Yeah it seems the laws regularities are given little bit tremore in its probabilities.In the other side, the perfect ethernal machine will give a perfect outcome(100 % certainty).
Try these words of exception in thermodynamic law :
"In the hot days, still there is possibilities water will turn to be ice".
"Tremore"? "Ethernal"?
If your objection is to statistical laws, you'll have to tell us what your objection to them is. If a fair coin is flipped a million times, we won't know which tosses will be heads and which will be tails, and there is a tiny likelihood that all of the flips will turn out to be heads and none tails, or vice versa. Nevertheless, we can say that the probability is very high that the numbers of heads and of tails will be roughly equal. I see nothing objectionable about that.
Maybe you have to distingush between the laws of probabilities and the certainty of physics laws.
The main differences between cellular automata and the real world are that cellular automata are discrete and deterministic (the two dimensionality is not so important).
Having said that, all continuous, partly random processes can be modelled (in principle) to any chosen accuracy by discrete deterministic programs. Moreover, it has been proven that the Game of Life is a Turing machine (a Universal Computer, equivalent in computational power to any other Universal Computer. This means that for any computation, there is some pattern in the Game of Life which will perform that computation. These computations include any simulation of any physical system obeying laws which may be partly random, including our Universe. You would need a big board to do a thorough job on that. 
Note that such computations can (in principle) be statistical, and could, for example, model the Universe from the Unified force level of M-Theory to the perpetually branching Universes of the Multiverse. This computation is emphatically "in principle", but it can be proven that it could be achieved with a large enough Game of Life board and a long enough time.
Of course, the Universe - apart from any unclear constraints of finiteness in space and time - is suitable for computing any Game of Life configuration, apart from an error rate (due to quantum mechanics) which can be made as small as desired. [Your computer has this error rate as well, but it is made small].
This bidirectional relationship gives a reason to take analogies with cellular automata seriously.
Maybe you have to distingush between the laws of probabilities and the certainty of physics laws.
The laws of probability are at the foundation of physical laws. This is most clear for the laws of statistical mechanics, but is also true of quantum mechanics. All physics is quantum field theory (although the part that includes gravity is still not complete, it is impossible for gravity not to be a quantum theory and to be consistent with quantum mechanics).
I think the other words for thermodinamic laws exception is "probable for something come into being from nothingness". We could or couldn't find the cause of it.
Anyhow, for anyone interested in evolution but unqualified there's a nice open course on Evolution and Genetics at Duke. It's possible to just sign up for free any time from now without any bother and dip into the short videos (which, from my sampling, are rather enjoyable as well as being by someone with a deep understanding of the subject).
[Just noticed it has a 30 minute interview with Jerry Coyne, which will surely be of interest to anyone who has read his book.]
[Just dipping in has emphasised to me the value of being explicit about the fact that evolution is about change, which includes both random drift as well as change directed by natural selection. A simplified analog is the movement of a dust particle in air. Its motion is made up of a component due to the bulk movement of the air and another Brownian component due to random collisions with air molecules. The former is the analog of change driven by natural selection, the latter of random drift. The neat thing is that to the dust particle, all it experiences is the random collisions: these are the analog of the random changes in the genomes due to mutation].
MindWalk - you are correct in regards to Sokal. It's ironic, is it not? He published a paper claiming that Gravity was nothing but a social construct, and left-wing academics swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
Regarding what Dawkins really meant by "machine", here is the author "clarifying" what he meant:
“p. 19 Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots…
This purple passage (a rare—well, fairly rare—indulgence) has been quoted and requoted in gleeful evidence of my rabid ‘genetic determinism’. Part of the problem lies with the popular, but erroneous, associations of the word ‘robot’. We are in the golden age of electronics, and robots are no longer rigidly inflexible morons but are capable of learning, intelligence, and creativity. Ironically, even as long ago as 1920 when Karel Capek coined the word, ‘robots’ were mechanical beings that ended up with human feelings, like falling in love. People who think that robots are by definition more ‘deterministic’ than human beings are muddled (unless they are religious, in which case they might consistently hold that humans have some divine gift of free will denied to mere machines). If, like most of the critics of my ‘lumbering robot’ passage, you are not religious, then face up to the following question. What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one? I have discussed all this in The Extended Phenotype, pp. 15–17.”
Excerpt From: Dawkins, Richard. “The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition.” Oxford University Press, 2006. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.
Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/kNkmU.l
For the 98% of the readers who won't bother to read the entire passage, I'll summarize Dawkins: of course you're a robot. What else could you be?
hapless, at this point it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify an objective scientific point where we are in disagreement. I emphasise that this thread is about scientific fact, not philosophy or semantics. For example, if you dislike Dawkins phrasing, that is one thing, but if you cannot extract from the above some testable point of disagreement about scientific fact it is not of any real importance to this discussion.
