Intelligent Design is in retreat


"How is it possible to have vitalism and teleology operating on all cosmic scales and yet disallow a cosmically creative intelligence? And what would be the benefit? How does this intransigence in the face of massive evidence reflect anything other scientific myopia?" Dan Smith

Vitalism is simply signal nonlocality. This includes Rupert Sheldrake's theory. It shows a violation of micro-quantum theory by macro-quantum theory in the same sense that general relativity shows a violation of special relativity.

In general relativity the laws of special relativity contract to being true only locally in the tangent fiber rather than globally.

In emergent post-quantum theory signal locality is only found in ensembles of simple pieces so small that they are "dead". Life, like superconductivity and gravity is an emergent collective phenomenon beyond mechanical reductionism, but certainly not beyond physics! The evidence for signal nonlocality is:

1. Mind-Brain experiments of Libet, Radin, Bierman.

2. SRI Remote Viewing e.g. Geller effect

3. NIDS High-Strangeness of the "Skinwalker"

...

*This means that the idea of secure untappable quantum cryptography is a chimera because signal locality, no-cloning can be broken. Don't bet on it. See the papers of Antony Valentini.

"ANTONY VALENTINI is a Research Associate, Department of Physics, at Imperial College in London. He received his PhD in Astrophysics at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, under Dennis Sciama (whose former PhD students include Stephen Hawking, David Deutsch and Martin Rees). The Thesis develops the pilot-wave theory of de Broglie and Bohm into a complete, alternative approach to modern physics, with applications to quantum gravity and cosmology.

Dynamical Origin of Quantum Probabilities, Antony Valentini, Hans Westman, (2004), quant-ph/0403034.
Subquantum Information and Computation, Antony Valentini, quant-ph/0203049 To appear in 'Proceedings of the Second Winter Institute on Foundations of Quantum Theory and Quantum Optics: Quantum Information Processing', ed. R. Ghosh (Indian Academy of Science, Bangalore, 2002), Journal-ref: Pramana - J. Phys. 59 (2002) 269-277.
Signal-Locality and Subquantum Information in Deterministic Hidden-Variables Theories’ in ‘Non-Locality and Modality’, eds. T. Placek and J. Butterfield (Kluwer, 2002) pp. 81-103.
Influence of bias voltage on the stability of CsI photocathodes exposed to air, N. Cioffi, E. Nappi, M. A. Nitti, B. K. Singh, Antony Valentini, (2002).
Influence of the substrate reflectance on the quantum efficiency of thin CsI photocathodes, E. Nappi, M. A. Nitti, Antony Valentini, (2002).
Signal-Locality in Hidden-Variables Theories, Antony Valentini, (2002).
Universal Signature of Non-Quantum Systems, Antony Valentini, quant-ph/0309107."

On Jan 6, 2006, at 7:50 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

Dan you are writing silly stuff. Most of it is not even wrong. First read ALL of Lenny Susskind's "Cosmic Landscape." Then rethink what you are saying. It would be real easy for a physicist like Lenny Susskind to rip you to smithereens as simply another scientifically illiterate Clueless Country Bumpkin.

A few facts:

1. Stephen Weinberg predicted that the cosmological constant would be ~ 10^-120 (c^3/hG) back in the 1980s years before it was actually measured to be that in Type 1a supernovae.

How did he do it. WAP that's how. Weak Anthropic Principle that only really makes sense if we live in a multiverse or megaverse of an infinity of parallel universes.

2. Fred Hoyle did a similar thing in the nuclear physics of elements forming in the stars many years ago. Accurately predicting position of a nuclear reaction resonance in the carbon nucleus before it was measured.

3. The same number for the cosmological constant explains the anomaly in which it appeared that some stars were older than the universe. Once you add in the measured positive constant vacuum zero point energy with negative pressure w = -1, so that every two objects in space repel with a force ~ to their separation, the universe is older than the stars in question because it is accelerating in its rate of expansion.

4. The measured lumpiness in the surface of last scattering 10^-5 measured by the WMAP NASA probe is exactly what is theoretically predicted ahead of the measurement in order for the galaxies to form.

5. The collective plasma oscillations seen in the WMAP data show that 3D space is flat on a large scale to maybe 2% precision.

These are only a few triumphs of the past 5 years or so.

That said, the WAP is enough to explain the many fine tuning "coincidences" that suggest GOD to the Evangelical Born Agains.

The only Fly in the Soup here is Skinwalker! But not even that means The Rapture, The Second Coming and the Revelations of Saint John et-al.


On Jan 6, 2006, at 5:12 PM, Dan Smith wrote:


"Jack,

You may recall it was I who pointed you to Robert Laughlin's website some months ago.

You might wonder why Robert and I are both touting non-reductionism. And then what do you propose to do about this?

Robert's point is that irreducible structures are endemic to Physics, even on macro scales.

Why might anyone care about this fact?

One significant locus of concern would be the biologists. They care because they need to know if it is their responsibility to provide reductive explanations for the biological laws that they have discovered. According to Robert, they can afford to remain agnostic as to the source of their laws, simply because physicists are in the same predicament. They too have laws that are irreducible to the first principles of physics.

Both the biologists and physicists, however, are reluctant to make much of this, and this is almost entirely due to the politics. If religion and science are not supposed to mix, what about politics and science? Is this better or worse?

If the biological laws are irreducible, how does this differ from the biological mechanisms that appear to be irreducible? Do the irreducible laws not present even a bigger ontological problem than do the mechanisms?

The specter of teleology and vitalism in biology is greatly magnified. This specter then has to be added to the already existing Anthropic problem of physics.

The Weak Anthropic Principle utterly fails to account for the necessarily pre-extant irreducible biological laws. The best you could do is invoke Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Resonance, but I'm skeptical that this will benefit physicalism.

How is it possible to have vitalism and teleology operating on all cosmic scales and yet disallow a cosmically creative intelligence? And what would be the benefit? How does this intransigence in the face of massive evidence reflect anything other scientific myopia?


Dan"