Words of encouragement from scientism

[Laird]

Anyhow. Enough game-playing and one-upwomanship. That means, no, I'm not going to hunt down the hidden messages in your posts. How about answering the serious question I put to you in post #94?

Linda,

Have you considered the hubris that comes along with most of us as it relates to our intellect?  I know its something real for me.

In this context, I think of it as the self-assuredness many of us have with our own concepts of proof, knowledge, logic, and facts.  Those intellectual things tend to serve us quite well in day to day activities.  They even serve us well in regard to less mundane things.  However, as we prove to ourselves over and over they can become dangerous when we get to the meta of things.  I see it often with staunch atheist/materialist zealots; just as I do with any zealot for that matter.

In a nutshell, I take some comfort that there may be real meaning (in the context we've been using in this thread) to our existence even if I can't  logically, intellectually, or scientifically see how that might be so.  Why?  Because I recognize my own hubris in that regard; that I simply may not have enough information to "know" or possibly not even have the capacity were the information available.

Its not great comfort for sure, but its something.

However, our weirdest, non-physical, non-matter discoveries are coming from Physics anyways.

Linda

OK  -- please please list a couple of what these discoveries are.  I THINK YOU LOST YOUR MIND.  My guess is that these "discoveries" are analysis of data that offers more than one probable explanation.  I thinks Physics is in a panic to present something new during the last decades.

(it's bioinformatics that is knocking it otta the box)

But that doesn't get you any further than the opening post.

Sorry, to what post are you referring?

I would need to know what you mean by "mental or conscious in some sense". For example, if I asked you about whether something or other included "life stuff in some sense", how would you respond?

Linda

Mental and perceptional ability is natural and intently studied by science.  They are processes that produce measurable outcomes and these informational activities are a crucial part of understanding bio-evolution.

ORGANIZATION MAINTAINED BY EXTRACTING 'ORDER' FROM THE ENVIRONMENT

How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvellous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: 'It feeds upon negative entropy', attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level. If D is a measure of disorder, its reciprocal, l/D, can be regarded as a direct measure of order. Since the logarithm of l/D is just minus the logarithm of D, we can write Boltzmann's equation thus: -(entropy) = k log (l/D).  - E. Schrodinger

http://www.whatislife.ie/downloads/What-is-Life.pdf

Like this:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.2529.pdf

Linda

Its a paper I have read.  - what does it have to do with Physics?  The authors are elite information scientists.

Yes, they build physical systems to test information science - but its not about measuring and defining energy.