a general introduction can be found in Edward B. Davis' chapter in the recent book:
Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion
by Ronald L. Numbers
In it he states that Newton was not a deist but believed it was blasphemy to think that God did not constantly interact with his creation. He bases this on some letters between his associate Samuel Clarke, and Leibniz
H. G. Alexander "the Leibniz - Clarke correspondence" Manchester U. pr. 1956 pg 11-12, 14
more info maybe here also:
"God of Gods, and Lord of Lords: the theology of Isaac Newton's General Scholium to the principia" Stephen D. Snobelen, Osiris #16 (2001) pgs 169-208
hmm apparently Newton was a very complicated fellow. here is a bbc presentation on his life
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
What Is Newton Trying To Say About God In His Opticks?
This is from query 32 of Newton's Opticks. Online here:
In this query he has been discussing all the chemistry he knows and wondering about the laws of physics that govern the particles of matter.
In it, he wonders about how the universe began, how the motions keep going given that there are inelastic collisions and friction in fluids and all motion must eventually cease.
In it he has a role for God at the beginning setting it in motion intelligently.
What i can't figure out from this passage is whether he has a role for God continuously prodding his creation, so it doesn't run down. I had seen arguments that Newton thought God must be doing so or else the chaotic motions of the solar system would eventually wreck it. these arguments are based on this passage:
For while Comets move in very excentrick Orbs in all manner of Positions, blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation.
from pg 378 below
but i don't see that their claim is supported by this passage.
What follows is half of query 32 broken up by me and notes inserted by me in uppercase. ( the page numbers appear thusly: <378>)
Notice how much Newton is thinking about and how hard it is to wrap ones head around what he is writing!
more references here
START HERE***
And thus Nature will be very conformable to her self and very simple, performing all the great Motions of the heavenly Bodies by the Attraction of Gravity which intercedes those Bodies, and almost all the small ones of their Particles by some other attractive and repelling Powers which intercede the Particles.
THE LAWS THUS FAR DO NOT SHOW HOW THE UNIVERSE STARTED
The Vis inertiæ is a passive Principle by which Bo <373> dies persist in their Motion or Rest, receive Motion in proportion to the Force impressing it, and resist as much as they are resisted. By this Principle alone there never could have been any Motion in the World.
INELASTIC COLLISIONS SHOW THAT THE MOTIONS WILL DISSIPATE
Some other Principle was necessary for putting Bodies into Motion; and now they are in Motion, some other Principle is necessary for conserving the Motion. For from the various Composition of two Motions, 'tis very certain that there is not always the same quantity of Motion in the World. For if two Globes joined by a slender Rod, revolve about their common Center of Gravity with an uniform Motion, while that Center moves on uniformly in a right Line drawn in the Plane of their circular Motion; the Sum of the Motions of the two Globes, as often as the Globes are in the right Line described by their common Center of Gravity, will be bigger than the Sum of their Motions, when they are in a Line perpendicular to that right Line. By this Instance it appears that Motion may be got or lost.
But by reason of the Tenacity of Fluids, and Attrition of their Parts, and the Weakness of Elasticity in Solids, Motion is much more apt to be lost than got, and is always upon the Decay. For Bodies which are either absolutely hard, or so soft as to be void of Elasticity, will not rebound from one another. Impenetrability makes them only stop. If two equal Bodies meet directly in vacuo, they will by the Laws of Motion stop where they meet, and lose all their Motion, and remain in rest, unless <374> they be elastick, and receive new Motion from their Spring. If they have so much Elasticity as suffices to make them rebound with a quarter, or half, or three quarters of the Force with which they come together, they will lose three quarters, or half, or a quarter of their Motion. And this may be tried, by letting two equal Pendulums fall against one another from equal heights. If the Pendulums be of Lead or soft Clay, they will lose all or almost all their Motions: If of elastick Bodies they will lose all but what they recover from their Elasticity. If it be said, that they can lose no Motion but what they communicate to other Bodies, the consequence is, that in vacuo they can lose no Motion, but when they meet they must go on and penetrate one anothers Dimensions.
DECAY OF MOTION IN LIQUIDS DUE TO FRICTION
If three equal round Vessels be filled, the one with Water, the other with Oil, the third with molten Pitch, and the Liquors be stirred about alike to give them a vortical Motion; the Pitch by its Tenacity will lose its Motion quickly, the Oil being less tenacious will keep it longest, but yet will lose it in a short time.
LOSS OF MOTION IN THE HEAVENS?
Whence it is easy to understand, that if many contiguous Vortices of molten Pitch were each of them as large as those which some suppose to revolve about the Sun and fix'd Stars, yet these and all their Parts would, by their tenacity and stiffness, communicate their Motion to one another till they all rested among themselves. Vortices of Oil or Water, or some fluider Matter, might <375> continue longer in Motion; but unless the Matter were void of all Tenacity and Attrition of Parts, and Communication of Motion, (which is not to be supposed) the Motion would constantly decay.
IF DECAY, THEN MOTION MUST BE RECRUITED BY ACTIVE PRINCIPLES:
Seeing therefore the variety of Motion which we find in the World is always decreasing, there is a necessity of conserving and recruiting it by active Principles, such as are the cause of Gravity, by which Planets and Comets keep their Motions in their Orbs, and Bodies acquire great Motion in falling;
and the cause of Fermentation, by which the Heart and Blood of Animals are kept in perpetual Motion
and Heat; the inward Parts of the Earth are constantly warm'd, and in some places grow very hot; Bodies burn and shine, Mountains take fire, the Caverns of the Earth are blown up, and the Sun continues violently hot and lucid, and warms all things by his Light. For we meet with very little Motion in the World, besides what is owing to these active Principles. And if it were not for these Principles the Bodies of the Earth, Planets, Comets, Sun, and all things in them would grow cold and freeze, and become inactive Masses; and all Putrefaction, Generation, Vegetation and Life would cease, and the Planets and Comets would not remain in their Orbs.
I DON'T UNDERSTAND, HOW CAN GRAVITY BE AN ACTIVE PRINCIPLE? IT'S NOT A SOURCE OF ENERGY! NEWTON IS CONFUSED.
GOD CREATED HARD PARTICLES IN THE BEGINING. SINCE THE NATURE OF WATER CANNOT CHANGE IN TIME, THESE PARTICLES WHICH GIVE IT PROPERTIES ARE NONDESTRUCTIBLE: ATOMS
All these things being consider'd, it seems probable to me, that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion <376> to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them; and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces: No ordinary Power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first Creation. While the Particles continue entire, they may compose Bodies of one and the same Nature and Texture in all Ages: But should they wear away, or break in pieces, the Nature of Things depending on them, would be changed. Water and Earth composed of old worn Particles and Fragments of Particles, would not be of the same Nature and Texture now, with Water and Earth composed of entire Particles, in the Beginning. And therefore that Nature may be lasting, the Changes of corporeal Things are to be placed only in the various Separations and new Associations and Motions of these permanent Particles; compound Bodies being apt to break, not in the midst of solid Particles, but where those Particles are laid together, and only touch in a few Points.
It seems to me farther, that these Particles have not only a Vis inertiæ, accompanied with such passive Laws of Motion as naturally result from that Force, but also that they are moved by certain active Principles, such as is that of Gravity, and that which causes Fermentation, and the Cohesion of Bodies.
These Principles I consider not as occult Qualities, supposed to result from the specifick Forms of Things, but <377> as general Laws of Nature, by which the Things themselves are form'd: their Truth appearing to us by Phænomena, though their Causes be not yet discover'd.
For these are manifest Qualities, and their Causes only are occult.
WHAT'S HE MEAN BY OCCULT MERELY HIDDEN AS OPPOSED TO MANIFEST?
And the Aristotelians gave the Name of occult Qualities not to manifest Qualities, but to such Qualities only as they supposed to lie hid in Bodies, and to be the unknown Causes of manifest Effects: Such as would be the Causes of Gravity, and of magnetick and electrick Attractions, and of Fermentations,
if we should suppose that these Forces or Actions arose from Qualities unknown to us, and uncapable of being discovered and made manifest.
Such occult Qualities put a stop to the Improvement of natural Philosophy, and therefore of late Years have been rejected. To tell us that every Species of Things is endow'd with an occult specifick Quality by which it acts an produces manifest Effects, is to tell us nothing:
But to derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phænomena, and afterwards to tell us how the Properties and Actions of all corporeal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy, though the Causes of those Principles were not yet discover'd: And therefore I scruple not to propose the Principles of Motion above mention'd, they being of very general Extent, and leave their Causes to be found out.
THE UNIVERSE WAS CREATED BY AN INTELLIGENT AGENT NOT BY LAWS OUT OF CHANCE CHAOS
Now by the help of these Principles, all material Things seem to have been composed of <378> the hard and solid Particles above mention'd, variously associated in the first Creation by the Counsel of an intelligent Agent.
For it became him who created them to set them in order.
And if he did so, it's unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature;
though being once form'd, it may continue by those Laws for many Ages.
IT LOOKS LIKE CHAOS OUT THERE IN THE COMETS SO HOW COULD THE PLANETS COME TO MOVE ALL IN ONE DIRECTION CONCENTRIC BY LAWS FROM CHAOS?
For while Comets move in very excentrick Orbs in all manner of Positions, blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation.
NO STATEMENT THOUGH THAT THIS IS WHAT will HAPPEN AND GOD MUST CONTINUE TO FIX IT. HMMM*****
Such a wonderful Uniformity in the Planetary System must be allowed the Effect of Choice.
SO TOO IT'S OBVIOUS THE CONTRIVANCES OF ANIMALS ARE DESIGNED
And so must the Uniformity in the Bodies of Animals, they having generally a right and a left side shaped alike, and on either side of their Bodies two Legs behind, and either two Arms, or two Legs, or two Wings before upon their Shoulders, and between their Shoulders a Neck running down into a Back-bone, and a Head upon it; and in the Head two Ears, two Eyes, a Nose, a Mouth and a Tongue, alike situated. Also the first Contrivance of those very artificial Parts of Animals, the Eyes, Ears, Brain, Muscles, Heart, Lungs, Midriff, Glands, Larynx, Hands, Wings, Swimming Bladders, na <379> tural Spectacles, and other Organs of Sense and Motion; and the Instinct of Brutes and Insects,
can be the effect of nothing else than the
Wisdom and Skill of a powerful
ever-living Agent, who being in all Places, is more able by his Will to move the Bodies within his boundless uniform Sensorium, and thereby to
form and reform the Parts of the Universe,
than we are by our Will to move the Parts of our own Bodies.
IS HE SAYING HERE THAT THE AGENT IS continuously REFORMING THE PARTS, EACH GENERATION OR SOMETHING?
And yet we are not to consider the World as the Body of God, or the several Parts thereof, as the Parts of God. He is an uniform Being, void of Organs, Members or Parts, and they are his Creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his Will;
and he is no more the Soul of them, than the Soul of a Man is the Soul of the Species of Things carried through the Organs of Sense into the place of its Sensation, where it perceives them by means of its immediate Presence, without the Intervention of any third thing.
