Does Evolution Beg the Question on Survival of the Fittest? - Page 4 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14839847
Hindsite wrote:So you believe a science fiction movie sums it all up. Well, the theory of evolution is science fiction alright. The Holy Bible tells us why we exist. You should read it sometime. HalleluYah


'A science fiction movie'! That movie is a seminal work in the evolution of the American scifi genera. Look at who made it, at what point in their careers and what themes in it were used in later famous movies.

Anyway, a comedy about arguing with a 'smart bomb' is a fun way to be introduced to phenomenology.


And so, if I might be so bold, I should point out that the typical Christian counter arguement to the scientific dumb luck idea is to assert the universe is in fact animated by a divine provenance. Is that so?
#14839863
foxdemon wrote:And so, if I might be so bold, I should point out that the typical Christian counter arguement to the scientific dumb luck idea is to assert the universe is in fact animated by a divine provenance. Is that so?

Something like that. HalleluYah
By RhetoricThug
#14840017
Potemkin wrote:Have you never seen a cat playing with a mouse? And I'm pretty sure the dinosaurs liked to play with their food too.
I raise chickens, they're 'twitch hunters,' and they never 'play' with their food. Whenever a mouse or salamander appears in their coop area, they instantly swarm and peck the creature to death. Perhaps dinosaurs behaved in a similar fashion.

Besides, the very fact that you are moralistically criticising human cruelty says a lot about the human sense of empathy even for other species of animal. I assure you that most animals have absolutely no sense of empathy for each other whatsoever. Nor are they writing monographs on the philosophy of ethics. They're too busy hunting and eating each other. Lol.
That is not an accurate statement. Do you have any experience with animals (not counting your interactions on PoFo), Potemkin?

And so, if I might be so bold cliche, I should point out that the typical Christian counter arguement to the scientific dumb luck idea is to assert the universe is in fact animated by a divine provenance. Is that so?
Dualistic interpretations will always inspire fixed perspectives. It's foolish to embrace absolutism when discussing the notion of cosmogenesis. The idea that science can know it, or Christianity can know it, is, well, laughable. Furthermore, 'luck' does not exist (perhaps the collision of information/energy may appear as a form of serendipity, but happenstance is a byproduct of your mental outlook and physical relativity). Everything that exists, exists for a reason, that is the law of evolution, from the tiniest molecule to the largest organism, everything is in a system communicating with other systems. Nonetheless, people tend to get confused, they use self-referential psychology and assume some things are here for 'no reason.' Think about it this way, even those stupid cat videos on youtube have an audience and represent something deeper, and it doesn't matter what you think about the cat videos, they exist for a reason, if people didn't watch em they wouldn't exist. All things in reality tend be side-effects of other-things in reality. In-fact I challenge you to find something that exists for 'no reason.' You'll find that everything has its place in the evolutionary scheme of things. The math is simple- 1X0=0, all individual things exist/interact inside a perfect circle of phenomenological happening. The ecology of 'being' represents the ouroboros season, a metaphysical concept beyond one (everything) and zero (nothing).

Systemic knowledge concerning phenomenology
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Knowledge must know its ledge.
#14868866
mikema63 wrote:Sorry, I don't study quantum woo.

Yeah, because you only think about what is being taught in your small world. Where's your intellectual curiosity? :roll:


Experiment demonstrates quantum mechanical effects from biological systems

Nearly 75 years ago, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger wondered if the mysterious world of quantum mechanics played a role in biology. A recent finding by Northwestern University's Prem Kumar adds further evidence that the answer might be yes.

Kumar and his team have, for the first time, created quantum entanglement from a biological system. This finding could advance scientists' fundamental understanding of biology and potentially open doors to exploit biological tools to enable new functions by harnessing quantum mechanics.

"Can we apply quantum tools to learn about biology?" said Kumar, professor of electrical engineering and computer science in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and of physics and astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "People have asked this question for many, many years—dating back to the dawn of quantum mechanics. The reason we are interested in these new quantum states is because they allow applications that are otherwise impossible."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-quantum-m ... l.html#jCp


Quantum Simulation Could Shed Light on the Origins of Life

What role does quantum mechanics play in the machinery of life? Nobody is quite sure, but in recent years, physicists have begun to investigate all kinds of possibilities. In the process, they have gathered evidence suggesting that quantum mechanics plays an important role in photosynthesis, in bird navigation, and perhaps in our sense of smell.

