God’s greatest mistakes.

These latest coronavirus figures are the last straw. They are impossible, scientifically, therefore science is wrong. I’m getting religion.

The solipsist religion.
I also know it as Descartes Demon’s Dream.
There are certain references to this in the Hitchhikers series.
And it’s a bit like the world of the film “The matrix”.

“Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.”

“Descartes imagines that an evil demon, of utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. This evil demon is imagined to present a complete illusion of an external world. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”

“Dreaming provides a springboard for those who question whether our own reality may be an illusion. The ability of the mind to be tricked into believing a mentally generated world is the real world means at least one variety of simulated reality is a common, even nightly event.” and “ the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman—how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too”

Then there’s the Boltmann Brain. The probability of the universe as we know it coming spontaneously into existence is so incredibly small that it is much more likely that a brain come into existence intact with a full memory of what it believes the universe to be.

From Hitchhikers we have: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened” and “God’s Greatest Mistakes is the second installment in a trilogy written by Oolon Colluphid” and “We haven’t even finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet” and “How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?” and “I couldn’t trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe – if there is one – for granted.”

Or you can think of this as an extreme version of the strong anthropic principle.

The three primary vaiants of the solipsist religion are:

• there exists one consciousness, one dream, and nothing else
• the senses are real but the dream ends where our senses end
• there are multiple consciousnesses, each dreaming their own dream (as in the Matrix movie)

What evidence is there that the solipsist concept is false? The first stumbling block is megalomania – if “an evil demon, of utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me” then that gives me great self importance, which appeals to magalomania.
The second stumbling block is timescale. When did this demon’s deam begin? And there’s no simple answer to this. One possibility is that it gained complexity over my lifetime. Another possibility is that it began now and there is no past. Another possibility is that it was created further in the past, such as 400 BC or circa 1600.

What evidence is there that the solipsist concept is correct? Well, look for God’s greatest mistakes. An event that cannot be explained by science at all, or is so improbable as to be impossible in this universe, or looks like a deus ex machina plot hole. Or are signs that a simple universe has been replaced by something more complex.

If you look closely enough there are scores if not hundreds of examples.

(to be continued)

I’ll just tantalise you with a few of God’s greatest mistakes:

• The Maunder minimum
• Origins of ice ages
• Neptune
• The Oort cloud
• The unidentifiable lines in the Sun’s spectrum
• Coronavirus statistics
• The nature of the interstellar medium
• Dark matter
• The origin of life
• Relativity vs quantum mechanics
• Failure of the atmospheric CO2 mass balance
• Ratio of noble gas isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere

Plenty more where those came from.

there is this aspect of human reality generation (speaking of representations mind generates of world), of which, in practice the most immediate experience is of what the mind does. The only direct connection a mind has with an environment, or the most direct, is really with the internal environment, or some feel for the workings of. Consciousness I guess is or involves senses of internal environment, workings of, and of (applied to) other minds as a consequence

there’s sort of a possible contradiction involved about that above for some, that’s avoided

consider for a moment if minds can be understood entirely from knowledge of physics. An interesting proposition I reckon

mollwollfumble said:

These latest coronavirus figures are the last straw. They are impossible, scientifically, therefore science is wrong. I’m getting religion.

What exactly is wrong with the stats?

I’m not at all attracted by this Boltmann Brain idea, with a mysterious brain just appearing out of nowhere, so let’s consider an alternative.

It is often proposed that we are likely to be a simulation created by some superior beings, and this at least seems not impossible.

But if this is true, then we can be certain that the beings that created our simulation also think they are likely to be a simulation, because they have firm proof that such a simulation is possible.

And the simulators of our simulators will also be convinced that they too are a simulation.

So it’s simulators all the way up.

But if that is true, the probability of us finding ourselves at the very base of the simulation tree is infinitesimal, if not zero.

So it is near certain that we are not a simulation.

A fundamental feature of solipsism is that it’s not falsifiable.

Nice Rationality!

The Universe Is Wrong Therefore God

SCIENCE said:

Nice Rationality!

The Universe Is Wrong Therefore God

All SCIENCE is wrong.

the force of ideas can be a powerful thing, but doubtful reliably results in greater certainty about reality

Witty Rejoinder said:

SCIENCE said:

Nice Rationality!

The Universe Is Wrong Therefore God

All SCIENCE is wrong.

sorry, can’t seem to find the thread to which you refer, comma or no

probably in the Lost Chapter (thank The Lab) of back in the day, we sincerely apologise

btm said:

A fundamental feature of solipsism is that it’s not falsifiable.

If just one falsification of a theory was found to be false, would that falsify the principle of falsification?

There does seem to be an unhealthy obsession with falsifiability and the lack thereof.

mollwollfumble said:

God’s greatest mistakes.

These latest coronavirus figures are the last straw. They are impossible, scientifically, therefore science is wrong. I’m getting religion.

The solipsist religion.
I also know it as Descartes Demon’s Dream.
There are certain references to this in the Hitchhikers series.
And it’s a bit like the world of the film “The matrix”.

“Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.”

“Descartes imagines that an evil demon, of utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. This evil demon is imagined to present a complete illusion of an external world. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”

“Dreaming provides a springboard for those who question whether our own reality may be an illusion. The ability of the mind to be tricked into believing a mentally generated world is the real world means at least one variety of simulated reality is a common, even nightly event.” and “ the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman—how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too”

Then there’s the Boltmann Brain. The probability of the universe as we know it coming spontaneously into existence is so incredibly small that it is much more likely that a brain come into existence intact with a full memory of what it believes the universe to be.

From Hitchhikers we have: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened” and “God’s Greatest Mistakes is the second installment in a trilogy written by Oolon Colluphid” and “We haven’t even finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet” and “How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?” and “I couldn’t trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe – if there is one – for granted.”

Or you can think of this as an extreme version of the strong anthropic principle.

The three primary vaiants of the solipsist religion are:

• there exists one consciousness, one dream, and nothing else
• the senses are real but the dream ends where our senses end
• there are multiple consciousnesses, each dreaming their own dream (as in the Matrix movie)

What evidence is there that the solipsist concept is false? The first stumbling block is megalomania – if “an evil demon, of utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me” then that gives me great self importance, which appeals to magalomania.
The second stumbling block is timescale. When did this demon’s deam begin? And there’s no simple answer to this. One possibility is that it gained complexity over my lifetime. Another possibility is that it began now and there is no past. Another possibility is that it was created further in the past, such as 400 BC or circa 1600.

What evidence is there that the solipsist concept is correct? Well, look for God’s greatest mistakes. An event that cannot be explained by science at all, or is so improbable as to be impossible in this universe, or looks like a deus ex machina plot hole. Or are signs that a simple universe has been replaced by something more complex.

If you look closely enough there are scores if not hundreds of examples.

(to be continued)

I’ll just tantalise you with a few of God’s greatest mistakes:

• The Maunder minimum
• Origins of ice ages
• Neptune
• The Oort cloud
• The unidentifiable lines in the Sun’s spectrum
• Coronavirus statistics
• The nature of the interstellar medium
• Dark matter
• The origin of life
• Relativity vs quantum mechanics
• Failure of the atmospheric CO2 mass balance
• Ratio of noble gas isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere

Plenty more where those came from.

But to return, to the original theme, that seems to be a short list of incomplete theories and or incomplete data. It seems a little unreasonable to invent a god so you can blame it for that.

Gods greatest mistake would be the human being, sure we can do and think some cool stuff, but are susceptible to all manner of disease (physical, mental and emotional) and the human form could do with some upgrades.

this title is problematic.

From: transition

> there is this aspect of human reality generation (speaking of representations mind generates of world), of which, in practice the most immediate experience is of what the mind does. The only direct connection a mind has with an environment, or the most direct, is really with the internal environment, or some feel for the workings of. Consciousness I guess is or involves senses of internal environment, workings of, and of (applied to) other minds as a consequence

Is there any internal environment that can be directly experienced? I could give stomach pain as an example, but as in the case of phantom limbs, these pain sensations may be from some completely different part of the body. Or perhaps you’re thinking of dreams as a direct observation of interior environment, in which case you’re sayi9ng that dreams are the most direct experiences of reality that we can have?

From: Witty Rejoinder

>> These latest coronavirus figures are the last straw. They are impossible, scientifically, therefore science is wrong. I’m getting religion.
> What exactly is wrong with the stats?

The one that prompted these thoughts is that there’s no simple reasons why the number of coronavirus cases should decide to increase in so many countries simultaneously, lately, when there is no causal connection between the countries. There were also earlier indicators that stretched credibility to the limit.

The maths is as follows, the number of deaths, cases and recoveries are linked. A case must become either a recovery or a death (or a death through unrelated causes), a new case can only occur through contact with a previous active case. On top of that is data reporting selectivity, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Put it together and it becomes a set of difference equations, which can be approximated accurately as a set of differential equations. I’m really good at constructing differential equations, but I can’t make a set of differential equations that would match even loosely what we really see in the official coronavirus statistics. Can you?

For starters there’s the rise and fall in China. The first sign of data problems is the long time delay between the first detected case (mid December) and the first death (11 Jan). (Compare with AIDS for example where the disease was first diagnosed after the first deaths). The peak infection rate in China is way lower than it has any right to be for such a large population. And there’s no way that the rate of decline could be as fast as the rate of rise, which is what was observed. Next, there’s the diaspora. An initial spread before China’s lockdown is plausible, but a continuing spread to other countries after lockdown really stretches the limits of plausibility. It’s silly to claim that coronavirus is both limited to a span of 1.5 metres and simultaneously able to travel freely by itself over distances of thousands of km.

But that just pushes the limits of credibility. The exact match for infection rate curves increasing to peak across many countries and wildly differing curves after peak in many countries limit credibility still further – neither the matching rise nor mismatching fall can be put down to any combination of age structure, health system and government action (including availability of tests). There are massively different mortality rates across different countries eg. Singapore vs Mexico. Some of this can be explained away as different strains and mixing of strains – mixing of strains being present in about 50% of countries and is observed as changes in mortality rates with time as one or other strain becomes dominant. But no combination of mixing strains, age structure, population density, health system and government action, even including racial differences, can explain the wildly different peak infection numbers in different countries, or the wildly differing rate of recovery in different countries.

And this latest synchronisation of non-causally linked increases in the number of cases across multiple countries is just the icing on the cake, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

From: The Rev Dodgson

> I’m not at all attracted by this Boltmann Brain idea, with a mysterious brain just appearing out of nowhere, so let’s consider an alternative. It is often proposed that we are likely to be a simulation created by some superior beings, and this at least seems not impossible. But if this is true, then we can be certain that the beings that created our simulation also think they are likely to be a simulation, because they have firm proof that such a simulation is possible. So it’s simulators all the way up. The probability of us finding ourselves at the very base of the simulation tree is infinitesimal, if not zero.

I like that logic. I’ll have to think about that.

From: btm

> A fundamental feature of solipsism is that it’s not falsifiable.

Only in the sense that nothing is ever falsifiable. Suppose for instance that I observed a contradiction of the second law of thermodynamics, the law that entropy must decrease. Then that doesn’t falsify it because my observations could be wrong, or quantum mechanics could be doing something of high improbability, or I could be right and negative entropy exist as an addition to the second law of thermodynamics without falsifying the fundamental law. The law of conservation of energy has had so many genuine falsifications that it’s had to be modified umpteen times (to conservation of mass-energy for example) without ever being accepted as false.

I’m not at all attracted by this Boltmann Brain idea, with a mysterious brain just appearing out of nowhere, so let’s consider an alternative. It is often proposed that we are likely to be a simulation created by some superior beings, and this at least seems not impossible. But if this is true, then we can be certain that the beings that created our simulation also think they are likely to be a simulation, because they have firm proof that such a simulation is possible. So it’s simulators all the way up. The probability of us finding ourselves at the very base of the simulation tree is infinitesimal, if not zero.

The simulation idea assumes that superior beings (humans ?) for some reason want to recreate the run on the mill boring life of most humans.
Human imagination universes seem much more interesting, super powers, starships, zombies, etc

Cymek said:

I’m not at all attracted by this Boltmann Brain idea, with a mysterious brain just appearing out of nowhere, so let’s consider an alternative. It is often proposed that we are likely to be a simulation created by some superior beings, and this at least seems not impossible. But if this is true, then we can be certain that the beings that created our simulation also think they are likely to be a simulation, because they have firm proof that such a simulation is possible. So it’s simulators all the way up. The probability of us finding ourselves at the very base of the simulation tree is infinitesimal, if not zero.

The simulation idea assumes that superior beings (humans ?) for some reason want to recreate the run on the mill boring life of most humans.
Human imagination universes seem much more interesting, super powers, starships, zombies, etc

On another note the simulation theory could explain why we haven’t yet discovered certain things, the programmers only made it so detailed and the finest details weren’t included, in the real universe they are, could be deliberate to limit the simulations abilities, they could break the program for example

>Is there any internal environment that can be directly experienced? I could give stomach pain as an example, but as in the case of phantom limbs, these pain sensations may be from some completely different part of the body. Or perhaps you’re thinking of dreams as a direct observation of interior environment, in which case you’re sayi9ng that dreams are the most direct experiences of reality that we can have?

my point was the workings of the fleshy wetware, the environment it generates internally, and the soft reality it works with (of ideas, representations), somewhat paradoxically are the nearest (most immediate) and perhaps in a sense firmest part of reality, which from arises problems, computational anomalies if you like, including delusions of various shades

Cymek said:

Gods greatest mistake would be the human being, sure we can do and think some cool stuff, but are susceptible to all manner of disease (physical, mental and emotional) and the human form could do with some upgrades.

It’s almost as if humans evolved under very different conditions to those they choose to live in today.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Cymek said:

Gods greatest mistake would be the human being, sure we can do and think some cool stuff, but are susceptible to all manner of disease (physical, mental and emotional) and the human form could do with some upgrades.

It’s almost as if humans evolved under very different conditions to those they choose to live in today.

Disease and illness would existed back then though.
It was the idea god is perfect but creates an imperfect species

transition said:

>Is there any internal environment that can be directly experienced? I could give stomach pain as an example, but as in the case of phantom limbs, these pain sensations may be from some completely different part of the body. Or perhaps you’re thinking of dreams as a direct observation of interior environment, in which case you’re sayi9ng that dreams are the most direct experiences of reality that we can have?

my point was the workings of the fleshy wetware, the environment it generates internally, and the soft reality it works with (of ideas, representations), somewhat paradoxically are the nearest (most immediate) and perhaps in a sense firmest part of reality, which from arises problems, computational anomalies if you like, including delusions of various shades

to simplify further, nothing of any representational work performed by a human mind, about reality, to resolve, measure or whatever, escapes something of the the work of computational apparatus being injected into the representation

everything a mind does to resolve something about external reality (applies of internal environments also) injects the work done into the representation

so it’s structure (of mind work) + structure (of whatever other), the best you can do is make some effort to minus the structure of the computational apparatus from the observation of whatever, detach it, or include some analysis pointing to possible artifact/s injected, or anomalous aspects

so fairly much all observation of and ideas about whatever reality, are not unlike a joke being funny, the reason it is funny is nothing more than what the mind does is amusing, though there exist people that believe or feel that the joke itself is funny, which it actually isn’t, not really

Cymek said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Cymek said:

Gods greatest mistake would be the human being, sure we can do and think some cool stuff, but are susceptible to all manner of disease (physical, mental and emotional) and the human form could do with some upgrades.

It’s almost as if humans evolved under very different conditions to those they choose to live in today.

Disease and illness would existed back then though.
It was the idea god is perfect but creates an imperfect species

Less so in small often isolated communities. I would think injury with microbe complications would be the main problem.

We have created the conditions ideal for communal diseases within the last 10,000 years.

PermeateFree said:

Cymek said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

It’s almost as if humans evolved under very different conditions to those they choose to live in today.

Disease and illness would existed back then though.
It was the idea god is perfect but creates an imperfect species

Less so in small often isolated communities. I would think injury with microbe complications would be the main problem.

We have created the conditions ideal for communal diseases within the last 10,000 years.

That is true but the main point was some people say we were created in gods image and he is perfect so wouldn’t make mistakes
Why then are humans past or present susceptible to some many diseases and illness wouldn’t we be made more robust if intelligently designed

Cymek said:

PermeateFree said:

Cymek said:

Disease and illness would existed back then though.
It was the idea god is perfect but creates an imperfect species

Less so in small often isolated communities. I would think injury with microbe complications would be the main problem.

We have created the conditions ideal for communal diseases within the last 10,000 years.

That is true but the main point was some people say we were created in gods image and he is perfect so wouldn’t make mistakes
Why then are humans past or present susceptible to some many diseases and illness wouldn’t we be made more robust if intelligently designed

He Moves In Mystérieux Ways

Cymek said:

PermeateFree said:

Cymek said:

Disease and illness would existed back then though.
It was the idea god is perfect but creates an imperfect species

Less so in small often isolated communities. I would think injury with microbe complications would be the main problem.

We have created the conditions ideal for communal diseases within the last 10,000 years.

That is true but the main point was some people say we were created in gods image and he is perfect so wouldn’t make mistakes
Why then are humans past or present susceptible to some many diseases and illness wouldn’t we be made more robust if intelligently designed

I’m surprised that proposition is even being considered. Even evolutionary history would show that.

I guess moll’s used God as a metaphor, which it’s probably been mostly since any notion of God originated

the idea of God probably well predates any serious ideas of organic life being an encoding > decoding system, and certainly predates any serious ideas of the human mind as being an encoding > decoding system

organic life certainty is that, and minds also, both of which have mix and match, try and test potentials, even if largely by way of accidents, call them transformation potentials maybe

transition said:

I guess moll’s used God as a metaphor, which it’s probably been mostly since any notion of God originated

I very much doubt that.

Certainly the people I know now who are actively religious seem to regard their god as very real and non-metaphorical.

The Rev Dodgson said:

transition said:

I guess moll’s used God as a metaphor, which it’s probably been mostly since any notion of God originated

I very much doubt that.

Certainly the people I know now who are actively religious seem to regard their god as very real and non-metaphorical.

That is I doubt the second bit.

I have no idea what moll’s intentions are.

The Rev Dodgson said:

transition said:

I guess moll’s used God as a metaphor, which it’s probably been mostly since any notion of God originated

I very much doubt that.

Certainly the people I know now who are actively religious seem to regard their god as very real and non-metaphorical.

I doubt they’re arrogant enough to know (for sure) what God is, so to some extent God must be metaphor

transition said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

transition said:

I guess moll’s used God as a metaphor, which it’s probably been mostly since any notion of God originated

I very much doubt that.

Certainly the people I know now who are actively religious seem to regard their god as very real and non-metaphorical.

I doubt they’re arrogant enough to know (for sure) what God is, so to some extent God must be metaphor

meaning it’s inclusive of unknowns and unknowables, so therefore serves to include them, and must serve as a metaphor for unknowns and unknowables

Trump certainly wouldn’t be on this list, the man was poured into his suit, oh baby

transition said:

transition said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

I very much doubt that.

Certainly the people I know now who are actively religious seem to regard their god as very real and non-metaphorical.

I doubt they’re arrogant enough to know (for sure) what God is, so to some extent God must be metaphor

meaning it’s inclusive of unknowns and unknowables, so therefore serves to include them, and must serve as a metaphor for unknowns and unknowables

but some things really are metaphors

SCIENCE said:

transition said:

transition said:

I doubt they’re arrogant enough to know (for sure) what God is, so to some extent God must be metaphor

meaning it’s inclusive of unknowns and unknowables, so therefore serves to include them, and must serve as a metaphor for unknowns and unknowables

but some things really are metaphors

nice

Cymek said:

I’m not at all attracted by this Boltmann Brain idea, with a mysterious brain just appearing out of nowhere, so let’s consider an alternative. It is often proposed that we are likely to be a simulation created by some superior beings, and this at least seems not impossible. But if this is true, then we can be certain that the beings that created our simulation also think they are likely to be a simulation, because they have firm proof that such a simulation is possible. So it’s simulators all the way up. The probability of us finding ourselves at the very base of the simulation tree is infinitesimal, if not zero.

The simulation idea assumes that superior beings (humans ?) for some reason want to recreate the run on the mill boring life of most humans.
Human imagination universes seem much more interesting, super powers, starships, zombies, etc

On another note the simulation theory could explain why we haven’t yet discovered certain things, the programmers only made it so detailed and the finest details weren’t included, in the real universe they are, could be deliberate to limit the simulations abilities, they could break the program for example

Let’s use Brian for the name of our demon/god/programmer.

> could be deliberate to limit the simulations abilities

Exactly. Here are some aspects that could have been introduced along the way into reality by Brian simply to simplify Brian’s tasks.

• The horizon on Earth – eliminates the need to simulate more than can be seen.
• The Earth as a sphere – eliminates the need for fine modelling of anything except a thin layer on the surface.
• The fixed stars – stars were fixed until the discovery of spectroscopy, which caught Brian somewhat unprepared.
• The stable elements of the periodic table. Prior to 1735 Brian only needed thirteen elements.
• The stable isotopes of the periodic table – no need to simulate molecules much further than that.
• The Milky Way – everything outside that was simulatable at lower resolution.
• The Big Bang – a start of the universe so don’t need to simulate further back in time.
• The finite speed of light – visible horizon of the universe eliminates the need to simulate further away than that.
• Universe metastability – an end to the universe in space and time, obviates the need for simulating a multiverse.
• The unique properties of carbon
• All large molecules of living things are DNA, RNA, protein, carbohydrate or lignin. A very limited set.
• Proton, neutron, electron and nothing else – in normal life.
• Only three flavours of subatomic particles.
• Laws of physics and chemistry constant across the entire visible universe.
• Only one intelligent lifeform in the universe.

mollwollfumble said:

I’ll just tantalise you with a few of God’s greatest mistakes:

• The Maunder minimum
• Origins of ice ages
• Neptune
• The Oort cloud
• The unidentifiable lines in the Sun’s spectrum
• Coronavirus statistics
• The nature of the interstellar medium
• Dark matter
• The origin of life
• Relativity vs quantum mechanics
• Failure of the atmospheric CO2 mass balance
• Ratio of noble gas isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere

Plenty more where those came from.

