(2021-01-25, 02:13 AM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]Since it has no consciousness it is fundamentally incapable of either envisioning or knowing or desiring the future state of being able to move via a new cellular organelle with certain basic components. I disagree that there can possibly be intent in this simple organism - intent clearly implies consciousness, which the bacterium simply doesn't have. The word "mental" simply doesn't apply to this organism.
In the semantic terms that describe anthropic mind, I find your assertions well founded. I ask you to see a different perspective, a perspective that can be objectively confirmed. Information science measures, as fundamental and through derivatives,
mutual information.
To know something is to have access to "copies" of key information describing the object. These matching information structures, measured in bits, are like answers to yes/no questions. When an agent gets enough mutual information about his object, it may then further process this knowledge into understanding. That is where it creates depth of context from past experience and can project where the object may be useful in the future. It need not be a house in the suburbs, just where is the next food particle.
Knowing mutual information changes probabilities of an agent in responding with appropriate outlooks. Understanding further, can increase mental outlook to active thoughts that organize and emit a response signal.
If mind is simply defined as the information processing system of a creature changing probabilities for activities its gain of mutual information and structured responses to its environments can be measured!
Bacteria can be observed as to the probability of interactions in an environment. Its physicality can be measured and so can its informational circuits and responses. Does it have detectors that are able to target food in a new locale? Can it trigger a response that acquires a target for ingestion?
Quote: Information Gain and Mutual Information for Machine Learning
by Jason Brownlee on October 16, 2019 in Probability
Last Updated on December 10, 2020
Information gain calculates the reduction in entropy or surprise from transforming a dataset in some way.
It is commonly used in the construction of decision trees from a training dataset, by evaluating the information gain for each variable, and selecting the variable that maximizes the information gain, which in turn minimizes the entropy and best splits the dataset into groups for effective classification.
Information gain can also be used for feature selection, by evaluating the gain of each variable in the context of the target variable. In this slightly different usage, the calculation is referred to as mutual information between the two random variables.
https://machinelearningmastery.com/infor...formation/
(2021-01-25, 08:30 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]Well the question remains whether they've discovered anything at all. But sure, I can make a separate thread to discuss the identity of the designer(s).
Yep, I was thinking of doing so too. It is, no doubt, an interesting discussion. I'll watch for your thoughts and hope that I can come up with something sensible to say.
(2021-01-25, 06:50 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]1. I've never said design is false, just that the probabilistic case IDers make isn't 100% convincing.
2. If a child is an accidental pregnancy, does that mean his/her whole existence is therefore meaningless? I'd say it is not meaningless, and extrapolate that to the entire human race.
3. As Kastrup notes, we just don't know if mutations across biological history were random. Even if the progress of evolution has no interventions, that doesn't mean souls don't exist.
Perhaps the Cosmic Fine Tuners - who might've been ourselves - planned evolution out at the beginning before the Big Bang.
Perhaps evolution is "guided" by genuine randomness but only after a point did the non-conscious biological mass become suitable for incarnating souls who exist in another realm.
And so on..
Quote:2. If a child is an accidental pregnancy, does that mean his/her whole existence is therefore meaningless? I'd say it is not meaningless, and extrapolate that to the entire human race.
The child certainly is meaningless if as Darwinism claims the child's entire nature and origin as a biological organism and as a thinking being is due to a directionless purposeless undirected mechanism driven by random genetic variations as filtered by natural selection.
Quote:3. As Kastrup notes, we just don't know if mutations across biological history were random. Even if the progress of evolution has no interventions, that doesn't mean souls don't exist.
You're not talking about true Darwinism here. Darwinism specifically assumes that genetic variations are random especially with respect to "fitness". No non-random purposeful "interventions" are allowed to exist.
Darwinism assumes as a matter of course that humans have no souls - human minds are supposed to have originated by randomness and selection processes. Then by logical extension "souls" generically don't exist either.
