The very notion of science itself is incompatible with religion.
No it isn't. Science itself is a kind of religion, with beliefs and practices adopted on faith.
Science takes as its central premise that nothing should escape testing or questioning.
That sounds like a recipe for The Inquisition.
But the real central premise of science is that observable phenomena can be understood, explained, and even predicted in terms of testable theories and models. The notion that the world can be understood in theoretical terms is an unprovable belief. It's a successful belief, but it can't be proven.
Moreover, the method for constructing scientific theories -- the Scientific Method -- is also adopted on faith. There is no guarantee that it will work in every case.
Part of the problem that we face in science is that the theories we are obliged to construct are often mathematically subtle and abstruse. Most lay people don't have the math to understand the mathematical models which comprise many of our best theories.
One of the reasons people like to debate Darwinism is because there isn't very much math in it, and so the lay public can readily understand what it's saying. Lay people don't take issue with Newtonian Gravitational Mechanics or Einstein's models because they are written in pure math -- a language most lay people don't understand. More to the point, they don't even take issue with population genetics, since that's mostly about calculating probabilities associated with breeding. And that was a subject founded by a religious cleric who bred peas.
Evolution is inconsistent with the Abrahamic... god.
Not really. Consider that the God of Abraham didn't have a name until Moses bothered to ask.
In the Hebrew, Moses learns that the God of the Hebrews is called Eheyah Asher Eheyah.
It's an interesting name. If you translate it literally, it comes out 'Will Be What Will Be'.
Not very grammatical.
But if you allow for the poetry of the language, you can render the name of the OT God as 'The Process of Creation'.
As a scientist, I happen to believe in the Process of Creation, the Process of Evolution, the Process of Enlightenment, etc. Science is largely about understanding how those processes work.
The Framers of the Constitution were Deists who also believed in Nature's God. Not only that, they understoond that the ongoing work of creating the world we live in is everyone's responsibility.
For some odd reason, modern day humans still fight over the names of these essential abstractions and their meanings.
The problem is coming up with a functional way of understanding abstract ideas.
How do we understand the Process of Creation in the Cosmos, or the Process of Evolution in the Biosphere, or the Process of Enlightenment in the Noösphere, or the Discovery Learning Process in the Developing Mind, or the Creative Problem-Solving Process, or the Healing Process, or the Peace-Making Process?
Traditionally, we have found it helpful to make up stories in which some heroic figure represents one of these abstractions.
I don't have a problem with the use of storycraft to help us wrap our brains around abstract ideas. And I don't have a problem populating stories with heroic characters. Storycraft is a useful tool in educating young people and inculcating them into a culture.
Science could probably profit from making better use of storycraft as an educational tool.
Having said that, it's important not to take our stories too seriously. What we need to take seriously is the intelligent use of story and drama to encapsulate elusive abstractions.
Before you can use reason you have to address fears. You could try pointing out that humans were decorating graves and writing the Code of Hammurabi long before the Bible was written and won't suddenly revert to animalism if they abandon the 20th-centruy movement to take the entire Bible literally.
One thing the biblical-era writers were good at was constructing stories that became the basis for inculcating themselves into their culture.
Tom Clancy reminds us that a well-told story has to embrace and sum up all the fears of the characters who inhabit the story.
I'm not sure why it is, but modern man seems peculiarly inept when it comes to reasoning about fear. The few who get good at it become novelists and playwrights.
One doesn't have to take bible stories literally to appreciate them as literature. Then again, we can also turn to the modern era of novels for even keener insights about dramas emerging from the sum of all fears.
Dostoevsky did that as well as any writer of traditional bible stories.
The meaning of the term "Intelligent Design" has been taken over and defined by dyed in the wool Creationists.
So take it back. That's what I did.
To my mind (and you know this already), Intelligent Design is something we strive to do in Engineering.
Creation is something we do in the Creative Arts.
One of the things I'd like to discover how to do more intelligently is to create stories that inspire, entertain, and enlighten.
Making up stories that scandalize, demean, or ridicule others doesn't strike me as exemplary of the intelligent design of a functional story that inspires and enlightens in an entertaining manner.
Don, I've been reading your ridiculous claims about other people's beliefs for weeks now.
I came here to discover how you come to form ridiculous notions about other people's beliefs.
It occurs to me that you are operating very much like GWB. You appear to decide in advance what you want to believe about others, and then you convince yourself that your theories about others are grounded.
What I want to know, Don, is why do you do that? What are you trying to learn by adopting such an appallingly unscientific practice?
It has to do with the wisdom (or foolishness) of dividing things into binary categories called Right and Wrong (or Good and Evil).
There are two competing characters in that oft-told story. One of them warns Adam and Eve not to adopt the practice of dividing things into discrete categories called Right and Wrong (or Good and Evil). This character warns them that doing so will lead to tragic outcomes.
