cancel2 2022
Canceled
They have discovered amino acids on comets and asteroids. The Stardust mission captured some from Comet Wild 2.
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On the impossibility of abiogenesis
- Thread starter The Ugly Truth
- Start date
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Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
I know...so there is a probability of life originating from non-living origins.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
That's absurd. You're making a philosophical observation that's outside the framework of science. That might float in a philosophy class or a religion class but it's not science. What you're attempting to do, and it's incredibly lame, is attempting to change the ground rules of science so that your observations fit a predetermined conclusion. Call it what you want but it's not science.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
That's why it's an absurd comment. The paradox it creates is apparent.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Well using formalism I can prove a ham sandwich doesn't exist but in the real world I'd like to know what useful predictions about nature can be made from that? LOL
Right you are, Mott.
And it also is NOT logic!
I'd like to see Ugly work, "Nature cannot create a computer" into a valid, correct syllogism.
Logic almost always requires that one stays away from assertions that encompassing.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Well that's the absurd paradox of your argument. Who then created the creator of these intelligent men and where is the objective and empirical evidence for this creator? Good luck with that one. LOL If you can't provide that evidence than what you are talking about is something other than science.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
or that random behavior is still subject to the natural laws of physics and chemistry.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Oh there are more fails here then an argument from authority logical fallacy. The premise of linked document is loaded with strawmen logical fallacies too. Not to mention an attempt to change the ground rules of science to include non natural causation. I don't know if I have the time or energy to go over the linked document and point out all the many blunders. Besides, what would be the point? Would it change the mind of an ID supporter? I doubt it.
Ultimately the single most important fail of the ID crowd is they don't provide any interesting or productive predictions that can be tested empirically. It has no practical use and no theoretical standing. To even debate it is, IMHO, a waste of time. What purpose would it serve other than to demonstrate ID Creationism as an example of a psuedo-science like Astrology, Torsion Field Physics, Non-Materialist Neuroscience or Psychokenisis.
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Oh man Mott, are you for real? How come you recognise arguing from authority as a piss poor defence here, yet scream consensus when talking about global warming?
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Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Well that's easy. Your arguments are poorly reasoned and based on logical fallacies, have no empirical data to support them, misrepresent the findings of science, attempt to change the definition of science, have predetermined a conclusion where you've cherry picked arguments to support your predetermined conclusion and do not draw conclusions based on empirical observation, testing and fact.
What I see you attempting to do is to advance a religious belief system as science by trying to discredit a hypothesis instead of providing scientifically verifiable evidence to support ID Creationism as science. That's just 3rd grade lame dude.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Well you have to be careful about logic. Much of science is counterintuitive and not logical.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Oh give me a break Tom. A general agreement that the available data supports a certain conclusion is not the same thing as saying something is absolutely right. It's a way of saying that there is probably a large body of evidence supporting that conclusion or it would be incredibly difficult to build such a consensus. That is not an argument from authority.
The Ugly Truth
Verified User
No one has actually addressed what I posted in the OP. Let's review and see if anyone can refute this.
Principle 01: Nothing comes from nothing or “ex nihilo nihil”.
Principle 02: “Of causality”, if an effect E entirely comes from a cause C any thing x belonging or referenced to E has a causative counterpart in C. In fact if something x of E hadn’t a counterpart in C, x would come from nothing and this is impossible due to the ex-nihilo-nihil principle. It may help to think about causation of E by C as a mathematical function where every ‘e’ of E is image of some ‘c’ of C.
Definition 01: “Symbol”, a thing referencing something else. Examples: (1) a circle drawn on a piece of paper may symbolize the sun; (2) the chemical symbol CGU (the molecular sequence cytosine / guanine / uracil) references arginine amino acid in the genomic language; (3) the word “horse” symbolizes the “Equus ferus caballus”. The choice of a symbol for a thing is purely contingent and arbitrary. No natural law forces such choices. A symbol is an indirect way to point to something, whereas physical objects are always direct in their action.