THIS IS PUZZLING. HE IS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT so MUCH.
The Organs of Sense are not for enabling the Soul to perceive the Species of Things in its Sensorium, but only for conveying them thither; and God has no need of such Organs, he being every where present to the Things themselves. And since Space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow'd that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in <380> several Parts of the Universe. At least, I see nothing of Contradiction in all this.
As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy. And although the arguing from Experiments and Observations by Induction be no Demonstration of general Conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of, and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the Induction is more general. And if no Exception occur from Phænomena, the Conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if at any time afterwards any Exception shall occur from Experiments, it may then begin to be pronounced with such Exceptions as occur. By this way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from Motions to the Forces producing them; and in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general. This is the Method of Analysis: And the Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discover'd and establish'd as Principles, and by them explaining the Phæ <381> nomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.
In the two first Books of these Opticks, I proceeded by this Analysis to discover and prove the original Differences of the Rays of Light in respect of Refrangibility, Reflexibility, and Colour, and their alternate Fits of easy Reflexion and easy Transmission, and the Properties of Bodies, both opake and pellucid, on which their Reflexions and Colours depend. And these Discoveries being proved, may be assumed in the Method of Composition for explaining the Phænomena arising from them: An Instance of which Method I gave in the End of the first Book. In this third Book I have only begun the Analysis of what remains to be discover'd about Light and its Effects upon the Frame of Nature, hinting several things about it, and leaving the Hints to be examin'd and improved by the farther Experiments and Observations of such as are inquisitive. And if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of moral Philosophy will be also enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature. And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal Virtues; and <382> instead of teaching the Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have taught us to worship our true Author and Benefactor.
In this query he has been discussing all the chemistry he knows and wondering about the laws of physics that govern the particles of matter.
In it, he wonders about how the universe began, how the motions keep going given that there are inelastic collisions and friction in fluids and all motion must eventually cease.
In it he has a role for God at the beginning setting it in motion intelligently.
What i can't figure out from this passage is whether he has a role for God continuously prodding his creation, so it doesn't run down. I had seen arguments that Newton thought God must be doing so or else the chaotic motions of the solar system would eventually wreck it. these arguments are based on this passage:
For while Comets move in very excentrick Orbs in all manner of Positions, blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation.
from pg 378 below
but i don't see that their claim is supported by this passage.
What follows is half of query 32 broken up by me and notes inserted by me in uppercase. ( the page numbers appear thusly: <378>)
Notice how much Newton is thinking about and how hard it is to wrap ones head around what he is writing!
more references here
START HERE***
And thus Nature will be very conformable to her self and very simple, performing all the great Motions of the heavenly Bodies by the Attraction of Gravity which intercedes those Bodies, and almost all the small ones of their Particles by some other attractive and repelling Powers which intercede the Particles.
THE LAWS THUS FAR DO NOT SHOW HOW THE UNIVERSE STARTED
The Vis inertiæ is a passive Principle by which Bo <373> dies persist in their Motion or Rest, receive Motion in proportion to the Force impressing it, and resist as much as they are resisted. By this Principle alone there never could have been any Motion in the World.
INELASTIC COLLISIONS SHOW THAT THE MOTIONS WILL DISSIPATE
Some other Principle was necessary for putting Bodies into Motion; and now they are in Motion, some other Principle is necessary for conserving the Motion. For from the various Composition of two Motions, 'tis very certain that there is not always the same quantity of Motion in the World. For if two Globes joined by a slender Rod, revolve about their common Center of Gravity with an uniform Motion, while that Center moves on uniformly in a right Line drawn in the Plane of their circular Motion; the Sum of the Motions of the two Globes, as often as the Globes are in the right Line described by their common Center of Gravity, will be bigger than the Sum of their Motions, when they are in a Line perpendicular to that right Line. By this Instance it appears that Motion may be got or lost.
But by reason of the Tenacity of Fluids, and Attrition of their Parts, and the Weakness of Elasticity in Solids, Motion is much more apt to be lost than got, and is always upon the Decay. For Bodies which are either absolutely hard, or so soft as to be void of Elasticity, will not rebound from one another. Impenetrability makes them only stop. If two equal Bodies meet directly in vacuo, they will by the Laws of Motion stop where they meet, and lose all their Motion, and remain in rest, unless <374> they be elastick, and receive new Motion from their Spring. If they have so much Elasticity as suffices to make them rebound with a quarter, or half, or three quarters of the Force with which they come together, they will lose three quarters, or half, or a quarter of their Motion. And this may be tried, by letting two equal Pendulums fall against one another from equal heights. If the Pendulums be of Lead or soft Clay, they will lose all or almost all their Motions: If of elastick Bodies they will lose all but what they recover from their Elasticity. If it be said, that they can lose no Motion but what they communicate to other Bodies, the consequence is, that in vacuo they can lose no Motion, but when they meet they must go on and penetrate one anothers Dimensions.
DECAY OF MOTION IN LIQUIDS DUE TO FRICTION
If three equal round Vessels be filled, the one with Water, the other with Oil, the third with molten Pitch, and the Liquors be stirred about alike to give them a vortical Motion; the Pitch by its Tenacity will lose its Motion quickly, the Oil being less tenacious will keep it longest, but yet will lose it in a short time.
LOSS OF MOTION IN THE HEAVENS?
Whence it is easy to understand, that if many contiguous Vortices of molten Pitch were each of them as large as those which some suppose to revolve about the Sun and fix'd Stars, yet these and all their Parts would, by their tenacity and stiffness, communicate their Motion to one another till they all rested among themselves. Vortices of Oil or Water, or some fluider Matter, might <375> continue longer in Motion; but unless the Matter were void of all Tenacity and Attrition of Parts, and Communication of Motion, (which is not to be supposed) the Motion would constantly decay.
IF DECAY, THEN MOTION MUST BE RECRUITED BY ACTIVE PRINCIPLES:
Seeing therefore the variety of Motion which we find in the World is always decreasing, there is a necessity of conserving and recruiting it by active Principles, such as are the cause of Gravity, by which Planets and Comets keep their Motions in their Orbs, and Bodies acquire great Motion in falling;
and the cause of Fermentation, by which the Heart and Blood of Animals are kept in perpetual Motion
and Heat; the inward Parts of the Earth are constantly warm'd, and in some places grow very hot; Bodies burn and shine, Mountains take fire, the Caverns of the Earth are blown up, and the Sun continues violently hot and lucid, and warms all things by his Light. For we meet with very little Motion in the World, besides what is owing to these active Principles. And if it were not for these Principles the Bodies of the Earth, Planets, Comets, Sun, and all things in them would grow cold and freeze, and become inactive Masses; and all Putrefaction, Generation, Vegetation and Life would cease, and the Planets and Comets would not remain in their Orbs.
I DON'T UNDERSTAND, HOW CAN GRAVITY BE AN ACTIVE PRINCIPLE? IT'S NOT A SOURCE OF ENERGY! NEWTON IS CONFUSED.
GOD CREATED HARD PARTICLES IN THE BEGINING. SINCE THE NATURE OF WATER CANNOT CHANGE IN TIME, THESE PARTICLES WHICH GIVE IT PROPERTIES ARE NONDESTRUCTIBLE: ATOMS
All these things being consider'd, it seems probable to me, that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion <376> to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them; and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces: No ordinary Power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first Creation. While the Particles continue entire, they may compose Bodies of one and the same Nature and Texture in all Ages: But should they wear away, or break in pieces, the Nature of Things depending on them, would be changed. Water and Earth composed of old worn Particles and Fragments of Particles, would not be of the same Nature and Texture now, with Water and Earth composed of entire Particles, in the Beginning. And therefore that Nature may be lasting, the Changes of corporeal Things are to be placed only in the various Separations and new Associations and Motions of these permanent Particles; compound Bodies being apt to break, not in the midst of solid Particles, but where those Particles are laid together, and only touch in a few Points.
It seems to me farther, that these Particles have not only a Vis inertiæ, accompanied with such passive Laws of Motion as naturally result from that Force, but also that they are moved by certain active Principles, such as is that of Gravity, and that which causes Fermentation, and the Cohesion of Bodies.
These Principles I consider not as occult Qualities, supposed to result from the specifick Forms of Things, but <377> as general Laws of Nature, by which the Things themselves are form'd: their Truth appearing to us by Phænomena, though their Causes be not yet discover'd.
For these are manifest Qualities, and their Causes only are occult.
WHAT'S HE MEAN BY OCCULT MERELY HIDDEN AS OPPOSED TO MANIFEST?
And the Aristotelians gave the Name of occult Qualities not to manifest Qualities, but to such Qualities only as they supposed to lie hid in Bodies, and to be the unknown Causes of manifest Effects: Such as would be the Causes of Gravity, and of magnetick and electrick Attractions, and of Fermentations,
if we should suppose that these Forces or Actions arose from Qualities unknown to us, and uncapable of being discovered and made manifest.
Such occult Qualities put a stop to the Improvement of natural Philosophy, and therefore of late Years have been rejected. To tell us that every Species of Things is endow'd with an occult specifick Quality by which it acts an produces manifest Effects, is to tell us nothing:
But to derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phænomena, and afterwards to tell us how the Properties and Actions of all corporeal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy, though the Causes of those Principles were not yet discover'd: And therefore I scruple not to propose the Principles of Motion above mention'd, they being of very general Extent, and leave their Causes to be found out.
THE UNIVERSE WAS CREATED BY AN INTELLIGENT AGENT NOT BY LAWS OUT OF CHANCE CHAOS
Now by the help of these Principles, all material Things seem to have been composed of <378> the hard and solid Particles above mention'd, variously associated in the first Creation by the Counsel of an intelligent Agent.
For it became him who created them to set them in order.
And if he did so, it's unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature;
though being once form'd, it may continue by those Laws for many Ages.
IT LOOKS LIKE CHAOS OUT THERE IN THE COMETS SO HOW COULD THE PLANETS COME TO MOVE ALL IN ONE DIRECTION CONCENTRIC BY LAWS FROM CHAOS?
For while Comets move in very excentrick Orbs in all manner of Positions, blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation.
NO STATEMENT THOUGH THAT THIS IS WHAT will HAPPEN AND GOD MUST CONTINUE TO FIX IT. HMMM*****
Such a wonderful Uniformity in the Planetary System must be allowed the Effect of Choice.
SO TOO IT'S OBVIOUS THE CONTRIVANCES OF ANIMALS ARE DESIGNED
And so must the Uniformity in the Bodies of Animals, they having generally a right and a left side shaped alike, and on either side of their Bodies two Legs behind, and either two Arms, or two Legs, or two Wings before upon their Shoulders, and between their Shoulders a Neck running down into a Back-bone, and a Head upon it; and in the Head two Ears, two Eyes, a Nose, a Mouth and a Tongue, alike situated. Also the first Contrivance of those very artificial Parts of Animals, the Eyes, Ears, Brain, Muscles, Heart, Lungs, Midriff, Glands, Larynx, Hands, Wings, Swimming Bladders, na <379> tural Spectacles, and other Organs of Sense and Motion; and the Instinct of Brutes and Insects,
can be the effect of nothing else than the
Wisdom and Skill of a powerful
ever-living Agent, who being in all Places, is more able by his Will to move the Bodies within his boundless uniform Sensorium, and thereby to
form and reform the Parts of the Universe,
than we are by our Will to move the Parts of our own Bodies.