Another character convinces Adam and Eve to go with the binary category paradigm (which they do).
Now to be fair, the Story of Adam and Eve was written long before Poincare and Lorentz worked out the mathematics of Chaos Theory, so it's understandable why their theory is wrapped up in the form of a story. After all, most people enjoy and respond to stories, but glaze their eyes when some tiresome professor starts spouting theory. Especially mathematics.
Now I don't like to call Adam and Eve's mistake 'Original Sin'.
I prefer to call it Hammurabi's Original Logic Error (HOLE).
Of course, it's probably unfair to attribute it solely to Hammurabi, but he does get credit for being among the first to enshrine it on stone tablets.
The cute thing about calling it HOLE (instead of 'Orginal Sin') is that one can then say that those who reprise this classic mistake are laboring with a HOLE in their head.
Don, don't you think it's a little late in the game to begin asking people what they believe, after spending weeks publishing ridiculous claims about other people's beliefs?
What I want to know, Don, is what kind of jollies you get out of disseminating undemonstrated claims about other people's beliefs.
The Real Topic is how people form their beliefs, including how they model the beliefs of others with whom they are not very familiar.
I've been collecting evidence about how you form beliefs about other people, Don.
I believe your methods could stand to be a tad more scientific, Don.
Take, for example, a famous fairy tale, known as the Tragedy of Romeo and Juliette. In that story, the central characters form erroneous beliefs and act on them as if they were accurate, without bothering to check their veracity. The outcome, of course, is tragedy.
I have a question for you, Don. Why are you so eager to conclude that I hold untenable beliefs? What's in it for you, if you can assert that someone else is laboring under a misconception?
What stories prove is that if you want to get an idea across, packaging it up inside a good story is not such a bad idea.
Umberto Eco says, "Whereof we cannot make a theory, we must tell a story instead."
I say that even if we do have a good theory, we're prolly gonna have to package it up inside a good story anyway, if we wanna get it out there for public consumption.
One doesn't have to be a Christian to be in favor of telling fairy tales to school children.
Every culture has its myths, including secular beliefs that eventually prove to be misconceptions.
The history of science is full of paradigm shifts, including many that are still underway.
If we want to attack myths, how about attacking myths about regulatory structures that claim to yield order, predictability, and stability (rather than chaos and instability).
I daresay that most people blithely adopt the widely-held secular belief that rule-driven systems are inherently stable, orderly, and predictable. School children are not only taught this, they are obliged to adopt this belief as our prevailing secular religion.
The mathematical truth may be a bit jarring, but the problem is that most people don't have enough math to understand why rule-driven systems are likely to be chaotic and unpredictable.
What's even worse, most people don't have enough math to understand how to design a functional regulatory structure that yields the stability lacking in rule-based architectures.
Poincare and Lorentz notwithstanding, this isn't a new idea. One can find this same idea in the Story of Adam and Eve.
The problem to be solved is that there is more to the story than the part explained by Darwinian Theory.
After Darwin's day, we learned how DNA carries the genetic code, and how the encoded blueprint for an organism code can change from one generation to the next, producing variations within a species and the occasional emergence of viable new species.
We have a pretty good story to tell about how DNA codes for proteins, how proteins build tissues, how tissues make organs, how collections of organs comprise an organism, and how organisms mate, exchange DNA, and reproduce.
What we don't yet have is good story to tell about how DNA-based life arose in the first place.
For that, we might eventually learn from research in Molecular Biology how DNA-based self-replicating structures arose from simpler nonliving precursors.
Or we might learn from space scientists that DNA-based micro-organisms (or their more primitive precursors) arrived on Earth via cosmic dust from extraterrestrial origins beyond the Solar System.
As wonderful as Darwin's Theory is, and as wonderful as present day Molecular Biology is, we still have a gap in the story when it comes to explaining how it all got started in the first place.
Rather than argue about Evolution vs ID, we ought to be looking for evidence to answer the question about how DNA-based life got started in the first place, and whether it got started here on Earth or arrived here via some precursor carried in the cosmic winds.
If and when space scientists demonstrate compelling evidence for Panspermia, we can then have a good time speculating on whether DNA-based self-replicates arose through elementary natural processes explainable with Freshman Chemistry rather than by sophisticated molecular engineering by some long-lost intelligent race of technogeeks who lived inside of some ancient computer-based technocivilization long before the creation of our own Latter Day Solar System.
We go straightaway into our first round of questions for today's distinguished guest panelist, SimHacker the Pickle-Faced PieMan.
Today's question was submitted by Boddler, of Mr. Dodger's Neighborhood...
Boddler asks SimHacker Don: Are you now or have you ever been a non-believer in the tenets of Christianity?
If your answer is 'yes', Boddler also wants to know if your disbelief is mere skepticism of one or more of the tenets, or if it's wholesale rejection and express denial of the entire package.
