Codes, Evolution, and Intelligent Design

I'd like to address this particular quote; I'm not sure it has been pointed out:

quote:

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If so far it appears that all codes come from a concious mind, than DNA, being a code, possibly came from a concious mind, until proven otherwise. This absolutly cuts it in science. How could it not? It is a presented problem. The facts so far point in direction A,and until you can prove that they actually point in direction B, than the logical assumption is that they point in direction A.

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This sounds reasonable indeed (if we accept the 'code' concept as you define it). But I would argue that your statement 'so far it appears that ALL codes come from a conscious mind' is somewhat misleading. Even if the statement were true, We shouldn't forget, that 'all' of these 'examples' that you put against the 'one' example of DNA, can be reduced to no more than one conscious mind: the human brain.So while you give the impression that the score is 5236-1, it would be more fair to say that it is 1-1 ! Furthermore, why not reason as follows: all currently known codes (except DNA?) can be traced back to the human mind. But the human mind itself can ultimately be traced back to... DNA! Even possible codes developed by intelligent animals would in the end just be a product of DNA. As such, ALL known codes would be the product of DNA, and there is no conscious mind left to oppose it with.

But why would you start with 1) ?Thus far, if we accept that DNA is your kind of "code", we have identified only two sources for these codes thus far: DNA and the human mind. First of all, this means two datapoints on the "codes vs. sources" graph and they are perfectly split. So nothing in there strongly suggests that intent, conscious mind and intelligence are somehow prerequisites. One could just as well say that the evidence points to the possibility of spontaneous generation of such a code, and that the human mind simply "emulates" it.Secondly, source 2, the human mind, is itself the product of source 1, DNA. Which points to the "emulation" conclusion.Now, it looks like this means that unless you could come up with several examples of codes or coders/encoders (cfr. the human mind) who are completely independant of DNA or anything similar to DNA, there seems to be no reason to a priori consider DNA unlikely or unusual to resemble a code?I could follow you if we for example had 20 examples of dieties who created codes "ex nihilo", or intelligent robots that could not be reduced to something similar to DNA. Both are very hard to imagine, clearly...In that respect, it would of course be extremely interesting to find other sources of life in the nearby universe. What would it mean to your idea, for example, if we found lifeforms on another planet which were based on something similar to DNA? And what would it mean if it were exactly like DNA?

{bold added by me}That's the whole problem... It looks like a particular wish you have, is the father of the idea. It is in the first place this wish that gives weight to the premise that DNA might have been 'designed'. You're not terribly interested in a naturalistic explanation to begin with, it seems.You stated repeatedly that the properties of DNA suggest that we can not exclude the possibility of somekind of conscious intervention at its origin. I would answer: "certainly, but so what?" One can ALWAYS suppose a sufficiently advanced technology (or an all-powerful God?) at the source of anything that 'works' in nature, or 'appears' to have design properties. But the real question (IMO) is: how productive is that approach?In practice, it's more or less a dead end. Can the 'code' itself tell us something about its 'originator'? Highly unlikely to say anything else than 'there must be an intelligence behind it' without any additional information. How to go about looking for that additional information? You could say we're doing that, in a way, via SETI for example. Given the current state of technology, it's not much more than 'Spielerei', though.It's not much more than an interesting philosophical possibility, but in the mean time we might find out some interesting things by exploring that other possibility: that DNA came about spontaneously and illustrates self-organizing properties of matter. There's certainly something to say for that, and there is so much that can be investigated and learned! I wrote that way because I don't want to get involved in the war about what constitutes a code and what not. It's not what I'm interested in, here My point was, kinda, that it was a bit misleading to put DNA as a single example of non-human 'code' against all the 'codes' that the human mind itself ever invented. It's better to talk about the coder/encoders, because it illustrates that currently it's just 1-1 (in terms of 'unknown' coders versus coders from definitely intelligent, human, origin) Given it's 1-1, I still don't think the strongly is warranted. It equally strongly suggests that conscious minds come from DNA . Chicken and egg, and something needed to be first. But why favour the one that, for all we know, came as second? Like you said, "it would change nothing". In fact, I can't think of anything that would produce progress with your approach! Can you? Is there ANYTHING that would lead you to ANOTHER conclusion than that an intelligence could be involved? It's a dead end (or infinite regression). It's simply not productive, and therefore not very interesting IMO.AnnafanEdited by Annafan, : language

For what it's worth, I think he just loves to argue for the sake of arguing. Like you now also pointed out, he'll actually never get anywhere with this approach. It's an infinite regression, and he seems to like it (??) Verrry "interesting".Personally, I'm done with it.

Although it doesn't look like you've convinced all that many people, no matter how hard you tried , it might still be interesting to pretend that you DID, and re-animate this previous post of your's: Why not open that can now and show what's in it? Something truly throught-provoking, a true eye-opener, or a simple boring rehash of a horse that was beaten to death decades ago already?