Pattern recognition and belief in God

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

In Reply 105 you said:

Different methods and methodologies need to be employed to study different phenomena.

In Reply 118 however, you also said:   

I have no methodology in the manner in which you require it.

Which is it?

In Reply 118 you continued:

For me, subjective insight and pattern recognition is enough as evidence of subtle forces working in my life.  Elaborate methodologies are not required.

Or any methodologies at all it seems, “elaborate” or otherwise. Fine. For me then, my “subjective insight” tells me that there are tap dancing unicorns on Alpha Centauri. As neither of us have any method at all to investigate our different subjective beliefs, can you think of any good reason for anyone else to take them seriously, let alone to consider them to be objectively true?

Come to think of it, can you think of any good reason for each of us to consider our subjective beliefs to be objectively true also?

Anything?     

[Alan Burns]

That's not actually what I said. I was saying that you can't claim (no matter how you define 'useful information') that it is always reduced and never increased by random variation because any change that a mutation can make can happen in the other direction too*.

And you're still ignoring natural selection, which ensures that the useful changes survive and the deleterious ones die out - so the fact that most mutations are not useful is irrelevant.

* To be clear, any particular change has a low probability, but a change from (say) GGATCG to AGATCG is just as probable as its inverse, so if one is an decrease in information (however you define it), the other must be an increase, so claiming that all random changes decrease information is nonsensical.

My claim is based upon the vastly greater probability of random events producing corruption rather than increase of useful information.
Imagine your recent post with random words either added or removed.  It would most likely result in gobbledygook rather than have discernable meaning, but there is admittedly a slim chance that you would produce a post with a different meaning.
Now imagine the same post being modified by the addition or removal of individual letters.  The probability of a different meaningful post would be substantially diminished.
Finally, imagine your post being modified at the binary level where the individual molecules underlying the content of your message get modified.  I think you will agree that the prospect of such modifications producing any meaningful result will be so infinitesimal as to be zero.

[Stranger]

My claim is based upon the vastly greater probability of random events producing corruption rather than increase of useful information.

You're still ignoring natural selection, which is the most important part of the process, and the observed facts about actual mutations, most of which are neutral, some of which are harmful, and some of which are beneficial. Natural selection removes the harmful ones and amplifies the beneficial ones, so they spread through the population.

Nobody is suggesting that random variation by itself will produce evolution. Random variation produces novelty, it's natural selection that sifts out the useful from the useless or harmful.

You're basically putting forward (again) an argument from personal incredulity that goes against the solid evidence and mathematical modelling.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

My claim is based upon the vastly greater probability of random events producing corruption rather than increase of useful information.

Depends what you mean by “corruption”, but even if that is true – so what? Provided the probability of this “corruption” isn’t 1, that’s all life would need.

Imagine your recent post with random words either added or removed.  It would most likely result in gobbledygook rather than have discernable meaning, but there is admittedly a slim chance that you would produce a post with a different meaning.

Again you’re ignoring the natural selection part. Genetic mutation isn’t inherently “useful/not useful” – it just is. Un/usefulness is defined by the host's relationship to its environment.

Now imagine the same post being modified by the addition or removal of individual letters.  The probability of a different meaningful post would be substantially diminished.

You’re still trying a false analogy.
 

Finally, imagine your post being modified at the binary level where the individual molecules underlying the content of your message get modified.  I think you will agree that the prospect of such modifications producing any meaningful result will be so infinitesimal as to be zero.

Finally, let’s not indulge your ignorance any further. Apparently random genetic mutations happen all the time. Sometimes they’re harmful to their host, sometime they’re useful and sometimes they have no significant effect either way. When they’re helpful though, over time increased complexity will often occur with no deity required to make it so.     

[torridon]

Shallit's argument is entirely dependent on his personal view of what he claims to be "information increase".  The random unguided forces of nature will certainly change whatever comprises the information contained in DNA, but truly random forces will invariably destroy useable information rather than increase it.  Try adding a few random characters to any piece of computer code and see what happens.

This is confusion by simplistic computing analogy, something Sriram also frequently falls for.  A mutation in a germ line cell will not 'destroy' the information in the cell, rather it will potentially alter its functioning.  The vast majority of mutations do not get passed on to descendants and of the ones that do, the vast majority will have no net effect on the fitness of descendants.  Of the few that do impact on fitness,  mutations that confer an advantage are more likely to be conserved down the generations, whilst mutations that confer a disadvantage are correspondingly more likely to be eliminated.  This is really just tautological.

[Sriram]

I think you people are missing the point about the powerful Unconscious mind and its role in running our lives. Recognizing unconscious patterns involves an understanding of the working of the unconscious mind. 

Science has established that the persistent influence of the unconscious mind is a very real phenomenon. The conscious mind is said to be just a broom closet in the mansion of the mind.

[torridon]

I think you people are missing the point about the powerful Unconscious mind and its role in running our lives. Recognizing unconscious patterns involves an understanding of the working of the unconscious mind. 

Science has established that the persistent influence of the unconscious mind is a very real phenomenon. The conscious mind is said to be just a broom closet in the mansion of the mind.

Nonsense, no one disputes that, this has been long understood.  There is nothing however to suggest that the subconscious mind is somehow incapable of spurious attribution or free of cognitive biases. All our biases are essentially subconscious and it is when they manifest through consciousness that they become apparent.

