A “remarkable fact”
| September 29, 2012 | Posted by David Anderson under Darwinism |
Let’s take again that quotation out of Richard Dawkins’ “The Greatest Show on Earth (pp. 332-333)”, published as many ages ago as the year 2009, quoted at http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/in_debate_brita_1064521.html
Leaving pseudogenes aside, it is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes.
Now, what here Dawkins calls a “remarkable fact”, turns out only three years later to be known (such that even he agrees, as the above link shows) to be totally false. It’s not even close; it’s as large an error as one could make in a propositional statement.
Not only that, but, this totally false statement is in an area of Dawkins’ speciality. Dawkins’ area of specialist study is evolutionary biology; and one of his specialist areas within that general area is in gene theory. Judging through qualifications and positions, Dawkins is as close as you could get to an expert. He was employed in a position with Oxford University to promote good science to the public. And yet here, in one of his “home” areas, he was, just three years ago, talking complete twaddle.
Regardless of whether you think Dawkins is brilliant or a fool, this ought to give some pause for thought about wider questions, ought it not? The link above shows that Dawkins himself is apparently remarkably unphased by it. But he surely ought to be.
Perhaps we could invite UD’s resident Darwinists and/or Dawkins-fans and general atheists to consider a few questions.
What other areas of his specialist subject, which he pronounces dogmatically upon, are you prepared to accept that Dawkins might be totally wrong about? Does that concern you? Are his other interpretations about the gene (e.g. that there is evidence of common descent) also possibly totally wrong? What else in evolutionary biology in general might be simply mistaken? What level of tentativeness, for example, should we attach to Dawkins’ assertions that the development of the eye could take place naturally, or that common descent in general is a fact that the fossil record bears out?
If Dawkins can be so drastically wrong about his specialist subject, then what of his forays into questions about the philosophy of science, the basis of knowledge, reasons for believing in a divine being, etc.?
We’re used on such occasions to the trotting out of sermons-to-the-choir about details about Darwinism being potentially wrong, but the scheme in general being as proved-true-as-gravity. But how do you actually distinguish that pronouncement from Dawkins’ one above? I don’t see any self doubt or wiggle room in it, or in various other of Dawkins’ pronouncements – or those of the “Darwinism is like gravity” crowd in general. I’m not thinking here of the “village atheists” but of credentialled academics.
If Dawkins, a gene specialist, can be wrong about the rather important question of the function of 95% of the gene, then shouldn’t that nudge you to employ a bit more critical thinking and not just trot out party slogans? If “remarkable fact” is really a synonym for “actually, we don’t know this, and perhaps next year we’ll know it’s nonsense”, then just why should teachers and educators pay so much attention to the Darwin lobby’s confident statements? Why should students, for example, only be taught the explanatory strengths of Darwinism and not its weaknesses? “There are none” is a “la-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you” response which new discoveries keep belying, and does not belong in the world of responsible study.
These are questions to do with critical thinking. Do you think Dawkins is a critical thinker? Have you seen him addressing any of them in a serious way? Or is it just party propaganda?
48 Responses to A “remarkable fact”
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I have loved this post
This is exactly what we have to deal with when facing darwinism, just so stories… in the name of science
This is a shame for people like Dawkins of course, but also for all the scientific community that support those guys
It appears the only place that ‘unlimited plasticity’ can actually be observed, a ‘unlimited plasticity’ that Darwin had originally envisioned for all life on earth, is within Darwin’s theory itself as it forever morphs into different versions of evolutionary theory, as more evidence comes in, that look nothing like what Darwin had originally envisioned.
Incredibly many Darwinists like to claim this ‘morphing’ of their basic theory to accommodate whatever evidence may come along is the sign of a healthy scientific theory (I’ve even heard the term ‘robust’), but the fact of the matter. much contrary to what committed Darwinists would prefer to believe, is that such morphing of a theory is the most sure sign that you are in fact dealing with a pseudo-science:
“It ain’t what folks know that’s the problem, it’s what they know that ain’t so.”
For those interested, here’s the full context of Dawkin’s words, thanks to google books.
But three years ago everybody who was anybody knew this was true. Beside, I am sure Dawkins was relying on the real experts, so we can hardly blame him.
he link above shows that Dawkins himself is apparently remarkably unphased by it.
Dawkins is unphased because he’s a psychopath. Psychopaths never admit to being wrong. You see, you just did not understand what they were saying.
