That is reasonable and what I believe also. I don’t even like the word magic, people use it when they don’t understand how something works.

“One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.” – Robert Heinlein

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke



A good point and what I am stating is that energy itself is needed to order a disordered system for a reason. I think of energy as being able to order a system because it contains consciousness (or information). I look at the quantum experiments as showing that consciousness is behind the energy, causing the collapse of a probabilistic wave into an ordered and discrete state or particle. I can see energy having the same ordering function with systems more complex than just an atom, photon, etc.



That is interesting so I am looking into it. I have always thought of time as relating to a position in space or as our perception as we move through space. It would be related to a snapshot of what we can comprehend at each point in space. Time seems to pass as our position in space changes. If you move to a spot on Earth where you have been before, you are not in the same space since the entire universe is in motion. The Earth/solar system/sun/galaxy/stars are continually moving into a different part of space with differing particles/energies at each point. Everything is in motion, unless you are at absolute zero, where even atoms show little to no movement, but even then the surrounding space is in motion. Time is related to speed, at least as relative to another object moving at a different speed through space.

Absolute zero: “Absolute zero is the lowest possible temperature. It is the point at which the atoms of a substance transmit no thermal energy - they are completely at rest. It is zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, which translates to -273.15 degrees Celsius or -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.” – physics.about.com

Someone may find this link interesting. It is talking about the arrow of time, quantum gravity, and wave function collapse.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/ ... our-heads/



Maybe it is Magic? This is a question that would be impossible to answer but it might be due to differing forces applied to the system, which change whatever underlying force is causing the Phi ratio to manifest.

I got interested in 1.618 and Fibonacci when I was trading stocks, options, and futures. I used technical analysis but came across the works of R.N. Elliot and his “Elliot Waves”. It seemed charts of stock action had a 5 up, 3 down fractal quality. If you take that ratio, it is not exactly 1.618 but is 1.666 but we are also using round numbers. We also should assume the effects of social mood on advance/declines of markets, which is a force in itself.

Elliot’s work was advanced decades later by Robert Prechter and AJ Frost (as well as others). Prechter wrote a book on Phi in nature but I can’t recall the name and I don’t have it anymore.

Here is a site with a few resources listed: http://www.goldennumber.net/books/

And a bit more info: http://www.goldennumber.net/golden-ratio-history/



Here is a little more on the double slit paradox.

“Though the reaction of the physics community to Einstein’s photons was, in a word, rejection, they were not just pig-headed. Light was proven to be a spread-out wave. Light displayed interference. A stream of discrete particles could not do that. Recall our discussion of interference in chapter 4: Light coming through a single narrow slit illuminates a screen more or less uniformly. Open a second slit, and a pattern of light and dark bands appears whose spacing depends on the separation of the two slits. At those dark places, wave crests from one slit arrive together with wave troughs from the other. Waves from one slit thus cancel waves from the other. Interference demonstrates that light is a wave spread out over both slits.

In chapter 4 we mentioned that the argument that tiny bullets could not cause interference was not airtight. Might they not somehow deflect each other to form the bright and dark bands? That loophole in the argument has been closed. Now that we know how much energy each photon carries, we can know how many photons are in a beam of a given intensity. We see interference with light so dim, so low intensity, that only one photon is present in the apparatus at a time. Choosing to demonstrate interference, something explicable only in terms of waves, you could demonstrate light to be a widely spread-out wave. However, by choosing a photoelectric experiment, you could demonstrate the opposite: that light was not a spread-out wave, but rather a stream of tiny compact objects. There seems to be an inconsistency.

From Quantum Enigma:

“Though the paradoxical nature of light disturbed Einstein, he clung to his photon hypothesis. He declared that a mystery existed in Nature and that we must confront it. He did not pretend to resolve the problem. And we do not pretend to resolve it in this book. The mystery is still with us one hundred years later. Later chapters focus on the implication of our being able to choose to establish either of two contradictory things. The mystery extends beyond physics to the nature of observation. It’s the quantum enigma. Far-out speculations are seriously proposed today by distinguished experts in quantum physics.”