Imagine a photon on a collision trajectory with an arginine molecule. On the fly the photon cannot decide: “I prefer to hit the arginine molecule indirectly, I hit CGU instead – which has a symbolic-mapping with arginine – and in turn something else will hit the arginine for me”. The photon must obey quantum mechanics laws that do not contain the symbol CGU=>arginine, given that it is entirely arbitrary. As a consequence the photon must hit the arginine molecule directly, without passing through symbolic links that transcend its laws. This is true for all physical objects and their laws.
Definition 02: “Symbolic processing” is a process implying choices of symbols and operations on them. The basic rules of symbolic processing are contingent and arbitrary and as such are not constrained by natural laws.
Definition 03: “Language”, mapping between sets of abstractions and sets of material entities by mean of symbolic processing.
Definition 04: “Instruction”, operational functional prescription on data and their behaviour by means of a language. Software consists of sets of instructions usually deployed to a target computer system (hardware) to be run. Instructions are something qualitatively different from arrangements of objects and can never be totally reduced to them.
Definition 05: Turing Machine (TM), abstract formalism composed of a finite state machine (FSM) (containing a table of instructions) + devices able to read / write symbols of an alphabet on one or more tapes (memories). A Turing Machine is the archetype of computation based on instructions. It is what we understand as a computer. Its main parts form what Michael Behe calls an “irreducibly complex system” [1]. Note that computation overlaps – as a higher abstract layer – a lower layer of things that per se are not computable, e.g. the choice of using an alphabet, the choice of its symbols, and the choice of the language and its rules are purely contingent and arbitrary. They don’t come from a mechanical procedure because they are free choices. Hence computation (which by definition is mechanical and never free) presupposes and works only thanks to a substrate which is fundamentally incomputable.
Definition 05a: “Halting problem”. Any specialized TM, given an input, may finish running (halt) or continue to run forever (infinite loop). If it halts, the TM has computed the input. Otherwise if it runs forever the input is not computed. Thus the problem in computability theory was to determine if there could be a super TM such that – given the description of a specialized TM – it would determine whether or not it would halt on a particular input (i.e. compute it in a finite number of steps). However, Turing proved that such a super TM general enough to be able to decide the halting for any specialized TM cannot in principle exist. The halting problem is incomputable.
Definition 06: “Physical computer”, a physical implementation of an abstract formalism of computation. It can be mechanical, electronic, chemical. It is an arrangement of atoms (hardware) that works out a computation.
Principle 03: Formalism > Physicality (F > P) [2], formalism overarches physicality, has existence in reality and determines its physical implementations. A consequence is that implementation has limits directly related to and implied by formalism. Another consequence is that not all atom arrangements are possible. Atom arrangements against the natural laws, logic and mathematics are impossible. Here are three examples: (1) a perpetual motion machine is an impossible arrangement because it contradicts the formalism of thermodynamic laws; (2) a TM computing the “halting problem” (see Definition 05a) is an impossible arrangement due to the formalism of computability theory; (3) the Penrose (or tribar) triangle -though it can be drawn on a 2D surface – is an impossible arrangement in 3D because it doesn’t meet the constraints of the formalism of Euclidean geometry of the 3D space. See figure at the top.
The key point is that the impossibility of certain formalisms implies the impossibility of the related physical implementations. Abstractness matters. It drives matter.
