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Talk:Distributed unconsciousness/DU Intellignent Design and Evolution Theory

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Premise: Just because evolutionary theory (ET) does not map out all the streets used to bounce semi-randomly from point A to point B doesn't mean that it won't eventually do so, or that there's any reason to believe that some other mechanism such as distributed unconsciousness was involved.

Counter:

DU isnt another mechanism, it is merely helping to answer missing information. It is not replacing ET, it is merely better explaining it.

"If DU is applied to Darwinism it answers a lot of the still unknown’s concerning the theory by answering its biggest criticism: How can mere random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life."

Darwinism is the answer to precisely this question. No further answer is needed. It's critics don't accept it because it conflicts with their desire to feel special; not because it doesn't account for the phenomena. [Email:Brain Meeker]

I agree my argument is really weak here and I will be spending time addressing the limitations of Darwinism as discussed by evolutionists and try to show how DU fills in the missing holes. DU doesn’t make anyone feel special... I think quite the opposite it points to the fact that we aren’t special and that all matter and energy is in essence equal. H0riz0n 20:26, 1 May 2006 (PDT)

Darwinism is a funny scientific theory as it cant predict outcomes like other theories or even tell you why and how something like a feature came into existence. Every other scientific theory can predict outcomes and possibilites, which is an important part of what makes it a scientific theory--detailed predictability to the past and future is in principle not possible in ET. We are creative and intelligent, why cant nature be creative and have a form of unconsciousness intellignece that we find in ourselves? Our creativity and knowlwdge is symtematic to the way things are in the universe. Why did feathers evolve? No scientist can tell you why. Dawkins' can't and admits it. Why is it that plants seem to have a form of intelligence? Plants know what are the best seeds to create. Natural selection just doesnt add up. Just as scientists are now saying there is epigenetic information being passed down with humans...why wouldnt the same happen to animals. Are all mutations mere random events? If you watch Life of plants you will see that random just logically doesnt add up. Can you control the growth of your hair? Ofcourse the answer is No. Then how is it that lion's in the Sudan are "choosing" not to have long hair... is it a mutation? Of course not.H0riz0n

1 information design
2 Information behaving as Cellular Automaton (CA)…and the evolution of RULE 30.
- 2.1 links
3 MICHAEL BEHE (Edited)
4 Links
5 a little bit of questionsar
6 Whether you have experience with it
7 who can or ran into a similar task

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information design

In contemplation of Evolution I have been formulating an adjusted view in respects the design is mere information sculpting that defines evolution and nothing else. Natural selection is nothing more than information exposure. A living mechanisms ability to process information defines not only its existence, but its evolution. Evolution actually complicates an extremely simple process. Evolution is not about resistance to adversity or overcoming barriers. It's about an organisms ability to manage information and to adjust to it. Information comes in every form: enviromental information, molecular information etc... Information defines the universe. The amount of food or lack of it is an information parameter, so is temperature, competition etc… All life has a propensity to process information, it is symptomatic of life. When information parameters change life has 1 or 2 possibilities: adapt to it of go extinct. For some life information hasn't changed enough to push life to a thresh hold change or extiction results: mollusks, insects, rodents etc... Also, Take the millions of species that haven’t evolved and are the same as they were 1 million years ago. Why did one evolve and another didn’t? Why haven’t they undergone some random genetic mutations? Its because the information parameters that affect them has pretty much stayed the same. Take the crab or the cockroach. The same info they processed in being does so effectively to merit no changes. Scientists are perplexed why many species went extinct. There is an information reason. The more complex the life the more susceptible to information change and the greater chance they will go extinct when information parameters change: food, completion, environment. If I recall correctly, something like 98% of all life has gone extinct. Personally, I think this is erroneous because it counts ancestors of evolved creatures. Just as the universe started from something like a singularity… all life too developed from one life form and all life is really just that 1st RNA mechanism that has adapted to random information exposure. Just as stars form by coalescing gas so one can say life formed in a similar fashion. (H0riz0n)

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Information behaving as Cellular Automaton (CA)…and the evolution of RULE 30.

There a remarkable man currently promoting a new kind of scientific thinking based on computational theory. Basically, as presented in A New Kind of Science (Wolfram 2002), he proposes an idea that everything observable is product of simple equations and that these can be modeled with CA equations. So I don’t butcher his ideas second-hand watch this very informative MIT video a few times. After listening to his presentation and hearing his explanation on CA take a look at building blocks of everything: crystalline structures, RNA, Proteins and Enzymes, DNA, What will be obvious is the CA modeling is clearly on the right path.

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MICHAEL BEHE (Edited)

(Here is an interesting account by Behe. I have subsituted "DU" for God because what he says becomes more pertinent when DU is used instead of God: H0riz0n) Behe is a biochemistry professor, Lehigh University; Senior fellow, Discovery Institute.

I'm still not against Darwinian evolution on theological grounds. I'm against it on scientific grounds. I think DU could have made life using apparently random mutation and natural selection. But my reading of the scientific evidence is that he did not do it that way, that there was a more active guiding (DU could be that guiding. But not a conscious one as would be suggested with God). I think that we are all descended from some single cell in the distant past but that that cell and later parts of life were intentionally produced as the result of intelligent activity. As a Christian, I say that intelligence "design" is very likely to be the "action of distributed unconsciousness."

Several Christian positions are theologically consistent with the theory of mutation and selection. Some people believe that DU is "guiding" the process from moment to moment (it isnt guiding it just has the appearence of being guiding; just as a table appears solid. In reality it isnt, it just appears to be.). Others think he set up the universe from the Big Bang to unfold like a computer program. Others take scientific positions that are indistinguishable from those atheist materialists might take but say that their nonscientific intuitions or philosophical considerations or the existence of the mind lead them to deduce that there is DU at work.

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