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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 5:26 pm 
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But whether living things are different from the sort of complexity that emerges spontaneously is something we can talk about; whether mathematics or physics are unusually rich are questions we have no reference for save assumptions. Once again, the whole point of Dawkin's argument is seeing when it would be necessary to suppose a designer, as opposed to being able to accept an alternate explanation like complexity being the consequence of simple rules, so being unwilling to accept any alternative doesn't address it.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 5:59 pm 
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LeoChopper wrote:
But whether living things are different from the sort of complexity that emerges spontaneously is something we can talk about; whether mathematics or physics are unusually rich are questions we have no reference for save assumptions. Once again, the whole point of Dawkin's argument is seeing when it would be necessary to suppose a designer, as opposed to being able to accept an alternate explanation like complexity being the consequence of simple rules, so being unwilling to accept any alternative doesn't address it.


I could recast your statement as "whether living things are different from the sort of complexity that emerges spontaneously is something we can talk about in a scientific context; whether mathematics or physics are unusually rich are questions in the realm of philosophy."

But Dawkins' argument is also in the realm of philosophy. Whether or not God is believable is a philosophical question.

My point contra Dawkins is that there are two halves to his argument. One is that evolution is an automatic, naturalistic process that makes design decisions. The other is that making design decisions is the only meaningful role for a deity. No matter how well he can support the first on purely scientific grounds, he cannot establish the second without traveling into the realm of philosophy.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 6:25 pm 
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kitoba wrote:
But Dawkins' argument is also in the realm of philosophy. Whether or not God is believable is a philosophical question.

And not really the subject of his argument, unless there is much more to it than you quote here. That genuinely is about whether there's scientific evidence necessitating a designer, and is plainly based on the presupposition that one might accept an alternate way of explaining things. As I said at the beginning, that would have to be a separate argument; this one isn't supposed to work if you're going to assume a designer regardless.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 10:07 pm 
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kitoba wrote:
drachefly wrote:
Kitoba, I'm pretty sure Dawkins is aware of the way life takes advantage of mathematical complexity. He just sees it as a part of particular solutions, not as a part of the algorithm - and the questions he's trying to answer are about the algorithm.


If you have a paint-by-numbers painting, who is the artist, the person who applies the paint according to the algorithm, or the person who designed the picture and set the numbers? Is "follow the numbers and the picture emerges" a valid explanation of where the picture came from, or merely an effective description of the process that reveals the picture?


This analogy is seriously flawed. Can you try again?

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 9:59 am 
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LeoChopper wrote:
And not really the subject of his argument, unless there is much more to it than you quote here. That genuinely is about whether there's scientific evidence necessitating a designer, and is plainly based on the presupposition that one might accept an alternate way of explaining things.


I guess I am conflating his "Blind Watchmaker" argument which is more about evolution as a creator of design, and his "God Delusion" argument which is entitled "Why there almost certainly is no God". But he lays the groundwork for the GD argument in those unscientific assumptions lurking in the background of the BW argument, even if they are not the center of what he is talking about at that time.

drachefly wrote:
This analogy is seriously flawed. Can you try again?


So demanding! :gwynn:

OK, I'm betting you're familiar with Conway's "Game of Life", the original cellular autonoma simulation. If not, it consists of a grid of squares, theoretically infinite, each square of which could be on or off, an initial configuration of "on" squares, and a set of rules which tell a square at any given iteration to turn on or off.

It has been shown that patterns of surprising persistence and sophistication can be created with this simple setup, and even that there is a initial configuration of squares that can simulate a universal computer.

The ultimate powers of the Game at vast levels of scale are unknown. Some people --notably Wolfram --have actually seriously proposed that our own entire universe could be produced by a similar grid of cellular autonoma.

Suppose intelligent creatures could evolve within the Game of Life. At some point they might analyze their universe and some clever scientist might discover that "everything about our universe can be explained by picturing it as a grid of squares, governed by a few simple rules."

That's more or less true, depending on what qualifies as "everything about our universe". But in this particular case, it's worth noting that someone --Conway -- had the original idea to create the grid, and also spent some time in figuring out which rules would produce an interesting result.

If one of those creatures went on to say "of course these are the rules that govern our universe --there's only a limited pool of rules that could create any kind of advanced result, and since we're here we would have to be governed by rules of this sort" it would be true, in a sort of trivial way, but it would also entirely miss the larger picture.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 10:20 am 
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kitoba wrote:
It has been shown that patterns of surprising persistence and sophistication can be created with this simple setup, and even that there is a initial configuration of squares that can simulate a universal computer.

The ultimate powers of the Game at vast levels of scale are unknown. Some people --notably Wolfram --have actually seriously proposed that our own entire universe could be produced by a similar grid of cellular autonoma.


Huh. It seems that that Universal Computer setup is equivalent to a Turing machine. So it can compute anything that a computer can compute, except it has potentially infinite memory.

...which makes the idea that it could simulate our universe seem quite plausible.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 10:34 am 
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Kitoba wrote:
So demanding!

I trust you enough that I didn't think it was necessary to go into detail on that one.

kitoba wrote:
OK, I'm betting you're familiar with Conway's "Game of Life", the original cellular autonoma simulation.


A safe bet.

I'm not sure I get your point. I mean, you made a point about epistemic inaccessibility of implementation layers completely screened from us. You made a point that some creativity went into finding that these rules were worth looking into. There's even an implied point about the operators continuously maintaining the universe.

But I'm not sure how it relates to your core argument, about the relationship between mathematical complexity and evolution.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 10:46 am 
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Sorry. In the analogy, evolution is the rules that govern which square will be on at a given tick of the clock. Complexity is the grid system. If all you do is look at the simple ruleset that governs the squares, and you take the entire grid system itself as a given, then you probably think you understand more than you do. It's true that you now know the rules that govern your universe at a fundamental level, but it doesn't mean you've truly answered any larger questions about where your universe came from and why it has the structure --at the biggest level --that it does.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 11:29 am 
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Okay, but that's all on point to a discussion of ontogeny, not the relevance of mathematical complexity to the evolution of life - given that I've allowed how it's totally, absolutely necessary, I'm not sure what this is adding to the original argument. It's a fine side-point, sure.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 11:46 am 
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If this doesn't address your point, then I've failed to apprehend your point

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 12:38 pm 
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kitoba wrote:
That's more or less true, depending on what qualifies as "everything about our universe". But in this particular case, it's worth noting that someone --Conway -- had the original idea to create the grid, and also spent some time in figuring out which rules would produce an interesting result.

This makes it sound like you think Conway designed the automaton. You wouldn't say Conway simply discovered which rules are most interesting to us, the same way Mandelbrot, Brooks, and Matelski discovered a way to make a particularly interesting set? Because I have a tough time seeing them as so different.

kitoba wrote:
It's true that you now know the rules that govern your universe at a fundamental level, but it doesn't mean you've truly answered any larger questions about where your universe came from and why it has the structure --at the biggest level --that it does.

Just for the record, I don't think saying some unexplained being made it through unexplained processes is any more of an answer to those questions. It's just a different choice of what you're ok with leaving unexplained; it's very different from cases like the calculator, where figuring out it is designed actually gives you a chance to learn a lot about its origin and structure. That's going to be a question of commitments, I know, but I wanted to point it out anyway since you keep talking about these "answers".

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 1:57 pm 
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Well, the Game of Life is more like the graph of the Mandelbrot Set, than like the Set itself --it's something someone actually has to construct.

But yes, I would say that the fact that certain rules create unexpectedly complex interactions is a discovery like the discovery of the Mandelbrot Set. So you couldn't consider Conway a complete answer either --you'd need at least one more level back to a super-Conway.

It seems like an odd tact for you to take, however, since you believe we wholly construct math.

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Just for the record, I don't think saying some unexplained being made it through unexplained processes is any more of an answer to those questions. It's just a different choice of what you're ok with leaving unexplained; it's very different from cases like the calculator, where figuring out it is designed actually gives you a chance to learn a lot about its origin and structure. That's going to be a question of commitments, I know, but I wanted to point it out anyway since you keep talking about these "answers".


Also for the record, I'm not currently promoting these "answers", just pointing out, contra Dawkins that the questions do still exist.

I'm not sure there's any additional ground to be gained on this particular topic, I think we're running in circles now. But I do have a related question for Drache:

It seemed like you might be a fan of EY's take on Bayesian Analysis. As far as I could tell from dipping into his site, what he is talking about isn't science and it isn't religion, but he seems to think it's better than both. Are you in agreement with him, and if so, would you like to explain it and/or defend it? It seems quite an expansion on the scope of where else I've seen Bayesian Analysis invoked.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 2:46 pm 
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kitoba wrote:
It seems like an odd tact for you to take, however, since you believe we wholly construct math.

No, I don't. But I was just curious why you would treat them differently. I agree that at this point, there isn't much more to say, unless say you became interested in just how much more there is to living things than what fractals provide. Otherwise, in spite of some frustration it's been the sort of conversation I miss having, so thank you for it.

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 3:26 pm 
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LeoChopper wrote:
I agree that at this point, there isn't much more to say, unless say you became interested in just how much more there is to living things than what fractals provide.


I suspect that complexity is deeply intertwined with evolution in ways both more subtle and important than the ones we have covered. But I don't have the evidence or the expertise to argue that competently.

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Otherwise, in spite of some frustration it's been the sort of conversation I miss having, so thank you for it.


Thank you as well. No pain, no gain, right?

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 Post subject: Re: Faith III Complexity
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 8:39 pm 
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I ran out of things to say a few pages back but still enjoyed following along.

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