>>As I see it, with a purely naturalistic process, you have no means of
preserving
>>"progress" (in the sense of increasing complexity).
>Why not ?
Because whatever chance creates, chance destroys. Try getting Howard's
perfume back into the bottle by chance.
Please show support for your thesis that "what chance creates, chance destroys". I do not consider this self evidentiary, on the contrary.
>Bill: If we assume that the human brain is more complex than an
expanding cloud
>of hydrogen gas, then what we see is a very real and substantial
increase
>in complexity, not an artifact (IMHO).
>
>But is that assumption correct ?
Maybe not; have you ever had a conversation with hydrogen? :-)
So conversation is a measure of complexity ?
And even if it is, what relevance
>does it have ? Nature can create complexity as it does all the time.
Bill: I know, and, as you know, it's the information content which counts.
Does it ? Another unsupported assertion. But we agree at least that Cummins is wrong. Once that obvious fact has been established most tend to swith to "information". If complexity fails, information should stop them for a while. But in the mean time no effort is made to provide a coherent argument why.
>Outside to what ? An outside force can still give a vector but as
>Kevin and others have shown a random walk process with a lower limit
>will give the appearance of increase in complexity.
Bill: There you go. Your "lower limit" is an outside force preventing chance
from destroying what chance created.
So outside forces can be totally natural. And is the lower limit truely an outside force ?