If your answer is 'no', Bodler wants to know if you are simply a non-committal student of the tenets of Christianity, or if you are an enthusiastic evangelical proponent of the storyline.
In either event, how do you feel about being thrust into the role of misapprehended target of a hoary scapegoat drama? Do you find it an exhilarating spiritual experience, or a dreadful rerun of a banal soap opera?
Please limit your response to a few well-chosen words that accurately describe your affective state. You need not modulate your facial expression if you prefer not to give away any such nonverbal signals.
Some emotions are easy to read on the face. Laughing and crying are pretty obvious. Surprise isn't too hard to detect. Frustration and anger tend to be easier to observe in children than in adults.
Boredom, annoyance, and perplexity are examples of emotions that an observer might not detect right away, depending on how strongly they are displayed.
The project at MIT seeks to develop methods for recognizing facial expressions associated with various emotions. Boredom is just one of many meaningful emotional states that the MIT system is being trained to recognize.
One of the interesting results is finding out which emotional expressions are easy to recognize, and which are harder to recognize. Agreement and disagreement, for example, tend to correlate with head nods and head shakes, which are relatively easy to detect. Frustration and confusion, associated with brow wrinkles, are fairly easy to detect if the subject hasn't taken Botox treatments.
Although it's fairly easy to track the direction of gaze, it's not always easy to discern the specific emotional state associated with different patterns of eye gaze direction.
There is evidence that people can learn (perhaps with good coaching) to become more keenly observant of subtle facial expressions, and more responsive to the inferred emotional state of others.
Working out the technical details of empathy is a useful branch of research, with benefits for the development of emotional intelligence in both humans and machines.
I am skeptical of claims for the ability of random remarks and simulated scandals to account for the complexity of drama. Careful examination of the evidence for Drama Theory should be pursued.
I sincerely believe you enjoy acribing imaginary beliefs and practices to others for the purpose of maligning and ridiculing them.
I happen to believe that's a ridiculous and unsustainable practice, but then everyone is entitled to their religious ecstacy, are they not?
What puzzles me, however, is what kind of joy you acquire through this peculiar practice of willfully inventing chimerical beliefs and ascribing them to total strangers.
My first theory is that you enjoy the ensuing drama.
Are you a dyed-in-the-wool drama junkie, Don?
If so, I think we might be able to collaborate a bit, as I have some oddball theories about drama, but scant experience in the art of crafting an intriguing drama.
It's great sport to be misunderstood and misjudged, isn't it Don?
Let's continue trading misunderstandings, misconceptions, and misjudgments until we've throughougly entertained ourselves to the point of utter banality.
Then we can distill our sobering experiences into simulated dramas full of realistic annoyance, frustration, and exasperation, in strict accordance with Clancy's Theorem.
It's been a while since I played any of the Maxis God-Games.
We used to feature SimSafari in Cahners Computer Place at the Boston Museum of Science, and I found some time to play it, some years ago.
I recall playing SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt back in the '90s. I've never seen The Sims.
Which brings me around to a design question for you...
I was thinking about 'manna' this morning.
'Manna' is a strange term that refers to some essential scarce resource. If a system runs out of 'manna', it collapses.
It's hard to figure out what the 'manna' is for any given system (real or simulated), at least until it becomes so depleted that the system begins to die.
So the question of the hour is this: What is the name of the 'manna' that sustains synthetic worlds like SimAnt, SimEarth, SimSafari, or The Sims?
In real human cultures, a few candidates come to mind...
A. Funding.
B. Attention.
C. Respect.
D. Amusement.
E. Grace.
F. Insight.
G. Progress.
H. Functionality.
I. Leadership.
J. Fairness.
K. Sincerity.
L. Challenge.
M. Mystery.
N. Drama.
O. Other ________.
What are the critical resource -- the 'manna' -- that synthetic systems like The Sims need to sustain themselves?
What is the 'manna' that synthetic worlds (and other systems like them) are most in danger of depleting, due to lack of guidance by the human player who assumes the role of God in these simulated cultures?
Whose role is it to identify and husband the critical resources? Is it the job of the human player, or do the simulated characters bear the responsibility of discovering and husbanding their most critical scarce resource?
What if the critical scarce resource is the providential intervention of the human player who assumes the role of God in these simulations? Would the characters then adopt the practice of beseeching their godlike supervisor to grant them boons?
To my mind, the fundamental unanswered question is how DNA-based life arose in the first place.
Darwin predates the discovery of the DNA mechanism. His theory is consistent with our understanding of how the DNA-based codestrings are subjected to random variations, some of which happenstantially give rise to new species with marginally better chances of survival.
What neither Darwin nor modern molecular biology can yet explain is how DNA-based life arose in the first place.
