Mathematician/Bioethicist challenges concept of whether DNA is naturalistic

Whatever is of the flesh is flesh, and profits nothing (is no help and often hurts/deceives).

The mind is in the brain though. And if anything is from the natural world, then by simply being from the natural world, it is obviously going to be naturalistic.

"Mind" is what the brain does.

Joseph G said:

And is the knowledge of science a product of the brain, or of the mind?


Job 21:22 NIV
“Can anyone teach knowledge to God,
since he judges even the highest?"

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Both the video and thread are mistitled. Lennox is a mathematician, not a scientist and sadly his claim is just innumeracy.

[edit: got the name of the fool wrong]

Hans Blaster said:

Both the video and thread are mistitled. Cox is a mathematician, not a scientist and sadly his claim is just innumeracy.

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That's a common thing I've seen: people like Joseph will use anyone BUT a scientist to try and prove whatever point they think they have.

Hans Blaster said:

Both the video and thread are mistitled. Lennox is a mathematician, not a scientist and sadly his claim is just innumeracy.

[edit: got the name of the fool wrong]

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I understand how what Lennox says in the OP short can be seen as a form of begging the question.

But y'know, Darwin had a similarly related question about the evolutionary consequence of the human brain/mind that Lennox apparently lifts here and likewise attempts to use for apologetic purposes.

Joseph G said:

And is the knowledge of science a product of the brain, or of the mind?


Job 21:22 NIV
“Can anyone teach knowledge to God,
since he judges even the highest?"

Click to expand...

That's terrible for several reasons.

First, does this guy really believe God is responsible for every genetic sequence in existence?

Second, he says he asks every scientist why they trust a mind they believe came about by natural means and none of them can answer. Well I can answer. Yes I trust it because it's been very clearly shown that it works.

Lastly, his main problem is how he assumes natural causes means no God, as if God can't use natural causes to create. Amos teaches us that God creates mountains and wind, but we don't therefore feel obligated to deny things like volcanism, plate tectonics, temperature gradients, and the Coriolis Effect.

2PhiloVoid said:

I understand how what Lennox says in the OP short can be seen as a form of begging the question.

But y'know, Darwin had a similarly related question about the evolutionary consequence of the human brain/mind that Lennox apparently lifts here and likewise attempts to use for apologetic purposes.

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I am familiar with Lennox and he is the most insufferable of the "intellectual apologists". Lennox's "argument" about "unreliable mind" is foolish since that is all *any* of us have to view the world. (If you'd like to debate that, take it up with your solipsist friend.)

Hans Blaster said:

I am familiar with Lennox and he is the most insufferable of the "intellectual apologists". Lennox's "argument" about "unreliable mind" is foolish since that is all *any* of us have to view the world. (If you'd like to debate that, take it up with your solipsist friend.)

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Although Lennox isn't at the top of my list of apologetic sources, I've heard a few things from him that resonate with me, and I can say this even if the points he makes in the OP short aren't the sort I find very compelling.

Also, by the way, I'm not here to debate it all. I'm just throwing a couple of Federation credits into the pot since I'm passing by ....

Joseph G said:

And is the knowledge of science a product of the brain, or of the mind?

{Insert YouTube from OP here}

Job 21:22 NIV
“Can anyone teach knowledge to God,
since he judges even the highest?"

Click to expand...

The information in DNA is not some kind of mind-independent thing. Information is just a good model that works for us.

So, what is 'information'? We know how we use information, but does it have some kind of separate existence from how we use it? When we say: 'information is lost', do we mean like we lose our keys, (where we know the keys still exist, but we don't have access to them), or do we mean like forgetting where we put the keys?
The difference is in whether or not we regard information as something that fundamentally involves us, or not .. are we talking about the keys themselves, or our memories about the keys?
The place where this distinction gets particularly muddled is the realm of quantum mechanics, because so far the answer of which type of 'lost information' we are talking about, actually depends on our interpretation of quantum mechanics, so not even on our predictions surrounding any experiment we've ever actually done.

2PhiloVoid said:

Although Lennox isn't at the top of my list of apologetic sources, I've heard a few things from him that I resonate with, even if the points he makes in the OP short aren't the sort that I find very compelling.

