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the bible,truth,God's kingdom,Jehovah God,New World,Jehovah's Witnesses,God's church,Christianity,apologetics,spirituality.
Thursday 9 February 2023
Unthinkable no more?
Harvesting Clones to Live Forever Would Be Monstrous
Wesley J Smith
James Tour re:Origin of Life research's continued failure as a polemic against I D.
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Listening to the skies declare JEHOVAH'S Glory.
Johannes Kepler on the Holy Work of Astronomy
Melissa C Travis
Wednesday 8 February 2023
Yet more on the science of design detection
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Tuesday 7 February 2023
Monday 6 February 2023
Yet more on why I D has long been mainstream.
SETI: Inventing Minds to Find Minds
One of the most intense projects in design detection is being carried out by people who deny the reality of intelligent design. For decades, SETI enthusiasts, who are largely materialists (as was their early protagonist Carl Sagan) have waded through radio signals and computer printouts, looking for some “Wow!” signal that they believe would isolate intelligent causes from natural causes — all while insisting that the intelligent causes emerged out of natural causes. If this sounds like special pleading, perhaps it is.Now, the SETI Institute has a new project that makes their cognitive dissonance curiouser and curiouser. They are planning to use artificial intelligence (AI) to look for the intelligent signals. But then, many SETI enthusiasts believe that biological intelligences on some advanced outposts have been supplanted by artificial intelligences of the aliens’ own making. In a real sense, they will use robots to look for robots. That’s to say, they believe that brains that emerged by natural processes are capable of designing intelligent systems that can look for signals from intelligent systems that were the products of brains that had emerged by natural processes. Welcome to the convoluted philosophy of SETI.
News from the SETI Institute asks, “Will Machine Learning Help Us Find Extraterrestrial Life?” Watch for words signifying mental powers of human minds.
January 30, 2023, Mountain View, CA — When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, “if they’re out there, why haven’t we found them yet?” And often, the response is that we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy. Further, algorithmsdeveloped decades ago for the earliest digital computers can be outdated and inefficient when applied to modern petabyte-scale datasets. Now, research published in Nature Astronomy and led by an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, Peter Ma, along with researchers from the SETI Institute, Breakthrough Listen and scientific research institutions around the world, has applied a deep learning technique to a previously studied dataset of nearby stars and uncovered eight previously unidentified signals of interest.
These are strange behaviors for meat robots to engage in.
“Signals of Interest”
They cheerfully boast about how many stars they’ve looked at, how many “signals of interest” have been found so far, and what they hope to achieve. After 63 years of searching, new tools had to be developed to handle the volume of data. The 2017 search of 820 nearby stars yielded 150 terabytes of data that meat-style brains decided were “devoid of interesting signals.” In the recent effort AI techniques turned up eight signals worth following up on.
This massive volume of data requires new computational tools to process and analyze that data quickly to identify anomalies that could be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This new machine learning approach is breaking new ground in the quest to answer the question, “are we alone?”
In some far future imaginary world, when the meat robots have gone extinct and metal minds have replaced them, would an alien civilization with meat brains be able to isolate intelligent causes from physical causes, and conclude that our robot descendants were not natural?
Nature and Natural Causes: Is Differentiation Natural?
The same day as the SETI Institute article, a “news explainer” at Nature asked, “Will an AI be the first to discover alien life?” Here is what the AI is being called on to do.
The biggest challenge for us in looking for SETI signals is not at this point getting the data,” says Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer at the SETI Institute. “The difficult part is differentiating signals from human or Earth technology from the kind of signals we’d be looking for from technology somewhere else out in the Galaxy.”
Differentiating technology on Earth from technology elsewhere is one step removed from the underlying assumption: the human mind can “differentiate signals” in observable phenomena. Intelligence in silico is merely a tool, an extension, of what the meat computer asks it to do. That’s true of most tools. A hammer is an extension of the hand, but the hammer lies inert in the tool chest until grasped and directed by the hand, which is directed by the brain. But what directs the brain to direct the hand to direct the hammer? Is there an ultimate differentiator in the functional result?
Your Designed Body
To be sure, life is full of signals and differentiation processes. As described in Chapter 14 of Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, the immune system routinely patrols the bloodstream to differentiate friend from foe, self from non-self, and new threat from old threat. Signal transduction is a key concept in biochemistry, and signal recognition proceeds all the way up to the organism and beyond. But would the orchestrated responses to signals function without some master controller at the top of the differentiation hierarchy? The moment a body dies, all those molecules and codes still exist, but they cannot act on their own.
