We’re not asking you how the physical brain produces thoughts or information Bill. We’re asking you for the mechanism a mind uses to physically manipulate matter into physical proteins.
Once again we have to chase you all around the board to get you to address the actual question asked.
Non-sequitur as a distraction noted.
Now what mechanism did a mind uses to physically manipulate matter to get your mind-produced sequences into physical form?
Well, because the definition you quoted said mechanism = causally interacting parts + processes that produce one or more effects.
Here’s an example of why this is important:
Say someone sees me sitting at the table sipping some tea, and they ask “how’d that get there?”
If my response was “I thought I’d have tea”, it could be accurate and truthful, and yet of very little value to explain how the tea got to the table. It has a causal agent (me) and an effect (cup of tea sitting at the table), and yet, without the process involved I really can’t say I understand the mechanism by which we went from my thinking about a cup of tea and the tea showing up. I certainly can’t tell whether I did or didn’t cause the tea to be there, can I? It’s just your word against mine.
Now, if I had said, “I thought I’d have some tea, so I grabbed a bag of Earl Grey and used the blue kettle to boil some water, after which I grabbed a cup from the far left cupboard and brewed the tea for 2 minutes.” If you wanted to see if I was telling the truth you could:
If any of those things turns out to be untrue you have reason to doubt my story.
This is why finding some sort of testable ID mechanism (causally interacting parts + processes that produce one or more effects) is important if ID is to be taken seriously as anything other than an ill-formed hypothesis or opinion.
Some of the cellular processes are known as the process of making tea is known. At some point though when you work your way back into the process there will be a point you can’t explain the origin such as the origin elections inside the tea leaves.
The video I posted is a non detailed version of a cellular process called transcription and translation. What is not known is the origin of the first cell of a new type of organism. This is what the ID explanation is directed toward.
As in the description of the cause of gravity (matter) some of the details of the mechanism are unknown but like gravity we can model the effects of the mechanism especially its ability to create unique functional sequences.
As there is a process that the mechanism of gravity (matter) initiates such as the orbit of the planets there is a process that the mechanism of the mind initiates and that is the original condition of a new cell.
Once the initial conditions are properly set up by design then the cellular processes (result of design) can initiate.
I’m not asking you to explain everything, I’m asking you to explain anything.
But what is the scientific ID explanation? How did the first cell get here? As far as I can tell, ID is a criticism (of UCA) and an idea, not an explanation.
You can? Explain the model/mechanism for God’s creation of the first cell? I haven’t read many ID books, perhaps I missed it somewhere.
ID or mind as a mechanism is causal explanation of the first cell and the first of most all biological innovations. There are two problems observed that a mind can solve. A complex arrangement of interdependent parts that perform a function and the genetic information that runs the cellular factory. This is a positive claim of the mechanism that can account for novel biological life.
As we don’t have a complete model or mechanism of God’s creation of gravities mechanism mass, we also don’t have a model for His creation of the first cell or new animal origins. What is identified here is a mechanism we can model that can handle some of the key observed problems facing the origin of these things. As a model mass can handle the problems of the challenge of explaining planetary orbit. Design or mind can explain the origin of organized functional complexity.
I appreciate you methodically working through this discussion. Thanks.
ID and mind aren’t mechanisms Bill no matter how many times you repeat the false claim. You need a mechanism capable of physically manipulating matter to translate your “mind designed” sequences into physical objects.
The last person who claimed a mind alone could do such things was Uri Geller the magician and fake spoon bender. Did you take spoon bending lessons from him?
OK, I’m not trying to whether mind actually solve this or not (that’s a separate question), but we need a way to distinguish between ID’s “solution” and mainstream evolutionary science’s “solution”. So you’re saying that the ID model is:
A mind (intelligence/designer) can account for:
But it seems as if there is still no distinguishable mechanism for how that happens, is that correct? My concern here is if the ID solution is “evolution can’t explain how it happened either”, then it’s a) not very scientific, and b) doesn’t have much utility (apologetic, scientific, or otherwise). That’s why I’m suggesting it needs to be more than a critique of UCA and evolutionary biology.
So far it seems as if the ID model is not detectable by science, which I see as the core tenant of ID. Note, I would have the same critique of UCA if it just said “organisms evolve, so all organisms must have evolved” without some sort of “how”.
