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Scientists Creating Life From Scratch
Rubberbando writes "MSNBC is running a story about bioengineering organisms to do specific tasks such as produce hydrogen or ethenol. It also goes into the risks and ethical issues of playing with this sort of science. Some of the scientists involved are saying it's more of an art instead of a science due to its 'biohacking' style of experimentation."
This type of biological research convinces me firmly that
the intelligent design (ID) is just another horse crap
made up by humans. The base of ID's claim lies on the belief
that the design of some rudimentary living organisms are
just too complex to be built by accident. Hence
some higher intelligence -- beyond human intelligence --
must be involved in creating such organisms. But now, we
are stepping closer to make one on our own. What does that
say about humans? Are we becoming a god?
No. It's all about perception. From our point of view, some
things may look too complex to be formed accidentally. But
as science advances, our perception does evolve (or should).
If our society continues to exist (not sure if that happens
in Kansas or in Bill Frist's home, but let's not go there),
then what it seems an impossible task may not be so impossible
any more.
Well, that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
Why have these scientists not heeded the dire warnings of Jeff Goldblum? You cannot control your creations! Life finds a way!
Their "science" and "bacteria" are going to cause random plot-convenient sex changes and bloody dismemberment of lawyers!!!
...well okay actually maybe this isn't going to be so bad
FYI, the title is incorrect. There is no "from scratch" component to the life. What they're doing is building custom DNA, then injecting it into a living cell.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Scientist #1: I am teh l33t bi0hax0R!!!!1111!lol!!!
Scientist #2: LOL j00 r bi -- ur teh ghey!!!
Scientist #1: STFU, n00b!111!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I hold rights to all life and I will see you in court.
God
As I understand it, it's trying to make it into more of a science, where previously it had lacked order and had merely been creative guessing which genes to put where. Seems like a much better method to me - start from the most basic (well, almost most basic... genes -> nucleotides -> atoms -> quarks... but you get the gist) elements and put them together building-block style. Go modern science.
Combining the genetic material of different species, I think we can all agree, is hardly creating life from scratch.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
If you actually want to read about the project on creating life "from scratch", that would be here
Are they using the intelligent design method, or the waiting around to see what happens on its own method?
in fact, my job is to record all the data from hundreds, well tens of thousands, of such mutations, sometimes only in one small section of the exact same original organism or protein.
....).
and then we crank out thousands of colonies for each of these, or at least we hope we do.
So, from my viewpoint, the concept of manufacturing an organism to crank out oil needs to be thought thru quite a bit - what if it harvests not just the biowaste of corn husks but starts eating grasses and other plant life? what if it hybridizes or mutates (there is solar radiation and chemical interference and ingestion) and loses its species-specific behavior - as bioengineered rice did in China and India when it hybridized with nearby "wild" rice crops due to their farming practices and this thing called nature (wind, storms, excessive rainfall, seeds falling out during transport
Be careful what you wish for - sure you may be able to make a plant that creates oil, but it may end up turning your front yard from grass into sludge, or attack your food crops.
It's happened before, and that's one of the joys of biochemistry - biological processes change and adapt and mutate and it's always fascinating in this multiply interdependent bio system we live in.
Now, if you want to experiment on Mars or in space colonies inside large asteroids, be my guest. But we live here. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you need to do something right now...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
With increased knowledge comes better understanding thus making advances in such fields quicker and easier.
If this field were to expand and grow, within time there would be banks and banks of customized dna. If a certain scientist wanted to create a more complex organism, all he/she would have to do would be to select certain compatable dna sequences. Kind of like programing when you think about it.
Seems cool! Just imagine the posibilities...
--
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Creating life from scratch? Who do they think they are? Darth Plagueis perhaps?
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experimen t
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Can they create me a girlfriend? how about half a girl friend?
