I’m not
I acknowledge the findings
Yes that
Not my message
I was going to use the climatology issue as an example of what Noble was talking about in medicine. When working with complex chaotic system you always run the risk of making the data fit the conclusions. What to keep in and what to throw out. When that happens you end up with estimates that are essentially useless for practical application. The other problem is that solutions don’t just flow from the data you end up with infinite regression. With the Global Warming debate you are dealing with two complex chaotic systems the climate and society. You can reduce the problem by separating one from the other. Global Warming is a good example of what happens when you try to reduce a complex system. Everything the West has done to reduce co2 has and is likely to make no difference. First there is the saturation issue that give you diminishing returns. More importantly are the long chain of social events that have removed control from the people that claim we have control.
When the West decided it was a good idea to export pollution and slave labor to China the gig was up. For every coal powered plant the West has shut down China has built two and is continuing to build more. The only problem that has been solved is the not in my backyard problem of dirty industries. So you have created a new problem, Trump. The only people that haven’t benefited from relocating those dirty industries are the people that worked in them. Here is where perverse motivations come in. It turns out that breaking up existing industries and switching to importation is more profitable than giving people jobs. The investor classes have made out like bandits and it worked out well for white collar workers who don’t have to deal with dirty backyards and dirty people. When you hear politicians using words like “clingers, deplorables and super predators” you know your society is on the wrong track. It is the same old game of dehumanization that always creeps into politics.
The point is that we have wasted a lot of time energy and effort to solve an unsolvable problem. The money that went to green energy should have gone to adaptation. And no I’m not saying it was a waste of money because pollution is always a real problem. What I’m saying is you can’t decouple the science issues from the social issues. Science doesn’t tell us anything about morality because nature is amoral. Here we get back to the issue with determinism. Yes physical and cultural determinism are real despite what Noble is saying. There are chains of events over which we have no control. Science should be telling us what we have control over but it was broken by politics. The ugly realities we don’t want to face. In this case that exporting slave labor and pollution maybe wasn’t such a good idea. By doing so we lost the ability to adapt. We no longer control the industrial base to do so. The question becomes was it amoral to do so?
What lausten job is here is to reduce speculation. To maintain reproductive fidelity. This is what this has all been about. I think what you and I are saying is you need to take a more “organic” approach. You shouldn’t reduce people to machines. The irony is that when you do that you end up with the wrong solutions. My point is very simple, it is that you can’t find solutions without random inputs. It is the fundamental principle of evolution. It is what makes people not machines. The other point is that you can’t deal with complex chaotic system from a top down approach. You have to go through the painful process of evolving solutions. What you say hubris is getting in the way of. You are trying to inject a little humanity into the discussion. An inherently messy process. We may not agree on what I said about Global Warming but we could perhaps agree that removing humanity from the equation was a major mistake. That maybe reducing the population by 7 billion is perhaps not evil but the devil is in the details.
A cartoon did the talking for you.
You are.
Sadly you aren’t even getting close.
I remember you recently commenting how knowing about the inside micro structure of your brain makes little, if any, difference to your intellect.
To me, you find too many things irrelevant.
I find understanding the inside of my body has provided countless intellectual insights that not only satisfy my original desire to know what’s going on inside of my body, but opens up all sort of intellectual insights into better understanding other aspect of my life ,and life in general.
So it’s schoolyard now. You make claim, I say I don’t know what you’re talking about, and you say, “do so”.
I guess the proper response here is, " no, you are."
Why do you think I should think the same way that you do? How does understanding your body relate to any of this current conversation?
I don’t think I said “intellect” anyway. I think I said we don’t have a feeling of what our brains are doing. We can know it, but we don’t sense it like we sense touching something hot.
Depth. That’s how.
You are basically trying to tell me understanding how the inside of things work doesn’t mean anything to your thinking processes.
It’s doesn’t compute, it’s like you’re getting into gaslighting territory.