According to modern science the universe can be considered a system that computes events according to the physical laws. According to Gregory Chaitin “the world is a giant computer”, “a scientific theory is a computer program that calculates the observations” [3]. This formulation allows us to frame the physical sciences in the very general paradigm of information sciences.
inputs => processor => outputs
This leads to the following:
Definition 07: “Primordial soup” or “naturalistic scenario”, an imagined physical implementation of a computer which can compute inputs of atoms/energy into output of arrangements of atoms. The instructions of such a computer are the natural laws, which somehow function as the “software” of the cosmos. This proposed system is synonymous with the “chance & necessity” (C&N) scenario:
atoms/energy => [ C&N ] => atom arrangements
One can think that for each of the n atoms in input a function must be computed:
f(a1,x1a,y1a,z1a,…) = (x1b, y1b, z1b,…)
where on the left we have all the characteristics / arguments of the situation related to the atom a1 when it is in the initial location A (coordinates, etc.) and on the right we have all the characteristics related to the atom a1 when it moves to the final location B.
This model is very general and is based on the concept of instruction = law because all agree that there exist natural laws computing events and processes.
Definition 08: “Constructor”, an information processing device that constructs a system from parts by means of internal coded instructions.
parts => [ constructor ] => system
It is similar to what John von Neumann [4] called a “universal constructor ” and which, together with a controller, a duplicator and a symbolic description of the machine, are the necessary component of a self-replicating automaton. Cells are living examples of self-replicating automata. A cybernetic constructor must necessarily contain a computer within itself.
Definition 09: “GRC” (genome / ribosome / genomic code) is a chemical implementation of a constructor, which makes proteins from amino acids according to the genomic language and instructions. It is a fundamental system in the molecular machinery of any biological cell, whose kernel can be modeled as a multi-tape TM.
amino acids => [ GRC ] => proteins
The DNA-polymerase molecular machine produces RNA from DNA (genome). In turn the ribosome molecular machines translate messenger RNA (mRNA) and builds polypeptide chains (proteins) using amino acids carried by transfer RNA (tRNA). DNA – a couple of complementary strands of molecules composed of four symbols {A, T, G, C} which can be written and read according to the “genetic code” – may be thought of as a tape of a TM.
Leonard Adleman, another mathematician, who is the pioneer of the so-called “DNA computing”, in his first groundbreaking work [5], recognised that “biology and informatics, life and computers are tied toghether”, and said that “it’s hard to imagine something more similar to a TM than the DNA-polymerase”. The DNA-polymerase is an important enzyme of the cell that is able, starting from a DNA strand, to produce another complementary DNA strand. (Complementarism means that C changes to G and T changes to A.) This nanomachine slides along the filament of the original DNA reading its bases and at the same time writes the complementary filament. As a TM begins an elaboration from a starting instruction on the tape likewise the DNA-polymerase needs a start mark telling it where to begin producing the complementary copy. Normally this mark consists of a DNA segment called a “primer”.
In some senses biological computers are more advanced than artificial ones. First the DNA language and the genetic code are highly optimized. Moreover the memory is used more efficiently. In fact, according to many researchers, often the same sequence of DNA contains multiple information (e.g. codifies for proteins and at the same time stores data related to other cellular processes or structures). Biological technology is superior because in multiple-coding DNA we derive many different levels of interpretation from the same span of code, an astounding compression of data so inconceivably difficult it has never even been attempted in human technology. It is clear that the problem of reading from memory in these cases of multiple interpretations becomes ever more unreachable by C&N.
Thesis 01: From a primordial soup of disorganized atoms as input a cybernetic constructor as output cannot spontaneously arise.
As said, a constructor implies a physical implementation of a computer formalism. In a naturalistic scenario, if the constructor formalism doesn’t exist already in the input, it should be generated by the C&N computer (for the principle of causality and the principle of existence of formalism, F > P). But we saw that this formalism doesn’t come from a computation. Then C&N cannot create it. That is expressed in the jargon of informatics by the GIGO principle (“Garbage In, Garbage Out”).
In the naturalistic scenario we are given to understand that formalism appears spontaneously in the output of a C&N computer. The principle of causality tells us that either C&N or intelligent input must have created the formalism. Yet we have already determined that a C&N computer cannot create a computer formalism. Therefore, if such formalism is present in the output of C&N, it must necessarily have first been introduced via input into the computer. There is no other option. But in the naturalistic scenario the input is limited to disordered atoms, which have no formalism. Therefore, given that intelligent input is prohibited and C&N is incompetent, no computer formalism can arise in the output of a C&N computer. The naturalistic scenario cannot produce the wonders demanded of it.