Mass isn’t a mechanism. Gravity isn’t a mechanism. Consider this from Wikipedia about black holes:
The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole.
The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although the event horizon has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, no locally detectable features appear to be observed.
Black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses (M☉) may form.
The presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Matter that falls onto a black hole can form an external accretion disk heated by friction, forming some of the brightest objects in the universe. If there are other stars orbiting a black hole, their orbits can be used to determine the black hole’s mass and location. Such observations can be used to exclude possible alternatives such as neutron stars.
Notice how there is a lot of “what” and “how” in this. So if I want a mechanism for “how does a black hole form?” I could say something like:
“When enough mass becomes highly compacted, like when a large star collapses, general relativity tells us it can deform space-time to a sufficient extent that nothing can escape the gravitational pull. Though we can’t see a black hole directly, we can observe its affect on nearby stellar objects and light created from frictional heating of mass just outside the black hole.”
This is the kind of thing I’m looking for ID to produce. OK, God creates the first cell (and cells at major transition points), do we know enough about how he did it to distinguish between the ID model and the UCA/evolution model? So far what I’ve seen is of the “UCA/Evolution can’t explain X” variety, which is not the same thing.
I truly hope that ID folks can figure out a well-defined, testable hypothesis/model that can be put to the test. As a Christian of course I believe God is capable of whatever he wants, the trick is can we tell what he actually did?
I should think the answer is obvious: When you are trying to explain how brain cells came to be, you cannot propose a mechanism that requires that brain cells already exist. No?
This. Bill is saying there was someone there who had learned to do science, using advanced computers and protein modeling software, and with all this equipment and knowledge they designed brain cells and proteins. And they probably also had arms, or some kind of limbs, so they could press the buttons on their computers. And some of them probably needed glasses because the font on the screen was too small. Oddly enough we don’t find biochemistry labs and computer hardware in precambrian strata.
Oh wait, no. This is not at all what Bill is saying. He’s sying there was ThE pOwEr Of ThOuGhTs existing all by itself, and this magical thinking power that existed in the absence of a physical brain and without a physical body, could just sort of WISH things into existence. Move a carbon atom over here to connect to a nitrogen atom? No problem, I’ll just WISH for it really hard and then it will just happen.
Also, this magical brain-absent and freefloating power of thoughts that can wish things into existence, it doesn’t need to do experiments or anything to know how to make a new protein, or a new type of cell. It just knows this by default, because well it just does, okay?
And we are to think this is credible because Bill can type english text into his browser window.
I disagree that there is no distinguishable mechanism. A mind is a distinguishable mechanism that can account for what we are observing. You are mischaracterizing the argument based on the straw man arguments that are used.
You are asking how to distinguish the solution from main stream science current solution of RMNS plus neutral theory you have a situation much the same way that gravity had with Newtons model. I could explain local action based on the mass of two objects but it would not accurately model planets in orbit.
In the same way evolution can explain local adaptions but it cannot explain origin of biological novelty. This is where FI comes in as large quantities are required to explain the complex novelty we are observing. A mind can account for the large amounts of FI we are observing. It can also account for the complex arrangement of parts we see such as the origin of the eukaryotic cell.
The detection of ID is what gpuccio is doing with his measurements of FI at certain transitions. As he stated he has accounted for 1.7 million bits of human FI that distinguish vertebrates from cellular structures like invertebrate jelly fish. RMNS or neutral mutations cannot adequately explain this appearance of new information IMO.
We can agree to disagree what is a mechanism and what is not. I don’t think that is important. What we need is a cause we can model and test that explains the effect we are observing.
This is an interesting point. I would say that mind gives us the same tool as gravity as it explains the complexity we are observing where the current model does not especially at the cellular level.
I think the more you learn about the theory you will see that it is a legitimate pursuit. Everything you are asking for exists today. As with any theory there are unknowns but mind is well tested for producing what we are observing.
How does a mind physically manipulate matter to translate your “mind designed” sequences into physical objects?
You keep dancing around the big problem but the big problem isn’t going away. 
Every time Bill uses the word “minds”, you can substitute in “Human beings”, and then the issue becomes obvious. Human beings were not around to design the proteins of life. Human beings are a product, not the cause of the proteins of life. There is zero evidence that there can be such things as minds without the molecules we are tying to explain the existence of.