Quote:Perhaps evolution is "guided" by genuine randomness but only after a point did the non-conscious biological mass become suitable for incarnating souls who exist in another realm.
Maybe so - some sort of "Darwinistic Spiritualism". But it is troubling (and I think makes this idea much less likely) that such a scheme by the Powers That Be would be so very inefficient and hit-or-miss in trying to generate a vehicle for consciousness in the physical. Many Darwinistic evolutionists have concluded that the origin of intelligence (implying a body able to utilize it) has been a very extremely unlikely event in the history of life.
Quote:Perhaps the Cosmic Fine Tuners - who might've been ourselves - planned evolution out at the beginning before the Big Bang.
Not viable. Quantum mechanics is basic to our Universe, and guarantees that there is true randomness at the subatomic level, and therefore at the level determining many of the phenomena responsible for random mutations. Therefore it doesn't look possible that the whole haphazard process of Darwinistic evolution could have been "planned out".
(2021-01-25, 10:05 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]The child certainly is meaningless if as Darwinism claims the child's entire nature and origin as a biological organism and as a thinking being is due to a directionless purposeless undirected mechanism driven by random genetic variations as filtered by natural selection.
Darwinism assumes as a matter of course that humans have no souls; then by logical extension "souls" generically don't exist either.
...
Maybe so - some sort of "Darwinistic Spiritualism". But it is troubling (and I think makes this idea much less likely) that such a scheme by the Powers That Be would be so very inefficient and hit-or-miss in trying to generate a vehicle for consciousness in the physical.
"Darwinistic Spiritualism" - now there's something to discuss in Sci's new thread (when it gets going).
(2021-01-25, 08:41 PM)stephenw Wrote: [ -> ]In the semantic terms that describe anthropic mind, I find your assertions well founded. I ask you to see a different perspective, a perspective that can be objectively confirmed. Information science measures, as fundamental and through derivatives, mutual information.
To know something is to have access to "copies" of key information describing the object. These matching information structures, measured in bits, are like answers to yes/no questions. When an agent gets enough mutual information about his object, it may then further process this knowledge into understanding. That is where it creates depth of context from past experience and can project where the object may be useful in the future. It need not be a house in the suburbs, just where is the next food particle.
Knowing mutual information changes probabilities of an agent in responding with appropriate outlooks. Understanding further, can increase mental outlook to active thoughts that organize and emit a response signal. If mind is simply defined as the information processing system of a creature changing probabilities for activities its gain of mutual information and structured responses to its environments can be measured!
Bacteria can be observed as to the probability of interactions in an environment. Its physicality can be measured and so can its informational circuits and responses. Does it have detectors that are able to target food in a new locale? Can it trigger a response that acquires a target for ingestion?
https://machinelearningmastery.com/infor...formation/
There is a basic error here. If to "know something" is merely to have access to information about it, then my home PC "knows" where I live and my Social Security number and "understands" that it can decide to give out that information, and can autonomously decide who it releases that information to. Obviously PCs (and even the most advanced current AI systems) literally know and understand nothing. This is because they simply are not aware - they have no consciousness, no subjective "agentness". Just because conglomerations of bacteria can sense their environment and respond to it in simple or even complex ways (as do current AI systems) does not make them agents or a collective agent.
You don't seem to understand that Mind simply can't be defined as information processing. This is invoking the well-known Hard Problem of consciousness in a big way. The essence of mind is subjectivity - knowing what it is like to perceive red, for a simple example. The awareness of red is not the processing of optical data from the eyes to determine that the optical stimulus is in red's particular EM frequency band (any AI system could do that). It is the inner private awareness of the ineffable quality of the conscious experience of the color red. The Hard Problem boils down simply to the fact that the basic elements of conscious experience are fundamentally of a different and higher existential order than the basic elements of mechanisms and their operation including information processing systems. The elements of the latter boil down to the basic physical parameters like velocity, mass, energy. The perception and awareness of the color red has none of those parameters.
