The book has finally arrived. And you have thirty days of, especially,  doing Nothing at all ( since there isn’t much that you do anyways ). Forty pages a day. You do not know if it is possible. Lets See …

Ian Musgrave has a site which ought to place quite a few issues related to Abiogenesis into perspective.Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics,and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations

You have never really bougbt the notion of a supernatural creator putting life ( as we know it – complex, diverse et al ) into motion consciously as a simple act. You do not really have a problem with Evolution as it has been generally laid out. The Creationist / Evolutionist / Intelligent Design / Natural Selection debates have never featured in your mindspace so far. You do not wish to peruse any creationist literature. “Intelligent Design”, for you, is successful natural design. It is just that you would not like to think of natural selection pressures being blind as dear Mr Dawkins would like to put it.

Dumb Questions : In relation to the last point above, how does Natural Selection itself evolve? Does it? Any studies / views on that count? You would not be content with the notion of a meaningless mechanistic process since it implies a cetain kind of inevitability that makes you think of the Anthropic Principle and its implications. In particular, you would not feel happy with the hypothesised necessary fine-tuning of initial conditions that gives rise to life as you know it. It seems needless to emphasise that if something were different by a certain degree then you might not be here at all. Does this mean that the only form of life that is possible in any arbitrary set of conditions, that may derive itself from a given initial beginning, is the carbon-based oxygen-dependent life? It would appear more reasonable to state that if the universe were any different, then life itself may or may not have been different.

Confession : You would feel happiest if the first replicative autopoetic life-form/process were to be seen as a kind of chaotic attractor that, once established, extends itself to develop the kind of complexity and simililarity within diversity that we see.

Ad Hoc : I suppose it would not really have been a bad idea to let ID be part of science curriculum, especially after having intoduced Darwin effectively - prefaced with something like ‘As a matter of curiosity, the question does arise for Humans, seeing the complexity of Nature; whether there is a conscious design behind it all. The theory of Intelligent Design is derived from Religious Sentiment and is not a Scientific perspective. Legend hast it that …

I am led to wonder how students would respond to something like this – not sure if it would, at worst, create a rational basis for NOMA.

The Origin of Life

 Miller-Urey Experiment.

Stupid Questions : Is there any fossilised ( or any other form ) of evidence of the first types of cells ( or protocells or the earliest traces of the necessary organisation of molecules ) / life on Earth? If not, is there any specific reason why not ( if you are able to find relics of slightly more evolved species ) ? Did the fact that life subsequently evolved to cellular form ( as we recognise it ) necessarily terminate the process by which life arose from non-life? And at the same time destroyed the earliest evidence ( or rendered it unrecognisable )?

Stromatolites.

Kurt Gödel’s Ontological Argument

Fractal.

Godel’s Argument? You concur that it is a little difficult to assimilate comprehensively. But then there is nothing that stops you from going over it again, sitting up with a paper and pencil …

Dawkins

This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment’s thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference.

On what reason-able basis does Mr Dawkins assert that a Universe with a God would be a completely different Universe from one without ( as far as our perceptions and possible limits of knowledge are concerned )? And what would that difference be? How, on earth, would we be in any position to register that difference? He goes on to add …

God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science.

And this above, is what Mr Dawkins calls difference? Mr Dawkins would have us believe ( God Bless His Soul ;), that the only kind of universe in which / out of which God could exist is that in which said Entity would be required to satisfy the exacting demands of Science. Now, that is interesting …

Maybe Mr Dawkins misses the point that a lot of theists seem to imply – the fact that Richard Dawkins exists, has been able to do what he has done and now, says what he is saying above – is living testimony to the desired “spectacular demonstration of powers”. What more could you ask for? ( Who was it who said that God Does Play Dice ? ;)

You note that you need to get down to looking at the “Ultimate Boeing 747” Argument subsequently.

A few questions and then some replies …

#1

#2

Deconstructing The Bang

Is Religion a Spandrel? : Horgan says,

Just because a trait originated as a spandrel does not mean that it never acquires any use or value. Our capacity for science is arguably a spandrel, a byproduct of our innate curiosity and compulsion for finding patterns in the flux of nature. And yet science has proved to be an enormously powerful method for understanding and controlling over nature.