IS HE SAYING HERE THAT THE AGENT IS continuously REFORMING THE PARTS, EACH GENERATION OR SOMETHING?
And yet we are not to consider the World as the Body of God, or the several Parts thereof, as the Parts of God. He is an uniform Being, void of Organs, Members or Parts, and they are his Creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his Will;
and he is no more the Soul of them, than the Soul of a Man is the Soul of the Species of Things carried through the Organs of Sense into the place of its Sensation, where it perceives them by means of its immediate Presence, without the Intervention of any third thing.
THIS IS PUZZLING. HE IS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT so MUCH.
The Organs of Sense are not for enabling the Soul to perceive the Species of Things in its Sensorium, but only for conveying them thither; and God has no need of such Organs, he being every where present to the Things themselves. And since Space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow'd that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in <380> several Parts of the Universe. At least, I see nothing of Contradiction in all this.
As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy. And although the arguing from Experiments and Observations by Induction be no Demonstration of general Conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of, and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the Induction is more general. And if no Exception occur from Phænomena, the Conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if at any time afterwards any Exception shall occur from Experiments, it may then begin to be pronounced with such Exceptions as occur. By this way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from Motions to the Forces producing them; and in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general. This is the Method of Analysis: And the Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discover'd and establish'd as Principles, and by them explaining the Phæ <381> nomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.
In the two first Books of these Opticks, I proceeded by this Analysis to discover and prove the original Differences of the Rays of Light in respect of Refrangibility, Reflexibility, and Colour, and their alternate Fits of easy Reflexion and easy Transmission, and the Properties of Bodies, both opake and pellucid, on which their Reflexions and Colours depend. And these Discoveries being proved, may be assumed in the Method of Composition for explaining the Phænomena arising from them: An Instance of which Method I gave in the End of the first Book. In this third Book I have only begun the Analysis of what remains to be discover'd about Light and its Effects upon the Frame of Nature, hinting several things about it, and leaving the Hints to be examin'd and improved by the farther Experiments and Observations of such as are inquisitive. And if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of moral Philosophy will be also enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature. And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal Virtues; and <382> instead of teaching the Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have taught us to worship our true Author and Benefactor.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Atheist Vs Theist World View
silly labels, eh? realize that atheism is NOT one cohesive tradition. there is probably an authoritative book on the nature of the banana. there is probably NOT one on the nature of not-bananas. atheism is NOT a single tradition. and all of my answers are my own. atheists only have ONE thing in common:
that there can't possibly be a being something like a human mind that created the universe and Earth and all the critters and man and is inordinately fond of mankind in particular and has a plan for mankind and earth of punnishment and reward. and that this being can be communicated with unambiguously. Certainly no mind like being in control of the universe wrote us a book in a hman language. that's it.
and even that is questionable because what's this mean "something like a human mind" surely some think that the evolving earth is SOMEthing like the human mind since the human mind might ALSO work by a process of overproduction of varying 'thoughts' and a 'natural selection' of them. Who knows? we don't know how the mind works yet. and still these people might call themselves atheists. there is no arbitor of who can and cannot call themselves atheists.
so these answers are my own. and i am not sure i would call myself an atheist, because we don't know how minds work, therefore, even if there was a deity, i don't know how it would work.
There are the basic world view questions:
1) Origins: Where did life originate
This is the exciting advanture that science is on now. is life as we know it on earth a natural consequence of chemistry? is it rather inevitable that under cetain geochemical conditions the chemistry of CHNOPS and SiAlFeMgKCaNaCl spontaneously forms into life?
Or is life a one time low probability event?
Or is it so improbable that it had to be designed?
The point is that most people don't know what we've learned in teh past 150 years. What we've learned is that rocks and chemicals are not innert and dumb. the gyrating 20 odd elements the earth is mostly made of are dynamic information processing subtle fuzzy machines always bouncing into each other exploring, with complex behaviors! molecules are complex and have sublte behaviors. they are NOT only like bricks or lego blocks.
In the last 70 years we've learned the molecular nature of life. This is utterly mindblowing knowlege, that again, has not seeped into popular culture. Yes when you look at the molecular organization of the simplest cell, the first impression is yes, the whole shebang, the whole autopoeitic loop looks irreducibly complex.
on the other hand over that same time period we've been widening the scope of our exploration of chemistry. in school we may learn something kind of dopey like: a flame is C6H12O6 +O2-->CO2 +H2O. FAR FROM IT. even an ordinary gas flame, CH4 and O2 burns in a complicated network of cyclic chemical reactions, reminiscent of some of those in the cell. We've begun to explore many such cyclic reactions in chemistry that spontaneously form. We know that many of the small molecules in cells can form spontanously in a reducing atmosphere, in fact are present in meteorites.
and of course even mineral chemistry is complex. clays, zeolites, metal sulfides... in fact at the core of many living reactions are metal sulfides..
The bottom line is, that our knowlege of all this is exploding exponentially, this is an EXCITING time for exploring this question. the gap between non life and life is narrowing. this is NO time to back down into a stance of "it's impossible"
1.5) and humanity originate?
The question of whether humanity 'originated' is partially a mathematical one. The record shows that between the common ancestor of us and chimps to the first records of human culture 30,000 years ago is about 5million years. that's between a 250,000 and a million generations. children in each generation are born slightly differently, though there may be periods where differences are higher.
can we say at some point we were chimp/humans and some point human? is there a SINGLE GENERATION where we can point to the dividing line? This seems to me a silly idea.
Unless there was a discrete bifurcation in the properties or our neural nets. (here comes the mathematical part..) Or a very fast bifurcation in the network properties of our develpmental circuits or between them and ecological circuits...
We don't know. Waht we do know is that in early eocene strata and lower we find no bones that are remotely hominid, and in upper strata we find many. many different kinds over a period of 5 million years and 2million in earnest. how can 500 thousand generations of changes turn a chimp like critter into a human? if you can't imagine that happening in 500 thousand changes.. you need to learn some biology. learn that we are the results of analog physics helping incredibly complex cell factories interpret a discretely coded blueprint called our genes.
2) The Problem: Why is there suffering,
Because there is creativity! There is suffering because that is one way to create. to create means to say try this, NOT that. to not try that is to suffer, unless you can break your attachments to that. This life involves innevitable choices. try the Buddha way if this bothers you.
2.5) why is there sickness, and death?
more specifically, why are humans prone to horrifying diseases, insanities, social chaos? because if we were perfect we'd be impervious to fluctuations out of which evolution creates new beings. we'd be impervious to fluctuations out of which our minds try out new ideas. and finally if we were perfect, would we be lovable? would we be human at all?
Why death? some creatures don't quite die. but vertebrates accumulate so many diseases, wear out etc... it's easier to have kids, start from scratch than to keep repairing, a 100 year old carcass! Of course most critters don't have the story telling memories that we do, don't become so attached to their memories as we do, so this irks us.
3) The Solution: What is the cure for man's suffering,
The buddha way.
or, accept it. Judaism is one way to live with the glorious creativity of life and accept the suffering as a consequence of this creativity
you mean cure for diseases? some can be cured, more wil always evolve. it is the way of life. You didn't want to escape this life did you? here is the knife, go for it. i don't recommend it.
3.5) esp. his existential lonliness?
why do you want to CURE this? isn't it one of the things that define us as humans? we spend our lives trying to connect, trying to make meaning, trying to create before we die or set up connections to what has come before us and to who will come after. this is the human way. why you not like it?
Questions of Meaning and Value:
4) How does an atheist assign meaning to human activity?
same as the rest of us, if we love it, if it brings us what we love, it means something to us. what we love is partially determined by what we are like, partially a-rational. is this a problem?
Bar, you must address the common misconception that guitar chick stated: if no god, then life has no meaning, we can plunder, there is no daddy to come home to after death all is a veil of horror, it's a pathology you must address.
4.5) Is all meaning subjective, or do some activities have self-evident and objective worth and meaning. If so, what are these activities, and how to you arrive at their value?
see the answers to morals
5) Are humans of more intrinsic value than animals? Why or why not?
To other humans and some of their pets they are. If we manage master our warlike, our apocalyptic tendancies, we may even come to be able to defend our planet against large asteroid collisions, interplanetary invasion, and even spread this Earth's life to other planets, who knows? life and we have already spread quite spectacularly.
then again in the cosmic scheme of things? is the moon of more value than the earth? one cannot say. one can only say "i love earth, life, humans, and this particular human more" it is a-rational.
are humans such that they can apprehend the laws of physics and one day come to be able to CHANGE the laws of physics themselves? I cannot imagine any way to say that's impossible in 10,000 years of continued science. so who knows?
6) How does an atheist determine what is moral or immoral
as i said in item 1.5 there is probably no ONE definition for humanity, just as there is no ONE definition for how a mammal can live. we have an idea that humanity is a fixed thing. and therefore that there is a fixed moral code. i think this is wrong.
a better understanding is that there is a statistical distribution of ways to be human just as all other properties of various species are distributed and vary, and that our idea of a norm of humanity is based on the fact that some large percentage of us DO operate under the same basic root behaviors and morals. certainly psychopaths and people with severe brain damage do not.
SHOULD humanity hold to ONE norm? that is entirely another question. would it lead to more stability? Do clashing norms naturally lead to an armed apocalypse destroying civilization? Can you imagine a world society enforced to one way of life? i think it would be hell, and would require HELL to produce. Nazi germany, anyone?
in different cultures in differnt times people think differntly about this norm. in current amercian culture we are so attentive to this norm idea that we largely ignore the real range of humanity, we are so bent on forcing each other into a norm.
7) right or wrong.
right for who and when and where? again there is a broad consensus among many people on rights and wrongs, but it's NOT UNIVERSAL. gravity is universal. certain laws of ecology are universal, though at any point a new biological invention like plant life on land, or insect pollination or the development of animal societies can change them.
Bar you must address a specific instance like african genetal mutilation, or the hijab or nazi germany. or feminism. or the automobile, YOU think it's wrong. ecologically it is. But he's asking about kosmic ultimates. and i'm saying it DOES depend on context.
8) Is there any objective standard or principles?
that's what i'm saying. NO. it's dependent on the ecological milleu. On the current state of evolution or speciation of Homo sapiens.
Questions of Worldview:
7. What type of government does atheistic philosophy translate into? How does it understand the relationship between man and government?