One of the main reasons that Darwinism has taken over “higher” education is that many of its leading proponents are psychopaths.
I’m still waiting to see anything substantive — any one thing of substance, beyond the absolutely trivial — that Dawkins has said that makes sense.
I’ve read only The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion.
The former, I found interesting here and there but ultimately I was not persuaded that variation and selection are both necessary and sufficient causes of biological organization and diversity. So, I’m deeply sympathetic with the basic impulse which animates intelligent design. I’m not an ID supporter myself because I think that self-organization theory has been worked out more carefully and stands a better chance of being right. But self-organization theorists and design theorists can make some common cause against ultra-Darwinists.
As for The God Delusion, I shall simply quote Michael Ruse: “The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist”. Exactly.
Kantian Naturalist:
Thanks for your thoughts and for being open to considering design.
Self-organization is tantalizing at first glance. I think what persuades me (and probably many others on this forum) that self-organization is a dead end in terms of accounting for either the origin of life or its subsequent development and diversification is the following:
Self-organization essentially posits, stated simply, that ‘things come together and make something new.’ Thus, we are dealing with two possibilities: things come together as a result of (i) natural laws, or (ii) a combination of natural laws and chance. Natural laws, by definition cannot be a source of the information content found in living systems (just briefly, this due to the fact that the information carrying capacity of a medium is inversely proportional to the law-driven organization of the medium); and chance just puts us back into the awful probability calculations that beset traditional evolutionary theories.
Self-organization (and the related “chaos” concepts) may have something to say about the formation of stars, planets, weather systems, rings of Saturn, and so on, but they have precious little to offer us in terms of understanding the origin of life and biological systems (or any system characterized by complex function specified information).
Kantian Naturalist:
Perhaps your preferred self organization model can pass empirical muster where Darwinism has failed???
Eric Anderson wrote:
“Natural laws, by definition cannot be a source of the information content found in living systems (just briefly, this due to the fact that the information carrying capacity of a medium is inversely proportional to the law-driven organization of the medium); and chance just puts us back into the awful probability calculations that beset traditional evolutionary theories.”
I’m not a practicing self-organization theorist myself, so I find myself up against the limit of my own ignorance. But here’s an off-the-cuff remark that might at least illuminate how a conversation between design theory and self-organization theory might proceed.
Anderson wrote that is just true by definition that natural laws cannot be sources of new information. A better way of putting that, maybe, would be to say that natural laws can only describe fully deterministic systems, where the behavior of a system at any future time can be predicted from the initial state of the system, plus the laws which govern that system. And it’s stipulated that all natural laws must be like that. But why? Why must all laws of nature be like Newton’s laws? If it’s not fully deterministic, then it’s not a law at all? Well, maybe — I can sort of see why this is so — but I’m not fully convinced that there can’t be laws about non-deterministic, information-creating systems.
That’s one point. The other is this: the major thing that design theory and self-organization theory agree on is that the Epicurean doctrine of “chance and necessity” isn’t adequate. There has to be at least a third major category. So what’s that category going to be? It would be ‘stacking the deck’ against self-organization theory to just assert that the only categories are chance, necessity, and design.
I mean, sure, if that were the case, then since self-organization isn’t design, it’s got to be one of the other two. And yes, Dembski defines “design” as the set-theoretic complement of chance and necessity. Of course this view has a venerable history, going back at least to Plato in Timaeus and Laws, but tradition isn’t an argument.
Kantian, it seems contradictory that on one hand you say:
And on the other hand you say:
OK Kantian, how can self organization be worked out ‘more carefully’ and have a better chance of being right when you don’t even know of any laws that can create information, but, as you stated, you are merely ‘not fully convinced’ that they don’t exist??? The burden is on you to show that it/they (some imagined information creating law’s') actually do exist!
But here in the real world, this new video just came out showing how detached from reality the empirical evidence is of your ‘shunned’ Darwinian cohorts
Actually, it’s a burden on self-organization theorists, like Stuart Kauffmann and Ilya Prigogine, to show that such laws exist. I’m just a dude with some knowledge of philosophy and too much time on his hands.
In any event, the laws themselves wouldn’t create new information — laws of nature are just idealized descriptions of systems — so if there are laws about self-organizing systems (and I’m not so sure that there are), they would be laws about systems that generate new information.