Did it arise spontaneously here on the earth? If so, how did that happen?
Did DNA-based life arrive here via cosmic dust from some other source of origin in the cosmos? The evidence for that may be scant, but interplanetary science is working hard to discover evidence of DNA-based life on other bodies in the solar system.
We know that debris has been exchanged among bodies in the solar system. And we know that DNA-based organisms can evidently survive the rigors of the vacuum of space. If and when we do discover evidence of DNA-based life on other planets, the likelihood of the Theory of Panspermia will gain ground.
If and when we find substantive evidence that DNA-based life may not have been of terrestrial origin, we'll be back to square one on how and when it arose. And the possibility that DNA-based life was the product of molecular engineering by some long-lost race of intelligent beings (who themselves were not descended from DNA-based biochemistry) will have to be included in the range of theories to reckon.
For myself, I would be happy to learn that DNA-based life arose by elementary natural processes right here on Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. And I would be thrilled if the molecular biologists could construct a plausible model for how that happened.
But I would be equally happy to learn that the entire solar system was seeded with DNA-based life (or its immediate molecular precursor) from some otherwise unknown point of origin.
In other words, I am in favor of doing the scientific research to estlablish a plausible theory for the origin, emergence, and distribution of DNA-based life.
And I agree with Picard and others that Darwin's Theory alone is insufficient to complete our understanding of this part of the story.
If fundamentalists want to exploit my enthusiasm for scientific research to further their own political agenda, who am I to deny them their religious ecstacy?
And if Don Hopkins wants to similarly exploit my enthusiasm for scientific research to support his own bizarre beliefs about me or Roz Picard, who am I to deny Don his own peculiar brand of religious ecstacy?
I think social engineers should employ intelligent design in the construction of regulatory processes.
For example, in your various Sim games, how do you design the regulatory processes whereby the human player affects the course of events in the simulated world?
Do you use a collection of rules? Or do you use mathematical functions that transcend the expressive power of a collection of rules?
Why do you adopt your chosen regulatory architecture that you integrate into the design of the system?
Does it have to do with striking a balance between total predictability and total randomness?
How do you strike that balance, so as to make the game comprehensible and not totally bewildering, while rich enough to maintain some degree of suspense and surprise?
And what role does frustration, annoyance, and exasperation play in the experience of the person supervising the simulation?
Are you referring to the Discovery Center at the Boston Museum of Science?
I've been affiliated with them for about 18 years now.
At the Discovery Center, my main role is to supervise the Puzzle Activity.
The Discovery Center promotes the development of Scientific Intelligence and Insight, through Discovery Activities. Puzzle Solving is just one of the many activities we employ there.
One of the reasons I am affiliated with the Discovery Center at the Boston Museum of Science is that we are free there to address subjects that are not part of the regular public school curriculum.
This includes a healthy dose of functional reasoning.
But I digress. I suspect that my actual activities are nothing like those you would like to be able to ascribe to me.
What puzzles me, Don, is why you evidently desire to ascribe to me practices and beliefs that I am largely unfamiliar with. Is there some reason that it's important to you to falsely characterize other people?
The only thing about the Theory of Evolution that troubles me is its silence on how the DNA code arose in the first place. Probably this gap will eventually be filled in by some other theory. One of the open questions is whether DNA-based life arose on Earth, or arrived here via cosmic dust from some other world. It would surprise me if the answer to this question came out of Darwinian Science. More likely it will come out of the field of Molecular Biology or Space Science. Still, it's possible that we will discover some arcane forms of life in the ocean's depths that yield some insights into how nucleic acids came to their current role in Cellular Biology.
And yes, I really believe that systems designers should reason carefully about their designs, so as to construct robust and functional systems.
There is nothing quite so disappointing as a poorly designed system, whether it be a living system, an ecosystem, a civilization, or a computer game.
My position on Intelligent Design is that it should be taught in the Engineering Curriculum, so that our engineered products are intelligently designed.
Consider, for example, the design of the God Function in so-called God Games. The God Function moderates the relationship between the human player (God) and the simulated characters inside the system model.
An intelligently designed God Function will yield an intriguing and persistent Life Drama within the framework of the World Simulation.
Which brings me around to a question for you, Don. How did you come to your insights on how to intelligently design the God Function in your various Sim franchises?
And more to the point, do you believe that it would be worthwhile to pass your insights on to the next generation of system designers?
After all, if your own system design meets the test of intelligence, wouldn't you want it to survive into future generations?
It would astonish me if you didn't believe in teaching the principle of intelligent design when designing systems that mimicked the dynamics of the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
The very notion of science itself is incompatible with religion.
No it isn't. Science itself is a kind of religion, with beliefs and practices adopted on faith.
Science takes as its central premise that nothing should escape testing or questioning.
That sounds like a recipe for The Inquisition.