I am not aware of a single type. Humanity is too complex to determine this i think. i think we are doomed to continual experimentation. there are certain guidelines, such as how stable creative ecosystems work by their interactions. We can learn how other mammal societies manage and whether some of those principles are appropriate for us or not, or whether they in fact DO operate among us and whether we WANT them to or not.
again, you want one fixed answer for all time. the evidence shows that this is NOT the way of life on this Earth. you want a reality more cozy than it is.
7.5) Does it merely rely on someone else's system of thought, like the assumptions of naturalistic science?
Some ONE else's? that's silly. government is when MANY people get together and knock out a creative agreement. and in the scheme of things perhaps governements will come to evolve as they interact with each other. after a few rounds of hellish war, maybe we'll learn. has europe learned or has she collapsed? interesting.
the assumptions of naturalistic science? these arent assumptions, they are observations of how ecosystems work, how humans work. we can base how to make governemtns partially on data of the world, partially on our own desires.
8. How does atheism view religions and religious faith?
obviously all ancient societies that we have record for have had religious civilizations. I think this is a reaction to the way we must have suddenly (see bifurcations in (1.5) above) awakened to the immense depths and horrifically tortuous passageways of our own minds. It has taken us a long time to get out of that nightmare, and back into this refreshing REAL world.
nevertheless, since humanity is not fixed there is no ONE answer for how to live. only a norm for MOSTLY how to live. The rest of the choices are left to what we LOVE. and how we love is a-rational.
and then there is the question of suffering. most of us grow up naturally loving some aspects of life, becoming attached to them and suffering thereby, because all is change. if you would like, you can define religion as a response to this.
Buddha way says practice letting go of attachements and you wont suffer. this is hard. This is a very hard path, not many are willing to put in the work.
tora way says accept the suffering, it's a necessary adjunct to creativity and individuality for humanity. celebrate it. this is also a hard path. very few take it.
I suppose these two are close to the atheist way.
the way of the cross says, suffer now, and after you die, you can escape that kind of reality. this is an easy path, billions take it.
untill we change the nature of reality, religion will be here.
8.5) What about metaphysics? Is atheism purely materialistic and naturalistic?
i don't know what those mean. what could possibly be unnatural?
answer the question is atheism purely rationalistic. ah..
9) Who are the authoritative writers/books of atheism?
there is probably an authoritative book on the nature of the banana. there is probably NOT one on the nature of not-bananas. atheism is NOT a single tradition. and all of my answers are my own.
10) What are the central tenets of atheism
that there can't possibly be a being something like a human mind that created the universe and Eaerth and all the critters and man and is inordinately fond of mankind in particular and has a plan for mankind and earth of punnishment and reward. and that this being can be communicated with unambiguously. Certainly no mind like being in control of the universe wrote us a book in a hman language. that's it.
what are the central tenets to MY view of life? oy vey.
11) and if they have a "greatest commandment," what is it? For example, arguably, Christianity's is "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself."
again, atheism is NOT a single tradition. perhaps you are thinking of the recent phenomenon of Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, Schermer.. I've not read. Do you suppose even THEY agree?
greatest commandment to me? keep trying to do the next thing.
Questions of Revelation:
10. What happens after we die?
everyone else still alive, lives. oh, you mean to us? but that's the point eh? you want to keep holding on to your life. Well, it wasn't yours to begin with, let go.
that there can't possibly be a being something like a human mind that created the universe and Earth and all the critters and man and is inordinately fond of mankind in particular and has a plan for mankind and earth of punnishment and reward. and that this being can be communicated with unambiguously. Certainly no mind like being in control of the universe wrote us a book in a hman language. that's it.
and even that is questionable because what's this mean "something like a human mind" surely some think that the evolving earth is SOMEthing like the human mind since the human mind might ALSO work by a process of overproduction of varying 'thoughts' and a 'natural selection' of them. Who knows? we don't know how the mind works yet. and still these people might call themselves atheists. there is no arbitor of who can and cannot call themselves atheists.
so these answers are my own. and i am not sure i would call myself an atheist, because we don't know how minds work, therefore, even if there was a deity, i don't know how it would work.
There are the basic world view questions:
1) Origins: Where did life originate
This is the exciting advanture that science is on now. is life as we know it on earth a natural consequence of chemistry? is it rather inevitable that under cetain geochemical conditions the chemistry of CHNOPS and SiAlFeMgKCaNaCl spontaneously forms into life?
Or is life a one time low probability event?
Or is it so improbable that it had to be designed?
The point is that most people don't know what we've learned in teh past 150 years. What we've learned is that rocks and chemicals are not innert and dumb. the gyrating 20 odd elements the earth is mostly made of are dynamic information processing subtle fuzzy machines always bouncing into each other exploring, with complex behaviors! molecules are complex and have sublte behaviors. they are NOT only like bricks or lego blocks.
In the last 70 years we've learned the molecular nature of life. This is utterly mindblowing knowlege, that again, has not seeped into popular culture. Yes when you look at the molecular organization of the simplest cell, the first impression is yes, the whole shebang, the whole autopoeitic loop looks irreducibly complex.
on the other hand over that same time period we've been widening the scope of our exploration of chemistry. in school we may learn something kind of dopey like: a flame is C6H12O6 +O2-->CO2 +H2O. FAR FROM IT. even an ordinary gas flame, CH4 and O2 burns in a complicated network of cyclic chemical reactions, reminiscent of some of those in the cell. We've begun to explore many such cyclic reactions in chemistry that spontaneously form. We know that many of the small molecules in cells can form spontanously in a reducing atmosphere, in fact are present in meteorites.
and of course even mineral chemistry is complex. clays, zeolites, metal sulfides... in fact at the core of many living reactions are metal sulfides..
The bottom line is, that our knowlege of all this is exploding exponentially, this is an EXCITING time for exploring this question. the gap between non life and life is narrowing. this is NO time to back down into a stance of "it's impossible"
1.5) and humanity originate?
The question of whether humanity 'originated' is partially a mathematical one. The record shows that between the common ancestor of us and chimps to the first records of human culture 30,000 years ago is about 5million years. that's between a 250,000 and a million generations. children in each generation are born slightly differently, though there may be periods where differences are higher.
can we say at some point we were chimp/humans and some point human? is there a SINGLE GENERATION where we can point to the dividing line? This seems to me a silly idea.
Unless there was a discrete bifurcation in the properties or our neural nets. (here comes the mathematical part..) Or a very fast bifurcation in the network properties of our develpmental circuits or between them and ecological circuits...
We don't know. Waht we do know is that in early eocene strata and lower we find no bones that are remotely hominid, and in upper strata we find many. many different kinds over a period of 5 million years and 2million in earnest. how can 500 thousand generations of changes turn a chimp like critter into a human? if you can't imagine that happening in 500 thousand changes.. you need to learn some biology. learn that we are the results of analog physics helping incredibly complex cell factories interpret a discretely coded blueprint called our genes.
2) The Problem: Why is there suffering,
Because there is creativity! There is suffering because that is one way to create. to create means to say try this, NOT that. to not try that is to suffer, unless you can break your attachments to that. This life involves innevitable choices. try the Buddha way if this bothers you.
2.5) why is there sickness, and death?
more specifically, why are humans prone to horrifying diseases, insanities, social chaos? because if we were perfect we'd be impervious to fluctuations out of which evolution creates new beings. we'd be impervious to fluctuations out of which our minds try out new ideas. and finally if we were perfect, would we be lovable? would we be human at all?
Why death? some creatures don't quite die. but vertebrates accumulate so many diseases, wear out etc... it's easier to have kids, start from scratch than to keep repairing, a 100 year old carcass! Of course most critters don't have the story telling memories that we do, don't become so attached to their memories as we do, so this irks us.
3) The Solution: What is the cure for man's suffering,
The buddha way.
or, accept it. Judaism is one way to live with the glorious creativity of life and accept the suffering as a consequence of this creativity
you mean cure for diseases? some can be cured, more wil always evolve. it is the way of life. You didn't want to escape this life did you? here is the knife, go for it. i don't recommend it.
3.5) esp. his existential lonliness?
why do you want to CURE this? isn't it one of the things that define us as humans? we spend our lives trying to connect, trying to make meaning, trying to create before we die or set up connections to what has come before us and to who will come after. this is the human way. why you not like it?
Questions of Meaning and Value:
4) How does an atheist assign meaning to human activity?
same as the rest of us, if we love it, if it brings us what we love, it means something to us. what we love is partially determined by what we are like, partially a-rational. is this a problem?
Bar, you must address the common misconception that guitar chick stated: if no god, then life has no meaning, we can plunder, there is no daddy to come home to after death all is a veil of horror, it's a pathology you must address.
4.5) Is all meaning subjective, or do some activities have self-evident and objective worth and meaning. If so, what are these activities, and how to you arrive at their value?
see the answers to morals
5) Are humans of more intrinsic value than animals? Why or why not?
To other humans and some of their pets they are. If we manage master our warlike, our apocalyptic tendancies, we may even come to be able to defend our planet against large asteroid collisions, interplanetary invasion, and even spread this Earth's life to other planets, who knows? life and we have already spread quite spectacularly.
then again in the cosmic scheme of things? is the moon of more value than the earth? one cannot say. one can only say "i love earth, life, humans, and this particular human more" it is a-rational.
are humans such that they can apprehend the laws of physics and one day come to be able to CHANGE the laws of physics themselves? I cannot imagine any way to say that's impossible in 10,000 years of continued science. so who knows?
6) How does an atheist determine what is moral or immoral
as i said in item 1.5 there is probably no ONE definition for humanity, just as there is no ONE definition for how a mammal can live. we have an idea that humanity is a fixed thing. and therefore that there is a fixed moral code. i think this is wrong.
a better understanding is that there is a statistical distribution of ways to be human just as all other properties of various species are distributed and vary, and that our idea of a norm of humanity is based on the fact that some large percentage of us DO operate under the same basic root behaviors and morals. certainly psychopaths and people with severe brain damage do not.
SHOULD humanity hold to ONE norm? that is entirely another question. would it lead to more stability? Do clashing norms naturally lead to an armed apocalypse destroying civilization? Can you imagine a world society enforced to one way of life? i think it would be hell, and would require HELL to produce. Nazi germany, anyone?
in different cultures in differnt times people think differntly about this norm. in current amercian culture we are so attentive to this norm idea that we largely ignore the real range of humanity, we are so bent on forcing each other into a norm.
7) right or wrong.
right for who and when and where? again there is a broad consensus among many people on rights and wrongs, but it's NOT UNIVERSAL. gravity is universal. certain laws of ecology are universal, though at any point a new biological invention like plant life on land, or insect pollination or the development of animal societies can change them.
Bar you must address a specific instance like african genetal mutilation, or the hijab or nazi germany. or feminism. or the automobile, YOU think it's wrong. ecologically it is. But he's asking about kosmic ultimates. and i'm saying it DOES depend on context.
8) Is there any objective standard or principles?
that's what i'm saying. NO. it's dependent on the ecological milleu. On the current state of evolution or speciation of Homo sapiens.
Questions of Worldview:
7. What type of government does atheistic philosophy translate into? How does it understand the relationship between man and government?
