Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

One of the problems is that the people involved in consciousness research have already decided that consciousness is an epiphenomenon: entirely produced by the brain. Just like evolution research, there is a protective exclusion zone around naturalistic causes. Whatever the philosophers might argue (and most argue in favour of naturalism anyway) is ignored because the extent of reality has already been fixed (in more senses than one).

If consciousness is an epiphenomenon, then how is it that we are talking about it?

I think people who believe it's an epiphenomenon haven't worked out the ramifications.

Another problem is subjectivity. Scientists use a method which has to be objective so there is a taboo around subjectivity. Science, as practiced, is reductionist and empirical. So it is maintained that consciousness can be reduced to electro-chemical activity in the brain; ultimately to the firing of the synapse. Thoughts, feelings and subjective qualities are, again in keeping with darwinistic explanations, reduced to chemicals.

Well, it's pretty clear that feelings are just chemicals. Thoughts are a bit more complicated. But, again, I'm all ears to some objective way of studying consciousness while considering it immaterial or whatever.

All very convenient for atheist dogma because the scientific community is overwhelmingly atheistic. That doesn't just eliminate God, it enshrines naturalism as dominant and incontrovertible and prohibits investigation beyond the borders of the exclusion zone.

I have no idea what consciousness being physical has to do with god.

There is a lot of griping about this issue without much in the way of suggestions for changing science. Is it possible people would rather science just slink away from these areas of investigation?

~~ Paul

You could falsify evolution, for example, by finding an irreducibly complex mechanism. That was one of the primary goals of the CSI program.

Let's say some study or observation conflicts with neo-Darwinian evolution. Let's say an irreducibly complex biological system like the bacterial flagellum. Despite the conflict, the Darwinists will always say that even though Darwinian thinking could not immediately explain what nature contains in this case, the fact that this happened means that somehow, some way, Darwinian evolution must have brought about this result. All that is needed is more study to find out just how this had happened. Given enough time and imagination, another 'just-so' story will be found, in this case some fanciful exceedingly unlikely story of a complicated indirect pathway. So another promissory note is issued. Their materialist view is held absolutely, they simply refuse under any circumstances to let go of it. This is their frozen a priori position, and they claim that this is what science is.

This type of argument is made over and over again by neo-Darwinists. Although it can be interesting, it’s ultimately useless to debate with them because there is absolutely nothing we can point to that will change their minds. Neo-Darwininan evolution is effectively not falsifiable to Darwinists. Once Darwinists assume the posture that nothing outside of unintelligent natural forces can be invoked to explain all biological phenomena, then their concept of evolution can never be disproved, no matter what the next experiment or observation turns up. It's a fundamental ideological world-view that does not allow any violations. Even finding a rabbit fossil in Cambrian strata would change no Darwinist minds; the hard core would still insist that either RM + NS somehow brought this about, or (more likely), Creationists must have planted the fossil or the researchers committed fraud. 

With some modification this same schema applies to the psi/paranormal debate. The committed hard-core materialist experiencing a deep NDE will quite likely interpret it as an elaborate hallucination. Objectivity and the intellect and above all the received world-view must rule supreme. 

Let's say some study or observation conflicts with neo-Darwinian evolution. Let's say an irreducibly complex biological system like the bacterial flagellum. Despite the conflict, the Darwinists will always say that even though Darwinian thinking could not immediately explain what nature contains in this case, the fact that this happened means that somehow, some way, Darwinian evolution must have brought about this result. All that is needed is more study to find out just how this had happened. Given enough time and imagination, another 'just-so' story will be found, in this case some fanciful exceedingly unlikely story of a complicated indirect pathway. So another promissory note is issued. Their materialist view is held absolutely, they simply refuse under any circumstances to let go of it. This is their frozen a priori position, and they claim that this is what science is.

I really don't understand this whole "promissory note" thing. Do you think that every unsolved scientific question is represented by a promissory note? How about philosophy?

Also, don't you have an inner conflict about this? What is Intelligent Design if not a massive promissory note? There is absolutely no direct evidence for it. The entire argument is a probability gambit that has been refuted many times.

This type of argument is made over and over again by neo-Darwinists. Although it can be interesting, it’s ultimately useless to debate with them because there is absolutely nothing we can point to that will change their minds. Neo-Darwininan evolution is effectively not falsifiable to Darwinists. Once Darwinists assume the posture that nothing outside of unintelligent natural forces can be invoked to explain all biological phenomena, then their concept of evolution can never be disproved, no matter what the next experiment or observation turns up. It's a fundamental ideological world-view that does not allow any violations. Even finding a rabbit fossil in Cambrian strata would change no Darwinist minds; the hard core would still insist that either RM + NS somehow brought this about, or (more likely), Creationists must have planted the fossil or the researchers committed fraud.

