds are disproportionately represented among so-called “nones”—atheists, agnostics and the religiously unaffiliated.

Pastors and other religious leaders have attributed this trend to many factors: young people being raised outside the church, an unfamiliarity with liturgy and church culture, even COVID-19.

We found another answer in our national survey to probe the underlying reasons for this growing unbelief: a misunderstanding of science.

Perhaps surprisingly, our survey discovered that the perceived message of science has played a leading role in the loss of faith. We found that scientific theories about the unguided evolution of life have, in particular, led more people to reject belief in God than worries about suffering, disease, or death. It also showed that 65 percent of self-described atheists and 43 percent of agnostics believe “the findings of science [generally] make the existence of God less probable.”

It’s easy to see why this perception has proliferated. In recent years, many scientists have emerged as celebrity spokesmen for atheism. Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Michael Shermer, the late Stephen Hawking, and others have published popular books arguing that science renders belief in God unnecessary or implausible. “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if, at bottom, there is no purpose, no design… nothing but blind, pitiless indifference,” Dawkins famously wrote.

ISTOCK

Yet, between message and reality, there is a major disconnect. Over the last century, important scientific discoveries have dramatically challenged science-based atheism, and three in particular now tell a decidedly more God-friendly story.

First, scientists have discovered that the physical universe had a beginning. This finding, supported by observational astronomy and theoretical physics, contradicts the expectations of scientific atheists, who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent—and, therefore, in no need of an external creator.

Evidence for what scientists call the Big Bang has instead confirmed the expectations of traditional theists. Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who helped make a key discovery supporting the Big Bang theory, has noted the obvious connection between its affirmation of a cosmic beginning and the concept of divine creation. “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses…[and] the Bible as a whole,” writes Penzias.

Second, discoveries from physics about the structure of the universe reinforce this theistic conclusion. Since the 1960s, physicists have determined that the fundamental physical laws and parameters of our universe are finely tuned, against all odds, to make our universe capable of hosting life. Even slight alterations of many independent factors—such as the strength of gravitational or electromagnetic attraction, or the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe—would have rendered life impossible. Scientists have discovered that we live in a kind of “Goldilocks Universe,” or what Australian physicist Luke Barnes calls an extremely “Fortunate Universe.”

Not surprisingly, many physicists have concluded that this improbable fine-tuning points to a cosmic “fine-tuner.” As former Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle argued, “A common-sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible.

Newsweek

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Published on July 15, 2022 17:56

July 14, 2022

At Mind Matters News: If octopuses are really smart, should we eat them?

Proposals to farm octopuses are meeting with opposition on grounds of animal cruelty

Underlying the ethical issues is the admitted fact that the evolution of animal intelligence, however it happened, is nowhere near as tidy as we once believed:

Octopuses present something of a puzzle. As Canadian investigative journalist Erin Anderssen pointed out earlier this month, “The octopus has already challenged our theories on evolution, intelligence and consciousness.”

Evolution? We have tended to assume that intelligence rose with the development of a spinal cord and brain (vertebrates), and warmbloodedness (mammals and birds). So invertebrates like octopuses were expected to be “naturally” less intelligent than, say, raccoons. But they are not less intelligent. They have been called a “second genesis” of intelligence and the jury’s still out on how they came to be so. Some have made the argument — only partly in jest — that they might be alien life forms.

They defy stereotypes. Intelligence is believed by many researchers to have evolved naturally because of the need to get along in groups:

Denyse O’Leary, “If octopuses are really smart, should we eat them?” at Mind Matters News

But the octopus defies that plausible evolution of intelligence thesis because it isn’t social at all; it is a loner.

Did you know: On account of their apparent (and unique) intelligence, octopuses are currently given more legal protection than most invertebrates.

You may also wish to read: Octopuses get emotional about pain, research suggests. The smartest of invertebrates, the octopus, once again prompts us to rethink what we believe to be the origin of intelligence. The brainy cephalopods behaved about the same as lab rats under similar conditions, raising both neuroscience and ethical issues.