Two other examples of God’s greatest mistakes have been haunting me all day.

One is that asteroids, and therefore planetesimals and solar system planets, can’t exist. Consider two metre-size chunks of rock colliding at a relative speed of the order of one kilometre per second. They are both going to be smashed to smithereens. They are not going to gently coalesce into a bigger chunk. The theory of asteroid/planetesimal/planet formation in the solar system requires the growth by gentle coalescence of bodies of this size colliding at these speeds. No way. (Hot Jupiters are not ruled out by this argument, but that’s a different story)

A second is the end of the inflationary epoch and its influence on galaxy formation. The expansion of cosmic inflation has to be fast enough to smear the laws of physics uniformly over the whole of the visible universe, and slow enough not to smear lumps of matter uniformly over the whole of the visible universe. This fine tuning is so incredibly unlikely that it’s fair to say that the probability of lumps of matter the right size for forming galaxies being around is neigh on impossible. Galaxies cannot possibly have formed.

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

I’ll just tantalise you with a few of God’s greatest mistakes:

• The Maunder minimum
• Origins of ice ages
• Neptune
• The Oort cloud
• The unidentifiable lines in the Sun’s spectrum
• Coronavirus statistics
• The nature of the interstellar medium
• Dark matter
• The origin of life
• Relativity vs quantum mechanics
• Failure of the atmospheric CO2 mass balance
• Ratio of noble gas isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere

Plenty more where those came from.

Two other examples of God’s greatest mistakes have been haunting me all day.

One is that asteroids, and therefore planetesimals and solar system planets, can’t exist. Consider two metre-size chunks of rock colliding at a relative speed of the order of one kilometre per second. They are both going to be smashed to smithereens. They are not going to gently coalesce into a bigger chunk. The theory of asteroid/planetesimal/planet formation in the solar system requires the growth by gentle coalescence of bodies of this size colliding at these speeds. No way. (Hot Jupiters are not ruled out by this argument, but that’s a different story)

A second is the end of the inflationary epoch and its influence on galaxy formation. The expansion of cosmic inflation has to be fast enough to smear the laws of physics uniformly over the whole of the visible universe, and slow enough not to smear lumps of matter uniformly over the whole of the visible universe. This fine tuning is so incredibly unlikely that it’s fair to say that the probability of lumps of matter the right size for forming galaxies being around is neigh on impossible. Galaxies cannot possibly have formed.

The final paragraph has at least three simple explanations:
1) Your understanding of the theory is wrong.
2) Your understanding of the theory is right but the theory is wrong.
3) Both the theory and your understanding of it are correct and there are sufficient universes to make even events with a very low probability likely to happen at least once.

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

I’ll just tantalise you with a few of God’s greatest mistakes:

• The Maunder minimum
• Origins of ice ages
• Neptune
• The Oort cloud
• The unidentifiable lines in the Sun’s spectrum
• Coronavirus statistics
• The nature of the interstellar medium
• Dark matter
• The origin of life
• Relativity vs quantum mechanics
• Failure of the atmospheric CO2 mass balance
• Ratio of noble gas isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere

Plenty more where those came from.

Two other examples of God’s greatest mistakes have been haunting me all day.

One is that asteroids, and therefore planetesimals and solar system planets, can’t exist. Consider two metre-size chunks of rock colliding at a relative speed of the order of one kilometre per second. They are both going to be smashed to smithereens. They are not going to gently coalesce into a bigger chunk. The theory of asteroid/planetesimal/planet formation in the solar system requires the growth by gentle coalescence of bodies of this size colliding at these speeds. No way. (Hot Jupiters are not ruled out by this argument, but that’s a different story)

A second is the end of the inflationary epoch and its influence on galaxy formation. The expansion of cosmic inflation has to be fast enough to smear the laws of physics uniformly over the whole of the visible universe, and slow enough not to smear lumps of matter uniformly over the whole of the visible universe. This fine tuning is so incredibly unlikely that it’s fair to say that the probability of lumps of matter the right size for forming galaxies being around is neigh on impossible. Galaxies cannot possibly have formed.

The final paragraph has at least three simple explanations:
1) Your understanding of the theory is wrong.
2) Your understanding of the theory is right but the theory is wrong.
3) Both the theory and your understanding of it are correct and there are sufficient universes to make even events with a very low probability likely to happen at least once.

Well actually it also has a fourth. 4) I’ve totally stuffed up my explanation of the problem. eg. it’s not the laws of physics that have been smeared but causality.

The fine tuning is such that the expansion from cosmic inflation has roughly a probability of one part in 10^20 of being of the right magnitude to allow the formation of galaxies. That’s a huge probability compared to the probability of the origin of life as we know it, but it’s still somewhat on the small side. 10^20 universes would take up rather a lot of space.

The probability of the origin of like as we know it is of the rough order one part in 10^1,000,000.

Then there are a heap of other fine tuning parameters to set correctly – the probability of getting enough stable elements to get our periodic table is likewise tiny. Ditto the probability that the density of dark energy, dark matter and baryonic matter should just happen to be close to the same size.

But to top that, the probability that the universe contains this much more matter than antimatter seems to be exactly zero, according to our theory so far.

Even little things like supernovas. Science says they can’t happen, there is not enough energy in a pre-supernova star to make them happen. And without supernovas there is no free carbon, and no life in the universe.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

Two other examples of God’s greatest mistakes have been haunting me all day.

One is that asteroids, and therefore planetesimals and solar system planets, can’t exist. Consider two metre-size chunks of rock colliding at a relative speed of the order of one kilometre per second. They are both going to be smashed to smithereens. They are not going to gently coalesce into a bigger chunk. The theory of asteroid/planetesimal/planet formation in the solar system requires the growth by gentle coalescence of bodies of this size colliding at these speeds. No way. (Hot Jupiters are not ruled out by this argument, but that’s a different story)

A second is the end of the inflationary epoch and its influence on galaxy formation. The expansion of cosmic inflation has to be fast enough to smear the laws of physics uniformly over the whole of the visible universe, and slow enough not to smear lumps of matter uniformly over the whole of the visible universe. This fine tuning is so incredibly unlikely that it’s fair to say that the probability of lumps of matter the right size for forming galaxies being around is neigh on impossible. Galaxies cannot possibly have formed.

The final paragraph has at least three simple explanations:
1) Your understanding of the theory is wrong.
2) Your understanding of the theory is right but the theory is wrong.
3) Both the theory and your understanding of it are correct and there are sufficient universes to make even events with a very low probability likely to happen at least once.

Well actually it also has a fourth. 4) I’ve totally stuffed up my explanation of the problem. eg. it’s not the laws of physics that have been smeared but causality.

The fine tuning is such that the expansion from cosmic inflation has roughly a probability of one part in 10^20 of being of the right magnitude to allow the formation of galaxies. That’s a huge probability compared to the probability of the origin of life as we know it, but it’s still somewhat on the small side. 10^20 universes would take up rather a lot of space.

The probability of the origin of like as we know it is of the rough order one part in 10^1,000,000.

Then there are a heap of other fine tuning parameters to set correctly – the probability of getting enough stable elements to get our periodic table is likewise tiny. Ditto the probability that the density of dark energy, dark matter and baryonic matter should just happen to be close to the same size.

But to top that, the probability that the universe contains this much more matter than antimatter seems to be exactly zero, according to our theory so far.

Even little things like supernovas. Science says they can’t happen, there is not enough energy in a pre-supernova star to make them happen. And without supernovas there is no free carbon, and no life in the universe.

You seem to have missed the point.

It doesn’t matter how unlikely a particular event is, if it has a finite probability, and we don’t know if there is an upper limit on the number of universes, and we are certain that our universe could only exist as we observe it if this very unlikely event happened, then we must live in one of the universes where it did happen, even if these are a very small proportion of the total.

And if it is considered certain that the probability of this event is exactly 0, that still leaves options 1 and 2 (which should also not be discounted when the probability is found to be small, rather than zero).

One is that asteroids, and therefore planetesimals and solar system planets, can’t exist. Consider two metre-size chunks of rock colliding at a relative speed of the order of one kilometre per second. They are both going to be smashed to smithereens. They are not going to gently coalesce into a bigger chunk. The theory of asteroid/planetesimal/planet formation in the solar system requires the growth by gentle coalescence of bodies of this size colliding at these speeds. No way. (Hot Jupiters are not ruled out by this argument, but that’s a different story)

Are the asteroids cold and solid or hot and of a putty like consistency and collisions mean they stick together

Cymek said:

One is that asteroids, and therefore planetesimals and solar system planets, can’t exist. Consider two metre-size chunks of rock colliding at a relative speed of the order of one kilometre per second. They are both going to be smashed to smithereens. They are not going to gently coalesce into a bigger chunk. The theory of asteroid/planetesimal/planet formation in the solar system requires the growth by gentle coalescence of bodies of this size colliding at these speeds. No way. (Hot Jupiters are not ruled out by this argument, but that’s a different story)

Are the asteroids cold and solid or hot and of a putty like consistency and collisions mean they stick together

cold. it must be remembered that not all collisions will be fast. so some clumping will happen. gravity, and at first, electrostatic charge will make them clump.

You are one of God’s mistakes
You crying tragic waste of skin

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

The final paragraph has at least three simple explanations:
1) Your understanding of the theory is wrong.
2) Your understanding of the theory is right but the theory is wrong.
3) Both the theory and your understanding of it are correct and there are sufficient universes to make even events with a very low probability likely to happen at least once.

Well actually it also has a fourth. 4) I’ve totally stuffed up my explanation of the problem. eg. it’s not the laws of physics that have been smeared but causality.

The fine tuning is such that the expansion from cosmic inflation has roughly a probability of one part in 10^20 of being of the right magnitude to allow the formation of galaxies. That’s a huge probability compared to the probability of the origin of life as we know it, but it’s still somewhat on the small side. 10^20 universes would take up rather a lot of space.

The probability of the origin of like as we know it is of the rough order one part in 10^1,000,000.

Then there are a heap of other fine tuning parameters to set correctly – the probability of getting enough stable elements to get our periodic table is likewise tiny. Ditto the probability that the density of dark energy, dark matter and baryonic matter should just happen to be close to the same size.

But to top that, the probability that the universe contains this much more matter than antimatter seems to be exactly zero, according to our theory so far.

Even little things like supernovas. Science says they can’t happen, there is not enough energy in a pre-supernova star to make them happen. And without supernovas there is no free carbon, and no life in the universe.

You seem to have missed the point.

It doesn’t matter how unlikely a particular event is, if it has a finite probability, and we don’t know if there is an upper limit on the number of universes, and we are certain that our universe could only exist as we observe it if this very unlikely event happened, then we must live in one of the universes where it did happen, even if these are a very small proportion of the total.

And if it is considered certain that the probability of this event is exactly 0, that still leaves options 1 and 2 (which should also not be discounted when the probability is found to be small, rather than zero).

> You seem to have missed the point.

The point is that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually incompatible, yet both are true. Believing in science presents us with a paradox for which there is no way out. And that’s far from the only part of science where the paradox that has been created has no way out, even in a multiverse.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

Well actually it also has a fourth. 4) I’ve totally stuffed up my explanation of the problem. eg. it’s not the laws of physics that have been smeared but causality.

The fine tuning is such that the expansion from cosmic inflation has roughly a probability of one part in 10^20 of being of the right magnitude to allow the formation of galaxies. That’s a huge probability compared to the probability of the origin of life as we know it, but it’s still somewhat on the small side. 10^20 universes would take up rather a lot of space.

The probability of the origin of like as we know it is of the rough order one part in 10^1,000,000.

Then there are a heap of other fine tuning parameters to set correctly – the probability of getting enough stable elements to get our periodic table is likewise tiny. Ditto the probability that the density of dark energy, dark matter and baryonic matter should just happen to be close to the same size.

But to top that, the probability that the universe contains this much more matter than antimatter seems to be exactly zero, according to our theory so far.

Even little things like supernovas. Science says they can’t happen, there is not enough energy in a pre-supernova star to make them happen. And without supernovas there is no free carbon, and no life in the universe.

You seem to have missed the point.

It doesn’t matter how unlikely a particular event is, if it has a finite probability, and we don’t know if there is an upper limit on the number of universes, and we are certain that our universe could only exist as we observe it if this very unlikely event happened, then we must live in one of the universes where it did happen, even if these are a very small proportion of the total.

And if it is considered certain that the probability of this event is exactly 0, that still leaves options 1 and 2 (which should also not be discounted when the probability is found to be small, rather than zero).

> You seem to have missed the point.

The point is that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually incompatible, yet both are true. Believing in science presents us with a paradox for which there is no way out. And that’s far from the only part of science where the paradox that has been created has no way out, even in a multiverse.

Is there any reason they can’t exist separately and things work differently at the small and large scale

mollwollfumble said:

The point is that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually incompatible, yet both are true.

obviously they aren’t both true. otherwise why look for a QTG?

Cymek said:

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

You seem to have missed the point.

It doesn’t matter how unlikely a particular event is, if it has a finite probability, and we don’t know if there is an upper limit on the number of universes, and we are certain that our universe could only exist as we observe it if this very unlikely event happened, then we must live in one of the universes where it did happen, even if these are a very small proportion of the total.

And if it is considered certain that the probability of this event is exactly 0, that still leaves options 1 and 2 (which should also not be discounted when the probability is found to be small, rather than zero).

> You seem to have missed the point.

The point is that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually incompatible, yet both are true. Believing in science presents us with a paradox for which there is no way out. And that’s far from the only part of science where the paradox that has been created has no way out, even in a multiverse.

Is there any reason they can’t exist separately and things work differently at the small and large scale

As all these things exist then an explanation must exist, perhaps the human brain is limited in how it thinks and we can’t find a solution.
We could eventually design physics AI to try and solve it

Cymek said:

Cymek said:

mollwollfumble said:

> You seem to have missed the point.

The point is that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually incompatible, yet both are true. Believing in science presents us with a paradox for which there is no way out. And that’s far from the only part of science where the paradox that has been created has no way out, even in a multiverse.

Is there any reason they can’t exist separately and things work differently at the small and large scale

As all these things exist then an explanation must exist, perhaps the human brain is limited in how it thinks and we can’t find a solution.
We could eventually design physics AI to try and solve it

I used to believe that. Perhaps it’s a good idea to look at the assumptions inherent in this. A fundamental tenet of science is:

• Every effect must have a cause. If not, then we would have cases where an explanation must not exist.

But if every effect must have a cause, then going back in time we get back to Rev Dodgson’s paradox. ie. Rev Dodgson’s

• “And the simulators of our simulators will also be convinced that they too are a simulation. So it’s simulators all the way up.”

gets rewritten as:

• And the causes of our causes will also have causes. So it’s causes all the way up.

ie. the assumptions behind science lead to the same paradox as the assumptions behind religion.

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

Cymek said:

Is there any reason they can’t exist separately and things work differently at the small and large scale

As all these things exist then an explanation must exist, perhaps the human brain is limited in how it thinks and we can’t find a solution.
We could eventually design physics AI to try and solve it

I used to believe that. Perhaps it’s a good idea to look at the assumptions inherent in this. A fundamental tenet of science is:

• Every effect must have a cause. If not, then we would have cases where an explanation must not exist.

But if every effect must have a cause, then going back in time we get back to Rev Dodgson’s paradox. ie. Rev Dodgson’s

• “And the simulators of our simulators will also be convinced that they too are a simulation. So it’s simulators all the way up.”

gets rewritten as:

• And the causes of our causes will also have causes. So it’s causes all the way up.

ie. the assumptions behind science lead to the same paradox as the assumptions behind religion.

Perhaps universes are connected and certain phenomena bleed through one universe into another but the original source/reason/explanation is in the origin universe and that’s why they don’t make sense in ours

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

Cymek said:

Is there any reason they can’t exist separately and things work differently at the small and large scale

As all these things exist then an explanation must exist, perhaps the human brain is limited in how it thinks and we can’t find a solution.
We could eventually design physics AI to try and solve it

I used to believe that. Perhaps it’s a good idea to look at the assumptions inherent in this. A fundamental tenet of science is:

• Every effect must have a cause. If not, then we would have cases where an explanation must not exist.

But if every effect must have a cause, then going back in time we get back to Rev Dodgson’s paradox. ie. Rev Dodgson’s

• “And the simulators of our simulators will also be convinced that they too are a simulation. So it’s simulators all the way up.”

gets rewritten as:

• And the causes of our causes will also have causes. So it’s causes all the way up.

ie. the assumptions behind science lead to the same paradox as the assumptions behind religion.

But that’s only a paradox if you also claim that the creator (or whatever the final step is) is the final step, which needs no explanation. Religion does that but science doesn’t. In science the “final step” is just as far as we have got, for now.

“So it’s causes all the way up.”

Quite so, how could it be otherwise?

JudgeMental said:

mollwollfumble said:

The point is that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually incompatible, yet both are true.

obviously they aren’t both true. otherwise why look for a QTG?

Yes, both fail to match observations when extrapolated outside the scale they were devised to explain, so both are incomplete and hence not “true” in the sense of being precisely correct at all scales.

It is also likely that neither is precisely correct at any scale.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

> You seem to have missed the point.

The point is that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually incompatible, yet both are true. Believing in science presents us with a paradox for which there is no way out. And that’s far from the only part of science where the paradox that has been created has no way out, even in a multiverse.

Please explain how this supposed paradox is not immediately resolved by the application of points 1 and/or 2.

The Rev Dodgson said:

JudgeMental said:

mollwollfumble said:

The point is that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually incompatible, yet both are true.

obviously they aren’t both true. otherwise why look for a QTG?

Yes, both fail to match observations when extrapolated outside the scale they were devised to explain, so both are incomplete and hence not “true” in the sense of being precisely correct at all scales.

It is also likely that neither is precisely correct at any scale.

it’s models all the way up.

JudgeMental said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

JudgeMental said:

obviously they aren’t both true. otherwise why look for a QTG?

Yes, both fail to match observations when extrapolated outside the scale they were devised to explain, so both are incomplete and hence not “true” in the sense of being precisely correct at all scales.

It is also likely that neither is precisely correct at any scale.

it’s models all the way up.

Or should that be down? :)

> furious & SCIENCE said:

> Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. … Evolving into humans

Bingo. That’s the mental input I needed to solve everything.

I now know the answer. The simple answer. The answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything. And the question. You’re not going to like it. And it’s not “forty-two”, though it can be reduced to a word with the same number of letters.

The answer solves all three problems that have been expressed in this thread.

• The time problem. When did this simulation begin?
• The causality problem. Rev Dodgson’s turtles all the way down.
• The paradox problem. Why does science contain so many unsolvable paradoxes?

So many unsolvable paradoxes? Yes. QM + GR for starters. Godel’s theorem. The inability to prove that quantum chromodynamics is internally consistent. The matter-antimatter problem. The origin of asteroids, supernovas, the interstellar medium. etc.

The answer has been available to me and the rest of you all the time, in pieces, I just hadn’t put all the pieces together until just now.

I need to state the ultimate question in order to understand the ultimate answer.

The ultimate question turns out to have been asked a very long time ago. It doesn’t appear so ultimate. It’s “what is life?”

The answer to that question led to Susan Blackmore’s memes. What we call “intelligence” is a lifeform made from memes, equally as valid a lifeform as the biological lifeforms.

Due to lack of time right now, I’m going to state the answer to the ultimate question, in the form you’re going to hate. The universe is the waste product of the lifeform we call “intelligence”.

The Bible turns out to be correct, to be more precise one sentence of the New Testament turns out to be correct, very nearly nearly correct. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”. Ignore more Christian interpretations of this sentence, they’re crap. Take it literally.

mollwollfumble said:

The Bible turns out to be correct, to be more precise one sentence of the New Testament turns out to be correct, very nearly nearly correct. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”. Ignore more Christian interpretations of this sentence, they’re crap. Take it literally.

Om was the first sound of the universe.
https://chopra.com/articles/appreciating-om-the-sound-of-the-universe

If you can sprout nonsense, so can I.

mollwollfumble said:

(snip)

Due to lack of time right now, I’m going to state the answer to the ultimate question, in the form you’re going to hate. The universe is the waste product of the lifeform we call “intelligence”.

The Bible turns out to be correct, to be more precise one sentence of the New Testament turns out to be correct, very nearly nearly correct. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”. Ignore more Christian interpretations of this sentence, they’re crap. Take it literally.

Om.

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

(snip)

Due to lack of time right now, I’m going to state the answer to the ultimate question, in the form you’re going to hate. The universe is the waste product of the lifeform we call “intelligence”.

The Bible turns out to be correct, to be more precise one sentence of the New Testament turns out to be correct, very nearly nearly correct. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”. Ignore more Christian interpretations of this sentence, they’re crap. Take it literally.

Om.

sigh

Missed it by >.< that much…

Michael V said:

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

(snip)

Due to lack of time right now, I’m going to state the answer to the ultimate question, in the form you’re going to hate. The universe is the waste product of the lifeform we call “intelligence”.

