Logic - 2017-12-16 (page 3 of 4)

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1:01 PM

@user21820 why don’t you believe in macro-evolution?

All we have evidence for is micro-evolution. In general, random mutation can only delete information, not create it. This is obvious from an information theoretic perspective.

Sure; organisms find new ways to use old things, but nothing significant can be created blindly. Just think about your computer. Did it evolve by random tinkering around with old generation computers?

and what information needs to be created for humans and chimpanzees to share a common ancestor?

@LeakyNun What information needs to be created for Windows 7 and Windows XP to share a common ancestor?

 It's only a matter of time before we blew ourselves up, and it is getting kinda boring
     watching humanity making the same mistakes again and again...

@Secret It's not boring to me; it's worrying.

1:04 PM

@user21820 what does “common ancestor” even mean there?

Well same meaning. A person who does not understand programming tinkering with the source code.

that is hardly the same meaning

And creating from the same source code base Windows 7 and Windows XP.

The point is that your question is equally meaningless, because you did not prove that they have a common ancestor.

what would count as a proof?

If you can convince me by any means, it's fine.

1:08 PM

also, we should clear up our definitions

@user21820 Do you think there are things that exist unreachable by Perception and/or Inference?

what do we mean by "macro-evolution"?

@LeakyNun The idea that all current living organisms came about by evolution via natural selection of genes that arise via random mutation, from some first self-replicating entity.

@LastIronStar Perception, obviously. We can't see through the core of the earth. Inference, I think it's clear from the incompleteness theorem that we surely can't figure out certain things.

@user21820 "incompleteness theorem"... well...

@user21820 right, we agree on this

that may be the last thing that we agree on :P

@LeakyNun Why so?

1:12 PM

@user21820 cool

@user21820 I thought it is clear that I think macro-evolution is real

Do you accept that modern biologists do not claim to know how the first self-replicating biological entity arose?

yes, I do

@user21820 well, by this definition, even I don't believe in macro-evolution

@LeakyNun Then earlier on wasn't the last thing that we agree on.

1:14 PM

@user21820 but that isn't about evolution

I don't get your point. You asked me to define macro-evolution. I basically summarized what modern biologists believe in as the idea of evolution.

I mean how the first self-replicating biological entity arose isn't about evolution

I didn't say that...

Never mind.

You said "last thing we agree on".

alright

I was just trying to be funny.

1:17 PM

eh

there's not a single thing I can point you to that would be convincing enough

it's many things that collaborate each other

There is a problem with that apparent corroboration (not collaboration).

words

I have observed very carefully how evolutionists do their work.

@user21820 How far back are you willing to accept? Do you accept Endosymbiosis?

They believe in evolution, and so their interpretations of their findings are incredibly coloured by their beliefs.

1:18 PM

@LastIronStar he doesn't even accept that we and chimpanzees share a common ancestor

I have talked with various experts and they all cannot deny the logical facts I present to them.

Experts meaning like professors at my university...

@LeakyNun oh! missed that

@user21820 How to understand Human presence on Earth?

I believe it is logically inescapable that there is a conscious being who created the world and instituted the physical laws governing it. There is no alternative that is actually a simpler explanation for the existence of the world.

@user21820 what I meant by corroboration is that one thing gives a tree of relations (which species is more related to each other), and another thing gives another tree, and the trees of course are not perfect match, but they do match up a lot

I gave a brief overview of my reasoning before here:

1:24 PM

well that isn't incompatible with "macro-evolution"...

Aug 5 at 16:03, by user21820

But it does seem to me that logically it is inescapable that there is a lawmaker. Even though not much else can be deduced logically.

@LeakyNun Yes it is not incompatible, however given that a lawmaker exists, macro-evolution is quite clearly a much more difficult explanation than mine.

@user21820 what is yours?

@LeakyNun I believe that the lawmaker largely does not interfere with how the world progresses according to the physical laws instituted right at the start. But at certain points it seems likely that he did, such as to initiate certain significant large-scale changes to the world.

Those correspond to the points where it seems information increased drastically.

and how does that contradict with humans and chimpanzees sharing a common ancestor?

Well, I think it is difficult to logically justify anything more than refuting the notion that we are our bodies.