I suppose I should go back and read Kauffmann to see if he thinks that self-organizing systems can be described under laws, and try to figure out how good his arguments are.
In any event, I just wanted to put myself out there as someone who is a committed naturalist and who finds Dawkins an embarrassment. (Though not for the reasons most of you might think — for me, the final straw was reading Terry Eagleton’s brilliant demolition of The God Delusion that appeared in the London Review of Books.)
On the question of “the weaknesses of evolutionary theory,” I think it’s important to distinguish between (a) important and interesting questions to which evolutionary theory does not provide answers and (b) answers provided by evolutionary theory which aren’t right. I’d put abiogenesis and what I’d call “morphogenesis” (the origins of form) in that category, not in category (b).
Well Kantian, until a empirical demonstration is forthcoming demonstrating the ability of ANY process (elucidated or imagined), other than intelligence to create functional information should not your, or anyone else’s musings, on the capacity of self organization to create functional information be rightly considered unsubstantiated conjectures??? Much like Darwinists you simply are not even in the realm of empirical science to hold to such a view with no evidence!,,, Moreover, the rationality you seemingly take for granted in order to ‘do science’ (or even philosophy) is not even possible unless Theism is held as true as a starting assumption!
Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
http://www.edge.org/3rd_cultur.....index.html
Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
KN:
Thanks for the thoughts.
I think it is useful to look at it from very basic first principles. A natural law describes the result that will attain given an initial set of conditions (assuming adequately described, no interceding events, and so on). Put simply, by law we are talking about something that must occur.
There is only one other possibility: that the thing in question did not have to occur. Thus, “had to occur” and “didn’t have to occur” cover the entire range of possibilities. There is no other possibility; we have comprehensively described all events that could, even in theory, occur.
Now, we can have a very interesting discussion about the second category, what we mean by chance, whether there is anything that can really be termed chance, for example. But the fact remains that everything falls into these two categories — yes, even design, which is the second main subset of the category “didn’t have to occur” (chance being the other subset).
Self-organization can only rely on natural law or some combination of natural law and “didn’t have to occur.” Self-organization rejects design, so it is left to get its explanatory power from some combination of natural law and chance.
This isn’t a question of people letting self-organization have its fair day in court. It is just a simple fact that there are only certain possibilities that can logically exist. Thus, when we peel away the fancy language we see that self-organization is really seeking to discover some kind of law/chance process that can produce the effect in question (in our context, complex functional specified information).
Self-organization is, in substance, nothing more than a semi-sophisticated way of looking at what can result from chance processes in the presence of known laws. It is interesting. There are some features of nature that might perhaps be described by it (although skeptics would question whether the concept brings anything new to the table even in those cases). Unfortunately, however, at the end of the day self-organization tells us precisely nothing beyond what a general discussion of necessity and chance would tell us without invoking the term “self-organization.”
Two points have been brought up:
(1) whether or not a theistic metaphysics is an a priori presupposition for empirical knowledge.
(2) whether self-organization reduces to (i) law; (ii) chance; (iii) both law and chance.
On (1), I don’t think that empirical knowledge requires any metaphysical presupposition, whether theistic or naturalistic — though I agree that metaphysics is, in a suitably broad sense, “a priori“. As I see it, the difference between science and metaphysics is that science is about what is and what metaphysics is about what ‘what is’ is. So while we need metaphysics in order to do science, and vice-verse, the relation between them is not the relation between ‘foundation’ and ‘superstructure’. It’s more like the relation between literature and literary criticism (but not quite that, either).
In any event, I certainly don’t find Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) convincing — we can get into that at some point if you’d like.
On (2), whether self-organization collapses into law, chance, or their conjoint depends on whether we accept, prior to that, the Platonic doctrine that chance, necessity, and design are the only truly basic categories we have. Once one accept that, then sure, it’ll turn out that self-organization, not being design, has to be one or both of the others. And then it’ll be fairly straightforward to convict self-organization theory of the same problems that afflict ultra-Darwinism. But I don’t see why that Platonic doctrine is obviously true. I think that an argument has to be made for it, and I’m not even sure Plato himself does a good job of arguing for it.