Or you’re even more out of touch than I would have imagined, though it does explain the dog chasing tail thing we seem to have going on.
You have taken some words out of context and made up what I was referring to. I do study and read up and personally test “how things work”. That includes the human body. That is the thinking process. It can’t be separated from “meaning anything” to your thinking process. Therefore, to wit, finitone, I have no idea what you are referring to. I’ve already offered a correction and have no f’s to give left to use my energy to search for quotes and correct you (given past performance).
This started with a question, sort of directed to wolfhnd, but I have no problem with your participation
What has happened, repeatedly, for months now, maybe a whole year, is when we have the slightest disagreement, you attack my responses to your comments from the past, with no quotes, and AFAIK, no desire to honestly engage with them. My evidence is right here, instead of engaging with the above quote, you switched to those earlier posts and threads.
I tried to explain that the cultural shift is from top down to bottom up solutions. I would call it the acceptance of ignorance as represented by the new reality concerning randomness. It the past you could say that randomness was just a stand in for ignorance but that is no longer the case. Unless you can prove that randomness isn’t “real” the case for determinism falls apart. But that isn’t exactly true because determinism is real. It is a real abstraction. A real thinking tool that gains it’s reality through how abstractions interact with physical reality. What you are doing is asking us to prove that determinism isn’t real ignoring the fact that it is an abstraction. It is like asking someone to prove that zero isn’t real. That is what we mean when we say you are chasing your tail.
This is a philosophy forum not a science forum so the rules are somewhat different. Proofs have a different meaning. Science as I said is dependent on determinism and the proofs are deterministic. In philosophy the proofs are in the utility of the abstractions. That I tried to illustrate by the fact that yes physical reality has it’s logic but formal logic is a closed system that derives it’s utility from abstractions.
What citizenschallengev4 is trying to do to get you to accept that there are solutions without comprehension which is what evolution is all about. I illustrated that by showing that what Darwin did wasn’t as amazing as people think. All he had to do was apply the well known practices of animal husbandry to nature. He was completely ignorant of the mechanism because it was dependent on random events. It starts with random events not reproductive fidelity. The reason it was rejected was because the world view at the time was entirely deterministic as illustrated by “Gods will”.
I don’t see anything all that complicated or controversial about it. You just have accept that there are solutions without comprehension. Accept evolution if you like.
I don’t understand that so I’m sure I’m not asking it
Not asking for proof.
Wow
What exactly do you mean by Wow?
The interesting question is why do ideas like natural selection seem to pop up at the same time in different places. The answer of course is a change in the cultural environment. What had changed is we “killed” God the ultimate determinism. We had to find something to replace God and it turned out to be just as abstract and undefined, randomness. No randomness no evolution. The point you need to focus on is that evolution was “discovered” without any real understanding of how genes work. What I call solutions without comprehension.
The reason the scientific culture has shifted is that we started to see that cultural evolution is very similar to physical evolution. No ape using a stone tool no Einstein. More importantly perhaps is we started to see that physical and cultural evolution were inseparable. Proving in a way perhaps that evolution was applicable to any problem. If you ask why human have large brains you noticed that it had to do with the use of tools to allow for the diversion of energy away from the gut to evolve a large brain. If you ask how Einstein came up with the theory of relativity well it turns out it is the same process. The co-evolution of physical tools and abstract tools within a cultural space.
Right now in the scientific culture we are killing another God, determinism itself. This time however it is not a projection of ego as God, it is ego itself, our own egos, that get in the way. That is why we have been talking about the virtue of humility. We say sure solutions without comprehension works in physical evolution but humans have something special that breaks that pattern. We had made ourselves gods and now we are backing off of that idea and looking at cultural evolution as the source of “discovery”. It turns out that just like physical evolution it is a random process prior to selection. It is the order of how things happen that is important to understand. First the random event then the selection. Now we ask how random and that turns out to be a relative problem.
I’m not saying we need to abandon determinism. What I’m saying we need to see it as an abstract tool not the thing itself. It is an essential tool in most areas of science. Just remember that absolute truths are trivial. They only seem to exist in closed logic spaces. Practical truths are a different kind of animal.
Minimizing the work of Charles Darwin. I know we assign one name to theories that build on the work of many, but there is no reason to say “all he had to do”
I disagree with that assessment. The process of evolving survival complexity is observable everywhere throughout the universe and rather than being random (as in nature) the process can be artificially (intentionally) duplicated.
Darwin was a naturalist and pigeon breeder and already referred to that process as a result of “artificial selection”.
Darwin, domestic breeding and artificial selection
Abstract
Darwin’s references to domestic breeding throughout his published work are usually taken to support an analogical argument: because artificial selection and natural selection are similar, and since artificial selection can produce great change, natural selection must also be able to produce great change.
However, the analogy between domestic breeding and nature was understood by Darwin and his contemporaries to indicate instead the inefficacy of selection. Darwin was treating domestic breeding as an ‘experiment’, and relied on the differences between domestication and nature - particularly those that rendered artificial selection inefficacious.
Darwin’s interest in domestic breeding is well known. Not only did he raise and breed pigeons, but throughout his scientific work he systematically referred to domestic breeding and `artificial selection’ - the tendency of breeders to select, for reproduction, those individual organisms with desirable physical and behavioral characteristics.
more… Darwin, domestic breeding and artificial selection - ScienceDirect
This was already practiced by farmers for thousands of years,
History of plant breeding
Plant breeding started with sedentary agriculture, particularly the domestication of the first agricultural plants, a practice which is estimated to date back 9,000 to 11,000 years. Initially, early human farmers selected food plants with particular desirable characteristics and used these as a seed source for subsequent generations, resulting in an accumulation of characteristics over time.
In time however, experiments began with deliberate hybridization, the science and understanding of which was greatly enhanced by the work of Gregor Mendel. Mendel’s work ultimately led to the new science of genetics.
Modern plant breeding is applied genetics, but its scientific basis is broader, covering molecular biology, cytology, systematics, physiology, pathology, entomology, chemistry, and statistics (biometrics). It has also developed its own technology. Plant breeding efforts are divided into a number of different historical landmarks
History of plant breeding - Wikipedia
It is the concept of God the “Creator” that offered a solution without comprehension and ignored generational “changes” altogether. According to scripture all life, including humans, was created complete and irreducibly complex to begin with.
What you are doing is minimizing the cultural evolution that led to the “discovery”. But that is not the point. The point is the process that mimics physical evolution both at the cultural and individual level. I have laid it out several times but I will do it again.
High intelligence is a necessary but insufficient condition for genius. What makes a genius a genius is imagination. The ability to create large numbers of mutations and select through them rapidly in a appropriate selection environment. That environment is not created by the individual but the cultural evolution. As I said it is the order of things that is important first the mutation then the selection.
The reason I didn’t want to go through all this is because you are right. Science requires a high degree of reproductive fidelity but I also said this whole thing is a philosophy of science question. I asked what is understanding to get the ball rolling but I got no takers. That’s fine because nobody knows.
What is science? I offered you a definition. It is the mutant, the individual making observations, forming a theory, the theory being another mutation, and making additional observations, and endless cycle. The thing is that the randomness comes first. Followed by the formation of reproductive fidelity. The whole enterprise collapses either way to little reproductive fidelity or too many mutations. The question is what is the proper balance.
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What in the world is artificial about it? It’s like the term artificial intelligence. There isn’t anything artificial about intelligence. There also isn’t anything artificial about animal husbandry.
You focused on the wrong part of the argument. Random mutations allow for both “artifical selection” and natural selection. It is the same process but the environments are different. And don’t go down the it’s an artificial environment road because that is the same circular argument.
Here is the key. The process of evolution is the same internally and externally. Earlier I used the example of Quantum Computers who’s genius is in the errors. The errors that allow solutions to be evolved. If you don’t think of mutations as errors then what are they? Planned deterministic events by a God? Well as far as we can tell the brain works the same way.
