The HP Way

That's a strawman. There is no refusal. Just waiting for someone imaginative enough to say something testable. You could be the first.

Jon

I should add that Popper should be a must read. For example, he does a good job of reduting the idea of reasoning inductively in "Objective Knowledge" and elaborating the power of the idea of the independence of theory and result. One could easily have a theory that the future will be identical to the past and make predictions on this basis, but eventually nearly all of them will fail. The best theories are remarkably different from anything that could be arrived at by induction from observation. They evolve instead in our mental space and not in perceptual space. It is their results that are in perceptual space.

I would definitely recommend it to Larkin.

However, for a more compact and modernized version, published not so long ago, Popper's protege David Miller wrote "Critical Rationalism: a Restatement and Defence," from Open Court Books in 1994. And Miller skillfully exposes and destroys inductivism in all its forms.

I'd recommend that to Larkin, as well.

Jon

refuting...

oh, well

In message , dated Mon, 11 Sep 2006, John Larkin writes

I haven't seen any such denials. You, however, keep postulating entities which are unnecessary unless you justify them, which you consistently fail to do.

Regarding impossibility, challenging a conservation law is a very bold move, but it is progressively done over the years, WHEN convincing evidence is presented. Lower-grade versions of 'impossibility' are indeed suspect. But people do say 'impossible' when they mean 'impracticable' (e.g. a 96-bit ADC) or 'uneconomic' (e.g. a 96-bit ADC).

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Only up until the idiot with the Glock mistakes me (or you) for the guy who actually did him wrong.

If the world were full of rational, sensible, well-informed people, I wouldn't mind in the least if they were all armed. But the world is full of people who shouldn't be trusted with a cell phone, much less a loaded weapon.

If someone really wants to do evil, they'll find a way, regardless of legal availability of any particular weapon. It's the irrational and misinformed people that I worry about, not the evil people. There are more of the former.

I remember the lamentable Geraldo interviewing some 14 yr old gang banger who had the IQ of a 6 yr old. I wouldn't want him operating his penis in the urinal next to mine - let alone holding a gun.

Huh...couldn't you get near that many bits by counting the output from Josephson junctions?

A little cold for most terrestrial uses...

Eh, nevermind... it would take a dynamic range of picovolts to megavolts to cover merely 1ppb of 96 bits. LOL

Tim

"Necessary" isn't the point; "reproductive advantage" is. Hearts and lungs aren't "necessary" but they sure come in handy, and their complexity makes the Occam thing look silly. If organism A uses random mutation to evolve, and organism B uses more efficient and less destructive algorithms, B will probably lunch on A. I suggest only that evolutionary processes themselves are capable of evolving, and that natural selection would of course favor more efficient methods of evolution. So the "random" part should, or must as it seems to me, inevitably be replaced by better stuff. If you truly believe in evolution, you should agree.

But since nobody on the planet understands 1% of how DNA actually works, it will be a long time until my ideas are checked. I just find the insistance on hundred-year-old orthodoxy to be interesting. I make my living doing stuff that other people think is impossible, so the concepts around invention and orthodoxy are of practical importance. I have a couple of young engineers working for me, who can do insanely great things if they let themselves, and I have to keep prodding them to stop thinking about what can't be done.

John

That's a complete non-sequitor.

There are many mechanisms for making random changes, and there are many mechanisms for limiting those changes. We know how the main ones work, and researchers regularly find new mechanisms. But there is no evidence, anywhere, of any sort of "higher order" controlling intelligence - all changes are random. The point of all the control mechanisms is to allow small random changes while having minimal chances of ending up with something completely broken.

DNA *does* include redundancy and repair mechanisms to cancel most of these changes.

Circuit boards are a case of "intelligent design", not evolution.

You wouldn't hire someone who thought warp drives would be invented within the next five years either - even if you don't like people saying things are impossible.

Of course, in a way your theories of some non-random, intelligent yet non-supernatural and non-religious control of DNA having evolved is correct. It's just not something that the DNA itself affects or controls - it's done by people.

If the changes are not random, then they are controlled. The question then is by what, or by whom? Assuming we can put aside religious ideas, then you are going to have to come up with some reasonable ideas of what that might be - certainly no serious scientist has come up with anything (or if they have, they've kept it secret). With nothing more to go on, it is no more of a "theory" than if I were to postulate that the moon

Well, we're finally getting somewhere. People have this control over their own genetic destiny - computer dating services are one example, even though they don't work very well - precisely because some particular string of DNA discovered that it was advantageous to have an intelligent host that could design computers. That's one late-coming macromechanism.

John

There's nothing wrong with conjecturing the impossible, and indeed I encourage it. A good engineer will explore all sorts of weird branches and goofy dead ends before he settles on a design. If he's a good engineer, he will in the end pick the best design that's possible. It's the amateurs and the dreamers who don't have the analytic tools to separate the practical choices from the impractical. And it's the duds who miss the possibilities. Lots of very smart people are duds.

John

I was thinking more on the lines of selective breeding (of animals, plants or humans) and genetic engineering.

But either way, it has nothing to do with any particular DNA string "discovering" anything. It has nothing fundamentally to do with DNA - selective breeding was done long before anyone knew about DNA, and it would apply regardless of the underlying mechanism for coding the genetic information. And it is still survival of the fittest - it's just that the mutations are not as random any more (although they are not as predictable as we'd like!). The point is, such "directed" evolution is not controlled by DNA, but by an outside influence.

Like Fred Bloggs ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

Simply by very sophisticated self-organizing adaptive algorithms, bootstrap designed by evolution itself. If the simple Mandelbrot equation can produce infinite and beautiful complexity, and Conway's Game of Life can build glider factory factories, why would DNA not be infinitely more complex?

The problem is that too many people are afraid to let themselves think, for fear of being called creationists or the equivalent.

John

Among others.

John

In message , dated Tue, 12 Sep 2006, John Larkin writes

No, the point is that anyone can postulate ANYTHING using the type of reasoning that you employ. You are free to do that, but it doesn't advance human knowledge and it's not science; it's pure speculation.

In message , dated Tue, 12 Sep 2006, David Brown writes

Not in every case!

-- OOO - Own Opinions Only. Try

Well, I'm not a biologists (although one of my kids is.) But it seems inevitable that such mechanisms must exist, but lots of people demand that they be impossible; they *refuse* to speculate and argue against people who do.

There's a lot more going on here than science, which is my real point.

The science, the *real* science, doesn't know enough yet to say.

John