1:28 PM

Like the analogy with human inventions, it is entirely possible that some monkey randomly put together a computer, or randomly getting Windows 7 from looking at source code of XP and typing on a typewriter.

So I do not say that there is an explicit contradiction of us and chimps having common ancestors.

It just is not likely.

Occam's razor, basically.

hmm

how do you suppose that humans and chimpanzees came into this world respectively?

I currently believe that sufficiently distinct species were largely created independently. Note that high similarity does not imply common ancestors, just as we have modularity of libraries in programming.

It makes sense to use the most efficient libraries over and over again.

And in fact the organization of a living organism is incredibly modular.

Simpler ones have fewer levels. Complex ones like ourselves have more levels.

This is the one thing that many biologists do not grasp.

when do you suppose that we and they are created respectively?

That I do not know, and I do not have sufficient tools to figure that out.

any time period?

as broad as you want?

1:35 PM

Um...

Well we have a rough idea of the age of the earth.

as narrow as possible?

And we are quite recent inhabitants.

why one being? why not a whole committee of creators?

@LastIronStar Good question. There is actually some reason to favour this hypothesis, besides just Occam's razor.

2

A: Is 'strong' omnipotence required to create another omnipotent being

I assume you use "weak omnipotence" for the fourth definition on the Wikipedia article, namely that a weakly omnipotent entity is one that can do anything that is logically possible. In that case I agree that it is not inconsistent that a weakly omnipotent entity can create another weakly omnipot...

Basically, you have to worry about whether two powerful beings can be simultaneously strong enough and still retain separate wills.

@user21820 why is it not likely that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor?

1:42 PM

Because in my estimation there are too many differences. The popular articles claiming 99% similarity are misleading...

also, I find quite a lot of similarities between linguistic evolution and species evolution (and I do know something, if not much, about linguistics)

Did you hear about the coelacanth?

I didn't

Evolutionists keep changing their hypotheses because many of the predictions turn out to be completely wrong.

It simply has too little predictive power in the macro-evolutionary sense.

@user21820 so do scientists in any field, really

1:45 PM

There are many other examples besides coelacanths.

@LeakyNun Yes but evolutionists always do not want to admit it.

And in mathematics and theoretical CS we have theorems and proofs.

@user21820 do they not admit that science changes as we gain new knowledge?

@user21820 so?

@LeakyNun They do not admit that the macro-evolutionary hypothesis has very little empirical support. It's basically all in their head.

Just consider a thought experiment. Suppose you are an alien who does not know anything about Earth.

eh, what happened with coelancanths?

They were believed to be long extinct because they were found in fossils dated millions of years ago, so they were at first classified consistent with that belief.

Then when they were found swimming somewhere recently, the evolutionists changed their diagrams.

Anyway I want to finish my point about you being an alien.

ok, I'm an alien now

#&^&^! %*&#?$! )A$*

:P

1:49 PM

You come and find the Earth one day but do not see any humans (but of course you do not even know humans once existed). You see massive radioactivity contamination everywhere. You come across some computers.

They still work.

So you interact with them.

You find upon research that they have incredible similarity to one another, despite having very different outward appearances.

How do you ever figure out where they came from?

I mean, you could cheat, by first deciphering human language and then reading what's left of the internet.

But if you couldn't?

You see, the problem is that your deductions will heavily depend on your chosen model of how things come about.

If you exclude the possibility of rational design in the computers' creation, you will miss the obvious solution.

You may even come across chimps hiding in the jungle.

You can tell they are stupid and can't design computers.

(self-note) unrelated short list: erv, gulo, chromosome 2, atavisms

Lol.

The following is alien:

user image

@Secret Hi George. Long Time No see :P

Very funny.

1:54 PM

@LastIronStar what does that mean?

@LeakyNun the alien is george.

was trying to be funny

@user21820 you know the problem with analogies

they always have holes

and you always have to fix them in an ad-hoc manner

anaologies aren't very useful afterall that's what I'm saying

@LeakyNun I know. But it's easier to understand when you try using the same kind of reasoning as evolutionists on computers when the creators are nowhere to be seen.