It gets even worse for Bill when we consider what it takes for “minds” to know something. They need to learn, to practice and train. To interact with the physical world. All minds we know are extremely limited by their circumstances, they are limited in their capacity to know things and to figure them out. No human being can simply think up a functional protein sequence.
The people who can make protein sequences de novo can do so because they have the advantage of centuries of accumulated scientific progress behind them, and entire civilizations which have developed and manufactured the tools and equipment that makes these things possible. Bill has not begun to even consider what it takes for “minds” to make functional protein sequences de novo.
All the things we know it takes to create functional protein sequences de novo, besides the evolutionary process itself, are absent in the fossil record. And if they really did once upon a time exist, we would expect there to be evidence of it. There are no ancient cities, no ancient fossilized biochemical plants, no factories, and no fossil supercomputers in the strata. There are no biochemistry labs, and the designers somehow managed to never die and leave a fossil themselves. They came with giant floating UFO laboratories, never had any accidents, created life progressively over billions of years while faking the nesting hierarchical structures in the genetic data, cleaned up after themselves, and then they took off again while leaving zero evidence of their existence.
Bill is making a Ghost-theory of protein origins. Ghosts wished them into existence. And he believes this because he can type english in a browser window, and then There’s a Book.
This whole thing is FATUOUS IN THE EXTREME. It is beneath everyone who posts on this website. It is a fantasy invented by a child.
This is the tired old argument from TSZ. You need to separate what is being observed from a mechanism that could have caused it. The Who caused it is an interesting question but separate from figuring out what type of mechanism could have caused what you are observing.
Human beings are our reference for inferring the capacity of a mind. Orbiting planets and falling objects were our reference for inferring the existence gravity resulting in black holes. We cannot see or directly observe gravity yet we can model its capability.
You can’t just remove the human being and then pretend you can retain the mind. That’s like saying I can run without limbs. Or you can have democracy without voters.
And you can’t just pretend mind and it’s capacity to influence the world is this weird thing that happens in a vacuum absent training, learning, development, and some sort of physical body with which to do those physical actions.
Also, thinking takes energy. If you’re positing proteins were thought up by someone, then someone, whoever it was, had to eat to think up those proteins. So they needed food, which also doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. And thinking takes time too, it’s not instantaneous. And the more complicated and demanding a cognitive task, the more food and the more time. And the more training you need. And the smaller the objects you want to make, the more advanced the technology required to do it. More advanced technology requires more complicated manufacturing processes, which you now also need to invent and build.
There are no ghosts Bill. None. They don’t exist. They can’t exist. There’s no soul, no gods, no spirits. No floating magic men outside of time and space.
Grow up. Accept it and move on with your life.
Really? What human being can physically manipulate matter using just mind power to translate a “mind designed” idea into a physical object?
Bill keeps ducking the huge hole in his reasoning and repeating his unsupported assertions.
A mind is not a mechanism.
And @gpuccio hasn’t looked very hard at phenomena like antibodies, catalytic and regular, that arise in real time from variation and selection.
He has done nothing of the sort. He has made a claim that he did not bother to check against the data.
He stated that, or something vaguely like it. What you wrote is word salad, because a jellyfish is not a cellular structure. Is your thought process as fuzzy?
You haven’t done any calculations, though, correct?
Which you don’t have.
I’m fairly certain that the more Jordan learns about it the more sketchy it becomes.
There’s no theory there, Bill. There’s not even a scientific hypothesis. If @gpuccio had less-egotistically stated his idea as a hypothesis, the conversation would have been more productive. Instead, he staked out a position and put his ego on the line.
This is a very silly analogy.
Gravity is the direct physical cause of the phenomena you describe, and we know it applies to every single physical object in the universe. It is not something that, as far as we can tell, only exists as a product of something like a brain.
God transcends the material universe and so it is pointless to ask for a mechanism capable of physically manipulating matter when dealing with divine design. God word is performative; he says something, and the thing comes into being. It seems to me that’s all that can be said on matter of mechanism regarding divine design. But if God is above matter, he is not above logic, the logic here being that a being act according to its attributes. One of God’s attribute being intelligence, his creations will display signs of intelligence such as FI or irreducible complexity. The bottom line: no mechanism is required to infer God’s design, only the usual signs of intelligence.