I believe presentation would be clarified by using the word "void" instead of "nothing". An empty space is a void, but it is not nothing. In any case, the whole paragraph boils down to saying that whatever appears to be a void is not really a void, it just appears so at macroscopic time and scale. Same kind of difference as between complete silence and white noise.
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Evolution vs Intelligent Design
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I believe presentation would be clarified by using the word "void" instead of "nothing". An empty space is a void, but it is not nothing. In any case, the whole paragraph boils down to saying that whatever appears to be a void is not really a void, it just appears so at macroscopic time and scale. Same kind of difference as between complete silence and white noise.
That's just about as wrong as I've ever heard it.
Firstly, a computer program is predictable--- in physics there is a small degree of randomization which in the larger scale of things has a much larger impact than first perceived-- the clockwork universe was discarded many decades ago.
Secondly, science is very much about understanding the physical realm. It's not a data sheet-- it requires interpretation just as much as a piece of literature does.
If your nothing is what you define as nothing, the it has no impact upon the physical realm, and thus is irrelevant to science. Thus, for all intents and purposes, your "void" is his "nothing"-- since your nothing is nothing. Get it?
The problem is you're seeing nothing from a either conceptual or perceived point of view. Nothing is nothing, but its really something. That's about as well as I can explain it. Non-existence is the fuel of existence.
Let me try to put it another way... if nothing is nothing, and it does not abide by any rules of the physical world as we perceive it, what stops it from becoming something?
It never was discarded - for instance, quantum mechanisms are definitely non-local, but they can very well be deterministic. The main interpretation of them might involve randomness, but I already mentioned two equivalent interpretations that do not. There is also nothing particularly magical about randomness - most of the time, pseudo-randomness in a system will lead to the same statistics and apparent behavior as "pure" randomness, up to an arbitrary precision. Despite all this, nothing says a computer program has to be predictable - it can very well have access to a source of random numbers, or randomness can be integrated in the computation model itself. I also never said we could fully reverse-engineer the "universal program" I am positing the existence of either - we just try as hard as we can.
The computer metaphor is a useful metaphysical context in which to understand things, that's all. There are solid arguments to the effect that the best physical theory is the program that best compresses the observations we make, since that would maximize its predictive power (its ability to generalize). So it's interesting to view science in that context. It also allows one to have a much wider perspective, because anything you might imagine simulating is fair game as a hypothesis, all that matters is whether it is consistent with what we observe or not.
What I'm saying is that in many ways its interpretation is arbitrary. For instance, you can imagine two physical theories that have the exact same explanatory power, yet assign two radically different topologies to the universe. The point is that if they predict the same observations in all cases, you can't tell them apart, they are isomorphic, perhaps provably so. And then you have to wonder whether the universe's topology is actually a relevant inquiry, if it is not only irrelevant to any decisions, but also provably unknowable.
The fact that it has no impact upon the physical realm is irrelevant to what its definition is. The word "void" is more precise, doesn't lead to any cognitive overload and therefore should be preferred. I mean, frankly, this is not rocket science.
The problem is that you are needlessly conflating different concepts. There are three concepts: the first is a literal nothing, which is an absence of space. The second is a literal void, which is usually understood as a stable empty space. The third is an "active void", which appears to be empty but is in fact a bubbling brew of virtual particles. According to current evidence, the third concept is the one that is applicable to our universe. The two others simply are not the case. This means that in our universe, "nothing" is not the state of affairs, and literal voids are sparse and unstable, so it's misleading to refer to them as such. I'm not going to redefine "nothing" and "void" to match the actual state of affairs just because they don't obtain.
"Nothing" is an absence. It doesn't "abide" by anything because things abide by other things. It doesn't "become" anything because things become other things. Semantically, the word "nothing" can't really be used like that.
My point is really simple: "void" is a better word than "nothing". It is more precise and it is unambiguous. When you say "nothing", I need to read between the lines to understand what you mean by it, because "nothing" can be used to mean "void" just as it can be used to mean a complete absence of matter, space, time and rules. When you say "void", it's clear. It is an existing word that everybody understands and specifically means what you want to say... so why not use it?
I'm sorry, but I just really like clarity :(
I think the real problem here is that I'm arguing with someone with whom I would agree with to a degree, when we should be discussing the existence of God-- semantics or not.
Once again, I highly recommend the lecture if you haven't seen it. I know it's an hour long (which is what has me thinking most people will not watch it), but, as I've repeated a million times, Krauss does a better job at explaining it than me.
ANYHOW... back on topic. Here's my opinion: God is a gratifying falsehood. Nothing more.
Once again, I highly recommend the lecture if you haven't seen it. I know it's an hour long (which is what has me thinking most people will not watch it), but, as I've repeated a million times, Krauss does a better job at explaining it than me.
ANYHOW... back on topic. Here's my opinion: God is a gratifying falsehood. Nothing more.
Yeah. It's just that to some extent it is about semantics. When one says "something cannot come from nothing", what do they mean exactly? Do they mean that the matter in the universe could not have arisen from empty space (a void) or do they mean that the universe itself, matter, space and time included could not have arisen by itself? The fact is, it seems like a clear statement, but it isn't. In the end, they always seem to bizarrely assume that there ever was a point in time where there was nothing, even though it is not logically necessary.
I've watched a bit of it, it seems nice. The "stars died for us" bit was indeed awesome, but you should have mentioned the context (i.e. that all the elements that we are made out of were produced within stars and spread around by their explosion).
Well, consider the audience... most people know just what he means when he says "star-stuff", so the information would be superfluous. It'd be like me talking about calculus and reminding you what it is to take an integral-- it's assumed that you already know. There's no need to be pedantic.
We're made of starstuff, said Carl Sagan.
Provide a computer program with a source of true randomness and it ceases to become predictable. ERNIE springs to mind.
I'm not familiar with ERNIE, but I can't think of any "random" program that doesn't conform to some pattern (RNG abuse, anyone?). In any case, that wasn't the purpose of my post... there IS randomization in the universe. If you get smoke in a jar and heat it from the bottom, the smoke will go through periods in which every particle's position can be predicted, as it'll flow up through the center and come down through the sides, and periods of complete randomness in which the particle motion is completely random. Likewise, if you open up the jar, you can predict where each particle will be for about 2 seconds before it randomizes.
Which, curiously, is chaos theory: the universe is specs of order within chaos.
Maybe it's just because I'd never actually seen that construct before, but without context "we are star-stuff" just strikes me as incoherent, as in I tend to read it as "we are stars" or "we are shaped as stars" rather than "we are made out of what stars are made out of" (which, to be perfectly honest, never even crossed my mind). And then I just mentally tag the sentence as strange and irrelevant, so, well, I can't say I even noticed it was there.
Ahem...it seems Google wasn't as good at giving results as I'd assumed it would be
http://www.nsandi.com/products/pb/surprisingfacts.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERNIE#ERNIE
But anyway, I reconsider my original statement.
All software run by a computer equivalent to a Turing machine (which is basically any digital non-quantum computer) is predictable in that a given input always results in a given output. If, however, one provides an input that is truly random, the output can then be not predictable if the input is not known. So it depends on exactly what one means by 'predictable'.
No physical process has been proven to be truly random, and such a proof is probably impossible, but current theories indicate quantum mechanics provides such processes.
On a side note, I'd like to add:
I love intelligent design: If you've ever seen it, it's basically naming number of scientific complexities and attributing them to a designer, because only a designer can create something complex. It's really quite amusing.
(I'm dropping the random-program thing, its irrelevant)
I love intelligent design: If you've ever seen it, it's basically naming number of scientific complexities and attributing them to a designer, because only a designer can create something complex. It's really quite amusing.
(I'm dropping the random-program thing, its irrelevant)
There are really 2 things that must happen with evolutionary theory. First, life had to be created from non-living material, and second that life had to become more complex and adapt to it's surroundings, creating all of the species we have today over millions of years.
The first one has been proven to be possible. People have made extremely simple life in laboratories by creating the correct conditions.
The second one is clearly possible too. Have you ever heard that if monkeys that randomly typed keys on a computer keyboard were given an infinite amount of time they would eventually write all the works of Shakespeare? Well, monkeys were created using a similar process. The only difference is that it has been a finite amount of time and it isn't "random," and it is instead based on adaptation to surroundings.
Anyone that owns a dog or eats genetically modified fruit should know that evolution is possible. The breeding of dogs into the various species and the genetic engineering of fruit are processes that have happened within the span of human existence, simply because our methods of selection are even more strict than that of nature. We look specifically for the trait mutations we want while nature simply makes it more statistically likely that that favorable mutation of a trait is carried on.
The fact is that the existence of earth, life, and evolution are all based on statistics. Given a huge amount of space and time, things happen, and we are only here to question it because it did. I once read something that likened it to buying a hotel room and noticing that the number of the hotel room is your birth year. You think to yourself "Wow, that is a strange coincidence, it must mean something!" but you only notice it because the coincidence exists. If it wasn't a number that was somehow important to you then the coincidence would not have occurred and you would have thought nothing of it, but it did therefore you wonder why.
This is the way life is. It is incredibly unlikely that any single planet contains life, and even less likely that it is intelligent, or even self-aware. However, there are so many planets, and there has been so much time for the correct conditions to occur that life WAS created, and in fact it was likely to be created. There is nothing coincidental about it. It is simply chance.
I would like to once again talk about the sharpshooter and the bullseye. Imagine that this bullseye was incredibly large, but also imagine that trillions of shells were shot at it. If someone were only able to see the shell that was shot directly in the middle, they may call it quite a coincidence, but it is only because they don't take into account the other trillion - 1 shells that missed.
The first one has been proven to be possible. People have made extremely simple life in laboratories by creating the correct conditions.
The second one is clearly possible too. Have you ever heard that if monkeys that randomly typed keys on a computer keyboard were given an infinite amount of time they would eventually write all the works of Shakespeare? Well, monkeys were created using a similar process. The only difference is that it has been a finite amount of time and it isn't "random," and it is instead based on adaptation to surroundings.
Anyone that owns a dog or eats genetically modified fruit should know that evolution is possible. The breeding of dogs into the various species and the genetic engineering of fruit are processes that have happened within the span of human existence, simply because our methods of selection are even more strict than that of nature. We look specifically for the trait mutations we want while nature simply makes it more statistically likely that that favorable mutation of a trait is carried on.
The fact is that the existence of earth, life, and evolution are all based on statistics. Given a huge amount of space and time, things happen, and we are only here to question it because it did. I once read something that likened it to buying a hotel room and noticing that the number of the hotel room is your birth year. You think to yourself "Wow, that is a strange coincidence, it must mean something!" but you only notice it because the coincidence exists. If it wasn't a number that was somehow important to you then the coincidence would not have occurred and you would have thought nothing of it, but it did therefore you wonder why.
This is the way life is. It is incredibly unlikely that any single planet contains life, and even less likely that it is intelligent, or even self-aware. However, there are so many planets, and there has been so much time for the correct conditions to occur that life WAS created, and in fact it was likely to be created. There is nothing coincidental about it. It is simply chance.
I would like to once again talk about the sharpshooter and the bullseye. Imagine that this bullseye was incredibly large, but also imagine that trillions of shells were shot at it. If someone were only able to see the shell that was shot directly in the middle, they may call it quite a coincidence, but it is only because they don't take into account the other trillion - 1 shells that missed.
There is an important distinction between the random selection until you get it right, and the adaptation process. Dawkins demonstrated it with a computer program designed to find the first few words of Hamlet (IIRC). His first run, it simply strung together characters at random. It ran for a week, I think, and didn't get anything remotely resembling the thirty-or-so letters he was looking for.
Then he made a second program where it randomly strung together characters but kept the ones that were correct. He ran it over his lunch hour, and by the time he got back it had already achieved 80% of the desired outcome.
The statistics of evolution if it was purely random chance would be so low that it is very possible that evolution would NEVER happen in a finite time period. But when you add natural (and subsequently, artificial) selection processes, it becomes dramatically more likely.
This is also known as the Anthropic Principle. Said another way, it states "If there is a condition required for human life to exist, Earth/Our Universe/etc. MUST have that condition because we observe human life exists." It is therefore not an amazing coincidence that Earth satisfies various requirements for life; it is an obvious certainty because if it didn't, we wouldn't be here to see it.
This actually isn't that accurate; as I said, the statistics of life evolving purely by random chance (i.e. without natural selection) are so low that it is conceivable that it would never happen in any finite time and finite number of planets.
This is a good point, I like this analogy.
Source please. If that has actually happened it would have been very recent and I would have thought I'd have heard about it.
It was linked on a previous page. It was a Nature paper.
Do you consider a virus living? They perform all those functions, and all they are is DNA in a protein shell.
Viruses are an unusual case. They are in fact capable of doing NONE of those functions without the support of a living cell.
Whether one considers viruses living depends on ones definition of life. But by the "Mrs Gren" definition given in school (Movement, Reproduction, Sensitivity, Growth, Respiration, Excretion, Nutrition) they are not living.
Whether one considers viruses living depends on ones definition of life. But by the "Mrs Gren" definition given in school (Movement, Reproduction, Sensitivity, Growth, Respiration, Excretion, Nutrition) they are not living.
You can go a long way with organisms that just replicate, though, and I suspect life as it is usually defined is still a long way from there. In that sense it might be unfair to expect anyone to produce life in laboratory from scratch, rather than through the (possibly lengthy) evolution of non-life before it. There's also the fact "life" is defined to match what we perceive as life right now.
Edit: I'd expect the "Mrs Gren" definition to proceed in steps, for instance. At first there would only be reproduction, then growth through incidental nutrition. Some form of movement would only come later as a sort of random walk allowing to collect more nutrients (or as a force to keep a distance between existing organisms), then some sort of sensitivity would arise to guide it. Something that has all of these properties would take a while to arise.
I think some biologists define life as that which evolves. Meaning that as soon as you've got reproduction, with variation, you've got evolution and by that definition life.
Certainly the school definition I mentioned seems inappropriate for this purpose - being designed with present-day organisms in mind. Movement (directed and/or powered by the organism) and sensitivity aren't really necessary for life, and I don't think excretion is either (getting rid of waste is useful, but not essential, and avoiding creating it may work in principle though be evolutionarily unfavourable).
Respiration is a modern biochemical pathway, but I think life has to have some way of using some form of energy. Nutrition, considered very broadly as the ability to take chemicals from the environment and put them to use, seems necessary - without nutrition you can't have growth and reproduction.
So I think the four properties:
Usage of energy
Usage of matter
Growth
Reproduction
may be suitable for defining life.
Many creatures an incapable of performing those functions without support from others; the fact that they are parasitic has no say on whether they are to be considered living or not.
I don't consider them truly living either, but I will say it's the first stepping stone. (enter ethics)
Ok, I was just asking.
Because we don't expect there to be gill / lung hybrids. The first lunged fish still had fully-formed gills. We have examples of species with both lungs and gills. Gills aren't very efficient (and useless to land-animals), and as such, they were no longer necessary and lost.
This is wrong. All theories are not all equally valid, and some can be proven wrong. The idea of a god in general probably cannot be proven either way, but that's partly because of how poorly defined the general term is. The Christian God, on the other hand, has specific attributes with specific effects on the world. Just as we can easily disprove the Greek Gods by going on top of Mt. Olympus and showing that they aren't there and, in fact, never were, we can disprove specific claims made by specific religions.
You can say "Sure, you can find all this evidence that the Christian God doesn't exist, but what if he's just covering it up!?". That's all well and good, except most people's view of God is that he is honest and doesn't cover it up, so you're trying to define a contradictory God.
Also, that's misunderstanding the meaning of Russel's Teapot. Russel's Teapot says that the person who makes the less-falsifiable or less-substantiated claim has the burden of proof. Since the nonexistance of God has supporting (though nonconclusive) evidence based on the observations of things that contradict religious teaching; it is those who assert the existence of a Creator need to prove it, and not the other way around.
@cantab: I saw something about this on History Channel lol. It was about 2 years ago so I remember almost nothing about it. \
@MrIndigo: That is a very interesting story!
Also, Life IS in fact a coincidence, but one that was given a lot of time and space to occur. Any coincidence that is observed obviously happens. If you couldn't call anything that actually happened a coincidence then the word would not exist! As you say, the fact that life exists may be highly improbably even given the amount of time and space available. Also, this analogy was only supposed to illustrate that, like you say, if it didn't happen we wouldn't be here to comment on it, and therefore arguments that rule out the possibility based on the improbability of a place like Earth being created naturally are flawed.
I simply likened it to the monkeys on the typewriter to show that anything even remotely unlikely becomes much more likely or indeed probable given enough time.
I am glad you liked that analogy, I do to :)
Anyway, my comments were aimed specifically at the people who think that life never would have happened if it weren't for a divine being. I was simply trying to show that it is in fact a product of probability.
@MrIndigo: That is a very interesting story!
Also, Life IS in fact a coincidence, but one that was given a lot of time and space to occur. Any coincidence that is observed obviously happens. If you couldn't call anything that actually happened a coincidence then the word would not exist! As you say, the fact that life exists may be highly improbably even given the amount of time and space available. Also, this analogy was only supposed to illustrate that, like you say, if it didn't happen we wouldn't be here to comment on it, and therefore arguments that rule out the possibility based on the improbability of a place like Earth being created naturally are flawed.
I simply likened it to the monkeys on the typewriter to show that anything even remotely unlikely becomes much more likely or indeed probable given enough time.
I am glad you liked that analogy, I do to :)
Anyway, my comments were aimed specifically at the people who think that life never would have happened if it weren't for a divine being. I was simply trying to show that it is in fact a product of probability.