Saturday, February 24, 2024

Someone Writes To Me

 that Simps says that I write like old people have sex.   

As if he'd know.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Maybe I Should Give Up Hate Mail Posts For The Rest of Lent

But they're sooooo easy to write!

SOMEONE APPARENTLY WANTS
me to fight the Darwin wars today, so soon after I'd thought about limiting myself to a major post a month repeating what I've pointed out which Darwin's Defenders have never yet once addressed honestly.  

I'm still sick from whatever it is - Covid test was negative, no idea what it is, so I'll do something easy that I haven't done so recently.  I'm going to bring up the more basic level of materialist nonsense, that our thoughts, our consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of material structures in our brains.  I think that like so much of materialist, atheist, scientistic lore, it suffers from a mistaken belief that a static, abstract model of something can be made to account for the most basic phenomena of our experience which is the opposite of static and abstract.  Maybe most telling of so many such materialist, atheist, scientistic models, this one is remarkably set apart from one of the most basic aspects of our experience of consciousness, that it happens in time. You could only hold with any of the various models if you refuse to acknowledge how fast things happen in our experience, when our experience of consciousness has to be that part of "nature" against which such models are compared to test their adequacy.  Instead, materialst-atheist ideology insists that it is consciousness that must be fit into the confines of their ideology, not the various and inadequate  schemes they come up with to explain it in materialist terms.

One of the more basic problems with that is in the question of novel ideas, new to us and new to, perhaps, the entire previous line of life on Earth. Certainly the majority of ideas that organisms on Earth came up with had to, at some point, be entirely unprecedented in living beings.   How would our brains know how to construct the right material structures to give rise to the right ideas for us to have any hope of knowing or navigating reality external to our bodies and brains.  How our brains could construct, in real time, the right structures to give rise to new and novel thoughts in order for us to act appropriately to, for example, keep us from being involved in fatal accidents.  That is something that happens to each of us pretty much starting with getting out of bed in the morning and starting to navigate around the house, seeing things we couldn't have expected to see, encountering new things.  Listening to the news or reading it, etc.

Remember any proposed mechanism for our bodies making the right structures to give rise to those novel ideas has to account for how we experience that happening in time, which is realistically estimated to be almost immediate. Any proposed biological action would have to happen that fast or it is not credible as an explanation.

In previous brawls with materialists about this, that would pretty much take care of one of their materialist creator gods, "DNA."  The time which it would take for DNA to come up with a sufficiently novel and appropriate string of amino acids to form a protein (what DNA "does," though not without an extremely complex and largely unknown series of cellular actions).  Structures WHICH WOULD THEN HAVE TO BE BENT INTO THE CORRECT SHAPE FOR IT TO PERFORM THAT FUNCTION would take too many minutes to account for our experience of having, using and confirming the validity of new ideas.  A car you don't expect to see coming at you, for example.  And that proposed solution would merely force the question of how "DNA" would know how to do that.  The same thing can be said for the other atheist creator gods within our brains that would have to know:

1. That it needed to make a novel structure to give rise to the right idea in the brain before the materialist model of consciousness would allow the information to do that to be present in the brain;

2. What it needed to make in order to give rise to the right idea in the near instantaneous time that such ideas arise in our conscious experience.  

3. How to make that correct structures and not the wrong ones to account for the efficacy of the hundreds if not thousands of novel ideas we deal with to get through the day;

4. How it could know that it had made the correct structure and not the wrong one by mistake since, in that case, only the wrong one would be present in the brain.

The other creator gods of atheism that were brought up, such as "natural selection" are even less credible because "natural selection" as it is imagined doesn't exist within our brains, it is supposed to be a force of nature that is always actively trying to kill us.  Though that would get me into the philosophical incompetence of the idea of natural selection and its scientific deficiencies, exactly what I didn't feel like going into again right now.  

One of the most common resorts of materialist-atheist ideology, "probability," certainly doesn't work to step in and rescue the materialist, atheist, scientistic model of consciousness because any given probability would almost certainly not allow for the consistent effective correctness of what goes on to give rise to successful ideas, I'd think if it were possible to tease out a plausible probabilistic calculation, it would soon start making the vanishingly small, generally abstract calculations of the improbability of our life-supporting universe seem unimpressively  small by comparison.  You would have to account for the absence of all of those perhaps quadrillilions of possible outcomes which couldn't show up much or our very existences would be swamped by them.   I've got some real questions about the way that probability is imagined as applying to the real world.

I am struck that those improbabilities that gave rise to desperate materialist, atheist, scientistic physicists and cosmologists inventing jillions and jillions of universes to make it go away would have to become ever more remote from the facts of the observable universe we know something of the more elaborate the phenomena and experiences of life that would have to be accounted for under any complete theory of the improbability of our reality being real.  I think that the reality of our lives and consciousness makes the idea that material probability accounts for it to be far less credible than intelligent design is, though I don't think that science as it exists now could deal with that question, either.  

I don't remember which scientist it was who said that a little learning gives rise to atheism but deeper knowledge gives rise to faith but that's been my experience, especially in considering, deeply, the claims of current atheists during the new atheism fad of the 00's.  I'm far more confident in both the Creation of the universe by God and the design of life, as well, the more I've thought deeply about the claims of the atheists.  And I mean the higher brow atheism, not the pop version of it.  In recent weeks I've been amazed at how readily the scientistic atheists are to violate everything there is about science to promote their ideology through its manipulation, especially the premature and entirely outsized claims surrounding those recently discovered giant galaxies so close to the Big Bang.  I'd come to see that it's not just people like Jerry Coyne who, much as I disagree with him and very much dislike him [confession, I think he's a real pill] at least his formal science generally has links to actual observation.  It's especially true of those like Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose whose careers in conjecture are entirely unrelated to any observations of nature.  I wasn't surprised by Hawking and his colleagues in cosmology doing it, I was shocked to realize recently that Penrose does the same thing.  I have too much respect for science to not notice the claim that it can be done in the absence of observation.  
 

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Having Criticized Hossenfelder Yesterday

I recommend the video she posted today about the horrific extent of and the growing problem of scientific fraud.  

I left a comment pointing out that science absolutely depends on something that science can't generate or support, a moral obligation to tell the truth and honestly follow the supposed methods of science, honesty in reporting, honesty in review and the independent replication of results.   If they don't do those things there is no reason for anyone to believe any of it.   And that would be a disaster but scientists, in whose hands science is, don't seem to be taking care of the problem very effectively.


William Bolcom - Gospel Prelude 1 What A Friend I Have In Jesus

 

Gabriel Dessauer

Göckel Orgel der Liebfrauenkirche in Frankfurt/Main im Rahmen