Rosenblum, Bruce; Kuttner, Fred. Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness (p. 64). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

And a box experiment:

“To display the quantum enigma, it is not necessary to tell how our box pairs are prepared. However, since we’ve already spoken of wavefunctions, we will describe the preparation. After that, however, we will display the quantum enigma telling only what you would actually see. We will describe the box-pairs experiment, without mentioning quantum theory, or wavefunctions, without even mentioning waves. Here’s how the atoms were put into the box pairs. Any wave can be reflected. A semitransparent mirror reflects part of a wave and allows the rest to go through. A glass windowpane, for example, allows some light through and reflects some. At the glass, the wavefunction of each individual photon splits.

Part of the photon wavefunction is reflected and part is transmitted. We can also have a semitransparent mirror for atoms. It splits an atom’s wavefunction into two wave packets. One packet goes through, and another is reflected. The arrangement of mirrors and boxes in figure 7.4 allows for the trapping of the two parts of an atom’s wavefunction in a pair of boxes. We send in a single atom at a known speed and close the doors of the boxes when the wavefunction packets are inside the boxes. After that, each part of the wavefunction bounces back and forth in its box. In figure 7.4 we show the wavefunction and waviness at three successive times.

We know there is one, and only one, atom in each box pair because we observed an atom and sent one into each box pair. These days, with the proper tools, we can see and deal with individual atoms and molecules. With a scanning tunneling microscope, for example, we can pick up and put down, single atoms.

Holding an atom in a box without disturbing its wavefunction would be tricky, but it’s certainly doable. Dividing the wavefunction of an atom into well-separated regions is accomplished in every actual interference experiment with atoms. Capturing the atoms in physical boxes is actually not needed for our demonstration. A defined region of space would be enough. We like to think of each region defined by a box because it’s more like the shell game. We can then consider the atom sitting there waiting for us to choose what to do with it, rather than have the atom zip through a two-slit diaphragm on its way to the detection screen.

From here on, the description of our box-pairs experiment will not mention wavefunctions, or waves at all. We just tell what you would actually see. We describe quantum-theory-neutral observations. By doing this we emphasize that the quantum enigma arises directly from experimental observations.
You are presented with large number of box pairs. (They were prepared as we described above, but for the demonstration of the enigma, you need not know anything of the preparation.) Position a box pair in front of a screen on which an impacting atom would stick. Open a narrow slit in each box, at about the same time. An atom hits the screen. Repeat this with many identically positioned box pairs. You find that atoms cluster in some regions of the screen, but avoid other regions. The pattern is the same as that shown previously in figure 7.2 for a pair of slits. Each atom followed a rule allowing it to land in certain regions and forbidding it from landing in other regions.

Now repeat this procedure with a new set of box pairs. This time have a different spacing between the boxes of each pair. You find the regions where the atoms clustered are spaced differently. The larger the spacing between the boxes of a pair, the smaller is the spacing between the places where atoms land. We illustrate this with figure 7.5. Each and every atom followed a rule that depends on the spacing of its box pair. Each atom therefore had to “know” its box-pair spacing.

Clearly, the experiment we just described is an interference experiment, like the two-slit experiment, and we’ll now call it an “interference experiment.” But we did not use any property of waves. Something of each atom had to come from each box because where atoms landed depended on the box-pair spacing. This interference experiment establishes that each atom had been a spread-out thing, in both boxes of its pair. (Nothing done outside the boxes while the atom is still inside has any effect at all.)”

Rosenblum, Bruce; Kuttner, Fred. Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness (pp. 92-93). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.



I do not agree with a young Earth view, I have argued with Christians who believe it but the basis of that view is genealogical. I have even argued against it based on Genesis 1 by using Exegesis (an explanation or critical interpretation of a text). Looking at ancient Hebrew and the meaning of days as ages or time spans is a common defense. This is well grounded by many Biblical scholars using the study of days/weeks/years being variable because God is outside time. A day is as a thousand years to God, to paraphrase one verse.
People can believe a 6000 year Earth based on genealogy and a day in Genesis as a literal 24 hour rotation of Earth but reading it in Hebrew and what is formed on what day would make a rotational day sound non-sensical. It seems I disagree with both sides on many things.

