Reflectorites
On Fri, 17 Nov 2000 19:06:06 -0600, Susan Brassfield Cogan wrote:
>BV>There is nothing wrong with it, IF creativity actually comes from randomness.
SC>randomness *allows* creativity. It gives you raw material to work with.
>Otherwise everything is determined and there's no such thing as an
>accident, lucky or otherwise. It's the lucky accidents that make life
>interesting. And it's randomness that makes us truly free to choose.
This seems to me to be a basic confusion between "determined" and "random".
Random events are part of a cause and effect chain and so are determined
just like everything else.
"Random" usually means the intersecting of one or more lines of
independent causality, and is simply a label to cover our ignorance. If we
knew everything about the causes, the resulting effect would appear fully
determined to us.
Moreover, "random" in the sense of Darwinism's mutations has a very
special meaning. It does not mean not determined. All it means is not
biased towards adaptive improvement:
"There is a fifth respect in which mutation might have been
nonrandom. We can imagine (just) a form of mutation that was
systematically biased in the direction of improving the animal's
adaptedness to its life. But although we can imagine it, nobody has
ever come close to suggesting any means by which this bias could
come about. It is only in this fifth respect, the 'mutationist' respect,
that the true, real-life Darwinian insists that mutation is random.
Mutation is not systematically biased in the direction of adaptive
improvement, and no mechanism is known (to put the point mildly)
that could guide mutation in directions that are non-random in this
fifth sense. Mutation is random with respect to adaptive advantage,
although it is non-random in all sorts of other respects. It is
selection, and only selection, that directs evolution in directions that
are nonrandom with respect to advantage." (Dawkins R., "The
Blind Watchmaker," 1991, reprint, p.312)
I understand that it is claimed by some versions of quantum mechanics that
at the subatomic level true randomness exists. But it seems to me may be
getting confused between unpredictable and uncaused.
In any event, at the macroscopic level at which we humans and other
biological organisms live, I understand that quantum effects cancel out and
can be ignored.
There is one possible exception and that is in human (and maybe higher
animal) thinking which Penrose claims has a quantum uncertainty
component which may explain free will.
The bottom line is that to us humans life *is* interesting even if "lucky
accidents" are fully determined because to us they are unpredictable and
therefore *seem* random.
*True* randomness would IMHO be like living a horror movie!
[...]
Steve
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"Contemporary religious thinkers often approach the Argument from
Design with a grim determination that their churches shall not again be
made to look foolish. Recalling what happened when churchmen opposed
first Galileo and then Darwin, they insist that religion must be based not on
science but on faith. Philosophy, they announce, has demonstrated that
Design Arguments lack all force. I hope to have shown that philosophy has
demonstrated no such thing. Our universe, which these religious thinkers
believe to be created by God, does look, greatly though this may dismay
them, very much as if created by God." (Leslie J., "Universes", [1989],
Routledge: London, 1996, reprint, p.22)
Stephen E. Jones | Ph. +61 8 9448 7439 | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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