Making stuff is the big deal. Most chemicals are made from petrol nowadays and the chemical companies are searching for a way out of this dependency on petrol. One way is plants (as raw material) + bacteria(for their enzymatic reactions). Quite a few microbiology labs are now working in discovery, selection and bio-engeneering of bacteria for this very purpose. Personally, I think the discovery part is very important since we know close to nothing about the biodiversity of bacteria. A number I heard recently is that 70% of the biomass of this planet is made of bacteria, and most of them live in the ground and are very difficult to isolate and study and thus mostly unknown. Look up metagenomic in google for more info.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Mix Red America vs. Blue America culture clash, a sprinkling of glitterati VC investors, and season with unimagined new Weapons of Mass Destruction falling into terrorist hands.
I'd rather read about Jude Law and his chauffuer/nanny/podiatrist whatever.
Tungsten!
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management
This has been done already!
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
It's only an ethical problem if scientists create something that has free will. That is, something that can make decisions using a "mind" as well as a brain. If someone succeeded in doing that, then they would have to treat the life as a person, not an animal. The mind (by definition) cannot be explained by science, and I doubt we will ever be able to create that, no matter how perfectly a brain could be developed or free thought mimicked.
Of course, some people believe that animals deserve the same treatment as humans, but that's another topic.
My whole theory is, if there was an intelligent designer who created us, which I doubt, then he created us with the capability to do such things as this. If he did not want us doing stuff like this, wouldn't he have designed us so as it was impossible for us to do such things? Perhaps God didn't create us to be his children, perhaps he is old and tired and created us to be his replacement
Some of the scientists involved are saying its more of an art instead of a science due to its 'biohacking' style of experimentation.
Much of biological science consists hacking, trial and error, dubious statistics, and manipulating life with cheap tricks and without deep understanding. I'm glad to hear scientists call as such. Given the daunting complexity of the subject matter, it is not surprising. But I wonder if there is there a deeper 'theory' of biology analogous to least action principles in physics, that could be illuminated by mathematics? Any biochemists or geneticists care to comment?
an ill wind that blows no good
We are our own god. Or at least thats what science proves.
I, for one, welcome our new custom made overlords.
If I wanted to see life started from stratch, I'll just look in my roommate's shower. The black stuff on the shower wall growing a leg is pretty funky.
but the other side of the coin, using DNA primitives to build things that are really new, is not yet viable (as I understand it). It's not "life" in that it can't reproduce. It's still highly valuable stuff, if it can do math or if it makes great rubber cement.
"Creating life" is taking Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Sodium, Chlorine, Phosphorus, etc. and turning that into cells which reproduce.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
synthetic biologists themselves fret that rogue scientists or "biohackers" could create new biological weapons -- like deadly viruses that lack natural foes
Oh you mean like the polio virus they assembled from parts?
what are the natural foes of a virus? Immune systems, maybe? What else?
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
damn it, I always thought that LFS was Linux From Scratch...
he intends to string together genes to create from scratch novel organisms that can produce alternative fuels such as hydrogen and ethanol. [emphasis mine]
Um, we already have a novel organism which can produce ethanol.
It's called yeast.
And it is well understood and has a low risk of becoming an ecological disaster.
Why would we invent a new organism?
Really, I don't see anything good coming out of this. It's nothing more than reinventing the wheel.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Hillbillies have been doing this for years.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The function of most genes that code for proteins is not known. This is a fact. Surf GenBank and see how many genes are annotated as "putative" this or "hypothetical" that. On top of this, there are very few functions that are controlled by just one gene; most functions have whole operons (strings of genes) that must act in complex feedback loops to make something biologically viable.
There's simply not enough knowledge about the genes we have sequenced right now for this "new approach" to be anything more than firing shots in the dark. This is truly arrogant and inane.
At this point, taking a known, culturable organism and dropping new genes in it is more likely to get you to your goal than starting from scratch. Maybe 100 years from now, well, who knows, maybe we'll actually know a little bit about biosystematics, but for now, no. Stop wasting my taxpayer money and give the grants to researchers who understand the limits of today's knowledge and are thus better qualified to extend those limits.
This is like trying to recreate the Linux kernel from scratch, except that we don't even know what 90% of the drivers are supposed to do!
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
start with a regular old cell then tweak and tune the hell out of it. Then keep dyno'ng the creation until they get what they want.
This is proof that the flying spaghetti monster created all life.... and midgets!