By the way, a computer formalism contains what David Abel calls “prescriptive functional information” (PI) [2] that is of course a form of what William Dembski calls “complex specified information” [6] and justifies what Michael Polanyi said: “the information content of a biological whole exceeds that of the sum of its parts” [7]. If this formalism x doesn’t exist, the output would have an information content equal to the sum of its atoms and nobody denies that a biological system is something more than a container of disordered atoms or a tank filled with gas molecules. That “formalism precedes physicalism” is expressed by another researcher this way:
“That a semantic does exist, i.e. that the information stored in the DNA is carrier of meaning, is inferable from the fact that biological systems do work, the information is translated in a sensible manner in functioning biological processes” [8].
Now, can anyone refute any of this?
Principle 01: Nothing comes from nothing or “ex nihilo nihil”.
Principle 02: “Of causality”, if an effect E entirely comes from a cause C any thing x belonging or referenced to E has a causative counterpart in C. In fact if something x of E hadn’t a counterpart in C, x would come from nothing and this is impossible due to the ex-nihilo-nihil principle. It may help to think about causation of E by C as a mathematical function where every ‘e’ of E is image of some ‘c’ of C.
Definition 01: “Symbol”, a thing referencing something else. Examples: (1) a circle drawn on a piece of paper may symbolize the sun; (2) the chemical symbol CGU (the molecular sequence cytosine / guanine / uracil) references arginine amino acid in the genomic language; (3) the word “horse” symbolizes the “Equus ferus caballus”. The choice of a symbol for a thing is purely contingent and arbitrary. No natural law forces such choices. A symbol is an indirect way to point to something, whereas physical objects are always direct in their action.
Imagine a photon on a collision trajectory with an arginine molecule. On the fly the photon cannot decide: “I prefer to hit the arginine molecule indirectly, I hit CGU instead – which has a symbolic-mapping with arginine – and in turn something else will hit the arginine for me”. The photon must obey quantum mechanics laws that do not contain the symbol CGU=>arginine, given that it is entirely arbitrary. As a consequence the photon must hit the arginine molecule directly, without passing through symbolic links that transcend its laws. This is true for all physical objects and their laws.
Definition 02: “Symbolic processing” is a process implying choices of symbols and operations on them. The basic rules of symbolic processing are contingent and arbitrary and as such are not constrained by natural laws.
Definition 03: “Language”, mapping between sets of abstractions and sets of material entities by mean of symbolic processing.
Definition 04: “Instruction”, operational functional prescription on data and their behaviour by means of a language. Software consists of sets of instructions usually deployed to a target computer system (hardware) to be run. Instructions are something qualitatively different from arrangements of objects and can never be totally reduced to them.
Definition 05: Turing Machine (TM), abstract formalism composed of a finite state machine (FSM) (containing a table of instructions) + devices able to read / write symbols of an alphabet on one or more tapes (memories). A Turing Machine is the archetype of computation based on instructions. It is what we understand as a computer. Its main parts form what Michael Behe calls an “irreducibly complex system” [1]. Note that computation overlaps – as a higher abstract layer – a lower layer of things that per se are not computable, e.g. the choice of using an alphabet, the choice of its symbols, and the choice of the language and its rules are purely contingent and arbitrary. They don’t come from a mechanical procedure because they are free choices. Hence computation (which by definition is mechanical and never free) presupposes and works only thanks to a substrate which is fundamentally incomputable.
