it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
Does anyone understand that DNA is inert?
It doesn't "DO" anything.
RNA "reads" DNA.
The fact that there is a code that is read and interpreted to imply certain actions to be taken by cellular automata indicates that there is a "mind" which takes these codes to mean the same.
it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
Cofty you aren't even close to understanding how any of this works.
The "code" is meaningless without the interpretation of "mind".
it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
cofty - DNA is meaningless without a "mind" to interpret what needs be done.
There is nothing in the chemistry which the laws of physics demands that when certain chemical sequences are present, certain structures should be built.
it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
Newchapter - I think you're not getting the fact that the coding will only make "sense" to a "mind" which interprets the change in sequences to mean "do this and not that", without that all you have is inert chemistry.
DNA is not active. It's passive in the same way as a book is passive.
Some "mind" has to read the book and decide to do something else.
it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
Newchapter, but you still need a "mind" to interpret and decide that any sequence "means" something new. In and of itself the coding "means" nothing any more than the chemicals making up ink on paper "mean" anything. "Mind" is an inescapable element to the equation.
it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
bohm, it's true that it's useful to clarify usage in discussion.
In this case "information" is a function of observed response by a "mind". DNA is essentially inert. DNA doesn't "read itself", the DNA is "read" by RNA in response to activities perceived in the environment.
It can, as in the case of detections of damage to the message, intelligently respond by way of substitution, or the DNA itself can be resequenced in response to the "percieved needs".
The "information" isn't the sequence of DNA read, but rather the "minds" of the intercellular processes as these respond after having read different sequences and interpreting the coding as requiring certain actions.
The "information" I'm referring to which has limitation in its production is/are the codes being interpreted.
In the case you mentioned: "The problem is that when put this way, i simply see an abundance of examples where evolution (selection+mutation) make "information". For instance the example of the nylon-eating bacteria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria where the genomen changed (by mutation) and the bacteria was able to do something new and usefull (information) which was selected for."
These did "make" information in the sense of rearranging the codes and reading these with its "mind" and responding differently, however it was limited to the codes present.
Simple rearrangements need to use the codes these have at their disposal. If certain codes which might be interpreted differently if these were actually present simply cannot just miraculously appear by any random walk.
My point is that evolution is a non-random directed process which has within it the capacity to learn and grow and that "random mutations" are simply not up to the task of generating the new codes.
The result of all this is that we see "mind" as a necessary component of life, and that "mind" communicates with codes to itself as regards its own differentiation.
"Minds", as far as we know, and "Codes" such as the aperiodic source we see in DNA or even in the coding of 1's and 0's which are "read" by the "minds" of computers allow us to communicate and these things simply don't spontaneously appear. We just never observe this occuring. Never.
"Minds" are needed for "Information" to exist.
"Mind" in my view must be a necessary, but undiscovered and not fully understood principle behind our reality, this including space, time, matter and this universe or multiverse.
Having said this, the idea of evolution is not what I'm arguing against, but rather the mechanisms by which it progresses.
it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
Qcmbr - and yet you'd still be supplying the needed information, afterwhich you'd have variations on the theme, but no additional information content - this because you started out with plans in advance.
http://www.randommutation.com/index.php
Check out this link.
Let me know how long it takes before you get a viable new sentence.
it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
Bohm, I'd love to see how information is generated via natural selection and mutation, however I haven't found any literature which shows how this is possible.
Let me explain my understanding.
Let's say we don't believe in any Lamarkian system of aquired characteristics or morphogenetic fields...
This means that natural selection is differential reproduction, which is nothing more than a competition as to who can produce the most offspring and keep that going over time.
Natural selection acts as a sifting mechanism. It doesn't generate novelty, it acts with veto authority. It says yea or nay, nothing more.
This leaves mutation as the only novelty generating mechanism.
This is suggested to have no teleological end, no purpose and no purposer behind its operation.
What is the rate of mutation?
What mutagens are available?
No matter this we can by way of illustration use a sentence like:
"The cat chased the rat."
This is an organism which, natural selection will act upon. The rules are that in order for this organism to be selected it must have an advantage in the differential reproductive realm as a result of the mutation aquired, or this mutation should at least be benign as regards differential reproduction. That is the sifting mechanism.
Now let's say by way of illustration that the for any sentence, to be viable, it must make semantic sense and gramattical sense, otherwise it is a dead, nonreproducing sentence.