I believe the widely held view is still that Homo Sapiens are approximately 200,000 years old or less. With such a short time span compared to the age of the Earth, a discrepancy of a few hundred thousand years can be argued as not significant if we look at dating methods.

It also believed that the first civilizations sprang up from 3000-4000BC. This includes not only large cities with governmental and other high structure but agriculture. Some date Sumer back to 6000-8000BC and this just shows the variability in dating techniques.

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/pla ... oryid=ab25

“In about 3200 BC the two earliest civilizations develop in the region where southwest Asia joins northeast Africa. Great rivers are a crucial part of the story. The Sumerians settle in what is now southern Iraq, between the mouths of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Egypt develops in the long narrow strip of the Nile valley.”

We could discuss errors of carbon dating as well as radiometric dating. I will just list a few on radiometric dating. Carbon dating only works for organic material and is well known to have major issues. The first is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is a long and technical article but worth looking at. We also have to remember that radioactive decay has only been studied for a hundred years (give or take) when a lot of variables have been fairly stable such as EM, solar output, gravitation, etc.

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/dating2.html

“Most scientists today believe that life has existed on the earth for billions of years. This belief in long ages for the earth and the existence of life is derived largely from radiometric dating. These long time periods are computed by measuring the ratio of daughter to parent substance in a rock and inferring an age based on this ratio. This age is computed under the assumption that the parent substance (say, uranium) gradually decays to the daughter substance (say, lead), so the higher the ratio of lead to uranium, the older the rock must be. Of course, there are many problems with such dating methods, such as parent or daughter substances entering or leaving the rock, as well as daughter product being present at the beginning.”

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research ... nsDec.html

“Radioactive decay rates, thought to be unique physical constants and counted on in such fields as medicine and anthropology, may be more variable than once thought.
A team of scientists from Purdue and Stanford universities has found that the decay of radioactive isotopes fluctuates in synch with the rotation of the sun's core.”

http://www.icr.org/article/isochron-dis ... heritance/

by Andrew A. Snelling (Phd in Geology, University of Sydney)

“New radioisotope data were obtained for ten rock units spanning the geologic record from the recent to the early Precambrian, five of these rock units being in the Grand Canyon area. All but one of these rock units were derived from basaltic magmas generated in the mantle. The objective was to test the reliability of the model and isochron “age” dating methods using the K-Ar, Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, and Pb-Pb radioisotope systems. The isochron “ages” for these rock units consistently indicated that the α-decaying radioisotopes (238U, 235U, and 147Sm) yield older “ages” than the β-decaying radioisotopes (40K, 87Rb). Marked discordances were found among the isochron “ages” yielded by these radioisotope systems, particularly for the seven Precambrian rock units studied. Also, the longer the half-life of the α- or β-decaying radioisotope, and/or the heavier the atomic weight of the parent radioisotope, the greater was the isochron “age” it yielded relative to the other α- or β-decaying radioisotopes respectively. It was concluded that because each of these radioisotope systems was dating the same geologic event for each rock unit, the only way this systematic isochron discordance could be reconciled would be if the decay of the parent radioisotopes had been accelerated at different rates at some time or times in the past, the α-decayers having been accelerated more than the β-decayers. However, a further complication to this pattern is that the radioisotope endowments of the mantle sources of basaltic magmas can sometimes be inherited by the magmas without resetting of the radioisotope “clocks” during ascent, intrusion, and extrusion in the earth’s crust. This is particularly evident in recent or young rocks.”