Please can you state at least one such point as a scientific hypothesis subject to potential testing? (I am not concerned if you restrict it to points that Dawkins discusses). If not, I am happy to accept that we are in complete agreement on the status of the science of evolution.
I notice that Dawkins specifically exempts at least some religious people from viewing human beings as robots. He is clearly aiming at those who take a deterministic, materialist view of human beings. I haven't read his The Extended Phenotype, pp. 15-17, where he "discusse[s] all this," but it seems clear that he doesn't mean "robot" to mean "a particular sort of item manufactured by a sentient entity" but instead means it to mean "a whole whose operation is determined by the operation of its parts," or some such. I do not see the objection.
MindWalk wrote:
Yes, you might say that the system as a whole is ordered; but then, you would have to say the same thing about an initial, unordered state of the universe subject to the operation of a few physical laws.
YOU might have to say that but I certainly don't. If you stop the action of cosmic bodies you may think you see ordered galaxies and planetary systems. However, if you apply Newtonian laws to these systems after a few 100 million or 1 lor 2 billion years the whole thing begins to look more random. Once again we run into the question of how do you distinguish between the action of known forces producing an apparewntly ordered result and a universe that is being ordered by an unknown force?
So now you will probably ask why would you propose some hypothetical force when there are perfectly good Newtonian laws governing the process? We have been here before. I do it to keep you fundamentalist scientists honest. You don't look for or even know the things you don't know. Yet in your statement of beliefs you imply that one should be willing to say "I don't know".
gopher, scientsts are very economical about introducing such assumptions. For example, Einstein was perfectly aware that the mathematical considerations allowed his field equations to include a term known as the cosmological constant. At first, he thought there was a role for such a term because it was impossible to have a steady state Universe without it. Later, the evidence for the Big Bang became too strong to ignore, and he viewed the unnecessary term as a big mistake. For about 80 years, scientists used the simplified field equations until at the end of the 20th century, observations showed the expansion of the Universe was accelerating, indicating that the term was needed to explain empirical facts. The term is what is referred to as "dark energy".
Another interesting fact here is that mathematical considerations are enormously restrictive in determining the models of reality. Einstein's equations were chosen as the most simple ones consistent with nothing more than the general principle of relativity (see his book for what this means) and the fact that there are 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time. There are more complicated models which some people believe will one day be justified but are as yet without any empirical reason to be preferred.
Note also that the simpler models are generally approximations to the more complex models that are extremely accurate for most purposes: this is an incremental process of improvement rather than refutation. Examples include the step from Newton to Einstein, and from Maxwell to QED (the equation for the photonic field is exactly the same as Maxwell's equations).
I'm puzzled. The original claim seemed to be that order wouldn't arise from disorder without God. I then cited the Game of Life, choosing a disordered starting position, as a counterexample. You seem to object to the characterization of the Game of Life's development of order from disorder on grounds that if you consider the opening position, however disordered it might seem, and the rules of development together, as a single system, then the whole thing is ordered. Well, OK. Then I note that the same thing can be said about a universe that starts from disorder and develops toward order (like, say, the order of life) via a few physical laws: the disordered initial state together with the laws themselves, considered together, form a single, ordered system.
But then you object to that by saying that if we look at the universe after more billions of years we might see what appears disordered again. That seems to get rid of the initial problem altogether: there's no longer order from disorder to account for and therefore the initial argument for God collapses.
Then you ask how to distinguish between a universe that runs according to natural forces and one that works as it does because of some unseen "force." But that is the naturalist's question to the theist! If you can't tell the difference, why invoke God? What ground is there for positing a supernatural being if everything would look the same naturalistically?
You do, at least, understand that that question will be asked.
But you seem to think that the fact that it's conceivable that some hidden "force" is doing the job instead of just natural forces means not only that we should say, "Well, yes, it's *conceivable* that some hidden 'force' is doing the job, so no, we don't know to a *certainty* that the naturalistic explanation is correct," but that we should go further and *seriously doubt* the naturalistic explanation because of that *conceivability*.
But we never do that. We don't go to the zoo, see a zebra, note that it's conceivable that we're really seeing a cleverly painted mule, and then *seriously doubt* that we're seeing a zebra. We don't open the refrigerator, see the light come on, note that it's conceivable that a pixie turns on the light, and *seriously doubt* that the light comes on because of how its circuits work. We don't go to the lake, see a splash, note that a tiny flying saucer crashing into the water would have made such a splash, and then *seriously doubt* that it was a fish or a pebble or some such that made the splash. We don't come up with all sorts of conceivabilities and then seriously doubt our ordinary, everyday understanding of the world. Why should we do that when what's conceivable is that some hidden "force" is operating instead of the natural forces we're familiar with?
