Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

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.

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.   

https://evolutionnews.org/2015/05/information_cre/#

From the given definition of "human information processing": 

"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."

A vast amount is sadly left out in this definition: it strips from the human, most of consciousness including awareness, initiative and desire, "agentness", insight, foresight, imagination, emotion, etc. etc. In other words, most of what makes us human. This is not surprising, since this approach is apparently descended from Skinnerian behaviorism. It is true in a very limited way but only by ignoring or trivializing the foregoing essential qualities and characteristics of being human, the "I" that "operates on the information." 

For materialists something like this was necessary to (vainly) try to analyze and understand human behavior ignoring the mystery of consciousness itself, using the tool of the computer processing analogy which is of course all the rage today.

The human can be attempted to be "characterized" (or behavioristically described) using this tool, but so much is left out that the unique capacities able to envision and implement new designs are far beyond the capabilities of such analysis.
 

You are arguing against my POV and the against the emerging science that refutes neoDarwinism.  Kinda confusing.   

This "emerging science" (if it were viable) would defeat Darwinism but since it reduces man to complex computing machines it would also defeat all notions of the human soul, and violate the Hard Problem of consciousness, and conflict with a mountain of empirical paranormal evidence. 

My view shouldn't be confusing - I think there is a ton of evidence that Darwinism is false as a theory of evolution, and as a cultural paradigm. I don't propose a full alternate theory at this time, just some preliminary ideas, most of which involve the paranormal and probably other realms of existence. 

Since the "emerging science" you refer to ultimately doesn't explain consciousness including its characteristics agentness, creativity and foresight  (all essential to any design process that could have led to the major innovations in evolution), in my view it can't really refute Darwinism.  

 

From the given definition of "human information processing": 

A vast amount is sadly left out in this definition: it strips from the human, most of consciousness including awareness, initiative and desire, "agentness", insight, foresight, imagination, emotion, etc. etc. In other words, most of what makes us human.

My view shouldn't be confusing - I think there is a ton of evidence that Darwinism is false as a theory of evolution, and as a cultural paradigm. I don't propose a full alternate theory at this time, just some preliminary ideas, most of which involve the paranormal and probably other realms of existence. 

Since the "emerging science" you refer to ultimately doesn't explain consciousness including its characteristics agentness, creativity and foresight  (all essential to any design process that could have led to the major innovations in evolution), in my view it can't really refute Darwinism.  

I am not into the culture wars, but do have opinions.  What is confusing, is your bitter arguing against IR, as if some strawman, which protects NS+RM evolution.  

I just posted a link to a review of William Dembski's, book 'Being as Communion', where he asserts the position of informational realism.       What am I missing?

In fact, informational realism challenges any "mindless cause" argument in NS and has blown up RM with bioinformatics. Mutation data correlates with intentional goals and logical adaptations and is simply not random to fitness.  {see the Third Way of Evolution website}.

We have been talking "apples and oranges", where I am noting productive science methodologies to support mind and Psi ---- and you reply about cultural paradigms and Dembski's positions of 20 years ago.

The methodologies and tools of information science where human activity is observed; makes no such cultural claims.  It merely is a framework for the analysis to be contextualized.  While it ignores the experiential that makes us human in its environment for research, is it no way eliminates it.  Information processing can abstract the patterns of organic, natural mind.  We can understand - how mind understands - from a science.  It says nothing against spiritual mind or higher mind or any religious worldview.  Once natural mind is acknowledged and better documented, its inter-relations with the brain can be verified and correlated. 

Darwin's actual Theory of Evolution included mental evolution as a pathway for selection.  (Provine lied)

I am not into the culture wars, but do have opinions.  What is confusing, is your bitter arguing against IR, as if some strawman, which protects NS+RM evolution.  

I just posted a link to a review of William Dembski's, book 'Being as Communion', where he asserts the position of informational realism.       What am I missing?

In fact, informational realism challenges any "mindless cause" argument in NS and has blown up RM with bioinformatics. Mutation data correlates with intentional goals and logical adaptations and is simply not random to fitness.  {see the Third Way of Evolution website}.

We have been talking "apples and oranges", where I am noting productive science methodologies to support mind and Psi ---- and you reply about cultural paradigms and Dembski's positions of 20 years ago.