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
I mean really it's getting, If we do create intelligent beings that destroy us, well than isnt that all part of god's design?! Stop the Jesus Freak. Save Science! The more we allow people who aren't smart to set limits on the abililties and exploration of the intelligent the more we are working against our species best interest. I'm sorry if i offended anyone but I'm tired of hearing people whine about issues based on religious grounds. Can't we just be like Krypton!
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
bioengineering organisms to do specific tasks such as produce hydrogen or ethenol
Isn't this a form of slavery?
They risk making the Flying Spaghetti Monster furiously angry and being strangled by His Noodly Appendage. We should recognies that there are things man was not meant to do, and leave it firmly in the realm of pasta.
http://www.venganza.org/
Abiogenesis is impossible. You cannot create life from non-life. If you could, then creationism wouldn't be a joke. And for that matter, neither would be macroevolution.
I guess I should not have left that sandwitch behind the couch...
Now they found it after this last heat wave and they found new life growing on it...
I wonder what they will go with next? grass in the ass? That would be a start from the scratch...es!
Have a good one.
===== "Every head is a different world so don't invade mine you FREAK!" smartSAGA said
I've seen your posts before and I've always wondered what your signature is from. It sounds cool, if it's book or something, it might be something I'd like to check out.
There are still a number of theories out there that claim there is a special essence that only living matter possesses and not in its constitute chemistry and physics. This essence is passed from being to being through the reproductive chain. It also could be passed by contaminate contact with living matter, or distilled like the "life force" in Star Wars or Frankenstein. The absolute refutation of vitalism would be to construct living matter directly from chemicals.
Vitalism has been used (and still is) to support the contention of a Creator- living matter had to arise somewhere? It has been used to explain disease processes, but scienitifc medicine has modtly killed this aspect. A corollary of vitalism is a mind that is greater than the physical brain, which could make artificial minds impossible.
'biohacking' style of experimentation is God's thing.
Maybe they can creat a bionic spell checker.
Also, the obligatory:
I'd like to see a Biowulf cluster of these.
All your biohacks are belong to us!
Some of the scientists involved are saying its more of an art instead of a science due to its 'biohacking' style of experimentation.
Shouldn't that be "Some of the artists involved are saying..."?
The shareholder is always right.
Molecular biologists have been cloning genes in prokaryotes and eukaryotes for tens of years. It's not a new idea to clone a series of genes that work cooperatively to change biochemical behaviour of an organism.
Something I find more note-worthy, as a biological chemist, is a new trend to expand the amino-acid table (past 20). Many of the codons (DNA or RNA triplets) are degenerate or they are stop codons. The idea is to add synthetic amino-acids to specific tRNAs. Chemically modified amino-acids are incorporated at the desire of the molecular biologist. This technology has already been developed, and the scientists in this field (not myself) are discussing using directed evolution with organisms with an expanded codon base. Very interesting.
"It's only an ethical problem if the creation has free will." Actually, it's also an ethical problem if its existence could lead to trouble, like some bacterie going wild and eating grass or whatever instead of oil, like they were saying. The fact is, if something "goes wrong" repurcussions could affect everyone. Since when is doing things that could harm others ethical?
"Already, synthetic biologists have created a polio virus and another smaller virus by stitching together individual genes purchased from biotechnology companies."
:) it would be like the next step for computer geeks' war against boredom.
so... i see we can patent life now?
perhaps we should attempt the founding of a free(speech+beer)/open genetic library... come to think of it, that would seriously kick ass
I tried that. Too many things wouldn't compile, and I'm too lazy to find out why right now. So I switched back to Slack.
What?
The mind (by definition) cannot be explained by science...
You claim the mind, by definition, can't be expolained by science. Mind is in quotations. What is this definition you're referring to? I"m not familiar with it.
I've learned a bit about neural networks and have been impressed with what neural networks with very few neurons (i.e. tens) can do. The human brain has 10's of billions of neurons. That is a huge difference in magnitude! I am not so arogant as to suggest we can presently know what a neural network of that size can or cannot accomplish. Instead, I have faith that it is sufficiently complex to explain everything we attribute to "mind" and "spirit".