Put otherwise: the ultra-Darwinist/Epicurean thinks we have two basic categories: (i) chance and (ii) necessity. The design theorist thinks we have three basic categories: (i) chance; (ii) necessity; (iii) design. The theorist of self-organizing systems also thinks we need three basic categories, and agrees with the design theorist that the two basic categories of ultra-Darwinism are insufficient. It’s just that she thinks the three basic categories are (i) chance; (ii) necessity; (iii) self-organization.*
* The philosopher C.S. Peirce called the third one “Love,” and classified metaphysical systems in terms of which one of the three categories they emphasized — hence, in his terms, “tychism,” “anakhism,” and “agapism”. I don’t completely agree, but I am terribly fond of Peirce!
Mung, thanks for the links!
Kantian you state:
Is that your mind thinking that particular thought that you hope to persuade us of the reasonableness of, or is that particular thought you had just the result of whatever state the particles in your brain happened to be in? If the later why should I care what you think?
In the following video, at the 37:00 minute mark, Anton Zeilinger, a leading researcher in quantum teleportation with many breakthroughs under his belt, humorously reflects on just how deeply determinism has been undermined by quantum mechanics by saying such a deep lack of determinism may provide some of us a loop hole when they meet God on judgment day.
Personally, I feel that such a deep undermining of determinism by quantum mechanics, far from providing a ‘loop hole’ on judgement day, actually restores free will to its rightful place in the grand scheme of things, thus making God’s final judgments on men’s souls all the more fully binding since man truly is a ‘free moral agent’ as Theism has always maintained. And to solidify this theistic claim for how reality is constructed, the following study came along a few months after I had seen Dr. Zeilinger’s video:
So just as I had suspected after watching Dr. Zeilinger’s video, it is found that a required assumption of ‘free will’ in quantum mechanics is what necessarily drives the completely random (non-deterministic) aspect of quantum mechanics. Moreover, it was shown in the paper that one cannot ever improve the predictive power of quantum mechanics by ever removing free will as a starting assumption in Quantum Mechanics!
of note:
Needless to say, finding ‘free will conscious observation’ to be ‘built into’ our best description of foundational reality, quantum mechanics, as a starting assumption, ‘free will observation’ which is indeed the driving aspect of randomness in quantum mechanics, is VERY antithetical to the entire materialistic philosophy which demands that a ‘non-telological randomness’ be the driving force of creativity in Darwinian evolution!
I once asked a evolutionist, after showing him the preceding experiments, “Since you ultimately believe that the ‘god of random chance’ produced everything we see around us, what in the world is my mind doing pushing your god around?”
Of note: since our free will choices figure so prominently in how reality is actually found to be constructed in our understanding of quantum mechanics, I think a Christian perspective on just how important our choices are in this temporal life, in regards to eternity destiny, is very fitting
correction:, in regards to our eternal destiny,
Eric:
I think emergentism holds there are still undiscovered natural laws, they are just not the laws of physics (I could be wrong). But your basic point, I think, remains. Law + Chance.
I think it might be better to label the categories necessity and contingency. Within contingency we have a subset, choice.
William Dembski – Order and Design: Philosophical Issues – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUnj5Uvjvdo
KN @16:
Thanks for your thoughts. Let me see if I can describe it this way.
It is not a question of accepting Platonic doctrine as some sort of authority. It is simply a question of acknowledging that everything, perforce, must either fall into one of the categories of (I’ll use Mung’s words here) necessity or contingency. That is not a question of doctrine, just a logical requirement.
Then we can look at contingency to see what it consists of. Contingency can be divided into choice and non-choice. Again, this isn’t some attempt to exclude self-organization a priori, it is just a logical reality.
Now in our language we typically understand the word “chance” to describe non-choice contingency. It is possible that there is some further subcategorization of chance, say, chance that is self-organization and chance that isn’t self organization. Fine, I’m open to that possibility. But I just haven’t seen a single example from self-organization theorists that would give me any reason to think that what they are describing cannot be adequately described with the regular concepts of necessity and chance without invoking the term “self-organization.”
More importantly, even if there is a subcategory, we are ultimately still dealing with some kind of chance. So self-organization ultimately ends up being some combination of necessity/chance. There is simply no logical way around it.
But, hey, I am open to hearing about different kinds of “chance” or different kinds of “laws” if they can come up with anything. Not holding my breath, though . . .
Some of you might be interested in one of Dembski’s criticisms of Kauffman (here).
To my way of thinking, there is of course a conceptual break between Kauffman’s autocatalytic sets and genuinely autopoeitic systems, such as organisms. I just don’t see why the gulf is so great that it could be crossed only through the infusion of intelligence into the system. My aim isn’t to eliminate teleology, mind you, but to explain it.