The methodologies and tools of information science where human activity is observed; makes no such cultural claims.  It merely is a framework for the analysis to be contextualized.  While it ignores the experiential that makes us human in its environment for research, is it no way eliminates it.  Information processing can abstract the patterns of organic, natural mind.  We can understand - how mind understands - from a science.  It says nothing against spiritual mind or higher mind or any religious worldview.  Once natural mind is acknowledged and better documented, its inter-relations with the brain can be verified and correlated. 

Darwin's actual Theory of Evolution included mental evolution as a pathway for selection.  (Provine lied)

Is this inline with your thoughts ->

The World is Not a Theorem

S. Kauffman, A. Roli

The evolution of the biosphere unfolds as a luxuriant generative process of new living forms and functions. Organisms adapt to their environment, and exploit novel opportunities that are created in this continuous blooming dynamics. Affordances play a fundamental role in the evolution of the biosphere, as they represent the opportunities organisms may choose for achieving their goals, thus actualizing what is in potentia. In this paper we maintain that affordances elude a formalization in mathematical terms: we argue that it is not possible to apply set theory to affordances, therefore we cannot devise a mathematical theory of affordances and the evolution of the biosphere.

The notion of affordancehas been originally introduced by Gibson [5] in psychology with the aim of expressing the actions that an object enable to an animal observing it. The concept has been subsequently extended, and it is currently adopted in diverse fields such as biosemiotics, cybernetics and robotics [2, 7]. In general and abstract terms, we can say that an affordance is “the use of Xto accomplish Y”, where X may be an object, a living being,a situation, etc., and Y is in general an action or a behavior that typically leads to a goal.Heritable variations and selection make it possible for organisms to find new, advantageous uses afforded by objects or other organisms. For example, an empty snail shell affords the pagurus a house where it can hide and protect itself from predators, or a colony of bacteria that is evolving in a new environment may discover a more efficient way to get to the food through favorable mutations and selection. In the same way, new organs have emerged in organisms as they afforded opportunities that enhanced their fitness in their environment. By organism we mean a Kantian whole: an organized being having the property that the parts exist for and by means of the whole [9, 13] that senses the world, chooses between what is good or bad for it, and acts.

The overlap with ideas from Jim Carpenter's First Sight is really interesting. Given Kauffman's sympathy to God/Souls/Psi - something I only just discovered - I wonder if the two have ever checked in with each other.

Also that last part, about "Kantian Wholes" is also how Arvan describes the free willed "gamers" in the P2P Simulation Hypothesis.

Is this inline with your thoughts ->

The World is Not a Theorem

S. Kauffman, A. Roli


The overlap with ideas from Jim Carpenter's First Sight is really interesting. Given Kauffman's sympathy to God/Souls/Psi - something I only just discovered - I wonder if the two have ever checked in with each other.

Also that last part, about "Kantian Wholes" is also how Arvan describes the free willed "gamers" in the P2P Simulation Hypothesis.

Very much in line with my humble ramblings.  Thanks as always.  I need to read it a second time.

An old story that I think well illustrates the sort of closed-minded mental stance of most Darwinists. It's the so-called "dead man syndrome" story in psychiatry.

Paraphrased from https://mindmatters.ai/2021/01/does-info...e-meaning/:

This story illustrates the challenges of being in a prison of belief, a prison of ideology that you can’t see out of. 

The story of the dead man syndrome is that a man enters a psychiatrist office and says, “Doc,”… He was really sad by the way. He says, “Doc, I’m dead.”

And he started sobbing. He went over and sat down and put his head down and started to cry. And the psychiatrist was just astonished. He said, “Well, come on. You’re not dead. You’re walking, you’re talking, and dead people don’t do that.” The guy says, “Yeah, I know, it’s astonishing, isn’t it? That I can walk and talk, but doc I’m dead.”

So the psychiatrist thought of a way that he could make an explanation to the man and convince the man that he wasn’t dead.

So he asked the guy, “Do dead men bleed?” And the patient said, “Why, no, dead men don’t bleed.” He said, “Here, give me your finger.” And so he picked his finger and the guy started to bleed. A little puddle of red blood came up and the guy’s eyes got big. And he looked at the doctor and looked at the puddle, and looked at the doctor and he said, “Doc, this is incredible. You’re right and I’m wrong. Dead men do bleed.”

The point of that story is if you’re very much imprisoned in an ideology, you are going to be pounding square pegs into round holes forever in order to defend that ideology. And I think we point a finger at Darwinists for doing that.