There is even a speculative line of thought that quantum processes must have governed the origin of life itself and the formulation of the genetic code. The work to study these questions is ongoing and involves careful observation of the molecules of life.

But there is another way to approach this question from the bottom up. Computer scientists have long toyed with artificial life forms built from computer code. This code lives in a silicon-based landscape where its fitness is measured against some selection criteria.
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It reproduces by combining with other code or by the mutation of its own code. And the fittest code has more offspring while the least fit dies away. In other words, the code evolves. Computer scientists have used this approach to study various aspects of life, evolution, and the emergence of complexity.

This is an entirely classical process following ordinary Newtonian steps, one after the other. The real world, on the other hand, includes quantum mechanics and the strange phenomena that it allows. That’s how the question arises of whether quantum mechanics can play a role in evolution and even in the origin of life itself.

So an important first step is to reproduce this process of evolution in the quantum world, creating artificial quantum life forms. But is this possible?

Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Unai Alvarez-Rodriguez and a few pals at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. These guys have created a quantum version of artificial life for the first time. And they say their results are the first examples of quantum evolution that allows physicists to explore the way complexity emerges in the quantum world.

The experiment is simple in principle. The team think of quantum life as consisting of two parts—a genotype and a phenotype. Just as with carbon-based life, the quantum genotype contains the quantum information that describes the individual—its genetic code. The genotype is the part of the quantum life unit that is transmitted from one generation to the next.

The phenotype, on the other hand, is the manifestation of the genotype that interacts with the real world—the “body” of the individual. “This state, together with the information it encodes, is degraded during the lifetime of the individual,” say Alvarez-Rodriguez and co.

So each unit of quantum life consists of two qubits—one representing the genotype and the other the phenotype. “The goal is to reproduce the characteristic processes of Darwinian evolution, adapted to the language of quantum algorithms and quantum computing,” say the team.

The first step in the evolutionary process is reproduction. Alvarez-Rodriguez and co do this using the process of entanglement, which allows the transmission of quantum states from one object to another. In this case, they entangle the genotype qubit with a blank state, and then transfer its quantum information.

The next stage is survival, which depends on the phenotype. Alvarez-Rodriguez and co do this by transfering an aspect of the genotype state to another blank state, which becomes the phenotype. The phenotype then interacts with the environment and eventually dissipates.

This process is equivalent to aging and dying, and the time it takes depends on the genotype. Those that live longer are implicitly better suited to their environment and are preferentially reproduced in the next generation.

There is another important aspect of evolution—how individuals differ from each other. In ordinary evolution, variation occurs in two ways. The first is through sexual recombination, where the genotype from two individuals combines. The second is by mutation, where random changes occur in the genotype during the reproductive process.

Alvarez-Rodriguez and co employ this second type of variation in their quantum world. When the quantum information is transferred from one generation to the next, the team introduce a random change—in this case a rotation of the quantum state. And this, in turn, determines the phenotype and how it interacts with its environment.

So that’s the theory. The experiment itself is tricky because quantum computers are still in their infancy. Nevertheless, Alvarez-Rodriguez and co have made use of the IBM QX, a superconducting quantum computer at IBM’s T.J. Watson Laboratories that the company has made publicly accessible via the cloud. The company claims that some 40,000 individuals have signed up to use the service and have together run some 275,000 quantum algorithms through the device.

Alvarez-Rodriguez and co used the five-qubit version of the machine, which runs quantum algorithms that allow two-qubit interactions. However, the system imposes some limitations on the process of evolution that the team want to run. For example, it does not allow the variations introduced during the reproductive process to be random.

Instead, the team run the experiment several times, introducing a different known rotation in each run, and then look at the results together. In total, they run the experiment thousands of times to get a good sense of the outcomes.