On Kauffman’s approach, some rather interesting things would follow — namely, if the conceptual distance between autopoeitic systems and autocatalytic sets is fairly small, and if autocatalytic sets are themselves — how to put it? — “spontaneous” in nature, then we have a rather interesting view, on which, on the one hand, organisms are genuinely and really teleological, but that matter itself is, to put it crudely, inherently proto-teleological. (That’s a far cry from the Epicurean conception of matter, so now you can see part of my complaint with Epicurean materialism.)
That said, I do think that Dembski is quite right in his major criticism of Kauffman (and I’d be surprised if Kauffman denied this): Kauffman’s theory is based on computer models. The models are sophisticated and, to my mind, compelling, but that’s no substitute for real chemistry. How Kauffman’s models would be chemically implemented is pretty much anyone’s guess. Certainly it’s beyond my expertise to speculate as to how it could be done.
On the question of laws: Kauffman openly speculates about what he calls an additional law of thermodynamics, which is that thermodynamically open systems will tend to evolve in such a way as to maximize complexity and diversity. (If that strikes you as a mighty funny kind of law, I feel your pain. But it could be that we need to re-think the very notion of law.
Perhaps relevant to these discussions is this interesting article, “No God, No Laws,” by Nancy Cartwright. (The PDF is available here.)
“Serendipitously”, I just ran across this neat little video which highlights just how important free choice is in the foundational precepts of Christianity,
Funny how free choice is found to be very important to the foundational precepts of quantum mechanics as well!
To reiterate part of post #18
I’ve been trying to think of any other religion besides Christianity that places as much emphasis on the central importance of our free choice as Christianity does, and I can think of none where it plays such a central, pivotal, role.
Very Aristotelian.
I’m one of those ID’ers who finds teleology everywhere. Maybe it’s because I just don’t understand it, hehe.
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.....ology.html
http://www.oxfordscholarship.c.....0199285303
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25052-.....teleology/
Yes, I find Aristotle quite intriguing and I’m sympathetic toward his view in several ways. I haven’t worked out much the details yet, since I’ve been busy doing other things, but if push were to come to shove, I think I’d want to defend a view intermediate between Epicurus and Aristotle.
I say that because I don’t think fully-fledged teleology goes “all the way down,” so to speak, as Aristotle did — the scientific revolution did get something right, after all! — but yet that there’s something proto-teleological which isn’t captured by the strictly mechanistic conception of matter (or at least not insofar as the mechanism is identified with 17th-century mathematical physics!).
Thanks for the links, Mung! Good stuff here!
Kantian, I find a profound disconnect from what you claim to believe (a type of naturalism of some ill defined sort) and any empirical warrant for any such naturalistic belief. As for you being a naturalist, I have taken the liberty of presupposing that you think mind ‘emerged’ from a material basis, and have provided empirical evidence against that position. Seeing that you tend to be very fuzzy when defining boundaries, please correct me if I am wrong on that naturalistic presupposition I have presupposed for you. But if, as a naturalist, you do hold that some natural/material basis does precede mind, then I can tell you, using solid empirical evidence, that you are not justified in holding that presupposition!
The evidence is as such:
We have at least three different intersecting lines of experimental evidence, from quantum mechanics, which all converge to this one following conclusion;
Here are the three intersecting lines of evidence from quantum mechanics. Wheeler’s delayed choice, Leggett’s inequalities, and Wigner’s symmetries;
#1. Here’s Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, and a variation of Wheeler’s Delayed Choice;
#2. Here’s Leggett’s Inequality
And #3. Here’s Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries
i.e. In the experiment the ‘world’ (i.e. the universe) does not have a ‘privileged center’. Yet strangely, the conscious observer does exhibit a ‘privileged center’. This is since the ‘matrix’, which determines which vector will be used to describe the particle in the experiment, is ‘observer-centric’ in its origination! Thus explaining Wigner’s dramatic statement, “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”
I think Wigner would be very pleased with what our ‘future concepts’ hold;
Now this is completely unheard of in science as far as I know. i.e. That a mathematical description of reality would advance to the point that one can actually perform a experiment showing that your current theory will not be exceeded in predictive power by another future theory is simply unprecedented in science! Moreover, finding ‘free will conscious observation’ to be ‘built into’ our best mathematical description of foundational reality, quantum mechanics, as a starting assumption, ‘free will observation’ which is indeed the driving aspect of randomness in quantum mechanics, is VERY antithetical, indeed completely devastating, to the entire materialistic philosophy which holds randomness to be the ultimate creative force of all life in the universe and also holds consciousness to be merely a ‘emergent property’, i.e. a ‘epiphenomena’, of material reality.
