We are the fringes of the universe, all we see is the past of the rest. look at the deep space pictures of 12 billion years ago/distant it is packed with galaxies, because the universe was smaller then. smaller than now.
You are babbling.
Creationist Should Dismiss Genesis Quickly
by Coded Logic 116 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Viviane
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Viviane
Physical complexity. The arrangement of molecules in the computer or the brain.
Complexity refers to interconnectness and intereaction of systems. The more connected, the more complex.
The amount of information a network contains is constant if all nodes in that network have a value regardless of whether those values have meaning to a human or other intelligence.
How are you defining information? The amount of information most certainly can and does change, otherwise, no one would ever learn anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
You keep bringing up "interaction". If it's essential for you to know where the interaction is, it's between the molecules making up a compound and between the atoms making up the molecules, and between the sub-atomic particles making up the atoms.
I am referring to the definition of "complex" which you keep avoiding. Of course it's essential for me to know that. That's precisely why I do, in fact, know it. It's also essential for you to know what complexity and information are, because it's clear you don't. I provided some handy URLs above to get you started.
Those interactions will of course change when data passes through them, but the number of interactions between particles, the complexity, is not increasing. In order for this to be the case, the network would have to develop new nodes.
Yes it is. Let's go back to your CPU example, or even that of a hard drive example. There are more interactions happening at various states of energy and as more and less work is being done. Obviously, powered off is a less complex state. Even less is disassempled. Even less would be the atoms that make up those parts floating millions of years apart in deep space. Same particles but clearly with different numbers of interactions happening and different rates of information, contrary to your assertion. CPUs can be off, idle except for the most bare work to remain powered up or at various percentages of activity. Same thing for a hard drive. The actuator arm can be idle or thrashing, interacting not at all or a lot or somewhere in between, changing the atoms on the platter or not. A CPU can be manipulating signals and changing the values of memory or opening and closing logic gates... or not.
Developing new nodes on a network is irrelevant to your CPU example.
You still seem to be saying complexity and information can't change, that it's simply a measure of how much material is in a given space. The question remains, how are you defining complexity? While you're at it, information also.
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hooberus
Caedes said:
If you cannot understand how adding a powerful creator god adds a hugely additional level of complexity to the natural universe then I don't know I can help you. We are not talking about maths we are talking about the concept. Of course any god sufficiently powerful to create universes has to be more complex than it's creation.
By complex do you mean composed of "many parts" (Dawkins type definition)
If so, What is the evidence that a supernatural God must be composed of "parts"???
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prologos
Genesis is easily dimisssed. Debating how we THINK about the beginning, is enlightening, and using the razor on that one, it is simpler to do without an originator, one more problem gone.
As some posters rightly pointed out in better words, our thinking has it's limits, and reality is not changed by it, (almost)
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Caedes
Hooberus,
See my post 1968 where I answered your question. It's interesting that you suddenly want evidence when in all the previous threads on this site where you have posted you run a mile when asked for your evidence.
Apognophos,
I see you are still having difficulties with the definition of complexity. Have you tried reading the wikipedia entry that I linked to?
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Caedes
Prologos,
Whilst I admire that you seem genuinely interested in science and that is obviously a good thing; it sometimes sounds like you have swallowed a book by Deepak Chopra (who is an awful charlatan and fraudster).
what is at the fringes of the natural universe gives us indications what is outside of it. The Background radiation, (really younger than the big bang), The movement, radiation that signals that all that matter has disappeared, out of the universe into a black hole, leaving only it's effects. time stands still in these conditions, and you can not be part of the universe if you do not paricipate in its movement through time. Remember that we live in a fabric of spacetime that is moving, expanding, and black hole matter has left us.
As I have said several times there is no outside our universe, our natural universe is everything there is. It includes billions of of black holes, the entire microwave background radiation and all of space-time. If you don't believe me feel free to research it, there are are dozens of books that explain this stuff. I and several others here would be happy to recommend some if you want to really have a scientific understanding of the universe. I don't say this merely to disagree with you but because you seem to have missed some fundamental aspects of the scientific understanding of the universe.
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prologos
Caedes, my understanding of reality , he universe, is shaped in part through language. in when I was young, in the 1930, we talked about the "ALL", the total, the everything, the Universe, so from that linguistic aspect I have to agree with you. I am not a scientist, which would mean anyway to be engaged in some specialty, and only an armchair cosmologist. Having read most books on the subject, with the hiatus during my decades as a witness worker, I have come to see, that these people, Krauss, Penrose, Davis, Krauss, Feynman et al seem to be very vague when it comes to the beyond, the before, the void of the future, the cosmos. I still read on a daily basis all the relevant science news.
I see a world picture trying to incorporate all this, and am stuck with a model where there was always time, a given, part of an unfathonable, eternal 'ueber', or 'Ur" dimension, a void beyond our capacity to mesure, understand.
As a compulsive worker and deliberate 'out-of-the-box thinker' with tangible patent, $, results, I can not bring myself to remove a creator from the coming -about of what we have and esperience. Originating a creative procces so ingenious that it can squeeze through the big bang and is undetectable in our realm.
