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EmergentSpirit favorited a video
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Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008) g...
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Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. For more, visit http://www.cmu.ed...
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EmergentSpirit favorited a video
(7 months ago)
As a teenager I worked at a gas station and as such I came in contact wi...
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As a teenager I worked at a gas station and as such I came in contact with all stripes of people. One customer of mine would often confront me about my religious tendencies as he was a Baptist preacher and the leader of a small group in a city not too far from my place of work. He used some scripture to try to impress me, and he also appealed to my scientific side after I revealed my intentions to become a scientist. He explained to me that he had received a MSc in physics at UCLA and that he decided that preaching "the word" was much more fulfilling of a calling than his work for his degree. I didn't know this at the time, so for any one who isn't familiar with the academy, as I wasn't at the time, a master's degree in physics generally means two things: a job in industry (to develop new tools as in MRI say, or the like) or a failed attempt at a PhD and early graduation because the professors didn't like your work. At first I have to say I would have guessed the former. He was a sensible person and he seemed like a hard worker and reasonably bright. But when he attempted to square the mysteries of nature with his justification for joining a seminary, had I understood the workings of university life as I do now, I would have opted for the latter.
He justified his seeking religious devotion with the idea that the coming about of life is so improbable that it would only take a creator to make its essential molecular elements. He further quantified his rational and gave me some extremely small probability figures that any nonscientist would consider impressive to say the least. I still remember, nevertheless, being unimpressed as I still understood, despite any naivete, that these ideas in no way justified specifically the truth claims of Evangelical Christianity or even of Christian theism in general. As Christopher Hitchens explains, the jump from deism of the sort my physics/preacher friend was trying to make to theism is more than difficult and we have very few positive reasons to do so. I had this feeling despite any real eduction to back my position. These hunches scientists call a first approximation, the gut feeling you get when you are suspicious about anything.
This video I think address this intuitive contradiction among many other issues. Predictions of probability require some foreknowledge of sample space on all scales. As is the case with coins we have some intuition of probability. There are only two possible states: heads and tails. We feel right when we say there is a "50/50" chance that it will or will not land on heads. Now take this idea and try to reconcile it with the probability of life's coming about. An honest marriage of mathematics with biology still doesn't allow for us to finitely prestate all the possible outcomes of all organic molecules, let alone quanta in general. Certainly we do have some intuitive understanding of what is required to make life, but we have no way of limiting a prediction of probability even in the least.
This inability speaks to the heart of Kauffman's central thesis. Does anyone really think that even the most intelligent being, even an omniscient one, could reasonably state all possible outcomes of a group of atoms even to predict the fluid motion of a heart. Laplace was a genius in his time, but I don't think he grasped the awesome complexity that emergence obviously manifests, even with all foreknowledge of 6N dimensional space, when he suggested any ability to predict future events given certain molecular information (velocity, vector direction etc).
If we mean by natural law a compact description available before hand and afterwords of the regularities of a process, does anyone think there could be a natural law for the evolution of swimm bladders? I agree with Stuart in saying no. Natural law as given to us by god or Galileo will never be sufficient to give a whole account of consequences. Thus value and morality are available through this manifold mystery and unpredictability. I hope believers see that this is where most atheists derive principle-based morality rather than dictum-based morality as they suggest ought to the case. In the example of an abused women hiding in your house, you would never tell the truth and reveal her location to her husband if he asked. We know that moral principles themselves could change with good reason and that good reason is the only tool to do so. Thus if we have good reasons to state anything, we can do so with more confidence than any "pronouncement" by any supposed "authority." Thus the only way to suggest the most probable outcome of anything is to offer supportive evidence and not to suggest that one or a group of few people say so "and thus it is so." We know that if "it is so" it is a not likely true because one person or a group of people are less likely to be able to predict sufficiently anything, let alone ideas as complex as creation, morality, or ethics.
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