But I think everybody has to be concerned about placing themselves in a prison of belief, and allow themselves to be open to other explanations, and go where the evidence leads. I mean, this is what the scientists say, right? Go where the evidence leads us. And the evidence in terms of Darwinian evolution is that no, it simply doesn’t work. Not unless it’s guided.

Some Proteins Change Their Folds to Perform Different Jobs

Viviane Callier

Dishman found that the oldest ancestor had a single stable fold, the one common to all the chemokines. In proteins from a little later in the reconstructed evolutionary sequence, she detected two fingerprints, one for the ancestral fold but also one for a newer fold, although the new fold remained rare. Surprisingly, just a little later in the evolutionary sequence, proteins showed the opposite: They were mainly folded in the new conformation and only rarely in the ancestral conformation. Finally, in the modern XCL1, the two conformations were about equal, Dishman found.

The fact that the ancestors exhibited the two folds unevenly while the modern XCL1 exhibits both in equal proportion strongly suggests that the switching property “is not an accident or an artifact. It’s something that must have been beneficial and improved the fitness of the organism, because it appeared to be selected for,” said Brian Volkman, a biophysicist and senior author of the study, which appeared in Science on January 1.

I have to admit this sounds somewhat...tautological? As in it hardly seems explanatory to just say what is happening.

They go over why the selection would've happened but then note this ->

The arguments for these apparent advantages can seem so convincing that they raise the question of why XCL1 is the only chemokine that evolved metamorphic folding. The researchers acknowledge that this is still a mystery.

Not compelling as an argument for natural selection...

The conclusion even gets into design it seems ->

Baker added that it’s hard enough to design an amino acid sequence that adopts a single low-energy state; computing one that can adopt two different low-energy states with roughly equal probability is even harder. But given how useful these bistable switches could be, “designing proteins with multiple low-energy states is going to be really key,” he said. “I think this is a very important frontier for protein science.”

Even for someone like myself who is reserved about ID, this raises issues with the idea that evolution is happening without the influence of mind....

Some Proteins Change Their Folds to Perform Different Jobs

Viviane Callier


I have to admit this sounds somewhat...tautological? As in it hardly seems explanatory to just say what is happening.

They go over why the selection would've happened but then note this ->


Not compelling as an argument for natural selection...

The conclusion even gets into design it seems ->


Even for someone like myself who is reserved about ID, this raises issues with the idea that evolution is happening without the influence of mind....

Concerning protein folds:

Protein folds are functionally specific – the precise sequence of arrangement of the amino acids will determine the conformation or physical shape of the polypeptide chain. It turns out as shown by various research studies that functional protein folds are sufficiently improbable to exhaust the available probabilistic resources - meaning they are exceedingly improbable: almost all folds are functionless or deleterious. In other words functional folds are beyond the reach of random walk processes, especially neo-Darwinistic evolution.

For instance,

Axe, D. D. (2004). Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds. Journal of Molecular Biology, 341(5), 1295-1315.

Axe’s research paper estimates “the prevalence of protein folds adopting functional enzyme folds” to be roughly 1 in 10^77. This means a blind search would never be able to navigate its way to a functional peak in the "protein fold fitness landscape". The neo-Darwinistic mechanism is essentially a blind search since it is utilizing mutations or other genetic changes that are random with respect to fitness. Therefore the Darwinistic mechanism totally fails to explain evolution of protein folds and therefore the evolution of enzymes and all the multitudinous other complicated protein structures forming living cells.

The problem of neural evolution...

A fundamental problem that has never been addressed by Darwinist evolutionary biologists and theorists: developing the DNA encoding changes for the intricate neural programs for new instinctual abilities required by physical evolution. A good example is bird flight, where somehow from random mutations millions of neurons had to be increased in number and reorganized into the extremely complex brain structures implementing the necessary new functional algorithms. The problem is actually greater and more complex than developing the new physical structures:

"Somehow, when we think about evolution, the problem of hardware–software coordination is ignored. Take, for example, the neo-Darwinian claim that modern birds evolved from reptile-like dinosaurs. Discussions of dinosaur-to-bird evolution talk about the hardware changes: scales became feathers, legs became wings, cold-blooded (exothermic) physiology became warm-blooded (endothermic) physiology, tooth-filled mouths became beaks, and so on. All of these monumental changes in hardware present enormous operational challenges that incremental mutations somehow solved over millions of years. But totally missing is any account of the evolution of the necessary software.