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I rate apologists on annoyance and Lennox is as smug as they get. His arguments generally come down to an argument from incredulity wrapped in the (false) impression of his intellectual credibility. (He has no expertise on any relevant topic.)

2PhiloVoid said:

Also, by the way, I'm not here to debate it all. I'm just throwing a couple of Federation credits into the pot since I'm passing by ....

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That and a slip of gold-pressed latinum will get you leave to sit on the chair.

Hans Blaster said:

I rate apologists on annoyance and Lennox is as smug as they get. His arguments generally come down to an argument from incredulity wrapped in the (false) impression of his intellectual credibility. (He has no expertise on any relevant topic.)

That and a slip of gold-pressed latinum will get you leave to sit on the chair.

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Picard's...............or Q's????

2PhiloVoid said:

Picard's...............or Q's????

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the one in the waiting room

Hans Blaster said:

I am familiar with Lennox and he is the most insufferable of the "intellectual apologists". Lennox's "argument" about "unreliable mind" is foolish since that is all *any* of us have to view the world. (If you'd like to debate that, take it up with your solipsist friend.)

Click to expand...

I don't know if it first, but Lewis in God in the Dock IIRC, used the "unreliable mind" argument.

Joseph G said:

And is the knowledge of science a product of the brain, or of the mind?

{Insert OP YouTube here}

Job 21:22 NIV
“Can anyone teach knowledge to God,
since he judges even the highest?"

Click to expand...

So, information and knowledge are pretty similar, but I think one could make a useful distinction around how 'raw' they are. Information is raw knowledge, meaning it is regarded as quite cut-and-dried. I think the simplest meaning of information that is quantitative, is that information is what allows you to answer a set of yes/no questions, where the 'amount' of information, is determined by how many independent yes/no questions you are empowered to answer by that information.

One could think of this as the exponent one would raise 2 to, in order to give the size of the potential uncertainties that one's information is 'cutting through'. Thought of that way, 2 raised to the power of the 'information entropy' gives the factor by which one is reducing the measure of some unknown space. If you can answer 2 independent yes/no questions, then the size of the space you are uncertain about, has gone down by a factor of 4, and so on. So this all has a very 'raw' feel to it .. you start with a range of unknown possibilities and you can cull that space down by some factor by answering yes/no questions using information.

Knowledge carries a flavor of something more than just culling a space of potential possibilities. It carries the flavor of understanding something, perhaps a sense of why things are the way they are. It seeks higher order connections, concepts like conservation laws, or cause and effect. Its something that I think is much harder to model, because it relates to how our minds think in ways that are harder to see in binary terms. Its certainly possible that anything we regard as knowledge could, in principle, be replaced by some kind of information concept, but that's not how we relate to it in practical everyday terms. So we might say that if you look at which team won a soccer game, you have the 'information' about which team won, but your 'knowledge' about the event might include your expectation that they would win because their players have more speed, or more experience, or things like that .. things that are not as easy to quantify. So I would say that knowledge implies a certain degree of 'making sense', and hence we can say we have knowledge of our mind dependent reality, and the goal in building a mind dependent reality, is a quest for knowledge. Our information is simply how the experiments came out.

Of course, mind independent reality believers would now ask, 'knowledge of what'? The response would be: I don't know what you mean, knowledge is just knowledge, all we can say about it, is that it has a context. So knowledge about soccer is 'knowledge of soccer', but that just identifies the context of the knowledge, no more. It certainly doesn't establish that the thing we know is something outside our heads/brains/minds ... knowledge lives inside our heads/brains/minds .. just like information does.

Tinker Grey said:

I don't know if it first, but Lewis in God in the Dock IIRC, used the "unreliable mind" argument.

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I didn't accuse Lennox of being original. In fact, the clearest impression one gets when aware of this whole genre is how unoriginal his statements really are.

Hans Blaster said:

the one in the waiting room

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Darned argumentative Ferengis!

SelfSim said:

Darned argumentative Ferengis!

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They just like to get paid.

Hans Blaster said:

the one in the waiting room

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Which deck of the Enterprise is that on?