I am not aware of a single type. Humanity is too complex to determine this i think. i think we are doomed to continual experimentation. there are certain guidelines, such as how stable creative ecosystems work by their interactions. We can learn how other mammal societies manage and whether some of those principles are appropriate for us or not, or whether they in fact DO operate among us and whether we WANT them to or not.
again, you want one fixed answer for all time. the evidence shows that this is NOT the way of life on this Earth. you want a reality more cozy than it is.
7.5) Does it merely rely on someone else's system of thought, like the assumptions of naturalistic science?
Some ONE else's? that's silly. government is when MANY people get together and knock out a creative agreement. and in the scheme of things perhaps governements will come to evolve as they interact with each other. after a few rounds of hellish war, maybe we'll learn. has europe learned or has she collapsed? interesting.
the assumptions of naturalistic science? these arent assumptions, they are observations of how ecosystems work, how humans work. we can base how to make governemtns partially on data of the world, partially on our own desires.
8. How does atheism view religions and religious faith?
obviously all ancient societies that we have record for have had religious civilizations. I think this is a reaction to the way we must have suddenly (see bifurcations in (1.5) above) awakened to the immense depths and horrifically tortuous passageways of our own minds. It has taken us a long time to get out of that nightmare, and back into this refreshing REAL world.
nevertheless, since humanity is not fixed there is no ONE answer for how to live. only a norm for MOSTLY how to live. The rest of the choices are left to what we LOVE. and how we love is a-rational.
and then there is the question of suffering. most of us grow up naturally loving some aspects of life, becoming attached to them and suffering thereby, because all is change. if you would like, you can define religion as a response to this.
Buddha way says practice letting go of attachements and you wont suffer. this is hard. This is a very hard path, not many are willing to put in the work.
tora way says accept the suffering, it's a necessary adjunct to creativity and individuality for humanity. celebrate it. this is also a hard path. very few take it.
I suppose these two are close to the atheist way.
the way of the cross says, suffer now, and after you die, you can escape that kind of reality. this is an easy path, billions take it.
untill we change the nature of reality, religion will be here.
8.5) What about metaphysics? Is atheism purely materialistic and naturalistic?
i don't know what those mean. what could possibly be unnatural?
answer the question is atheism purely rationalistic. ah..
9) Who are the authoritative writers/books of atheism?
there is probably an authoritative book on the nature of the banana. there is probably NOT one on the nature of not-bananas. atheism is NOT a single tradition. and all of my answers are my own.
10) What are the central tenets of atheism
that there can't possibly be a being something like a human mind that created the universe and Eaerth and all the critters and man and is inordinately fond of mankind in particular and has a plan for mankind and earth of punnishment and reward. and that this being can be communicated with unambiguously. Certainly no mind like being in control of the universe wrote us a book in a hman language. that's it.
what are the central tenets to MY view of life? oy vey.
11) and if they have a "greatest commandment," what is it? For example, arguably, Christianity's is "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself."
again, atheism is NOT a single tradition. perhaps you are thinking of the recent phenomenon of Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, Schermer.. I've not read. Do you suppose even THEY agree?
greatest commandment to me? keep trying to do the next thing.
Questions of Revelation:
10. What happens after we die?
everyone else still alive, lives. oh, you mean to us? but that's the point eh? you want to keep holding on to your life. Well, it wasn't yours to begin with, let go.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Corn Starch Holes by Merkt, Deegan et. al. , kast55555,
from the description of this youtube entry:
I found this clip on the net some time ago and did a voice over to it...I also put Booker T. and the MG's as the soundtrack...
the video comes from the research here
F. Merkt, R.D. Deegan, D. Goldman, E. Rericha, and H.L. Swinney, �Persistent holes in a fluid�, Phys. Rev. Letters. 92 184501 (2004)
what is it? the fingers are self organizing structures feeding off of the vibrational energy supplied to the goop.
you can youtube corn starch and water and find all sorts of fun stuff.
you can make it yourself. easy.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
My Responses to A Survey of Public Understanding of Evolution
A Survey of Public Understanding of Evolution
>To the best of your understanding, and in your own words,
please explain what “evolution” means.
the word means to volute out of, that is for something to come (fly?) out of something. in our context it means where do the multitudinous forms of all of us critters come from? It looks like some kind of artwork after all. In Humanity's youth, the experience of our own minds was the most powerful presence around, the most surprising one at any rate. By Shakespeare's time certainly his mind was an example of the most detailed creative process we'd ever observed, or bothered to observe.
so the most logical answer to the question "were did all the forms we find on earth come from?" is: "something like a human mind"
Starting in the time of Galileo, we finally began looking, paying attention to, respecting, even, what was outside our minds. So that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries observations seemed to suggest that there was a deep geological history going on and that projecting current environmental processes backwards in time for 100s of millions of years could begin to explain the geological forms we found.
In this geological record we find different forms of critters (fossils). we find that over time, forms become extinct and new ones arise. we also find that some classes of forms transform from one to another as we go up in time. We also find that we don't find forms in earlier layers than the forms they depended on. I.e. we don't find fossil horses in layers before the earliest fossil fishes. We don't find honeybees in layers before there were flowers. Ecosystems change with the layers. ..till we get to the current age with... well, by darwin's time we had found maybe 100,000 different kinds of plants and animals and fungi and other oddities.
All this geology and biology stretches the imagination for what it means for something like a human mind, some being, to create all that, and in a small cozy amount of historical time.
Other clues were:
the odd placement of related or different species on islands. Marsupials in australia and south america. All those crazy finches on the galapagos islands...
the fact that organisms AREN'T so well designed after all. whales have miniscule hip bones in them, some snakes have leg bones in them, we've got an appendix that gives us trouble, giraffes have this crazy recurrent laryngeal nerve that starts out in the neck right below the head at the larynx and loops all the way down to pass under the aorta in the chest and comes all the way back up to enter the larynx..
The fact that under domestication organisms can be caused to vary quite a bit, like dogs, pigeons..
A clue from Adam Smith. Smith suggests that if every one pursued his own selfish economic means, the interactions in aggregate would even out, would buffet out to a stable economic system. (doesn't work for humans, who happen to be too intelligently, craetively INSANE for such a simple system to work)
And from John Malthus: populations increase exponentially and quickly outstrip the carrying capacity of the environment for them. this means that in every generation not all critters of any kind get to grow up and have offspring.
In fact there's gonna be competition between critters for having kids.
Do Darwin put this all together and came up with:
Offspring are mostly like their parents, but a little different too. And there's too many of these different offspring. Those that inherited differences that allow them to outcompete their cohorts and have more kids in a particular environment, will more likely pass on those differences to the next generation of offspring in that environment. various conditions will constrain this process to either weed out extraneous differences, or encourage the spread of these differences if the environment changes or subpopulations emigrate to new environments. extinctions happen, especially to critters of intermediate character that arent as able to compete as are the extremes, which are often more efficient at living in their particular environments.
Over time this will give the results we see in the fossil record. Sports which are seen in domestic breeding can continue to accumulate (look at the diversity of dogs or pigeons!) and ultimately result in new features.
Since Darwin we've learned a lot more. Founder effects excacerbate differences when small subpopulations leave large ones and immigrate to new environments, resulting in punctuation events in the fossil record.
mutations can occur which are neutral and accumulate that way. extinctions can be arbitrary bad luck of the draw, and large extinction events will wipe out MANY intermediate species, leaving fewer scattered species surviving that are more different than each other.
We've also realized that one of the most effective ways to have more kids is to COOPERATE with your neighbors and brothers and sisters instead of competing and thus we have wildly successful social species like wolves, ravens, penguins, honeybees and of course... ants. Oh yeah, maybe humans? well, we haven't even been around as long as wolves and how are we doing? time will tell.
And finally we learn that not all form comes from evolution, but the very clay that evolution gets to work with: molecular biology is fecund indeed and can produce much form by itself, from which natural selection can select. Finally this is all possible because of mathematics...
So Evolution means: The interactions between simple agents who can accumulate mutations, in large populations, over time, in complex changing environments, leads to the unpredictable extravagant creation of form that we see in the world today. And that form is so extravagant because the clay that evolution gets to sculpt with - molecular biology played on two dozen different peculiar elements - is fecund indeed thanks to geometry and mathematics.
see "complexity lab manual" for a discussion of the extravagance of this 'chemical clay' we got and how interactions between simple agents under flow of energy can lead to complex surprising subtle organization.
>If you accept the theory of evolution, please explain in your own words why; or if you do not accept the theory of evolution, please explain in your own words why not.
Ah... lets go over each of the hints:
Geology. how much have i observed? Actually i've never travelled enough to get a good sense of how rock strata patterns match up over large areas and allow you to build up a deep stratigraphical collumn of time. I've certainly seen some strata and fossils. Not MANY. Mostly i trust what i read in books, why? Hold on a few paragraphs.
I've certainly found fossils of critters no longer alive today, and certainly have found fossil beds of sea critters up on dry land.
I do have experience with the disparity and diversity of life out there. I've learned 500 different kinds of plants belonging to over a hundred different families in new york state. I've learned a dozen different Asters, 30 different kinds of grasses. once i took a walk and found 40 different kinds of mosses. I know of 22 different kinds of lichens and 22 different kinds of ants. I've met over 200 disparate forms of life like red algae, plasmodial slime molds, mushrooms, crustose lichens, waterbears, millipedes, honeybee colonies, deer, stentor, pine trees... I've found many kinds of rocks and minerals, and at museums... and books, yes i see that there are over 2000 different kinds of minerals that grow in maybe over 10,000 different forms and that there are easily over 10million different kinds of critters (mostly insects). and I've seen enough geological structures.
So where did it come from? no one i've ever experienced could sculpt all that. Makes no sense.
I do know what it is like to craft mechanisms, to come up with creative solutions to problems, to edit one's work and redesign it over and over again to optimise it. I've written complex computer programs, repaired automobiles, drawn pictures...
I've seen plenty of examples that organisms are NOT optimally designed (for what, anyway?) For instance infants at about 6mos are mentally ready to start learning to communicate with grammar. however their larynxes (dammed larynx stuff again!) are not yet ready for speach untill about 1 and a half years old. thus they remain frustrated for a year and cry a lot. That's poor design, or design ON THE MOVE, depending on how you look at it. I mean two different features are evolving at different paces!
Now recently in history, humans have developed a rather well publicized and world wide sign language for the deaf, and some mothers have started to sign with their infants. The infants love this and starting at 6 months they are less frustrated, cry less, and begin signing/talking earlier and better. this is biological and cultural evolution happening right befor our eyes.
I have bred kittens and guppies and have experience of the kind of variation that's possible in litters.
The point is that the diversity and disparity of life on Earth IS extravagant but not INFINITELY so. There appear to be constraints. Why are there no insects the size of wolves? why no mammals as small as insects? Why are the marsupials in australia and south america? why are there birds some of which are almost reminiscent of lions, some of which are reminiscent of honeybees, but not COMPLETLY so? They still seem to be stuck being birds. Hummingbirds seem to WANT to become honeybees, or at least the environment would select them to be.. yet none have transparent wings, etc...
