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No. Biology is unique in the sense that life is the creation of God and is far more complex and awe-inspiring than any other subject.
by jononomo 2y ago
No. Biology is unique in the sense that life is the creation of God and is far more complex and awe-inspiring than any other subject.
- Jerrrry 2y agoNewton remarked that what colors leaves green would always be a mystery to all but our great Creator, Jesus Christ, the father. Turns out, its chlorophyll. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
- jononomo 2y agoYes, I bite the bullet on the God of the Gaps. What I object to is materialism of the gaps. At least God has explanatory power. Materialism does not.
- pfdietz 2y ago> God has explanatory power For a hypothesis to have explanatory power, it must be falsifiable. Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing. What observation in your mind would falsify the existence of God?
- mistermann 2y ago> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything > and hence can explain nothing. Could you explain your reasoning here?
- pfdietz 2y agoAn explanation for why X is true must also be an explanation of why not X is false. But God could perfectly well explain why not X is true and X is false. If God has no predictive power, if it's consistent with anything, it can't be used to distinguish between any possibilities, and hence can't explain why they should hold.
- mistermann 2y agoA problem: there is no requirement for explanations to be true. In fact, untrue explanations are very often preferred, if not ~mandatory.
- esafak 2y agoOtherwise you can't test it, for one. It is easy to concoct all-encompassing explanations that can't be proven wrong. Here's one I just made up: instead of one god, there is a pantheon of gods. And a different one for each universe. Ours is governed by the Norse league. Prove me wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
- dl9999 2y agoI think unguided natural processes plus deep time plus multiverses could also be an all-concompassing explanation that can't be proven wrong.
- mistermann 2y agoEven more fundamental: anything ~false built on top of Naive Realism can exist indefinitely not just undiscovered to be false, but cannot even be identified as a candidate for consideration. Let's hope we don't have this problem here on planet Earth, and especially at a core, fundamental level(s)!
- Kim_Bruning 2y agoHmm, maybe my explanation above was too ELI5, you'll have to accept my apologies if so, and you may need to explain in more detail what you're asking exactly there. Meanwhile can you expand on your take on Naive Realism here? What's the specific issue with Naive Realism you're pointing out? (am aware there's issues)
- mistermann 2y agoHumans contemplate "reality" on top of various models of it, as well as various other processes (cognition) and phenomena (culture), thinking they are contemplating reality itself. And the whole world runs on this. It's kind of funny if you think about it.
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- Kim_Bruning 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw < have an explanation by Feynman on the scientific method. (Feynman is a great teacher!) The whole video is pretty good, and the specific point starting with "You cannot prove a vague theory wrong" is explained around 5:10.
- mistermann 2y agoCan you explain how this video substantiates the the claims in the comment to which I am replying?
- Kim_Bruning 2y agoNot sure what you're asking here. In re: > Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing. Feynman restates it from a different angle: he calls these kinds of things vague theories and states that they are not very useful to scientists because they can be hard to prove wrong. Throughout he gives a bunch of examples of such vague theories that cannot be proven wrong. (eg that moogles did it, or the positions of the planets influenced when to go to the dentist, or maybe it was caused by flying saucers. ) He also points out Newtons laws which are not vague, and thus can and have been proven somewhat wrong since (see also: Einstein) . I think further down our thread, this is in re whether saying "God did it" (or "A wizard did it" etc ) has Explanatory power: * Why do the planets move in ellipses: "God did it" * Why do the tides go in and out: "A wizard did it" * How fast will an apple hit my head if dropped from precisely 10.25 meters, and will I need to wear a helmet? "Zeus knows the answer" etc. I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P (ps. The answer to the latter should be about ~14.17 m/s ~= 50.4 km/h . Something you could go out and measure for yourself outdoors if you like! )
- mistermann 2y agoI think I may have noticed the problem: > Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything > and hence can explain nothing. If I'm not mistaken, what you're referring to is the fundamental unknowability of certain things, and this state often causes the mind to hallucinate "facts" like the two above. "It is unknown, therefore it is a fact that anything is possible" is plain bad thinking, but paradoxically it is very popular thinking (thus: proper thinking), even among relatively smart people. There must be something going on here that can "explain" (in a non-incorrect fashion) all of this, it seems unlikely that we've stumbled upon never before encountered phenomena. > I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P I too enjoy building simple strawmen and knocking them down: "Science exists, and "is correct", and I believe in it, therefore my personal opinion of fact is factual in fact". I wonder which of these two strawmen most closely matches actual conversations that can be found on the internet. I constantly hear stories about religious people saying incredibly silly things (over and above standard silly Normative Cognition), but I rarely ever encounter it in real life. What I describe in my strawman though (essentially: scientism, the ~religion of science, etc), it is extremely common on all social media platforms, ion TV, in the newspaper, etc.
