N.Wells
Posts: 1836 Joined: Oct. 2005
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Quote | Quote | (N.Wells @ Sep. 20 2014,18:55) Is it then correct to say that in your view the christian god, if it existed, would not exhibit intelligence per se, but something more than intelligence? |
See Henry's questions. That might help. |
So that's a yes.
Quote | Matter does not have to be intelligent for intelligence to be emergent from it. |
Quote | Matter is modeled with an all-knowing algorithm. All levels of intelligent or unintelligent behavior that emerge from it are self-similar but don't need to know anything to have been created from the behavior of matter. |
If something "emerges" from something else in a scientific sense, then the precursor and the emergent phenomenon are not self-similar and design is not involved. An emergent phenomenon is something new that is qualitatively different from what went before, an unpredictable result of the combination of simpler precursors. Design is an intentional process that is intended to lead to predictable results: emergence is a process without intent that leads to unpredictable results.
Intelligence has indeed emerged from non-intelligent precursors, but you still haven't given an operational definition for it or a redefinition that justifies using the term for anything below fairly complex brains, nor have you demonstrated that anything that qualifies as intelligence exists at those lower levels.
Quote | Quote | (N.Wells @ Sep. 20 2014,18:55) B) Where exactly is this memory that is holding all the information that matter knows? |
For one thing the molecular intelligence level is a memory system going back to the origin of life on this planet. And an all-knowing behavior needs no memory when self-powered matter is all that is needed to produce it. Subatomic level memory cannot be ruled out by the theory, but it's not needed for the theory to make sense. |
The genome is a repository of information about what works that has accumulated in continuity since the origin of life. That does not make it intelligent. It also does not make guesses. However, the question is not about life but about matter. You haven't demonstrated that matter "remembers" anything or "knows" anything, or does anything other than behave according to the laws of physics and chemistry. What's needed for the theory to make sense is demonstration that molecular. I'm not sure what you mean by matter being "self-powered": matter gains and loses energy according to the laws of thermodynamics.
Quote | Quote | (N.Wells @ Sep. 20 2014,18:55) C) What exactly is that information? How does it differ from standard laws of physics and chemistry? |
There is no difference. It's a more complete understanding of physics and chemistry. |
Again, a hollow assertion. Aside from being very poorly written, your stuff is pretty similar to reading a theological disquisition on the nature of the Trinity or of the holy ghost, which is to say a whole load of hollow but jargon-ridden assertions that are trying to sound learned, with absolutely no actual evidence for the existence of the things under discussion. If you buy the assumptions, some of it kinda sounds reasonable if you squint at it just right, but otherwise it's just gobbledygook, or a house of cards. If you think about any religion other than the one that you believe in, it is obvious that the function of the learned theologians in the religion that isn't yours is to jabber sufficiently opaquely and obtusely that the average believer can imagine that someone far more intelligent than them, and/or with a more direct line to their deity, has thought through the problems presented by their dogma and has a reasonable explanation, even if the explanation isn't particularly clear to the audience. You, in contrast, are the only person who buys into your assertions, which is why no one but you buys into your conclusions.
Science doesn't work like that. It sets out operational definitions, which tell everyone what to measure, how to measure it, and in what units it can be measured, so that anyone can go out and measure it for themselves. No one (notably including you) can measure "molecular intelligence" because no one (including you) knows what it is, and no one (except you) thinks that it actually exists. Molecular and cellular "intelligence" are clearly obvious to you in exactly the way that spirits are obvious to an animist, but (continuing the parallels) the rest of the world sees no evidence of the spirits, nor any need of them, and wants some hard evidence for them before buying one iota of the animist's explanations for things.
Quote | That's the way "nature" is. It's expected that the theory is beyond your understanding of what "nature" is, but that does not make "nature" something else. |
I differ a bit from what NoName said here. He's absolutely right that every successful new theory must eventually explain everything explained by the previous theory and more, but it's not always the case that new theories incorporate old theories in doing so. The classic incorporation is Newtonian physics continuing to work just fine within Einsteinian relativity, just as long as you and/or the stuff that you are considering are not moving at velocities or energies near the speed of light. In other cases, however, a theory can completely be displaced by a newer and better theory. Phlogiston theory didn't get subsumed into better chemistry, but got tossed onto the dunghill of bad ideas. Plate tectonics is intermediate: the concept of "stable continents" went to the dunghill, but geosynclines and eugeosynclines and orogenic belts were incorporated into a fuller description and better explanations.
However, there are no cases of replacement by bald assertion or special revelation. That happens only in religious disputes. In every case in science, the new theory had put up operational definitions, prove its assumptions, and lay hard supporting evidence on the table. You don't have that.
Also, quite apart from your model not being relevant to nearly all the things that you claim for it, a computer model can never provide the sort of proof that you need. Global climate models are among the most complex and complete computer models out there, but they don't definitively prove anything. The fact that they work as well as they do helps bolster the claim that we understand how the climate works, but this is based on a huge amount of ground-proofing and testing, and extreme attention to programming algorithms that are as close to realistic as possible. Your problems with your model include that one modelled bug without genes, without recombination, without a reproducing population and multiple generations cannot say anything about evolution and natural selection. Contrary to your claims, the ontogeny of a bug is not relevant to the emergence of intelligence over the history of life. It has no relevance to the Cambrian explosion (whose facts you have wrong), or to a host of other things that you assert. A modelled insect cannot have a hippocampus when insects don't have that. Your bug is considerably constrained in its responses to the options that you programmed for it. You've labelled a lot of things with names without modelling the details of how those things work in the real world. One doesn't prove global climate change by having a model with an algorithm that has Global Mean Temperature simply rise X degrees for every additional Y ppm of CO2. As NoName said so aptly, WWI fighter planes are modeled very realistically in plastic, but that doesn't prove that the originals were made of plastic. You've got huge disconnects between reality and your model.
Quote | The definition of intelligence does not change by making a logical inference from it such as "the ability to learn from experience". |
As has been pointed out for a long time, that's not a necessary consequence of your "requirements for intelligence". Besides being so poorly written that they are hard to interpret, your requirements (addressable memory, motor control, "success/fail confidence level", and ability to guess) do not necessarily imply an ability to learn from experience. They include autofocus cameras and Neato robot vacuum cleaners, but exclude re-evaluating your life.
There's a small if controversial literature on broadened definitions of intelligence that you could use, starting with whether instinct counts as intelligence and moving on from there, but they are concerned with definitions, operational definitions, verifiable assumptions, quantitative measurements, and other hard evidence, all stuff that you just blow right by.
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