Captain Sorzo, on 28 Apr 2013 - 06:03 AM, said:
"Suppose" being the key word. While the notion of truly sentient artificial intelligence is a fascinating concept, one I enjoy seeing in fiction, there's no proof that such a thing is actually possible. Speculation, perhaps, but until humanity produces a Data or Cortana or whatever, that's all it will ever be. What little reading I've done on the matter indicates many scientists actually consider it impossible.
Our bodies are organic machines, yes, but I believe that the consciousness, the soul, is distinct from the body, a thing not on the physical level of existence. It is tied to the physical, of course, bound in extremely complex ways that I won't pretend to understand to the brain, but that doesn't make it part of the body, a thing that can be divided up into so many atoms. You couldn't just grab however much of various elements and arrange them together in a certain way to get my mind.
Not to mention that would still be biogenesis, life from life. The android would be intelligently designed by its sentient maker, a human being...that wouldn't happen because an explosion in a machine factory. The parts wouldn't magically assemble themselves over time and natural conditions. Instead, they would rust and wither away to dust. If you told someone an android did somehow come out of that rusting junk pile, they'd say you were nuts. Why? Because complex structures don't magically assemble by themselves and the android would be irreducibly complex. It must have been preassembled beforehand in order to function by a group of intelligent designers.
To clarify: a plane is made of over a million parts, and not a single part flies. You need all the engineering to be structured correctly in order to work as a whole. The wings, to the engines, to the uncomfortably cramped toilets have to coexist simultaneously for functionality. If the engine is not there, the wings are useless; if the cockpit is not there; the rest will never be steered to fly, ad nauseum. The simplest life forms are nanotech on scale, and more interpedently complex than any construct to ever be made by man.
I did a fun experiment once while at Mammoth Cave. You see there is a bathroom inside the cave fully functioning with heaters, and blowers, and mirrors, tile, and toilet paper, antiseptic soap, and all forms of plumbing, ect. I smiled and stood boldly in front of the group I was with after we had been discussing evolution. “Behold!” I said. “The greatest example of blind gradualism creating complex structures! You see how over time wind erosion and water erosion created this here toilet, fully functional and fully capable of taking a dump in! ”
They got the point, better yet they got it not through argument and with anger, but a lighthearted “ah-ha.”
Now in the doctrine/hypothesis of macroevolution there is the idea of gradualism, which says life changes slowly over time into different kinds of life (a protazoa becomes a multicellorganism ect.). A common mistake people who are not trained in biology make when using it to defend their arguments about this issue is the misconflation of the concepts of microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution is the change within kinds of life forms, not a change into another life form entirely.
An example would be a pet dog. He came from a wolf but is still in the same family/kind (Canis Lupis/Canis Familiaris). This is not from an increase in genetic code but either a rearrangement or decrease in genetic code and variety. A poodle is nowhere as fit to survive as a wolf, especially in the wild. Or, neither is an isolated gene pool ever as fit to survive as a diverse one (take that Hitler, you dork *blows raspberry*!). Over time genes are filed down to fit a certain environment and only those traits remain dominate in the species gene pool, unless they breed with another filed down gene pool. This is not evolution as commonly conceived, this is speciation. It is the use of prior genetic information coming to the surface in response to the changing environment of the organism. You can see this in all life, even within your own lifetime! If you had a twin and that twin lived in Alaska and you in Brazil, you would look different than your twin and your immune system, thermoregulation, ect., would be different. Why? Because markers on your DNA would express their selves differently within your environment (this is called epigenetics). All this is not gradual macroevolution. No, macroevolution is simple molecules to eventually man. It demands not a different structuring and expression of a gene pool, but a giant leap forward in information and genetic intercomplexity.
In a documentary called a Frog to a Prince a journalist asked Dr. Richard Dawkins (ironically a “strong-empiricist”) if he as a zoologist has, or known of another scientist, that has ever witnessed a single increase in genetic information. Dr. Dawkins remained silent for around a good five seconds, and then admitted such a thing has not ever been witnessed in the whole of science. Instead epigenetics and speciation seem to be the prime mechanism for biological diversity and responding to the challenges of one’s environment, sustainability, and dealing with overall senescence. The atheistic hypothesis/ article of faith known as abiogenesis (life from random chance and non-life) states that macroevolution, one: exists; and two: happened without the aid of intelligent design. An atheist must account for the complexity of the microevolutionary mechanism as well as all other biological schema (neurology, endocrinology, ect) purely by an astronomical amount of gradual random chances processes. Since these organic mechanisms are intercomplex and irreducible entities which need various simultaneously functioning parts to survive, this is impossible.
The other option is that it must somehow spontaneously generate the necessary quaternary (the 4-digit chemical-coding of all life) for the DNA and RNA to build the simplest life, that being single-celled bacteria, which has over 250 complex proteins. Then these magically produced strands of quad must somehow magically order themselves in the appropriate structure. Both these ideas fly in the face of the laws of Thermodynamics, especially the second law. You can only have macroevolution work by a continual series of miracles that somehow contradicts laws like the law of entropy (things are constantly breaking down from simple to complex: eg. food rots to goo). Or of course life was prebuilt intelligently like in creationism, and by way of a predesigned interplay genes and epigenetic markers the adaptation we perceive in species occurs.
By Occam’s razor alone any form of intelligent design be it theo-evolution or creationism is infinitely more credible than atheistic abiogenisis. To presuppose it in the light of the general revelations we have especially obtained in mico-biology, is to be supremely irrational or deceiving for the purpose of fulfilling some subversive desire on the basis of the presupposer .
"DNA is an incredibly detailed language, revealing vast amounts of information encoded in each and every living cell - design which could not have arisen by purely naturalistic means. In every other area of our world, we recodnize that information requires intellgigence and design requires a designer. With our present-day knowledge of DNA, this presents a formidable challange to Darwinian evolution." Charles Thaxton, physical chemist.
"Darwinism is claiming that alll the adaptive structures in nature, all the organisms which have existed throughout history were generated by the accumulation of eniterly undirected mutations. That is an entirely unsubstantiated belief for which there is not the slightest evidence whatsoever." - Molecular Biologist Micheal Denton.
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