Thus to conclude, we have at least three different intersecting lines of experimental evidence, from quantum mechanics, which all converge to the one Theistic presupposition which holds that consciousness precedes all of material reality!
Further weight for consciousness to be treated as a separate entity in quantum mechanics, and thus the universe, is also found in the fact that it is impossible to ‘geometrically’ maintain 3-Dimensional spherical symmetry of the universe, within the sphere of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), for each 3D point of the universe, unless all the ‘higher dimensional quantum information waves’ actually do collapse to their ‘uncertain 3D wave/particle state’, universally and instantaneously, for each point of conscious observation in the universe just as the experiments of quantum mechanics are telling us that they do. The 4-D expanding hypersphere of the space-time of general relativity is insufficient to maintain such 3D integrity/symmetry, all by itself, for each different 3D point of observation in the universe. The primary reason for why the 4D space-time, of the 3D universe, is insufficient to maintain 3D symmetry, by itself, is because the universe is shown to have only 10^80 particles. In other words, it is geometrically impossible to maintain such 3D symmetry of centrality with finite 3D material resources to work with for each 3D point of observation in the universe. Universal quantum wave collapse of photons, to each point of ‘conscious observation’ in the universe, is the only answer that has adequate sufficiency to explain the 3D centrality we witness for ourselves in this universe.
From a slightly different, more rigorous, point of reasoning this following site, through a fairly exhaustive examination of the General Relativity equations themselves, acknowledges the insufficiency of General Relativity to account for the ‘completeness’ of 4D space-time within the sphere of the CMBR from different points of observation in the universe.
Verse and music:
KN @ 25:
Thanks for the Dembski citation. It has been a while since I read that, so it was a good refresher. As near as I can tell, in the 15+ intervening years since Dembski’s critique self-organization has made little to no discernible progress in identifying the elusive self-organizing principles.
Yikes. I hope he isn’t thinking in terms of the classic open/closed thermodynamic systems debate. That is not only a dead end for explaining biological systems, it is an intellectual embarrassment for anyone to use such an idea to try to explain how life arose and developed. I truly hope he has something else in mind.
Also, there is scant evidence that systems will tend toward complexity and diversity. There is just no reason why they would not tend toward simplicity and fast reproduction, for example. Blessed are the bacteria, for they shall inherit the Earth . . .
Let me suggest we take a different approach. Rather than rethinking what we mean by the very notion of law, how about we wait until Kauffman et al. have come up with something concrete and rational and then we will take it under consideration.
In response to bornagain77:
(1) I do not hold, and never claimed, that my naturalism is somehow read directly off from empirical science. For me, naturalism is a metaphysical view, and as I said before, I think of metaphysics and science as being different — though closely related — enterprises. To repeat a line of which I’m become quite fond (too bad it’s not mine to begin with!), science is about what is, and metaphysics is about what ‘what is’ is.
(2) Since metaphysics is a different enterprise than science, there are different criteria for what makes a metaphysical view a good or reasonable one than what we use for scientific theories. The debate between naturalistic and theological metaphysics is just different from the debate between ultra-Darwinism, design theory, and self-organization theory. Although all scientific theories have an implicit metaphysics to them, that’s not to say that we can get an acceptable metaphysics “for free” once we have an acceptable scientific theory. Science and metaphysics certainly need to inform one another, but they aren’t the same thing.
(3) I will offer only sporadic comments on the metaphysics of quantum mechanics, because in my experience it’s a bad idea to talk about the metaphysics of a science one doesn’t know. I do know quite a bit about biology, but I don’t know much about quantum mechanics. I think of quantum mechanics as being, essentially, a mathematical theory, and I simply don’t have the mathematical competence to engage with it seriously. I will note, however, that the last time I checked, the jury was still out on (a) collapse vs. no-collapse, i.e. deterministic theories, e.g. Bohmian mechanics and (b) whether consciousness is required for collapse, as in the Copenhagen Interpretation.