But the real central premise of science is that observable phenomena can be understood, explained, and even predicted in terms of testable theories and models. The notion that the world can be understood in theoretical terms is an unprovable belief. It's a successful belief, but it can't be proven.
Moreover, the method for constructing scientific theories -- the Scientific Method -- is also adopted on faith. There is no guarantee that it will work in every case.
Part of the problem that we face in science is that the theories we are obliged to construct are often mathematically subtle and abstruse. Most lay people don't have the math to understand the mathematical models which comprise many of our best theories.
One of the reasons people like to debate Darwinism is because there isn't very much math in it, and so the lay public can readily understand what it's saying. Lay people don't take issue with Newtonian Gravitational Mechanics or Einstein's models because they are written in pure math -- a language most lay people don't understand. More to the point, they don't even take issue with population genetics, since that's mostly about calculating probabilities associated with breeding. And that was a subject founded by a religious cleric who bred peas.
Evolution is inconsistent with the Abrahamic ... god.
Not really. Consider that the God of Abraham didn't have a name until Moses bothered to ask.
In the Hebrew, Moses learns that the God of the Hebrews is called Eheyah Asher Eheyah.
It's an interesting name. If you translate it literally, it comes out 'Will Be What Will Be'.
Not very grammatical.
But if you allow for the poetry of the language, you can render the name of the OT God as 'The Process of Creation'.
As a scientist, I happen to believe in the Process of Creation, the Process of Evolution, the Process of Enlightenment, etc. Science is largely about understanding how those processes work.
The Framers of the Constitution were Deists who also believed in Nature's God. Not only that, they understoond that the ongoing work of creating the world we live in is everyone's responsibility.
For some odd reason, modern day humans still fight over the names of these essential abstractions and their meanings.
The problem is coming up with a functional way of understanding abstract ideas.
How do we understand the Process of Creation in the Cosmos, or the Process of Evolution in the Biosphere, or the Process of Enlightenment in the Noösphere, or the Discovery Learning Process in the Developing Mind, or the Creative Problem-Solving Process, or the Healing Process, or the Peace-Making Process?
Traditionally, we have found it helpful to make up stories in which some heroic figure represents one of these abstractions.
I don't have a problem with the use of storycraft to help us wrap our brains around abstract ideas. And I don't have a problem populating stories with heroic characters. Storycraft is a useful tool in educating young people and inculcating them into a culture.
Science could probably profit from making better use of storycraft as an educational tool.
Having said that, it's important not to take our stories too seriously. What we need to take seriously is the intelligent use of story and drama to encapsulate elusive abstractions.
Before you can use reason you have to address fears. You could try pointing out that humans were decorating graves and writing the Code of Hammurabi long before the Bible was written and won't suddenly revert to animalism if they abandon the 20th-centruy movement to take the entire Bible literally.
One thing the biblical-era writers were good at was constructing stories that became the basis for inculcating themselves into their culture.
Tom Clancy reminds us that a well-told story has to embrace and sum up all the fears of the characters who inhabit the story.
I'm not sure why it is, but modern man seems peculiarly inept when it comes to reasoning about fear. The few who get good at it become novelists and playwrights.
One doesn't have to take bible stories literally to appreciate them as literature. Then again, we can also turn to the modern era of novels for even keener insights about dramas emerging from the sum of all fears.
Dostoevsky did that as well as any writer of traditional bible stories.
So take it back. That's what I did.
To my mind (and you know this already), Intelligent Design is something we strive to do in Engineering.
Creation is something we do in the Creative Arts.
One of the things I'd like to discover how to do more intelligently is to create stories that inspire, entertain, and enlighten.
Making up stories that scandalize, demean, or ridicule others doesn't strike me as exemplary of the intelligent design of a functional story that inspires and enlightens in an entertaining manner.
Don, I've been reading your ridiculous claims about other people's beliefs for weeks now.
I came here to discover how you come to form ridiculous notions about other people's beliefs.
It occurs to me that you are operating very much like GWB. You appear to decide in advance what you want to believe about others, and then you convince yourself that your theories about others are grounded.
What I want to know, Don, is why do you do that? What are you trying to learn by adopting such an appallingly unscientific practice?
I'm surprised you don't know this, Don.
It has to do with the wisdom (or foolishness) of dividing things into binary categories called Right and Wrong (or Good and Evil).
There are two competing characters in that oft-told story. One of them warns Adam and Eve not to adopt the practice of dividing things into discrete categories called Right and Wrong (or Good and Evil). This character warns them that doing so will lead to tragic outcomes.
Another character convinces Adam and Eve to go with the binary category paradigm (which they do).
Now to be fair, the Story of Adam and Eve was written long before Poincare and Lorentz worked out the mathematics of Chaos Theory, so it's understandable why their theory is wrapped up in the form of a story. After all, most people enjoy and respond to stories, but glaze their eyes when some tiresome professor starts spouting theory. Especially mathematics.