Definition 05a: “Halting problem”. Any specialized TM, given an input, may finish running (halt) or continue to run forever (infinite loop). If it halts, the TM has computed the input. Otherwise if it runs forever the input is not computed. Thus the problem in computability theory was to determine if there could be a super TM such that – given the description of a specialized TM – it would determine whether or not it would halt on a particular input (i.e. compute it in a finite number of steps). However, Turing proved that such a super TM general enough to be able to decide the halting for any specialized TM cannot in principle exist. The halting problem is incomputable.
Definition 06: “Physical computer”, a physical implementation of an abstract formalism of computation. It can be mechanical, electronic, chemical. It is an arrangement of atoms (hardware) that works out a computation.
Principle 03: Formalism > Physicality (F > P) [2], formalism overarches physicality, has existence in reality and determines its physical implementations. A consequence is that implementation has limits directly related to and implied by formalism. Another consequence is that not all atom arrangements are possible. Atom arrangements against the natural laws, logic and mathematics are impossible. Here are three examples: (1) a perpetual motion machine is an impossible arrangement because it contradicts the formalism of thermodynamic laws; (2) a TM computing the “halting problem” (see Definition 05a) is an impossible arrangement due to the formalism of computability theory; (3) the Penrose (or tribar) triangle -though it can be drawn on a 2D surface – is an impossible arrangement in 3D because it doesn’t meet the constraints of the formalism of Euclidean geometry of the 3D space. See figure at the top.
The key point is that the impossibility of certain formalisms implies the impossibility of the related physical implementations. Abstractness matters. It drives matter.
According to modern science the universe can be considered a system that computes events according to the physical laws. According to Gregory Chaitin “the world is a giant computer”, “a scientific theory is a computer program that calculates the observations” [3]. This formulation allows us to frame the physical sciences in the very general paradigm of information sciences.
inputs => processor => outputs
This leads to the following:
Definition 07: “Primordial soup” or “naturalistic scenario”, an imagined physical implementation of a computer which can compute inputs of atoms/energy into output of arrangements of atoms. The instructions of such a computer are the natural laws, which somehow function as the “software” of the cosmos. This proposed system is synonymous with the “chance & necessity” (C&N) scenario:
atoms/energy => [ C&N ] => atom arrangements
One can think that for each of the n atoms in input a function must be computed:
f(a1,x1a,y1a,z1a,…) = (x1b, y1b, z1b,…)
where on the left we have all the characteristics / arguments of the situation related to the atom a1 when it is in the initial location A (coordinates, etc.) and on the right we have all the characteristics related to the atom a1 when it moves to the final location B.
This model is very general and is based on the concept of instruction = law because all agree that there exist natural laws computing events and processes.
Definition 08: “Constructor”, an information processing device that constructs a system from parts by means of internal coded instructions.
parts => [ constructor ] => system
It is similar to what John von Neumann [4] called a “universal constructor ” and which, together with a controller, a duplicator and a symbolic description of the machine, are the necessary component of a self-replicating automaton. Cells are living examples of self-replicating automata. A cybernetic constructor must necessarily contain a computer within itself.
Definition 09: “GRC” (genome / ribosome / genomic code) is a chemical implementation of a constructor, which makes proteins from amino acids according to the genomic language and instructions. It is a fundamental system in the molecular machinery of any biological cell, whose kernel can be modeled as a multi-tape TM.
amino acids => [ GRC ] => proteins
The DNA-polymerase molecular machine produces RNA from DNA (genome). In turn the ribosome molecular machines translate messenger RNA (mRNA) and builds polypeptide chains (proteins) using amino acids carried by transfer RNA (tRNA). DNA – a couple of complementary strands of molecules composed of four symbols {A, T, G, C} which can be written and read according to the “genetic code” – may be thought of as a tape of a TM.