Similarly, artificial devices can differentiate signals. An imaginary Maxwell’s Demon could separate hot from cold molecules against the principle of entropy increase, but the device would be traceable to a choosing mind — a master differentiator. It could be said that SETI is an effort by differentiators to detect differentiators. If differentiation were natural, we would find differentiation in rocks and sand that perform functions contrary to the tendencies of natural law, just like Aristotle quipped that “If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature.”
What Rocks Could Do
To maintain materialism, the SETI people would have to conclude that if robot signals can be differentiated by our robots, then robots exist by nature. This would likely insult the programmers who worked so hard to write the software. Would Frank Marchis at the SETI Institute, who is involved with the AI search, tell his programmers that they’re just doing what rocks could do, given billions of years?
For the humor of it, consider what astrophysicist Paul Sutter said on Live Science last month: “Alien life could be turning harsh planets into paradises — and astronomers want to find them.” He proposes a new extension of the Habitable Zone concept, bouncing off “new research, published to the preprint server arXiv.org, [that] suggests that our current definition of the habitable zone may be too narrow because it doesn’t include how life influences a world.” Call in the (non-religious) Deities:
Therefore, we must rethink the traditional definition of the habitable zone. The researchers propose a new one: the Gaian habitable zone (from Gaia, the Greek mythological personification of the Earth). This zone would be wider than what we currently consider suitable for life, because life itself is capable of changing the boundaries of the suitable.
He speaks as if personifying the Earth is a quaint fallacy of less enlightened minds. But think about it; do rocks personify the Earth? Do rocks create myths? If they did, then we would have gods and myths by nature. Look for the words implying mental activity again:
The researchers argue that we should employ these broader definitions of the habitable zone in selecting future targets for exploration. If the habitable zone is too narrow, we may miss signs of life, simply because we’re looking in the wrong place. No matter what, when searching for extraterrestrial life, we must keep an open mind and be prepared for surprises. Life … finds a way.
Summarizing, life finds a way to design robots (but not by intelligent design) that can differentiate signals as long as it keeps an open… an open… whatever!
In this mode of thinking, why go to the trouble of building robots? Design detection is natural. Human researchers are superfluous. The art of shipbuilding is in the wood. Planets are already differentiating between themselves though hundreds of light-years apart. Gaia oversees this natural activity, but she is NOT religious!
The only way to please everybody?
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Solar energy:the fine print.
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Well past the slippery slope?
Suicide Tourism Comes to Oregon
Assisted-suicide activists always promise that strict guidelines will protect against abuse. It’s a big con. The guidelines are not really strict. They rely primarily on self-reporting. And they are meant to be temporary: As soon as political conditions permit, the access to doctor-prescribed death expands.
Witness Oregon. When Measure 16 passed, assisted suicide was limited to state residents. That requirement was recently deemed inoperative by the state’s ever-flaccid suicide regulators after a Lawsuit was settled and is expected to soon be repealed.
Opening the Floodgate
That threatens to open a floodgate and transform Oregon into the U.S. equivalent of Switzerland, where suicide clinics flourish. Already, people from out of state who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness — something very loosely defined — are traveling to Oregon to find a death doctor willing to help make themselves dead in just over two weeks. From the daily mail story :
Oregon has become America’s first ‘death tourism’ destination, where terminally ill people from Texas and other states that have outlawed assisted suicide have started travelling to get their hands on a deadly cocktail of drugs to end their lives, DailyMail.com can reveal.
In the liberal bastion Portland, at least one clinic has started receiving out-of-staters who have less than six months to live and meet the other strict requirements of the state’s Death with Dignity (DWD) law.
Dr Nicholas Gideonse, the director of End of Life Choices Oregon, recently told a panel that he was advising terminally ill non-residents on travelling to Oregon to end their lives, despite a legal gray area.
Remember, suicidal people who qualify for assisted suicide are not usually offered prevention, meaning some suicidal people receive efforts to save their lives while others are abandoned to facilitation.
Activists also promised that assisted suicide would only occur in the context of a close doctor/patient relationship. But Oregon permits doctor-shopping. If one doctor says no, suicidal patients can merely ask an advocacy group to recommend an ideologically predisposed doctor willing to prescribe death. And suicide prescribers don’t even need to practice in the specialty that treats the patient’s underlying medical condition.
