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Old 10th March 2008, 05:52 AM   #159
wollery
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In order to have a more productive discussion, avoid playing semantic games, and to attempt to learn how your theory came about, I decided to read your website in more detail. I have to be honest, given your lucid writing, and obvious knowledge of how to conduct research, I was was truly staggered by the complete misunderstanding you display of basic scientific principles and and your childish argument against abiogenesis (which you mistakenly conflate with evolution) by probability.

Your misunderstanding of entropy is so complete that you actually have it entirely backwards, as demonstrated by the example you give of a newly hatched chick and a raw egg. In this example you state "It also follows that a just hatched chick is less ordered than a raw egg, as at a constant surrounding temperature only processes can happen in the egg where entropy (disorder) increases." This is entirely wrong. A newly hatched chick is more ordered than a raw egg, since the egg requires an input of energy to form the chick, thus decreasing the entropy of the system. Entropy is actually best thought of not in terms of order or disorder, but in terms of energy states. An increase in entropy is one where the system tends towards the lowest energy state, which in the case of your ten litres of water and ten 10 litre containers is the one in which the water is evenly distributed amongst the containers (think about the gravitational potential of the whole ten litres of water, assuming the containers are all next to each other on level ground).

Your argument against abiogenesis relies on the comparison of the likelihood of rolling 100 dice and getting all 100 come up six to the chance of life getting started on Earth. Ignoring the fact that the start of life is Abiogenesis, not evolution, your argument is childish in its simplicity and its naivety. You say that to be certain of rolling 100 6s would take far more rolls than the number of attempts that would be made if one roll were made on every square metre of Earth since its surface cooled, and even larger than that for a billion planets each in a billion galaxies. This is true, but misses the point - it doesn't require enough throws for certainty, it just has to happen once, and why square metres not square mm, and why once per second not once per nanosecond, and why 100 dice not 50? The answer is, because if it were 50 dice then the number of rolls required would be less than the number of rolls in your example, and changing the units in your example would increase the number of possible throws. This is just a case of fiddling the maths to fit your conclusion.

You invent an a posteriori theory of "Final Laws of Nature" which bears no relation to anything even remotely scientific, citing an example of a gambler having more than his share of luck as evidence. There is no such thing as someone having more than his share of luck. Every person has just as much luck as they have, with there being no measurable average value. This example is a clear case of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Your comparison of mechanical and living systems is thoroughly naive, ignoring huge swathes of research into biology, biomechanics, psychology & computer science.

The section on Spacial Extension of Elementary Particles also reveals a lack of understanding of particle physics. There are specific sizes for the fields of influence for any given particle which can be known a priori by the application of quantum mechanics and electromagnetism, and for larger bodies, by Newtonian or relativistic mechanics. Furthermore, QM places limits on the space into which particular particles can be squashed and still maintain their physical attributes. If the density is increased beyond this point the particles' natures change (I suggest you look up degenerate matter), and thus there is indeed a limit to the number of particles that may be pressed into a given volume, unless you aren't concerned with changing their nature. The wave/particle description of particles is widely accepted as merely a mathematical method of describing their properties. You then make a sudden and unwarranted leap to pair production/annihilation as due to Psychons, for which you present no evidence, but merely assert as a fact. In reality, pair production/annihilation can be explained by QM purely in terms of energy exchanges with no guiding necessary.

The equating of human consciousness with viral and bacterial action is, frankly, laughable, since the reactions of such forms of life are extremely predictable, and based on reaction to stimuli. The section on the nature of life is an exercise in wishful thinking and anthropomorphism of chemicals and particles, the actions of which are well understood in terms of purely mechanistic physics.

You then proceed to leap straight into the evolution of Psychons, offering no evidence for their existence, other than an analogy with photons, and a discussion of the human soul, again with no evidence of the existence of such a thing. You offer former lives as evidence for what you call environment continuity, taking it as read that such a phenomenon exists, again offering no evidence. You then state, "For genes or living beings, if they were not more than highly structured dead matter, it would make no sense to aspire to reproduction and at the same time to lose their identity because of evolutionary adaption and further development.". This sentence is simply wishful thinking, since the drive to reproduce can be explained in purely materialistic terms as a function of life. Any organism which lacks such a drive (or in which the drive is weak) will die out (as is the case for the Giant Panda, the low natural birthrate of which cannot be explained by your psychon theory), so only organisms with that drive will flourish, and in doing so will pass that drive on to the next generation. The rest of that section is just an exercise in wild speculation.

The next section, "The Human Soul" is yet another case of wishful thinking and speculation with no supportive evidence.

In the following section you attribute the formation of fullerenes to psychons, ignoring the rather obvious fact that if such entities did exist they would surely be able to form fullerenes under any conditions, but in reality they only form under specific, well understood conditions, with the physics of their formation being well understood. You also state that there is a limit on the space and resources available to psychons, despite having earlier asserted (erroneously) that there is no limit on the number of particles that may be squeezed into a given volume. Your assessment of the role of psychoanalysis is also severely flawed, apparently based on a misconception of the dynamics of the treatment. As for the rest, telepathy relies heavily on confirmation bias and is completely without evidence, and in fact stage magicians doing cold readings consistently get better results, hypnosis is a well understood psychological phenomenon, psychokinesis like telepathy is utterly without evidence, and spoon bending is a parlour trick.

Your "final devastating argument against reductionism" is about as devastating as a moist haddock. If the condensing of information into smaller encoded packets didn't work you would be unable to post your ramblings on the internet, since it is precisely this principle which allows information to be transmitted at acceptable rates.

In short, your entire argument is an argument from incredulity, full of wishful thinking, anthropomorphism and flights of fancy, and supported by misunderstandings, misconceptions and utterly erroneous science.

I am certain that none of what I have written will alter your conviction that you are right, but until you address the points I've made nobody with any scientific knowledge will do anything more than laugh at your ideas.
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"You're a sick SOB. You know that, Wollery?" - Roadtoad

"Just think how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are even stupider!" --George Carlin

Last edited by wollery; 10th March 2008 at 05:56 AM.
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