The question is whether you assume they do not have creators, and hence strive to come up with an explanation.

Or whether you have a better way of guessing whether there was design involved or not.

the problem is that computers cannot self-replicate

that's where the whole analogy fails

@LeakyNun That's irrelevant. We are not talking about replication here. We are merely talking about figuring out where something came from.

And viruses can replicate.

1:58 PM

@user21820 that's very relevant

"common ancestor" does not even make sense for non-self-replicating entities

@user21820 eh, so?

If that is your objection, you can simply imagine a near future where computers control production of new computers.

@user21820 then it is quite possible that two different computers have a common ancestor!

Yes, but where did they actually come from? Does their replication mechanism come from themselves?

If you're just going to say that you think that chimps and humans have a common ancestor, but reject the full macro-evolutionary hypothesis, then my analogy of aliens and computers is indeed irrelevant.

We need to split finer hairs.

I was giving the analogy against the whole reasoning process used by typical evolutionists.

Not against your specific question about chimps.

we need to start somewhere

we agree that some groups of organisms have respective common ancestors

Yeap.

2:03 PM

the "full" macro-evolutionary hypothesis is quite large

we need to go step by step

and my favourite analogy is still with languages

@user21820 endosymbiotic origin of Eukarya: Agree or Not?

English and Hindi are so different; how can they have a common ancestor?

Oops need to go.

Will continue later.

ok

ciao

2:15 PM

ok this is taking too long to crunch through not Q. I need a break

will do this later

now it seems of logic, minecraft and my PhD, the latter two is more plausible to finish

2:35 PM

@Secret Lol don't give up so quick.

@LastIronStar @LeakyNun: I'm back. Let's hope we can get to a nice stopping point before I have to go again.

@user21820 ok

@LastIronStar No. I have reviewed the evidence and found it lacking.

@user21820 eh, the list of evidence goes like: double-membrane, having own dna, ???

@LeakyNun Yeap I have read about those and much more, a few years ago.

Let us back up and see what global assumptions we agree upon.

No multiverse. One unique reality.

Agree?

I do not reject multiverse though

I don't think there's any evidence at all though

so, agree

(if multiverse exists, then it's still one unique reality...)

2:42 PM

@LeakyNun Exactly, that's my argument, and then Occam's razor makes it pointless to consider multiverse.

go on

The physical laws seem fine-tuned to preserve physical stability. This includes universal constants and things like that.

Mo more multiverse implies we can't invoke the anthropic principle to explain this.

(And let me just say that I detest most of those intelligent design advocates who are anti-logic scammers who actively harm people publicly, such as by stating that vaccines are toxic or cause AIDS.)

2 mins ago, by user21820

Mo more multiverse implies we can't invoke the anthropic principle to explain this.

I see where you are going with that

Great!

Anyway this is not the only path of reasoning I took.

you're going to put words in my mouth

2:47 PM

No no.

I just want to say that the linked conversation is a parallel path, both pointing to existence of a lawmaker who designed the physical laws.

Independent of evolution.

But this path happens to be related to evolution as well.

Because we cannot invoke the possibility of chance mutation creating overall drastic net information.

The other path is a more philosophical path via excluding infinite regress via considering the totality.

> The validity of fine tuning examples is sometimes questioned on the grounds that such reasoning is subjective anthropomorphism applied to natural physical constants. Critics also suggest that the fine-tuned Universe assertion and the anthropic principle are essentially tautologies.

(obviously from Wikipedia)

I'm not sure what you are implying by that quote. I perhaps shall have to elaborate more on what I mean by preserving stability.

The easiest version to understand is physical stability. Sufficiently slight perturbations result in slight deviations and the result is still stable, even if slightly different from the original. Furthermore, continual energy needs to be expended to maintain instability indefinitely.

This notion may be still disputed as anthropic on the grounds that our notions of physics are anthropic. The more robust version is information theoretic stability, but that is more difficult for me to explain, so I hope you get the idea without me having to do so.

Cosmological argument

In natural theology and philosophy, a cosmological argument is an argument in which the existence of a unique being, generally seen as some kind of god or demiurge is deduced or inferred from facts or alleged facts concerning causation, change, motion, contingency, or finitude in respect of the universe as a whole or processes within it. It is traditionally known as an argument from universal causation, an argument from first cause, or the causal argument, and is more precisely a cosmogonical argument (about the origin). Whichever term is employed, there are three basic variants of the argument...