Meanwhile, in Other States
Other states are also loosening “strict guidelines.” For example, Vermont permits virtual assisted suicide, meaning the consultation can be over Zoom or Skype. California has attempted to compel doctors to participate in the assisted-suicide process — after promising MDs, in order to get the law passed, that they would not have to do any of that. The new anti-conscience law is on hold after a lawsuit. Other states where assisted suicide has been legalized have similarly loosened waiting times and procedures.
The ultimate goal — or, at least, the consequence — of allowing assisted suicide/euthanasia is death on demand. Some jurisdictions are getting there faster — Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada — and some slower, such as Oregon, Vermont, California, and Colorado. But that tide only flows in one direction.
Sunday 5 February 2023
On succession in the Ottoman empire.
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Saturday 4 February 2023
OOL Science is going backwards?
James Tour: The Goalposts Are Racing Away from the Origin-of-Life Community
From conspiracy theory to Just plain conspiracy?
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Another black Friday for Darwinism courtesy of the fossil record.
Fossil Friday: The Abrupt Origins of Treeshrews (Scandentia) and Colugos (Dermoptera)
Friday 3 February 2023
The fall of Rome: silicon valley edition.
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Where science meets the gospel?
The Science of Kindness
Why the Origin of Life remains design deniers' bane.
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Ps. "Chemicals do not evolve." James Tour.
That puts the case against abiogenesis in a nutshell.
A design denier in his own words.
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Ps. We believe in steel manning our opponents position not straw manning it.
Yet more re: the thumb print of JEHOVAH; human body edition.
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The hope of the Resurrection resides in every human heart
The Fantasy of Living Forever in a Computer
Transhumanists pursue the dream of immortality by hoping to Upload their minds into computers — as if the mimicking software would be them. No, it would be a computer program, nothing more. They would still be dead and gone.
And here’s another somewhat less ambitious approach to the same goal. Apparently a company is developing technology that would allow you to speak to loved ones after you shuffle off this mortal coil. From the Vice story
The founder of a top metaverse company says that the fast-moving development of ChatGPT has pushed the timeline for one of his most ambitious and eccentric projects up by a matter of years. In an interview with Motherboard, Somnium Space’s Artur Sychov said a user has started to integrate OpenAI’s chatbot into his metaverse, creating a virtual assistant that offers a faster pathway for the development of “Live Forever” mode, Sychov’s project to allow people to store the way they talk, move, and sound until after they die, when they can come back from the dead as an online avatar to speak with their relatives.
Leaving aside the narcissistic aspect of people continually having themselves recorded, “they” wouldn’t be “back.” The deceased would still be dead. The AI reproduction would merely be a more sophisticated remembrance of the dearly departed than is available now, akin to a precious photo or video, nothing more.
Immortality cannot be attained in the corporeal world. If eternal life is attainable, it will be found by working on one’s soul in faith, not by developing ever-more-advanced AI computers.
Reality: a brief history.
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Why does the Ostrich have four kneecaps? Well don't ask Darwinists.
Kneecaps: “Ultimately, there might not be a simple pattern”
Why do ostriches have four, rather than two, kneecaps? A new study has found several possible biomechanical advantages. Perhaps they allow the ostrich to straighten its leg more quickly, helping the animal to run quickly. Perhaps the lower kneecap protects the joined tendons crossing the front of the knee. One reason that does not help to explain the ostriches four kneecaps is evolution. That is because this unique design is not predicted, and makes no sense, on the theory. As one article admits: “Bizarrely, many of the ostrich’s closest relatives don’t have kneecaps at all.” Similarities across the species were a strong argument for evolution, but in fact biology is full of unique designs, particular to one or a few species. Such one-off, “lineage specific,” designs are “bizarre” for evolutionists. So while there are design reasons for the ostriches four kneecaps, on the ordinary view of the evolution of each being, we can only say that so it is.
Thursday 2 February 2023
On the Darwinian Gestapo?
NASA Persecution Case Reaches a Grim Anniversary
Another civil war?
"Gay clubs operating in seminaries " claims Pope Benedict from beyond the grave.
The culture war within the culture war?
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I D is a science starter?
Socrates in the city :James Tour on nanotech
A new ID the Future episode features the first part of a conversation between James Tour and Socrates in the City host Eric Metaxas on Tour’s astonishing work in nanotechnology and on the topic “How Did Life Come into Being?” Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Materials Science and Nanoengineering at Rice University. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading nano-scientists. This event took place at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston, Texas. Here in Part 1, Tour explains some of the inventions coming out of his Rice University lab, including molecular cars and astonishing graphene technologies, one of which restores full mobility in laboratory rats whose spines have been severed. Download the podcast or listen to it here