(2021-01-25, 10:05 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]You're not talking about true Darwinism here. Darwinism specifically assumes that genetic variations are random especially with respect to "fitness". No non-random purposeful "interventions" are allowed to exist.
Isn't this a modernized, Physicalist-Atheist projection onto Darwin's basic ideas? AFAIK Darwin was an agnostic to the end.
(2021-01-25, 10:37 PM)Kamarling Wrote: [ -> ]"Darwinistic Spiritualism" - now there's something to discuss in Sci's new thread (when it gets going).
If it seems long in coming feel free to make it yourself. I haven't had a chance to really sit down and dig into Ufology, as I am curious if "aliens" really have the kind of advanced technologies we'd expect of potential designers.
Perhaps these entities only mirror our own technological achievements, in a dreamlike fashion, because they are more of the Spirit World than the physical universe.
(2021-01-26, 04:16 AM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]If it seems long in coming feel free to make it yourself. I haven't had a chance to really sit down and dig into Ufology, as I am curious if "aliens" really have the kind of advanced technologies we'd expect of potential designers.
Perhaps these entities only mirror our own technological achievements, in a dreamlike fashion, because they are more of the Spirit World than the physical universe.
OK - I will start a thread although I need a little time to gather my thoughts on the matter. That shouldn't stop anyone else with ideas, however.
(2021-01-26, 01:26 AM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]There is a basic error here. If to "know something" is merely to have access to information about it, then my home PC "knows" where I live
You don't seem to understand that Mind simply can't be defined as information processing...... The essence of mind is subjectivity - knowing what it is like to perceive red, for a simple example.
Your computer has encoded information, that only becomes connected to real world meanings, when operated by a mindful entity. Remember mutual information, stored as code, only changes ongoing real-world probabilities when activated by a mindful agent who can decode and understand the representations. Your computer "knows" where you live, if stolen and the thief can read your files.
The term essence - at a technical level - is an engineered aromatic compound in the production of flavors and perfumes. In science there is nothing specifically called essence, as it was a term of alchemy. What has been meant by the term essence now translates to a model or simulation of a thing, event or process. The human mind is surely being studied, objectively, as to its role in the reality of information and emotion.
Quote: Definition
Human information processing is an approach to the study of human thought and behavior developed beginning in the 1950s as an alternative to the behavioral approaches that were popular at that time. It is a cognitive approach that is often equated with contemporary cognitive psychology. The central tenet of the information-processing approach is that the human can be characterized as an information-processing system, which encodes input, operates on that information, stores and retrieves it from memory, and produces output in terms of actions.
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1428-6_722
So, let talk about mind and subjectivity. Yes - bacterial subjectivity maybe exceedingly low to non-existent, BUT objectively bacteria are processing information into intentional actions. Pragmatically, bacterial info processing is observable, measurable and the resulting patterns in the data are teaching us about the evolution of mind.
I am attacking the prime tenet of "mindless" evolution {and therefore random mutations} being a determinate factor. You are arguing against my POV and the against the emerging science that refutes neoDarwinism. Kinda confusing.
Quote: In Being as Communion, William Dembski defends a new ontology: the most fundamental thing in the universe, he argues, is information. He calls this position “informational realism.” Dembski makes use of Shannon’s information theory, employing it as a springboard into the nature of message transmission and reception.
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/05/information_cre/#
(2021-01-26, 03:43 PM)stephenw Wrote: [ -> ]So, let talk about mind and subjectivity. Yes - bacterial subjectivity maybe exceedingly low to non-existent, BUT objectively bacteria are processing information into intentional actions. Pragmatically, bacterial info processing is observable, measurable and the resulting patterns in the data are teaching us about the evolution of mind.
Are the bacteria taking advantage of random mutation, or actually changing either their own genetic structure or weighting the dice on what mutations their offspring have?
Or to put it more succinctly, do you think Psi is involved here?