- mistermann 2y agoI have a feeling you just made the stories below up. Could you refer to an existing proof of these claims, or at least put it in some sort of a more logical form that can demonstrate that these things are necessarily true? Narrative format can make not actually true things appear true pretty easily.
- jononomo 2y agoThen falsify my hypothesis by coming up with some plausible materialistic mechanism to account for the existence of life.
- pfdietz 2y agoObserver selection says a plausible materialistic mechanism for origin of life could be extremely unlikely on any given planet, and so could be an impossibly hard problem to solve.
- SturgeonsLaw 2y agoSupernatural forces are a lazy explanation and don't offer any true insight. They have been invoked time and time again, and there has always been a natural explanation for phenomena that were once attributed to God(s). It's an intellectual dead end.
- jononomo 2y agoI disagree. I think that life is a unique case.
- Jerrrry 2y agoWhat you consider "Life" is just an awe-inspiring amount of complexity that has irked out an existence in the small, brief gradient of temperature our universe has permitted. The clouds of Jupiter, when viewed from a planetary scale, have a similar amount of [apparent] complexity. We simply bias familiar complexity due to our evolutionary pathway. A planet-sized fungal-like Gaia creature that "eats" clouds by atmospheric manipulation and is able to seed it's lower planetary orbit with proto-replicative molecules would scuff at such a self-centered bias.
- jononomo 2y agoCan you think of anything that might distinguish the complexity of life from the complexity of the clouds of Jupiter? Or do you think life is simply a nonsense concept?
- Jerrrry 2y ago>Or do you think life is simply a nonsense concept? yes! Just as Carl Sagan likened consciousnesses as an emergent phenomenon that happens somewhere between the neuron count of a worm and a dog an a certain ape; " Life " is a word we use for a MASSIVE AMOUNT OF COMPLEXITY. we are not a single species in a vacuum - we are clearly, nearly obviously, the product of our environment, literally. We are a biosphere, stuck in a gravity well, fed by the sun: without Sol (gravity really under the hood), we cannot afford the fight on the second law of thermodynamics. We use it to locally displace some entropy and get us a lil complexity, even if temporarily. life is just some magnitude of complexity. its an illusion. we are not special. we came from tidally-stirred, protein-packed, slurry pools of eventually-replicative molecules. probably packed tightly into some mineral for a backbone at first; eventually crossing the line from a repeating geologic/acid formation and more of a proto-algaeic-slime of a chain of molecules that depend on each other. shit is moot. once you have replication - even if that seems like a massive gap to you (not to me), you have a resource-competing-selfish entity. It will then innately, by its own merit of existence, compete against itself for its own resources and be subject to random mutations due to ionizing radiation. ionization radiating is pretty universal, so no leap there. the molecules would be subject to increasing selective pressure. Darwin's theory. either we here, or we aint. the universe, time, and pretty much everything is dominated by bacteria like molecules, i am sure. "intelligence (as we know it)" - (the ability to arrive at the same state from different inputs) is a mini-max point in many evolutionary pathways that we can easily see felines arriving at in our absence. we are nothing special.
- echelon 2y agoI think it's far more likely that we're the simulation of some super intelligence than the creation of a mythological deity worshiped by ancient goat herders. But to each simulant, their own programming. Unicuique suum.
- jononomo 2y agoYou realize that those two ideas are identical, right? RIGHT??
- mistermann 2y agoCan you copy paste in your implementation of equals()? My spider senses tell me there is a bug contained within.
- willy_k 2y agoWhat do we call the people who created the simulation? Is it unreasonable that they would give us stories to impose their own morals on us? Maybe they have a punishment or a reward for you depending on your qualities, such as getting to live in the host universe or getting stuck in an undesirable environment. I’m more partial to God being Humans that survived the flood (being real and caused by an asteroid exploding over ice caps) and have been chilling underwater, occasionally popping their UAPs up and poking around. But I don’t hold that view too firmly.