Assume for the moment that unguided mutation could actually modify a reptile and install the wing apparatus, including all the muscles and feathers. For the early stubby proto-wing to give the modified reptile the “survival advantage” necessary to win in natural selection, the reptile must know how to use the proto-wing. A reptile with proto-wings instead of legs is like a human with roller skates instead of feet. The reptile must have the biological software to operate the proto-wings successfully. Whatever software the legged reptile had, it won’t operate a proto-wing. The stubby-winged reptile is worse off than his legged brothers and sisters, not better, and won’t win the natural selection prize.
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No article I’ve seen reveals the mechanism for modifying behavioral software in animals, let alone how the algorithm for walking in two dimensions can be modified by undirected mutation to become the algorithm for flying in three dimensions.
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Materialist thinkers contend that every feature of brain, mind, and consciousness arose via cause-effect physics and chemistry accounted for by neo-Darwinism. In that case, they first need to explain how biological software is created and stored in animals, and then how such software can be mutated by accident just in time to operate new biological hardware. Solve those problems first, before claiming human consciousness is mere biochemistry."

The problem of neural evolution...

A fundamental problem that has never been addressed by Darwinist evolutionary biologists and theorists: developing the DNA encoding changes for the intricate neural programs for new instinctual abilities required by physical evolution. A good example is bird flight, where somehow from random mutations millions of neurons had to be increased in number and reorganized into the extremely complex brain structures implementing the necessary new functional algorithms. The problem is actually greater and more complex than developing the new physical structures:

A few notes on the complexity of the neural systems required for the bird to fly that had to be evolved somehow from random mutations and other genetic changes (or more likely designed), based on the design of human-designed autopilots. A very difficult and problematic area that has been (I'm sure deliberately) left out of Darwinist evolutionary theorizing and "just so stories".

An autopilot is a device that must be capable of accomplishing all types of controlling functions including automatic take-off (in UAVs), flying toward the target destination, performing mission operations (e.g., surveillance in UAVs), and automatic landing. The autopilot has the responsibility for: (1) stabilizing the vehicle (two or three axis gyroscopic stabilization), (2) tracking and in some UAVs attack based on commands (in the bird from higher (conscious) neural structures), (3) following guidance (consciousness neural centers in the bird), and (4) navigating to destinations (in the bird combining terrain following, magnetic north sensing and at-night stellar navigation, also involving consciousness).

The two-axis autopilot system installed in most general aviation aircraft controls the pitch and roll of the aircraft. The autopilot can operate independently, controlling
heading and altitude, or it can be coupled to a navigation system and fly a programmed course or an approach with glideslope. The bird has to have a 3-axis system (including yaw or heading).

Autopilots can automate tasks, such as maintaining an altitude, climbing or descending to an assigned altitude, turning to and maintaining an assigned heading, intercepting a course, guiding the aircraft between waypoints that make up a programmed route. Of course the route plan in the bird has to be some sort of higher neural processing center associated with consciousness.

Many advanced avionics installations really include two different, but integrated, systems. One is the autopilot system, which is the set of servo actuators that actually do
the control movements and the control circuits to make the servo actuators move the correct amount for the selected task. The second is the flight director (FD) component. The
FD is the brain of the autopilot system. 

The bird has to have both systems implemented in intricate neural structures combined with extensive modifications to the motor areas, in which the FD system includes the consciousness component.

Hey all, been on hiatus for a while. As such, have had quite a bit of personal and all kinds of development.

Regarding this topic, here are my current thoughts on the subject.

Let's start with this analogy - life as universe "observers" traversing all potential potentialities of what can be (aka reference frames in physics). This might be likened to traversing a multidimensional maze.

The creationist would be (incorrectly IMO) arguing that instead of traversing a path from origin to the current location in the maze, instead there have been jumps in the path.

The materialist would correctly see the path back to the origin. But, they would not understand that the path which was chosen was not random, but rather selected by the observer, which does not necessarily think in the same terms as a modern-day human. The materialist is inexorably tied to Maya, the great illusion, which is an extension of the self, the observable through one's reference frame. To transcend beyond this, we need to be comfortable with the fundamentally unknowable. Pure potential, and this is where quantum comes into play (in a non-woo sense, meaning it can be applied to one's life in a useful way).

I suspect that the answer to this question, when fully understood, will show us what it means to be alive, to be human - and it will be quite exciting.