These are very simply observations that shouldn’t be controversial. The proof, if we need one, is in what is called neuron pruning or culling. A process that mimics evolution at the cellular level as opposed to individuals competing outside the body. All the way up and down the line the process is the same. It is called solutions without comprehension. Now I’m sure someone is going to come along and through in the very strange idea of emergence. On careful examination it is as strange as the idea of artificial. What do you mean by artificial? something outside physical reality? Nothing emerges, the pattern was always there. The one mistake I saw that Noble made was in assuming that the mutations in the immune were not already there or that the process was some how different than other cases of evolution.
If you have followed along you can see why we are saying a new culture is emerging. One that kind of knocks determinism off it’s throne. What Noble is talking about. It is a recognition of the virtue of humility. What citizenchallengev4 is talking about. We don’t create we discover, we are no longer the Gods of science. We have been humbled by the failures that Noble outlined.
I really hope you guys will read Stephen Wolfram’s “New Kind of Science” it is kind of hard to see that title as humility but if you read the book you will understand what I’m talking about.
How can you say I ignore it, when I referred to it in the sentence before the one you quoted?
Do you mean, what is “understanding”? I don’t remember you asking that question.
Your posts are disorganized, so I don’t remember that either. I might have questioned something to said, but don’t really respond to questions, just make long speeches with stuff zero not really existing or whatever
I read some reviews and it sounds like what I expected, given your thoughts on it. I started a thread. Kind of expected your comments.
Yes there is. Artificial merely means “man-made”. And that means Intentional selection , not random selection for functional excellence.
There is no randomness in controlled (artificial) breeding for specific qualities.
Artificial breeding or artificial selection is the practice of selectively breeding organisms with desirable traits1234.Examples of artificial breeding include1234:
- Breeding chickens, cattle, sheep, and pigs for meat production
- Breeding broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage from the wild mustard plant
- Breeding corn to be larger and thicker in the cobs
- Breeding broccoflower and tangelo from different fruits
- Breeding dogs for specific work tasks or appearance
That’s how we get million dollar race horses.
The most expensive horse of all time, a Thoroughbred – Fusaichi Pegasus – sold at a whopping $70 million . Another famous one, the retired British champion – Frankel – was once valued at over $100 million .
7 Most Expensive Horse Breeds in 2025 (With Info & Pictures) | PangoVet
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I didn’t I said minimized. I don’t think Darwin would have taken my comment as a minimization in any case. Remember he was a natural philosopher. He would have been more than happy to attribute his “gifts” to nature and his society. He was actually a pretty humble person in a good way.
You have to know I wanted the wow comment. I’m getting to know how you think. It is the same as when you asked what the organism did. I said it just had to wait for a random input. On the question of freewill I’m not sure that Weinberg gets it either so you are in good company, I like him. Freewill is a product of randomness but I go future and say intelligence as a property of life is a product of randomness. Everything is “evolutionary” and it all starts with “randomness”. I don’t see how that is controversial.
That is enough for now, maybe I can figure out what you find controversial given enough time.
You use that like it means something. Darwin was just as much of a scientist as anyone. Look at etymology of those words.
Of course evolution starts with randomness, it’s genetic mutation then natural selection. What would nature select from if we all had the same genes?
I really have started getting frustrated. I hope you don’t mean by man-made that you mean man created.
As I pointed out you are starting at the wrong point. Nothing happens in selective breeding until the mutation has happened to be selected. Other wise you get exact copies. Copies that produce copies that produce copies. Now can humans produce mutations in breeding stock? Sure but I doubt that they would meet your standard of “functional excellence”. There is even enough randomness in cloning that “exact copies” is not really true and some of the results have been totally unexpected. So even when you want exact copies you can’t get them, nature doesn’t work that way.
As I said the concepts here are very simple and should not be controversial.