Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

It's interesting that nbtruthman suddenly stopped posting in this thread as soon as David001 joined in and that both David's opinions and his posting style seem very similar to me.

Just sayin'  

Just to make sure you know, I am not David001, and I have no reason whatsoever to change my name on this forum. 

I am just mostly otherwise occupied lately, and mostly agree with David001 on these topics (I guess great minds think alike), and note that he is holding his own very well indeed.

Floridi's paper certainly helps to create obfuscation - here is the abstract:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...014.940140

That got a laugh from me.  This starts halfway down L. Floridi's bio, which goes on afterwards.

 Between 2006 and 2010, he was President of IACAP (International Association for Computing And Philosophy). In 2009, he became the first philosopher to be elected Gauss Professor by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. Still in 2009, he was awarded the Barwise Prize by the American Philosophical Association in recognition of his research on the philosophy of information, and was elected Fellow of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. In 2010, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Springer’s new journal Philosophy & Technology and elected Fellow of the Center for Information Policy Research, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. In 2011, he was awarded a laurea honoris causa by the University of Suceava, Romania, for his research on the philosophy of information.In 2012, he was appointed Chairman of the expert group, organised by the DG INFSO of the European Commission, on the impact of information and communication technologies on the digital transformations occurring in the European society. Still in 2012, he was the recipient of the Covey Award, by the International Association for Computing and Philosophy, for “outstanding research in philosophy and computing”. He was then the recipient of the Weizenbaum Award for 2013 for his “significant contribution to the field of information and computer ethics, through his research, service, and vision” (the Award is given every two years by the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology). Still in 2013, he was elected Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and Member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences (MAIPS). In 2014, he awarded a Cátedras de Excelencia by the University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) for his work on the philosophy and ethics of information. In 2015, he was elected Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow of the European University Institute. In 2016, he received the Copernicus Scientist Award by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Ferrara. He also received the J. Ong Award by the Media Ecology Association for my book The Fourth Revolution; and the Malpensa Prize, by the city of Guarcino, Italy. In 2017, he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. 

lol   All the world of thinkers find him an elite scholar, even when disagreeing with his arguments.  He seems to be clarifying issues in every subject he publishes on.  I do not agree with some of his arguments and many are just plain over my head.

That got a laugh from me.  This starts halfway down L. Floridi's bio, which goes on afterwards.



lol   All the world of thinkers find him an elite scholar, even when disagreeing with his arguments.  He seems to be clarifying issues in every subject he publishes on.  I do not agree with some of his arguments and many are just plain over my head.

Well maybe I'm not a thinker, because that abstract clarified nothing for me.

He is and I think it is justified. My only problem with him is that he tries to identify the designer in evolution as the God of the Scriptures. For many reasons I think that is unlikely. He doesn't recognize that there could be multiple designers (perhaps in the form of powerful spiritual entities nevertheless much lower in the hierarchy than God). Or other possibilities some of which we probably can't even imagine.

Agreed, except Meyer extends his argument to include the various fine tunings of physics in "The Return of The God Hypothesis". Maybe I am wrong, but I have a feeling that physics has bloated out with theory which is less securely founded in established facts than biology. So for example what today seems to be a remarkable fine tuning, might come out that way as a result of a better physics theory. Remember for example Sheldrake's suggestion that constants such as big-G might not be really constant.

If Halton Arp turns out to be right that a lot of red shifts do not reflect the distance of the object in question, that could create a humongous upset in cosmology. This could certainly affect any conclusions about the big bang.

I also wonder if there are not multiple designers at work. All the predator-prey arms races seem to require more than one designer - either that or a very mean designer. Possible every morphogenetic field is a designer - as in Sheldrake's scheme of things.

Well maybe I'm not a thinker, because that abstract clarified nothing for me.

Me too. Here's the abstract:

Informational structural realism, ISR (Floridi, 2008a), describes the reality as a complex informational structure for an epistemic agent interacting with the universe by the exchange of data as constraining affordances. In conjunction with naturalist computationalism – the view that the dynamics of the nature can be understood as computation – Floridi's ISR presents a basis for the construction of the unified framework of info-computationalism. In this framework, the fundamental mechanism of all natural computation is morphological computation, expressed as a process of information self-organisation, with information structure understood in the sense of Floridi's ISR. Recently, in robotics, morphological computing has been used for decentralised embodied control of robots. In this article, we describe how appropriate body morphology saves information-processing (computation) resources as well as enables learning through self-structuring of information in an epistemic, cognizing agent.

Word salad in a super-specialized esoteric jargon. All I can take from this is that Floridi's informational structural realism begins by simply posing the existence of (presumably conscious living) agents (presumably exhibiting intentionality which is one of the attributes of consciousness), without accounting for their origin or describing their inner nature. They just exist. Then there is the claim that all the interactions of these agents with the environment are some sort of self-organized natural computation, origin unspecified. This all seems incoherent, especially since (1) consciousness including intentionality or agentness can't be reduced to computation, and (2) self-organization involves a complex mechanism which with no intelligent origin is magic.  