The Bible turns out to be correct, to be more precise one sentence of the New Testament turns out to be correct, very nearly nearly correct. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”. Ignore more Christian interpretations of this sentence, they’re crap. Take it literally.

Om.

sigh

Missed it by >.< that much…

Well you’re not om-nipotent.

Michael V said:

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

(snip)

Due to lack of time right now, I’m going to state the answer to the ultimate question, in the form you’re going to hate. The universe is the waste product of the lifeform we call “intelligence”.

The Bible turns out to be correct, to be more precise one sentence of the New Testament turns out to be correct, very nearly nearly correct. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”. Ignore more Christian interpretations of this sentence, they’re crap. Take it literally.

Om.

sigh

Missed it by >.< that much…

Om came before OMG.

Tamb said:

Michael V said:

Michael V said:

Om.

sigh

Missed it by >.< that much…

Well you’re not om-nipotent.

Ha!

:)

Divine Angel said:

mollwollfumble said:

The Bible turns out to be correct, to be more precise one sentence of the New Testament turns out to be correct, very nearly nearly correct. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”. Ignore more Christian interpretations of this sentence, they’re crap. Take it literally.

Om was the first sound of the universe.
https://chopra.com/articles/appreciating-om-the-sound-of-the-universe

If you can sprout nonsense, so can I.

Ah, but does your nonsense include the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything?

Well, neither does mine, yet, I’m skating around the issue.

One of the mysteries of LTU&E is that the first languages appeared fully formed. There is no such thing as a primitive language.

So man created a god in his own image, and that god created the universe. Intelligence doesn’t just discover the universe, it creates it. Solved the “turtles all the way down” problem.

Gotta go.

mollwollfumble said:

> furious & SCIENCE said:

> Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. … Evolving into humans

Bingo. That’s the mental input I needed to solve everything.

I now know the answer. The simple answer. The answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything. And the question. You’re not going to like it. And it’s not “forty-two”, though it can be reduced to a word with the same number of letters.

The answer solves all three problems that have been expressed in this thread.

• The time problem. When did this simulation begin?
• The causality problem. Rev Dodgson’s turtles all the way down.
• The paradox problem. Why does science contain so many unsolvable paradoxes?

So many unsolvable paradoxes? Yes. QM + GR for starters. Godel’s theorem. The inability to prove that quantum chromodynamics is internally consistent. The matter-antimatter problem. The origin of asteroids, supernovas, the interstellar medium. etc.

The answer has been available to me and the rest of you all the time, in pieces, I just hadn’t put all the pieces together until just now.

I need to state the ultimate question in order to understand the ultimate answer.

The ultimate question turns out to have been asked a very long time ago. It doesn’t appear so ultimate. It’s “what is life?”

The answer to that question led to Susan Blackmore’s memes. What we call “intelligence” is a lifeform made from memes, equally as valid a lifeform as the biological lifeforms.

Due to lack of time right now, I’m going to state the answer to the ultimate question, in the form you’re going to hate. The universe is the waste product of the lifeform we call “intelligence”.

The Bible turns out to be correct, to be more precise one sentence of the New Testament turns out to be correct, very nearly nearly correct. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”. Ignore more Christian interpretations of this sentence, they’re crap. Take it literally.

I was all set to be very impressed, but that sentence has more than 42 letters.

Apart from which, why do you ignore the simple solution to your so-called unsolvable paradoxes?

Divine Angel said:

mollwollfumble said:

The Bible turns out to be correct, to be more precise one sentence of the New Testament turns out to be correct, very nearly nearly correct. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”. Ignore more Christian interpretations of this sentence, they’re crap. Take it literally.

Om was the first sound of the universe.
https://chopra.com/articles/appreciating-om-the-sound-of-the-universe

If you can sprout nonsense, so can I.

:)

roughbarked said:

Michael V said:

Michael V said:

Om.

sigh

Missed it by >.< that much…

Om came before OMG.

Also a very good point :)

Why didn’t I think of that.

mollwollfumble said:

One of the mysteries of LTU&E is that the first languages appeared fully formed. There is no such thing as a primitive language.

I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

One of the mysteries of LTU&E is that the first languages appeared fully formed. There is no such thing as a primitive language.

I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Like when dogs meet on the street.
Or when the cat lets you know she wants to go outside (maybe).

Just to mention two particularly obvious ones.

The Rev Dodgson said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

One of the mysteries of LTU&E is that the first languages appeared fully formed. There is no such thing as a primitive language.

I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Like when dogs meet on the street.
Or when the cat lets you know she wants to go outside (maybe).

Just to mention two particularly obvious ones.

Cats don’t use the meow type noise with each other only humans
Does language in animals have to be vocal can it be body gestures

Cymek said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Like when dogs meet on the street.
Or when the cat lets you know she wants to go outside (maybe).

Just to mention two particularly obvious ones.

Cats don’t use the meow type noise with each other only humans
Does language in animals have to be vocal can it be body gestures

In the context of this thread, I think language should be taken as any means of intentionally communicating information.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Cymek said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Like when dogs meet on the street.
Or when the cat lets you know she wants to go outside (maybe).

Just to mention two particularly obvious ones.

Cats don’t use the meow type noise with each other only humans
Does language in animals have to be vocal can it be body gestures

In the context of this thread, I think language should be taken as any means of intentionally communicating information.

Bats purr & squeak to humans. They are communicating hunger, happiness, desire to be stroked, etc.

Tamb said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Cymek said:

Cats don’t use the meow type noise with each other only humans
Does language in animals have to be vocal can it be body gestures

In the context of this thread, I think language should be taken as any means of intentionally communicating information.

Bats purr & squeak to humans. They are communicating hunger, happiness, desire to be stroked, etc.

Yes this type of thing

Tamb said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Cymek said:

Cats don’t use the meow type noise with each other only humans
Does language in animals have to be vocal can it be body gestures

In the context of this thread, I think language should be taken as any means of intentionally communicating information.

Bats purr & squeak to humans. They are communicating hunger, happiness, desire to be stroked, etc.

cats, you silly bunt!

JudgeMental said:

Tamb said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

In the context of this thread, I think language should be taken as any means of intentionally communicating information.

Bats purr & squeak to humans. They are communicating hunger, happiness, desire to be stroked, etc.

cats, you silly bunt!

No, bats. Maybe cats do it too.

Tamb said:

JudgeMental said:

Tamb said:

Bats purr & squeak to humans. They are communicating hunger, happiness, desire to be stroked, etc.

cats, you silly bunt!

No, bats. Maybe cats do it too.

monty python reference.

Tamb said:

JudgeMental said:

Tamb said:

Bats purr & squeak to humans. They are communicating hunger, happiness, desire to be stroked, etc.

cats, you silly bunt!

No, bats. Maybe cats do it too.

I imagine its the sort of thing you don’t think about until you have encounters with a particular animal and realise most if not all act this way.

JudgeMental said:

Tamb said:

JudgeMental said:

cats, you silly bunt!

No, bats. Maybe cats do it too.

monty python reference.

I don’t remember that one.

JudgeMental said:

Tamb said:

JudgeMental said:

cats, you silly bunt!

No, bats. Maybe cats do it too.

monty python reference.

What? I missed a Monty P ref?

That’s a bit of a worry.

Tamb said:

JudgeMental said:

Tamb said:

No, bats. Maybe cats do it too.

monty python reference.

I don’t remember that one.

http://www.montypython.net/scripts/travagent.php

JudgeMental said:

Tamb said:

JudgeMental said:

monty python reference.

I don’t remember that one.

http://www.montypython.net/scripts/travagent.php

What a silly bunt am I.

I suppose if we are talking about the biblical god creating all these different languages so humans couldn’t understand each other anymore and conflict and misunderstanding ensued

Cymek said:

I suppose if we are talking about the biblical god creating all these different languages so humans couldn’t understand each other anymore and conflict and misunderstanding ensued

And when that god created the world, while burying dinosaur fossils for a laugh, it was a bit of a mistake burying all those fossil fuel deposits at the same time…

Cymek said:

I suppose if we are talking about the biblical god creating all these different languages so humans couldn’t understand each other anymore and conflict and misunderstanding ensued

Methinks it also ocurred beforehand the felling of the tower of Babylon.

Not a biblical God, nor a Descartes evil demon. But something of neutral morality.

Two more quotes that relate.

“Cogito ergo sum”. I think therefore I am. Taken literally this can mean that everything that doesn’t think, doesn’t exist.

“In cases of major discrepancy it’s always reality that’s got it wrong. The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

mollwollfumble said:

Not a biblical God, nor a Descartes evil demon. But something of neutral morality.

Two more quotes that relate.

“Cogito ergo sum”. I think therefore I am. Taken literally this can mean that everything that doesn’t think, doesn’t exist.

“In cases of major discrepancy it’s always reality that’s got it wrong. The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

Not even close. It means that things that don’t think don’t know whether they exist or not.

Or perhaps just that Descartes doesn’t know whether things that don’t think know whether they exist or not.

But I like the version from (I think) a Pink Floyd album:

I think, therefore I am.

I think.

The Rev Dodgson said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

One of the mysteries of LTU&E is that the first languages appeared fully formed. There is no such thing as a primitive language.

I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Like when dogs meet on the street.
Or when the cat lets you know she wants to go outside (maybe).

Just to mention two particularly obvious ones.

> I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

I thought it was well known. I’ve heard it said of the origins of Indo-European languages (eg. Sanskrit) of Aboriginal languages and of African languages.

> Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Good. You’re ahead of me here. I haven’t explained yet why I ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.
Stay tuned.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Like when dogs meet on the street.
Or when the cat lets you know she wants to go outside (maybe).

Just to mention two particularly obvious ones.

> I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

I thought it was well known. I’ve heard it said of the origins of Indo-European languages (eg. Sanskrit) of Aboriginal languages and of African languages.

> Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Good. You’re ahead of me here. I haven’t explained yet why I ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.
Stay tuned.

Could sign language be considered a primitive language, it’s word limit would be smaller, I’ve noticed recently the expression of the faces of the signers on the news conveys emotion so that helps to add to it

> I was all set to be very impressed, but that sentence has more than 42 letters.

Oops. I meant that the answer to the ultimate question has the same number of letters as the word “forty-two”. ie. Eight letters.

I’ll write my thoughts out in a semi-cogent whole, like a full explanation of “what is life?”. Next post, I promise.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Like when dogs meet on the street.
Or when the cat lets you know she wants to go outside (maybe).

Just to mention two particularly obvious ones.

> I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

I thought it was well known. I’ve heard it said of the origins of Indo-European languages (eg. Sanskrit) of Aboriginal languages and of African languages.

> Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Good. You’re ahead of me here. I haven’t explained yet why I ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.
Stay tuned.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=stella+talking+dog

This dog (stella) communicates with its human by pressing buttons that speak English words. Stella can make crude sentences.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Like when dogs meet on the street.
Or when the cat lets you know she wants to go outside (maybe).

Just to mention two particularly obvious ones.

> I will be very interested to see your evidence for that.

I thought it was well known. I’ve heard it said of the origins of Indo-European languages (eg. Sanskrit) of Aboriginal languages and of African languages.

But I’m not talking about any of those very recent languages. I’m talking about the one original human spoken language, which presumably originated in Africa.

Also, hearing something said is not evidence. What evidence did these people present?

mollwollfumble said:

> Also I’ll be interested to know why you ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.

Good. You’re ahead of me here. I haven’t explained yet why I ignore all the evidence of primitive languages in other animals.
Stay tuned.

I eagerly await.

Michael V said:

Stella can make crude sentences.

I don’t think it all that nice teaching a dog to be crude.

the most primitive language, even of those tending toward solely refined vocalizations, used by humans today, still used, are grunts etc, variations of, essentially part of breathing, vocal extensions of, if you will

transition said:

the most primitive language, even of those tending toward solely refined vocalizations, used by humans today, still used, are grunts etc, variations of, essentially part of breathing, vocal extensions of, if you will

I used primitive in a nice way there, I could have said native, similarly approvingly

transition said:

the most primitive language, even of those tending toward solely refined vocalizations, used by humans today, still used, are grunts etc, variations of, essentially part of breathing, vocal extensions of, if you will

uh-huh.

The Rev Dodgson said:

transition said:

the most primitive language, even of those tending toward solely refined vocalizations, used by humans today, still used, are grunts etc, variations of, essentially part of breathing, vocal extensions of, if you will

uh-huh.

chuckle

Thank you all for waiting. Here I’ve cobbled the disparate components together in what is hopefully a cogent whole.

“What’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing if there is or isn’t a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?”

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”

OK, so I’ve had my 1% inspiration, now let’s put in a bit of perspiration to see if it leads where I think it does. Does this question solve the time problem, the causality problem, the paradox problem, supply a useful answer for the meaning of life, explain the nature of the universe? Does it explain what has being going wrong all this time without anyone having to get nailed to anything? Does it supply God’s phone number?

Well let’s see.

Choose as the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything the question “What is life?” This question has venerable antiquity. It must have been asked many times before Percy Shelley asked it in the year 1822. I see a web reference to it being asked by Democritus, but not sure of that.

I’m going to answer that question in the transactional way, defining life by what it does.

Life is an entity that:

• assimilates
• grows
• reproduces
• dies

Many non-living entities assimilate, grow and die without reproducing, a simple example is the Sun, which eats comets. So it’s clear that reproduction is a key. The next step up from inanimate entities like the Sun are the entities ‘fire’ and ‘crystals’. Crystals are entities that assimilate and grow; if shattered into seed crystals they can reproduce, or die. Fires are entities that assimilate, grow and die. They can reproduce by burning embers. So you may think that crystals and/or fires qualify as living things under that definition. The reason that they fail is by virtue of fidelity of reproduction. For something to qualify as being alive, the fidelity of reproduction has to be very high, and for crystals and fires it isn’t. Gaia can’t reproduce.

There’s another independent check on the above definition. Consider the biological domain of bacterium, mycoplasma, virus and prion. All four can die and accurately reproduce. But neither prions nor viruses assimilate or grow once created. And when you check the literature, a bacterium and mycoplasma is considered to be alive, a virus and prion is not. (OK, I know, virus is debatable).

But what is also unequivocally alive according to the above definition? Memes. Not just joke memes, but memes of all descriptions. Religions are memes. Languages are memes. Computer viruses are memes. Wikipedia web pages are memes. Individual sciences are memes. But science itself, as an umbrella term, like Gaia is not a meme.

In other words we have these biological lifeforms based on the genetic code that are lifeforms. And we also have these other entities, based on codes other than the genetic code, that are also alive.

So far so good.

It’s now time to talk about codes and the fidelity of reproduction.

In biology we have the nucleic acid code ACGTU, translated into the protein code ARNDCQEGHILKMFPOSUTWYVBZXJ.

For memes, the code began with verbal utterances (phonemes) and gestures. The equivalent to the protein code for the meme is the syllable.

But that’s only how they began. Phonemes have a high mutation rate, have you ever played the game of Chinese Whispers. The next step beyond phonemes and gestures was letters and pictures. These were first copied by scribes. Then came the printing press. Then came ASCII and other computer codecs. Although memes began as verbal stories, they next progressed beyond their human origins first onto clay, papyrus and paper. And next progressed onto computers and technology. Memes are no longer tied to humanity.

For memes, the reproduction fidelity has improved, the length of text has increased. These are genuine living entities.

If you don’t believe me, just entertain the idea temporarily. You can take it out to coffee, you don’t have to marry it.

So far so good? Rev Dodgson has asked what about the languages of animals. Animal languages don’t have phonemes, don’t have syllables, don’t have a genetic code.

Descartes famously said “cogito ergo sum”. I think, therefore I am. A thought is a meme, a quick check will show that it satisfies the criteria for a living thing. Now if I take “thought” as the primal guide for existence, then I’m actually struck by the seemingly absurd solipsist notion that a thought has a cleaner right to existence than a human body.

A human body may not exist, we only know about it by an interpretation of a coincidence of thoughts that we interpret to be senses. So the living thing “a human body” may not exist, but the living thing “thought as meme” must exist.

To recap, I started with the question “what is life?” and made my way through to the first conclusion: that memes are alive and must exist. Biological organisms, by contrast, are alive if they exist, but may not exist.

What then of the universe? The universe has been invented or discovered by memes, for example by individual branches of science. This brings into focus the difference between an invention and a discovery. An invention is patentable, a discovery is not. An algorithm is patentable, applied mathematics is not. Or so you might think. But it so happens that applied mathematics is an algorithm, always. So the difference between invention and discovery is not such a big divide after all.

What if? What if the universe hasn’t been discovered, but instead has been invented. We’re already entertaining the idea that our senses are not a reliable guide to what does and doesn’t exist. If we take the solipsist point of view that what we believe to be a human body may not exist, then the same can be said of the universe.

Some quotes from Hitchhikers fit in here. “How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?” and “I couldn’t trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe – if there is one – for granted.”

If you rebel at the idea that biological life may not exist, using as grounds for argument everything we know about biological life, such as cells, mitochondria, lipid bilayer, proteins, DNA etc., keep in mind that none of these were known prior to Robert Hooke, in 1665.

If I accept that the universe is an invention rather than a discovery, then the paradoxes that have plagued science start to make sense. Paradoxes such as Godel’s theorem have been invented, not discovered. The paradox of the preponderance of matter in the universe. The paradox of the nature of the interstellar medium. The paradox of the impossibility of proving that quantum chromodynamics is free from self-contradiction. These paradoxes have been invented by human minds. God is not a mathematician, the human mind is the mathematician, and a very imperfect one at that.

As for “turtles all the way down”, the problem of causality in science. That’s solved, too. That’s just another paradox that the human mind has invented. There is no need for a good God or an evil demon feeding simulations into human minds because the human minds generate their own simulations.

I’m doing the best I can with the English language here. When I say “human mind” I don’t take it in the anthropocentric sense. I could with equal validity use the phrases “living entity” or “collection of memes” or “intelligence”.

Both general relativity and quantum mechanics stress that importance of observation in determining reality. Relativity tells us that time and distance as measured by one observer will not the the same as those measured by a different observer. Quantum mechanics tells us that observation affects the state of the universe, says that a particle’s position and momentum cannot both be accurately observed, and says that any movement, no matter how bizarre, has a finite probability. So my claim up to this point that observation creates reality is not quite so wild as one may suppose.

Another big philosophical question is “what is the meaning of life?”. From the above, I get an answer to this. The purpose of life is to create reality. Surprisingly, this is morally neutral. So Fenchurch’s “no one would have to get nailed to anything” is satisfied.

I’ve done “life”, the “universe” and, with the above paragraph, “everything”. Art, for instance, is included. All that’s left now is to provide a simple answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. The ultimate question, I claim above, is “what is life?” and the simple answer is “the meme”, which with seven letters is an even shorter answer than “forty-two”.

Or, I can misquote “A body is simply a gene’s way of making more genes” to get “Reality is simply a meme’s way of creating more memes”.

Do I need to explain exactly what a meme is? Perhaps. I don’t have a great definition. An adequate definition might be: “A meme is a replicant composed of syllables and/or images”. This excludes whalesong.

In the above monologue, I have missed giving an answer to the big question “What lies in the future?”. A funny answer to that might be “Full employment, and end to poverty and happiness for all. Those are the lies”. Another answer might be “The future is what we make it”. I find myself concerned about a negative possibility for the future. As memes migrate from human minds onto computerised technology, will human beings become slaves of technology? I had previously thought “yes”. Looking at it now more dispassionately I can see an analogy between ‘humans and technology’ and ‘proteins and DNA’. To expand this analogy, humans code memes as phonemes and images, technologies code memes as ASCII and codecs, in analogy to the coding of genes as amino acids and nucleic acids.

The answer is still “yes”, proteins are slaves to DNA. But would that be so bad? The combination would be a superorganism of humans and technology, not too different to today’s businesses. A slow migration form a human-based society to a business-based society.

To end on a provocative note. What about Nature with a capital N? Nature is a goddess that some people worship. Like other deities, Nature is an invention.

mollwollfumble said:

Thank you all for waiting. Here I’ve cobbled the disparate components together in what is hopefully a cogent whole.

“What’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing if there is or isn’t a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?”

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”

OK, so I’ve had my 1% inspiration, now let’s put in a bit of perspiration to see if it leads where I think it does. Does this question solve the time problem, the causality problem, the paradox problem, supply a useful answer for the meaning of life, explain the nature of the universe? Does it explain what has being going wrong all this time without anyone having to get nailed to anything? Does it supply God’s phone number?

Well let’s see.

Choose as the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything the question “What is life?” This question has venerable antiquity. It must have been asked many times before Percy Shelley asked it in the year 1822. I see a web reference to it being asked by Democritus, but not sure of that.

I’m going to answer that question in the transactional way, defining life by what it does.

Life is an entity that:

• assimilates
• grows
• reproduces
• dies

Many non-living entities assimilate, grow and die without reproducing, a simple example is the Sun, which eats comets. So it’s clear that reproduction is a key. The next step up from inanimate entities like the Sun are the entities ‘fire’ and ‘crystals’. Crystals are entities that assimilate and grow; if shattered into seed crystals they can reproduce, or die. Fires are entities that assimilate, grow and die. They can reproduce by burning embers. So you may think that crystals and/or fires qualify as living things under that definition. The reason that they fail is by virtue of fidelity of reproduction. For something to qualify as being alive, the fidelity of reproduction has to be very high, and for crystals and fires it isn’t. Gaia can’t reproduce.

There’s another independent check on the above definition. Consider the biological domain of bacterium, mycoplasma, virus and prion. All four can die and accurately reproduce. But neither prions nor viruses assimilate or grow once created. And when you check the literature, a bacterium and mycoplasma is considered to be alive, a virus and prion is not. (OK, I know, virus is debatable).

