SOTS,
So in Reply 154 I posted a series of rebuttals and corrections, all of which you’ve ignored in favour of response just to a footnote about why you may keep misrepresenting what emergence actually entails.
Oh well.
Your response really does lay bare your prejudices for all to see.
By “your response” you’re referring just to the trivial bit about why you may behave as you do I guess – oh, let’s test your claim in any case then.
1. You’ve brought up my religious beliefs when I have not mentioned them. Furthermore, you’ve made assumptions about them when you don’t even know what I believe and why! If religious belief is a factor then what is the factor for Jack Knave (who is not a theist), who was also challenging aspects of what is claimed on the Karma thread?
No, I merely suggested your religious beliefs as a possible motivating factor for your misrepresentation and rejection of the facts. If you do it for other reasons though, then fair enough.
And by the way I made no assumptions at all about what you may believe and why. If you insist on lying about things like this, can I suggest for your benefit that you at least try to do it less blatantly?
2. By bringing up religious beliefs when they have not been mentioned, it shows that your approach is not one based on getting to the truth of the matter. It is to avoid anything that could potentially lead to a religious explanation for a cause.
No, it was merely to suggest a possible motive for your behaviour. “The truth of the matter” was discussed at length in the body of Reply 154, but you just ignored all that.
3. You evaded all of the issues raised in my previous post. No surprise there. Anyone reading your post would think I am against the notion of emergence!
Please stop lying – it’s just boorish. What I actually did was to rebut them point-by-point – pretty much the opposite of evasion.
Therefore, let me explain again what the quintessential problem is.
By the “the problem” would I be right in thinking that you’re about to highlight again your problem of understanding?
On the Karma thread, the poster Enki asked a key question: what makes one system adaptive and another non-adaptive where emergence is concerned? The question was asked three times (#546, #560, #581). Each time you responded (#552, #562, #584) you evaded the question by describing what adaptive and non-adaptive systems are. So let the examples and analogies illustrate!
So yes I would be...
If you want to discuss that you can, though you don’t seem to understand the question you’re trying to frame. Are you trying to ask what qualitatively it is about some systems that gives them the property “adaptive”, or are you trying to ask what causes some systems to become adaptive while others do not?
Either way though it’s completely irrelevant to the thrust of the point, which is that adaptive systems manifestly
exist and moreover they exist with no top down designer being necessary to make it so.
In an adaptive system, that which causes it to be adaptive is already present.
Wrong again. It’s the
interactions between the constituent parts that give rise to complex adaptive emergent properties – the constituents themselves have none of those characteristics and nor can they be "present" unless the interactions between them occur.
Look, it’s really not my job to educate you about this. I’ve pointed you to reading material several times now but if you don’t want to bother with it and prefer instead to keep making the same mistakes there’s not much more I can do to help you.
In all of the examples where living organisms are involved, life is already present. In your SIMS analogy, human beings were responsible for the game, so the simulated life in that game (a characteristic for the adaptive system from which any emergence occurs) has its ultimate cause as a result of the computer coding of human beings! So guess what? Your own analogy ends up illustrating why an external cause is needed and suggests possible characteristics of that cause!!
Whoosh!
Despite all this, you continue to peddle the hypothesis that an adaptive system can result in organic and/or inorganic matter coming together for life to emerge when all of the analogies and examples show that life is present in order for it to be adaptive.
Trouble is, “all this” is just another restatement of your failure to understand the phenomenon, and yes – the hypothesis is that life can emerge from non-life because that’s what all the evidence and reasoning suggests. You seem to think that there’s some kind of mystical special status for the term “life”. Yes it’s a useful definition for creating a barrier from one state to a different one (though not early so clear-cut as you may think – are viruses alive for example?) but there’s no special magic there. Life itself could be described as the point at which non-adaptive systems become adaptive for example as layer of complexity builds upon layer of complexity.
Then again, you’d probably have known that had you read something of the subject before presuming to critique it.
By all means come back when you have some grasp of the basics though, and I’ll be happy to talk to you again then.