Now let's "mutate" this sentence and see how much novelty we can generate.
"The cat chased the bat"
"The bat chased the bat"
"The bat chased the rat"
"The bat chased the hat"
"The cat chased the hat"
"The rat chased the hat"
"The rat chases heat"
You can permute and mutate the sentence, but it must operate within certain bounds, and aquisition on new information is quite difficult.
Now ask yourself about mutation rates and see if current rates of mutation would lend themselves to the rates required to go from the 3,000 nucleotides for say virus x0174 (BTW with 5,386 nucleotides)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_X_174
You can see over 3,000,000,000 nucleotides in the human genome, so the idea that mutation and natural selection acting as a sieve is simply insufficient to the task assigned to it.
You can't generate more information in a random process, and yet here we are, obviously more complex but without an adequate explanation for the insertion of all this additional information.
it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
I'm not a Sheldrake devotee, but then again, neither is Sheldrake.
Perhaps you might consider reading this little book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q_h5ZyjJWA
I think you might come to appreciate that there is much in the way of this sort of thing in all human endeavors.
There are no "scientists" just as there are no "christians", but there are people who at one point or another in a debatably greater or lesser degree either engage in the application of the scientific method as outlined and discussed at length by the philosopher Sir Carl Popper.
There are also no "quacks", but it must be admitted that we find no standard as to what this might mean other than its use in a dismissive hand wave. Which itself is no argument. It's merely declaring victory and going home.
Famous "Quacks" include:
"
Now...
If we could engineer a self-repliating biological system from scratch, then we might know one pathway for life-generation, however we've not been able to do that and the closer we investigate, the more we realize how phenomenal even the simplest form of life can be.
The genetic code is aperiodic and not at all like the information we find inherent in crystal formation. The organization of a crystal is like the statement "Write three letters at a time, starting with the letter a and continuing to the letter z; then increment the starting letter and repeat the pattern until z is reached, then reset and start over."
The information content is low, however when biological systems are examined, such as even a debatably alive something as a virus with 3,000 nucleotides which has no machinery for replication within itself, the binomial distribution of the sequences arrived at by any non-directional walk is beyond the random. Anything beyong something like 1 in 10 raised to the power of 50 is essentially zero chance.
Now when life was supposedly born over 200 million years ago, we have a problem and that problem is that this is a finite period of time as well as the finite period of time the universe has been existence...
Flipping a coin yields a 50/50 probability ever time, it has no memory, so when you look at a virus with 3,000 nucleotides read in a specific sequence and the suggestion that information not already present in something as simple as this can acquire this information over this finite period of time and retain and build upon it...well, it strikes me that the mechanisms of mutation and natural selection are simply not up to the task of generating the kind of novelty we see.
We need something else to explain the origins of information, and it isn't the God of the bible or any other book, but the idea that "mind" may be the primary "field" which is prior to matter at least has some hope of yielding some more interesting dialogue.
The cupboard of mother hubbard is empty as far as I can see, and science needs look outside the box.
it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.
being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.
i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.
I'm quite frankly tired of both sides of the same fundamentalist coin.
If there is a God it's clear that its morals are not those represented in any text and not at all representative of what anyone would call moral today when viewed from the average human perspective.
I would never have designed a universe like this one.
Having said this...
I know about hox genes, and jumping genes. I know about micro and macro evolution. I'm familiar with the work of Gould and Dawkins and the host before these two. I've spent years reading as much as I can with regard to the framework of all the various supporting disciplines and found them all wanting for their presumed materialist foundation.
The mechanisms suggested in every scenario fail to explain the whole and that when pressed the faithful on both sides resort to emotional rebuttals which don't address the problems.
When we have a situation as this, that the laws of physics are not derivative of matter, we have of necessity mind as the essential feature which necessarily precedes matter. This mind, however is not the mind of the God of the Bible, or any other sacred book.
Years ago I read a book by Rupert Sheldrake dealing with the idea of morphogenetic fields and initially dismissed it. Now I'm thinking I dismissed this too soon. At least the recognition that the suggested materialistic mechanisms have failed to provide the needed organizing ability and forever cannot generate new information, but rather that information left alone dissipates is going in the proper direction.
Never mind it will be rather difficult to test a nonmaterial explanation save by inference, but we're dealing with many things like this even now. Gravity, for one.
This is rather long, but Rupert is an engaging speaker.
