A Growing Problem for Materialists

by Sea Breeze 70 Replies latest social current

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  waton

  If there comes a time when a huge asteroid comes directly to are planet creating a colossal impact and knowingly this is going kill just about every living thing on this planet, similar to how one did 40 million years ago " bold added MF.

  we have information gleaned from research, that meteor, asteroid, comet impacts were shapers of life and the deliverers chemicals that sustains it. Even the event , that (contrary to Newton's belief)* "knowingly" killed the big ones, gave our forebearers the niche we needed to thrive.

  * Isaac believed that god need to nudge the bodies of the solarsystem once in a while to keep their places for so long.

  The "systems" in the universe are in many ways self correcting, or are destied to go out of existence. It is the existence ion the foirst place that is so remarkable.

  1) communicating data to another sentient being. 2) technical, subject of information theory.) Cofty,

  those are very narrow definitions. "information ' as used by us lowly laypersons to be understood in a broader, all encompassing sense, info existing, conveyed in many ways, usually seen seen in the context.
  
  
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  Mr.Finkelstein

  bold added MF.

  By the way Newton didn't know about the asteroid that hit this planet and the totality of the damage it caused, this information was before his time.
  

  I didn't bold anything you F..ing idiot.
  

  Are you trying to suggest that god the grand creator of the universe guided that huge asteroid to this planet killing most living things because he wasn't fond of what he saw here and wanted to correct things ?
  
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  cofty

  Waton - creationists use the word 'information' in a dishonest way. They equivocate, knowingly or otherwise.

  In the technical sense of information no minds or sentient beings are required.

  In one sense DNA contains information but that is nothing but a metaphor. In reality it is just chemicals doing their thing.
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  waton

  I didn't bold anything you F..ing idiot.
  
  Are you trying to suggest that god the grand creator of the universe guided that huge asteroid MF:

  sorry, I added the bold as stated, to mark what I was referring to.

  Waton: No, what I am saying, that the universe acts in such a way is so flexible, to come up with unexpected beneficial results, like fertilizing BC fishing grounds with carbon from Oregon forest fires. (food for plankton and thought.

  newton was not referring in the "nudge" remark to catastrophes, but regularity.

  I am imagining the "creator" as an entity so advanced, it can create out of co-eternal energy a totally self-creating universe or two, without having to tinker, or aim. It would not be farfetched to call it "father" which says it all. .
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  waton

  In one sense DNA contains information but that is nothing but a metaphor. In reality it is just chemicals doing their thing. C:

  We know you like the life sciences, and DNA is a superb information carrier in it's structure. but are not all developments depending on the "structure" of their "preceding structures", so that it is the information that is passed along,survives temporarily, , while the previous carrier may not exist any more, have "passed on" in more sense then one. are not all things carriers of information, that can be extracted, not just photons, sound waves, dinosaur footprints?

  is not the information there, embodied, whether it is "read" or not?
  
  
  
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  Mr.Finkelstein

  We as all living organisms on this planet may possibly be an occurrence of unplanned and unintended happenstance by the grand creator of the universe......... ummmmm ???
  
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  waton

  ---unplanned and unintended happenstance --MF

  Only wt adherents take it upon themselves to read the mind of their god all the time.

  It is a valid question. The making of the universe, our solar system, the firing up of life, our functioning brains are certainly milestones we have not been able to replicate, even satisfactorily explain.

  imho the creator has the wherewithal, and could have endowed the early beginning with all the embodied information that is needed to bring these events about in time. ***. Did he take a personal hand in abiogenesis for example?

  If we never succeed to copy it, would be one way to find out.

  *** one theory suggests that multiple universes came into existence, many, with flawed information flow or laws failed. Our"s exist and we, because by chance all went well here. Survival of the fittest ata cosmic scale.
  
  
  
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  Mr.Finkelstein

  The growing problem with spiritualists is human knowledge of the universe itself.

  The discovered knowledge of the very vastness of the universe has ruined the presumptuousness by mankind of this being the only planet in the universe with living organisms and life.

  We are starting to discover planets with atmospheric conditions similar to are planet which could break the long standing acceptance of this being the only planet with life.
  
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  Sea Breeze

  Getting back to the OP,

  Here's what we know:

  Get a chunk of carbon with say.....1000 atoms; and fire it through one slit and have another slit a few millimeters away. The particle actually dematerializes and passes through BOTH slits as a ( most think information) probability wave. On the other side, it rematerializes as a chunk of carbon as it strikes receptors.

  It is the majority of scientists at the University of Colorado that believe that this wave contains information, not creationists. That is their description in the peer reviewed papaer I cited. So, lets not poison the well because this finding is a threat to the materialist world-view.

  If true, then reality is really a triality. matter, waves, & information. This latter feature is not material. Think of the number 3 for example. It cannot be overused or be worn out because it is simply a value. It doesn't degrade and is not subject to decay.

  Since, the 1950's we have known about the DNA molecule and its amazing ability to store information. One cup of this stuff can store all television shows and movies ever created in high def and have room to spare. But the hardware device, as amazing as it is doesn't even begin to address where the information originated from.

  Similarly to biological studies, the studies cited in the OP are suggesting that the common denominator to our observable world (matter) is information as well.

  Bible believers will immediately recall the unique description in which everything came into existence:

  By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth....Let all the earth fear the Lord: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast. - Ps. 33

  3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. - Gen. 1

  Isn't it interesting that in contrast to other cultures' creation stories, that the bible describes creation as the release of auditory information waves (speaking) ?

  Regardless of that, the materialist world-view is on very shaky ground because of these experiments. The immaterial nature of information, which is simply values and potential, cannot be accounted for.
  
  Of course, materialists could easily falsify such conclusions by providing examples of information appearing from something other than a mind.

  Anyone know of examples like that?
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  slimboyfat

  What we have direct experience of is our own minds, perceptions and experience. By the use of our senses we then infer that there is a material world out there and what it looks like. So the material world and our understanding of it is necessarily secondary, and at one remove, whereas our conscious experience is the most direct form of knowledge that we have.

  Do our senses give us a reliable picture of the material world around us? Increasingly the evidence would suggest that they do not. Neuroscientist Donald Hoffman has explored whether seeing the material world as it really is confers evolutionary advantage or disadvantage. He found that creatures that comprehend the world in ways that are useful for their survival have a selective advantage over those who employ the extra neural capacity to see the world as it really is. This means that short cuts and useful representations of the world always crowd out accurate or realistic representations. The conclusion being that we as humans don’t see the world as it really is, but rather we see it in the form that has the greatest selective advantage for our species.

  Since our senses therefore are not a reliable guide to how the world really is, we come back to our direct conscious experiences, which are fundamental to everything we know. In a very real sense there are all that know. We can make useful deductions about the world around us that work most of the time. But to infer from this that we are therefore seeing the world as it really is, is not warranted by the evidence. Indeed the evidence is that, whatever the world out there is really like, it is not as we perceive it to be.

  So what really is reality? Maybe we can never know. Or maybe we can on know by some kind of intervention that stands outside of our everyday senses, and our notions of what the material world consists of. We might call this revelation.