@LastIronStar I know that, and have read pretty much all the major variants.

You may notice that none of them are anywhere close to mine as given in the linked conversation.

@user21820 Have you read the Nyaya School's argument?

2:58 PM

I will have to look it up now.

My link is something i just found, thought that it might be interesting enough to post

But at least for the record I'll say that "unmoved mover" is stupid, and "perfect being necessarily existing" is ridiculous.

I say that we are too obsessed with "explanations"

All I see in this article is explanation

> He acknowledges that he currently has no explanation (apart from a multiverse) for the smallness of the cosmological constant

why should we care about explanations

what is so cool about explanations

As I said, I am not like the typical intelligent designers, and what you are going to find on the internet are totally not my kind of viewpoint.

@user21820 nobody is typical

3:00 PM

@LeakyNun I am not following, please explain

@LastIronStar we are too obsessed with explanations, that's all

everything here is about explanations

causes

reasons

@LeakyNun But I'm serious that quoting the junk is pointless if you want to discuss our views.

@LastIronStar It says:

> This is not so since, as a matter of fact, no result is accomplished without human action.

what did I quote?

This claim is obviously false; physical laws are obeyed without human action.

@LeakyNun You quoted the fine-tuning article on wikipedia, but that is irrelevant to my statement about fine-tuned physical laws.

It is also not what you believe, so it would be misleading to others if I do not say it is irrelevant to mine.

where did you read it from?

3:02 PM

@user21820 you said that the universal constants are fine-tuned

how is that article not relevant

@LastIronStar From the wikipedia article here.

@LeakyNun It does not have anything to do with my viewpoints.

If you wish to conflate my viewpoints with others, there will no longer be any point in our discussion.

@user21820 which section? Exists or Not Exists?

@LastIronStar "Arguments that God does not exist"

@user21820 the article discusses even whether the constants are really fine-tuned

that is surely relevant

@user21820 read the one about exists, that is more sensible i think

ofc, it is very very condensed on wiki

3:06 PM

@LeakyNun: It's not that I want to dismiss it just like that, but that there are millions of articles you can link to, and it is pointless to ask me to read them just to further our discussion. You can read them yourself, and come up with your own reasoning in response to mine, but don't just quote people.

in any case, some of the points are similar to Aquinas' argument I think

@user21820 I didn't ask you to read it

not everything that I said is a response to the thing you said immediately above my message, or even a response to you at all

Well as I said I then have no choice but to say it is irrelevant to my views, since it is.

let's move on

So if you reject my claim that it is fine-tuned, you will have to address my specific explanation of stability.

Not anything on that article.

3:08 PM

you had me agree that no multiverse exists in order to render me unable to use the anthropic principle to explain the fine-tuning. I don't see how that is not putting words in my mouth

I don't believe that multiverse exists

I didn't say you said it.

that doesn't mean I believe that multiverse doesn't exist

the thing is that you've based your "logical" arguments on things that are hardly logical

I said I used Occam's razor to eliminate that possibility.

And actually, I do have a logical argument without Occam's razor.

@user21820 then I don't agree with that

But you didn't even ask.

3:09 PM

there's a subtle but important difference between to not believe X and to believe not X

@LeakyNun No you should take back this claim. I think my arguments are more logical than those used by evolutionists.

You just didn't see 10% of my reasoning and you concluded.

That is hardly fair.

I didn't say your argument is illogical

I just said you've based it on non-logical things

so it isn't purely logical

@LeakyNun And do you believe I do not know this?

@user21820 to me, Occam'z razor does not eliminate possibilities

@user21820 do we agree that our arguments are not purely logical?

@LeakyNun Firstly, that is false. Secondly, I never based my belief on that alone as I said already. I have solid logical arguments for rejecting the multiverse.

When I say "solid" of course they cannot be 100% formalized in standard logic, but I am sure you would agree.

Occam's razor does not eliminate possibilities in the absolute sense, but eliminates them as having explanatory power.

