If you think this kind of assumption should be bounded by the limits of our universe, and do not extend beyond, then you are actually not consistent, because you would also have to believe that they do not extend beyond your lab or wherever you did your experiments.
@user21820 I reject that science(more a methodology of how to put perception and inference together to make theories than anything else) will ever determine the truth or wisdom or whatever one may call it that there is a supreme being.
@LastIronStar I don't think you got my point; think very carefully about the boundaries you assume about the laws. You have no reason to believe they hold anywhere that you have not personally observed.
Except for the reason I am using. Namely it is the simplest explanation for the universe, in the sense of information theory.
@LastIronStar Not that. Your assumption that scientific experiments can give you information about parts of the world you have never personally observed.
@user21820 At a conceptual level, Science can be different for other beings in the universe is not hard to acknowledge. Now, if the question is will all humans(i.e, same perceptual/inferential apparatus) wherever they go to the universe will find out that the laws are all the same - that i'm divided on
@LeakyNun: I don't think you have sufficiently evaluated the evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis and how they are promulgated. If you can show me convincing statistical evidence of correctness of predictions of that hypothesis, without selection bias and experimenter bias, then of course I would have to switch to it as my tentative belief.
My beliefs are all tentative, but I do not think my core beliefs will switch so easily from this point because I have spent roughly a decade thinking as carefully as I can about many related issues as a whole.
@LeakyNun That is why I said I think you should critically reevaluate your sources about evolution. That very kind of estimate you are citing is made by assuming they had a LCA.
The ability to reproduce is not a well-defined notion. Living organisms do not merely reproduce of their own accord. They often rely on some external factors. Some, like viruses, are not even considered living by some people, but by quite arbitrary reasons. How about villages? Cities?
Ponds?
Similarly, I could argue that computers reproduce by relying on humans who see them and like them to want to make new versions of them.
Humans become the external factors that are utilized in the computers' reproduction.
Can humans stop it? No. Computers will succeed in reproducing. They are enticing humans at even childhood now.
Ultimately, whether or not reproduction occurs in the biological sense, it is not really relevant. What matters is the amount of information that goes into Win7, how much comes from WinXP, and how much comes from other sources such as designers.
My argument is simply that by my estimates of information, it is easier (not necessary) to explain the many creatures on earth as instances of creation than of evolution.
I do not doubt that some (by today's classification) different species could have evolved from the same ancestors.
But I think the grouping is quite small.
To assert that there is no design at all in the history of the earth would be to assert that all the information in it has arisen out of natural processes that had no conscious intent behind them.
@LeakyNun I didn't say you did. I am just suggesting that if we assume design in some points in the history of the earth, then the question boils down to what points had injection of information.
Since I do think that there was design inherent in the universe, via my argument that stability preservation is a hallmark of the physical laws, I hence think (as of now) that the most likely historical points where there was information injection include creation of sufficiently distinct species at various points in history.
@LeakyNun It's the one I defined earlier, remember?
Erm, current mutation rates only tell us how fast the information in genetic structures degrades.
@LeakyNun In particular, this does not hold in a world with drastic alteration of existing species at some points in time.
The evolutionary hypothesis must include some assumptions that current mutation rates are approximately the same as mutation rates throughout history, and that no other sources of changes are present.
@LeakyNun In my own opinion, it is highly unlikely not only because the information gap is too large, but also because there already is evidence of information injection at other points in history, such as the Cambrian explosion. If so, then the likelihood of such long-age ancestral relation goes down. Asking whether something is possible is not much point; of course everything consistent is possible. It is 'possible' for nobody to exist except you.
I could just be your imaginary friend toying with you.
They explain it via radiative adaptation, but note that that conflicts with the assumption of constant mutation rates...
You can't have your cake both big and small.
I mean, if you say that mutation rates are constant but circumvent that by saying that niche environment can encourage sudden divergence of lineages, then the calculation of LCA age is suspect too.
A couple of years ago I had some interest in linguistics, but haven't read much about it.
By the way, I hope we don't have to go into linguistics, because actually I see no relevance to the evolutionary hypothesis since human languages are designed, whether by individuals or by societies.
My main point was that an explanation that is simpler on the whole is preferable to one that is more complex. If the lawmaker injected information at some point in history, then if it is simpler to explain some other points by him doing it again, as compared to 'purely physical' processes, then that's all there is to my reasoning.
Same reasoning for things like organs and organelles.
It is far simpler to explain organs as the obvious thing to do if you are designing a functioning complex multi-cell organism, by principles of modularity that programmers all ought to know, than to explain them by some convoluted evolutionary arguments.
If you are the lawmaker, and you imagine the task that you set yourself of creating a world that is interesting (not just random chaos), you would make physical laws that preserve stability. This is most easily done if you do things in a modular way. If you also want to create creatures that have individual volitions, you would create them to be like software that runs on your physical hardware. And your hardware, to be fault tolerant, would also be modular. And so on and on.
You would probably agree with me that this easily accounts for all the similarity we observe between living organisms not at the finest level but at the apparent modularity level.
@user21820 correct me if I'm wrong, but in my opinion, your "lawmaker" is so vague that the force that injected information can be, you know, the universe itself
Given what we know about quantum mechanics, it is still consistent with a deterministic universe, whereby the lawmaker can simply create the world with such precise initial configuration so as to lead to everything we see today.
@LeakyNun However, I have no choice but to disagree with that possibility, based on considerations that I have not even yet touched upon.
Except fleetingly above when I said "individual volitions".
@LeakyNun Well that is what my philosophical reasoning would be useful for, to point towards a conscious lawmaker with intentions behind creation than an unconscious one.
@LeakyNun No; everything is possible. But given a conscious lawmaker it is much more likely that they were created separately than evolved from the same organism.
Of course nothing I said can be formalized, but I'm thinking in terms of information. If something needs n bits of information more to specify than something else, then I consider it 1/2^n times as likely to be the real explanation than the other.
I have personal experiences, but of course everyone can discount that as chance.
Suffice to say that I was once brainwashed by a religious organization, and came out of it, and began my years long search for truth.
I ended up rejecting everything I was taught and rebuilding my beliefs from scratch.
@LeakyNun A thought experiment you can try is this: Randomly consider objects you can see in your environment, and ask yourself whether you consider it designed or not, and if so designed consciously or not.
And then ask yourself how you are making that judgement. If you say it's because you know what they are, try to remove that bias.
The point is to try to understand what I feel when I say that many things in the physical world, especially living organisms, look designed consciously as much as a laptop looks to me.
There are many things that are not designed, of course.
The presence of a lot of information that cannot be explained by chaotic processes suggests design.
I think it is fair to say that every moral framework is based on the assumption that we have some free choices that we ought to make based on some moral judgements. If everything is deterministic, morality is meaningless.
Well, free will is my explanation of the aspects of this world that seem counter to my claim that the lawmaker created stability preserving laws because he wants a stable world.
It merely is part of why I pick my explanation as the simplest that accounts for everything in the world. It indirectly suggests that humans and chimps seem to be separate creations because everything that seems self-stable looks like a unit.
And if we cannot see a good reason for the lawmaker to create a CA and then let it diverge, then I wouldn't believe it as likely.
It is limited by my reasoning, but everything is anyway.
Anyway, I really have to go. It was very interesting talking to you, and hearing your thoughts and questions and objections.