I'm disappointed that you have stooped to outright lies Murray sir. haha

Quick response regarding Richard Dawkins. If you have watched Mr Dawkins' other videos or television series, you will notice some sharp contrasts to the video produced by Mr Stein. I happily compare it to the type of journalism that Mr Massivedesign was a victim to when he gave a lengthy interview regarding shooting in the national forests and had 2 sentences in the resulting article.
Mr Dawkins appears flushed, flustered, and honestly a bit ill in the Stein show.
I would bet dollars to donuts that Dawkins' comments regarding interstellar seeding were given as one of many competing theories, but the result highly snipped to make him look goofy. I have heard him speak of this theory, and he has -always- included a bit that "even if this is how life arose in our solar system, it does nothing to satisfy our search because the ultimate question about life's origin remains unanswered."

When you realize that Mr Stein edited Mr Dawkins to discredit his viewpoint in the same way that the anti-2A people edit 2A people it should help you view that, uh, bushwhacking with a bit of a jaundiced eye.

I have been hoping to roust out our fellow philosophers. I'm interested in how people form their worldviews.

Have been busy with the preparations for the storm, building, cleaning, moving and the little one so haven't sat down for long enough to concentrate on the computer for the last few days.

Rehashing a little bit this morning.
Age of the Earth can be estimated by many different ways to around 4 and a half billion years, give or take a few hundred million. The reason for the "more or less" is because of the incredibly long span of time since the formation of the solar system, not because the science is shaky or uncertain.

The saltiness of the ocean
The ratio of daughter products to radioactive elements in solid samples
The brightness of the sun relative to its mass
Sedimentary buildup
Water and wind erosion
Tectonic plates lift/tilt
Comparing mountain ranges

The amount of time even one million years "means" is astounding to the human mind. For most of history and prehistory our species has lived short brutish lives, only very very rarely reaching an age to have the hair turn grey. Most of the comparisons of the age of the earth to any familiar system of time are truly meaningless to the casual observer because they are so far beyond our experience. It is similar to the effect large distances have on the mind... The weaknesses of the human mind in dealing with magnitudes of scale are well known by anyone who stares up in the night sky and realizes that the very nearest of those little points of light would is far enough away that it would take us almost 200,000 years to get there at 15,000 miles per hour.
The nearest! Daunting, to say the very least.
Years and decades and centuries and millennia - one more step and we are deep into prehistory; one more step and we're 100,000 years in the past. It takes another step, another factor of 10 to get back even one million years. A factor 10x again for ten million, then 10x longer again for 100 million, and 10 times that incredible number again to get to one billion. If you just skim through these words you won't get to "feel" the grandness of time and space. Image the slow washing of the salts from the ground, down the rivers and into the oceans, the water cycle, the slow erosion of the mountains and filling in of valleys, and the tectonic plates crushing together to slowly raise new mountain chains. We still see and measure the salts in our rivers as the groundwater leaches them out of the soils before joining the flow to the ocean to leave it there after the water is evaporated again to be carried over the land to wash some more out. The Colorado River is a particularly salty river on the PPM scale I think.
So the Earth has had an awesome amount of time to slosh elements, molecules, and compounds around in water. Chemistry works wonderfully even without the animation of life, and the little detail of our not knowing enough to be able to pinpoint the first self-replicating energy-seeking molecule in the vast soup of the oceans is not a sign of the theory being weak (seems to me.) Once a healthy colony of self-replicator energy seekers became established, life is off and running. How was it able to bridge some of the tough gaps in our knowledge? This information is in the gaps of our knowledge, so if the lack of our knowledge is evidence of divine intervention to others, then we reach a tautological end to the discussion. (Although I'm happy to keep chatting about it for sure. )
I would point to some of the amazing leaps in logic and experimental and accidental "studies" that have leapfrogged our species from wearing skins living in small clans to stepping out of a spacecraft onto the surface of the moon a few short years ago. Reading through books like "The Discoverers" and "Great Discoveries" kind of blows my mind when I read how some of our predecessors have been able to design, build, study and calculate... And the incredible intuitions and lucky breaks "we" received along the way.
I consider it this way... These things seem "lucky" and incredible and impossible because of the same concept as the grandness of time and space impress us. To James Clerk Maxwell, the calculations about electricity and magnetism were the result of a lot of time and effort... To those of us who have to SS&S every morning before heading off to earn an income to feed our families and keep shelter, we can't fully understand the great leaps that were available to the aristocratic and well-heeled folks who had a bent for studying at the breaking of the scientific revolution. James Clerk Maxwell is a Giant among the tribe of men. Newton, despite all his character and personality flaws could see relationships and mathematics in a way that elevates him to a super rare class of contributors towards our stepping out onto the surface of the moon.