Hopefully, someday, we'll be able to buld neural networks (artificial or bilogical) on the scale of the human mind and submerge it an an emersive environment as our own mind is, and we may finally begin to realize more about our own reality.
P.S. Please do NOT start to use transistor count in processors as a corralary because they are not at all similar to a neural network... each human neuron has, on average, a connection to 1,000 other neurons -- those connections critical and the human brain has trillions of them!
I think they had better keep an eye on their grad students.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
so... i see we can patent life now?
perhaps we should attempt the founding of a free(speech+beer)/open genetic library...
I think MSFT already patented it. Especially the bugs which are now referred to as "features".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No, he gave us free will and a conscience so we can choose to follow Him and His Word or disobey. He gives us choices and consequences/rewards.
Yeast is itchy. I see no mention of itchiness in the article; therefore these organisms are far superior than their itchy counterparts.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
O people! a parable is set forth, so listen to it: surely those whom you call upon besides God cannot create a fly, even if they all gathered for it, and should the fly snatch away anything from them, they could not take it back. Weak are the invoker and the invoked. (Quran 22:73)
Move right along, there's nothing new to see here. A bunch of enterprising scientists have found a new name for the gradual maturation of biotechnology and genetic engineering.
There is neat stuff happening in this area, but there was neat stuff happening before people gave it a new name.
You just dismissed the deeply held beliefs of over half the world's population. Who's the troll, again? Being certain there is no God is just as "religious" a statement as to be certain there is one. Moreover, if you're going to operate on blind faith and not reason, why in whomever's name would you go with atheism? I can see saying "I have no idea regarding the existence of a creator" but to come down with a definite conclusion, and for that to be a hard bet against the home team? That's just crazy. Seventy-two virgins crazy. Ever hear of Pascal's Wager?
The definitive word on this is "Zodiac" by your favourite author Neal Stephenson...and it shows up the rest of his stuff as pulp written trash too ;-)
ISBN: 0099415526
Dare I say it?
"I for one welcome our new scientific overlords-of-creation."
*groan*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Wonder what they'll put on the cover.
When can we learn that the "process" behind building bridges, buildings, and other lifeless hardware doesn't apply to life or software? These are fuzzy and constantly evolving processes - boxing them into processes, steps, or rules is not the right approach.
Explore your creative side
Until what they create has a brain and is capable of rational thought I don't see where the moral implications of this differ from material science.
-
Yes it's a feature called free will.
"God schmod, I want my monkey-man!"
The title and the article have NOTHING to do with each other!
When the hell did Slashdot become the New York Daily News???
Is there a definitive test for determining whether a creature has a mind in addition to having a brain?
Is there a way to rule out that a particular animal does not have a mind?
Is there a way to show that all or even most humans possess a mind?
The one reason I would like to see research like this done is to eventually see if we can create life through chemical processes. The results would probably raise far more questions than it answers if such a process was discovered or was ruled out as impossible for some unknown reason.
That's assuming this article is refering to trying to take the chemicals that make up DNA to create organisms, rather than playing around with DNA. The latter would not be particular useful for insight into philosophical questions about life.
If they are just playing around with DNA, what's the difference between "synthetic biology" and "genetic engineering"? That would really make this old news if they're splicing DNA.
I think it is pretty clear that we are becoming a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Not to take anything away from the scientists involved (they are at the top of their field), but I do not see in TFA where the claim came that they are creating life from scatch. Reading the article, I see that they have purchased genes from other comapanies or getting the genes from other organisms, arranging these genes in new ways, and then injecting them into other organisms. While this in itself is a big breakthrough and accomplishment, it does not live up to the hype of creating life from scratch. This is more like cutting out whole paragraphs or pages (not letters) out of several books, arranging them in a new and interesting order, and pasting them into yet another book. Creating life from scratch would be akin to writing and printing a book from scratch. Note the scientists are using pre-existing genetic information to create new strains of bactria/viri; they are not writing a new genetic code from scratch.