Leonard Adleman, another mathematician, who is the pioneer of the so-called “DNA computing”, in his first groundbreaking work [5], recognised that “biology and informatics, life and computers are tied toghether”, and said that “it’s hard to imagine something more similar to a TM than the DNA-polymerase”. The DNA-polymerase is an important enzyme of the cell that is able, starting from a DNA strand, to produce another complementary DNA strand. (Complementarism means that C changes to G and T changes to A.) This nanomachine slides along the filament of the original DNA reading its bases and at the same time writes the complementary filament. As a TM begins an elaboration from a starting instruction on the tape likewise the DNA-polymerase needs a start mark telling it where to begin producing the complementary copy. Normally this mark consists of a DNA segment called a “primer”.
In some senses biological computers are more advanced than artificial ones. First the DNA language and the genetic code are highly optimized. Moreover the memory is used more efficiently. In fact, according to many researchers, often the same sequence of DNA contains multiple information (e.g. codifies for proteins and at the same time stores data related to other cellular processes or structures). Biological technology is superior because in multiple-coding DNA we derive many different levels of interpretation from the same span of code, an astounding compression of data so inconceivably difficult it has never even been attempted in human technology. It is clear that the problem of reading from memory in these cases of multiple interpretations becomes ever more unreachable by C&N.
Thesis 01: From a primordial soup of disorganized atoms as input a cybernetic constructor as output cannot spontaneously arise.
As said, a constructor implies a physical implementation of a computer formalism. In a naturalistic scenario, if the constructor formalism doesn’t exist already in the input, it should be generated by the C&N computer (for the principle of causality and the principle of existence of formalism, F > P). But we saw that this formalism doesn’t come from a computation. Then C&N cannot create it. That is expressed in the jargon of informatics by the GIGO principle (“Garbage In, Garbage Out”).
In the naturalistic scenario we are given to understand that formalism appears spontaneously in the output of a C&N computer. The principle of causality tells us that either C&N or intelligent input must have created the formalism. Yet we have already determined that a C&N computer cannot create a computer formalism. Therefore, if such formalism is present in the output of C&N, it must necessarily have first been introduced via input into the computer. There is no other option. But in the naturalistic scenario the input is limited to disordered atoms, which have no formalism. Therefore, given that intelligent input is prohibited and C&N is incompetent, no computer formalism can arise in the output of a C&N computer. The naturalistic scenario cannot produce the wonders demanded of it.
By the way, a computer formalism contains what David Abel calls “prescriptive functional information” (PI) [2] that is of course a form of what William Dembski calls “complex specified information” [6] and justifies what Michael Polanyi said: “the information content of a biological whole exceeds that of the sum of its parts” [7]. If this formalism x doesn’t exist, the output would have an information content equal to the sum of its atoms and nobody denies that a biological system is something more than a container of disordered atoms or a tank filled with gas molecules. That “formalism precedes physicalism” is expressed by another researcher this way:
“That a semantic does exist, i.e. that the information stored in the DNA is carrier of meaning, is inferable from the fact that biological systems do work, the information is translated in a sensible manner in functioning biological processes” [8].
Now, can anyone refute any of this?
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Of course it is, you must know that. I took this from Fabius Maximus, it sums up pretty well the gist of many AGW protagonist's arguments.
Pro-AGW comments often display no signs of having read the sceptics work.
Pro-AGW comments often invent assertions which they can easily refute.
Pro-AGW comments usually show little or no awareness of the authoritative reports on this issue.
Pro-AGW comments usually show little or no knowledge of the long struggle to force some climate scientists to release data and methods.
Pro-AGW comments usually show little understanding of the scientific method.
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Last edited:
Irish Exit
Verified User
It was a question, not a comment and questions create no paradox
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
I meant his comment. Not your question.
Okay...let me handle this:
Everything Ugly just posted is BULLSHIT!
Now...are you happy?
The Ugly Truth
Verified User
So, you admit defeat. I graciously accept your unconditional surrender. Have a nice day.
Leonthecat
Racism Watchdog
That is not an argument. It is circular logic based on childish magical thinking.
Have a wonderful zombie Jesus day.