I note that you keep making up examples: flagellum, rabbit fossil. Do you have any actual examples? I'm not sure how you could have one for irreducible complexity, since it ignores scaffolding. I'm not sure how you could have one for CSI, since it's never been calculated for any biological mechanism.

This is why I don't suddenly cave to the idea of ID. There just isn't any compelling evidence.

~~ Paul

Yeah, that's a pesky one. I doubt there really is a Hard Problem. I think people are just tired of waiting. But I agree that consciousness is a toughie.

Really the HP is like a beautiful theorem - is it the one piece of solid proof that the materialist view is wrong somewhere.

Scientists are doing these experiments, unless you don't think any of the parapsychology researchers are scientists. As for consciousness, there are lots of neuroscientists working on it.

It's not quite like that. You can find a lot of thoughtful analyses of the experiments. You can also find a lot of replications that failed, some of which were not published.

Yeah, I'm skeptical.

You still want to fall back on failed replications as a way of dismissing these experiments - even though, as I pointed out - presentiment has been recorded in experiments where nobody was looking for it. You never think of the mass of exciting science that opens up when you stop denying the validity of at least some psi experiments.

One of the problems with psi is that the studies are all about statistics. There are very few studies where you can actually see the thing happening. This makes it difficult to come up with theories of psi that yield hypotheses that can be tested. With time, perhaps this issue will become less of one.

I was going to give an example from this website:

https://www.troikarv.com/

However they seem to have restructured the site, and I can't find it off-hand. However, it was a remote viewing experiment performed well before the US presidential election.

As is standard practice, the remote viewers were not told the selected target, which was "The next US president".

One of the accounts described a man of great ambition who reached the peak of his ambition, but was then assailed by concerns for his own safety because so many people were opposing him. (I forget the exact words, but that was the gist of it). I remember looking at that page shortly before the election and wondering if the world was materialistic and Hillary would get in, or whether it was much stranger than that, and Donald Trump would make it to the White House!

You can say the election was settled almost by a flip of the coin, and p=0.5 isn't very good odds, but consider that that prediction was done about a year earlier, and the remote viewers were not told what to remote view (it is said that that is the way to get the best results).

Viewing that page a few days before the election felt decidedly creepy. Of course I wanted Trump to win, so when he triumphed, I felt pleased on both counts.

If science wanted non-statistical evidence, it might invest in some remote viewing experiments. In truth, Paul, modern institutional science doesn't want any such disrupting evidence - so it won't look for it and ostracises anyone who does. Big institutions are like that.

I have read the figure that one Higgs boson would require 10^12 collision events to be filtered to create it - whatever the exact figure is, it is obviously pretty enormous. The Higgs hasn't made any practical difference to anyone - for good or bad - so shouldn't science put a fraction of that effort into confirming or refuting the implications of the Hard Problem?

David

Really the HP is like a beautiful theorem - is it the one piece of solid proof that the materialist view is wrong somewhere.

I don't think so. It's more like a hypothesis without a proof. Saying "Gee, I don't think consciousness can be the result of physical processes" is not a proof.

You still want to fall back on failed replications as a way of dismissing these experiments - even though, as I pointed out - presentiment has been recorded in experiments where nobody was looking for it. You never think of the mass of exciting science that opens up when you stop denying the validity of at least some psi experiments.

I'm not dismissing them. I'm just not convinced. Give me a link to one of these cases where no one was looking for presentiment.

I'm not sure what this has to do with evolution.

One of the accounts described a man of great ambition who reached the peak of his ambition, but was then assailed by concerns for his own safety because so many people were opposing him. (I forget the exact words, but that was the gist of it). I remember looking at that page shortly before the election and wondering if the world was materialistic and Hillary would get in, or whether it was much stranger than that, and Donald Trump would make it to the White House!

You can say the election was settled almost by a flip of the coin, and p=0.5 isn't very good odds, but consider that that prediction was done about a year earlier, and the remote viewers were not told what to remote view (it is said that that is the way to get the best results).

Why is that prediction exciting? What does it have to do with remote viewing? It sounds more like a silly palm reading or something.

And I'm sure the best results are obtained by letting the remote viewers say anything they want and then having the entire world to search for matches.

If science wanted non-statistical evidence, it might invest in some remote viewing experiments. In truth, Paul, modern institutional science doesn't want any such disrupting evidence - so it won't look for it and ostracises anyone who does. Big institutions are like that.

