Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

Look at the clues from the sort of actual systems whose origin is the concern, such as cellular organelles like the bacterial flagellum, or even more, the complex organ systems of the first invertebrate Cambrian animals. Because of the nature of these intricate irreducibly complex mechanisms that are involved I think that the intelligence must be a focused sentient conscious agent or more likely agents. It seems unlikely that some sort of distributed intelligence formed collectively by bacterial or viral cells could create such entities.

You choose to believe an intelligent conscious agent is behind evolving species. Here's a study on the New York City pigeon living and adapting to a changing environment.  That's one mechanism for speciation.


https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/t...-a-pigeon/

Here's another possible example of speciation by environmental adaptation. You might note that both examples of possible speciation are rapid and do not require the help through some intelligent agent.

Lizards adapt to invasive fire ants, reversing geographical patterns of lizard traits

Date:

November 29, 2018

Source:

Penn State

Summary:

Some lizards in the eastern U.S. have adapted to invasive fire ants -- which can bite, sting, and kill lizards -- reversing geographical trends in behavioral and physical traits used to avoid predators.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...114124.htm

In any case, I believe I've learned physics from Maaneli / Iyace / Ethan in the Skeptiko forums, learned more about the varied sciences from Skeptiko interviews and forum discussions, learned a good bit about philosophy/history/religion.

I learned some physics from Maaneli, especially about Foundational physics. I definitely didn’t learn any statistics from him, but I did learn a bit from Jay when he tried to educate Maaneli on his errors. I didn’t learn anything from Loneshaman, given that whenever I had discussions with him on stuff I know about (medical matters or research methods or gravity), his ignorance was obvious to me, even though his presentation style was as though he knew what he was talking about. I had no reason to think that it wasn’t the same case with anything else he chose to talk about. I did learn a fair bit from Paul’s discussion with him though, with respect to evolution and consciousness/AI.

I think all of this has also made people morally better and happier in their lives. I doubt one could ask for more than that from Skeptiko or a forum like this, where it seems at most you have a few hundred people (probably less) visiting.

It would be nice if that were true.

Linda

I learned some physics from Maaneli, especially about Foundational physics. I definitely didn’t learn any statistics from him, but I did learn a bit from Jay when he tried to educate Maaneli on his errors. I didn’t learn anything from Loneshaman, given that whenever I had discussions with him on stuff I know about (medical matters or research methods or gravity), his ignorance was obvious to me, even though his presentation style was as though he knew what he was talking about. I had no reason to think that it wasn’t the same case with anything else he chose to talk about. I did learn a fair bit from Paul’s discussion with him though, with respect to evolution and consciousness/AI.


It would be nice if that were true.

Linda

I had a few peeves about Maaneli. The one that most irritated me was his assuredness his statical analysis was infallible. I vaguely recall Jay pointing out the errors. I share your thought about Loneshaman. Paul is no slouch.

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.

I meant that T1 and T2 were orthogonal, not pointing in opposite directions. Thus T2 'residents' can see the activities in T1 at all times. I guess 'orthogonal' isn't quite the right term, because presumable 'residents' of T1 (us) can't see the whole of T2 at once.

Having a second, quite independent time axis seems to be essential, otherwise how can timeless beings do anything?

I feel that if you accept the evidence of NDE's (say), where people sometimes get told about a future event, then you have to accept some sort of temporal weirdness!

I thought you couldn't determine what a fact is and yet you see them when they support your point of view. That's one problem your side, meaning the average reader, has no facts, therefore nothing has ever become established truth. The other is your side rarely at best take it upon themselves to perform rigorous scientific experiments. That's how truth is found by testing assumptions to see which standup to prior observations.
You asked: What is the truth about the Cambrian Explosion? Such a question suggests you've never read up on it or you reject it outright because it allows no room for spirituality. Which is it? 
So you learned a lot from Paul and LS obviously you learned more from LS why?

See, there you go again - attack with no substance. You accuse me of not reading about the Cambrian Explosion yet you are wrong - I have and I find it interesting. But you don't answer my question: you think you know the truth about it so what is that truth and why is it true? Explain yourself instead of merely attacking. I suspect that you can't but please - go ahead and prove me wrong. Show us that you actually know something about that which you accuse others of being ignorant. I doubt that you know much at all or have read the material you accuse others of avoiding but, yet again, prove me wrong. Start, at long last, to add some substance to your argument instead of empty assertions.

I suspect that proteins, in particular when they are formed into repeating helix structures like centrioles (which also replicate and migrate to form the basal body of the flagellar) are - the appearance to us within spacetime - of a combined sensor and processor for spacetime, and that together, these highly conserved protein structures probably do form a phenomenally powerful collective 'intelligence' at a micro-level.

It seems obvious to me they are processing something, something that is stored 'nicely' and predictably, something that appears information-like at a fundamental level, and I think we're scratching at the surface of this 'something' when we talk about quantum mechanics, spin, angular momentum, and the magnetic moment etc.

Is mind computation, that is, can it be one and the same as computation? Regardless of the particular mechanization of the computational algorithms, whether human brains or digital computers or distributed bacterial or viral nets and their subcellular organelles. The answer is No. Mind is the opposite of computation. Thoughts are intentional, meaning that every thought is about something. This something can even be itself in self-awareness and introspection. The mind points to things mostly other than itself. We think about things: about people, about places, about concepts.

Computation is inherently absolutely never "about" anything other than itself, that is, the computation itself. And that computation is just internal mapping: input to output according to an algorithm — irrespective of the input. A simple example is a word-processing program, blind to the meaning conveyed by the letters typed into it. The word processor doesn’t know or care about the meaning in the text typed into it. The photo image processing program uploads and processes picture data from a digital camera - it certainly doesn't care whether the pictures are of a trip to France or of your grandma or of your kid’s school play.

Computation is never about anything; it is non-intentional. The mind is the mind in part because it’s always about something. It’s intentional. Computation is the opposite of the mind. If it is computation, it is not mental. If it is mental, it is not computation. The Venn diagrams never cross. 

Another major problem of the contention that the mind is computation is the good old Hard Problem. The qualia of consciousness are in an entirely other realm of existence than physical things and their interactions, such as the data processing carried out by the parts of a computer. No matter how the processing and algorithms are carried out, whether in a central processor or in a distributed computational net of cells or cellular organelles, it's still processing and algorithms, not mind.

Is mind computation, that is, can it be one and the same as computation? Regardless of the particular mechanization of the computational algorithms, whether human brains or digital computers or distributed bacterial or viral nets and their subcellular organelles. The answer is No. Mind is the opposite of computation. Thoughts are intentional, meaning that every thought is about something. This something can even be itself in self-awareness and introspection. The mind points to things mostly other than itself. We think about things: about people, about places, about concepts.

Computation is inherently absolutely never about anything other than itself. Computation is internal mapping: input to output according to an algorithm — irrespective of the input. A simple example is a word-processing program, blind to the meaning conveyed by the letters typed into it. The word processor doesn’t know or care about the meaning in the text typed into it. The photo image processing program uploads and processes picture data from a digital camera - it certainly doesn't care whether the pictures are of a trip to France or of your grandma or of your kid’s school play.

Computation is never about anything; it is non-intentional. The mind is the mind in part because it’s always about something. It’s intentional. Computation is the opposite of the mind. If it is computation, it is not mental. If it is mental, it is not computation. The Venn diagrams never cross. 

Another major problem of the contention that the mind is computation is the good old Hard Problem. The qualia of consciousness are in an entirely other realm of existence than physical things and their interactions, such as the data processing carried out by the parts of a computer. No matter how the processing and algorithms are carried out, whether in a central processor or in a distributed computational net of cells or cellular organelles, it's still processing and algorithms, not mind.

I agree with this, but I'm not sure how it addresses Max's points?

Is the idea that "processing" which Max refers to is computation, and this suggests a top-down influence from a mental entity since computers are, as Calasso put it, prosthetics to the Mind[?]

See, there you go again - attack with no substance. You accuse me of not reading about the Cambrian Explosion yet you are wrong - I have and I find it interesting. But you don't answer my question: you think you know the truth about it so what is that truth and why is it true? Explain yourself instead of merely attacking. I suspect that you can't but please - go ahead and prove me wrong. Show us that you actually know something about that which you accuse others of being ignorant. I doubt that you know much at all or have read the material you accuse others of avoiding but, yet again, prove me wrong. Start, at long last, to add some substance to your argument instead of empty assertions.

The idea that there are no rigorous experiments seems like an odd accusation. Irvin Child, who once was Yale's chair of psychology, noted the significance of Krippner's work years ago:

The knock on parapsychology studies has long been that any so-called evidence of ESP is usually limited to negligible effects only detectable after scouring massive bodies of data. "Those to whom this criticism has any appeal should be aware that the Maimonides experiments are clearly exempt from it," wrote Irvin Child, Yale's former psychology department chair, in American Psychologist, the APA's flagship journal. "I believe many psychologists would, like myself, consider the ESP hypothesis to merit serious consideration and continued research if they read the Maimonides reports for themselves."

And the American Psychology Association published Transcendent Mind in 2016

Everyone knows that consciousness resides in the brain. Or does it? In this book, Imants Barušs and Julia Mossbridge utilize findings from quantum mechanics, special relativity, philosophy, and paranormal psychology to build a rigorous, scientific investigation into the origins and nature of human consciousness. Along the way, they examine the scientific literature on concepts such as mediumship, out-of-body and near-death experiences, telekinesis, “apparent” vs. “deep time,” and mind-to-mind communication, and introduce eye-opening ideas about our shared reality. The result is a revelatory tour of the “post-materialist” world—and a roadmap for consciousness research in the twenty-first century.

This isn't to say Psi is going mainstream just yet, but if the data was respectable enough for the APA it seems, at the least, worthy of some consideration. The caveat being psychology as a field is in the midst of a replication crisis, but this could be a good opportunity to start coming up with AI that can rate all studies without any bias. Probably will take a few years of advances in computer science but we do seem to moving rapidly in at least some of the necessary arenas.

In fact one of the people involved with AI advances, Ben Goertzel, was convinced by the work in parapsychology.

My general attitude toward psi is one of guarded but definite positivity — based on fairly carefully reviewing the scientific evidence, I think psi almost surely does exist, though it’s a strange and finicky phenomenon and nobody really understands it very well yet.  Obviously there are a lot of fakers out there pretending to have psychic powers that they don’t actually have, but this doesn’t weaken the scientific data about psi, any more than myths about bug-eyed aliens weaken the evidence that humans went to the moon.

I have witnessed some phenomena personally that would be difficult to explain without invoking some kind of psi.  However, if not for the fairly compelling corpus of scientific data on psi, I’d probably be willing to write these off as incredible coincidences or part of the inexplicable mystery of life or whatever.