Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

I prefer not to speculate on the ultimate nature of the intelligence that evidently is operating. I think it must be a sentient intelligence. It is sufficient to show without a reasonable doubt that it is indeed operating.

Curious - why do you feel some kind of Psi effect at, say, the bacterial/viral/cellular level is not enough to account for the argued-for holes in the accepted theory?

Not wanting to butt in, but it seems to me that if we were open to the possibility of the laws of physics allowing retro-causation, in principle that would open the door to an alternative evolutionary mechanism that wouldn't necessarily involve intelligence - and might not even involve anything non-material.

Why not butt in - that sounds like an interesting suggestion, but can you flesh the idea out a bit? 

Are you suggesting that we are gradually 'designing' life - causing stuff that happened 3 billion years ago?

It would still involve intelligence, but it would be basically us, but I suspect you need non-material beings to come up with the whole idea in the first place.

Remember that the concept of timelessness comes up repeatedly in NDE and related material.

Perhaps a possible scenario goes like this:

Non-material beings wanted to experience physical existence , and created a crude cartoonish version of the reality we now enjoy. Some of them became incarnated in this reality. This required constant intervention from the non-material world to keep it running, but then non-material beings that could dip into time at whatever time they wanted, gradually fixed it up to work better and better with less interference from outside.

That sounds a bit outlandish, but probably less so than RM+NS

Why not butt in - that sounds like an interesting suggestion, but can you flesh the idea out a bit? 

Are you suggesting that we are gradually 'designing' life - causing stuff that happened 3 billion years ago?

It would still involve intelligence, but it would be basically us, but I suspect you need non-material beings to come up with the whole idea in the first place.

Remember that the concept of timelessness comes up repeatedly in NDE and related material.

Perhaps a possible scenario goes like this:

Non-material beings wanted to experience physical existence , and created a crude cartoonish version of the reality we now enjoy. Some of them became incarnated in this reality. This required constant intervention from the non-material world to keep it running, but then non-material beings that could dip into time at whatever time they wanted, gradually fixed it up to work better and better with less interference from outside.

That sounds a bit outlandish, but probably less so than RM+NS

The incorporation of mental entities, or Mind of some kind, is what Josephson seems to argue for. Wheeler had similar ideas that Josephson drew on - Wheeler's famous It from Bit essay mentioned the idea of observations throughout time influencing the universe.

Re: Timelessness, do you mean time on a different track, independent to our flow of Time? To think of this by analogy, the time within versus outside a simulation.

I’m not sure why you are calling them outsiders.
Linda

OMG

Do you know the facts surrounding the blow-back to each one of 4 scientists I cited?????

I have already posted the McClintock's quote.  Margulis is already famous for her battles with Dawkins.  Maybe its Ted that's new to you.

 During the 1980s and 1990s Ted Steele clashed with the scientific establishment, particularly in the UK, over this hypothesis and his support for Lamarck's place in modern science. Steele has stated publicly in an interview with the ABC program Lateline that his controversial theories have had a strong impact on his career: "To be branded a heretic and a pariah meant that my career to keep doing research in this area were extremely limited."[3]

During the period 2010 - 2018 Ted Steele continued to explore reverse transcription as a mechanism to explain the emergence of complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ～500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes.[4] 

Mainstreamers - but not necessarily - are the ones giving shit to those with breakthroughs that disturb convention.

Ever read Kuhn? 

 In honor of his legacy, the "Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award" is awarded by the American Chemical Society to speakers who present original views that are at odds with mainstream scientific understanding. The winner is selected based in the novelty of the viewpoint and its potential impact if it were to be widely accepted.[27] 

Why not butt in - that sounds like an interesting suggestion, but can you flesh the idea out a bit? 

Are you suggesting that we are gradually 'designing' life - causing stuff that happened 3 billion years ago?

It would still involve intelligence, but it would be basically us, but I suspect you need non-material beings to come up with the whole idea in the first place.

Remember that the concept of timelessness comes up repeatedly in NDE and related material.