In general, the results match the theoretical predictions with high fidelity. “The experiments reproduce the characteristic properties of the sought quantum natural selection scenario,” say Alvarez-Rodriguez and co.

And the team say that the mutations have an important impact on the outcomes: “[They] significantly improved the fidelity of the quantum algorithm outcome.” That’s not so different from the classical world, where mutations help species adapt to changing environments.

Of course, there are important caveats. The limitations of IBM’s quantum computer raise important questions about whether the team has really simulated evolution. But these issues should be ironed out in the near future.

All this work is the result of the team’s long focus on quantum life. Back in 2015, we reported on the team’s work in simulating quantum life on a classical computer. Now they have taken the first step in testing these ideas on a real quantum computer.

And the future looks bright. Quantum computer technology is advancing rapidly, which this should allow Alvarez-Rodriguez and co to create quantum life in more complex environments. IBM, for example, has a 20-qubit processor online and is testing a 50-qubit version.

That will make possible a variety of new experiments on quantum life. The most obvious will include the ability for quantum life forms to interact with each other and perhaps reproduce by sexual recombination—in other words, by combining elements of their genotypes. Another possibility will be to allow the quantum life forms to move and see how this influences their interactions and fitness for survival.

Just what will emerge isn’t clear. But Alvarez-Rodriguez and co hope their quantum life forms will become important models for exploring the emergence of complexity in the quantum world.

Eventually, that should feed into our understanding of the role of quantum processes in carbon-based life forms and the origin of life itself. The ensuing debate will be fascinating to watch.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6096 ... s-of-life/


Scientists demonstrate one of largest quantum simulators
viewtopic.php?f=76&t=172267
User avatar
By Hindsite
#14868915
RhetoricThug wrote:Everything that exists, exists for a reason, that is the law of evolution, from the tiniest molecule to the largest organism, everything is in a system communicating with other systems.

There is no law of evolution that is why it is only called the theory of evolution.

RhetoricThug wrote:All things in reality tend be side-effects of other-things in reality. In-fact I challenge you to find something that exists for 'no reason.' You'll find that everything has its place in the evolutionary scheme of things.

Since God is the creator, everything exists in the scheme of the mind of God.

RhetoricThug wrote:Yeah, because you only think about what is being taught in your small world. Where's your intellectual curiosity?

Jesus replied, "What is impossible with man is possible with God."
(Luke 18:27)
#14868918
Potemkin wrote:Intelligent dinosaurs? Unlikely. Intelligence is only necessary to compensate for physical weakness. The glaring physical deficiencies of the human body - our lack of claws or fangs, our slow running speed, our physical weakness - would have spelt doom for our species long ago, were not for the fact that we are clever little bastards. The dinosaurs staked everything on being bigger, stronger, faster and more badass than anything else on the planet. They didn't need to be smart. The dinos were the jocks of the natural world, and humans are the nerds. By sheer dumb luck, the nerds inherited the Earth. Lol.

You have a very narrow idea of intelligence. It is well known that even plants have intelligence. For example, plant roots show intelligence when their feeding tips expand in search for food and water. Fungi can grow for centuries over several square miles. And if you don't understand stone intelligence than that only proves your own very limited intelligence.

If most life forms are destroyed in the next couple of centuries through nuclear holocaust, climate change or some other form of man-made catastrophe, it will prove that dinosaurs like most animals have superior intelligence because they lasted longer.

Social Darwinism has already been debunked by others in this thread, so I will leave it at that.

RhetoricThug wrote:Everything that exists, exists for a reason, that is the law of evolution, from the tiniest molecule to the largest organism, everything is in a system communicating with other systems


How do you know?

Your reasoning works in a limited universe with an end and a beginning. There is causation. A causes B. The reason for B is A. But what is the reason for A? What was before the big bang and who created god? What is outside the limited universe, when you stick your head through the celestial spheres? Thus, the limited universe and the big bang are logically impossible.

In a universe that is not limited, there is no beginning and no end. There is no causation. Each moment exists independently of all others. Like the frames in a movie reel. If the keyboard you see in this frame looks like the one in the previous frame, it is just due to conditioning. Each moment in that universe exists independently of all others in all eternity.