3:13 PM

Can people state their exact position right now? It will be useful to pin this down

I did already.

No multiverse. So anthropic principle is useless.

@user21820 because you sounded like your argument is purely logical

so what's your non-occam rejection of multiverse?

I believe in the existence of a supreme being but I don't agree that it can be proven to exist using Perception and Inference alone.

@LeakyNun You should know better than that. I always said that anything to do with the real world cannot be captured purely syntactically because there is always that pesky interpretation.

@LeakyNun It is via information theoretic stability preservation. The multiverse hypothesis itself requires the belief that the individual universes interact sufficiently weakly so that their individual properties can remain separate and not get mixed into a single chaotic mess. Even if this is not the case, there is something to this extent. All proponents have admitted this or something like it.

The problem is that this is exactly the same as assuming that there is really information-theoretic stability preservation.

So I can freely assume it.

Now, just move one level up and treat the multiverse as the one reality.

It does not matter whether we are stuck in some corner of the one reality. The point is that there is only one, and we are still stuck with the problem of explaining how that unique reality came to be.

why is information the most important metric or parameter?

3:19 PM

@user21820 but if you move one level up, then the fine-tunings disappear

@LeakyNun No. The fine-tunings are even greater, now in the framework that permits the universes to exist and interact only weakly.

@LastIronStar I will have to say that I don't have the time to explain, but roughly this discussion is about meaning and meaning is captured by information. No information means no meaning.

@FrançoisG.Dorais: Hello! Weird to see a moderator in here, but you're welcome!

What brings you here?

This room is normally about (mathematical) logic, but we are on a side-track.

@user21820 In the Shannonesque sense or some other definition?

@LastIronStar You can use information theory as the guideline, yes. But this is obviously impossible to make 100% precise, for the reasons I mentioned to LeakyNun.

logic only brings you so far back

So are you satisfied that the multiverse hypothesis is a hack that requires more assumptions than just one universe? Or you still think less information is required in the multiverse framework?

My point is that the information you observe in your universe is still there in the multiverse framework. It did not somehow vanish.

3:26 PM

> this discussion is about meaning

heh?

I meant that @LastIronStar's question was why I pick a certain thing as important, and the notion of importance is about meaning.

Similarly, if we discuss the origins of the world, we are asking for information capturing the way the world progressed near the beginning.

If you have ever written a quine, you do know that there is some minimal information in the quining idea that you need to have. We can conclude from this information theoretic analysis that nobody would write a quine without meaning to, even though it is of course negligibly possible.

At least in standard programming languages.

But really this is a distraction.

this line of reasoning is incredibly anthropomorphic...

Why so? You can only say so if you doubt that information is meaningful without humans.

But that is ridiculous, because science is based on fundamental assumptions that rely on information being there even without humans!

That the physical laws are obeyed even if humans didn't exist.

I think you've heard of (naturalistic) explanations of self-replicating entities...

at least, chemicals

I know about them, but I don't see why you reject the notion of information.

It's not about measuring in bits or whatever.

It's the general notion. Like physical laws are there regardless of how anything observes it.

They are not changed by perspective.

This is fundamentally assumed in science.

3:36 PM

50 secs ago, by user21820

I know about them, but I don't see why you reject the notion of information.

does that not contradict with your analysis

24 mins ago, by LastIronStar

Can people state their exact position right now? It will be useful to pin this down

I don't know enough to reject anything as "impossible"

I do find macro-evolution a satisfying explanation

@LeakyNun I don't even see what you are getting at. Please be more explicit.

but I do not reject other things

> We can conclude from this information theoretic analysis that nobody would write a quine without meaning to

6 mins ago, by user21820

At least in standard programming languages.

I'm sure you missed that...

I thought you're going to apply this to self-replicating entities

I could easily design a quining-friendly language.

3:39 PM

you know, you do analogies too much

The information is still there, but now in the language...

Well you can't escape that the information can't disappear.

2 mins ago, by Leaky Nun

I don't know enough to reject anything as "impossible"

2 mins ago, by Leaky Nun

but I do not reject other things

Similarly in self-replicating molecules, such as prions, the ability to self-replicate is not 'given' by the molecule itself but the physical laws governing their physical interactions with other molecules.

