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Discussion and Debate
Discussion and Debate
Physical & Life Sciences
Can we/you number the amount of quantum particles in the universe...?
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<blockquote data-quote="FrumiousBandersnatch" data-source="post: 73562381" data-attributes="member: 241055"><p>Yes, I myself am dubious about 'true' randomness. What I meant was something like unpredictable external influences causally unrelated to the phenomena in question. I use a simple few examples that I thought it would be difficult to interpret in terms of design.</p><p></p><p>However, if you want to claim that those examples are part of a program by a designer, then it's rather ambiguous. There's a difference between a designer designing a system that generates a wide variety of phenomena and each phenomenon being explicitly designed.</p><p></p><p>So if you're saying that a designer could have set up the universe with the correct parameters at the big bang to allow the emergence of complexity, and that, in <em>that </em>sense, everything is designed, I would accept that it would be consistent with what we observe, but it's a stretch of the meaning of 'design' for individual phenomena. OTOH if you're saying that you think every ordered phenomenon is <em>explicitly</em> designed, I would say that the evidence suggests that is not necessary - complexity and order arise out of the underlying rules of the system (the physics), so explicit design is a redundant claim - Occam's Razor applies - as Laplace said (apocryphally) about his omission of God from his work on celestial mechanics, "I had no need of that hypothesis".</p><p></p><p>Those patterns are present typically because they represent simple and efficient solutions for survival in the environment. Large parts of most plants and leaves are pseudo-fractal, i.e. self-similar with scale invariance; they're constructed of the same simple structure repeated at different growth scales (see <a href="http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/ferns/fractal.html" target="_blank">Fractal Ferns</a> for a mathematical equivalent). Sunflower heads pack their seeds according to the Golden Ratio, not because they know it's a mathematical construct, but because that's the most efficient way to pack the seeds without leaving gaps; sunflowers that pack more seeds will tend to have more offspring, so natural selection favours Golden Ratio packing.</p><p></p><p>The results may appear to 'scream design' to you, but that's a common cognitive bias - we naturally tend to ascribe sentient agency to ordered systems with satisfying aesthetics; but once you understand the natural processes that give rise to them, you realise that sentient design is not necessary, iterative processes like evolution can produce such 'designs' unaided.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FrumiousBandersnatch, post: 73562381, member: 241055"] Yes, I myself am dubious about 'true' randomness. What I meant was something like unpredictable external influences causally unrelated to the phenomena in question. I use a simple few examples that I thought it would be difficult to interpret in terms of design. However, if you want to claim that those examples are part of a program by a designer, then it's rather ambiguous. There's a difference between a designer designing a system that generates a wide variety of phenomena and each phenomenon being explicitly designed. So if you're saying that a designer could have set up the universe with the correct parameters at the big bang to allow the emergence of complexity, and that, in [I]that [/I]sense, everything is designed, I would accept that it would be consistent with what we observe, but it's a stretch of the meaning of 'design' for individual phenomena. OTOH if you're saying that you think every ordered phenomenon is [I]explicitly[/I] designed, I would say that the evidence suggests that is not necessary - complexity and order arise out of the underlying rules of the system (the physics), so explicit design is a redundant claim - Occam's Razor applies - as Laplace said (apocryphally) about his omission of God from his work on celestial mechanics, "I had no need of that hypothesis". Those patterns are present typically because they represent simple and efficient solutions for survival in the environment. Large parts of most plants and leaves are pseudo-fractal, i.e. self-similar with scale invariance; they're constructed of the same simple structure repeated at different growth scales (see [URL='http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/ferns/fractal.html']Fractal Ferns[/URL] for a mathematical equivalent). Sunflower heads pack their seeds according to the Golden Ratio, not because they know it's a mathematical construct, but because that's the most efficient way to pack the seeds without leaving gaps; sunflowers that pack more seeds will tend to have more offspring, so natural selection favours Golden Ratio packing. The results may appear to 'scream design' to you, but that's a common cognitive bias - we naturally tend to ascribe sentient agency to ordered systems with satisfying aesthetics; but once you understand the natural processes that give rise to them, you realise that sentient design is not necessary, iterative processes like evolution can produce such 'designs' unaided. [/QUOTE]
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Can we/you number the amount of quantum particles in the universe...?
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