Now I don't like to call Adam and Eve's mistake 'Original Sin'.
I prefer to call it Hammurabi's Original Logic Error (HOLE).
Of course, it's probably unfair to attribute it solely to Hammurabi, but he does get credit for being among the first to enshrine it on stone tablets.
The cute thing about calling it HOLE (instead of 'Orginal Sin') is that one can then say that those who reprise this classic mistake are laboring with a HOLE in their head.
You still haven't responded to my latest postings in that other topic.
Don, don't you think it's a little late in the game to begin asking people what they believe, after spending weeks publishing ridiculous claims about other people's beliefs?
What I want to know, Don, is what kind of jollies you get out of disseminating undemonstrated claims about other people's beliefs.
The Real Topic is how people form their beliefs, including how they model the beliefs of others with whom they are not very familiar.
I've been collecting evidence about how you form beliefs about other people, Don.
I believe your methods could stand to be a tad more scientific, Don.
Take, for example, a famous fairy tale, known as the Tragedy of Romeo and Juliette. In that story, the central characters form erroneous beliefs and act on them as if they were accurate, without bothering to check their veracity. The outcome, of course, is tragedy.
I have a question for you, Don. Why are you so eager to conclude that I hold untenable beliefs? What's in it for you, if you can assert that someone else is laboring under a misconception?
Did you hide any Easter Eggs inside any of the Sim Games you developed?
See, it's all about capturing people's fancy and imagination.
What stories prove is that if you want to get an idea across, packaging it up inside a good story is not such a bad idea.
Umberto Eco says, "Whereof we cannot make a theory, we must tell a story instead."
I say that even if we do have a good theory, we're prolly gonna have to package it up inside a good story anyway, if we wanna get it out there for public consumption.
Actually, the central insight in the Story of Adam and Eve is supported by the work of Poincare and Lorentz, not the Easter Bunny.
One doesn't have to be a Christian to be in favor of telling fairy tales to school children.
Every culture has its myths, including secular beliefs that eventually prove to be misconceptions.
The history of science is full of paradigm shifts, including many that are still underway.
If we want to attack myths, how about attacking myths about regulatory structures that claim to yield order, predictability, and stability (rather than chaos and instability).
I daresay that most people blithely adopt the widely-held secular belief that rule-driven systems are inherently stable, orderly, and predictable. School children are not only taught this, they are obliged to adopt this belief as our prevailing secular religion.
The mathematical truth may be a bit jarring, but the problem is that most people don't have enough math to understand why rule-driven systems are likely to be chaotic and unpredictable.
What's even worse, most people don't have enough math to understand how to design a functional regulatory structure that yields the stability lacking in rule-based architectures.
Poincare and Lorentz notwithstanding, this isn't a new idea. One can find this same idea in the Story of Adam and Eve.
The problem to be solved is that there is more to the story than the part explained by Darwinian Theory.
After Darwin's day, we learned how DNA carries the genetic code, and how the encoded blueprint for an organism code can change from one generation to the next, producing variations within a species and the occasional emergence of viable new species.
We have a pretty good story to tell about how DNA codes for proteins, how proteins build tissues, how tissues make organs, how collections of organs comprise an organism, and how organisms mate, exchange DNA, and reproduce.
What we don't yet have is good story to tell about how DNA-based life arose in the first place.
For that, we might eventually learn from research in Molecular Biology how DNA-based self-replicating structures arose from simpler nonliving precursors.
Or we might learn from space scientists that DNA-based micro-organisms (or their more primitive precursors) arrived on Earth via cosmic dust from extraterrestrial origins beyond the Solar System.
As wonderful as Darwin's Theory is, and as wonderful as present day Molecular Biology is, we still have a gap in the story when it comes to explaining how it all got started in the first place.
Rather than argue about Evolution vs ID, we ought to be looking for evidence to answer the question about how DNA-based life got started in the first place, and whether it got started here on Earth or arrived here via some precursor carried in the cosmic winds.
If and when space scientists demonstrate compelling evidence for Panspermia, we can then have a good time speculating on whether DNA-based self-replicates arose through elementary natural processes explainable with Freshman Chemistry rather than by sophisticated molecular engineering by some long-lost intelligent race of technogeeks who lived inside of some ancient computer-based technocivilization long before the creation of our own Latter Day Solar System.
Greetings Earthling.
Welcome to yet another episode of SimScandal.
We go straightaway into our first round of questions for today's distinguished guest panelist, SimHacker the Pickle-Faced PieMan.
Today's question was submitted by Boddler, of Mr. Dodger's Neighborhood...
Boddler asks SimHacker Don: Are you now or have you ever been a non-believer in the tenets of Christianity?