I'm kind of going off the tracks here...

It would then seem to come down to the part that I find interesting... How and why some of us are satisfied with waiting for the gaps of knowledge to be filled by scientific theory and study, and others experience the reverential awe of nature in a way that accepts (insists on!) a supernatural grand designer.
I am not opposed to the idea at all - it's just not what I see when I try to contemplate the vastness of time and space.
When we calculate how precisely the 4 forces in nature had to be balanced for our universe to exist, I see that the universe exists and accept it thus. This is why we are here, because our universe has the material and forces that exist.
My disposition away from a personal god who designed the species the way they are and watches over us is not arrogance in any way shape or form... Quite the opposite.
I am humbled by what we are. By the fact that our laryngeal nerve travels from our brain, down our neck, into our chest around a major highway of blood flow and then back up to our larynx... this demonstrates to me the simplicity of our origins, not my arrogance. It also demonstrates to me our fragility. Tough and fragile all in one.

If you haven't watched the video posted previously in this thread about the laryngeal nerve, please do so with an open mind. It is a stunner.

I didn't skip this post- just took me some extra time to percolate the following :



That is quite an idea... I confess that this is the first time that I have thought about it, or even heard of it.
My initial response is to reject it for this reason - Energy is harnessed and used for evil purposes, thereby seeming to counter the notion of divinity.
Since this is such a new train of thought for me, please be patient with simplistic responses.

It may come down to my preconceived ideas of what a Grand Designer's purpose in creating the universe would be (Which is still heavily influenced by my religious upbringing and later disappointment in some of the quite horrid humans who practiced that religion around me.)

Tell me more about this consciousness in energy... For it seems quite unconscious to me, since it seems to follow laws, not create them. The whole idea of Grand Design(er) is that the consciousness that designed the Earth and universe and Us did so outside of the natural laws and order that we see around us. I ask with an open mind sir!
I am prejudiced against creation theory because of my experiences in life.... Not because I actually understand the birth of the universe.
My prejudice would not be nearly what it is if folks had answered my questions with "We don't know" more often than "because if you don't believe it, you will suffer in a burning lake of fire for eternity" when I was a wee lad.

I am eagerly looking forward to learning, Murray. :salute:

From the laryngeal nerve video, :38-:42

"Obviously a ridiculous detour; no engineer would EVER make a mistake like that."


You care to bet money on that?

No kidding...

That was one of my disagreements with the video. There was a purpose and a goal behind it, and I much prefer the raw data. I don't like spin.

It ruined the remainder of the video for me. Reminds me of a mayor at the podium telling the "good people of Upper Sanduskatiptaponty" how "officials in charge" will handle it so much better because, well, they're officials and all.

Clearly Dawkins has not actually worked with too many design engineers. As someone who does I can assure you I have seen much more stupid design elements. From a human perspective (not making statements for or against intelligent design theories) "Intelligent design" =/= "Common sense design" and it certainly doesn't mean "flawless design".

It boggles my mind how people can expect others to think they are of superior intelligence when they say doofus things like he did.

Nobody knows everything, and one's ignorant assumption can't be negated by their IQ score or status of their university degree.

He wasn't trying to impress with his IQ or degree... He has a belief system and he was trying to convince others to believe the same way. His fault is that he made an assumption, that in certain regards seems to be right on the money. It's not doofus... It is biased. (Unless we should look at all statements that show bias and call them all doofus?)

To me, this looks like getting lost on a detail rather than seeing the point. There are several people who I find disagreeable who I still hold in high regard, and can still respect. But even closer to the point- this isn't about Mr Dawkins, who despite a biased viewpoint, still is a brilliant and fearless man.