Perhaps a possible scenario goes like this:

Non-material beings wanted to experience physical existence , and created a crude cartoonish version of the reality we now enjoy. Some of them became incarnated in this reality. This required constant intervention from the non-material world to keep it running, but then non-material beings that could dip into time at whatever time they wanted, gradually fixed it up to work better and better with less interference from outside.

That sounds a bit outlandish, but probably less so than RM+NS

My idea was much vaguer than that. I just meant that if there could be a retro-causation effect from future to past - say in the form of something like Sheldrake's morphic resonance process, but acting backwards in time - then it could bias the probability distributions so that instead of random mutations there was a tendency for mutations to occur in a preferred direction. I suppose that even an extremely weak effect of that sort would completely alter the process of evolution over long enough timescales. Of course there would be a circular aspect to the process, but I think that kind of thing is inevitable if retro-causation is allowed.

My idea was much vaguer than that. I just meant that if there could be a retro-causation effect from future to past - say in the form of something like Sheldrake's morphic resonance process, but acting backwards in time - then it could bias the probability distributions so that instead of random mutations there was a tendency for mutations to occur in a preferred direction. I suppose that even an extremely weak effect of that sort would completely alter the process of evolution over long enough timescales. Of course there would be a circular aspect to the process, but I think that kind of thing is inevitable if retro-causation is allowed.

I think retro-causation has tremendous problems, but if someone can really solve them* this sounds like an idea worth investigation. Of course at this stage I think any examination of issues w/r/to evolution is the preliminary step.

*For an example of someone who I think fails utterly to solve them, see Eric Wargo.

OMG

Do you know the facts surrounding the blow-back to each one of 4 scientists I cited?????

I’m familiar with them, as well as thousands of other scientists working on novel ideas, some of which will pan out, and most which won’t. Pretty much everybody who is trying something new gets some degree of blow-back. And, of course, it makes a much better story if you emphasize the resistance and forget to mention the support. And, of course, the stories are only told about the few who eventually turned out to be right, not their thousands of peers whose ideas faded away because the resistance turned out to be valid. The idea that you have to prove yourself to get your ideas accepted, rather than ‘anything which goes with the status quo gets accepted without question’, is one of the strengths of the practice of science.

Mainstreamers - but not necessarily - are the ones giving shit to those with breakthroughs that disturb convention.

That’s not helpful. Pretty much all scientists get shit and give shit.

Ever read Kuhn?

Yes.

That award pretty much contradicts what you seem to be trying to claim. You don’t get the Nobel Prize for following convention.

Linda

Re: Timelessness, do you mean time on a different track, independent to our flow of Time? To think of this by analogy, the time within versus outside a simulation.

Yes, as far as I can see, beings can only be timeless with respect to a specific time track - to me existing outside of all time is impossible to comprehend - but perhaps that is my limitation (perhaps Linda can help ).

Thus if we exist in T1, they exist in T2, and mess about with things in T1 in a way that therefore seems a-causal to us. 

A lot of pretty well established phenomena seem to involve retrocausation - presentiment, precognitive dreams, etc.

Yes, as far as I can see, beings can only be timeless with respect to a specific time track - to me existing outside of all time is impossible to comprehend - but perhaps that is my limitation (perhaps Linda can help ).

Thus if we exist in T1, they exist in T2, and mess about with things in T1 in a way that therefore seems a-causal to us. 

A lot of pretty well established phenomena seem to involve retrocausation - presentiment, precognitive dreams, etc.

It seems to me all Psi-phenomena that presume retrocausation could be explained by other means?

I think Braude hit the nail on the head when he asked what limits the backwards arrow of time, and what it might mean to have two arrows of time going in different directions?

There was a time when I was more sympathetic to the ideas of "syntropy", that backward/forward arrows of time meet in the Now, but the more I thought about it this seems to create a large mess of issues when you ask why certain points of future time seem to be communicating backward and not others.

At present the problems with retrocausation seem insurmountable to me.