Also, just to play the devils advocate; this (to me) seems to be proof for intelligent design rather than against it. The scientists (who, I assume, are highly intelligent) are creating new organisms. These new organisms are not evolving randomly by themselves, but instead evolved (were created?) under the watchful eyes of highly intelligent beings. We would never (in most likelyhood) have seen these organisms if the scientists had not started tinkering in their labs. An interesting point to ponder.
Yeah typical,
"oh lets invent something because the free nature stuff cannot be patented and sold for profits"
Any one can clone natures best, cloning plants is trivial.
So - http://www.hempcar.org/
So if the damn politicans and christian nut cases would just die of cancers overnight, we could have some real prople with brains running the show to everyones benefit not just the corporate elites nutjobs.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Hey! Look what I made.. a computer! I did it from scratch! I used an Intel Motherboard and CPU, a Maxtor Hard Drive, a NVidia Video Card, a case from AlienWare... etc.. Not exactly from scratch.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
to do specific tasks such as produce hydrogen or ethenol.
Hydrogen maybe, but ethanol? Why not just use yeast?
Definetly Intelligent Design.. The other "method" (Theory) has yet to be proven AND seems too slow (if it was to work)...
"So a new breed of biologists is attempting to bring order to the hit-and-miss chaos of genetic engineering by bringing to biotechnology the same engineering strategies used to build computers, bridges and buildings."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
So if the damn politicans and christian nut cases would just die of cancers overnight, we could have some real prople with brains running the show to everyones benefit not just the corporate elites nutjobs.
Fact: More than 90% of the people in the United States Congress, and the White House, and the Supreme Court, have backgrounds in law. They're either lawyers, or they went to school for a law degree. Of course the former are always the latter, but not vice versa. Anyway, science types, and engineers never run for political office. They choose to help the world realistically, not through red tape and taxes.
If the younger lawyers didn't replace the fuckers who are in office, it would be the business assholes. That's just what we need, big business not only lobbying Congress, but actully RUNNING it.
With a $42.6 million grant that originated at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Berkeley researchers are creating a new malaria drug by removing genetic material of the E. coli bacterium and replacing it with genes from wormwood and yeast."
OK, so here we have a bunch of money, originating from Bill Gates, going to Berkely (of BSD and LSD fame) to do high-tech cross-breeding of fecal bacteria, the plant responsible for the drug-like qualities of absinthe, and the organism responsible for the beer-like qualities of beer.
Some day soon, a hallucinigenic, but otherwise shitty beer will take over the world. I'm convinced of it.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Not a single "OMG! The evil biologists are creating life! Soon they'll create bio-grey goo and kill us all!!!" comment. I am pleasantly (and greatly) surprised. Incidently, I work in this field, and while we're certainly not creating life (I think that was thrown in by MSNBC's crappy reporters), we're basically trying to apply EE-type methods to biology. You guys should love this stuff.
If, hypothetically, I wanted to make brownies,
and I started with cocoa and sugar and flour and eggs and butter and vanilla extract and a pinch of salt (optional raisins, walnuts or ganja), it would be fair to say that was from scratch.
I wouldn't need to start from sugar cane and wheat and chickens and whole milk etc.
Let's advance science. Who cares about ethics, they are just a roadblock to progress.
Forward!!!
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sir Arthur Clarke once said that:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
Replace "technology" with "art" or "magic" with "religious visions", and you'll get the same perception, but a different way to articulate it than in say... Kansas
Funny enough, wasn't Kansas during the Civil War a place that was regarded as pagans by the southerns because of their early support of science in their schools ?
Certainly, in some places evolution doesn't take place.
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So... We bitch about keeping Intelligent Design out of schools, and yet when scientists try a little Intelligent Design themselves we cry "They're playing god!"
Well, which is it?
Either Life was created by God and so we are also playing God or Life was created by natural processes in which case we are playing... natural processes.
Recipe to make brownies from scratch: 1. Create Universe...
ID proponents claim that a complex being is needed to explain other complex beings.
It's bullshit! You cock sucking motherfucker.
I guess you won't be satisfied until someone designs a replacement for DNA and construct new kinds of life from it. :P
+1 funny
Humans place a lot of importance on this. Why? Because most of us believe that we can make choices that aren't dictated by our environment, that somehow we can truly change ourselves. This is impossible with a wholly naturalistic view of the universe.
