I don't know, island, that article contained quite a bit of hand-waving.

I would call it a currently unknown symmetry rather than a "suppression," but that's kind of a nitpick.

And then the article comes up with the following sentence, which contains numerous red flags and is surely wrong in its claim of "logic dictates..."

"It is this cosmological principle that is willfully ignored by scientists for reasons that have nothing to do with science, and logic dictates that this is the reason why physicists have failed to resolve the problem of the near-static yet expanding universe in all their many years of ducking the the obvious call for a bio-oriented cosmological structure principle that actually resolves the problem from first principles."

Chiding the scientific community for ignoring your idea is a good way to get your idea ignored by the scientific community.

__________________
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

I didn't say that the universe was "bio-oriented"... I said that there is a apparent bio-orientated cosmological structure principle in effect, which was supported with a link that includes a good description for exactly why that is so.

The physics derives an enigma that makes testable predictions about exactly where life will and will not be found elsewhere in the universe, and this region of space AND time is extremely limited by it's features.

Won't bother with another excellent link here:
______________________________________

I don't need help for them to do that, and they aren't my "ideas", they are direct and known observations:

http://knol.google.com/k/richard-rya...cb34nnchgkl5/2

And um... unsupported claims about "handwaving" have zero effect on me.

Excellent question. Any science, advanced enough beyond our own, is indistiguishable from magic. We know that gravity works, and can predict it's action down to the nth degree, but we don't know how it works. I may yet be undiscovered science, but it might be magic, or even the hand of God holding everything together.

Our not yet knowing the mechanism of gravity isn't evidence for design, however. It's merely evidence of our ignorance.

Have you ever picked microfossils from among mineral grains under a microscope... probably not, still... you can look through thousands of grains, each slightly different to each other, then spot a fossil immediatly distinct by its regularity of curve and then you might spot another another quite similar, you can instinctively see that a principle of design is at work in these fossils, that is absent in the millions of sand grains, in this case it is the common blueprint of DNA the fossils share. When we look at stars and planets I would suggest that they resemble the millions of sand grains, more than the fossils, no two are alike, they form in a wide spread of morphologies, dependent primarily on a range in a few contingent conditions. So which could be considered to be the prototype? or the archetype? Artifacts of a design process would seem to be missing from the universe.

__________________
plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

When we see examples of how life and "the way things are" seem to match up well, the most parsimonious explanation would seem to be that life, which is subject to natural selection, has adapted to its environment.

When any answer is "possible", all answers are meaningless.

__________________
"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

The problem with anthropic "explanations" is that they come nowhere close to really answering the question. One way to frame the question is, why is it that unusually intelligent apes have devised two theories, quantum mechanics and general relativity, that are themselves not even the slightest bit relevant to survival or natural selection, yet are accurate to ten decimal places under ideal circumstances in environments that humans never themselves experience. Let the "anthropic principle" chew on that one.

That depends very sensitively on how you define "design." You make an excellent point in regard to some definitions of that word, but not others. For example, even 500 years ago, about the craziest suggestion any scientist could make to his/her colleagues is that we will someday understand the interiors of those designless stars you speak of. Knowing that we would never get anything more than the light they emit, it seemed the height of folly to imagine that we could model them in the great detail that we have successfully modeled them today. Partly, that is because they didn't know about spectral lines back then, so better observational technology opened a new door that proved decisive. But partly, it's because stars are pretty darned undestandable even for intelligent apes, astonishingly. There are definitions of design that would fit that to a tee, definitions that reflect your point that simple and symmetric structures are easily distinguishable from random or highly complex ones. In a similar vein, a random string of digits is the one that contains the most information, whereas a repeating decimal is something our eye can detect easily, and provides a far greater chance of containing information we can interpret.

Well, yes, apparent because here we are. And I agree on the "structure principle," though I think it's broader than just bio-oriented. Life needs a good variety of interacting elements and molecules. (Their "chaotic" interaction can happen upon auto-catalysis, and you're off and running.) But the required variety of elements weren't even here at the beginning, and they didn't begin to be "manufactured" in the first stars for nearly a billion years.^{[citation needed]} I mean, it worked, but I might have "designed it" differently...

__________________
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Firstly 'Transreality' your 'Artefacts' of a design process are missing. I would argue. That might be because we have not looked very well yet. I said it myself that we have not yet found such that could confirm this... but not finding and drawing the conclusion its not there are not the same thing. We do not and as yet can not confirm or deny such other life. But then I draw the thought that finding signs of other life changes nothing.
'Island' I looked at your linked article and drew the same conclusion as Couger.
Without becoming personal and keeping this topic alive by avoiding the dialogue that will offend, its difficult to draw a conclusion that will please all. The fact that we have viewed so little of the universe we can not say with any certainty much at all.
The very use of the word design is to suggest that a greater power than we yet know might be responsible. That conclusion is not the way my mind works. A singular one time event does not require a design. It just happened. I can live with that.

