Spook, Thank you for taking the time for writing the above post. It has brought to light a couple of things that I have not been clear on. My schedule is too tight today to allow for the time for me to do your post justice. I will address it in a way that I hope will clarify things. |
You're welcome and I understand - I'm probably spending more daylight on this than I should myself. As touchy feely as anonymous internet commentary can be, I want to say that despite the assertions and rehetorical accusations that come up on a good old fashioned debate, I respect that you are trying to do justice to the question with integrity. So, cheers to you and I'll check in on this thread at later time without pre-empting or adding a lot of new subject material.
The last things I'll say, after some consideration and reading yesterday:
To clarify what I meant by the species being arbitrary point: Under many naturalistic theories of evolution, a species is a hypothetical entity in the same or a similar way a closed thermodynamic system is in that it is useful but does not really exist almost by definition of the assumptions behind it. In many traditional theistic theories of kinds or creation a species is a real metaphysical entity. This is complicated and off the main subject, but these thoughts are traditionally classically Platonic in nature. The best thing I could think of to say what this means is that under this way of thinking any given computer is only an imperfect example of some real metaphysical computer that exists in the ether somewhere and to which the set of all computers is imperfectly compared. Hope that helps the readers out there who were thinking WTF because I used species in my argument and then said it doesn't exist.