And of course, if a spandrel is defined as something intrinsically purposeless and unnecessary, then everything is really a spandrel, including humanity, life and the entire universe.

While on the subject, you just happen to mention that you are in the process of Deconstructing the Big Bang with Brian Greene.

A common misconception is that the big bang provides a theory of cosmic origins. It doesn’t. The big bang is a theory … that delineates cosmic evolution from a split second after what happened to bring the universe into existence, but it says nothing at all about time zero itself. And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged, or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all.

Darwin’s God :

If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

The God Experiments :

Suppose scientists found a way to give us permanent, blissful, mystical self-transcendence. Would we want that power? Before Timothy Leary touted LSD as a route to profound psychological and spiritual insight, the CIA was studying its potential as a brainwashing agent. Persinger warns that in the wrong hands, a truly precise, powerful God machine, capable of implanting beliefs or signals that seem to come straight from the Almighty, could be the ultimate mind-control device. “Just think of the practical impact,” he says. “People will die for this.”

Horganism : ( Link may expire )

I left the fellowship mightily impressed by the intelligence, courage, passion and integrity of Dawkins’s assault on religion. I have intellectual disagreements with him, though. In The God Delusion, Dawkins embraces the tautological anthropic principle and untestable multi-universe theories as potential explanations of the riddle of existence.

Richard, substituting pseudo-scientific creation theories for religious ones is not a step forward! Better to accept that some mysteries may lie forever beyond our ken.

You have spent nights with these figures developing and enveloping your dreamscape universes.

Is it possible to conceive of Space sans the dimension of Time?

Think about it – the moment you make space for space, it is sustainable ( within your perception ) / sensible only if temporal. Yes, stupid question, you know. Nevertheless, Never Mind.

Tesseract.

You read this and do not wish to hold yourself back from imagining Black Holes as some kind of entropic attractors. Yes, you are strangely attracted too …

Greene has this to say, at the end of his chapter on symmetries in nature …

Physicists also believe these theories are on the right track because, in some hard-to-describe way, they feel right, and ideas of symmetry are essential to this feeling. It feels right that no location in the universe is somehow special compared to any other, so physicists have confidence that translational symmetry should be among the symmetries of nature’s laws. It feels right that no particular constant-velocity motion is somehow special compared with any other, so physicists have confidence that special relativity, by fully embracing symmetry among all constant-velocity observers, is an essential part of nature’s laws. It feels right,moreover, that any observational vantage point – regardless of the possibly accelerated motion involved- should be as valid as any other, and so physicists believe that general relativity, the simplest theory incorporating this symmetry, is among the deep truths governing natural phenomena. And, as we shall shortly see, the theories of the three forces other than gravity – electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces – are founded on other, somewhat more abstract but equally compelling principles of symmetry. So the symmetries of nature are not merely consequences of nature’s laws. From our modern perspective, symmetries are the foundation from which laws spring.

And from here, you move onto the necessity for hypothesising the  Higgs’ Field  and  Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking.

You are made to think of a glass of water with partially melted ice-cubes. That is all that you have now. You have not observed its past. You do not know where it came from. With your experience of the passage of time and the nature of events, you would assume, quite reasonably, that the partially melted ice came from fully-formed cubes in the past.Entropy is considered to be a measure of the possibility of events occuring. It is assumed that disorder is more probable than order, in the absence of any work being done to enforce order. Order requires work and release of energy that is not useful in any way, which, in its own way, compensates for itself, entropically speaking.

The laws of nature are symmetrical with respect to time. Moving towards the past is equivalent to moving into the future. Entropy, mathematically speaking, is the same. That is, given the statement that from any given moment in time, entropy can either stay the same or increase, regardless of whether you are going back or forward.

Probabilistically speaking, the question is, where do you assume the partially melted ice-cubes came from? Re-phrasing the question – where do you think the partially formed ice-cubes came from?

You think of God, whose nature was to be revealed to Man, but not his consciousness ( If it could, you would be a God too. And if you were a God, all that would be revealed to you, would be your own self-consciousness. : ). Do you expect your consciousness to be perceptible, susceptible to analysis, and necessarily predictable at the level of the neurons that constitute you? Would you, reasonably, be able to attribute a definition to it that would stand to test?

• If the question above be meaningless or devoid of any form of sense whatever, then, logically, the “hypothesis” of God cannot be considered a Scientific Hypothesis, and therefore, warrants no Scientific E/Inquiry.