It's a small point, but I would mention that you couldn't prove that empirically no matter how ambitious you were. The burden has to be on the person making a claim of the existence of something. If something cannot be shown to exist, it should be assumed (meaning essentially an agnostic stance) not to exist.

__________________
As above, so below

You can give any definition you want to "Intelligent design" but the fact is that it is a term coined by anti-science people ultimately to drive a very narrow religious view into public school.

The problems with "intelligent design" are many. First it is a dishonest attempt to get religion inserted into public schools in the USA. The theological implications should be disturbing to honest people of faith. It implies that we can detect "design" over "non design" without ever getting into how you can detect "design" beyond having a gut feel, which in science is often wrong especially when you know little about the topic in question. If you are a person of faith and believe in a one or more "gods" that created the universe then ask yourself did your "god or gods" design all or only part of the universe? If you answer "all of it" then what good is asking "Can you see design" in the universe. It would be like being in a completely white room and asking if you can see anything white.

Terms like "Hand of creation" are loaded terms.

We live in a complex universe. Science attempts to answer questions about the universe we live in. IDers often complain about methodological naturalism in science but that is what science is. It is the search for natural explanations about the universe we live in. It is not about religion.

Though I didn't state so specifically, part of my thinking about this comes from the (to me) intriguing idea that we could be living in a simulation, a la Nick Bostrom. Depending on how much memory or processing power is available, it would be very difficult to tell that we are living in such a simulation (a form of intelligent design, I suppose) rather than in a "real world." In fact, being slightly deranged, I can imagine a world where each universe is only a simulation made by another universe, in an infinite series of constructed universes. In that case there would be no ultimate reality at all. But as usual, I think that's the kind of thinking that can end up getting you confined into a hospital room with white walls and no sharp edges.

__________________
As above, so below

Apparently, you missed my point entirely. However, since it's meaningless, enjoy your evening.

I understand what you mean here, but I think OP uses the word design as meaning that something/someone has actively done the designing. I don't think evolution and its products match that description. What you see is something that seems different from more random processes, but it's not evidence of "active design".

Spend enough time going over quotemines by ID folks and you become sensitive to words having more than one meaning or interpretation

__________________
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

My problem with this way of thinking is not that it is crazy (all philosophy is in some sense crazy) or even that it is wrong (we don't get to know that), but simply that it is not scientific thinking. Whether you believe that science requires there be an "ultimate reality", or if you simply think that science works when it pretends there is, makes no difference to the science you are doing. What does make a difference to the science you are doing is whether or not you are using scientific definitions, i.e., whether or not every claim you make can be supported by the outcome of some practical or idealized experiment.

That's the criterion that the "simulacrum" claim does not satisfy-- one can speculate as much as one likes about what evidence we have that we are in a simulacrum, but if you cannot say "experiment X comes out Y if we are in a simulacrum and not Y if we aren't", then you are not doing science. On the other hand, if every single experimental outcome you can imagine is unable to falsify either reality model, then the reality models are simply not distinguished by science, and Occam indicates that science must go with the most parsimonious view. So, to argue scientifically that we are in a simulacrum, it follows that you must do either of these:
1) describe an experiment that can falsify the simulacrum idea, or
2) argue that the simulacrum is a more parsimonious description than an "ultimate reality".
I don't see the simulacrum idea being able to accomplish either, so I reject it as scientific thinking. That holds whether or not it is actually true. It is essentially the exact same reason that intelligent design is not science.

I remember reading once that some group decided to test this idea by looking for 'computational artefacts' in the simulation. Things like glitches in the 'frame-rate' at which reality is being calculated. Needless to say, nothing was found, but the proposal stuck in my head as it was 'way out there'.

__________________
Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

And it's perfectly scientific to look for something like that, but it's still hard to say what such an "artifact" would look like. We have measurement error, assumption over-idealization, and limitations in the laws and principles-- what space is left for computational artifacts? I really don't know how you could tell you found one, or how you could rule out their presence, so that's why it doesn't sound very scientific to me. It's similar to why there's no experiment that could rule out the presence of a divine hand, although you could imagine an experimental outcome that supported the idea so there's no harm in trying. The default expectation is that you won't find it, and you won't know what to make of the fact that you didn't find it.