If what you want is, "I'm not *certain*"--oh, OK, fine. We already say that.
If what you want is, "It's completely up in the air--I can't believe in the operation of natural forces"--well, no, that's just not how we do things with zebras and cleverly painted mules, or with circuits and pixies, or with pebble-splashes and tiny-spacecraft-splashes.
Firstly, I would point out that when everything is taken into account, the arrow of entropy is entirely from low amounts of disorder to high amounts.
However, what appears to be total disorder may not be if there is the possibility of a phase change. For example, consider a large isotropic cloud of hydrogen gas at a constant temperature that extends a huge distance in every direction. This would be the classical highest entropy state for a gas. But on this scale, it can only be unstable equilibrium, and a variation in density allows the formation of stars. After that happens nuclear forces provide further potential for increases in entropy.
Elroch, as my daughter learned in her class, it's one thing to possess "the hard facts", another to draw inferences.
The points I'm making are two:
1. The state of our understanding of genetics does not support the wild-eyed assertions Dawkins makes. Machines? Genetic puppet-masters? You're free to believe them.
2. The scientific method is a method, not a philosophy. We use reductionism to study things, but reductionism as a "worldview" is profoundly impoverished. It's one thing to say that the brain is "meat and wetware" but to assert that that is ALL we are is lunacy.
Your biggest failing is that you believe science requires you to come to these silly conclusions, it doesn't, but as long as you think it does, nothing more meaningfully can be said. You will resort at stochastics and red font pleonastics and continue to limit your own outlook.
I was going to to say that you are free to do so, but that would be false. Your genetic puppet-masters manipulate you into believing so.
We are both physical and mental.
The mental part is *important*.
Mental function is determined by brain function.
We are physical wholes whose operation is determined by the operation of our parts (and, of course, by exterior influences) and in that sense are biological machines--biological robots.
Do you disagree with any of that?
hapless, you haven't yet come up with an objective scientific claim with which you disagree (you didn't take the opportunity to do so in post #1127, but instead complained about Dawkins's semantics. Yawn). I don't believe you have any objective scientific disagreement with Dawkins' description of how organisms behave: you merely hate his way of expressing it, and intuitively dislike the whole notion. If you disagree with any scientific statement of Dawkins, describe the experiment that would give you a chance to prove him wrong.
The scientific evidence supports the fact that the behaviour of people is entirely the result of the behaviour of the molecules that make up people. Moreover, the configuration of those molecules is entirely the result of physical and chemical interactions without the guidance of some intelligent agent (beyond the very indirect effect of our own intelligent choices, themselves being emergent behaviour of those chemicals and cells that make up our brains).
Dawkins' correct thesis is that every cell of your body is driven by its genes and their expression. Moreover, those genes arose by billions of years of replication, mutation and the inevitable evolution driven by natural selection that entails.
Those who don't accept evolution are in denial about what mutation and natural selection can do. There is not a scientific reason for any additional hypothesis (such as a fake world being made a few thousand years ago, or a supernatural genetic engineer tweaking the genes at selected times throughout the last 4 billion years (einstein99 appears to believe this happened over a few million years at the start of the Cambrian).
To be honest, I feel you are more inclined to accept the naturalistic hypothesis than the "intelligent tinkerer" hypothesis, and I know you accept the evolution of life on Earth over geological timescales.
I like hapless. Also, I am delighted that he eventually downloaded the book and is enjoying it so much.
Elroch, it is NOT a semantic issue. It is an interpretive issue.
Remember my daughter's homework:
Results are not the same as inferences are not the same as conclusions.
For about the gazillionth time, I'm not calling into question any of the hard science, only the inferences made from it.
The above paragraphs prove the point. We use a mechanistic model to study biological processes, therefore they must be mechanistic, therefore we must be mechanistic, therefore we must be machines.
You either see the fallacy in that, or you don't.
And this statement is a howler:
The scientific evidence supports the fact that the behaviour of people is entirely the result of the behaviour of the molecules that make up people. Moreover, the configuration of those molecules is entirely the result of physical and chemical interactions without the guidance of some intelligent agent (beyond the very indirect effect of our own intelligent choices, themselves being emergent behaviour of those chemicals and cells that make up our brains).
Science does no such thing. Every word of this is inferential.
You have reduced the mind to nothing more than a secretion of the brain. We are nothing more than ghosts in the machine.
You fall squarely in Daniel Dennett's camp, and his is the most impoverished outlook of the lot.
Other atheists have been trying to set Dennett straight for a decade and he's too refractory to correction. As an amateur, my task here is quite hopeless.
I'm sorry, extenza, I don't know what you mean.