Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Can we talk? Human language as the business end of consciousness

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Naturalism (the view that it’s material nature all the way down) hasn’t fared much better with human language than with consciousness. The problem is that the things we communicate to each other are often stuff that nature never otherwise knew. Whether it is “We hold these truths …” or “Love your neighbor as yourself,” they are not the counsels of nature as such but of a specifically human nature, which we explore when we explore the human mind. More.

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As you pinted out News, one thing that drastically separates man from animals, (i.e. part of the ‘image of God’ inherent to man), is our ability to communicate information.
Origin of the Mind: Marc Hauser – Scientific American – April 2009 Excerpt: “Researchers have found some of the building blocks of human cognition in other species. But these building blocks make up only the cement footprint of the skyscraper that is the human mind”,,, http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/?/~mnkylab/publications/rec?ent/mindSciAm.pdf Young Children Have Grammar and Chimpanzees Don’t – Apr. 10, 2013 Excerpt: “When you compare what children should say if they follow grammar against what children do say, you find it to almost indistinguishable,” Yang said. “If you simulate the expected diversity when a child is only repeating what adults say, it produces a diversity much lower than what children actually say.” As a comparison, Yang applied the same predictive models to the set of Nim Chimpsky’s signed phrases, the only data set of spontaneous animal language usage publicly available. He found further evidence for what many scientists, including Nim’s own trainers, have contended about Nim: that the sequences of signs Nim put together did not follow from rules like those in human language. Nim’s signs show significantly lower diversity than what is expected under a systematic grammar and were similar to the level expected with memorization. This suggests that true language learning is — so far — a uniquely human trait, and that it is present very early in development. “The idea that children are only imitating adults’ language is very intuitive, so it’s seen a revival over the last few years,” Yang said. “But this is strong statistical evidence in favor of the idea that children actually know a lot about abstract grammar from an early age.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130410131327.htm
In fact, the three r’s, ‘reading, writing, and arithmetic’, are the first things to be taught to children when they enter school. And in direct contradiction to Charles Darwin’s claim that we have no right to believe that God creates ‘in ways analogous to the intellectual powers of the human mind’, at the heart of life, we find ‘reading, writing, and arithmetic’ (information processing) to be central to biological life:
Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVkdQhNdzHU “One of the things I do in my classes, to get this idea across to students, is I hold up two computer disks. One is loaded with software, and the other one is blank. And I ask them, ‘what is the difference in mass between these two computer disks, as a result of the difference in the information content that they posses’? And of course the answer is, ‘Zero! None! There is no difference as a result of the information. And that’s because information is a mass-less quantity. Now, if information is not a material entity, then how can any materialistic explanation account for its origin? How can any material cause explain it’s origin? And this is the real and fundamental problem that the presence of information in biology has posed. It creates a fundamental challenge to the materialistic, evolutionary scenarios because information is a different kind of entity that matter and energy cannot produce. In the nineteenth century we thought that there were two fundamental entities in science; matter, and energy. At the beginning of the twenty first century, we now recognize that there’s a third fundamental entity; and its ‘information’. It’s not reducible to matter. It’s not reducible to energy. But it’s still a very important thing that is real; we buy it, we sell it, we send it down wires. Now, what do we make of the fact, that information is present at the very root of all biological function? In biology, we have matter, we have energy, but we also have this third, very important entity; information. I think the biology of the information age, poses a fundamental challenge to any materialistic approach to the origin of life.” -Dr. Stephen C. Meyer earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of science from Cambridge University for a dissertation on the history of origin-of-life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences. Intelligent design: Why can’t biological information originate through a materialistic process? – Stephen Meyer – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqiXNxyoof8 John Lennox – Is There Evidence of Something Beyond Nature? (Semiotic Information) – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6rd4HEdffw
Moreover, scriptures hold that God 'spoke' reality into existence, and, although many theologians would be willing to write those scriptures off as mere metaphor, surprisingly we find a fairly direct connection between sound and energy:
Photons and Phonons Excerpt: You see, the primary Planck-Law (E=hf) is metaphysical and independent on the inertia distribution of the solid states.,,, Both, photon and phonon carry massequivalent energy m=E/c2=hf/c2. The matter-light interaction so is rendered electromagnetically noninertial for the photon and becomes acoustically inertial for the phonons; both however subject to Bose-Einstein stochastic wave mechanics incorporative the Planck-Law.,, Where, how and why does E=hf correctly and experimentally verifiably describe the quantum mechanics of energy propagation?,,, http://www.tonyb.freeyellow.com/id135.html Phonon Excerpt: In physics, a phonon,, represents an excited state in the quantum mechanical quantization of the modes of vibrations,, The name phonon,, translates as sound or voice because long-wavelength phonons give rise to sound. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon
Verse and Music:
Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,,,, TobyMac - Speak Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeBv9r92VQ0
bornagain77
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