If a creative mind crafted critters i would expect MORE inbetweens! and more disparity. 1.5million animal species found so far but .7million of them are beetles and they all fall into ONLY 30 basic groups. why not insects with 10 legs? why not crabs with 6 legs? why NO marine insects? Why only insects, mammals, reptiles learned to fly? Why do almost all land vertebrates have always 5 fingers or less? In fact just look at the panda! His ecological environment put selection pressure for an extra finger and look at the peculiar design it took to give him one. had to coopt some bones from other parts of the wrist to make one. Why is the creative process so constrained if not by descent with modification?
So do i really think that such simple interactions over long periods of time can result in such stark creations as all these different plants and animals? YES. I've studied much computer science, mathematics, something called cellular automata, even chemistry, and have the experience that simple systems can indeed give rise to surprising complexity. It takes a lot of study. I've begun summarizing that study in my "Complexity Lab Manual". You can find it by googling complexity lab, no quotes.
But what's the REAL explanation of why i accept evolutionary biology? Accept it AS WHAT?
For starters, I grew up with it. I grew up in the tradition of natural science. I grew up learning, experiencing concretely more details than are to be found in all of Shakespeare and the Bible put together. I grew up in a culture in the lower east side of manhattan that was multicultural, that was mostly a result of enlightenment Europe with a little rabbinic judaism thrown in. But i did not grow up in an isolated shtettle.
But it can't be only that. I certainly was exposed to religious culture, read tora, but... nah.. none of those adults made a big effort to come out and say what they thought god was, or really, why should i pray and be jewish.
Over the years I've met many such people both jewish, christian, buddhist, new age.. I have to admit that few if any of them have any real INTEREST in the details of critters and rocks and chemistry and mechanisms that i grew up with. See my review of Francis Collins biographical book. Sure, he can manage a molecular biology lab and talk the evolutionary biology lingo, even use the scientific method in limited domains of his work, maybe. But he came from a vastly different culture than i did, and seems to still belong to that CULTURE.
I mean i can easily slip into a religious culture and do fascinating theological exegesis and enter a poetic trance and pray with people... But it is not my home.
I've had my share of ecstatic experiences, but they were out in the fields and swamps and woods either being directly in contact with nature or meditating on its complex, subtle, richly textured details. I did not have them in church or synagogue.
The third thing about this scientific culture... sure, when i read books by scientists i feel at home with them... but it's more than just a heimishe feeling. The point is that anything these books report about the natural history that i HAVE had the opportunity to observe first hand, jives with my observations. The point is that these guys can also shoot the breeze about how to troubleshoot cars, design computers, algorithms... things that i have done. I have created computer systems and programs and fixed cars and other mechanisms. I have done chemistry and pottery and grown plants... and i do it by way of attitudes akin to the scientific method, not at all by way of prayer...
I fully admit that i do not react strongly to father figures, policemen, politicians, celebrities. Perhaps it is simply comes down to a quirk of personality. the complex interactions between bugs and plants, between mechanical parts, rocks and chemicals is to me MORE interesting than celebrity father figures.
On the other hand, my study of biology, ecology and human history suggest to me that our propensity to follow such celebrities has not led to our most endearing behaviors. Far from it: world wars, inquisitions, crusades... So in the balance i think that evolving ecosystems are much more creative, stable, harmonious, encouraging of human dignity than are systems created, ruled and judged by fatherkingpolicemancraftsmen
>How confident are you that you understand the scientific theory of evolution?
That i understand how life on earth evolves, or that i understand the current scientific understanding of it? oops that just changed as i typed this...
To the first question, i KNOW that there are things that i still don't understand at all, and that none of us do. That's all right in the scientific culture i live in. To the second question? I've studied it for 30 years or more, I suppose i understand it as well as any graduate student with a firm grasp of his studies. though because i've not had the oppurtunity to work out some details, i know i've got definite gaps.
And like i said there are major issues that i believe are unresolved.
>On the question of the origin and development of life and humans,
what do you believe?
that's four questions.
On the development of life, we've just been discussing that.
On the origins of humans... well, mostly the same as the origins of any other species. oh, by the way, can you define human? if not you can't discuss it's exact origins can you? The whole issue of species and origins is very subtle and messy. We don't have good answers right now. Did humanity result from a final mutation that caused a bifurcation in the dynamical system that was the behavior of the individual in which it happened in and thus in all her descendants?
Or did it result from bifurcation in properties of a whole population, which then went on to grow?
Or was there NO distinct origin of humanity in time on this Earth? most likely answer. I don't beleive you can define humanity, the only reason we are so distinct from every other critter we can see, is that the apes have always been rather flimsy low population critters frought with much extinction. The fossil record shows many variations over the last 5million years and at some times in the past there were as many as FIVE different kinds of 'apey human critters'. For that matter is a poor sot with the IQ of 40 a human? Is an idiot savant mathematical genius who can't even tie his own shoes or say hello, a human? how about a Homo or a Nigger? (I use these terms to point out that the definition of what is human is not so objective but influenced by strong emotions, especially when religion is involved)
Species are not fixed, they are moving targets. Thats one of the points of evolutionary biology.
Are humans different from other living critters in ways that no other critter is different than other critters? I've tried to argue this, but in the end i can come up with nothing that stands:
"what's so special about humans.txt"
On the development of humans, you mean that culture changes everything? but plenty of critters have culture... don't worry, humans are still evolving genetically.
The origin of life? Ah, my FAVORITE topic. What do i BELIEVE? Better, what am i excited about to explore for the rest of my life and vicariously for the rest of human history! It is true that currently we do NOT have a clue whether life as we know it is a reasonable extrapolation of what we know of geochemistry today. BUT:
Some of us have a very strong HUNCH and not because we've been told it is so, but becuase we've put in decades of study of the topics in complexity lab:
1) we are actively exploring all sorts of new chemistry experiments and finding more and more complex chemical reactions, more complex molecular structures that can form from scratch in the laboratory
2) we are exploring the very molecular structure of life, and taking apart some of the molecular systems that makes life go and seeing which subsystems can work alone, and how they work together, slowly finding the simplest systems that still have interesting complex properties of life.
3) we are exploring all kinds of mathematics and computer science that shows us that when you simple mechanisms interacting repeatedly with simple rules of interaction between their neighbors, complex patterns eventually come out, sometimes even in a process similar to the one darwin proposed for evolution of forms out of simple iinteractions between creatures.
4) It's not, dammit, so much as what i believe, it's that this is such exciting stuff, that i want to take part in this exploration and see what is possible. This exploration is only SIXTY years old or so, In the history of human civilization, it is brand new. Imagine what we will learn in the next 60 years? Aren't you excited.
Yes, my hunch is that within the next 60 years we will find out that life is a natural consequence of chemistry.
>rate myself on these scales:
>a fiscal/economic conservative -----a fiscal/economic liberal
don't know what it means, you need both conservative and experimental elements to run a stable creative society
>a social conservative ------a social liberal
still don't know what you mean, same answer.
>not very interested in science ------very interested in science
very interested in science
>not at all religious-------very religious
sometimes religious, mystical-poetic anyway
>Do you believe there is a God?
(a purposeful higher intelligence that created the universe)
"purposeful higher intelligence" higher than what? chihuahua? wait, is there even a single linear scale to intelligence? now what do we mean? I mean what do you, some catholics, some fundamentalist protestants, some new age hipsters, some hindus.... mean the same thing by this? The best i can do with your question is pick as concrete examples as i can:
did something like human intelligence create the universe? ummm... guess what? we don't even know what human intelligence is, how it works, and how it is a product of it's neuronal substrate. So can there be some kind of weird computer at the origin of the universe that's something like human intelligence that creaeted the laws of physics and flicked a switch...
you ask too silly, too general a question. why you switch from evolution of life to the whole universe? now you have broadened dangerously your question and open up a whole new can of worms.
i can certainly say that it does not seem to me that a human like intelligence created and maintains life on this earth. Also i don't see how such an entity could have sculpted this earth out of what universe stuff there was before.
now you want me to go back and discuss physics? I'm not very well versed in it.
i see no evidence of purpose in this universe though. you can see my discussion: How to Explore Whether the Universe Is a Loving God (Cosmological Anthropic Principle) on blackskimmerblog.blogspot.com
Or another example: can the whole universe be a purposeful humanelike intelligence? We've hardly explored it have we? like i said we don't know how human intelligence works. Is it digital? is it a wave phenomenon? does it have quantum phenomena that are important? we simply do not know.
My suspicion is that the universe is not now interconnected enough to be thinking very fast. But way way back? since we see stars and galaxies are receeding from each other, maybe 10billion years ago or even very close to the big bang (whatever that is) the universe WAS interconnected enough to be intelligent?
You ask BIG questions.
>On average, when you were growing up, how often did you attend religious services?
pre-K to 3rd day, Hebrew day school. I hated school i don't recall religious services. afterwards, sometimes we did shabat services once a week. untill my bar mitzva at age 13. Then i was allowed to quit. STUPID strand of religion, eh?
>How often do you presently attend religious services?
now? rarely. every know and then i do weekly. for instance even zen practice twice a week or more. and there have been times when practiced religous ritual much more often, meditation, acts of appreciating this glorious life, standing with sunset, eating a meal... These days i am not very religious. but that's a rather personal question.
>Current religious organization membership:
Membership? funny word! Judaism, 'am yisro'el is my family. a particular local unit community that i attend functions at regularly? no.
>What is your highest level of education?
1 semester of graduate biology. But of course i am always studying new things outside of school, very high level.
>Gender M
>Age 46
>Ethnicity
African Jewish Eastern European European Enlightenment Brittish Naturalist Scientist Native American Lower East Side New Yorker.
You didn't want to define what you meant by ethnicity did you? i mean, "white" is a stupid term. i don't think "caucasian" is much more accurate either! Neither would solely jewish be accurate.
>What is your country of residence?
gave it. New York City. currently in exile upstate. New York City is NOT American.
>To the best of your understanding, and in your own words,
please explain what “evolution” means.
the word means to volute out of, that is for something to come (fly?) out of something. in our context it means where do the multitudinous forms of all of us critters come from? It looks like some kind of artwork after all. In Humanity's youth, the experience of our own minds was the most powerful presence around, the most surprising one at any rate. By Shakespeare's time certainly his mind was an example of the most detailed creative process we'd ever observed, or bothered to observe.
so the most logical answer to the question "were did all the forms we find on earth come from?" is: "something like a human mind"
Starting in the time of Galileo, we finally began looking, paying attention to, respecting, even, what was outside our minds. So that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries observations seemed to suggest that there was a deep geological history going on and that projecting current environmental processes backwards in time for 100s of millions of years could begin to explain the geological forms we found.