But what is also unequivocally alive according to the above definition? Memes. Not just joke memes, but memes of all descriptions. Religions are memes. Languages are memes. Computer viruses are memes. Wikipedia web pages are memes. Individual sciences are memes. But science itself, as an umbrella term, like Gaia is not a meme.

In other words we have these biological lifeforms based on the genetic code that are lifeforms. And we also have these other entities, based on codes other than the genetic code, that are also alive.

So far so good.

It’s now time to talk about codes and the fidelity of reproduction.

In biology we have the nucleic acid code ACGTU, translated into the protein code ARNDCQEGHILKMFPOSUTWYVBZXJ.

For memes, the code began with verbal utterances (phonemes) and gestures. The equivalent to the protein code for the meme is the syllable.

But that’s only how they began. Phonemes have a high mutation rate, have you ever played the game of Chinese Whispers. The next step beyond phonemes and gestures was letters and pictures. These were first copied by scribes. Then came the printing press. Then came ASCII and other computer codecs. Although memes began as verbal stories, they next progressed beyond their human origins first onto clay, papyrus and paper. And next progressed onto computers and technology. Memes are no longer tied to humanity.

For memes, the reproduction fidelity has improved, the length of text has increased. These are genuine living entities.

If you don’t believe me, just entertain the idea temporarily. You can take it out to coffee, you don’t have to marry it.

So far so good? Rev Dodgson has asked what about the languages of animals. Animal languages don’t have phonemes, don’t have syllables, don’t have a genetic code.

Descartes famously said “cogito ergo sum”. I think, therefore I am. A thought is a meme, a quick check will show that it satisfies the criteria for a living thing. Now if I take “thought” as the primal guide for existence, then I’m actually struck by the seemingly absurd solipsist notion that a thought has a cleaner right to existence than a human body.

A human body may not exist, we only know about it by an interpretation of a coincidence of thoughts that we interpret to be senses. So the living thing “a human body” may not exist, but the living thing “thought as meme” must exist.

To recap, I started with the question “what is life?” and made my way through to the first conclusion: that memes are alive and must exist. Biological organisms, by contrast, are alive if they exist, but may not exist.

What then of the universe? The universe has been invented or discovered by memes, for example by individual branches of science. This brings into focus the difference between an invention and a discovery. An invention is patentable, a discovery is not. An algorithm is patentable, applied mathematics is not. Or so you might think. But it so happens that applied mathematics is an algorithm, always. So the difference between invention and discovery is not such a big divide after all.

What if? What if the universe hasn’t been discovered, but instead has been invented. We’re already entertaining the idea that our senses are not a reliable guide to what does and doesn’t exist. If we take the solipsist point of view that what we believe to be a human body may not exist, then the same can be said of the universe.

Some quotes from Hitchhikers fit in here. “How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?” and “I couldn’t trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe – if there is one – for granted.”

If you rebel at the idea that biological life may not exist, using as grounds for argument everything we know about biological life, such as cells, mitochondria, lipid bilayer, proteins, DNA etc., keep in mind that none of these were known prior to Robert Hooke, in 1665.

If I accept that the universe is an invention rather than a discovery, then the paradoxes that have plagued science start to make sense. Paradoxes such as Godel’s theorem have been invented, not discovered. The paradox of the preponderance of matter in the universe. The paradox of the nature of the interstellar medium. The paradox of the impossibility of proving that quantum chromodynamics is free from self-contradiction. These paradoxes have been invented by human minds. God is not a mathematician, the human mind is the mathematician, and a very imperfect one at that.

As for “turtles all the way down”, the problem of causality in science. That’s solved, too. That’s just another paradox that the human mind has invented. There is no need for a good God or an evil demon feeding simulations into human minds because the human minds generate their own simulations.

I’m doing the best I can with the English language here. When I say “human mind” I don’t take it in the anthropocentric sense. I could with equal validity use the phrases “living entity” or “collection of memes” or “intelligence”.

Both general relativity and quantum mechanics stress that importance of observation in determining reality. Relativity tells us that time and distance as measured by one observer will not the the same as those measured by a different observer. Quantum mechanics tells us that observation affects the state of the universe, says that a particle’s position and momentum cannot both be accurately observed, and says that any movement, no matter how bizarre, has a finite probability. So my claim up to this point that observation creates reality is not quite so wild as one may suppose.

Another big philosophical question is “what is the meaning of life?”. From the above, I get an answer to this. The purpose of life is to create reality. Surprisingly, this is morally neutral. So Fenchurch’s “no one would have to get nailed to anything” is satisfied.

I’ve done “life”, the “universe” and, with the above paragraph, “everything”. Art, for instance, is included. All that’s left now is to provide a simple answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. The ultimate question, I claim above, is “what is life?” and the simple answer is “the meme”, which with seven letters is an even shorter answer than “forty-two”.

Or, I can misquote “A body is simply a gene’s way of making more genes” to get “Reality is simply a meme’s way of creating more memes”.

Do I need to explain exactly what a meme is? Perhaps. I don’t have a great definition. An adequate definition might be: “A meme is a replicant composed of syllables and/or images”. This excludes whalesong.

In the above monologue, I have missed giving an answer to the big question “What lies in the future?”. A funny answer to that might be “Full employment, and end to poverty and happiness for all. Those are the lies”. Another answer might be “The future is what we make it”. I find myself concerned about a negative possibility for the future. As memes migrate from human minds onto computerised technology, will human beings become slaves of technology? I had previously thought “yes”. Looking at it now more dispassionately I can see an analogy between ‘humans and technology’ and ‘proteins and DNA’. To expand this analogy, humans code memes as phonemes and images, technologies code memes as ASCII and codecs, in analogy to the coding of genes as amino acids and nucleic acids.

The answer is still “yes”, proteins are slaves to DNA. But would that be so bad? The combination would be a superorganism of humans and technology, not too different to today’s businesses. A slow migration form a human-based society to a business-based society.

To end on a provocative note. What about Nature with a capital N? Nature is a goddess that some people worship. Like other deities, Nature is an invention.

So who invents?

mollwollfumble said:

Thank you all for waiting. Here I’ve cobbled the disparate components together in what is hopefully a cogent whole.

“What’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing if there is or isn’t a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?”

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”

OK, so I’ve had my 1% inspiration, now let’s put in a bit of perspiration to see if it leads where I think it does. Does this question solve the time problem, the causality problem, the paradox problem, supply a useful answer for the meaning of life, explain the nature of the universe? Does it explain what has being going wrong all this time without anyone having to get nailed to anything? Does it supply God’s phone number?

Well let’s see.

Choose as the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything the question “What is life?” This question has venerable antiquity. It must have been asked many times before Percy Shelley asked it in the year 1822. I see a web reference to it being asked by Democritus, but not sure of that.

I’m going to answer that question in the transactional way, defining life by what it does.

Life is an entity that:

• assimilates
• grows
• reproduces
• dies

Many non-living entities assimilate, grow and die without reproducing, a simple example is the Sun, which eats comets. So it’s clear that reproduction is a key. The next step up from inanimate entities like the Sun are the entities ‘fire’ and ‘crystals’. Crystals are entities that assimilate and grow; if shattered into seed crystals they can reproduce, or die. Fires are entities that assimilate, grow and die. They can reproduce by burning embers. So you may think that crystals and/or fires qualify as living things under that definition. The reason that they fail is by virtue of fidelity of reproduction. For something to qualify as being alive, the fidelity of reproduction has to be very high, and for crystals and fires it isn’t. Gaia can’t reproduce.

There’s another independent check on the above definition. Consider the biological domain of bacterium, mycoplasma, virus and prion. All four can die and accurately reproduce. But neither prions nor viruses assimilate or grow once created. And when you check the literature, a bacterium and mycoplasma is considered to be alive, a virus and prion is not. (OK, I know, virus is debatable).

But what is also unequivocally alive according to the above definition? Memes. Not just joke memes, but memes of all descriptions. Religions are memes. Languages are memes. Computer viruses are memes. Wikipedia web pages are memes. Individual sciences are memes. But science itself, as an umbrella term, like Gaia is not a meme.

In other words we have these biological lifeforms based on the genetic code that are lifeforms. And we also have these other entities, based on codes other than the genetic code, that are also alive.

So far so good.

It’s now time to talk about codes and the fidelity of reproduction.

In biology we have the nucleic acid code ACGTU, translated into the protein code ARNDCQEGHILKMFPOSUTWYVBZXJ.

For memes, the code began with verbal utterances (phonemes) and gestures. The equivalent to the protein code for the meme is the syllable.

But that’s only how they began. Phonemes have a high mutation rate, have you ever played the game of Chinese Whispers. The next step beyond phonemes and gestures was letters and pictures. These were first copied by scribes. Then came the printing press. Then came ASCII and other computer codecs. Although memes began as verbal stories, they next progressed beyond their human origins first onto clay, papyrus and paper. And next progressed onto computers and technology. Memes are no longer tied to humanity.

For memes, the reproduction fidelity has improved, the length of text has increased. These are genuine living entities.

If you don’t believe me, just entertain the idea temporarily. You can take it out to coffee, you don’t have to marry it.

So far so good? Rev Dodgson has asked what about the languages of animals. Animal languages don’t have phonemes, don’t have syllables, don’t have a genetic code.

Descartes famously said “cogito ergo sum”. I think, therefore I am. A thought is a meme, a quick check will show that it satisfies the criteria for a living thing. Now if I take “thought” as the primal guide for existence, then I’m actually struck by the seemingly absurd solipsist notion that a thought has a cleaner right to existence than a human body.

A human body may not exist, we only know about it by an interpretation of a coincidence of thoughts that we interpret to be senses. So the living thing “a human body” may not exist, but the living thing “thought as meme” must exist.

To recap, I started with the question “what is life?” and made my way through to the first conclusion: that memes are alive and must exist. Biological organisms, by contrast, are alive if they exist, but may not exist.

What then of the universe? The universe has been invented or discovered by memes, for example by individual branches of science. This brings into focus the difference between an invention and a discovery. An invention is patentable, a discovery is not. An algorithm is patentable, applied mathematics is not. Or so you might think. But it so happens that applied mathematics is an algorithm, always. So the difference between invention and discovery is not such a big divide after all.

What if? What if the universe hasn’t been discovered, but instead has been invented. We’re already entertaining the idea that our senses are not a reliable guide to what does and doesn’t exist. If we take the solipsist point of view that what we believe to be a human body may not exist, then the same can be said of the universe.

Some quotes from Hitchhikers fit in here. “How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?” and “I couldn’t trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe – if there is one – for granted.”

If you rebel at the idea that biological life may not exist, using as grounds for argument everything we know about biological life, such as cells, mitochondria, lipid bilayer, proteins, DNA etc., keep in mind that none of these were known prior to Robert Hooke, in 1665.

If I accept that the universe is an invention rather than a discovery, then the paradoxes that have plagued science start to make sense. Paradoxes such as Godel’s theorem have been invented, not discovered. The paradox of the preponderance of matter in the universe. The paradox of the nature of the interstellar medium. The paradox of the impossibility of proving that quantum chromodynamics is free from self-contradiction. These paradoxes have been invented by human minds. God is not a mathematician, the human mind is the mathematician, and a very imperfect one at that.

As for “turtles all the way down”, the problem of causality in science. That’s solved, too. That’s just another paradox that the human mind has invented. There is no need for a good God or an evil demon feeding simulations into human minds because the human minds generate their own simulations.

I’m doing the best I can with the English language here. When I say “human mind” I don’t take it in the anthropocentric sense. I could with equal validity use the phrases “living entity” or “collection of memes” or “intelligence”.

Both general relativity and quantum mechanics stress that importance of observation in determining reality. Relativity tells us that time and distance as measured by one observer will not the the same as those measured by a different observer. Quantum mechanics tells us that observation affects the state of the universe, says that a particle’s position and momentum cannot both be accurately observed, and says that any movement, no matter how bizarre, has a finite probability. So my claim up to this point that observation creates reality is not quite so wild as one may suppose.

Another big philosophical question is “what is the meaning of life?”. From the above, I get an answer to this. The purpose of life is to create reality. Surprisingly, this is morally neutral. So Fenchurch’s “no one would have to get nailed to anything” is satisfied.

I’ve done “life”, the “universe” and, with the above paragraph, “everything”. Art, for instance, is included. All that’s left now is to provide a simple answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. The ultimate question, I claim above, is “what is life?” and the simple answer is “the meme”, which with seven letters is an even shorter answer than “forty-two”.

Or, I can misquote “A body is simply a gene’s way of making more genes” to get “Reality is simply a meme’s way of creating more memes”.

Do I need to explain exactly what a meme is? Perhaps. I don’t have a great definition. An adequate definition might be: “A meme is a replicant composed of syllables and/or images”. This excludes whalesong.

In the above monologue, I have missed giving an answer to the big question “What lies in the future?”. A funny answer to that might be “Full employment, and end to poverty and happiness for all. Those are the lies”. Another answer might be “The future is what we make it”. I find myself concerned about a negative possibility for the future. As memes migrate from human minds onto computerised technology, will human beings become slaves of technology? I had previously thought “yes”. Looking at it now more dispassionately I can see an analogy between ‘humans and technology’ and ‘proteins and DNA’. To expand this analogy, humans code memes as phonemes and images, technologies code memes as ASCII and codecs, in analogy to the coding of genes as amino acids and nucleic acids.

The answer is still “yes”, proteins are slaves to DNA. But would that be so bad? The combination would be a superorganism of humans and technology, not too different to today’s businesses. A slow migration form a human-based society to a business-based society.

To end on a provocative note. What about Nature with a capital N? Nature is a goddess that some people worship. Like other deities, Nature is an invention.

RUOK?

roughbarked said:

So who invents?

I invent. I as in the collection of memes that comprise my mind.

> RUOK

I’m having fun. It’s like a voyage of exploration.
It’s quite amazing how a simple little idea can bloom into a full-blown philosophy.

The above post of mine is a framework. A lot more perspiration still to go.

I’m taking the solipsist viewpoint: “the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing”.
I’m taking the Cartesian viewpoint: “cogito ego sum”.
I’m taking Blackmore’s viewpoint: memes are replicators.
I’m taking the transactional definition of life: life assimilates, grows, reproduces and dies
I’m taking the historical linguist’s viewpoint: the world’s languages didn’t evolve from primitive gestures and grunts but arrived fully formed with grammar and syntax.
I’m also taking the viewpoint that replication cannot be sufficiently accurate without a simplified encoding of information into a string.

I’m putting the above puzzle pieces together.

“Semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. The two main areas are logical semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference and presupposition and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them.”

I haven’t yet dealt with the taxonomy of memes. Not all memes are equal, any more than all RNA strands are equal.

I haven’t yet dealt with the time problem. The answer to the time problem seems obvious – the simulation began synchronously with lexical semantics – but this is not necessarily correct.

If both truth and fiction are part of an invented reality, how can I distinguish between the two?

Solipsism is extreme egocentricity. Is it possible to construct a good morality within the solipsist framework?

mollwollfumble said:

roughbarked said:

So who invents?

I invent. I as in the collection of memes that comprise my mind.

> RUOK

I’m having fun. It’s like a voyage of exploration.
It’s quite amazing how a simple little idea can bloom into a full-blown philosophy.

The above post of mine is a framework. A lot more perspiration still to go.

……………………(snip)

Oh, good.

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

roughbarked said:

So who invents?

I invent. I as in the collection of memes that comprise my mind.

> RUOK

I’m having fun. It’s like a voyage of exploration.
It’s quite amazing how a simple little idea can bloom into a full-blown philosophy.

The above post of mine is a framework. A lot more perspiration still to go.

……………………(snip)

Oh, good.

Such intense reading is the framework?

“Grok” is an exact synonym for “assimilate”. Food is both food for body and food for thought. Digestion is both biological digestion and gaining understanding. Other words associated with assimilation crossing the biological/mental divide include merge and incorporate.

Some readers may understand better the use the modern word grok as a replacement for the older word assimilation. Viruses don’t grok, bacterias do.

• Life groks.
• Life grows.
• Life reproduces.
• Life dies.

Have just bit the bullet and ebay ordered.
The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore.

It’s not really fair of me saying the answer to the ultimate question is “the meme” without reading the first published book on the topic.

mollwollfumble said:

Have just bit the bullet and ebay ordered.
The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore.

It’s not really fair of me saying the answer to the ultimate question is “the meme” without reading the first published book on the topic.

Why¿

SMH

Coronavirus cases are climbing rapidly among young adults in a number of US states where bars, stores and restaurants have reopened – a disturbing generational shift that not only puts them in greater peril than many realise but poses an even bigger danger to older people who cross their paths.

“People got complacent,” said Dr Marc Boom, chief executive of the Houston Methodist hospital system. “And it’s coming back and biting us, quite frankly.”

Stocks slid on Wall Street as the news dampened hopes for a quick economic turnaround. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost over 700 points for a drop of 2.7 per cent.

In Florida, young people ages 15 to 34 now make up 31 per cent of all cases, up from 25 per cent in early June. Experts say the phenomenon cannot be explained away as simply the result of more testing.

For months, elderly people were more likely to be diagnosed with the virus, too. But figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that almost as soon as states began reopening, the picture flipped, with people 18 to 49 years old quickly becoming the age bracket most likely to be diagnosed with new cases.

If the trends continue, hospitals will probably exceed capacity within the next several weeks, said Dr Joseph Gerald, a University of Arizona public health policy professor.

“We are in deep trouble,” said Gerald, urging the state to impose new restrictions on businesses, which Governor Doug Ducey has refused to do.

Dr Peter Hotez, an infectious-disease expert at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, said he worries that states will squander what time they have to head off a much larger crisis.

“We’re still talking about subtlety, still arguing whether or not we should wear masks, and still not understanding that a vaccine is not going to rescue us,” he said.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/disaster-unfolding-in-the-us-as-virus-resurgence-hits-new-peaks-20200625-p55632.html

SMH

sorry that was my greatest mistake

SCIENCE said:

SMH

Coronavirus cases are climbing rapidly among young adults in a number of US states where bars, stores and restaurants have reopened – a disturbing generational shift that not only puts them in greater peril than many realise but poses an even bigger danger to older people who cross their paths.

“People got complacent,” said Dr Marc Boom, chief executive of the Houston Methodist hospital system. “And it’s coming back and biting us, quite frankly.”

Stocks slid on Wall Street as the news dampened hopes for a quick economic turnaround. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost over 700 points for a drop of 2.7 per cent.

In Florida, young people ages 15 to 34 now make up 31 per cent of all cases, up from 25 per cent in early June. Experts say the phenomenon cannot be explained away as simply the result of more testing.

For months, elderly people were more likely to be diagnosed with the virus, too. But figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that almost as soon as states began reopening, the picture flipped, with people 18 to 49 years old quickly becoming the age bracket most likely to be diagnosed with new cases.

If the trends continue, hospitals will probably exceed capacity within the next several weeks, said Dr Joseph Gerald, a University of Arizona public health policy professor.

“We are in deep trouble,” said Gerald, urging the state to impose new restrictions on businesses, which Governor Doug Ducey has refused to do.

Dr Peter Hotez, an infectious-disease expert at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, said he worries that states will squander what time they have to head off a much larger crisis.

“We’re still talking about subtlety, still arguing whether or not we should wear masks, and still not understanding that a vaccine is not going to rescue us,” he said.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/disaster-unfolding-in-the-us-as-virus-resurgence-hits-new-peaks-20200625-p55632.html

SMH

sigh

SCIENCE said:

mollwollfumble said:

Have just bit the bullet and ebay ordered.
The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore.

It’s not really fair of me saying the answer to the ultimate question is “the meme” without reading the first published book on the topic.

Why¿

This cartoon relates to your ‘Why¿’

> Solipsism is exteme egocentricity. Is it possible to construct a good morality within the solipsist framework?

Yes. Some moral systems come through almost intact.

Let me suppose that I am all that exists. Then everything I read, everything I see, is something I invented. Wow, that sure is egotistical, aren’t I great.

The first moral system to come through completely intact is hedonism “be happy”. Although this moral philosophy has been attacked by hundreds of philosophers over the years, it is not too bad. For if everyone maximises their own happiness then we’re back to Bentham’s “greatest happiness of the greatest number”.

And that’s the second moral system to come through intact. For if I am all that exists then you are all my alter egos. In order to keep me happy I also need to keep my alter egos happy. And keeping all my alter egos happy then reduces to Bentham’s “greatest happiness of the greatest number”.

A third moral system that comes through intact is the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. This keeps alter egos happy and stops me from sabotaging myself.

The medical moral system “Do no harm”. Yuk, how I hate that, because “Do no harm” is exactly synonymous with “Do nothing”. I much prefer “Maximise net good”. Anyway, “Do no harm” can be taken in the physical sense or the mental sense. In the mental sense, not harming alter egos comes through intact into the solipsist framework. In the physical sense it comes through only as the physical state affects the mental, which it usually does.

What then of other moral systems? Those of Confucius, the Tao, and Jain. Confucius is an ethical system for the businessman. The Tao is an ethical system for the peasant. Jain is an ethical system for the academic.

The Tao is: “be free from desire … being and nonbeing create each other … do not seek good or evil but welcome both saints and sinners … do not seek beauty or ugliness but welcome both … empty your mind and fill your core”. That sort of thing. If I was to try to put Taoism in a nutshell I might say “be one with everything and don’t sweat the small stuff”. As an ancient text, it’s held up remarkably well over the years, unlike the Bible. The Tao is a heavily mental morality, which allows it to translate well into the solipsist philosophy.