If the universe is not limited, it doesn't mean that it is cyclic or formed like a circle. Beyond the limited universe, the opposites coincides, small is big, and good is bad,
#14868933
Atlantis wrote:You have a very narrow idea of intelligence. It is well known that even plants have intelligence. For example, plant roots show intelligence when their feeding tips expand in search for food and water. Fungi can grow for centuries over several square miles. And if you don't understand stone intelligence than that only proves your own very limited intelligence.

You are talking low life intelligence there. :lol:
#14868996
You have a very narrow idea of intelligence. It is well known that even plants have intelligence. For example, plant roots show intelligence when their feeding tips expand in search for food and water. Fungi can grow for centuries over several square miles. And if you don't understand stone intelligence than that only proves your own very limited intelligence.

You've been reading too much Krishnamurti, Atlantis. And you're also showing your age; that sort of nonsense went out of fashion along with kipper ties, flared trousers and the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky. :roll:
#14869164
@Hindsite You're producing a fixed perspective. I'm not sure why you feel compelled to 'troll' here. What's your reasoning?


You have a very narrow idea of intelligence. It is well known that even plants have intelligence. For example, plant roots show intelligence when their feeding tips expand in search for food and water. Fungi can grow for centuries over several square miles. And if you don't understand stone intelligence than that only proves your own very limited intelligence.
:up:

Atlantis wrote:How do you know?

Your reasoning works in a limited universe with an end and a beginning. There is causation. A causes B. The reason for B is A. But what is the reason for A? What was before the big bang and who created god? What is outside the limited universe, when you stick your head through the celestial spheres? Thus, the limited universe and the big bang are logically impossible.

In a universe that is not limited, there is no beginning and no end. There is no causation. Each moment exists independently of all others. Like the frames in a movie reel. If the keyboard you see in this frame looks like the one in the previous frame, it is just due to conditioning. Each moment in that universe exists independently of all others in all eternity.

If the universe is not limited, it doesn't mean that it is cyclic or formed like a circle. Beyond the limited universe, the opposites coincides, small is big, and good is bad,
People tend to cling to one notion, or interpretation, and that is the program they use to explain 'things.' My reasoning can be applied to the material layer of reality. Biologically, evolution is occurring through physical expressions of consciousness. I may entertain and explore the metaphysics of Being, but that is yet one more layer of interpretation. Personally, I think worldly & spiritual interpretations can co-exist. As for everything having a purpose... I challenge you to bring something to my attention that doesn't have a purpose. I'm unable to answer the greater cosmological questions right now, because I'm consciousness having a human experience. Lastly, if there's no causation, why did you reply to my post? :lol:

Potemkin wrote:You've been reading too much Krishnamurti, Atlantis. And you're also showing your age; that sort of nonsense went out of fashion along with kipper ties, flared trousers and the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky. :roll:
You're not contributing, so why post? I'm not sure why you're making fun of Atlantis. There must be a reason, some-kind of subconscious tick.

mikema63 wrote:I mean if you want to redefine intelligence into meaninglessness go ahead. :coffee:
Perhaps you're a specialist, not an intellectual? Nonetheless, specialism is a great & honorable endeavor! I'm not sure why you feel compelled to post such a short retort. Earlier in this thread, you made fun of quantum mechanics being used as a tool to explore biological evolution... :hmm: That's unfortunate. Do you have an opinion concerning quantum mechanics and evolution?
#14869255
RhetoricThug wrote:Earlier in this thread, you made fun of quantum mechanics being used as a tool to explore biological evolution... :hmm: That's unfortunate.


A lot of Neo-Darwinists have been so pompous about it all that the discovery of any new mechanism which is crucial to explaining the diversity and complexity of life would make them all a bunch of massive jackholes. At this point they pretty much have to be smug and dismissive.

Even an EES is a bitter pill for many of these characters, so something as paradigm shattering as quantum evolution is just out of the question.
#14869326
RhetoricThug wrote:@Hindsite You're producing a fixed perspective. I'm not sure why you feel compelled to 'troll' here. What's your reasoning?