In this geological record we find different forms of critters (fossils). we find that over time, forms become extinct and new ones arise. we also find that some classes of forms transform from one to another as we go up in time. We also find that we don't find forms in earlier layers than the forms they depended on. I.e. we don't find fossil horses in layers before the earliest fossil fishes. We don't find honeybees in layers before there were flowers. Ecosystems change with the layers. ..till we get to the current age with... well, by darwin's time we had found maybe 100,000 different kinds of plants and animals and fungi and other oddities.
All this geology and biology stretches the imagination for what it means for something like a human mind, some being, to create all that, and in a small cozy amount of historical time.
Other clues were:
the odd placement of related or different species on islands. Marsupials in australia and south america. All those crazy finches on the galapagos islands...
the fact that organisms AREN'T so well designed after all. whales have miniscule hip bones in them, some snakes have leg bones in them, we've got an appendix that gives us trouble, giraffes have this crazy recurrent laryngeal nerve that starts out in the neck right below the head at the larynx and loops all the way down to pass under the aorta in the chest and comes all the way back up to enter the larynx..
The fact that under domestication organisms can be caused to vary quite a bit, like dogs, pigeons..
A clue from Adam Smith. Smith suggests that if every one pursued his own selfish economic means, the interactions in aggregate would even out, would buffet out to a stable economic system. (doesn't work for humans, who happen to be too intelligently, craetively INSANE for such a simple system to work)
And from John Malthus: populations increase exponentially and quickly outstrip the carrying capacity of the environment for them. this means that in every generation not all critters of any kind get to grow up and have offspring.
In fact there's gonna be competition between critters for having kids.
Do Darwin put this all together and came up with:
Offspring are mostly like their parents, but a little different too. And there's too many of these different offspring. Those that inherited differences that allow them to outcompete their cohorts and have more kids in a particular environment, will more likely pass on those differences to the next generation of offspring in that environment. various conditions will constrain this process to either weed out extraneous differences, or encourage the spread of these differences if the environment changes or subpopulations emigrate to new environments. extinctions happen, especially to critters of intermediate character that arent as able to compete as are the extremes, which are often more efficient at living in their particular environments.
Over time this will give the results we see in the fossil record. Sports which are seen in domestic breeding can continue to accumulate (look at the diversity of dogs or pigeons!) and ultimately result in new features.
Since Darwin we've learned a lot more. Founder effects excacerbate differences when small subpopulations leave large ones and immigrate to new environments, resulting in punctuation events in the fossil record.
mutations can occur which are neutral and accumulate that way. extinctions can be arbitrary bad luck of the draw, and large extinction events will wipe out MANY intermediate species, leaving fewer scattered species surviving that are more different than each other.
We've also realized that one of the most effective ways to have more kids is to COOPERATE with your neighbors and brothers and sisters instead of competing and thus we have wildly successful social species like wolves, ravens, penguins, honeybees and of course... ants. Oh yeah, maybe humans? well, we haven't even been around as long as wolves and how are we doing? time will tell.
And finally we learn that not all form comes from evolution, but the very clay that evolution gets to work with: molecular biology is fecund indeed and can produce much form by itself, from which natural selection can select. Finally this is all possible because of mathematics...
So Evolution means: The interactions between simple agents who can accumulate mutations, in large populations, over time, in complex changing environments, leads to the unpredictable extravagant creation of form that we see in the world today. And that form is so extravagant because the clay that evolution gets to sculpt with - molecular biology played on two dozen different peculiar elements - is fecund indeed thanks to geometry and mathematics.
see "complexity lab manual" for a discussion of the extravagance of this 'chemical clay' we got and how interactions between simple agents under flow of energy can lead to complex surprising subtle organization.
>If you accept the theory of evolution, please explain in your own words why; or if you do not accept the theory of evolution, please explain in your own words why not.
Ah... lets go over each of the hints:
Geology. how much have i observed? Actually i've never travelled enough to get a good sense of how rock strata patterns match up over large areas and allow you to build up a deep stratigraphical collumn of time. I've certainly seen some strata and fossils. Not MANY. Mostly i trust what i read in books, why? Hold on a few paragraphs.
I've certainly found fossils of critters no longer alive today, and certainly have found fossil beds of sea critters up on dry land.
I do have experience with the disparity and diversity of life out there. I've learned 500 different kinds of plants belonging to over a hundred different families in new york state. I've learned a dozen different Asters, 30 different kinds of grasses. once i took a walk and found 40 different kinds of mosses. I know of 22 different kinds of lichens and 22 different kinds of ants. I've met over 200 disparate forms of life like red algae, plasmodial slime molds, mushrooms, crustose lichens, waterbears, millipedes, honeybee colonies, deer, stentor, pine trees... I've found many kinds of rocks and minerals, and at museums... and books, yes i see that there are over 2000 different kinds of minerals that grow in maybe over 10,000 different forms and that there are easily over 10million different kinds of critters (mostly insects). and I've seen enough geological structures.
So where did it come from? no one i've ever experienced could sculpt all that. Makes no sense.
I do know what it is like to craft mechanisms, to come up with creative solutions to problems, to edit one's work and redesign it over and over again to optimise it. I've written complex computer programs, repaired automobiles, drawn pictures...
I've seen plenty of examples that organisms are NOT optimally designed (for what, anyway?) For instance infants at about 6mos are mentally ready to start learning to communicate with grammar. however their larynxes (dammed larynx stuff again!) are not yet ready for speach untill about 1 and a half years old. thus they remain frustrated for a year and cry a lot. That's poor design, or design ON THE MOVE, depending on how you look at it. I mean two different features are evolving at different paces!
Now recently in history, humans have developed a rather well publicized and world wide sign language for the deaf, and some mothers have started to sign with their infants. The infants love this and starting at 6 months they are less frustrated, cry less, and begin signing/talking earlier and better. this is biological and cultural evolution happening right befor our eyes.
I have bred kittens and guppies and have experience of the kind of variation that's possible in litters.
The point is that the diversity and disparity of life on Earth IS extravagant but not INFINITELY so. There appear to be constraints. Why are there no insects the size of wolves? why no mammals as small as insects? Why are the marsupials in australia and south america? why are there birds some of which are almost reminiscent of lions, some of which are reminiscent of honeybees, but not COMPLETLY so? They still seem to be stuck being birds. Hummingbirds seem to WANT to become honeybees, or at least the environment would select them to be.. yet none have transparent wings, etc...
If a creative mind crafted critters i would expect MORE inbetweens! and more disparity. 1.5million animal species found so far but .7million of them are beetles and they all fall into ONLY 30 basic groups. why not insects with 10 legs? why not crabs with 6 legs? why NO marine insects? Why only insects, mammals, reptiles learned to fly? Why do almost all land vertebrates have always 5 fingers or less? In fact just look at the panda! His ecological environment put selection pressure for an extra finger and look at the peculiar design it took to give him one. had to coopt some bones from other parts of the wrist to make one. Why is the creative process so constrained if not by descent with modification?
So do i really think that such simple interactions over long periods of time can result in such stark creations as all these different plants and animals? YES. I've studied much computer science, mathematics, something called cellular automata, even chemistry, and have the experience that simple systems can indeed give rise to surprising complexity. It takes a lot of study. I've begun summarizing that study in my "Complexity Lab Manual". You can find it by googling complexity lab, no quotes.
But what's the REAL explanation of why i accept evolutionary biology? Accept it AS WHAT?
For starters, I grew up with it. I grew up in the tradition of natural science. I grew up learning, experiencing concretely more details than are to be found in all of Shakespeare and the Bible put together. I grew up in a culture in the lower east side of manhattan that was multicultural, that was mostly a result of enlightenment Europe with a little rabbinic judaism thrown in. But i did not grow up in an isolated shtettle.
But it can't be only that. I certainly was exposed to religious culture, read tora, but... nah.. none of those adults made a big effort to come out and say what they thought god was, or really, why should i pray and be jewish.
Over the years I've met many such people both jewish, christian, buddhist, new age.. I have to admit that few if any of them have any real INTEREST in the details of critters and rocks and chemistry and mechanisms that i grew up with. See my review of Francis Collins biographical book. Sure, he can manage a molecular biology lab and talk the evolutionary biology lingo, even use the scientific method in limited domains of his work, maybe. But he came from a vastly different culture than i did, and seems to still belong to that CULTURE.
I mean i can easily slip into a religious culture and do fascinating theological exegesis and enter a poetic trance and pray with people... But it is not my home.
I've had my share of ecstatic experiences, but they were out in the fields and swamps and woods either being directly in contact with nature or meditating on its complex, subtle, richly textured details. I did not have them in church or synagogue.
The third thing about this scientific culture... sure, when i read books by scientists i feel at home with them... but it's more than just a heimishe feeling. The point is that anything these books report about the natural history that i HAVE had the opportunity to observe first hand, jives with my observations. The point is that these guys can also shoot the breeze about how to troubleshoot cars, design computers, algorithms... things that i have done. I have created computer systems and programs and fixed cars and other mechanisms. I have done chemistry and pottery and grown plants... and i do it by way of attitudes akin to the scientific method, not at all by way of prayer...
I fully admit that i do not react strongly to father figures, policemen, politicians, celebrities. Perhaps it is simply comes down to a quirk of personality. the complex interactions between bugs and plants, between mechanical parts, rocks and chemicals is to me MORE interesting than celebrity father figures.
On the other hand, my study of biology, ecology and human history suggest to me that our propensity to follow such celebrities has not led to our most endearing behaviors. Far from it: world wars, inquisitions, crusades... So in the balance i think that evolving ecosystems are much more creative, stable, harmonious, encouraging of human dignity than are systems created, ruled and judged by fatherkingpolicemancraftsmen
>How confident are you that you understand the scientific theory of evolution?
That i understand how life on earth evolves, or that i understand the current scientific understanding of it? oops that just changed as i typed this...
To the first question, i KNOW that there are things that i still don't understand at all, and that none of us do. That's all right in the scientific culture i live in. To the second question? I've studied it for 30 years or more, I suppose i understand it as well as any graduate student with a firm grasp of his studies. though because i've not had the oppurtunity to work out some details, i know i've got definite gaps.
And like i said there are major issues that i believe are unresolved.
>On the question of the origin and development of life and humans,
what do you believe?
that's four questions.
On the development of life, we've just been discussing that.
On the origins of humans... well, mostly the same as the origins of any other species. oh, by the way, can you define human? if not you can't discuss it's exact origins can you? The whole issue of species and origins is very subtle and messy. We don't have good answers right now. Did humanity result from a final mutation that caused a bifurcation in the dynamical system that was the behavior of the individual in which it happened in and thus in all her descendants?
Or did it result from bifurcation in properties of a whole population, which then went on to grow?
Or was there NO distinct origin of humanity in time on this Earth? most likely answer. I don't beleive you can define humanity, the only reason we are so distinct from every other critter we can see, is that the apes have always been rather flimsy low population critters frought with much extinction. The fossil record shows many variations over the last 5million years and at some times in the past there were as many as FIVE different kinds of 'apey human critters'. For that matter is a poor sot with the IQ of 40 a human? Is an idiot savant mathematical genius who can't even tie his own shoes or say hello, a human? how about a Homo or a Nigger? (I use these terms to point out that the definition of what is human is not so objective but influenced by strong emotions, especially when religion is involved)
Species are not fixed, they are moving targets. Thats one of the points of evolutionary biology.