Confucius is “attention to business, sincerity, thrift, overflow in love to all, respect your elders, and cultivate the friendship of the good … do not be dazzled by beauty”. It’s a much more worldly morality than the Tao, and does seem geared to the accumulation of personal wealth. If I was to try to put Confucius in a nutshell I might say “don’t piss anybody off unless you have to, and avoiding sabotaging yourself”. Being a morality oriented toward mental rather than the physical it does translate into the solipsist philosophy, in the sense of being as nice as possible to your alter egos.

Jain is best known for its nonviolence, towards both people and animals. Jain is the the only religion which comes with a cookbook, a vegetarian cookbook. The original texts are almost as messy as the Bible. Here’s a quote: “(do not) cut or strike the blind, (do not) cut or strike the foot, the ankle, the knee, the thigh, the hip, the navel, the belly, the flank, the back, the bosom, the heart, the breast, the neck, the arm, the finger, the nail, the eye, the brow, the forehead, the head”. It’s very biological, and therefore doesn’t translate well into the solipsist philosophy.

Another morality that appears from time to time is “no holds barred, the only crime is getting caught”. The less said about that the better.

A new morality that pops into existence with the solipsist philosophy is “keep your mind as busy as possible”.

mollwollfumble said:

SCIENCE said:

mollwollfumble said:

Have just bit the bullet and ebay ordered.
The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore.

It’s not really fair of me saying the answer to the ultimate question is “the meme” without reading the first published book on the topic.

Why¿

This cartoon relates to your ‘Why¿’

> Solipsism is exteme egocentricity. Is it possible to construct a good morality within the solipsist framework?

Yes. Some moral systems come through almost intact.

Let me suppose that I am all that exists. Then everything I read, everything I see, is something I invented. Wow, that sure is egotistical, aren’t I great.

The first moral system to come through completely intact is hedonism “be happy”. Although this moral philosophy has been attacked by hundreds of philosophers over the years, it is not too bad. For if everyone maximises their own happiness then we’re back to Bentham’s “greatest happiness of the greatest number”.

And that’s the second moral system to come through intact. For if I am all that exists then you are all my alter egos. In order to keep me happy I also need to keep my alter egos happy. And keeping all my alter egos happy then reduces to Bentham’s “greatest happiness of the greatest number”.

A third moral system that comes through intact is the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. This keeps alter egos happy and stops me from sabotaging myself.

The medical moral system “Do no harm”. Yuk, how I hate that, because “Do no harm” is exactly synonymous with “Do nothing”. I much prefer “Maximise net good”. Anyway, “Do no harm” can be taken in the physical sense or the mental sense. In the mental sense, not harming alter egos comes through intact into the solipsist framework. In the physical sense it comes through only as the physical state affects the mental, which it usually does.

What then of other moral systems? Those of Confucius, the Tao, and Jain. Confucius is an ethical system for the businessman. The Tao is an ethical system for the peasant. Jain is an ethical system for the academic.

The Tao is: “be free from desire … being and nonbeing create each other … do not seek good or evil but welcome both saints and sinners … do not seek beauty or ugliness but welcome both … empty your mind and fill your core”. That sort of thing. If I was to try to put Taoism in a nutshell I might say “be one with everything and don’t sweat the small stuff”. As an ancient text, it’s held up remarkably well over the years, unlike the Bible. The Tao is a heavily mental morality, which allows it to translate well into the solipsist philosophy.

Confucius is “attention to business, sincerity, thrift, overflow in love to all, respect your elders, and cultivate the friendship of the good … do not be dazzled by beauty”. It’s a much more worldly morality than the Tao, and does seem geared to the accumulation of personal wealth. If I was to try to put Confucius in a nutshell I might say “don’t piss anybody off unless you have to, and avoiding sabotaging yourself”. Being a morality oriented toward mental rather than the physical it does translate into the solipsist philosophy, in the sense of being as nice as possible to your alter egos.

Jain is best known for its nonviolence, towards both people and animals. Jain is the the only religion which comes with a cookbook, a vegetarian cookbook. The original texts are almost as messy as the Bible. Here’s a quote: “(do not) cut or strike the blind, (do not) cut or strike the foot, the ankle, the knee, the thigh, the hip, the navel, the belly, the flank, the back, the bosom, the heart, the breast, the neck, the arm, the finger, the nail, the eye, the brow, the forehead, the head”. It’s very biological, and therefore doesn’t translate well into the solipsist philosophy.

Another morality that appears from time to time is “no holds barred, the only crime is getting caught”. The less said about that the better.

A new morality that pops into existence with the solipsist philosophy is “keep your mind as busy as possible”.

Before I get into the big negative I’ll just comment that I totally agree that memes should be paid more attention.

But:

If memes are the fundamental lifeform, what is the thing that is doing the thinking?

The Rev Dodgson said:

Before I get into the big negative I’ll just comment that I totally agree that memes should be paid more attention.

But:

If memes are the fundamental lifeform, what is the thing that is doing the thinking?

I am. The collection of memes that I call I. Memes can create new memes, new thoughts. That’s the definition of meme as replicant.

Here’s an interesting website I just stumbled across about the meaning of life. “https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-meaning-of-life-2/”:https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-meaning-of-life-2/ I’ll read it later.

> If both truth and fiction are part of an invented reality, how can I distinguish between the two?

Let’s start by brainstorming, casting around for random thoughts.

Quote from somebody: “Respect the truth. This is a profound statement when you realise just how slippery the truth is”.
Quote from the Hunting of the Snark: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
Truth is everything with a Dewey Decimal classification.
From the two Ronnies “A bookshop in the high street is in trouble today. They had filed the British Rail Timetable under Fiction”.

Perhaps I can use an analogy. Imagine that there are two compartments in the mind called “Truth” and “Fiction”. These compartments produce antibodies that react with new ideas. That new idea gets allocated to the compartment that produces the antibodies that react most strongly. If it were that simple then there would never be a paradigm shift. Instead, ideas are held in these categories by individual links to other thoughts. Enough of these individual links get broken and a whole section can drift from truth to fiction or, less commonly, from fiction to truth.

Is that all there is to it? It can’t be as simple as that.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Before I get into the big negative I’ll just comment that I totally agree that memes should be paid more attention.

But:

If memes are the fundamental lifeform, what is the thing that is doing the thinking?

I am. The collection of memes that I call I. Memes can create new memes, new thoughts. That’s the definition of meme as replicant.

So you are saying it is memes all the way down then (or up, if you prefer).

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Before I get into the big negative I’ll just comment that I totally agree that memes should be paid more attention.

But:

If memes are the fundamental lifeform, what is the thing that is doing the thinking?

I am. The collection of memes that I call I. Memes can create new memes, new thoughts. That’s the definition of meme as replicant.

So you are saying it is memes all the way down then (or up, if you prefer).

No. But I think you make have hit on a fundamental mistake I’ve made.

Rather than asking the question “what is doing the thinking?”, the question that is difficult to answer is “what am I eating?”. Life groks, life assimilates, so life must be eating. If memes are lifeforms then they must be eating. What are they eating?

If I was to answer that “memes eat paper and computer memory and brainspace and energy” then that presupposes that paper and computer memory and brainspace and energy have a real existence independent from memes.

But on the other hand if I answer that “memes eat other memes and proto-memes” then that presupposes that memes grow by eating their own waste products, which violates a couple of physical laws.

So do I have to throw out physical laws such as conservation of mass-energy and the laws of thermodynamics? Or do I have to abandon the idea that memes created everything I seem to sense? And if the physical laws are dispensed with then what replaces them?

U.S. CDC estimates 20 million American infections as coronavirus cases near record high

U.S. CDC officials, relying on blood tests, estimated Thursday that 20 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, a figure that represents about 6 percent percent of the country’s population and roughly 10 times the 2.3 million confirmed cases in the nation.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/06/26/world/cdc-estimates-20-million-coronavirus/

dv said:

U.S. CDC estimates 20 million American infections as coronavirus cases near record high

U.S. CDC officials, relying on blood tests, estimated Thursday that 20 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, a figure that represents about 6 percent percent of the country’s population and roughly 10 times the 2.3 million confirmed cases in the nation.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/06/26/world/cdc-estimates-20-million-coronavirus/

I don’t know why you’re blaming a deity for this.

sibeen said:

dv said:

U.S. CDC estimates 20 million American infections as coronavirus cases near record high

U.S. CDC officials, relying on blood tests, estimated Thursday that 20 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, a figure that represents about 6 percent percent of the country’s population and roughly 10 times the 2.3 million confirmed cases in the nation.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/06/26/world/cdc-estimates-20-million-coronavirus/

I don’t know why you’re blaming a deity for this.

wrong fred

Sheryl or Cheryl?

Speedy said:

Sheryl or Cheryl?

This was also wrong thread

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

I am. The collection of memes that I call I. Memes can create new memes, new thoughts. That’s the definition of meme as replicant.

So you are saying it is memes all the way down then (or up, if you prefer).

No. But I think you make have hit on a fundamental mistake I’ve made.

Rather than asking the question “what is doing the thinking?”, the question that is difficult to answer is “what am I eating?”. Life groks, life assimilates, so life must be eating. If memes are lifeforms then they must be eating. What are they eating?

If I was to answer that “memes eat paper and computer memory and brainspace and energy” then that presupposes that paper and computer memory and brainspace and energy have a real existence independent from memes.

But on the other hand if I answer that “memes eat other memes and proto-memes” then that presupposes that memes grow by eating their own waste products, which violates a couple of physical laws.

So do I have to throw out physical laws such as conservation of mass-energy and the laws of thermodynamics? Or do I have to abandon the idea that memes created everything I seem to sense? And if the physical laws are dispensed with then what replaces them?

The laws of physics governing memes should be the laws of thermodynamics.
The laws of thermodynamics also govern biological life.
It would be worth comparing the two.
Could it be that Maxwell’s demon and Descartes’ demon are one and the same?, Both plausible but impossible!

https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3230 and sci-hub.tw/10.1038/nphys3230
“Maxwell’s demon. He argued that if an intelligent being, a demon, had information about the velocities and positions of the particles in a gas, then that demon could transfer the fast, hot particles from a cold reservoir to a hot one, in apparent violation of the second law. Maxwell’s demon revealed the relationship between entropy and information for the first time. For over a century, much effort has been devoted to incorporating information into thermodynamics and assessing the entropic and energetic costs of manipulating information. More recently, this historically theoretical pursuit has become relevant in practical situations where information is manipulated at small scales, such as in molecular and cell biology … “

“The physical meaning of Shannon entropy. It determines the energetics of non-equilibrium processes for systems coupled to one or more thermodynamic reservoirs … “. More in the above reference.

But what exactly is ‘food for thought’ in this context?

Let us suppose that a meme consists of a picture plus words. How much energy would it take to make that, as a function of time, compared to the amount of energy to replicate a cell? Initially, a lot of the energy would go into grinding the pigments. Then we have pre-prepared pigments that still need energy to paint. Then the hand operated printing press. Then the machine operated printing press. The camera. Then the photocopier. Then the scanner with computer screen display. Computer images. The energy requirement would tend to get less with time.

But what actually is the energy requirement in each case?

—-

On the topic of the time problem. The first guess has to be that languages containing syllables evolved once, some time prior to the global diaspora of H. sapiens. Some time before 60,000 to 80,000 years ago. The earliest known cave art is of order 64,000 to 44,000 years ago. So at first guess I’m talking of order 80,000 years ago for the first memes. But there are complicating factors. Perhaps there were proto-memes in the chain of ancestry going back much further, using non-syllabic language plus gestures, back millions of years rather than thousands. And on the other hand, perhaps there were pseudo-memes, memes of recent origin that purport to be much older.

For example, perhaps the first true memes arrived simultaneously with the first civilizations and written languages, circa 3100 BC, in a rough match for the approximation in the Bible. Or even more recently than that, because “ancient history” could have been invented after “modern history”, which began circa 1500 AD. Or, if the solipsist viewpoint of I am all there is is correct, then the first meme could have occurred less than 70 years ago.

The uncertainty forces me to accept the generally accepted timeline, and the lack of readable writing prior to about 3100 BC forces me to start a categorisation of different taxonomic classifications of memes no earlier than that.

Someone on the forum said I couldn’t test the solipsist religion which says that I and my thoughts are all that there is.

Here is a start on how to test that philosophy for whether it is true or fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_index

A diversity index is a quantitative measure that reflects how many different types (such as species) there are in a dataset (a community) and that can simultaneously take into account the phylogenetic relations among the individuals distributed among those types, such as richness, divergence or evenness. These indices are statistically representations of biodiversity in different aspects. Including biodiversity among memes.

Richness simply quantifies how many different types the dataset of interest contains. For example, species richness of a dataset is the number of different species in the corresponding species list. Richness is useful where abundance data are often not available for the datasets of interest. It is not the same thing as diversity, which does take abundances into account.

The Shannon index has been a popular diversity index in the ecological literature. I could apply it to the diversity of memes. The measure was originally proposed to quantify the entropy in strings of text. The idea is that the more different letters there are, and the more equal their proportional abundances in the string of interest, the more difficult it is to correctly predict which letter will be the next one in the string.

When diversity indices are used in ecology, the types of interest can be species, genera, families, functional types or haplotypes. The entities of interest are usually individual plants or animals, and the measure of abundance can be, for example, number of individuals, biomass or coverage. In information science, the entities can be characters and the types the different letters of the alphabet. The most commonly used diversity indices are simple transformations of the effective number of types. Each diversity index can be interpreted in its own right as a measure corresponding to some real phenomenon.

mollwollfumble said:

roughbarked said:

So who invents?

I invent. I as in the collection of memes that comprise my mind.

> RUOK

I’m having fun. It’s like a voyage of exploration.
It’s quite amazing how a simple little idea can bloom into a full-blown philosophy.

The above post of mine is a framework. A lot more perspiration still to go.

I’m taking the solipsist viewpoint: “the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing”.
I’m taking the Cartesian viewpoint: “cogito ego sum”.
I’m taking Blackmore’s viewpoint: memes are replicators.
I’m taking the transactional definition of life: life assimilates, grows, reproduces and dies
I’m taking the historical linguist’s viewpoint: the world’s languages didn’t evolve from primitive gestures and grunts but arrived fully formed with grammar and syntax.
I’m also taking the viewpoint that replication cannot be sufficiently accurate without a simplified encoding of information into a string.

I’m putting the above puzzle pieces together.

“Semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. The two main areas are logical semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference and presupposition and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them.”

I haven’t yet dealt with the taxonomy of memes. Not all memes are equal, any more than all RNA strands are equal.

I haven’t yet dealt with the time problem. The answer to the time problem seems obvious – the simulation began synchronously with lexical semantics – but this is not necessarily correct.

If both truth and fiction are part of an invented reality, how can I distinguish between the two?

Solipsism is extreme egocentricity. Is it possible to construct a good morality within the solipsist framework?

Nearly there, apart from looking more closely into Rev Dodgson’s second paradox that can be summarised as “what do I eat?”

I’ve done the time problem, truth and fiction. good morality.

> I haven’t yet dealt with the taxonomy of memes. Not all memes are equal, any more than all RNA strands are equal.

Talk about opening a can of worms! It’s hard to know even where to start. Where there are several ways to categorise memes, I’m going to take the simplest possible approach. Let’s keep the accepted historical time framework, and ignore any aspects of meme replication.

I’m going to define a “meme” as a picture with words, this is not the standard definition of meme so feel free to give it a different name. I create this definition fully aware of the analogy between ‘words and picture’ and ‘nucleic acid and protein’. Even with such a simple definition, does it include a signature as picture and words? A picture title for an unsigned picture? Does it include calligraphy as both? Does it include a corporate logo as a picture? Let’s say ‘yes’ in all cases of doubt.

Protomemes. These are relatively easy to enumerate:

• Grunts and gestures.
• Talk and gesture.
• Song and dance.
• A message stick (picture) with associated verbal message (words). Without the words this ceases to be a meme, until it’s given a description in a museum.
• Smoke signals, while they last.
• Emoji.

An unsigned picture without a title, such as cave art, painting or photo, is not a meme, until it gets given a description or title at a later date. Ancient writing is not a meme until it gets photographed or sketched. This web post is not a meme until a picture is added.

So let me cast my net into the ocean of uncertainty and see what gets hauled in:

• Egyptian tombs, with hieroglyphs and pictures.
• Illuminated manuscripts.
• A treatise on geometry.
• A stage play.
• Chinese calligraphy.
• Museum exhibits.
• Islamic calligraphy.
• Signed art, signed documents.
• Scientific illustrations.
• Cartoons.
• Picture books.
• Graffiti.
• TV.
• A document with corporate or government logo.
• An advertisement.
• A conference presentation.
• A web page with logo.

That’s a much smaller haul than I expected. Actually not all what I expected – I expected a distinction between true and fiction, contract, law, historical documents, etc but that’s not at all what ended up in the net.

God couldn’t possibly have made any of these suggested mistakes due to the fact that there is no evidence of God at all.

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

roughbarked said:

So who invents?

I invent. I as in the collection of memes that comprise my mind.

> RUOK

I’m having fun. It’s like a voyage of exploration.
It’s quite amazing how a simple little idea can bloom into a full-blown philosophy.

The above post of mine is a framework. A lot more perspiration still to go.

I’m taking the solipsist viewpoint: “the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing”.
I’m taking the Cartesian viewpoint: “cogito ego sum”.
I’m taking Blackmore’s viewpoint: memes are replicators.
I’m taking the transactional definition of life: life assimilates, grows, reproduces and dies
I’m taking the historical linguist’s viewpoint: the world’s languages didn’t evolve from primitive gestures and grunts but arrived fully formed with grammar and syntax.
I’m also taking the viewpoint that replication cannot be sufficiently accurate without a simplified encoding of information into a string.

I’m putting the above puzzle pieces together.

“Semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. The two main areas are logical semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference and presupposition and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them.”

I haven’t yet dealt with the taxonomy of memes. Not all memes are equal, any more than all RNA strands are equal.

I haven’t yet dealt with the time problem. The answer to the time problem seems obvious – the simulation began synchronously with lexical semantics – but this is not necessarily correct.

If both truth and fiction are part of an invented reality, how can I distinguish between the two?

Solipsism is extreme egocentricity. Is it possible to construct a good morality within the solipsist framework?

Nearly there, apart from looking more closely into Rev Dodgson’s second paradox that can be summarised as “what do I eat?”

I’ve done the time problem, truth and fiction. good morality.

> I haven’t yet dealt with the taxonomy of memes. Not all memes are equal, any more than all RNA strands are equal.

Talk about opening a can of worms! It’s hard to know even where to start. Where there are several ways to categorise memes, I’m going to take the simplest possible approach. Let’s keep the accepted historical time framework, and ignore any aspects of meme replication.

I’m going to define a “meme” as a picture with words, this is not the standard definition of meme so feel free to give it a different name. I create this definition fully aware of the analogy between ‘words and picture’ and ‘nucleic acid and protein’. Even with such a simple definition, does it include a signature as picture and words? A picture title for an unsigned picture? Does it include calligraphy as both? Does it include a corporate logo as a picture? Let’s say ‘yes’ in all cases of doubt.

Protomemes. These are relatively easy to enumerate:

• Grunts and gestures.
• Talk and gesture.
• Song and dance.
• A message stick (picture) with associated verbal message (words). Without the words this ceases to be a meme, until it’s given a description in a museum.
• Smoke signals, while they last.
• Emoji.

An unsigned picture without a title, such as cave art, painting or photo, is not a meme, until it gets given a description or title at a later date. Ancient writing is not a meme until it gets photographed or sketched. This web post is not a meme until a picture is added.

So let me cast my net into the ocean of uncertainty and see what gets hauled in:

• Egyptian tombs, with hieroglyphs and pictures.
• Illuminated manuscripts.
• A treatise on geometry.
• A stage play.
• Chinese calligraphy.
• Museum exhibits.
• Islamic calligraphy.
• Signed art, signed documents.
• Scientific illustrations.
• Cartoons.
• Picture books.
• Graffiti.
• TV.
• A document with corporate or government logo.
• An advertisement.
• A conference presentation.
• A web page with logo.

That’s a much smaller haul than I expected. Actually not all what I expected – I expected a distinction between true and fiction, contract, law, historical documents, etc but that’s not at all what ended up in the net.

Missed one

• Map

PS, If you’ve just tuned in and are wondering what this has to do with God’s greatest mistakes. I initially argued that paradoxes in science/nature mean that it’s easier to abandon science completely, that paradoxes in religion also mean the abandonment of religion. Which only leaves solipsism, the philosophy that only I exist. The “I” here has to be mental rather than physical, a physical “I” would die rapidly in an environmental vacuum. And from that I claim that the only true lifeforms are the memes, which grok, grow, reproduce and die, just like the biological lifeforms are supposed to do.

I am now into the categorisation and evolution of memes.

making only one of me.

JudgeMental said:

making only one of me.

Each of us is our own nationalistic socialist?

JudgeMental said:

making only one of me.

Fixed your error for you.

:)

captain_spalding said:

JudgeMental said:

making only one of me.

Fixed your error for you.

:)

Did you use a proper bolted bracing plate?

I have no idea what the last 3 posts are on about.

(Not saying I have much idea about any of the previous ones, but the comprehension isn’t zero).

The Rev Dodgson said:

I have no idea what the last 3 posts are on about.

(Not saying I have much idea about any of the previous ones, but the comprehension isn’t zero).

is it one?

roughbarked said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

I have no idea what the last 3 posts are on about.

(Not saying I have much idea about any of the previous ones, but the comprehension isn’t zero).

is it one?

It’s not one for anything.

The Rev Dodgson said:

roughbarked said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

I have no idea what the last 3 posts are on about.