I am comfortable with the illustrations of the Feynman diagrams, , Penrose, whhere time is always depicted as a dimension, the x axis, where movement through time is shown as a progression, time being fixed. us moving (not the other way around). Space expanding since the beginning and as a consequences entwined with time as it travels outward from the BB singularity.
I have yet to read or hear an explanation that cotradicts that world picture; I see only confirmations. Time eternal, fixed. infinite, the lazy "8" the i dimension Moebius strip. When people charactarize what I say with these ideas as a base, as babbel, as rambling, it is, because they must have a better model, they are not trying to see my consistency.
Genesis, (the book) and it's 'god' do not enter into it, except as a root word.
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Apognophos
I keep debating whether I should be spending my time on this argument. I think that my hypothesis, which I advanced in a casual, agnostic way as just one possibility, was perfectly reasonable and there is no profit for you or me in discussing this at the fine level at which you are trying to parse it. But okay, this is how I've been using these two words:
Complexity - The amount of information in a certain volume.
Information - Any set of values that can be read from some arrangement of material.
How are you defining information? The amount of information most certainly can and does change, otherwise, no one would ever learn anything.
You're simply using a more specific definition of information than I am. It only takes a glance at a few different reference works to see that "information" does not have one authoritative definition. You're defining information as "something meaningful to humans". I'm simply defining it as any set of values. Your definition of information is basically "knowledge encoded as data", and mine does not include "knowledge" as a requirement for something containing information.
If you want some citation of a work that agrees with my definition, then we can simply look at the lede of the "Information" article from Wikipedia, which supports both of our definitions (mine is underlined): "Information (shortened as info or info.) is that which informs, i.e. that from which data and knowledge can be derived (as data represents values attributed to parameters, and knowledge signifies understanding of real things or abstract concepts). As it regards data, the information's existence is not necessarily coupled to an observer (it exists beyond an event horizon, for example), while in the case of knowledge, information requires a cognitive observer. At its most fundamental, information is any propagation of cause and effect within a system."
Now, we've zigzagged all over the place in trying to discuss various analogies, but let's try to keep this limited to the actual topic. No analogy is perfect, so if you delve deeply enough into the subject of computer engineering you can probably find a flaw in my analogy, but that will only detract from the validity of my analogy, not the validity of my original proposition.
I also feel that I failed to complete my original thought because I was trying to get there in steps and the conversation was derailed into nitpicking -- so let me recap and then finish my thought:
1. My initial statement was that "creator+universe" is not necessarily more complex than just "universe". In order to lead you all towards understanding why I would say this, I then suggested that the creator could be "thinking us up". After all, if there is a creator, then it has some sort of mind. It might have decided to think about a universe that develops life. We could be those very thoughts, in its mind.
2. If so, then the total complexity of the scenario is not much greater than the complexity of a universe that developed on its own. Once again, the reason I say this is that a brain has constant complexity on the physical level regardless of what it is being used for. If this creator's intelligence is anything like ours, then before us, he had to have been thinking about something else. Regardless of what subject occupied his mind, the scenario was already as complex as when he thought up the universe, just as a brain filled with random thoughts is as complex as a brain focused on one large task like imagining the flow of logic in a computer program one is designing.
3. The next step in my argument was going to be that, if the creator is using any part of himself to produce the universe, then the complexity is the same -- whether he uses his brain or a portion of his body to construct the universe. The amount of information that he would be dedicating to the universe would be the same whether it came from what we would consider to be its mind or its body (its "active force", to borrow a JWism). It seems that most people assume that a creator would build the universe with new material that it summoned into existence, but this ought to be impossible. It's more logical to imagine that it must use a part of itself.
So if I previously made statements which were more vague than this, I apologize, but this was my intended statement from the beginning.
Mind you, I am not claiming some mystical knowledge of the universe. There is no reason that I think the above proposal has to be true. I consider it equally likely that we are here by accident. I'm sort of taken aback by the determination with which you are attacking this simple idea, and didn't think I would have to spend so much time stating the obvious in order to defend what was only a whimsical suggestion intended to point to other possibilities besides our being here by accident.
As I stated earlier, I consider our existence absurd no matter what, as it's absurd that an intelligent creator could arise from nothing and then make a universe, and it's absurd that intelligent humans could arise from nothing and develop The Sims™.
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Caedes
I have yet to read or hear an explanation that cotradicts that world picture
'A brief history of time' by Hawking contradicts your view of time and the universe. It is well worth reading.
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Caedes
Apognophos,
What you describe is commonly referred to as 'last thursdayism' and is utterly unfalsifiable and meaningless.
if the creator is using any part of himself to produce the universe, then the complexity is the same -- whether he uses his brain or a portion of his body to construct the universe. The amount of information that he would be dedicating to the universe would be the same whether it came from what we would consider to be its mind or its body (its "active force", to borrow a JWism). It seems that most people assume that a creator would build the universe with new material that it summoned into existence, but this ought to be impossible. It's more logical to imagine that it must use a part of itself.
You are then stuck back with the same problem, this (god's spare third testicle) universe that you are talking about has the same level of complexity as my materialistic natural universe. You still have the same problem I described before, that the rest of your god (sans third testical) also has a seperate level of complexity.