If the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretations were unequivocally preferred by physicists and philosophers of physics, I’d happily concede the point. Since that’s not yet the case, I simply don’t know what I should say.
(4) The really interesting question, for me, and the question that defines “Kantian naturalism,” is, “how can we explain the 4 Ms in terms of the 4Fs?” The 4 Fs — Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Reproduction — figure centrally in our understanding of living things. The 4 Ms are Mind, Meaning, Morality, and Modality.
Reductive naturalism just dispenses with the 4 Ms altogether, and that’s clearly not going to work, and with the kinds of people who come to Uncommon Descent I don’t think I need to rehearse the problems with reductive naturalism. So I think that the philosophical task has to begin with a phenomenological elucidation and conceptual explication of the 4 Ms, and that project is, as I conceive of it, fundamentally Kantian in spirit (though not in letter). From there, it’s a question of showing how the 4 Fs explain the 4 Ms — how to get a naturalistic, biological account of living things to square with an analysis of the basic structures of rational agency.
So, it should be quite obvious by now that my entire project here is not really all that sympathetic to intelligent design. I must stress — and this is quite important to me — that I fully understand that this is an intelligent design blog, and that it’s your sandbox. I’ll happily leave if or when asked to do so.
That’s only three F’s.
KN,
You seem very respectful and have interesting things to say. I’m sure you’ll be welcome here as long as you wish to stay.
Kantian you state:
“(1) I do not hold, and never claimed, that my naturalism is somehow read directly off from empirical science”
Thus my comment:
“I find a profound disconnect from what you claim to believe (a type of naturalism of some ill defined sort) and any empirical warrant for any such naturalistic belief.”
i.e. without empirical warrant you are not even in the realm of empirical science as to justifying your a-priori preferred metaphysical view is grounded in reality!!!
You complain that quantum mechanics is a ‘mathematical theory’ and thus refuse to engage with it, yet I beg to differ in that many of the experiments have very ‘visual’ evidence that little to ambiguity as to the implications as the mathematics you shy away from are prone to do for many people.
Moreover if you like to follow consensus,,,
“If the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretations were unequivocally preferred by physicists and philosophers of physics, I’d happily concede the point.”
rather than following the evidence itself then you are not truly practicing science. In fact this explains why you are severely misled into believing that some form of ‘bottom up’ Darwinism is true (for the field of biology which you claim to know much better than quantum mechanics!!!):
Notes:
It is important to note that the following experiment actually encoded information into a photon while it was in its quantum wave state, thus destroying the notion, held by many, that the wave function was not ‘physically real’ but was merely ‘abstract’. i.e. How can information possibly be encoded into something that is not physically real but merely abstract?
Ultra-Dense Optical Storage – on One Photon
Excerpt: Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image’s worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.,,, As a wave, it passed through all parts of the stencil at once,,,
http://www.physorg.com/news88439430.html
Information In Photon – Robert W. Boyd – slides from presentation
http://www.quantumphotonics.uo.....-InPho.pdf
Information in a Photon – Robert W. Boyd – 2010
Excerpt: By its conventional definition, a photon is one unit of excitation of a mode of the electromagnetic field. The modes of the electromagnetic field constitute a countably infinite set of basis functions, and in this sense the amount of information that can be impressed onto an individual photon is unlimited.
http://www.pqeconference.com/p.....td/013.pdf
Kantian you claim:
Which I find to be a very peculiar claim since quantum mechanics is now found to be foundational to biology!
‘spooky action at a distance’ (as Einstein called it) quantum entanglement/information, which rigorously falsified local realism (reductive materialism) as the ‘true’ description of reality (Bohr, Einstein, Bell, Aspect, Zeilinger, etc..), is now being found in molecular biology on a massive scale!
