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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (913509)	1/11/2016 12:24:07 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573891

"No understanding" doesn't imply or suggest "impossible under the laws of physics". This is an "anything can happen cause it's not impossible" under the laws of physics. A white rabbit might suddenly materialize in front of you ... after all, just cause we have no understanding of how that could happen doesn't mean it's impossible under the laws of physics. Right? In fact to get a strong implication that it [ apply this to the white rabbit ] is impossible you would have to have a greater degree of understanding then we have. ----------------------- Life is software based What does that even mean? That life is driven and controlled by software languages, one of which has been decoded. These guys recognize software when they see it: "Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created" Bill Gates in The Road Ahead. "Life is a DNA software system." J. Craig Venter, " The Big Idea: Craig Venter On the Future of Life," The Daily Beast (October 25, 2013). DNA is "the software of life", containing "digital information" or "digital code." J. Craig Venter, Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life (Viking, 2013), 7. I know, just cause we don't know of any laws of physics or chemistry that would produce a software language out of nothing, doesn't mean it's impossible. We just don't understand physics enough yet. This is naturalism of the gaps. ---------------------------------- No iPhone can reproduce itself, power itself, repair itself, but the simplest form of life imaginable can do all that and more. Biological things are different in nature then electronic devices. I don't see how that fact supports your point. Well, I do. [ BTW biological things are better than electronic devices and in time our electronic devices might become more and more biological - use of DNA as a data storage medium is being explored now. Some of the implications this can be scary. ] It shows the simplest form of life imaginable does things that our own creation doesn't do .. at least not yet. IOW the first life had to have been extraordinarily complex in fact, regardless of whether we call it simple for rhetorical purposes. ---------------------------------------- Once you have even very simple life, probably simpler then anything that exists now, normal evolution would seem to cover life getting more complex esp. given a lot of time. I guess we both agree the key point in this context is abiogenesis, the origin of life. That is, as you point out, something that we have a poor understanding of. But despite the fact that even the simplist life forms can do things an iphone can not, that doesn't mean they are more complex then an iphone or as hard to create by natural processes. I think so. Just because something is considered objectionable, unthinkable by many .. and I'm talking about God, doesn't make it really unthinkable. It's just a failure of our mind to break through thought walls we've built for ourselves (what the New Testament refers to when it speaks of "tearing down strongholds"). Once you have even very simple life, probably simpler then anything that exists now, normal evolution would seem to cover life getting more complex esp. given a lot of time. I used to think that, but I was wrong. There's no real good reason to think evolution, as it's presented to us, would increase complexity at all. After all, if life is fit, it's fit and will survive. If it's not it will die. I believe life evolves but we have no idea how or why. After humans began producing nylon, bacteria with two necessary new genes appeared to all that particular bacteria to digest waste products from nylon manufacture. These two new genes appeared almost immediately, perhaps literally immediately, with the beginning of nylon manufacture. They were first discovered btw in a lab in New Zealand, thousand of miles from the nearest nylon manufacturing site. Natural process? We can't produce proof it wasn't but it seems suspicious to me. I suggest we be open minded enough, unprejudiced enough, to consider that evolution isn't a process driven entirely by natural processes. A lot of the things people believe they haven't thought much about and believe because it makes them feel good. That and authority figures and others telling people that's how it is. And this does NOT just apply to religious people. It's ALL people, including those who IMAGINE THEMSELVES as rational and open-minded and objective.