Again, why are you implying that all the parapsychologists doing remote viewing experiments are not scientists?

~~ Paul

The history of human design fits the Darwinian model fairly well; It's gradual, building on cultural memories (latterly, documented in writing) of what went before; involves a degree of serendipity; and technological developments tend to get selected out if they prove to be ineffective or inefficient.

Darwin was aware of this, of course, and it'd be hard to believe that none of it influenced his theory of evolution. However, one thing couldn't be allowed into his schema: consciousness. In any case, Darwinism only applies once there are living organisms on which RM+NS can act. How there came to be living organisms in the first place is another question. The indications are that they arose around 800m years after the earth is supposed to have been formed, with some estimates being as low as 400m years after.

The first organisms we find in the fossil record are prokaryotic unicells (archaea and bacteria), which don't have a membrane-bound nucleus. They were already enormously complex: so much so that we have a whole academic field (bacteriology) applied to them. As an evolutionist myself, albeit not a Darwinian, I don't imagine that at at some point between 400m and 800m , universal consciousness (MAL) said "abracadabra" and lo, they appeared.

No: I believe that the seminal "invention" that led to the prokaryotes occurred prior to that, and was of the elements that we now represent in the periodic table. That's just a short-hand version of what happened, hence the scare quotes. First off, the elements weren't, I don't think, "invented". Using a word like that tends to invoke dualism; on the one hand, there's a creator, and on the other, its creation. The two are conceived of as being separate and different, and that's a mistake that both theists and atheists tend to make.

Both views agree there must be an ultimate cause. One view personifies that as "God", whilst the other doesn't, postulating that so-called "laws" -- the patterns and regularities that our minds have come up with (based on our perceptions or their instrumental extensions) -- are the root cause. In practice, is there actually much of a difference between the two views? For one, God is a person of sorts; for the other, the God they don't believe exists has become replaced by a non-person that, despite the readily apparent order in nature, lacks any sort of consciousness.

This implies that order doesn't depend on consciousness; the "stuff" out of which everything is perceived to be made just happens to be the way it is for no rhyme or reason. The way we perceive it to be ordered ("lawful"), is just a fluke. Maybe in countless other universes, these laws don't exist and there is chaos; that's one (staggeringly non-parsimonious) conjecture that allows the tail to wag the dog.

As soon as you have the elements represented in the periodic table -- along with their properties -- there's the immediate potential for all the molecules present in living organisms. But even with elements, we posit a kind of evolution: hydrogen came first, then all the others. So there are actually three successive shades of evolution that lead to present-day life: cosmogenesis, abiogenesis, and "evolution" as the term is most often applied today.

I wonder whether it wouldn't be more accurate to think of just the one process of evolution. I'm not sure where it would start -- with elements or even before, but it's self-evident that, in potential, living beings have been a possibility (inevitability given conditions here on earth?) right from the start. Living beings include us, and we are naturally creative entities, so right from the start there's been the potential for microwave ovens and particle accelerators to exist.

As I've said, the point about which both parties (those who believe MAL, or a God, and those who don't), agree, is that there has to be some ultimate cause for all of existence; some way in which microwave ovens and particle accelerators can come to be. All of existence, whichever you believe, has to be implicit in the ultimate cause.

As a species, we are very clever. But we have come up with some amazing inventions only to find that other organisms got there millions, even billions of years before us. The prototypical example is the genetic code; setting aside languages, which are codes, we first started using what we'd readily recognise as codes perhaps thousands of years ago. Cyphers, a species of code, were used to send messages from one person to another when secrecy was desired (e.g. Caesar's cipher); but the genetic code has been in existence ever since life got started.

Recently, we've consciously started to look to organisms for inspiration for our inventions. One of the earliest examples was Velcro, inspired by the hooks of burdock seeds. Just Google "Biomimicry" and you'll come across many instances, e.g:



One example that has not yet been turned into an invention (though is seen as being potentially very useful), concerns the eyes of scallops. The original paper is in Science, and it's behind a paywall, but  discussion of it can be found here, here and here.

Scallop eyes are remarkable. One of the articles says: Just as the complex optics of other animals, like lobsters, have informed telescope design, these results may pave the way to the construction of novel bio-inspired optical devices for imaging and sensing applications. Dr. Palmer said that scallop eyes may provide inspirations for new inventions. Thereâ€s certainly precedent: NASA has built X-ray detectors to study black holes that mimic lobster eyes.

That said, according to Darwinists, scallop eyes evolved without any kind of design, even though investigation of them allows human designers to think of ways of applying the principles discovered. If human beings could in some way harness this remarkable ability, they could dispense with engineering skills and allow the like of microwave ovens and particle accelerators to arise through blind processes.

Ah, I hear you say, the two situations are quite different. For a start, scallop eyes had millions of years to evolve, whereas our inventions have had only anything from a few, to thousands, of years to be produced. We are conscious beings, and can accelerate the process considerably through our ingenuity.

But where did our ingenuity purportedly come from, if not through Darwinian evolution? The ingenious, we are supposed to believe, arose from the non-ingenious. Remarkable, this Darwinian evolution. It can transcend itself and generate consciousness even though it's not itself conscious. And then this consciousness can look back on organisms, see the many remarkable discoveries they stumbled across first, and declare the means they did that did not involve consciousness.

I'm not exaggerating: that's the way it is. One distinction between evolution and human invention is the amount of time involved. Time is what saves Darwinian evolution from being laughed out of court. Another distinction is the scale of inventions: Darwinism supposedly works at the molecular level and is alleged to have produced nano-machines of incredible complexity: the nearest we've some so far are the nanocars of James Tour who, incidentally, is a dissenter from Darwinism:



I hope you get time to watch the video; it's a real eye-opener.

Very advanced organic chemistry only occurs in cells; they're like factories where chemical reactions that are virtually impossible outside them take place as a matter of course inside them. The best we get outside them are a few naturally occurring, carbon-based organic compounds, such as amino acids (and then in both d- and l- forms rather than just the l- forms found in living organisms).

Only synthetic chemists can go a bit further than that, and amongst those, James Tour has a formidable reputation. Listen to what he has to say about how far we've got with the generation of cells or even subcellular components. Hear him tell you that he hasn't the faintest idea how cells could have been generated; hasn't got the first notion of what is supposed to have happened in abiogenesis. He's pointing out that neither has anyone else, but he's one of the few who has the courage to say the emperor has no clothes.

But where did our ingenuity purportedly come from, if not through Darwinian evolution? The ingenious, we are supposed to believe, arose from the non-ingenious. Remarkable, this Darwinian evolution. It can transcend itself and generate consciousness even though it's not itself conscious. And then this consciousness can look back on organisms, see the many remarkable discoveries they stumbled across first, and declare the means they did that did not involve consciousness.

Why is this argument compelling? It's the usual "How can consciousness possibly be a physical process?" gambit.

Only synthetic chemists can go a bit further than that, and amongst those, James Tour has a formidable reputation. Listen to what he has to say about how far we've got with the generation of cells or even subcellular components. Hear him tell you that he hasn't the faintest idea how cells could have been generated; hasn't got the first notion of what is supposed to have happened in abiogenesis. He's pointing out that neither has anyone else, but he's one of the few who has the courage to say the emperor has no clothes.

Why should I assume that Tour, regardless of his apparent credentials, understands evolution? But I'll spend some time and listen to the video.

Here is Larry Moran's take on him:

http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-c...stand.html

Interesting page at Tour's site:

https://www.jmtour.com/personal-topics/t...%E2%80%9D/

He does seem to be reasonably balanced in his view.

"I have been labeled as an Intelligent Design (ID) proponent. I am not."

https://lambfollower.wordpress.com/gospe...-creation/

~~ Paul

Since this thread appears to be one of the most active on the forum, I think I would my make my announcement here.

My interview with Loyd Auerbach is ready and published here:

http://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-wr...8#pid11988

It appears that it remains largely unnoticed, so I decided to "advertise" it a bit. Loyd and I tried our best, so I don't want our efforts to remain out of sight.

Why is this argument compelling? It's the usual "How can consciousness possibly be a physical process?" gambit.

Why should I assume that Tour, regardless of his apparent credentials, understands evolution? But I'll spend some time and listen to the video.

Here is Larry Moran's take on him:

http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-c...stand.html

Interesting page at Tour's site:

https://www.jmtour.com/personal-topics/t...%E2%80%9D/

He does seem to be reasonably balanced in his view.

"I have been labeled as an Intelligent Design (ID) proponent. I am not."

https://lambfollower.wordpress.com/gospe...-creation/

~~ Paul

This may be more to the point https://www.jmtour.com/personal-topics/e...-creation/
instead of listening to an hour and 23 minute long video. A quote....

using today’s expertise, to even construct the lipid bilayer, namely the exterior packaging that holds the cell’s nanomachinery in place. Just the lipid bilayer (which itself surrounds thousands of nanosystems) is beyond our ability to synthesize.

...and Tour said it could not be done. Apparently it's a trivial task too.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/chemists-creat...l-membrane