Quantum Entanglement/Information is confirmed in DNA and proteins by direct observation here;
Moreover:
There is a second level of information from the ‘quantum top’, in the overall hierarchy of information in the cell, this is the ‘biophotonic’ information:
The following video gives a ‘jaw dropping’ look at the biophotonic information in action:
and lastly, The third ‘bottom’ level of information found in life is the ‘classical information’ which is encoded onto the material/molecular substrates of the cell (DNA, RNA and proteins). Furthermore, the hierarchical organization of this ‘bottom level’ of information is anything but simple. And at the very bottom of this organization structure is the linear (one dimensional) sequences of DNA. It is simply beyond belief that anyone would dogmatically cling to the notion that mutations on this very bottom level of the information hierarchy of the information in a cell would be responsible for all the unfathomed orginizational complexity that is above that very bottom level:
Of course all this could be further hashed out in far more detail, but for now, I think this basic overview gives a good brief outline as to just how far detached from reality the ‘bottom up’ model of neo-Darwinism is:
footnote:
,,,Encoded ‘classical information’, such as what Dembski and Marks demonstrated the conservation of, is found to be a subset of ‘transcendent’ (beyond space and time) quantum entanglement/information by the following proof:,,,
(1) I thought it would be perfectly obvious that I consider metaphysics to be (basically and for the most part) a priori, since I consider metaphysics distinct from science, and science is quite clearly a posteriori. So accusing me of holding my metaphysics a priori is no accusation at all.
(2) It’s not that I refuse to engage with quantum mechanics, it’s that I know my own cognitive limitations. I’m just not good at mathematics. Heck, I barely passed basic calculus.
(3) My knowledge of biology is based on majoring in biology as an undergraduate. Quantum biology wasn’t covered.
(4) The only philosophers I know of who work in quantum mechanics is Hilary Putnam and David Albert (though Albert is really a theoretical physicist with a strong background in philosophy). Putnam has two books come out recently, and if I get around to reading what he says about QM, I’ll return to this topic.
(5) Thank you, Mung. I’ll do my very best to be respectful and polite at all times.
KN @39:
I definitely second Mung’s statement. You are certainly welcome here.
Kantian, the whole point of my criticism against you is that you have no reference to the real world if you divorce your metaphysics from empirics as you seem more than willing to do., i.e. you are merely day dreaming as far as I’m concerned in such a practice, a polite day-dreamer but a day dreamer none-the-less!
I claimed that I regard metaphysics as distinct from science, not that metaphysics is separate from science. I certainly don’t think that one can do good metaphysics without taking the sciences seriously, and if I said anything above which indicated I believed otherwise, I heartily retract it.
The reason why I don’t think metaphysics can be “read off” from any of the sciences is because that metaphysics attempts to see how everything hangs together — not just the results of the sciences, but how the sciences hang together with ordinary experience, with art, with religion, ethics, etc.
Take for example the concept of personhood. Personhood — being a person — is not a scientific concept. It’s central to our ethical and political discourse. But at the same time, some of our sciences raise difficult questions about what sorts of things are persons, when does personhood begin, do non-persons have rights, and if so, what kinds of rights, and so forth. Dealing with those questions means getting certain facts correct, and the sciences do that, but when science and ethics conflict, we have to do metaphysics in order to get our thinking straight.
Not that this ordering represent the actual order in which the works were produced, but look where Metaphysics falls.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Aristotelicum
Kantian, you made a specific claim about reality with ‘self ordering’, yet when pressed you could cite no empirical support, thus why should I consider your preferred metaphysics nothing more than wish fulfillment?
I made a specific claim about self-organizing systems, which is a far cry from any claim about “reality.” And I made explicit that Kauffman’s theory has been tested with computer models, but not with chemicals. If you want to stipulate that only implementation in a chemical set-up count as “empirical support,” that’s your right.
There’s a story that Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” got its name because it was put after “Physics” by the people who compiled Aristotle’s works. The “Physics” gets its name from its topic, nature (or “phusis”) — “Physics” just means “On Nature”. The book which was put after the “Physics” was called “Metaphysics” because “meta-” just means “after.” So, strictly speaking, “metaphysics” means “the book that comes after the book about nature.” Aristotle himself doesn’t use the word; it didn’t exist in his vocabulary. He says that his concern there is “being qua being”, and thereupon hangs many a tale.
For instance of backing up metaphysical claims with empirical evidence. Theism claims that not only has God created this universe but that he also sustains this universe in its continued existence (Revelation 4:11). To back up this metaphysical claim I submit this empirical support:
i.e. a ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, cause must be supplied to explain why photons continue to exist within space-time. What is your cause? Theism has had a beyond space and time cause postulated for centuries!
It is important to grasp just how seriously this undermines the foundations of materialism. Materialism presupposes that material particles are ‘self-sustaining’, eternal, entities. Indeed when someone says that something occurred ‘naturally’ this underlying assumption of self sustaining material particles is present in the basis of that assumption of ‘naturally occurring’!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism