Re: To sum up

On 18/02/2025 4:06 am, Ernest Major wrote:

On 17/02/2025 11:05, MarkE wrote:

On 15/02/2025 10:06 pm, jillery wrote:

On Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:59:53 +1100, MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com> wrote:
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On 15/02/2025 1:53 pm, Mark Isaak wrote:

On 2/8/25 5:06 AM, MarkE wrote:

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My argument is therefore, as complexity goes up, the challenges to
naturalistic OOL and evolution also increase.

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Evolution produces complexity without the least concern. Design tries to
minimize it and create simplicity. As complexity goes up, the challenge
to designed OOL also increases.
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My assertion is self-evident, is it not? I.e.:
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OOL: the more complex the first self-replicating entity needs to be, the
greater the challenge to its prebiotic (i.e. pre-Darwinian evolution)
formation.
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Evolution: the more complex a "higher" organism, given a maximum
plausible rate of mutation, fixation and time, the greater the challenge
to its evolution.
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On the other hand, your assertion that "evolution produces complexity
without the least concern" is not self-evident, and is neither an
argument nor a rebuttal. The capability of evolution to produce
complexity is, rather, a fundamental contention.

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Here's an opportunity for you to actually speak to me, instead of your
usual petty sniping.  I understand your arguments stated above.
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WRT OOL: It's unknown what the complexity of a self-replicating entity
"needs to be". Any estimates about this are based on *assumptions*
about the mechanism(s) which could create the first self-replicating
entity, and the environment(s) which could support those mechanism(s).
This makes your claim a GotG argument.
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WRT OOL and Evolution: The fatal flaw with both of your arguments is
they conflate complexity with functionality.  The one does not inform
the other.  The actual challenge to evolution is to create better
functionality for a given environment.
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Pro Ployd's concurrent post WRT altitude hypoxia illustrates the
difference.  Most humans respond to extreme altitude by increasing
their hematocrit.  This is a simple but at best temporary solution,
with long-term and fatal complications. A simpler and better solution
most mountain human populations did is to change their hemoglobin to
increase its oxygen saturation.  Of course, this requires time for
natural selection to select for this trait, and some individuals will
likely die without it.
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Once again, your obsession with complexity serves you poorly.
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Agreed, care is needed in defining complexity and its relationship to function.
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The challenge to evolution is the creation of functional complexity. Here is a description of the ultimate manifestation of functional complexity:
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'The human brain contains some 100 billion neurons, which together form a network of Internet-like complexity. Christof Koch, chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, calls the brain "the most complex object in the known universe," and he's mapping its connections in hopes of discovering the origins of consciousness.'
http://www.npr.org/2013/06/14/191614360/decoding-the-most-complex- object-in-the-universe

 A problem with irreducible complexity as an argument for design (apart from being achievable by natural processes) is the lack of an objective criterion for delimiting systems, parts and functions. Something maybe both irreducibly complex or not irreducibly complex depending on the choices made for the preceding. Similarly there is an issue with the lack of an objective criterion for dividing the universe into disjoint objects. The human brain is part of the human body; either the human is more complex that the human brain, or the rest of the human body has negative complexity, or complexity is an intensive rather than an extensive property.

More precisely, if a supposed instance of irreducible complexity is achievable by natural processes, then it's not irreducible.

 Another issue is defining a measure of complexity. If complexity is an extensive property why is the elephant brain, with 3 times the number of neurons, a more complex object than the human brain. (You could try appealing to the size of the connectome, where there is a convenient gap in our knowledge of the size of connectomes. I don't find it especially plausible that human neurons have on average 3 times the number of synapses as elephant neurons, but my intuition might be wrong on this point.) If complexity is an intensive property then might not corvid and psittacid brains have a higher complexity than human brains; the achieve a surprising degree of intelligence with much smaller brains.

Agree that complexity, including "functional complexity", is difficult to both define and quantify.

 

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'According to physicist Roger Penrose, what’s in our head is orders of magnitude more complex than anything one sees in the Universe: "If you look at the entire physical cosmos," says Penrose, "our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they're the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump."'
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'Each cubic millimeter of tissue in the neocortex, reports Michael Chorost in World Wide Mind, contains between 860 million and 1.3 billion synapses. Estimates of the total number of synapses in the neocortex range from 164 trillion to 200 trillion. The total number of synapses in the brain as a whole is much higher than that. The neocortex has the same number of neurons as a galaxy has stars: 100 billion. One researcher estimates that with current technology it would take 10,000 automated microscopes thirty years to map the connections between every neuron in a human brain, and 100 million terabytes of disk space to store the data.'
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2015/12/human-brain-intelligence- networks-identified-.html

 Some organisms have deterministic cell fates. That is why Caenorhabditis elegans was adopted as a model organism for investigating the genetic control of development - it allowed researchers to simplify the problem by not having to consider the effects of randomness and environmental factors. This is not the case for humans, and I believe for the majority of multi-cellular organisms. The human brain is self-organising, but it doesn't self-organise to a fixed target.

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Can we deduce "complexity therefore design" from this? That's one question.

 No.
 

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However, another question that needs to be asked is, can we deduce "that evolution can create sentient beings due to a galaxy of functional complexity inside their heads"?
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 We already have. Do you have anything other than an argument from incredulity against this?
 

Yes, Darwinian evolution is the prevailing theory. Nevertheless, this cuts both ways: the deduction that evolution has the capability to construct the most complex object in the known universe, held without any doubt, can similarly be called "belief from credulity".
Is your statement "The human brain is self-organising" referring to wiring through learning, i.e. the process of raising and educating a child, etc?