[Sriram]

Nonsense, no one disputes that, this has been long understood.  There is nothing however to suggest that the subconscious mind is somehow incapable of spurious attribution or free of cognitive biases. All our biases are essentially subconscious and it is when they manifest through consciousness that they become apparent.

You are missing the point again...  You have to stop confusing the powerful Unconscious mind with the subconscious mind that merely stores repressed memories.

The unconscious mind is not just a back office or store room to the conscious mind.  It is an independent deciding agency that merely takes its inputs from the conscious mind. This is a new idea that needs to be understood.

When I talk of pattern recognition....it is not about any religious belief.  It is about the working of the deeper levels of the Unconscious mind.   

[torridon]

You are missing the point again...  You have to stop confusing the powerful Unconscious mind with the subconscious mind that merely stores repressed memories.

The unconscious mind is not just a back office or store room to the conscious mind.  It is an independent deciding agency that merely takes its inputs from the conscious mind. This is a new idea that needs to be understood.

When I talk of pattern recognition....it is not about any religious belief.  It is about the working of the deeper levels of the Unconscious mind.   

Religious beliefs are a characteristic outcome of subconscious pattern recognition, but they aren't the only ones. All our biases tend to build up subconsciously, and they become manifest through conscious expression. 

When you look at an optical illusion or hear an auditory illusion, that is powerful evidence of misdirected non conscious pattern recognition happening.

[jeremyp]

Natural selection can only work on things which have gained advantage by some means.
Which from a secular point of view requires random forces to be capable of increasing the usefulness of information rather than corrupting it.

No. The variation can be random. As long as there is variation, natural selection can act on it. The increase in formation comes from the selection, not the variation.

[jeremyp]

That is fine.  But first causes cannot be understood using the above steps.

Why not?

Consciousness for example, cannot be understood using that methodology.

Why not?

[jeremyp]

The unconscious mind is not just a back office or store room to the conscious mind.  It is an independent deciding agency that merely takes its inputs from the conscious mind. This is a new idea that needs to be understood.

OK. How have you demonstrated that this unconscious mind exists?

[Outrider]

The absurdity is in your presumption that truly random events are equally probable of increasing information rather than corrupting it.

The absurdity is that you think this is the claim - random events are significantly more likely to alter data in such a way that the data is corrupted, but there are enough instances of the alterations that the small portion of them that blindly alter the data in such a way that the information is not corrupted lead to variation that sometimes is more complex, sometimes is less, sometimes offers an advantage sometimes doesn't... and then natural forces act upon that variation.

O.

[Outrider]

Finally, imagine your post being modified at the binary level where the individual molecules underlying the content of your message get modified.  I think you will agree that the prospect of such modifications producing any meaningful result will be so infinitesimal as to be zero.

I think you fail to appreciate how many messages are out there, how many times that data gets tiny corruptions.  I think also that you forget, for instance, that when you change the data you don't have an equal 1 in 25 chance for the replacement, you have one other option for individual gene expressions, or you get whole chunks of excised data replicated in a different place, but essentially still the same data.  You change the rhythm of the message, you change the context of one paragraph, but the words stay the same.

It's not the free-for-all that you depict, nor is it only four or five times in the 3.7 billion years this process has been running.

O.

[Sriram]

Reply to post 136

Check with google and David Eagleman, Benjamin Libet etc.

[Sriram]

Religious beliefs are a characteristic outcome of subconscious pattern recognition, but they aren't the only ones. All our biases tend to build up subconsciously, and they become manifest through conscious expression. 

When you look at an optical illusion or hear an auditory illusion, that is powerful evidence of misdirected non conscious pattern recognition happening.

You are sticking with religion even after I have told you that what I am talking about has nothing to do with religion. You are carefully avoiding the topic of the Unconscious mind....or repeating that it is a memory bank.   

The Unconscious mind is the 'missing link' that will help bridge  science and spiritual ideas.   

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

You are sticking with religion even after I have told you that what I am talking about has nothing to do with religion.

Yes it has. You make claims of fact with no method of any kind to investigate or to verify them. That makes them faith claims. Religion concerns faith claims. They’re epistemically the same thing.

You are carefully avoiding the topic of the Unconscious mind....or repeating that it is a memory bank.

No he isn’t – he corrected your misunderstanding of it.   

The Unconscious mind is the 'missing link' that will help bridge  science and spiritual ideas.

You can have all the “spiritual ideas” you like. Your problem though is that your subjective opinions about that are just that – subjective, personal only to you. They have no more objective value than my subjective ideas about unicorns. Until and unless you can find a way to bridge the gap from subjective to objective, that will remain the case.

I explained this to you a few replies ago – why have you just ignored it?       

[jeremyp]

Reply to post 136

Check with google and David Eagleman, Benjamin Libet etc.

How will that demonstrate your assertion to be true?

[ippy]

You are missing the point again...  You have to stop confusing the powerful Unconscious mind with the subconscious mind that merely stores repressed memories.

The unconscious mind is not just a back office or store room to the conscious mind.  It is an independent deciding agency that merely takes its inputs from the conscious mind. This is a new idea that needs to be understood.

When I talk of pattern recognition....it is not about any religious belief.  It is about the working of the deeper levels of the Unconscious mind.   

You've failed to mention using the deeper levels of guess work Sriram?

Reggs, ippy.