If your answer is 'yes', Boddler also wants to know if your disbelief is mere skepticism of one or more of the tenets, or if it's wholesale rejection and express denial of the entire package.
If your answer is 'no', Bodler wants to know if you are simply a non-committal student of the tenets of Christianity, or if you are an enthusiastic evangelical proponent of the storyline.
In either event, how do you feel about being thrust into the role of misapprehended target of a hoary scapegoat drama? Do you find it an exhilarating spiritual experience, or a dreadful rerun of a banal soap opera?
Please limit your response to a few well-chosen words that accurately describe your affective state. You need not modulate your facial expression if you prefer not to give away any such nonverbal signals.
Some emotions are easy to read on the face. Laughing and crying are pretty obvious. Surprise isn't too hard to detect. Frustration and anger tend to be easier to observe in children than in adults.
Boredom, annoyance, and perplexity are examples of emotions that an observer might not detect right away, depending on how strongly they are displayed.
The project at MIT seeks to develop methods for recognizing facial expressions associated with various emotions. Boredom is just one of many meaningful emotional states that the MIT system is being trained to recognize.
One of the interesting results is finding out which emotional expressions are easy to recognize, and which are harder to recognize. Agreement and disagreement, for example, tend to correlate with head nods and head shakes, which are relatively easy to detect. Frustration and confusion, associated with brow wrinkles, are fairly easy to detect if the subject hasn't taken Botox treatments.
Although it's fairly easy to track the direction of gaze, it's not always easy to discern the specific emotional state associated with different patterns of eye gaze direction.
There is evidence that people can learn (perhaps with good coaching) to become more keenly observant of subtle facial expressions, and more responsive to the inferred emotional state of others.
Working out the technical details of empathy is a useful branch of research, with benefits for the development of emotional intelligence in both humans and machines.
I am skeptical of claims for the ability of random remarks and simulated scandals to account for the complexity of drama. Careful examination of the evidence for Drama Theory should be pursued.
I previously told you what I believe, Don.
I sincerely believe you enjoy acribing imaginary beliefs and practices to others for the purpose of maligning and ridiculing them.
I happen to believe that's a ridiculous and unsustainable practice, but then everyone is entitled to their religious ecstacy, are they not?
What puzzles me, however, is what kind of joy you acquire through this peculiar practice of willfully inventing chimerical beliefs and ascribing them to total strangers.
My first theory is that you enjoy the ensuing drama.
Are you a dyed-in-the-wool drama junkie, Don?
If so, I think we might be able to collaborate a bit, as I have some oddball theories about drama, but scant experience in the art of crafting an intriguing drama.
I hope you are enjoying being misunderstood, Don.
It makes for an amusing storyline, doesn't it?
Think of Clint Eastwood's memorable line, "I'm afraid you've misjudged me."
It's great sport to be misunderstood and misjudged, isn't it Don?
Let's continue trading misunderstandings, misconceptions, and misjudgments until we've throughougly entertained ourselves to the point of utter banality.
Then we can distill our sobering experiences into simulated dramas full of realistic annoyance, frustration, and exasperation, in strict accordance with Clancy's Theorem.
It's been a while since I played any of the Maxis God-Games.
We used to feature SimSafari in Cahners Computer Place at the Boston Museum of Science, and I found some time to play it, some years ago.
I recall playing SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt back in the '90s. I've never seen The Sims.
Which brings me around to a design question for you...
I was thinking about 'manna' this morning.
'Manna' is a strange term that refers to some essential scarce resource. If a system runs out of 'manna', it collapses.
It's hard to figure out what the 'manna' is for any given system (real or simulated), at least until it becomes so depleted that the system begins to die.
So the question of the hour is this: What is the name of the 'manna' that sustains synthetic worlds like SimAnt, SimEarth, SimSafari, or The Sims?
In real human cultures, a few candidates come to mind...
A. Funding.
B. Attention.
C. Respect.
D. Amusement.
E. Grace.
F. Insight.
G. Progress.
H. Functionality.
I. Leadership.
J. Fairness.
K. Sincerity.
L. Challenge.
M. Mystery.
N. Drama.
O. Other ________.
What are the critical resource -- the 'manna' -- that synthetic systems like The Sims need to sustain themselves?
What is the 'manna' that synthetic worlds (and other systems like them) are most in danger of depleting, due to lack of guidance by the human player who assumes the role of God in these simulated cultures?
Whose role is it to identify and husband the critical resources? Is it the job of the human player, or do the simulated characters bear the responsibility of discovering and husbanding their most critical scarce resource?
What if the critical scarce resource is the providential intervention of the human player who assumes the role of God in these simulations? Would the characters then adopt the practice of beseeching their godlike supervisor to grant them boons?
To my mind, the fundamental unanswered question is how DNA-based life arose in the first place.
Darwin predates the discovery of the DNA mechanism. His theory is consistent with our understanding of how the DNA-based codestrings are subjected to random variations, some of which happenstantially give rise to new species with marginally better chances of survival.
What neither Darwin nor modern molecular biology can yet explain is how DNA-based life arose in the first place.
Did it arise spontaneously here on the earth? If so, how did that happen?
Did DNA-based life arrive here via cosmic dust from some other source of origin in the cosmos? The evidence for that may be scant, but interplanetary science is working hard to discover evidence of DNA-based life on other bodies in the solar system.
We know that debris has been exchanged among bodies in the solar system. And we know that DNA-based organisms can evidently survive the rigors of the vacuum of space. If and when we do discover evidence of DNA-based life on other planets, the likelihood of the Theory of Panspermia will gain ground.
If and when we find substantive evidence that DNA-based life may not have been of terrestrial origin, we'll be back to square one on how and when it arose. And the possibility that DNA-based life was the product of molecular engineering by some long-lost race of intelligent beings (who themselves were not descended from DNA-based biochemistry) will have to be included in the range of theories to reckon.
For myself, I would be happy to learn that DNA-based life arose by elementary natural processes right here on Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. And I would be thrilled if the molecular biologists could construct a plausible model for how that happened.
But I would be equally happy to learn that the entire solar system was seeded with DNA-based life (or its immediate molecular precursor) from some otherwise unknown point of origin.
In other words, I am in favor of doing the scientific research to estlablish a plausible theory for the origin, emergence, and distribution of DNA-based life.
And I agree with Picard and others that Darwin's Theory alone is insufficient to complete our understanding of this part of the story.
If fundamentalists want to exploit my enthusiasm for scientific research to further their own political agenda, who am I to deny them their religious ecstacy?
And if Don Hopkins wants to similarly exploit my enthusiasm for scientific research to support his own bizarre beliefs about me or Roz Picard, who am I to deny Don his own peculiar brand of religious ecstacy?
I think social engineers should employ intelligent design in the construction of regulatory processes.
For example, in your various Sim games, how do you design the regulatory processes whereby the human player affects the course of events in the simulated world?
Do you use a collection of rules? Or do you use mathematical functions that transcend the expressive power of a collection of rules?
Why do you adopt your chosen regulatory architecture that you integrate into the design of the system?
Does it have to do with striking a balance between total predictability and total randomness?
How do you strike that balance, so as to make the game comprehensible and not totally bewildering, while rich enough to maintain some degree of suspense and surprise?
And what role does frustration, annoyance, and exasperation play in the experience of the person supervising the simulation?
Are you referring to the Discovery Center at the Boston Museum of Science?
I've been affiliated with them for about 18 years now.
At the Discovery Center, my main role is to supervise the Puzzle Activity.
The Discovery Center promotes the development of Scientific Intelligence and Insight, through Discovery Activities. Puzzle Solving is just one of the many activities we employ there.
One of the reasons I am affiliated with the Discovery Center at the Boston Museum of Science is that we are free there to address subjects that are not part of the regular public school curriculum.
This includes a healthy dose of functional reasoning.
But I digress. I suspect that my actual activities are nothing like those you would like to be able to ascribe to me.
What puzzles me, Don, is why you evidently desire to ascribe to me practices and beliefs that I am largely unfamiliar with. Is there some reason that it's important to you to falsely characterize other people?
The only thing about the Theory of Evolution that troubles me is its silence on how the DNA code arose in the first place. Probably this gap will eventually be filled in by some other theory. One of the open questions is whether DNA-based life arose on Earth, or arrived here via cosmic dust from some other world. It would surprise me if the answer to this question came out of Darwinian Science. More likely it will come out of the field of Molecular Biology or Space Science. Still, it's possible that we will discover some arcane forms of life in the ocean's depths that yield some insights into how nucleic acids came to their current role in Cellular Biology.
And yes, I really believe that systems designers should reason carefully about their designs, so as to construct robust and functional systems.
There is nothing quite so disappointing as a poorly designed system, whether it be a living system, an ecosystem, a civilization, or a computer game.
My position on Intelligent Design is that it should be taught in the Engineering Curriculum, so that our engineered products are intelligently designed.
Consider, for example, the design of the God Function in so-called God Games. The God Function moderates the relationship between the human player (God) and the simulated characters inside the system model.
An intelligently designed God Function will yield an intriguing and persistent Life Drama within the framework of the World Simulation.
Which brings me around to a question for you, Don. How did you come to your insights on how to intelligently design the God Function in your various Sim franchises?
And more to the point, do you believe that it would be worthwhile to pass your insights on to the next generation of system designers?
After all, if your own system design meets the test of intelligence, wouldn't you want it to survive into future generations?
It would astonish me if you didn't believe in teaching the principle of intelligent design when designing systems that mimicked the dynamics of the real world.