This is where I'm not understanding you. If our behavior is subject to the control of our biological constitution and its environment, then we should be able to change ourselves by altering our environment and/or our biology.
i welcome our new...oh shpx it.
when can we grow our own "implants"?
Of all the lame sunday afternoon jokes that are so beloved by christians, I think this is one of the worst. It basically makes their all-powerful god sound like a stingy little toddler.
You can imagine all sorts of interesting alternate endings. Like man throwing the dirt in God's face. After which he started crying, and then ran home to His Mommy. Then he destroyed the universe.
Intelligence of the kind you are talking about is relative. If this kind of genetic tinkering generates something complex or useful, we are apt to call it "intelligent". However, if it does something with adverse unintended consequences, it will hardly be judged as "intelligent". Likewise, it might be intelligent because it benefits the person (corporation) that creates it, but detrimental to everyone else. Whether or not its "intelligent" depends on your perspective.
My guess is that such technology will be both be used and misused. Whether we survive the latter is anyone's guess.
The fact that a design is perceived as "intelligent" explains nothing about its origins, but rather only something about the state of mind of the observer. Hence, one can hardly use such an artifice to explain the origin of species in the natural world. Besides, it isn't necessary as a perfectly good and extraordinarily well-corroberated SCIENTIFIC theory is available, namely evolution by means of natural selection.
Nice try at spining, even when it is pointless to do so.
We've reached a level of scientific understanding that does seem to suggest that in the court of rational opinion God does indeed need lawyers. This seems mostly because he seems to be getting such a poor quality defense from the religious zealots and blind believers.
For those who seem to believe they can explain anything and everything by a belief in god, I would suggest that they do us all a favor and explain themselves away.
The fallacy in your statement is in the fact that these organisms weren't merely created by accident - they were intelligently created by scientists in a lab. So the fact that this occurred only reinforces the supposition that it could not, in fact, happen on accident
I don't know how you come up with it saying it's not being possible for life to happen accidentally. I didn't see anything like this in the article. I read before but because of your remark I read it again, and here I must thank you because the in first reading I didn't see a page two so now I'll read that as well... Nope, I didn't even find one instance of "accident" in the compleat article.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I've never understood why science and religion must be at odds. Why can't one's deity be the one who caused these scientific laws and phenomena, and either nudged evolution a little bit here and there or maybe just planned it all in the beginning (like writing a program, or planning a chess game ahead) and set it loose?
The previous pope, John Paul II, pretty much said as much. Something like "God" used evolution to create man or some such.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I didn't say human will is unaffected by the body's environment.
If we are affected by our environment, then we should conclude that we are not truly free from its control.
Yikes. How did you read fatalism from my post?
Your notion that a lack of free will abdicates responsibility sounds like a form of fatalism to me.
My previous post points out that a consequence of dismissing free will is dismissal of anyone's personal responsibility for their behavior.
We could ask whether it's the temperature, the humidity, or the barometric pressure that causes rain, but no single element acts alone -- they all are responsible. If another car sideswipes my car after running a red light, we blame the person who violated the rule even though both cars were necessary in bringing the collision to fruition. We assign responsibility to the rule breaker as a convenient means of preventing future accidents.
No matter how unpredictable your actions may be, randomness cannot provide the metaphysical truth of independent agency.
A phenomena may be caused by a preceding event, randomly generated, or brought about by a stochastic synthesis of the above (e.g. white noise modulating a sine wave in an analog synthesizer). Can you give me an example of an event that is not random, not stochastic, and not caused by antecedent events?
I'm not talking about "decisions" the way you're talking about them. Your body can react to stimuli, but that's not independent decision making.
If a decision were independent of external control, would it not be random?
In other words, you cannot alter the course of your own thoughts and actions unless you have free will.
I could change my environment to alter the course of my behavior. I don't see why I would need a metaphysical agent to do that. And if we assume that my behavior is under the control of a soul, free will, a homunculus, or some such, then what controls the soul? I have a hard time imagining a first cause that isn't random.