If you have ever played with Conway's game of life, you should really get what I'm saying in a much more concrete sense.

@user21820 I have

but I doubt whether you can apply your information-theoretic analysis on the universe as a whole

even on the "meta-universe"

So your doubt is mostly in whether information theory holds in the ultimate reality in similar fashion to what we observe here.

3:42 PM

@user21820 no, my doubt is evenly divided

but what are we getting at here?

As I said, this is a parallel path that points to a lawmaker, that also happens to be related to evolutionist thinking, because most of them assume that the mutation events that are needed to create information can happen just by chance. This is statistically impossible if there are no multiverses.

information theory is syntactic isn't it?

@LastIronStar Information theory can be captured within some formal system, but whether it has the intended meaning outside the formal system is the matter that LeakyNun has evenly divided doubt.

> whether it has the intended meaning outside the formal system is the matter that LeakyNun has evenly divided doubt

I think you mean

> whether it has the intended meaning outside the formal system is the matter that LeakyNun has evenly divided doubt upon

Yea.

3:47 PM

syntax.

Picky picky.

yes but what is your view?

about its range of applicability

who is "you" referring to? me?

@user21820

@LeakyNun you are even split on its power I thought?

he applied it on the whole meta-universe

though

3:48 PM

This is quite hard for me lol

I believe in some things that each of you are believing in

@LastIronStar I said that I do not believe it makes sense to assume the multiverse hypothesis because it makes the same exact kind of assumption that it purports to evade. Namely it can explain fine-tuning of laws within individual universes, but it fails to explain the multiverse itself, which must be sufficiently fine-tuned so that it supports fine-tuning of laws within the individual universes and prevents them from interacting in any way that would mess that up.

As in the symmetric difference of beliefs

@user21820 Why should the supreme being create only hospitable universes?

In particular, they say that the physical laws are not the same for different universes, and this can be explained by the multiverse. That is nonsense, because what about the laws of the multiverse itself??

@LastIronStar I did not say he has to.

I am merely rejecting the standard multiverse hypothesis.

ok you are saying mutliverse doesn't explain anything about fine-tuning

or rather it is an convoluted explanation

It logically is harder to defend the multiverse hypothesis than just defending that there is one universe in the sense that the same physical laws we seek in science applies everywhere.

In other words, the multiverse hypothesis does not explain anything since it merely shifts the explaining needed up one level.

3:53 PM

@user21820 Isn't it more simpler to assume there may be a variety of laws than there is just one specific instance of that variety?

@LastIronStar Then you have to reject the fundamental tenets of science.

Which, I should add, have served us well empirically.

@user21820 That there are "universal" laws that govern the operation of the "universe"?

9 mins ago, by user21820

As I said, this is a parallel path that points to a lawmaker, that also happens to be related to evolutionist thinking, because most of them assume that the mutation events that are needed to create information can happen just by chance. This is statistically impossible if there are no multiverses.

well you tell us not to quote other advocates of ID

but you always quote evolutionists

not sure what you're getting at

I think other advocates of ID are far too cuckoo to see the points they are missing.

so technically @user21820 is not an ID person

@LastIronStar Yes. We may not be able to figure out the true laws, but the assumption that they exist has empirically held up.

@LastIronStar Yes that is my point exactly.

@LeakyNun I quote evolutionists only on points which are the standard fare. If you disagree with the standard fare, say so and I will stop as well.

I thought you considered the standard evolutionary hypothesis to be acceptable:

18 mins ago, by Leaky Nun

I do find macro-evolution a satisfying explanation

3:57 PM

alright

now what are we talking about

@user21820 How is that assumption important to actual science making? I fail to see the connection between idealism of there are true laws with the idea of scientific theory making.

@LastIronStar One consequence is that we believe we can discover the laws or at least approximate them by doing experiments.

Experiments meaning we repeatedly do something and see if there is some statistical correlation.

And draw inferences based on the belief that statistical significance points toward some underlying properties or laws.

@user21820 So? How is that universal? It is bounded by the limits of time and space as they operate in our universe

My point is that without such a belief, we cannot do science. Do you reject science as well?

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