More "miscellany" (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 18, 2022, 10:49 (681 days ago) @ xeno6696

xeno: …randomly generated computer programs are used to solve real-world problems.

xeno: So random generation combined with selection for fitness most certainly CAN create complex and useful results--that compete with human intelligence.

DAVID: Delighted to see you are following. I do not accept your Wiki-supported article as proof of your view. It is simply more human intelligence playing within a computer program. You still must answer the problem of chance mutations creating the complexity of evolutionary biochemistry. I have produced many pointed examples here. The biochemical complexity is real and difficult to explain by chance events. I'm sure you have looked at it.

I’m also delighted to welcome you back! I must confess that the computer world is as much a mystery to me as the natural world, but I’m quite happy to accept your conclusions that random programs can solve complex real-world problems. However – most unusually – I find myself very much in sympathy with David’s objection. Even if computers can “compete with human intelligence”, so far human intelligence has struggled in vain to explain how randomly generated programs can produce living cells that reproduce, and evolve from singular cells into the almost incalculable complexities of just about every animal, fish, bird, reptile, insect and anthropoid you can think of. And so I don’t see how your randomly generated computer programs can even begin to prove that life, evolution and consciousness are the products of chance. (Just to restore the agnostic balance: nor do I see how a sourceless, supremely intelligent, conscious mind capable of creating a universe, life and evolution can simply have been there forever.)

New cell

DAVID: You just can't give up your illogical view that your god must have human emotions.

dhw: Not “must”, but might – as you have agreed – and there is nothing illogical in the possibility that the possible creator of all things might wish to endow humans with some of his own thought patterns and emotions, since he could hardly have created them without knowing what they were.

DAVID: Still insisting on a humanized God.

I’m still insisting that it is absurd for you to agree that your God might have human thought patterns and emotions, and then to reject logical alternative explanations of life’s history solely on the grounds that they entail your God's possible human thought patterns and emotions.

Sturdy bird nests

DAVID: Animal thought processes are in God-given brains which allow them to have purposeful actions but not conceptualization as we have. They cannot envision new survival techniques.

dhw: You are deliberately choosing terms that denote abstract thinking (“conceptualization”, “envision”), whereas it is obvious that survival techniques are created as direct responses to immediate, concrete situations. Every kind of nest would have been built originally by birds working out how to use the existing properties of the materials available to them. I find it very hard to believe that every species of bird was provided with an instruction manual on how to build its nest.

DAVID: I know.

And since you have a fixed belief that your God provided an instruction manual for every nest, we have reached a dead end.

Biomimetics

QUOTE: The seed pod of the maple tree helps design better drone:

DAVID: the original designer is much better than we are.

dhw: Again, I find it hard to understand why your God would have specially designed the seed pod of the maple tree if his one and only aim was to design H. sapiens and our food. But I have no difficulty understanding alternative theistic theories, e.g. your God’s enjoyment of creation, or his giving cells the autonomous intelligence with which to design their own methods of survival…

DAVID: God gave the organisms many abilities for survival. Survival is required for evolution to advance.

So did your God specially design the seed pod of the maple tree to enable himself to specially design H. sapiens and our food bush?

The missing fossils argument

DAVID: No complexity like in the Cambrian animals. The phenotypic gap persists, and this article is another Darwinian attempt to shrink the gap.

Either there is continuity, which could be made to fit in with your fixed belief that humans were your God’s purpose from the very beginning of life, or there are gaps, which in your theory (we are descended from species with no precursors) contradicts that fixed belief. (See other thread.)


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