Posts by Rich Lock
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But isn't metaphysics by definition not the concern of scientists? At least in the current setup, I mean.
Yes, but it's a situation which begs for a 'why' question - why are they separate?
Ask enough 'why' questions from either a scientific perspective or a metaphysical perspective (or religious), and you start getting convergence towards the vanishing point - 'why are we here?'
How is the journey, why is the reason.
Yes. Gio's question was entirely on point, though.
There is considerable overlap between 'why?' and 'how?' when you are looking at what is directly in front of your face.
But when you start looking beyond the immediate, the difference between 'why' and 'how' gets a bit more important. 'Why are we here?' is a completely different question from 'how are we here?'
The best answer to 'why' that science can currently offer is, as Mr Jones pointed out:
[shrug] That's how things came out in the Big Bang.
But why did the big bang happen? In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God? A troubling thought if you're a filthy non-believer like me.
Perhaps it was Rich who was saying that?
Not me. Merely noting that there are built-in copying errors, but that we cannot adequately explain why that is the case.
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Wouldn't that be metaphysical?
Yep, that's kind of what I'm clumsily struggling towards.
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Are they really asking themselves why it happens? What good could that do?
Gio, you're missing the point.
Asking 'why does X happen?' is the fundamental scientific starting point.
Once we know why X happens, we can start to do something useful with that knowledge - we can apply it so that we act on our environment, and not the other way around.
Take gravity. We know it happens. If I drop something, it will accelerate towards the centre of the earth at 9.81 m/s/s. We know this to always be true. But we don't understand the mechanism.
Now, if those chaps in the white coats would actually pull finger, we could go some way towards understanding the mechanism, and using that knowledge, develop something of use. Like, say, that hoverbike I've been waiting 30 years for.
Superbugs, as another example. We are always reacting - we are always one step behind.
We develop a new antibiotic which kills most of them. The 10% which are resistant evolve and become the dominant strain. Process starts again. We are always on the back foot. If we understand the mechanisms of their evolution better, maybe we can get a jump on them.
But it's not even a journey of a thousand miles we're starting with these single steps - it's effectively infinite.
So you say
If they work out how to inhibit it, it will be ultimately because they've somehow isolated how it happens, not why.
Exactly. But the knowledge of 'how' will be one more step towards the 'why'.
if mutation itself was a characteristic that organisms were somehow able to lose, they would have by now
But why does it happen, or not happen, at all? Why are we animate, and not just a random collection of non-animate chemical compounds?
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Nobody is really asking why it happens, are they?
You mean apart from any researcher who wants to try to get to grips with superbugs and various other nasties that are evolving away from being affected by pennecillin and the like?
Proper medical research using proper scientific theorising, y'see :)
It'd be a bit like asking why gravity happens
Well, there's plenty of debate around that, too.
And plenty of money being spent trying to track down the elusive Bos'n Higgs and his mate Graviton, who've been on unauthorised shore leave for quite a while now.
And I thought we had a pretty good idea of the how: natural selections of replicators, copying errors that give certain organisms a reproductive advantage. No?
But the bazillion dollar question is why
Why does life not just make a perfect copy? OK, we have a theory, as you have pointed out - reproductive advantage. But how did that come about? How did life know to introduce an error?
Which leads to the really big questions: What is life? How did it come into existence? Why are we animate, and not just inanimate collections of cells? Why are we more than the sum of our parts?
Who are we, and how did we come to be?
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Evolution, for example, is still a theory - of course the evidence for it is substantial.
Evolution is an established fact.
The theory part is the mechanism - no-one really understands how or why it happens (although we know if definitely does happen).
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Having thought about it, I'm sorry I posted my last post.
I'm not a Michael Jackson fan - I don't like his music enough to be able to overlook his extremely dubious behaviours.
But I don't need to be kicking his children around - I suspect they'll be copping enough crap for the rest of their lives anyway.
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I do it all the time, you guys for instance are all products of my imagination.
Funny, cos I've always thought you were some sort of ghost-in-the-machine AI construct.
I mean, how else are we to explain your apparent ubiquity in the NZ blogosphere?
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Seems the first two kids at least, aren't biologically Jackson's.
Or, uh... did everyone else know this?
Well, given that they both appear to be 100% white......possibly something of a hint.
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PAS does seem to have a 'p' problem. Although only a little one.
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I love Dr Who.
We know. You mentioned it in another thread.
I knew we'd be able to out you as an SF fan sooner or later.
When shall I send my BSG box set round?