I think they were looking for things like 'skips' in motion, like a DVD player that drops frames from a movie, resulting in a staccato type effect. The other effect, from memory, was to look in space for a repeating pattern of stars, which would indicate that the universe was a lot smaller than we imagoned (and so easer to simulate). Anyway, that's all I can remember and I may have got some details wrong, I just bring it up because someone had actually thought about how something like a simulacrum-reality might be tested.

__________________
Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

I don't know about everyone else, but I believe that all the matter in the Universe groups together in a giant spider web design. As for the Universe as a whole however, there isn't.

__________________
"This world is rough, and if a man is gonna make it he's gotta be tough." -Johnny Cash

Yeah, I suppose there's no harm in looking for it. But even if they did see dropped frames, it's still a pretty big leap to a simulacrum. I feel science would still be compelled to look for reasons why ultimate reality skipped frames, not for reasons why that couldn't be ultimate reality. It's just so unscientific to say "I know reality can't do that, so it must be a simulation of reality." It seems more scientific to just be open to what reality does, whatever it is.

This is a great thread! Almost everyone has contributed valuable
ideas. Even those who are disagreeing with each other.

I disagree. I think that Occam is one step beyond science. Given
the same evidence, which science is as yet unable to evaluate, you
may interpret one possible scenario as being the most parsimonious,
and I may interpret another as being the most parsimonious, but
science doesn't go one way or another. It has to keep on trying to
find a solution, or wait until some scientist is interested enough to
resume trying to find a solution. Maybe all scientists will give up
trying, but that doesn't mean that science has decided anything.

In such a case, going with what you think is the less parsimonious
scenario is not anti-science any more than going with what you think
is the more parsimonious scenario IS science. They are both just
opinions.

There is lots of evidence. The currently-existing tools of science are
not able to say whether that evidence supports a designed Universe
or an undesigned Universe. Most people feel that one of those two
scenarios is far more parsimonious than the other. They just disagree
on which of the two is the one that is far more parsimonious.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but it seems that you are trying to argue that Occam's razor is beyond science. Occam's razor is simply a rule of thumb which states that given the choice between two propositions, the simpler one is the better choice (as it makes fewer assumptions). Of course, the choice may change at a later point when more evidence provides a stronger selection basis.

__________________
Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

You detect artificiality in a sharp flint or the simulation example by noting hints of previously observed patterns of artificiality. One can't identify design in the Universe as, has been noted, we have nothing with which to compare our observations. (Design also implies purpose which is a metaphysical debate).

Science may never fully explain first causes or why the laws of physics are such as they are; filling gaps in knowledge with a supernatural designer after eliminating natural explanations is more presumptious than saying "I don't know and may never".

__________________
Yonder is Dubhe seen on Earth tonight as it was in the days of Grover Cleveland's presidency whereas this way is Deneb seen as it was in the lifetime of Muhammed . If one somehow travelled to Deneb at very close to c then whenever you looked back you'd measure Earth as closer to you than the distance you would simultaneously measure between Earth and Dubhe.

My bold.

Mugaliens, please refrain from trying to incite any kind of religious statements here, please keep it to a sensible and reasonable discussion. Thank you.

__________________
You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you can not please all of the people all of the time.

"Why change passwords when you've got a baseball bat?"

It is true that sometimes parsimony is a debatable issue, and in those cases it is really an issue of different pedagogies rather than different actual theories. But those situations are clearly distinguished from the current issue by being clear that no specific ontology is being proposed that is intended to be taken seriously or uniquely determined-- all pedagogical ontologies are just intended to be useful ways of approximating the reality to gain power over it in specific situations, rather than being interpreted as the reality itself (Newton's "law of gravity" is an excellent example of a pedagogical ontology that is no longer intended to be taken seriously). In the case we are actually discussing here, it is perfectly clear that a very specific ontology is being floated (as a speculation), it is meant to be taken perfectly seriously, and there is no ambiguity whatever about the fact that it is less parsimonious than theories expressed as being about ultimate reality. That is because the simulacrum picture takes all the same elements as a reality without the simulacrum, and then adds the simulacrum, which then contributes zero demonstrated predictive power.