My reasoning is that a fixed perspective of truth is better than random fairy tales and lies. Praise the Lord.
#14869451
Sivad wrote:A lot of Neo-Darwinists have been so pompous about it all that the discovery of any new mechanism which is crucial to explaining the diversity and complexity of life would make them all a bunch of massive jackholes. At this point they pretty much have to be smug and dismissive.

Even an EES is a bitter pill for many of these characters, so something as paradigm shattering as quantum evolution is just out of the question.
Good point. Thanks for the link. :up:

Hindsite wrote:My reasoning is that a fixed perspective of truth is better than random fairy tales and lies. Praise the Lord.
If you study human history, Truth is a moving target. You can get away with calling other perspectives 'fairy tales,' but you're not going to facilitate constructive dialogue.
#14869524
RhetoricThug wrote:People tend to cling to one notion, or interpretation, and that is the program they use to explain 'things.' My reasoning can be applied to the material layer of reality. Biologically, evolution is occurring through physical expressions of consciousness. I may entertain and explore the metaphysics of Being, but that is yet one more layer of interpretation. Personally, I think worldly & spiritual interpretations can co-exist. As for everything having a purpose... I challenge you to bring something to my attention that doesn't have a purpose. I'm unable to answer the greater cosmological questions right now, because I'm consciousness having a human experience. Lastly, if there's no causation, why did you reply to my post? :lol:

Did your post cause my reply? I could have written what I wrote without your post. I could not have replied to your post. I could have replied something different ... Thus, there is free choice. To believe in the deterministic finite universe is also a free choice. The arguments in favour may be compelling from our point of view, but ultimately the idea of a finite universe doesn’t hold true.

Your reasoning “on the material or biological level” may produce a model of evolution, but that model may also collapse like the model of the flat Earth when looked at it from another perspective. I don’t see how consciousness can be confined to biology. But when we look deeper into matter, we find that quantum physics suggests a worldview that puts into question the very existence of matter, the big bang and evolution, which coincides with a view of the world that is not finite and not deterministic.
#14869793
Atlantis wrote:Thus, there is free choice. To believe in the deterministic finite universe is also a free choice. The arguments in favour may be compelling from our point of view, but ultimately the idea of a finite universe doesn’t hold true.
Wait, when did I say anything about free-will? Also, free-will is limited by several factors. Can 1+1=3, is it a choice? I'm not sure how a cosmological Ad infinitum negates the fact that you're a finite expression of the universe. Again, I'm not saying the universe is finite, I'm saying that the human experience is finite, and it's a side-effect or expression of 'what is.' Consciousness doesn't belong to you, it doesn't belong to anything-in-itself, everything happens simultaneously, and you're a living expression of that consciousness. So you see, there is no choice in the matter. As finite expressions, we're limited by 'what is,' and being present creates an information bias. As an analogy, play a game of Go, you'll discover that 'liberty' is confined and defined by 'what is.'

Did your post cause my reply? I could have written what I wrote without your post. I could not have replied to your post. I could have replied something different ...
I'm not going to claim that I understand the cause, but surely something caused it, for I can perceive its effect. To be or not to be seems like a reasonable compromise, albeit it's a form of reconciliation- deterministic choice defined by the boundaries of 'being' human.

Your reasoning “on the material or biological level” may produce a model of evolution, but that model may also collapse like the model of the flat Earth when looked at it from another perspective.
And tell me, Atlantis, what perspective would that be?

But when we look deeper into matter, we find that quantum physics suggests a worldview that puts into question the very existence of matter, the big bang and evolution, which coincides with a view of the world that is not finite and not deterministic.
Read carefully, I said- Biologically, evolution is occurring through physical expressions of consciousness. Consciousness comes before the physical manifestation of 'things.' Reality is layered, one layer infinite, one layer finite (hence quantum decoherence), creating a spectrum of experience. You're infinite consciousness having a finite human experience.

As for everything having a purpose... I challenge you to bring something to my attention that doesn't have a purpose.
#14870000
RhetoricThug wrote:I'm not sure how a cosmological Ad infinitum negates the fact that you're a finite expression of the universe. Again, I'm not saying the universe is finite, I'm saying that the human experience is finite, and it's a side-effect or expression of 'what is.'