My theory is, if God didn't want me to be enormously, grotesquely fat, He wouldn't have created dozens of varieties of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.
Also, if you didn't want me to poop on your doorstep, you wouldn't have left all that soft grass around for me to wipe.
I've got no problem with cautious bioengineering, but just because we CAN do something doesn't mean we should, or that God wants us to.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions.
Then again, believing in randomness itself takes a bit of faith. I think you would agree with that.
I don't think it requires an undue amount of faith, unless you are trying to promote the solipsistic belief that every concept requires faith. We need only a bit of statistical analysis to establish that an outcome is random. I like to think of randomness as a platonic ideal. In that sense, some sequences of events more closely resemble theoretical randomness than others. It would be difficult to prove that an event was truly uncaused because in order to do so, we would need to systematically eliminate all mediating influences that could potentially instigate said event.
One should remember that random events are not necessarily uncaused, but uncaused events would be random. We call an outcome "random" not because it is uncaused, but rather because it follows stochastic variation. For instance, there is evidence to suggest that the motions of a coin are subject to the laws of physics -- however, the outcomes of a coin flip manifest themselves probabilistically. This is because the forces acting on the coin are highly variable and favor no one side in particular.
You are right to feel that we don't have perfect certainty, but that lack of certainty doesn't grant one the epistemological license to arbitrarily accept explanatory fictions. We shouldn't conclude that all ideas are equally erroneous just because our perceptions are limited and fallible. Science does not grant us perfect certainty, but it is still, nevertheless, useful.
A place like this could provide the "super-existence" necessary to create ours. Is this my explanation for the universe? Hardly. It's just a feeble attempt at resolving the dilemma you've proposed.
You admit that it is a feeble explanation; perhaps you should declare that it's an explanatory fiction and abandon it all together. I could use a similar "super-existence" to explain how my plumbing system works, but it wouldn't be a very useful or convincing explanation.
It's important to keep in mind: free will isn't the only thing that defies logic.
If your conception of free will admittedly defies logic, then it may behoove you to look into some of the research in the disciplines of behavioral science, genetics, and neurophysiology that explain why we do what we do.
All we can say for certain is that nothing is certain; nothing is provable. Even the most basic beliefs are built on the tenet of faith.
I'm a pragmatist. I'm not particularly concerned with what is ultimately true or false. I do, however, care about what works.
I believe in them because I feel that without these things, our lives couldn't possibly have meaning.
Are you saying that you believe in those things because they appeal to your sense of vanity, and not because you have evidence for their existence?
Meaning is a pretty safe measuring stick if you think about it.
I find meaning to be a very poor metric. First of all, we don't have units to measure the level of meaning that an object has. Secondly, a meaning will very greatly from one person to the next.
But with it, there is the promise of truth. In my opinion, we were designed to use meaning as a heuristic for determining our closeness to absolute truth.
Are you trying to tell me that a belief that feels meaningful is more likely to be true?
If Slashdot locks the comments on this story, I would like to continue this discussion in an email exchange.
My email address is selectivepressure a t gmail'com.
But if you "relaxed your morals" and did whatever you felt like, you would be considered amoral. Amoral is mostly easy to define as "what's bad for society." That is, behaviors, which, if left uncheck, would decimate the population of a society.
Take murder, for example. Show me a society who lets people get murder people over trivial angers, and I'll show you a society who doesn't exist. A society that kills its people off readily will implode.
Hence, we have laws that support our moral values. And if you decide you don't have to be responsible for your actions, then you'll be removed from society (jail, death penalty, whatever).
But that doens't mean you had to have free will to execute your amoral actions. Consider a network of computers. Suppose one computer started sending out voltage spikes on the network bringing it down. Well, it would be better for the network to have that computer removed. The computer didn't use free will to decide to send power spikes. It has a fault that causes it to do so. Where that fault came from is irrelevant.
Likewise, we don't have to know why someone committed murder, it's still amoral. And, by "why", I don't mean self-defense vs. lack of respect for life, but the actual cumulative inputs throughout their life that led ot the deicsion to commit murder. That is far too complex. Hence, it will always be useful to talk in abstractions, whether or not they're based in spirit or science.