Whenever that is the case, there is no credible debate about parsimony-- it is demonstrably less parsimonious to add an utterly superfluous layer between the "ultimate reality" and ourselves, and call that layer a computer program of some kind. If doing that presents us with zero added predictive power over our environment, and zero conceptual unification of concepts we could not unify without it, then it is quite clearly less parsimonious. Pretending that we could disagree is not the same thing as actually being able to make a case for it-- I could as easily say that I personally feel that taking modern physics exactly as it is, and adding to it a breed of invisible unicorns that will it all to be true, is just as parsimonious as the current setup, and then pretend that because I feel this way, it is somehow not crystal clear that such extraneous appendages are reducing parsimony.
Science never decides anything, but scientists do have to make decisions all the time, like what is good science versus what is an unnecessary loss of parsimony. I would say that Occam is not only part of what defines science, it is one of its more core defining principles, expressly because science is all about understanding, and understanding is all about simplifying-- but not deciding.
You are confusing what science "goes with" with what science claims has been "decided must be true." There is kind of a myth about Occam's Razor that says it is a principle that the more parsimonious a theory, the more likely it is to be true, but that is certainly not a justifiable proposition. All scientists have to do is to decide what is their current best theory, depending on context and accuracy target, and parsimony is a key element of that, yet they never have to decide what is the truth, which parsimony has no role in whatsoever. Not having to decide truth is one of the things that makes science possible.
Anyone who thinks that taking all the same observations and all the same demonstrated predictive power over those observations, and adding a designer, while making zero different predictions and adding zero computational power is not less parsimonious, simply does not understand the concept of parsimony. Their personal beliefs are their own, but what part of that is science is perfectly clear.

Another aspect when considering the universe compared to other fields where we know design has been at work, is that all examples of design with which we are familiar are an iterative process. The Designer NEVER gets it right first time. In design there is an inheritance of form, as a prototype moves towards a functional example. This is also the process in the natural evolution in life, where design is inhereited, but not in stars where the design of a star, maybe dependent on available local conditions and is in no way informed by the failure or success of the stars that have gone before.

Of course, while life proceeds on some self-designing algorithm, and stars I argue have no design, there is a remarkable resemblance between say the fractal distribution of mass in the universe, and the fractal organisation by which most life constructs itself... this would surely be be due to the convergence towards universal parameters defining efficiency rather on any common design theme.

__________________
plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

That's a good point, and it connects with what I meant about there being many possible meanings for "design." It is often assumed that if the universe involves design, it had to be done all at once. In some ways, natural selection is a design process. Perhaps the multiverse camp sees an analogy in the "selection" of universes, where universes that contain more intelligent processing have a proportionately higher chance of having our intelligence in them. That's another kind of unintentional design, that throws out "failed" universes automatically, they never do intelligent processing.

But as I said above, I don't actually count that a scientific explanation of anything, as it offers no predictive power, is not testable, and attaches superfluous elements onto the universe we can actually observe, gaining no scientific insight (no guidance into the next experiment, etc.) in the process. One could use it to predict that our values of the constants maximize the amount of intelligent processing (a strong anthropic kind of argument, a la Tipler), but such is much easier to claim than to actually use for anything demonstrable.
It is conceivable that the physical constants in a universe could represent a kind of "DNA signature" for that universe, and universes might spawn other universes with similar DNA signatures every time they successfully generate intelligent processing. That sounds far fetched, but "many worlds" thinking has all outcomes occur, but maybe those outcomes are "inert" except along paths that generate a consciousness. Such a process would naturally achieve physical constants that are conducive to consciousness generation, and maintain those constants at those optimum values. That's an interative process of inheriting successes with modification, much like evolution. Many think of evolution as the absolute opposite of design, but I never knew why, it just seems like a way to do design gradually and without intent.I agree with your connecting evolutionary and design processes, but perhaps the nonbiological processes share some of the same design themes, if the two possibilities you mention are somehow different halves of the same coin. Atoms don't care if they are part of a living organism or part of a star. Rather than asking what is design and what isn't, my point is that the whole concept of "design" is pretty scientifically useless when applied to the whole universe, expressly because we only interact with one realization of any design theme that might be present. It would be like if there was only one surviving living organism on Earth, a young child with great intelligence but no other living things anywhere to interact with, and with all fossil records completely eradicated by some catastrophe, what possible use could conceiving of Darwinian evolution have for such an individual?

Not really, because it is only a particular concept which views the universe as a single entity, and one for which we really have no real evidence or, for that that matter, use. For all intents the universe is the objects we see about us, and this is the only place we can look for evidence.

We look at a black hole, a very simple regular object, and can ask is there any evidence for design in that object, and in the array of objects we call black holes. But if we ask has someone laid down the rules for how blackholes form, from outside the universe, then we enter barren realms of speculation. So instead we compare the variation in blackholes to variation in objects that we know are designed (like cars, and maybe like species) and possibly we can determine some criteria to distinguish a designed object. There aren't any old low efficiency primitive black holes, or any evidence that black holes have improved at being black holes, or any gain in blackhole complexity over time, for example.

__________________
plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...