Are humans different from other living critters in ways that no other critter is different than other critters? I've tried to argue this, but in the end i can come up with nothing that stands:
"what's so special about humans.txt"
On the development of humans, you mean that culture changes everything? but plenty of critters have culture... don't worry, humans are still evolving genetically.
The origin of life? Ah, my FAVORITE topic. What do i BELIEVE? Better, what am i excited about to explore for the rest of my life and vicariously for the rest of human history! It is true that currently we do NOT have a clue whether life as we know it is a reasonable extrapolation of what we know of geochemistry today. BUT:
Some of us have a very strong HUNCH and not because we've been told it is so, but becuase we've put in decades of study of the topics in complexity lab:
1) we are actively exploring all sorts of new chemistry experiments and finding more and more complex chemical reactions, more complex molecular structures that can form from scratch in the laboratory
2) we are exploring the very molecular structure of life, and taking apart some of the molecular systems that makes life go and seeing which subsystems can work alone, and how they work together, slowly finding the simplest systems that still have interesting complex properties of life.
3) we are exploring all kinds of mathematics and computer science that shows us that when you simple mechanisms interacting repeatedly with simple rules of interaction between their neighbors, complex patterns eventually come out, sometimes even in a process similar to the one darwin proposed for evolution of forms out of simple iinteractions between creatures.
4) It's not, dammit, so much as what i believe, it's that this is such exciting stuff, that i want to take part in this exploration and see what is possible. This exploration is only SIXTY years old or so, In the history of human civilization, it is brand new. Imagine what we will learn in the next 60 years? Aren't you excited.
Yes, my hunch is that within the next 60 years we will find out that life is a natural consequence of chemistry.
>rate myself on these scales:
>a fiscal/economic conservative -----a fiscal/economic liberal
don't know what it means, you need both conservative and experimental elements to run a stable creative society
>a social conservative ------a social liberal
still don't know what you mean, same answer.
>not very interested in science ------very interested in science
very interested in science
>not at all religious-------very religious
sometimes religious, mystical-poetic anyway
>Do you believe there is a God?
(a purposeful higher intelligence that created the universe)
"purposeful higher intelligence" higher than what? chihuahua? wait, is there even a single linear scale to intelligence? now what do we mean? I mean what do you, some catholics, some fundamentalist protestants, some new age hipsters, some hindus.... mean the same thing by this? The best i can do with your question is pick as concrete examples as i can:
did something like human intelligence create the universe? ummm... guess what? we don't even know what human intelligence is, how it works, and how it is a product of it's neuronal substrate. So can there be some kind of weird computer at the origin of the universe that's something like human intelligence that creaeted the laws of physics and flicked a switch...
you ask too silly, too general a question. why you switch from evolution of life to the whole universe? now you have broadened dangerously your question and open up a whole new can of worms.
i can certainly say that it does not seem to me that a human like intelligence created and maintains life on this earth. Also i don't see how such an entity could have sculpted this earth out of what universe stuff there was before.
now you want me to go back and discuss physics? I'm not very well versed in it.
i see no evidence of purpose in this universe though. you can see my discussion: How to Explore Whether the Universe Is a Loving God (Cosmological Anthropic Principle) on blackskimmerblog.blogspot.com
Or another example: can the whole universe be a purposeful humanelike intelligence? We've hardly explored it have we? like i said we don't know how human intelligence works. Is it digital? is it a wave phenomenon? does it have quantum phenomena that are important? we simply do not know.
My suspicion is that the universe is not now interconnected enough to be thinking very fast. But way way back? since we see stars and galaxies are receeding from each other, maybe 10billion years ago or even very close to the big bang (whatever that is) the universe WAS interconnected enough to be intelligent?
You ask BIG questions.
>On average, when you were growing up, how often did you attend religious services?
pre-K to 3rd day, Hebrew day school. I hated school i don't recall religious services. afterwards, sometimes we did shabat services once a week. untill my bar mitzva at age 13. Then i was allowed to quit. STUPID strand of religion, eh?
>How often do you presently attend religious services?
now? rarely. every know and then i do weekly. for instance even zen practice twice a week or more. and there have been times when practiced religous ritual much more often, meditation, acts of appreciating this glorious life, standing with sunset, eating a meal... These days i am not very religious. but that's a rather personal question.
>Current religious organization membership:
Membership? funny word! Judaism, 'am yisro'el is my family. a particular local unit community that i attend functions at regularly? no.
>What is your highest level of education?
1 semester of graduate biology. But of course i am always studying new things outside of school, very high level.
>Gender M
>Age 46
>Ethnicity
African Jewish Eastern European European Enlightenment Brittish Naturalist Scientist Native American Lower East Side New Yorker.
You didn't want to define what you meant by ethnicity did you? i mean, "white" is a stupid term. i don't think "caucasian" is much more accurate either! Neither would solely jewish be accurate.
>What is your country of residence?
gave it. New York City. currently in exile upstate. New York City is NOT American.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
An Example of How Science Works From George W. Corner
I got this story first from Garett Hardin's 2nd ed biology textbook. In it George W. Corner tells about his and W. M. Allen's research on progesterone in rabbits to illustrate how science works. Note how the scientists treat their observations, their techniques, how they critique themselves and each other but how they don't give up.
A failure and what it taught.
Willard Allen and I had a
queer experience with our first extracts, from which we learned
something important, so that the story is not only amusing
but useful. The beginning of this tale is that when we started
we followed (as I said before) a hint from the work of Ed-
mund Herrmann, who had obviously produced progestational
proliferation in a few of his experiments without knowing it.
He had used very young rabbits, roughly 8 weeks old. They
react more readily than adults to the estrogen which was the
chief ingredient of his extracts. Since we wanted to follow his
methods closely at first, we used infant rabbits too, and with
them our first successes were obtained. In the spring of 1929
we were all ready to report the first steps in print. The paper
was being written, when it occurred to me that our directions
for extracting the hormone ought to be tried out by a none-
too-good chemist, just to make sure they were foolproof. We
did not want others to think our work could not be repeated,
just because our directions were not clear. It was agreed that
I was a bad enough chemist for the test : if I could make the
extract all by myself, then anybody could. So Allen went on
his vacation and I went back to our extractors and vacuum
stills. In a week I had a batch ready; to my horror it was
ineffectual. I made another batch; it, too, was worthless. I
suppressed the paper and telegraphed for Allen. We decided
that I needed a vacation and that we would look for the
trouble in the fall. In September I made another batch with
Allen watching every step, but not touching the apparatus.
It was no good. What could be wrong.'' Since my laboratory
was sunnier than his, perhaps my hormone was being spoiled
by sunlight. I had a room blacked out and made a batch in
the dark. That failed. Then we remembered that Allen, being
a better chemist than I, usually got his extracts freer of su-
perfluous grease and therefore had to mix them with corn oil
(Mazola) so that he could inject them. Mine were greasy
enough to inject without added oil. Perhaps the corn oil pro-
tected his hormones somehow while mine spoiled. We checked
that idea — another two weeks gone — and that was not the
answer. Then in desperation we made a batch together, side
by side and almost hand in hand, each watching the other. We
divided it into two lots and tested it separately — Allen's
worked ; mine did not ! Eureka, my trouble was in the testing,
not in the cookery.
The explanation will seem so silly that I almost hesitate
to admit what it was. The fact is that rabbits do not respond
well to progesterone until they are about 8 weeks old and
weigh about 800 grams. We did not know this, and our rab-
bits ranged from 600 to 1,200 grams. When we went to the
cages to inject them, Willard Allen's idea of what constitutes
a nice rabbit led him to choose the larger ones, while I must
have had a subconscious preference for the infants. My ex-
tracts had been as good as his all the while, but my rabbits
were insensitive. It is staggering to think how often the success
or failure of research may hang upon such an unimaginable
contingency.
from
THE HORMONES IN HUMAN REPRODUCTION
by George W. Corner
pg 118 to 119
the whole book looks rather fun.
read the whole book online here:
A failure and what it taught.
Willard Allen and I had a
queer experience with our first extracts, from which we learned
something important, so that the story is not only amusing
but useful. The beginning of this tale is that when we started
we followed (as I said before) a hint from the work of Ed-
mund Herrmann, who had obviously produced progestational
proliferation in a few of his experiments without knowing it.
He had used very young rabbits, roughly 8 weeks old. They
react more readily than adults to the estrogen which was the
chief ingredient of his extracts. Since we wanted to follow his
methods closely at first, we used infant rabbits too, and with
them our first successes were obtained. In the spring of 1929
we were all ready to report the first steps in print. The paper
was being written, when it occurred to me that our directions
for extracting the hormone ought to be tried out by a none-
too-good chemist, just to make sure they were foolproof. We
did not want others to think our work could not be repeated,
just because our directions were not clear. It was agreed that
I was a bad enough chemist for the test : if I could make the
extract all by myself, then anybody could. So Allen went on
his vacation and I went back to our extractors and vacuum
stills. In a week I had a batch ready; to my horror it was
ineffectual. I made another batch; it, too, was worthless. I
suppressed the paper and telegraphed for Allen. We decided
that I needed a vacation and that we would look for the
trouble in the fall. In September I made another batch with
Allen watching every step, but not touching the apparatus.
It was no good. What could be wrong.'' Since my laboratory
was sunnier than his, perhaps my hormone was being spoiled
by sunlight. I had a room blacked out and made a batch in
the dark. That failed. Then we remembered that Allen, being
a better chemist than I, usually got his extracts freer of su-
perfluous grease and therefore had to mix them with corn oil
(Mazola) so that he could inject them. Mine were greasy
enough to inject without added oil. Perhaps the corn oil pro-
tected his hormones somehow while mine spoiled. We checked
that idea — another two weeks gone — and that was not the
answer. Then in desperation we made a batch together, side
by side and almost hand in hand, each watching the other. We
divided it into two lots and tested it separately — Allen's
worked ; mine did not ! Eureka, my trouble was in the testing,
not in the cookery.
The explanation will seem so silly that I almost hesitate
to admit what it was. The fact is that rabbits do not respond
well to progesterone until they are about 8 weeks old and
weigh about 800 grams. We did not know this, and our rab-
bits ranged from 600 to 1,200 grams. When we went to the
cages to inject them, Willard Allen's idea of what constitutes
a nice rabbit led him to choose the larger ones, while I must
have had a subconscious preference for the infants. My ex-
tracts had been as good as his all the while, but my rabbits
were insensitive. It is staggering to think how often the success
or failure of research may hang upon such an unimaginable
contingency.
from
THE HORMONES IN HUMAN REPRODUCTION
by George W. Corner
pg 118 to 119
the whole book looks rather fun.
read the whole book online here:
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