Anyway, enough with a probably fruitless attempt to make sense of a writing that maybe was hampered by English not being the author's first language.

 ormational structural realism, ISR (Floridi, 2008a), describes the reality as a complex informational structure for an epistemic agent interacting with the universe by the exchange of data as constraining affordances. In conjunction with naturalist computationalism – the view that the dynamics of the nature can be understood as computation – Floridi's ISR presents a basis for the construction of the unified framework of info-computationalism. In this framework, the fundamental mechanism of all natural computation is morphological computation, expressed as a process of information self-organisation, with information structure understood in the sense of Floridi's ISR. Recently, in robotics, morphological computing has been used for decentralised embodied control of robots. In this article, we describe how appropriate body morphology saves information-processing (computation) resources as well as enables learning through self-structuring of information in an epistemic, cognizing agent.

Me too. Here's the abstract:


Word salad in a super-specialized esoteric jargon. All I can take from this is that Floridi's informational structural realism begins by simply posing the existence of (presumably conscious living) agents (presumably exhibiting intentionality which is one of the attributes of consciousness), without accounting for their origin or describing their inner nature. They just exist. Then there is the claim that all the interactions of these agents with the environment are some sort of self-organized natural computation, origin unspecified. This all seems incoherent, especially since (1) consciousness including intentionality or agentness can't be reduced to computation, and (2) self-organization involves a complex mechanism which with no intelligent origin is magic.  

Anyway, enough with a probably fruitless attempt to make sense of a writing that maybe was hampered by English not being the author's first language.

 ormational structural realism, ISR (Floridi, 2008a), describes the reality as a complex informational structure for an epistemic agent interacting with the universe by the exchange of data as constraining affordances. In conjunction with naturalist computationalism – the view that the dynamics of the nature can be understood as computation – Floridi's ISR presents a basis for the construction of the unified framework of info-computationalism. In this framework, the fundamental mechanism of all natural computation is morphological computation, expressed as a process of information self-organisation, with information structure understood in the sense of Floridi's ISR. Recently, in robotics, morphological computing has been used for decentralised embodied control of robots. In this article, we describe how appropriate body morphology saves information-processing (computation) resources as well as enables learning through self-structuring of information in an epistemic, cognizing agent.

I've very many times expressed my doubts about attempting to describe the universe or consciousness in terms of the fashion of the day. That computers exist all around us ought to cast serious doubts upon any theory which is so enamoured of this idiom, just as previous generations were caught up in the idiom of God as a watchmaker. At that time, clocks and watches had become the miracle technology of the day, solving many problems such as navigation at sea and being able to construct a railway timetable where everyone was using the same synchronised time - though that meant detaching oneself from the natural movement of the sun across the sky.

Though I have another angle on all of this. My grounding in the nature of consciousness is not of endless fussing around with transmission of data, busy activity. The one thing I come back to as the foundation is simply being. To be. That is my bedrock. It is how I understand reincarnation, not through transmission of information, meaningless facts such as names and dates, but on the continuation of that state of being, in the eternal now. In meditation, it is always the slowing, the bringing to a halt all restless thought, to just be. That is where I like to reside. (There may be a parallel here with the way clocks detached us from natural cycles of the sun, data transmission detaches us from being. Rediscovering what we are requires a letting go.)

Me too. Here's the abstract:
 ormational structural realism, ISR (Floridi, 2008a), describes the reality as a complex informational structure for an epistemic agent interacting with the universe by the exchange of data as constraining affordances. In conjunction with naturalist computationalism – the view that the dynamics of the nature can be understood as computation – Floridi's ISR presents a basis for the construction of the unified framework of info-computationalism. In this framework, the fundamental mechanism of all natural computation is morphological computation, expressed as a process of information self-organisation, with information structure understood in the sense of Floridi's ISR. Recently, in robotics, morphological computing has been used for decentralised embodied control of robots. In this article, we describe how appropriate body morphology saves information-processing (computation) resources as well as enables learning through self-structuring of information in an epistemic, cognizing agent.

It would seem there is a whole swathe of this stuff that GOOGLE can find, including a modern physics treatise:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/

@stephenw Do the advocates of The Third Way in biology - people like Perry Marshal - reference this stuff themselves?

David

Not that Floridi's papers are necessarily examples, but apparently a modern phenomenon of science paper publishing is the proliferation of phony gibberish papers masquerading as legitimate scientific studies. This has become a sort of embarrassing mini-scandal that these could somehow pass peer review and be published as serious studies. Interestingly enough, most of this stuff has been in the computer science field. 

From an article on this in Nature at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01436-7 :

Nonsensical research papers generated by a computer program are still popping up in the scientific literature many years after the problem was first seen, a study has revealed1. Some publishers have told Nature they will take down the papers, which could result in more than 200 retractions.

The issue began in 2005, when three PhD students created paper-generating software called SCIgen for “maximum amusement”, and to show that some conferences would accept meaningless papers. The program cobbles together words to generate research articles with random titles, text and charts, easily spotted as gibberish by a human reader. It is free to download, and anyone can use it.

By 2012, computer scientist Cyril Labbé had found 85 fake SCIgen papers in conferences published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE); he went on to find more than 120 fake SCIgen papers published by the IEEE and by Springer. It was unclear who had generated the papers or why. The articles were subsequently retracted — or sometimes deleted — and Labbé released a website allowing anyone to upload a manuscript and check whether it seems to be a SCIgen invention. Springer also sponsored a PhD project to help spot SCIgen papers, which resulted in free software called SciDetect. (Springer is now part of Springer Nature; Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.)'

Labbé, who works at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France, originally searched manuscripts for words typical of SCIgen’s vocabulary. But he and another computer scientist, Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse, France, came up with a new idea: searching for key grammatical phrases characteristic of SCIgen’s output. Last May, he and Cabanac searched for such phrases in millions of papers indexed in the Dimensions database.

After manually inspecting every hit, the researchers identified 243 nonsense articles created entirely or partly by SCIgen, they report in a study published on 26 May. These articles, published between 2008 and 2020, appeared in various journals, conference proceedings and preprint sites, and were mostly in the computer-science field. Some appeared in open-access journals; others were paywalled. Forty-six of them had already been retracted or deleted from the websites where they were first published.

I've very many times expressed my doubts about attempting to describe the universe or consciousness in terms of the fashion of the day. That computers exist all around us ought to cast serious doubts upon any theory which is so enamoured of this idiom, just as previous generations were caught up in the idiom of God as a watchmaker. At that time, clocks and watches had become the miracle technology of the day, solving many problems such as navigation at sea and being able to construct a railway timetable where everyone was using the same synchronised time - though that meant detaching oneself from the natural movement of the sun across the sky.

Though I have another angle on all of this. My grounding in the nature of consciousness is not of endless fussing around with transmission of data, busy activity. The one thing I come back to as the foundation is simply being. To be. That is my bedrock. It is how I understand reincarnation, not through transmission of information, meaningless facts such as names and dates, but on the continuation of that state of being, in the eternal now. In meditation, it is always the slowing, the bringing to a halt all restless thought, to just be. That is where I like to reside. (There may be a parallel here with the way clocks detached us from natural cycles of the sun, data transmission detaches us from being. Rediscovering what we are requires a letting go.)

Like you, my starting point is consciousness. If we forget that and try to work within the materialist framework, we tend to try to force-fit something like design into that framework while forgetting that the "intelligence" is the framework. Consciousness is the ground of being. Intelligence might be described as applied or creative consciousness. 

Tom Campbell describes what I am calling a framework as a Virtual Reality. Even staunch materialists like Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about living in a "simulation" except that, true to his materialist bias, he ascribes the intelligence behind the simulation to some super race of aliens and/or, as you mention, computers. We don't need to think of the ground of being as something that has itself been created (as in the super computer) because it is, by definition, the uncreated. The infinite and unlimited. To claim that it is something which was created applies limits - there must have been something to create it therefore we have at least two. To have two must mean that each has limits and can't, therefore, be infinite.

Sorry, I jumped in with a philosophical point which you are welcome to ignore and continue with your interesting debate. I couldn't resist as it is something I have been thinking about (again) recently.

Not that Floridi's papers are necessarily examples, but apparently a modern phenomenon of science paper publishing is the proliferation of phony gibberish papers masquerading as legitimate scientific studies. This has become a sort of embarrassing mini-scandal that these could somehow pass peer review and be published as serious studies. Interestingly enough, most of this stuff has been in the computer science field. 

From an article on this in Nature at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01436-7 :

That link leads onto a vaguely related phenomenon of "Paper Mills"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00733-5

I suspect there is a sort of continuum from completely genuine papers through various sorts of gibberish and gibberish cliques - all of which speaks volumes about the state of science and the refereeing process!

However it would seem that Floridi is the director of the "Digital Ethics Lab" at Oxford University.

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/luciano-floridi

Nevertheless, I'd still urge StephenW to realise that there really is a huge problem accounting for the digital information stored in genes.

Let us say you want the information to build an enzyme of some sort. The active site of an enzyme will bring a number of amino acid residues into close proximity, where they can interact with the substrate of the enzyme to catalyse some chemical transformation. The problem is that these residues will not typically be adjacent on the linear chain of the protein, they will only become adjacent after the linear protein chain has folded up - an enormously complicated subject, that is not well understood. So creating the information in a novel gene is only possible by an entity that understands this whole process completely. You can't circumvent this process. Remember that equations could be laid out as strings of symbols using the same encoding process, so if there were a way to magically create the information in a gene, you could equally well generate all the equations of QM or advanced maths using the same process!

If you can't rely on RM+NS, you have to have a consciousness that understands the whole biochemical problem.