This is about an explanation of how and why a nerve that needs to be 4 to 5 inches long is actually 20 feet long in the giraffe, and similarly outstretched in other animals.
It is a graphically understandable explanation and demonstration of how the definition of "species" works for us because we are a species... and short-lived. Species are fluid... The Tree of Life is constantly growing/shrinking being pruned.

To make it about Mr Dawkins and his bias is to become sidetracked.
Because I am flawed I tend to give a lot of leeway to other flawed men before hating on them.

Define brilliant and fearless. When making assumptions that sound rather simpleton I lose brilliant and think arrogant.

I'm flawed. That's why I don't prefer to give praise to other flawed people pretending they are better because of their job title or a piece of paper.

Content good. Delivery poor. That's not being sidetracked.

We're discussing a man's flawed delivery and/or perceived personality flaws, the definitions of brilliant and fearless, his education and accomplishments- and you don't think we're sidetracked? Come on Dan.
In what way is he pretending to be better? It doesn't look at ALL to me like that. He is a professor, and he has a viewpoint. Are all professors pretending to be better than all non-professors? Is there any reason for an education beyond high school, other than to pretend that one is better than other people? Is there value in higher education? You are letting your dislike of a man sidetrack from the meaning of the presentation. Those are rhetorical questions, BTW. I assure you that the man knows one hell of a lot more than non-biological science experts on the topic of biological science. That doesn't make him automatically correct on everything that he has to say on this or any other topic of course.

I could type out a list of his books, papers, speeches, degrees and other accomplishments - but that would be a continuation of being sidetracked by a man and away from the implication of a laryngeal nerve stretching 20 feet when the physical needs of the nerve are 4 to 5 inches.

Maybe there's a good reason for it other than the slow and gradual evolution of individual animals over hundreds of millions of years. I don't know the answer, but it seems to explain the strangeness of it well.

So... We've hashed out how Mr Dawkins presented poorly. I've agreed. Talking about this particular man's flaws doesn't seem to have further value to add to our philosophical discussion.
Can we get back to the implications of the design vs blind evolution of species?

Murray has some great points regarding the gaps that must be jumped in the step from non-living matter to living matter. There's a mystery.

There's an excellent book by Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box that covers a lot of ground in why there is such a strong belief against evolution from simplest to most complex. I have it and partially read it, but my education level doesn't permit me to really grasp the details of the biochemistry.
I like to grok a subject... Biology is amazingly complex, so much so that an expert can have no more than a 1% mastery of all that we as humans have unraveled about the mysteries of life.

You made quite a bit out of two small posts by a blue collar nobody. The video was brought up again as a must watch....so I did. Again. It presents something 'cool'....something 'oh wow, that's odd'....but doesn't really say much else.

His entire argument in that video---a video that someone here reminded everyone reading to go watch again---is that intelligent design would NOT engineer something as "ridiculous" as that nerve, and its varying length depending on the creature being looked at.

My argument, based on this discussion, is that intelligent design is 1) not always the most efficient 2) not always even the most 'simple' or 'obvious' and 3) very much many times 'ridiculous' in its execution.


"why is it that way?"


"Well, it's the way we've always done it."


That proves nothing, really. Dawkins appears on the surface to have much disdain for the entire argument of 'creationism' but I'd need to investigate further to put my points in proper Waguns verbiage.


I'm agnostic, with no opinion either way, really. This thread is an enjoyable read.

Agreed, we are sidetracked. I apologize for having a part in it. I meant my comment to be more of a comic relief than a genuinely critical comment about Dawkins. I meant that to be the end of it. I regret that it wasn't. He made a bias comparison that we all know is flawed (engineers aren't perfect, I know because I am one and am a long way from perfect whether we are talking professionally or otherwise). Who isn't bias toward their own viewpoints/theories? That doesn't necessarily make their contributions to their field of study less valuable. Again I apologize for derailing the discussion.

Oh, it's not you. It's me. I should know my place and stick with single syllable discussions about DURR.....sorry to the masses.