We don’t know that human experience is limited (there are transformations, but life/existence goes on). We are an expression of an infinite something. Therefore, we cannot exist outside of this infinite something. If you divide something into parts, the parts must by necessity be limited. But the act of division is arbitrary since the parts cannot exist without the whole. Thus, it is the mental act of dividing that limits our analytic thinking. Determinism and causality are the inherent limitations of the rational mind. But that has no bearing on the true nature of the universe.

Consciousness doesn't belong to you, it doesn't belong to anything-in-itself, everything happens simultaneously, and you're a living expression of that consciousness.


If everything happens simultaneously, then there can be no causation, because causation presupposes a temporal relation.

I'm not going to claim that I understand the cause, but surely something caused it, for I can perceive its effect.


To say that A causes B is an abstraction. To understand everything that causes B we need to look at the totality of the infinite universe, which is beyond the ability of the finite rational mind. Moreover, since the observer mentally subtracts himself from what is observed, there will always be something missing. Thus, the illusion of the finite deterministic world is just a trick played by the rational mind.


If the universe is infinite, it is always present even if the rational mind cannot grasp it. Thus, the universal consciousness spontaneously creates the world at each instant without causation.

As for everything having a purpose... I challenge you to bring something to my attention that doesn't have a purpose.


Tell me RT, what is the purpose of the universe?
#14870063
Atlantis wrote:We don’t know that human experience is limited (there are transformations, but life/existence goes on). We are an expression of an infinite something. Therefore, we cannot exist outside of this infinite something. If you divide something into parts, the parts must by necessity be limited. But the act of division is arbitrary since the parts cannot exist without the whole. Thus, it is the mental act of dividing that limits our analytic thinking. Determinism and causality are the inherent limitations of the rational mind. But that has no bearing on the true nature of the universe.

If everything happens simultaneously, then there can be no causation, because causation presupposes a temporal relation.

To say that A causes B is an abstraction. To understand everything that causes B we need to look at the totality of the infinite universe, which is beyond the ability of the finite rational mind. Moreover, since the observer mentally subtracts himself from what is observed, there will always be something missing. Thus, the illusion of the finite deterministic world is just a trick played by the rational mind.

If the universe is infinite, it is always present even if the rational mind cannot grasp it. Thus, the universal consciousness spontaneously creates the world at each instant without causation.

Tell me RT, what is the purpose of the universe?

Forgive the meme, but I didn't want to copy and paste words that match your sentiments.
[center-img]https://i.imgur.com/hLIQDf3.jpg[/center-img]
viewtopic.php?f=92&t=170622
Humans invent 'purpose.'

Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery:

The "principle of causality" is the assertion that any event whatsoever can be causally explained- that it 'can' be deductively predicted. According to the way in which one interprets the word 'can' in this assertion, it will either be tautological (analytic), or else an assertion about reality (synthetic). For if 'can' means that it is always logically possible to construct a causal explanation, then the assertion is tautological, since for any prediction whatsoever we can always find universal statements and initial conditions from which the prediction is derivable. (Whether these universal statements have been tested and corroborated in other cases is of course quite a different question.) If, however, 'can' is meant to signify that the world is governed by strict laws, that it is so constructed that every specific event is an instance of a universal regularity or law, then the assertion is admittedly synthetic. But in this case it is not falsifiable,... I shall, therefore, neither adopt nor reject the "principle of causality" ; I shall be content simply to exclude it, as 'metaphysical,' from the sphere of science.

I shall, however, propose a methodological rule which corresponds so closely to the "principle of causality" that the latter might be regarded as its metaphysical version. It is the simple rule that we are not to abandon the search for universal laws and for a coherent theoretical system, nor ever give up our attempts to explain causally any kind of event we can describe. This rule guides the scientific investigator in his work.


As for the perception of any evolutionary pattern we've abstracted from the visible spectrum of reality- everything in IT must have a purpose, otherwise IT wouldn't exist. Each organism or thing-in-itself is in a communication loop with everything else.
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