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Published on July 14, 2022 20:56

Jerry Coyne fires back at Egnor and Luskin

Jerry Coyne

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is not a fan of the podcast referenced here (and found here.)

I’m not going to waste my time rebutting these clowns at length, as I’d simply have to reiterate what I’ve said before many times on this site, and since they clearly either don’t know, don’t understand, or deliberately ignore what I’ve said many times over, I just want to point out their article (one of several) to underscore a.) the mental thickness of the protagonists, b.) the religiosity of the protagonists, c.) the real reason why the Discovery Institute operates, and d.) to satisfy Egnor’s eternal desire to get attention by engaging in a dialogue with me. But they’re not going to get their wish on the last one, as I’m just going to show you what they say and let you, the reader here, figure out how I’ve already rebutted it.

Jerry Coyne, “Attack of the Lilliputians: Casey Luskin and Michael Egnor put misleading words and sentiments about free will in my mouth” at Why Evolution Is True (July 14, 2022)

Having stated that he wouldn’t engage in a dialogue (which he would presumably be doing if he responded), Coyne conceded shortly afterward that “I may be forced by the laws of physics in making a few remarks.” And he makes more than a few. But he presses on: “one more before I grow ill.”

Physics is a harsh master.

The rest is here.

The laws of physics that so constrain him are not

You may also wish to read:

Here’s a writeup of an earlier podcast with Casey Luskin as Dr. Egnor’s host: Why free will is philosophically and scientifically sound. It has been nearly a century since determinism ruled unchallenged in physics. Though free will may be unpopular with atheist thinkers, science doesn’t refute it.

You may also wish to read: Can AI really predict crime a week in advance? That’s the claim. University of Chicago data scientists claims 90% accuracy for their algorithm using past data — but it’s hard to evaluate. The scary part: Intelligent, well-meaning people think that bail, sentencing, and parole decisions should be based on what may well be statistical coincidences. (Gary Smith)

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Published on July 14, 2022 19:42

At Mind Matters News: Mike Egnor to Jerry Coyne: If evil exists, so must good — and real choices!

In a podcast (partially transcribed) with Casey Luskin, Michael Egnor explains, denial of free will doesn’t mean that there is no guilt but rather that there is no innocence:

Michael Egnor: I should point out that the argument that free will does not exist, and that we are all sort of following instructions, perhaps our chemical instructions, was actually very much an argument used by defense counsel at Nuremberg [the trials of Nazi war criminals]. That is, that when the Nazis themselves were asked, “Why did you do this?” The answer was, “Well, we were compelled to. We were following instructions. We weren’t really morally accountable.” So when you find that your metaphysics was shared by the defense counsel at the Nazi war crime trials, you ought to reconsider your metaphysics. And I think Coyne should reconsider.

Casey Luskin: … Of course, Dr. Egnor, all of this flows out of Jerry Coyne’s scientism. If you can’t scientifically prove that something is good or evil, then scientism dictates he can’t condemn it as good or evil. Obviously we have ways of determining whether things are good or evil that go beyond science. Jerry Coyne has to reject those ways of knowing because of his scientism.

But there’s another way that I think Jerry Coyne’s scientism leads him astray. You wrote in a post “If Jerry Coyne believes, as Dawkins does, that we can upset the design of our selfish genes and practice genuine generosity and altruism, then Coyne presupposes strong free will, an idea he has repeatedly rejected up until now. Cognitive dissonance is inherent to materialism.”

News, “Michael Egnor: If evil exists, so must good — and real choices!” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Denial of free will means, when dealing with crime, identifying those who, statistically, “might” commit a crime rather than those who have actually done so.

Also, here’s a writeup of an earlier podcast with Casey Luskin as Dr. Egnor’s host: Why free will is philosophically and scientifically sound. It has been nearly a century since determinism ruled unchallenged in physics. Though free will may be unpopular with atheist thinkers, science doesn’t refute it.

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Published on July 14, 2022 19:26

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