Re: Paradoxes

On 16/01/2025 8:19 am, LDagget wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 8:04:55 +0000, MarkE wrote:
 

Potential paradoxes are of particular interest because if unresolved,
they may indicate not just difficultly but impossibility.
>
Benner's framing remark is noteworthy: "Discussed here is an alternative
approach to guide research into the origins of life, one that focuses on
'paradoxes', pairs of statements, both grounded in theory and
observation, that (taken together) suggest that the 'origins problem'
cannot be solved."

 Seems to me that framing things as paradoxes is a transparently
deceptive sophistry.
 It displaces the actual argument's details to a categorical that
pretends
to be a fundamental problem. Thus we get chicken and egg paradoxes.
Can't
get one without the other --- see it's a paradox. Or you get sophistry
like
zeno's paradox, or the liar's paradox. They are games on sets up by
language
that superficially sounds fair and reasonable but ultimately embed a
hidden
absurdity in their premises.
 

Interesting that you go directly to pejorative and dismissal.
And yet, for example, Eigen's paradox "is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life,"* which rightly identifies "a fundamental problem" and is decidedly not "transparently deceptive sophistry". A similar assessment holds for other OoL paradoxes named by Benner and others.
Your haste to categorise Benner's statement as such seems to me to be, ironically, transparent sophistry.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)