**Ahh; interesting stuff, indeed.
--- Emlyn <emlyn@one.net.au> wrote:
> John ** Marlow wrote:
> > **
> > --- Damien Broderick
> > <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > > At 06:33 PM 13/01/01 -0800, john marlow wrote
> (or
> > > possibly trolled, it's
> > > hard to tell by this point)
>
> You must not confuse the beginning with the process.
> The initial state is
> mostly unrelated to following states after a certain
> amount of steps in an
> interative process like this. The question of how it
> came to be is
> interesting; the beginning of things, if there can
> be said to be one, is
> shrouded in mystery (hopefully some of our
> astronomical friends can expound
> apon this a little, it's pretty fun).
**Speaking of which--cosmology of course is coming
apart at the seams lately. All those nice tidy
(well-accepted) theories blown to tiny bits. I love
it.
**Regarding cosmogony (if anyone out there is up on
this): Is it still thought credible that Big Bang was
smaller offshoot of larger event splitting ten
dimensional universe into six and four-d unis? Just
curious.
>
> It's a really dumb process; inherently lacking in
> intelligence. It's one of
> the great wonders of the universe that we would
> develop from that; however,
> it is not at all implausible.
>
> A really very interesting thing to note about
> natural selection is that it
> works better than you would imagine. I learned this
> after working on some
> material from a book called "genetic programming"
> (can't remember the author
> or anything else, it was borrowed from the library).
> It turns out that, in
> software mimicking the process of natural selection,
> you can evolve highly
> ordered solutions or systems (even software) from a
> surprisingly small
> number of generations. What you can do in an
> afternoon on a single-processor
> pentium is quite astounding, and un-intuitive.
> Perhaps the world could be
> created in 7 days after all; it'd probably require a
> P4 though.
**Yeah; some interesting stuff going on right now. But
of course, WE intelligently PROGRAMMED the computers
to do this within parameters established by us.
>What do you mean by "The intelligence may BE the
system"? How?
**How? I don't know how. It could all be the
collective experience of a single consciousness.
Something like Shintoism (later repackaged as The
Force).
> Do you
mean
that the physical laws of the universe somehow embody
an intelligence,
that
there is some extra thing which guides their
(assumedly capricious)
application?
**I believe (note use of word "believe") that at the
very least, something consciously determined the rules
by which the game would be played, and then set it
into motion. Whether that something is still
around..(?) Why not?
That's the same as assuming God, as far as I can see.
**Hmm. You wanna call that God? Okay. God is in the
details. When people say God, I think of this big
muscular bearded guy pointing fingers and hurling
thunderbolts. That I don't buy.
>> **Discussion broadened, or so I thought. "Angelic?"
> Hardly. (Hey that's religion, ain't it?) There
remains
> no proof we evolved from primordial pond scum, which
> in turn evolved from nothing. doesn't that sound a
> LITTLE unlikely..?
>Well, we came from somewhere. A fairly mainstream
view is that it is
massively unlikely, in fact; however, there's a big
universe out there,
and
a long, long time; on that scale, it becomes more
probable that
somewhere,
somewhen, this kind of improbable event could occur.
**AACCKKK!!!
>The really big jump, I think, is from non-replacing
chemical soup to
replicators.
**That first step's a dandy, all right.
> I'd like to hear some pontificating on this from
someone
knowledgable, if any of you are reading this.
**Ditto.
> After the replicators
exist,
however, it all becomes a lot more stolid, marching
forward from
generation
to generation. Now, from pond scum to us, that's
pretty unlikely, but
so is
any state some billions (?) of years after the initial
state of any
complex
iterative system. From pond scum to something which in
no way resembles
it's
origins, that is incredibly probable. From pond scum
to pond scum,
that's
unimaginable.
>On the other hand, the probability does not come into
play. By the
anthropic
principle, we are going to be us, intelligent life,
because what else
can we
be? If we had never existed, that might say something
about the
probability
of us existing. Our existence, however, does not say
anything other
than
that we are possible. It is not possible to estimate a
probability; in
turn,
our origin does not have to be probable. Only
possible.
**Double AAACCKKK!!!
>
This doesn't really explain anything; there is a whiff
of trolldom in
the
air.
**No; you know what it is, really? I've been spending
too much time around idiots, and then I tuned in to
this place. Perhaps I'm overcompensating.
> What do you mean?
More than handwaving about something greater
than
ourselves; let us know how you really think we came
about. What's the
mechanism?
**I don't know. And on this issue of original origin
(can there even be such a thing?) I'm not sure WHAT I
mean in its entirety--but I DO mean, as a part of it,
that This Place (Life, The Universe, and Everything)
is not happenstance. I will never believe that. Can I
prove it? Of course not--not can anyone prove it is.
**How can we even go about it properly when our minds
cannot even grasp the concepts involved? For
example--when and what was the beginning? There had to
be one--yet a beginning is, quite clearly, a logical
impossibility. There had to be something before that,
and so on... Same with the extent of the universe.
**We must become more than we are to find out. That is
what this is about, yes?
john marlow
>Emlyn
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:19 MDT