Note : Think of Ants and Ant Colonies, if you like. The question remains the same.

Mobius Strip with Ants : MC Escher

• If the question has meaning, then any pursuit of God, scientifically speaking, is a non-starter. You are back at the above position.

Note : Would it not make sense if one were to ( scientifically ) comment upon a God-like consciousness ( within / without / of the Universe ), if and only if one were able to make out how one’s own works? Till such time you actually have a handle on the latter, you sure as hell can’t pry the lid off the former. And then, to pose another question, if you were to have have aged without human contact, would you have any notion of your consciousness? Could you begin to talk of yourself, without a measure of the Other?

… you await the release and availability of Douglas Hofstadter’s new book : I am a Strange Loop. Yes, you have read and treasured most of his other work. Metamagical Themas is strongly recommended.

… Or, at least, a science that explicitly defines the boundaries of that which may be known.You would be well advised to read the following …

Darwinian Fundamentalism : Stephen Jay Gould, New York Review of Books

Daniel Dennett’s 1995 book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, presents itself as the ultras’ philosophical manifesto of pure adaptationism. Dennett explains the strict adaptationist view well enough, but he defends a miserly and blinkered picture of evolution in assuming that all important phenomena can be explained thereby. His limited and superficial book reads like a caricature of a caricature—for if Richard Dawkins has trivialized Darwin’s richness by adhering to the strictest form of adaptationist argument in a maximally reductionist mode, then Dennett, as Dawkins’s publicist, manages to convert an already vitiated and improbable account into an even more simplistic and uncompromising doctrine. If history, as often noted, replays grandeurs as farces, and if T.H. Huxley truly acted as “Darwin’s bulldog,” then it is hard to resist thinking of Dennett, in this book, as “Dawkins’s lapdog.”

It could be construed as a sad day when you have Mr Dawkins dismissing Mr Gould’s NOMA, sans challenge, the latter no longer around to defend himself.

Science and the Unknowable : Martin Gardner, Skeptical Inquirer

You gave up following what was current with Physics and Cognitive Science some years back, simply because of an acquaintance with Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. It was disturbing enough, though specified only for formal arithmetic. You felt that there was more to it, regardless of the constraint. Instead of focussing on Completeness, you found yourself attuned to Consistency.It is with no small sense of pleasure that you find your intuitions clarified and set out explicitly, in Tarski’s Indefinability Theorem.

Greene makes a wonderful case for revising your notions of what gravity and acceleration are all about. You wonder why he felt the need for using something as odd as Newton’s Bucket to begin his exposition of the weave, weft and warp of spacetime. And then, you stop wondering and start grinning idiotically.Aside : You are not surprised at the implication that if you were to submit yourself, sans resistance, to Gravity, all you shall experience is untrammelled levity.

Is It Godelian? : That if skepticism be an inviolable tenet of Science, then, for reasons of self-consistency, it ought to be reserved for its own perception of itself. And, if that be the case, it cannot be complete?

If you need to call a spade a spade, you deserve to be clobbered on the head with it.

You are grateful to this site for providing you with links to Mr Dawkin’s other works and a download of his book – The Blind Watchmaker.

Is this to deny that living things obey the laws of physics? Certainly not. There is no reason to think that the laws of physics are violated in living matter. There is nothing supernatural, no ‘life force’ to rival the fundamental forces of physics. It is just that if you try to use the laws of physics, in a naive way, to understand the behaviour of a whole living body, you will find that you don’t get very far. The body is a complex thing with many constituent parts, and to understand its behaviour you must apply the laws of physics to its parts, not to the whole. The behaviour of the body as a whole will then emerge as a consequence of interactions of the parts.

Nothing wrong with the above paragraph. In fact, you would have liked to use it yourself. The only point is that the behaviour of the body as a whole, emerges, outside of itself, to someone else as a consequence of its parts.

Aside : While the Watchmaker gains his vision, the eyes that evolve to see, do not ever learn what they do and why.

Note on Hierarchial Reductionism : Each layer of the Hierarchy has its own explanation. You do not discount that. The question is – is it possible to mathematically prove the necessity for such organisation along hierarchies, to achieve an arbitrary level of autonomous behaviour and complexity?