(Not saying I have much idea about any of the previous ones, but the comprehension isn’t zero).

is it one?

It’s not one for anything.

:)

roughbarked said:

JudgeMental said:

making only one of me.

Each of us is our own nationalistic socialist?

I suppose so.

roughbarked said:

captain_spalding said:

JudgeMental said:

making only one of me.

Fixed your error for you.

:)

Did you use a proper bolted bracing plate?

LOL. The self-made man. Without a proper bracing plate where would he be.

This is priceless!
It has to be up there as one of the God’s greatest mistakes.

The earliest graffiti with words and picture …
Is also the earliest depiction of Jesus …
And the first political cartoon. Jesus is drawn with the head of a donkey.

This deserves to be better known.
I can’t think why all the TV programs on early Christianity don’t feature this. LOL.

It’s from 200 AD and is called the Alexamenos graffito.

mollwollfumble said:

This is priceless!
It has to be up there as one of the God’s greatest mistakes.

The earliest graffiti with words and picture …
Is also the earliest depiction of Jesus …
And the first political cartoon. Jesus is drawn with the head of a donkey.

This deserves to be better known.
I can’t think why all the TV programs on early Christianity don’t feature this. LOL.

It’s from 200 AD and is called the Alexamenos graffito.

Let’s put some tentative dates on these.

Protomemes
370 million years ago. Grunts and gestures.
330 million years ago. Song and dance.
80,000 BC. Talk and gesture.
80,000 BC. Smoke signals.
3,100 BC. Autograph.
1840. A message stick (picture) with associated verbal message (words). This is the date these were first noticed by Europeans.
1972. Emoji.

Words and Pictures
3,500 BC. Cylinder seals, the progenitor of the autograph and corporate logo (Uruk period).
3,100 BC. Egyptian tombs, with heiroglyphs and pictures (first Dynasty).
3,000 BC. A treatise on geometry (in Babylonian).
2,500 BC. Map with labels (Akkadian Gasur).
2,200 BC. Architectural drawing (Statue of Gudea in Lagash).
530 BC. Museum exhibits (Ennigaldi-Nanna in Babylon).
484 BC. A stage play (Aeschylus).
315 BC. Scientific illustrations (Herophilos).
206 BC. Chinese caligraphy (Han dynasty).
200 AD. Graffiti, with words and picture, political cartoon (Alexamenos graffito).
400 AD. Illuminated manuscripts.
700 AD. Islamic caligraphy (Quba Mosque).
1063. Signed documents (El Cid).
1366. Corporate logo with words and picture (Stella Artois)
1400. Signed art (Early Renaissance).
1520. Book title page with image.
1658. Picture books (Orbis Pictus).
1818. Printed illustrated book cover.
1895. Cinema (Lumiere).
1926. TV (Farnsworth).
1992. Photo with text on the intenet (Les Horribles Cernettes).

I did try to trace back the origins of memes in advertising, but advertising is so ancient that I couldn’t. It evolved from cylinder seals from 3,500 BC. Advertising had made its way into bronze and iron age makers marks, into ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and ancient China. Advertising is known from Pompeii and ancient Rome. It was popular in Medieval England. The second printed document by William Caxton was an advertisement. Etc.

Where do you get your 80,000 years for “talk and gesture” from?

I’d be surprised if it wasn’t much earlier than that.

Not that I know anything about it.

mollwollfumble said:

This is priceless!
It has to be up there as one of the God’s greatest mistakes.

The earliest graffiti with words and picture …
Is also the earliest depiction of Jesus …
And the first political cartoon. Jesus is drawn with the head of a donkey.

This deserves to be better known.
I can’t think why all the TV programs on early Christianity don’t feature this. LOL.

It’s from 200 AD and is called the Alexamenos graffito.

What is the evidence that’s supposed to be Jesus?

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

This is priceless!
It has to be up there as one of the God’s greatest mistakes.

The earliest graffiti with words and picture …
Is also the earliest depiction of Jesus …
And the first political cartoon. Jesus is drawn with the head of a donkey.

This deserves to be better known.
I can’t think why all the TV programs on early Christianity don’t feature this. LOL.

It’s from 200 AD and is called the Alexamenos graffito.

What is the evidence that’s supposed to be Jesus?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito#Interpretation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito

>The Alexamenos graffito (also known as the graffito blasfemo, or blasphemous graffito):393 is a piece of Roman graffiti scratched in plaster on the wall of a room near the Palatine Hill in Rome, which has now been removed and is in the Palatine Hill Museum. It may be the earliest surviving depiction of Jesus and, if so, competes with an engraved gem as the earliest known pictorial representation of the Crucifixion of Jesus. It is hard to date, but has been estimated to have been made c. 200. The image seems to show a young man worshipping a crucified, donkey-headed figure. The Greek inscription approximately translates to “Alexamenos worships god,” indicating that the graffito was apparently meant to mock a Christian named Alexamenos.

Bubblecar said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito

>The Alexamenos graffito (also known as the graffito blasfemo, or blasphemous graffito):393 is a piece of Roman graffiti scratched in plaster on the wall of a room near the Palatine Hill in Rome, which has now been removed and is in the Palatine Hill Museum. It may be the earliest surviving depiction of Jesus and, if so, competes with an engraved gem as the earliest known pictorial representation of the Crucifixion of Jesus. It is hard to date, but has been estimated to have been made c. 200. The image seems to show a young man worshipping a crucified, donkey-headed figure. The Greek inscription approximately translates to “Alexamenos worships god,” indicating that the graffito was apparently meant to mock a Christian named Alexamenos.

Humph.

‘spose it could be.

(It does look more like a cross in the clearer image)

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

This is priceless!
It has to be up there as one of the God’s greatest mistakes.

The earliest graffiti with words and picture …
Is also the earliest depiction of Jesus …
And the first political cartoon. Jesus is drawn with the head of a donkey.

This deserves to be better known.
I can’t think why all the TV programs on early Christianity don’t feature this. LOL.

It’s from 200 AD and is called the Alexamenos graffito.

What is the evidence that’s supposed to be Jesus?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito

mollwollfumble said:

I can’t think why all the TV programs on early Christianity don’t feature this. LOL.

Don’t ask me, I’m still wondering why The Flintstones celebrate Christmas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Flintstone_Christmas

Divine Angel said:

mollwollfumble said:

I can’t think why all the TV programs on early Christianity don’t feature this. LOL.

Don’t ask me, I’m still wondering why The Flintstones celebrate Christmas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Flintstone_Christmas

The same reason they have a 1950’s USA suburban lifestyle, but still mix with dinosaurs, I suppose.

Bubblecar said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito

>The Alexamenos graffito (also known as the graffito blasfemo, or blasphemous graffito):393 is a piece of Roman graffiti scratched in plaster on the wall of a room near the Palatine Hill in Rome, which has now been removed and is in the Palatine Hill Museum. It may be the earliest surviving depiction of Jesus and, if so, competes with an engraved gem as the earliest known pictorial representation of the Crucifixion of Jesus. It is hard to date, but has been estimated to have been made c. 200. The image seems to show a young man worshipping a crucified, donkey-headed figure. The Greek inscription approximately translates to “Alexamenos worships god,” indicating that the graffito was apparently meant to mock a Christian named Alexamenos.

cheers

dv said:

Too right!

Michael V said:

dv said:

Too right!

Looks like bs to me.
They still have a huge gun problem & Afghanistan is still at war so I don’t see the health care system being given the overhaul it needs.

Tamb said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

Too right!

Looks like bs to me.
They still have a huge gun problem & Afghanistan is still at war so I don’t see the health care system being given the overhaul it needs.

Christ, man …

That’s the point of the tweet.

dv said:

Tamb said:

Michael V said:

Too right!

Looks like bs to me.
They still have a huge gun problem & Afghanistan is still at war so I don’t see the health care system being given the overhaul it needs.

Christ, man …

That’s the point of the tweet.

Oh Duh. Brain fade. Lack of alcohol.

Tamb said:

dv said:

Tamb said:

Looks like bs to me.
They still have a huge gun problem & Afghanistan is still at war so I don’t see the health care system being given the overhaul it needs.

Christ, man …

That’s the point of the tweet.

Oh Duh. Brain fade. Lack of alcohol.

Fefefefefe!

Tamb said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

Too right!

Looks like bs to me.
They still have a huge gun problem & Afghanistan is still at war so I don’t see the health care system being given the overhaul it needs.

I think that’s the point of the comment…

The Rev Dodgson said:

Where do you get your 80,000 years for “talk and gesture” from?

I’d be surprised if it wasn’t much earlier than that.

Not that I know anything about it.

Could have been much earlier. It’s only based on the approximate date of divergence of the syntactic aboriginal languages (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.) from the syntactic african languages. African people diverged earlier than that but language could have spread across cultures there, whereas the spread of African languages to Australia at a later date (eg. 20,000 BC) seems less likely.

Add in:
600 BC. Metal coins (Lydia).
1023. Banknote (Jiaozi wu, Song Dynasty).

Given the antiquity of advertising (evolved from cylinder seals circa 35,000 BC). Perhaps an evolution of memes could be seen as equivalent to an evolution of advertising.

mollwollfumble said:

> If both truth and fiction are part of an invented reality, how can I distinguish between the two?

Let’s start by brainstorming, casting around for random thoughts.

Quote from somebody: “Respect the truth. This is a profound statement when you realise just how slippery the truth is”.
Quote from the Hunting of the Snark: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
Truth is everything with a Dewey Decimal classification.
From the two Ronnies “A bookshop in the high street is in trouble today. They had filed the British Rail Timetable under Fiction”.

Perhaps I can use an analogy. Imagine that there are two compartments in the mind called “Truth” and “Fiction”. These compartments produce antibodies that react with new ideas. That new idea gets allocated to the compartment that produces the antibodies that react most strongly. If it were that simple then there would never be a paradigm shift. Instead, ideas are held in these categories by individual links to other thoughts. Enough of these individual links get broken and a whole section can drift from truth to fiction or, less commonly, from fiction to truth.

Is that all there is to it? It can’t be as simple as that.

So, if I was to take the evolution of advertising as a proximate measure of the evolution of memes. Then the evolution of the truth vs fiction in created reality would be approximated by the evolution of truth in advertising. The first written advertising (cylinder seals) was invented as a guardian of the truth.

Which makes me wonder about how much truth/fiction there is in other branches of reality. Branches such as:

stories, technology, science, mathematics, accounting, law, politics, history, religion, newspapers, humour, art, …

How would you rate those for truth/fiction? I’m inclined to rate technology, and possibly even accounting, as having a higher percentage of truth than science and possibly even mathematics.

How think you?

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Where do you get your 80,000 years for “talk and gesture” from?

I’d be surprised if it wasn’t much earlier than that.

Not that I know anything about it.

Could have been much earlier. It’s only based on the approximate date of divergence of the syntactic aboriginal languages (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.) from the syntactic african languages. African people diverged earlier than that but language could have spread across cultures there, whereas the spread of African languages to Australia at a later date (eg. 20,000 BC) seems less likely.

Add in:
600 BC. Metal coins (Lydia).
1023. Banknote (Jiaozi wu, Song Dynasty).

Given the antiquity of advertising (evolved from cylinder seals circa 35,000 BC). Perhaps an evolution of memes could be seen as equivalent to an evolution of advertising.

mollwollfumble said:

> If both truth and fiction are part of an invented reality, how can I distinguish between the two?

Let’s start by brainstorming, casting around for random thoughts.

Quote from somebody: “Respect the truth. This is a profound statement when you realise just how slippery the truth is”.
Quote from the Hunting of the Snark: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
Truth is everything with a Dewey Decimal classification.
From the two Ronnies “A bookshop in the high street is in trouble today. They had filed the British Rail Timetable under Fiction”.

Perhaps I can use an analogy. Imagine that there are two compartments in the mind called “Truth” and “Fiction”. These compartments produce antibodies that react with new ideas. That new idea gets allocated to the compartment that produces the antibodies that react most strongly. If it were that simple then there would never be a paradigm shift. Instead, ideas are held in these categories by individual links to other thoughts. Enough of these individual links get broken and a whole section can drift from truth to fiction or, less commonly, from fiction to truth.

Is that all there is to it? It can’t be as simple as that.

So, if I was to take the evolution of advertising as a proximate measure of the evolution of memes. Then the evolution of the truth vs fiction in created reality would be approximated by the evolution of truth in advertising. The first written advertising (cylinder seals) was invented as a guardian of the truth.

Which makes me wonder about how much truth/fiction there is in other branches of reality. Branches such as:

stories, technology, science, mathematics, accounting, law, politics, history, religion, newspapers, humour, art, …

How would you rate those for truth/fiction? I’m inclined to rate technology, and possibly even accounting, as having a higher percentage of truth than science and possibly even mathematics.

How think you?

It’s back to summary time.

Starting from the solipsist philosophy and Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. I get:

• meme as replicant
• a look at how morality translates into this framework, considering others as alter egos
• temporary definition of meme as text plus pictures
• taking the easy way out – a timescale
• a search for truth vs fiction

Questions still requiring an answer include:

• Rev Dodgson’s second paradox, which I’ll express as “if I am all that exists, what do I eat?”
• What replicates?
• What evolves?
• Using the analogy between the evolution of memes and prebiology, what does the replication and evolution of memes tell us about the origins of biological life?
• Can I get anything valuable here out of the application of Shannon entropy and the Diversity Index?

I haven’t yet:

• Had a good read of https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-meaning-of-life-2/
• Of the original “God’s greatest mistakes”, I’ve listed how many, fifteen or so? I haven’t explained any of them.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Where do you get your 80,000 years for “talk and gesture” from?

I’d be surprised if it wasn’t much earlier than that.

Not that I know anything about it.

Could have been much earlier. It’s only based on the approximate date of divergence of the syntactic aboriginal languages (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.) from the syntactic african languages. African people diverged earlier than that but language could have spread across cultures there, whereas the spread of African languages to Australia at a later date (eg. 20,000 BC) seems less likely.

Add in:
600 BC. Metal coins (Lydia).
1023. Banknote (Jiaozi wu, Song Dynasty).

Given the antiquity of advertising (evolved from cylinder seals circa 35,000 BC). Perhaps an evolution of memes could be seen as equivalent to an evolution of advertising.

mollwollfumble said:

> If both truth and fiction are part of an invented reality, how can I distinguish between the two?

Let’s start by brainstorming, casting around for random thoughts.

Quote from somebody: “Respect the truth. This is a profound statement when you realise just how slippery the truth is”.
Quote from the Hunting of the Snark: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
Truth is everything with a Dewey Decimal classification.
From the two Ronnies “A bookshop in the high street is in trouble today. They had filed the British Rail Timetable under Fiction”.

Perhaps I can use an analogy. Imagine that there are two compartments in the mind called “Truth” and “Fiction”. These compartments produce antibodies that react with new ideas. That new idea gets allocated to the compartment that produces the antibodies that react most strongly. If it were that simple then there would never be a paradigm shift. Instead, ideas are held in these categories by individual links to other thoughts. Enough of these individual links get broken and a whole section can drift from truth to fiction or, less commonly, from fiction to truth.

Is that all there is to it? It can’t be as simple as that.

So, if I was to take the evolution of advertising as a proximate measure of the evolution of memes. Then the evolution of the truth vs fiction in created reality would be approximated by the evolution of truth in advertising. The first written advertising (cylinder seals) was invented as a guardian of the truth.

Which makes me wonder about how much truth/fiction there is in other branches of reality. Branches such as:

stories, technology, science, mathematics, accounting, law, politics, history, religion, newspapers, humour, art, …

How would you rate those for truth/fiction? I’m inclined to rate technology, and possibly even accounting, as having a higher percentage of truth than science and possibly even mathematics.

How think you?

It’s back to summary time.

Starting from the solipsist philosophy and Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. I get:

• meme as replicant
• a look at how morality translates into this framework, considering others as alter egos
• temporary definition of meme as text plus pictures
• taking the easy way out – a timescale
• a search for truth vs fiction

Questions still requiring an answer include:

• Rev Dodgson’s second paradox, which I’ll express as “if I am all that exists, what do I eat?”
• What replicates?
• What evolves?
• Using the analogy between the evolution of memes and prebiology, what does the replication and evolution of memes tell us about the origins of biological life?
• Can I get anything valuable here out of the application of Shannon entropy and the Diversity Index?

I haven’t yet:

• Had a good read of https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-meaning-of-life-2/
• Of the original “God’s greatest mistakes”, I’ve listed how many, fifteen or so? I haven’t explained any of them.

PermeateFree said:

The meme in action

> furious & SCIENCE said:
> Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. … Evolving into humans

What is about mankind that made “coming down from the trees in the first place” a big mistake? This leads to the question “what separates mankind from animals”?

“what makes us different from animals is we don’t use our tongues to clean our own genitals”, Red Dwarf
“the species divide”
“and they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. … and the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons”, Genesis
“dogs admire humans because humans can throw”, mollwollfumble
“use of a bone as a club – technology”, 2001 a Space Odyssey
“Noam Chomsky, a proponent of discontinuity theory, argues that a single chance mutation occurred in one individual in the order of 100,000 years ago, installing the language faculty (a component of the mid-brain) in “perfect” or “near-perfect” form.”

A different idea has come to me now, “trade”. I don’t know of any animals that engage in trade.
The first trade would have been the dowry.
The first “money” would have been food.
If Australian aborigines are anything to go by, the earliest dowries were rental agreements rather than outright purchases.
Following that, the next item of trade would be of narcotics.
And then weapons technology, both raw materials and finished products.

Trade, technology and “language faculty” then, are all so old that they can’t be separated. All humans have all, no nonhumans have any. Any one of the three could be what made “coming down from the trees in the first place” a big mistake. However, I have to add that the only explanation that was literally a consequence coming down from the trees is the ability to throw.

The next major transition then would have been from “hunter gatherer” to “slash and burn” … Or not … Animal domestication seems to have occurred between the two, animals such as hunting dogs. Not animal breeding, that came later.

¿What does “slash and burn” and “hunting dogs” have to do with memes, I hear you ask. Only in the sense of the evolution of the mind.

>Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.

whoever said that, not that matters, I took it to mean (as humor) that regret has a creeping tendency, like some philosopher said once, if you regret one thing it tends toward regretting everything. The other part of it was maybe a reflection on this self-aware consciousness business, how varied it is, and what an unfinished business that is, perhaps a perpetual foible machine

>dogs admire humans because humans can throw

domestic dogs (the smarter of them) want to understand their nearest family, need to, which most often is humans. They (domestic canines) often exhibit an evident desire to understand humans, they have a what and why faculty (of behavior), an interest that way, some native psychological mindedness in fact, it could be said. They’re substantially receptive and understanding of moods, and even mental states it might be argued. Sleep’s not properly a mood, it’s a mental state, dogs understand sleep, even twilight states

mollwollfumble said:

> furious & SCIENCE said:
> Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. … Evolving into humans

What is about mankind that made “coming down from the trees in the first place” a big mistake? This leads to the question “what separates mankind from animals”?

“what makes us different from animals is we don’t use our tongues to clean our own genitals”, Red Dwarf
“the species divide”
“and they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. … and the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons”, Genesis
“dogs admire humans because humans can throw”, mollwollfumble
“use of a bone as a club – technology”, 2001 a Space Odyssey
“Noam Chomsky, a proponent of discontinuity theory, argues that a single chance mutation occurred in one individual in the order of 100,000 years ago, installing the language faculty (a component of the mid-brain) in “perfect” or “near-perfect” form.”

A different idea has come to me now, “trade”. I don’t know of any animals that engage in trade.
The first trade would have been the dowry.
The first “money” would have been food.
If Australian aborigines are anything to go by, the earliest dowries were rental agreements rather than outright purchases.
Following that, the next item of trade would be of narcotics.
And then weapons technology, both raw materials and finished products.

Trade, technology and “language faculty” then, are all so old that they can’t be separated. All humans have all, no nonhumans have any. Any one of the three could be what made “coming down from the trees in the first place” a big mistake. However, I have to add that the only explanation that was literally a consequence coming down from the trees is the ability to throw.

The next major transition then would have been from “hunter gatherer” to “slash and burn” … Or not … Animal domestication seems to have occurred between the two, animals such as hunting dogs. Not animal breeding, that came later.

¿What does “slash and burn” and “hunting dogs” have to do with memes, I hear you ask. Only in the sense of the evolution of the mind.

transition said:

>Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.

whoever said that, not that matters, I took it to mean (as humor) that regret has a creeping tendency, like some philosopher said once, if you regret one thing it tends toward regretting everything. The other part of it was maybe a reflection on this self-aware consciousness business, how varied it is, and what an unfinished business that is, perhaps a perpetual foible machine

>dogs admire humans because humans can throw

domestic dogs (the smarter of them) want to understand their nearest family, need to, which most often is humans. They (domestic canines) often exhibit an evident desire to understand humans, they have a what and why faculty (of behavior), an interest that way, some native psychological mindedness in fact, it could be said. They’re substantially receptive and understanding of moods, and even mental states it might be argued. Sleep’s not properly a mood, it’s a mental state, dogs understand sleep, even twilight states

Thanks, that’s insightful, particularly the bits about “perpetual foible machine”, “tendency towards regretting”, and “dogs understand sleep, even twilight states”.

Trade is not a first option, though. Satisfaction of desire in humans tends to go through the stages:

If you can, kill.
If you can’t kill alone, kill cooperatively.
If you can’t kill cooperatively, steal.
If you can’t steal, beg.
If begging doesn’t work, trade.
If trading doesn’t work, farm animals.
If farming animals doesn’t work, farm plants.

Animals tend to stop at begging.

Mrs m got a book for her birthday (today) called “Success”

It’s very solipsist, almost startlingly so.

What’s the difference. Well, if I would say “the secret to success is to chop down trees, wear high heels, suspenders and a bra” then that is the opposite of solipsist, it assumes a real world outside of self and alter egos.

But the Success book starts with:

“They are able who think they are able”, Virgil
“The thing always happens that you really believer in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen”, Frank Lloyd Wright
“The secret of making something work in your lives is first of all the deep desire to make it work .. without one thought of doubt or disbelief”
“One of the greatest of all principles is that men can do what they think they can do”
…
“Belief that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact”
…
“Whether you believe you can do a thing or believe you can’t, you are right”
“Belief is one of the most powerful of all problem dissolvers”
…
“To thine own self be true, and it must follow (that) thou canst not then be false to any man”
etc.
Totally totally solipsist. and totally egocentric.

Other books on practical philosophy and morality are like that, too. Including books “Life’s little instruction book”, “The travelling Leunig”, “The meaning of life”

>Totally totally solipsist. and totally egocentric

dunno, would say actualizing ideas, with composite force of desire, of the many things a person could do (that displace what isn’t and can’t be done as a consequence) is a complex business of humans, part of this consciousness thing, choice an all that, thermodynamics has a say

truth of it is humans don’t do a lot, it’s safer, more comfortable, there are lots of things i’m not doing, I don’t do a lot of things most of the time, I like it mundane, i’m a lover of mundane, mundane can be orderly.

I do enough, plenty in fact, am happy with not doing most things, it’s practical to not do too much, absolutely essential not to try to do everything, or anything

transition said:

>Totally totally solipsist. and totally egocentric

dunno, would say actualizing ideas, with composite force of desire, of the many things a person could do (that displace what isn’t and can’t be done as a consequence) is a complex business of humans, part of this consciousness thing, choice an all that, thermodynamics has a say

truth of it is humans don’t do a lot, it’s safer, more comfortable, there are lots of things i’m not doing, I don’t do a lot of things most of the time, I like it mundane, i’m a lover of mundane, mundane can be orderly.

I do enough, plenty in fact, am happy with not doing most things, it’s practical to not do too much, absolutely essential not to try to do everything, or anything

Yep. I won’t disagree with any of that.

mollwollfumble said:

I’m having fun. It’s like a voyage of exploration.
It’s quite amazing how a simple little idea can bloom into a full-blown philosophy.

The above post of mine is a framework. A lot more perspiration still to go.

I’m taking the solipsist viewpoint: “the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing”.
I’m taking the Cartesian viewpoint: “cogito ego sum”.
I’m taking Blackmore’s viewpoint: memes are replicators.
I’m taking the transactional definition of life: life assimilates, grows, reproduces and dies
I’m taking the historical linguist’s viewpoint: the world’s languages didn’t evolve from primitive gestures and grunts but arrived fully formed with grammar and syntax.
I’m also taking the viewpoint that replication cannot be sufficiently accurate without a simplified encoding of information into a string.

I’m putting the above puzzle pieces together.

> I haven’t yet dealt with the taxonomy of memes. Not all memes are equal, any more than all RNA strands are equal.

Talk about opening a can of worms! It’s hard to know even where to start. Where there are several ways to categorise memes, I’m going to take the simplest possible approach. Let’s keep the accepted historical time framework, and ignore any aspects of meme replication.

I’m going to define a “meme” as a picture with words, this is not the standard definition of meme so feel free to give it a different name. I create this definition fully aware of the analogy between ‘words and picture’ and ‘nucleic acid and protein’. Even with such a simple definition, does it include a signature as picture and words? A picture title for an unsigned picture? Does it include calligraphy as both? Does it include a corporate logo as a picture? Let’s say ‘yes’ in all cases of doubt.

Protomemes. These are relatively easy to enumerate:

• etc.

So let me cast my net into the ocean of uncertainty and see what gets hauled in:

• etc.

PS, If you’ve just tuned in and are wondering what this has to do with God’s greatest mistakes. I initially argued that paradoxes in science/nature mean that it’s easier to abandon science completely, that paradoxes in religion also mean the abandonment of religion. Which only leaves solipsism, the philosophy that only I exist. The “I” here has to be mental rather than physical, a physical “I” would die rapidly in an environmental vacuum. And from that I claim that the only true lifeforms are the memes, which grok, grow, reproduce and die, just like the biological lifeforms are supposed to do.

I am now into the categorisation and evolution of memes.

> I’m going to define a “meme” as a picture with words, this is not the standard definition of meme so feel free to give it a different name.

Now I’m going to abandon that definition of “meme” and deal with four biggies. Each of which could qualify as one of “God’s greatest mistakes”

• Cars
• Languages
• Operating systems
• Religions

And look at each in turn in the context of

• grok
• grow
• reproduce
• die
• evolve

And see if together they can give me any insight into the origin of biological life.

Cars.

Cars grok, reproduce, die and evolve, but they don’t grow (any more than a virus does). A car, once made, doesn’t grow larger during its lifetime, usually. Cars could grow if they had upgrades rather than just repairs.

Unlike a language, operating system or religion, a car has a physical body. This is sometimes open top or convertible, which may have implications for the origin of biological life – what if the first cells had openings rather than being fully enclosed?

There are about 1.4 billion cars. It’s not easy to find out how many families, genus, species and subspecies of car there are. There are something like 55 major genus (brands) from 15 families (brand owners). Parts can sometimes be swapped from family to family. Individual species from one family have a lot of similarity to those from another family. Each car has well-defined components each with a different function and well-defined evolution of its own.

Cars evolved from carts, drawn by animals. Then made by humans. Now can be fully autonomous and fully made by machinery.

Cars grok, after manufacture, liquid fuel or electricity. They also grok road space and parking space.
Cars die, usually. Those that manage massive odometer readings tend to end by hitting a dear.

Languages

To be continued.

mollwollfumble said:

transition said:

>Totally totally solipsist. and totally egocentric

dunno, would say actualizing ideas, with composite force of desire, of the many things a person could do (that displace what isn’t and can’t be done as a consequence) is a complex business of humans, part of this consciousness thing, choice an all that, thermodynamics has a say

truth of it is humans don’t do a lot, it’s safer, more comfortable, there are lots of things i’m not doing, I don’t do a lot of things most of the time, I like it mundane, i’m a lover of mundane, mundane can be orderly.

I do enough, plenty in fact, am happy with not doing most things, it’s practical to not do too much, absolutely essential not to try to do everything, or anything

Yep. I won’t disagree with any of that.

mollwollfumble said:

I’m having fun. It’s like a voyage of exploration.
It’s quite amazing how a simple little idea can bloom into a full-blown philosophy.

The above post of mine is a framework. A lot more perspiration still to go.

I’m taking the solipsist viewpoint: “the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing”.
I’m taking the Cartesian viewpoint: “cogito ego sum”.
I’m taking Blackmore’s viewpoint: memes are replicators.
I’m taking the transactional definition of life: life assimilates, grows, reproduces and dies
I’m taking the historical linguist’s viewpoint: the world’s languages didn’t evolve from primitive gestures and grunts but arrived fully formed with grammar and syntax.
I’m also taking the viewpoint that replication cannot be sufficiently accurate without a simplified encoding of information into a string.

I’m putting the above puzzle pieces together.

> I haven’t yet dealt with the taxonomy of memes. Not all memes are equal, any more than all RNA strands are equal.

Talk about opening a can of worms! It’s hard to know even where to start. Where there are several ways to categorise memes, I’m going to take the simplest possible approach. Let’s keep the accepted historical time framework, and ignore any aspects of meme replication.

I’m going to define a “meme” as a picture with words, this is not the standard definition of meme so feel free to give it a different name. I create this definition fully aware of the analogy between ‘words and picture’ and ‘nucleic acid and protein’. Even with such a simple definition, does it include a signature as picture and words? A picture title for an unsigned picture? Does it include calligraphy as both? Does it include a corporate logo as a picture? Let’s say ‘yes’ in all cases of doubt.

Protomemes. These are relatively easy to enumerate:

• etc.

So let me cast my net into the ocean of uncertainty and see what gets hauled in:

• etc.

PS, If you’ve just tuned in and are wondering what this has to do with God’s greatest mistakes. I initially argued that paradoxes in science/nature mean that it’s easier to abandon science completely, that paradoxes in religion also mean the abandonment of religion. Which only leaves solipsism, the philosophy that only I exist. The “I” here has to be mental rather than physical, a physical “I” would die rapidly in an environmental vacuum. And from that I claim that the only true lifeforms are the memes, which grok, grow, reproduce and die, just like the biological lifeforms are supposed to do.

I am now into the categorisation and evolution of memes.

> I’m going to define a “meme” as a picture with words, this is not the standard definition of meme so feel free to give it a different name.

Now I’m going to abandon that definition of “meme” and deal with four biggies. Each of which could qualify as one of “God’s greatest mistakes”

• Cars
• Languages
• Operating systems
• Religions

And look at each in turn in the context of

• grok
• grow
• reproduce
• die
• evolve

And see if together they can give me any insight into the origin of biological life.

Cars.

Cars grok, reproduce, die and evolve, but they don’t grow (any more than a virus does). A car, once made, doesn’t grow larger during its lifetime, usually. Cars could grow if they had upgrades rather than just repairs.

Unlike a language, operating system or religion, a car has a physical body. This is sometimes open top or convertible, which may have implications for the origin of biological life – what if the first cells had openings rather than being fully enclosed?

There are about 1.4 billion cars. It’s not easy to find out how many families, genus, species and subspecies of car there are. There are something like 55 major genus (brands) from 15 families (brand owners). Parts can sometimes be swapped from family to family. Individual species from one family have a lot of similarity to those from another family. Each car has well-defined components each with a different function and well-defined evolution of its own.

Cars evolved from carts, drawn by animals. Then made by humans. Now can be fully autonomous and fully made by machinery.

Cars grok, after manufacture, liquid fuel or electricity. They also grok road space and parking space.
Cars die, usually. Those that manage massive odometer readings tend to end by hitting a dear.

Languages

To be continued.

OK, I don’t see cars as being memes (although they incorporate many memes), but I’m happy to look at them as a form of life (until proved otherwise).

On that basis, I think the “growth” part of the definition of life is entirely incidental, and entirely unnecessary. It so happens that on this planet all life (other than life manufactured by humans) starts off small and grows, but that’s just how it works here. I can’t see any reason for it to be a requirement.

So let’s remove “growth” from the list of requirements for life.

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

transition said:

>Totally totally solipsist. and totally egocentric

dunno, would say actualizing ideas, with composite force of desire, of the many things a person could do (that displace what isn’t and can’t be done as a consequence) is a complex business of humans, part of this consciousness thing, choice an all that, thermodynamics has a say

truth of it is humans don’t do a lot, it’s safer, more comfortable, there are lots of things i’m not doing, I don’t do a lot of things most of the time, I like it mundane, i’m a lover of mundane, mundane can be orderly.

I do enough, plenty in fact, am happy with not doing most things, it’s practical to not do too much, absolutely essential not to try to do everything, or anything

Yep. I won’t disagree with any of that.

mollwollfumble said:

I’m having fun. It’s like a voyage of exploration.
It’s quite amazing how a simple little idea can bloom into a full-blown philosophy.

The above post of mine is a framework. A lot more perspiration still to go.

I’m taking the solipsist viewpoint: “the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing”.
I’m taking the Cartesian viewpoint: “cogito ego sum”.
I’m taking Blackmore’s viewpoint: memes are replicators.
I’m taking the transactional definition of life: life assimilates, grows, reproduces and dies
I’m taking the historical linguist’s viewpoint: the world’s languages didn’t evolve from primitive gestures and grunts but arrived fully formed with grammar and syntax.
I’m also taking the viewpoint that replication cannot be sufficiently accurate without a simplified encoding of information into a string.

I’m putting the above puzzle pieces together.

> I haven’t yet dealt with the taxonomy of memes. Not all memes are equal, any more than all RNA strands are equal.

Talk about opening a can of worms! It’s hard to know even where to start. Where there are several ways to categorise memes, I’m going to take the simplest possible approach. Let’s keep the accepted historical time framework, and ignore any aspects of meme replication.

I’m going to define a “meme” as a picture with words, this is not the standard definition of meme so feel free to give it a different name. I create this definition fully aware of the analogy between ‘words and picture’ and ‘nucleic acid and protein’. Even with such a simple definition, does it include a signature as picture and words? A picture title for an unsigned picture? Does it include calligraphy as both? Does it include a corporate logo as a picture? Let’s say ‘yes’ in all cases of doubt.

Protomemes. These are relatively easy to enumerate:

• etc.

So let me cast my net into the ocean of uncertainty and see what gets hauled in:

• etc.

PS, If you’ve just tuned in and are wondering what this has to do with God’s greatest mistakes. I initially argued that paradoxes in science/nature mean that it’s easier to abandon science completely, that paradoxes in religion also mean the abandonment of religion. Which only leaves solipsism, the philosophy that only I exist. The “I” here has to be mental rather than physical, a physical “I” would die rapidly in an environmental vacuum. And from that I claim that the only true lifeforms are the memes, which grok, grow, reproduce and die, just like the biological lifeforms are supposed to do.

I am now into the categorisation and evolution of memes.

> I’m going to define a “meme” as a picture with words, this is not the standard definition of meme so feel free to give it a different name.

Now I’m going to abandon that definition of “meme” and deal with four biggies. Each of which could qualify as one of “God’s greatest mistakes”

• Cars
• Languages
• Operating systems
• Religions

And look at each in turn in the context of

• grok
• grow
• reproduce
• die
• evolve

And see if together they can give me any insight into the origin of biological life.

Cars.

Cars grok, reproduce, die and evolve, but they don’t grow (any more than a virus does). A car, once made, doesn’t grow larger during its lifetime, usually. Cars could grow if they had upgrades rather than just repairs.

Unlike a language, operating system or religion, a car has a physical body. This is sometimes open top or convertible, which may have implications for the origin of biological life – what if the first cells had openings rather than being fully enclosed?

There are about 1.4 billion cars. It’s not easy to find out how many families, genus, species and subspecies of car there are. There are something like 55 major genus (brands) from 15 families (brand owners). Parts can sometimes be swapped from family to family. Individual species from one family have a lot of similarity to those from another family. Each car has well-defined components each with a different function and well-defined evolution of its own.

Cars evolved from carts, drawn by animals. Then made by humans. Now can be fully autonomous and fully made by machinery.

Cars grok, after manufacture, liquid fuel or electricity. They also grok road space and parking space.
Cars die, usually. Those that manage massive odometer readings tend to end by hitting a dear.

Languages

To be continued.

OK, I don’t see cars as being memes (although they incorporate many memes), but I’m happy to look at them as a form of life (until proved otherwise).

On that basis, I think the “growth” part of the definition of life is entirely incidental, and entirely unnecessary. It so happens that on this planet all life (other than life manufactured by humans) starts off small and grows, but that’s just how it works here. I can’t see any reason for it to be a requirement.

So let’s remove “growth” from the list of requirements for life.

That’s a very good point. Viruses don’t grow. Growth can be removed from the list of requirements. There’s an aboriginal story about “The Nargun and the stars” in which a Nargun is an intelligent form of life that never grows. Rock-like, once created it always shrinks as it gets older.

But I’m not quite ready to remove it yet. Without growth, that form of life would have to rely on an external creator … perhaps.

Let’s look at the other three first.

Semantic Languages

Roughly 6,500 languages are spoken in the world today. There are 33 official languages in the world, ie. languages that are recognised by governments. Google translate handles 109 written languages, and even that excludes translation between the four main branches of written English (American, UK, Canadian, Australian).

Languages are readily divided like organisms into family, genus, species, subspecies, with extra levels of taxonomy as well.

And even on top of that, there are proper nouns. And there are roughly ten times as many recognised acronyms as dictionary words.

Languages grok. They grok words, speakers and computer memory.

Languages grow. Growth is the the most obvious characteristic of languages. They grow by invention, borrowing, concatenation and acronyms for starters. I did once parse the English wikipedia for words. I found 550,000 words that each occurred more than 100 times in the English Wikipedia. The English dictionary contains 170,000 words.

Languages reproduce by divergence and interbreeding. The reproduction among human languages has slowed down because writing has slowed the rate of divergence, and because the speed of travel has increased. Also, and this is tentative on my part, peace has slowed the rate of divergence. One factor accelerating divergence was the need for a war party to communicate together in a way that the enemy could not understand. Languages also reproduce by reinvention, an imagining of what an extinct language might have been like, such as spoken Hebrew.

What are the most recent human languages? The written Korean alphabet was invented in the year 1446, which would make it the most recent alphabet. Australian Kriol was created circa 1900 to 1908 and only recognised as a separate language in the 1970s.

Languages die. About 6.1% of the 6,909 living languages are considered nearly extinct. This website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction lists languages by date of extinction. 55 languages are listed as becoming extinct in the 21st century.

Languages evolve. Definitely. Particularly when it comes to pronunciation. Linguists will tell you about “vowel shift”. “The best-known example in the English language is the Great Vowel Shift, which began in the 15th century.”

There are also computer languages, but that’s another kettle of worms. As the creation of new human languages declines, so the creation of new computer languages increases.

Can this tell us anything about the origins of biological life? Not much, but language is perhaps the purest of memes, semantic languages are self-created rather than deliberately created by humans. Languages aren’t human-made the way that cars or computer operating systems are. That makes languages self-sustaining, it would be far more difficult for human beings to kill off all semantic languages than kill off all cars or computer operating systems for instance. Languages don’t even need humans to live. They can survive without humans in books, and grow without humans inside computers.

Operating systems

Here’s a starting point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems

To be continued.

Religions

A religion is defined as a “system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”. There are about 4,200 religions in the world.

There’s taxonomy. One website lists 18 groups of world religions. Atheism/Agnosticism, Bahá’í, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Druze, Gnosticism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Shinto, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Traditional African Religions, African Diaspora Religions, Indigenous American Religions. Among Christianity there are Eastern and Western. The next level of taxonomy down is Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Oriental Orthodoxy, Assyrians and possibly Restorationism. Major entities in the next level of taxonomy down from Protestant is Adventists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians. I’m sure you can think of many other religions that are not on the above list, eg. Hillsong, Churches of Christ, Uniting Church in Australia, Salvation Army, Mormon, Quaker, Druid, Cargo Cult, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.

The most obvious feature of religions are their taxonomic diversity. I, personally, don’t see much difference between them. A friend of mine found little difference between
a daoist church and a protestant one for example. Think of that as cross-pollenisation. History is full of religious schisms, among Christians in years 431, in 451, 1054, 1378, 1529, 1534, 1738 etc.

Religions grok what? Brainspace, land, art, paper, wine, time. Not a lot, actually.

Religions grow, initially explosively through evangelism then more slowly as they settle into a rut.

Religions reproduce by binary fission, like bacteria, like languages, not like cars or operating systems. A few religions have reproduced by merging, such as the Sikh and Australian Uniting Churches.

Religions die, but it’s not always clear whether the death is permanent or whether such religions have simply gone into a spore-like state awaiting reawakening at some time in the future. This can happen to any meme that has been committed to paper.

Religions evolve. Sermons, adapting to the times, are causes of change. For instance, some Christian preachers will preach on the evils of pollution and climate change, and do cartwheels to avoid being seen as homophobic, and I don’t see any of those in the Bible. Other Christian preachers will stick closely to the Bible.

On a side note, there are things called “seminaries”. So far as I can tell, the purpose of a seminary is to induce multiple nervous breakdowns in its students, to prepare them for life preaching in a church.

The most defining feature of religions as a meme lifeform is taxonomy created by reproduction by binary fission.

—-

Operating systems

“Operating systems” are a subset of “computer programs”, and also a subset of “generalized semantic languages”. The topic “computer programs” is too vast for me to summarise. The topic “computer viruses” is too hidden for me to summarise. So I’ll stick to “operating systems”.

Here’s a starting point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems

In operating systems, the most obvious feature is the dichotemy between “designed” and “chaotic”. Religions and languages are chaotic. Cars are designed. Major operating systems are Microsoft Windows, Apple’s MacOS, Android and Linux/Unix. They steal features from each other yet remain totally distinct.

There were times when computers, both mainframes and microcomputers, shipped without operating systems and the user had to supply one or make do with machine language (or assembler). Am I right in thinking that each current operating system comes with at least four levels? Using terms loosely, there’s the BIOS, the kernal, development kit and windows operation.

Again loosely, it’s the BIOS that allows an operating system to grok. The kernal allows an operating system to reproduce. The development kit allows an operating system to grow and evolve. The windows operation affects the attractiveness and hence survival. Sort of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems lists about 750 different operating systems. This list excludes non-proprietary Linux distributions. There are in addition about are about 560 different non-proprietary Linux operating systems, including extinct ones. I count 390 extant versions of Linux.

As a general rule, an operating system dies when the hardware running it dies. This is a bit like how a language dies when the number of speakers vanishes. ie. both can be resurrected from documentation but the resurrected form is not not necessarily the same.

The following is Wikipedia’s Linux taxonomy chart. If you think of it as a taxonomy chart for prebiotic organisms, it’s quite interesting. For full chart see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

reading^

thought i’d better read something about it since i’m seeing the grunt writ here yawn

transition said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

reading^

thought i’d better read something about it since i’m seeing the grunt writ here yawn

Thanks for that Mr. t

I thought it was an Australian and just meant to like a lot.

mollwollfumble said:

Religions

A religion is defined as a “system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”.

Coincidentally, I was just reading of Julia Baird’s (failed) attempts to have women recognised as having equal status to men by the Anglican Church in Sydney.

mollwollfumble said:

Religions

A religion is defined as a “system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”. There are about 4,200 religions in the world.

There’s taxonomy. One website lists 18 groups of world religions. Atheism/Agnosticism, Bahá’í, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Druze, Gnosticism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Shinto, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Traditional African Religions, African Diaspora Religions, Indigenous American Religions. Among Christianity there are Eastern and Western. The next level of taxonomy down is Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Oriental Orthodoxy, Assyrians and possibly Restorationism. Major entities in the next level of taxonomy down from Protestant is Adventists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians. I’m sure you can think of many other religions that are not on the above list, eg. Hillsong, Churches of Christ, Uniting Church in Australia, Salvation Army, Mormon, Quaker, Druid, Cargo Cult, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.

The most obvious feature of religions are their taxonomic diversity. I, personally, don’t see much difference between them. A friend of mine found little difference between
a daoist church and a protestant one for example. Think of that as cross-pollenisation. History is full of religious schisms, among Christians in years 431, in 451, 1054, 1378, 1529, 1534, 1738 etc.

Religions grok what? Brainspace, land, art, paper, wine, time. Not a lot, actually.

Religions grow, initially explosively through evangelism then more slowly as they settle into a rut.

Religions reproduce by binary fission, like bacteria, like languages, not like cars or operating systems. A few religions have reproduced by merging, such as the Sikh and Australian Uniting Churches.

Religions die, but it’s not always clear whether the death is permanent or whether such religions have simply gone into a spore-like state awaiting reawakening at some time in the future. This can happen to any meme that has been committed to paper.

Religions evolve. Sermons, adapting to the times, are causes of change. For instance, some Christian preachers will preach on the evils of pollution and climate change, and do cartwheels to avoid being seen as homophobic, and I don’t see any of those in the Bible. Other Christian preachers will stick closely to the Bible.

On a side note, there are things called “seminaries”. So far as I can tell, the purpose of a seminary is to induce multiple nervous breakdowns in its students, to prepare them for life preaching in a church.

The most defining feature of religions as a meme lifeform is taxonomy created by reproduction by binary fission.

—-

Operating systems

“Operating systems” are a subset of “computer programs”, and also a subset of “generalized semantic languages”. The topic “computer programs” is too vast for me to summarise. The topic “computer viruses” is too hidden for me to summarise. So I’ll stick to “operating systems”.

Here’s a starting point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems

In operating systems, the most obvious feature is the dichotemy between “designed” and “chaotic”. Religions and languages are chaotic. Cars are designed. Major operating systems are Microsoft Windows, Apple’s MacOS, Android and Linux/Unix. They steal features from each other yet remain totally distinct.

There were times when computers, both mainframes and microcomputers, shipped without operating systems and the user had to supply one or make do with machine language (or assembler). Am I right in thinking that each current operating system comes with at least four levels? Using terms loosely, there’s the BIOS, the kernal, development kit and windows operation.

Again loosely, it’s the BIOS that allows an operating system to grok. The kernal allows an operating system to reproduce. The development kit allows an operating system to grow and evolve. The windows operation affects the attractiveness and hence survival. Sort of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems lists about 750 different operating systems. This list excludes non-proprietary Linux distributions. There are in addition about are about 560 different non-proprietary Linux operating systems, including extinct ones. I count 390 extant versions of Linux.

As a general rule, an operating system dies when the hardware running it dies. This is a bit like how a language dies when the number of speakers vanishes. ie. both can be resurrected from documentation but the resurrected form is not not necessarily the same.

The following is Wikipedia’s Linux taxonomy chart. If you think of it as a taxonomy chart for prebiotic organisms, it’s quite interesting. For full chart see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg

What was the question again?

The Rev Dodgson said:

transition said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

reading^

thought i’d better read something about it since i’m seeing the grunt writ here yawn

Thanks for that Mr. t

I thought it was an Australian and just meant to like a lot.

Did your hippie experience not include Stranger in a Strange Land and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?

Ian said:

mollwollfumble said:

Religions

A religion is defined as a “system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”. There are about 4,200 religions in the world.

There’s taxonomy. One website lists 18 groups of world religions. Atheism/Agnosticism, Bahá’í, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Druze, Gnosticism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Shinto, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Traditional African Religions, African Diaspora Religions, Indigenous American Religions. Among Christianity there are Eastern and Western. The next level of taxonomy down is Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Oriental Orthodoxy, Assyrians and possibly Restorationism. Major entities in the next level of taxonomy down from Protestant is Adventists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians. I’m sure you can think of many other religions that are not on the above list, eg. Hillsong, Churches of Christ, Uniting Church in Australia, Salvation Army, Mormon, Quaker, Druid, Cargo Cult, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.

The most obvious feature of religions are their taxonomic diversity. I, personally, don’t see much difference between them. A friend of mine found little difference between
a daoist church and a protestant one for example. Think of that as cross-pollenisation. History is full of religious schisms, among Christians in years 431, in 451, 1054, 1378, 1529, 1534, 1738 etc.

Religions grok what? Brainspace, land, art, paper, wine, time. Not a lot, actually.

Religions grow, initially explosively through evangelism then more slowly as they settle into a rut.

Religions reproduce by binary fission, like bacteria, like languages, not like cars or operating systems. A few religions have reproduced by merging, such as the Sikh and Australian Uniting Churches.

Religions die, but it’s not always clear whether the death is permanent or whether such religions have simply gone into a spore-like state awaiting reawakening at some time in the future. This can happen to any meme that has been committed to paper.

Religions evolve. Sermons, adapting to the times, are causes of change. For instance, some Christian preachers will preach on the evils of pollution and climate change, and do cartwheels to avoid being seen as homophobic, and I don’t see any of those in the Bible. Other Christian preachers will stick closely to the Bible.

On a side note, there are things called “seminaries”. So far as I can tell, the purpose of a seminary is to induce multiple nervous breakdowns in its students, to prepare them for life preaching in a church.

The most defining feature of religions as a meme lifeform is taxonomy created by reproduction by binary fission.

—-

Operating systems

“Operating systems” are a subset of “computer programs”, and also a subset of “generalized semantic languages”. The topic “computer programs” is too vast for me to summarise. The topic “computer viruses” is too hidden for me to summarise. So I’ll stick to “operating systems”.

Here’s a starting point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems

In operating systems, the most obvious feature is the dichotemy between “designed” and “chaotic”. Religions and languages are chaotic. Cars are designed. Major operating systems are Microsoft Windows, Apple’s MacOS, Android and Linux/Unix. They steal features from each other yet remain totally distinct.

There were times when computers, both mainframes and microcomputers, shipped without operating systems and the user had to supply one or make do with machine language (or assembler). Am I right in thinking that each current operating system comes with at least four levels? Using terms loosely, there’s the BIOS, the kernal, development kit and windows operation.

Again loosely, it’s the BIOS that allows an operating system to grok. The kernal allows an operating system to reproduce. The development kit allows an operating system to grow and evolve. The windows operation affects the attractiveness and hence survival. Sort of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems lists about 750 different operating systems. This list excludes non-proprietary Linux distributions. There are in addition about are about 560 different non-proprietary Linux operating systems, including extinct ones. I count 390 extant versions of Linux.

As a general rule, an operating system dies when the hardware running it dies. This is a bit like how a language dies when the number of speakers vanishes. ie. both can be resurrected from documentation but the resurrected form is not not necessarily the same.

The following is Wikipedia’s Linux taxonomy chart. If you think of it as a taxonomy chart for prebiotic organisms, it’s quite interesting. For full chart see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg

What was the question again?

LOLOLOLOL

Ian said:

What was the question again?

The ultimate question? The ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?

“What is life?”

Working on the answer led me to the taxonomy of operating systems, of course.

Time to restart the thread, perhaps.

Something that has tweaked my interest is that “God’s greatest mistake” could be “Oxygen”. Or to be more specific, the O2 molecule. O2 was deadly poison to early life. It is to a lot of technology as well, such as early cars.

Looking for an analogy between early memes (and so far they’re all early memes) and the origins of life has made it abundantly clear how important the role of humans is in the origin of memes. Now that they’re starting to be established, memes can survive better in a computing environment. But first they needed humans.

And there were no humans or human analogues at the time of the origin of the first biological life. God, time travel? Well, let’s not go there yet. Let’s consider the minuscule possibility that scientists may have missed something blindingly obvious.

For the generation of macromolecules, one possibility is high energy (lava, lightning, UV etc.) and evaporation. That’s been well studied.

The other possibility is catalysis. It is now known that every chemical process in living cells requires a catalyst. That’s a startling statement when you think about it, because there are a lot of chemical processes occurring in living cells.

Now when i toss around the word “catalyst” in my mind, it isn’t long before the word “metal” comes to mind. The metals used in contemporary catalysis include platinum, palladium, rhodium, cerium, manganese and nickel. In a world without the oxygen molecule, the more common metals (and semi-metals) would be available, too. Particularly magnesium, sodium, potassium, aluminium, calcium, iron and titanium.

¿Could nanoparticles of these metals catalyse the chemical reactions of protolife, in much the same way that humans catalyse the production of memes. The standard way to produce carbon nanotubes is to use iron nanoparticles to catalyse the reduction of methane to carbon.

Has that been tested in the scientific literature? Almost certainly so, but has it been tested thoroughly enough in an oxygen-free environment?

And that led to an even more radical possibility. Metal-organics can play an important role in life as we know it, particularly in molecules such as chlorophyll and heme. But also recently discovered in a meteorite where iron atoms stabilise a beta-sheet inorganically-produced protein.

The radical possibility is that organic chemists may have missed the blindingly obvious possibility that metal (and semi-metal) salts in an O2-free environment could end up being incorporated in and catalysing the production of the first large organic molecules.

The Miller-Urey experiment was done with distilled water. Has it been redone with dissolved salts? In particular dissolved salts of aluminium, iron and titanium. This is so blindingly obvious a test that it must have been done, but sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked.

I’m surprised The Miller-Urey experiments aren’t done all the time just out of curiosity.

What would be interesting would to be get water ice from say somewhere like a comet bring it back and try it but that’s a lot of effort

mollwollfumble said:

Ian said:

What was the question again?

The ultimate question? The ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?

“What is life?”

Working on the answer led me to the taxonomy of operating systems, of course.

Time to restart the thread, perhaps.

Something that has tweaked my interest is that “God’s greatest mistake” could be “Oxygen”. Or to be more specific, the O2 molecule. O2 was deadly poison to early life. It is to a lot of technology as well, such as early cars.

Looking for an analogy between early memes (and so far they’re all early memes) and the origins of life has made it abundantly clear how important the role of humans is in the origin of memes. Now that they’re starting to be established, memes can survive better in a computing environment. But first they needed humans.

And there were no humans or human analogues at the time of the origin of the first biological life. God, time travel? Well, let’s not go there yet. Let’s consider the minuscule possibility that scientists may have missed something blindingly obvious.

For the generation of macromolecules, one possibility is high energy (lava, lightning, UV etc.) and evaporation. That’s been well studied.

The other possibility is catalysis. It is now known that every chemical process in living cells requires a catalyst. That’s a startling statement when you think about it, because there are a lot of chemical processes occurring in living cells.

Now when i toss around the word “catalyst” in my mind, it isn’t long before the word “metal” comes to mind. The metals used in contemporary catalysis include platinum, palladium, rhodium, cerium, manganese and nickel. In a world without the oxygen molecule, the more common metals (and semi-metals) would be available, too. Particularly magnesium, sodium, potassium, aluminium, calcium, iron and titanium.

¿Could nanoparticles of these metals catalyse the chemical reactions of protolife, in much the same way that humans catalyse the production of memes. The standard way to produce carbon nanotubes is to use iron nanoparticles to catalyse the reduction of methane to carbon.

Has that been tested in the scientific literature? Almost certainly so, but has it been tested thoroughly enough in an oxygen-free environment?

And that led to an even more radical possibility. Metal-organics can play an important role in life as we know it, particularly in molecules such as chlorophyll and heme. But also recently discovered in a meteorite where iron atoms stabilise a beta-sheet inorganically-produced protein.

The radical possibility is that organic chemists may have missed the blindingly obvious possibility that metal (and semi-metal) salts in an O2-free environment could end up being incorporated in and catalysing the production of the first large organic molecules.

The Miller-Urey experiment was done with distilled water. Has it been redone with dissolved salts? In particular dissolved salts of aluminium, iron and titanium. This is so blindingly obvious a test that it must have been done, but sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked.

The 1970s coal to liquids trials in Australia used “Gladstone Red Mud” – the waste stream of from an alumina plant – as catalyst. I’m guessing Gladstone Red Mud has iron and aluminium oxides, silica and clays.

well, it’s not me!!!

JudgeMental said:

well, it’s not me!!!

Prove it!

> The 1970s coal to liquids trials in Australia used “Gladstone Red Mud” – the waste stream of from an alumina plant – as catalyst. I’m guessing Gladstone Red Mud has iron and aluminium oxides, silica and clays.

I am far too familiar with red mud. It’s one of the most “ornery”, to use an Americanism, waste products out there. It holds onto water to form a gelatinous goo that doesn’t dewater without a lot of help. I hadn’t thopught of it as a catalyst.

Cymek said:

I’m surprised The Miller-Urey experiments aren’t done all the time just out of curiosity.

What would be interesting would to be get water ice from say somewhere like a comet bring it back and try it but that’s a lot of effort

There were two immediate criticisms of Miller-Urey at the time. One is that there wasn’t that much lightning around. The other that the primitive earth atmosphere had too much CO and CO2 in it for it to proceed. The first criticism is fair enough.

The second criticism is just plain wrong, the primitive Earth was bathed in a solar-system wide bath of hydrogen until the solar wind eventually purged it from our vicinity. Even then the primitive Earth’s atmosphere had to be hydrogen dominated until such times as Jeans radiation and thermal effects slowly removed the hydrogen from our atmosphere. I don’t care what the rocks say, the rocks that we see now came from way later and are not representative of the earliest Earth.

The second criticism still gets quoted in every article about Miller-Urey. It’s false false false false false. Total myth.

That is why we hardly ever see new variants of Miller-Urey. All the early variants were deliberately designed to produce less product by changing the parameters to be more oxidising (wrong) and dispensing with the electric spark.

The other reason we hardly ever see new variants of Miller-Urey is the chemist’s mantra (eg. the Nobel prizewinning chemist Kornberg said this) of “purify purify purify”, which destroys the complexity before it gets analysed. Miller’s mixtures were hydrolysed before analysis, which would have destroyed all the proteins, deliberately. An exciting exception to that was the waxy deposits of large molecules that built up on the electrodes. These were observed by never analysed. Thinking now, these were metal catalysed because the electrodes were metal.

There have been some fantastically successful variants of Miller-Urey. One from 1974 (or 1976) found abiotically-generated bacteria-sized organic cells with double-layer cell walls in a Miller-Urey experiment. But the chemical make-up of these cell walls was never analysed. And nobody quotes this papers.

I see now that there are a couple of recent articles about metal and metal ions as catalysts for polymerisation. But these still fall foul of the “purify purify purify” mantra by concentrating on a very limited range of monomers.

dv said:

Start of review of Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (SB)

Continued from thread “God’s greatest mistakes”.

By the way, nobody pulled me up on my listing of “cliffs” among God’s greatest mistakes. Consider the Nullarbor cliffs. The sea level fluctuates. It has has only been at the current level for 10,000 years. The Nullarbor cliffs retreat an average of 10 cm a year due to wave action. Over 10,000 years that’s only 100 metres. 100 metres is nowhere near long enough to explain height and strata of the Nullarbor cliffs. Or many other cliff faces around the world. There’s no point in extending the timescale further than that because sea levels were very variable. In a nutshell, proposing that all the world’s current coastlines – beaches, cliffs, etc. – were formed in only 10,000 years is ridiculous.

There is a way around this by adding up different lengths of time at different sea levels, but even that doesn’t work very well, because sea cliffs cease to be sea cliffs whenever the sea level drops.

Book Review “The meme machine”, by SB.

There are many similarities and a few differences with what I’ve said above about, for instance, what separates mankind from the animals, and “I think therefore I am”. It doesn’t stress or even seriously consider solipsism.

SB says early on that what separates mankind from the animals if mankind’s use of imitation. No mention there of imitation in the animal world, such as parroting by parrots, aping by apes, and lyrebirding by lyrebirds. I do concede that humans do a lot of imitating, and that imitation is the key to replication, in this case by memes.

SB says later that “I think therefore I am” only means that each thought has an origin, and allows that the origin of each thought may be different and therefore necessarily an indicator of an all-inclusive “I”. That multiplicity could be taken to indicate that different parts of the brain have different thoughts, or that different mental archaetypes (persona, ego, id, shadow, anima, animus) have different thoughts.

A good point by SB is that we can’t always point to something and say “that is a meme”. For instance we could take Beethoven’s 5th as a meme … or … we could take the just the first four notes of Beethoven’s 5th as the meme. SB coins the term “memeplex” for an interacting collection of memes, such as a language or a religion.

(To be continued).

semantics

>I do concede that humans do a lot of imitating, and that imitation is the key to replication, in this case by memes.

when considering these appealing ideas (ideas about ideas, perhaps involving a recursion-induced poverty of imagination), it’s worth considering the behaviors that limit them, that work in the opposite direction, the social and psychological mechanisms that counter them

resistance to memes tends to be less obvious, less apparent, less demonstrable

transition said:

>I do concede that humans do a lot of imitating, and that imitation is the key to replication, in this case by memes.

when considering these appealing ideas (ideas about ideas, perhaps involving a recursion-induced poverty of imagination), it’s worth considering the behaviors that limit them, that work in the opposite direction, the social and psychological mechanisms that counter them

resistance to memes tends to be less obvious, less apparent, less demonstrable

What a load of rubbish ;)

mollwollfumble said:

Start of review of Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (SB)

Continued from thread “God’s greatest mistakes”.

By the way, nobody pulled me up on my listing of “cliffs” among God’s greatest mistakes. Consider the Nullarbor cliffs. The sea level fluctuates. It has has only been at the current level for 10,000 years. The Nullarbor cliffs retreat an average of 10 cm a year due to wave action. Over 10,000 years that’s only 100 metres. 100 metres is nowhere near long enough to explain height and strata of the Nullarbor cliffs. Or many other cliff faces around the world. There’s no point in extending the timescale further than that because sea levels were very variable. In a nutshell, proposing that all the world’s current coastlines – beaches, cliffs, etc. – were formed in only 10,000 years is ridiculous.

There is a way around this by adding up different lengths of time at different sea levels, but even that doesn’t work very well, because sea cliffs cease to be sea cliffs whenever the sea level drops.

Who claims that all the world’s current coastlines were formed in only 10,000 years?

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

Start of review of Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (SB)

Continued from thread “God’s greatest mistakes”.

By the way, nobody pulled me up on my listing of “cliffs” among God’s greatest mistakes. Consider the Nullarbor cliffs. The sea level fluctuates. It has has only been at the current level for 10,000 years. The Nullarbor cliffs retreat an average of 10 cm a year due to wave action. Over 10,000 years that’s only 100 metres. 100 metres is nowhere near long enough to explain height and strata of the Nullarbor cliffs. Or many other cliff faces around the world. There’s no point in extending the timescale further than that because sea levels were very variable. In a nutshell, proposing that all the world’s current coastlines – beaches, cliffs, etc. – were formed in only 10,000 years is ridiculous.

There is a way around this by adding up different lengths of time at different sea levels, but even that doesn’t work very well, because sea cliffs cease to be sea cliffs whenever the sea level drops.

Who claims that all the world’s current coastlines were formed in only 10,000 years?

Mollwoll?

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

Start of review of Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (SB)

Continued from thread “God’s greatest mistakes”.

By the way, nobody pulled me up on my listing of “cliffs” among God’s greatest mistakes. Consider the Nullarbor cliffs. The sea level fluctuates. It has has only been at the current level for 10,000 years. The Nullarbor cliffs retreat an average of 10 cm a year due to wave action. Over 10,000 years that’s only 100 metres. 100 metres is nowhere near long enough to explain height and strata of the Nullarbor cliffs. Or many other cliff faces around the world. There’s no point in extending the timescale further than that because sea levels were very variable. In a nutshell, proposing that all the world’s current coastlines – beaches, cliffs, etc. – were formed in only 10,000 years is ridiculous.

There is a way around this by adding up different lengths of time at different sea levels, but even that doesn’t work very well, because sea cliffs cease to be sea cliffs whenever the sea level drops.

Who claims that all the world’s current coastlines were formed in only 10,000 years?

slartibartfast?

JudgeMental said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

Start of review of Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (SB)

Continued from thread “God’s greatest mistakes”.

By the way, nobody pulled me up on my listing of “cliffs” among God’s greatest mistakes. Consider the Nullarbor cliffs. The sea level fluctuates. It has has only been at the current level for 10,000 years. The Nullarbor cliffs retreat an average of 10 cm a year due to wave action. Over 10,000 years that’s only 100 metres. 100 metres is nowhere near long enough to explain height and strata of the Nullarbor cliffs. Or many other cliff faces around the world. There’s no point in extending the timescale further than that because sea levels were very variable. In a nutshell, proposing that all the world’s current coastlines – beaches, cliffs, etc. – were formed in only 10,000 years is ridiculous.

There is a way around this by adding up different lengths of time at different sea levels, but even that doesn’t work very well, because sea cliffs cease to be sea cliffs whenever the sea level drops.

Who claims that all the world’s current coastlines were formed in only 10,000 years?

slartibartfast?

Oh well, who am I to argue with two such experts?

>slartibartfast?

chuckle