was one that absolutely floored me. I checked the math - a few times, several years ago - and yup, it's pretty much spot on. That makes the universe something that the average mind could wrap itself around, at least in the abstract, when you reduce the entire universe, atomically, to a total number of particles which reads as '10 with 80 zeroes behind it.'
I have been pretty surprised by biologists' inability to recreate life in the laboratory. It definitely adds some zest to this particular meal-for-the-mind. But much like the Fermi's Paradox issue, it's more fun for me to try poking holes in the overwhelmingly compelling evidence's most obvious conclusions ;-)
I'm just not inclined to think that life's creation is really all that rare; aside from our apparent aloneness, I haven't seen much which suggests to me that life, itself, is hyper rare. It exists all over the place on Earth, in all manner of environments which, only a few decades ago, we would have thought impossible.)
Ok, so I took a few minutes and searched for the monkeys-typing-Hamlet problem, and found its wikipedia page. It's worth a read, for sure, if you haven't already. Something about the theorem's name just cracks me up...
The Infinite Monkey Theorem
I've got a whole other post written up below this, but I'll copy it to a word document since it's mostly about the rise of intelligence, and not life's formation. I don't want to derail the conversation.
Final thought: the Earth is still the only place in our infinitesimally miniscule understanding of the known universe that can sustain an open flame. I think it would be impossible for a species even remotely resembling ours (meaning it's composed of the same basic elements, in the same rough proportions, as we are), without fire's analogue, to master their environment in any meaningful way. Shaping minerals is the first key toward mastering the environment, and how are you supposed to do that without fire? So, while life in the form of bacteria, or even dinosaurs, might not be all that rare, I have a hard time deducing that intelligent life is a commonplace occurrance.
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Fodder here for Biology Rick!
In the last Konspiracy Korner, an amigo brought up "abiogenesis," the "natural process" of RNA/DNA coding itself to produce the first life form. Dr. D did not start out intending for Konspiracy Korner to go in this direction, but it did, and so here is one of his favorite points of reflection. It relates to the "unfathomably" vast Milky Way galaxy that must have given rise to scads of alien species. :- )
.........
Let's back-envelope the actual math here. Everybody says, "give a million monkeys long enough, and they'll type out Hamlet." But! Nobody ever grabs a pencil and calculates, "How long must they type, exactly?"
The answer is, a million monkeys would never type out even 100 words of Hamlet. Absolutely never. Not in a googolplex of years.
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The simplest animal has what, 5,000 codons (= three base-pairs)? How many ATCG base-pairs are needed to sequence the simplest self-replicating* virus?
The usual answer I've gotten from biologists is somewhere around that 5,000 figure. At least, as it pertains to observed animals in our experience. What are you going to do, posit a self-replicating organic machine with 100 total bits of information to it?!
So if the chances of your DNA sequencing itself is 1/4 for each DNA base pair, and your own body has 3 billion base pairs, the odds of the DNA falling into place from a lightning bolt is 1 in 4, raised to the 3 billionth power.
No problem. The universe is unfathomably vast, right?
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The first life form had much better chances than your own DNA would: there, the odds-against are a mere 1/4 raised to the 5,000th power. Easy squeezee! We've got that "unfathomably" vast and old universe, making all those trials.
Wait. Is it really unfathomable? There are 10 to the 80th atoms in the universe. And it's been here, for about 10 to the 15th power seconds.
That means if you assign the universe 1 chance to sequence a virus DNA --- > per every atom, per every second, forever, you've got 10 to the 95th power trials to work with -- 10 followed by 95 zeroes. (This is why mathemeticians call anything more unlikely than 1 in 10 to the 100th "effectively impossible." If its chances are worse than that, it simply didn't happen, and won't happen. Let's have a sense of proportion here.)
10 to the 80th atoms, that's a very fathomable universe, amigos.
As against a chance of random-sequencing the DNA that is more like 1 in 10 to the 3,000th power -- 10 followed not by 95 zeroes, but by 3,000 of them. In probability, you just subtract those two exponents: the chance of the universe doing this by chance is about 1/10 to the 2,900th power.
.........
You might ask, how do biologists reply to this? They start trying to:
1) Find ways that the ATCG base-pair dice might be loaded -- ways that the next "A" might be predisposed to be correct, in that first virus. (A virus needs a host, but forget that for a second.)
2) And they point out that DNA nucleotides tend to have some redundancies in them: an RNA helix doesn't have to be perfect -- just 95% correct.
3) And they create intelligent experiments designed to make ATCG base-pairs sequence correctly, due to outside (human) intervention.
This sounds good on paper -- until you start asking "how much does that subtract, exactly, from that 1/10 to the 2,900th power?" The answer is: Not Much.
To have any feasible chance of nonintelligent, random processes sequencing that first DNA, you've obviously got to get your odds down to much less in than 1/10 to the 20th power. How do you make the first DNA string that simple, or that predisposed?
You don't.
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Hey, we are not within a million miles of Dr. D's personal world view. Einstein, Flew, and Jefferson were "deists" -- they believed that outside intervention was obvious, but believed that this transcendent intelligence was completely uninterested in man.
We are just talking about one math problem, with profound implications. As Stephen Hawking once said about a similar math problem in astronomy, "I think there are clearly religious implications." That's just where the math goes. A blind dance of atoms didn't produce life.
This particular problem is why Dr. Francis Collins, who was director of the Human Genome Project -- let me read that sentence again -- reversed his position on "abiogenesis" and wrote a book titled, "The Language of God." He concluded that the "natural" evolution of the first living animal was simply impossible. Dr. D did not invent this problem.
That is either a real situation -- that DNA is too complicated to self-generate -- or it is not a real situation. Truth will eventually reflect that which is real. If a lightning bolt could hit a piece of coal (Mojician) and a virus-simple animal could pop out, that will become the consensus. If not, let's get on with imagining the Infinite Bubble Machine ;- )
The discussion itself? It becomes a house of mirrors, because technically-trained biochemists work hard at proposing "solutions" to the problem of this logic. But you, the reader, might not have run across this idea, that the universe is not very old, and not very big. Thought you might find it an interesting point of reflection.
Warmly,
Jeff
Comments
The exact way you phrase that, to me, is the key. To me, you've got to *start* with -- yep, I see the force of the logic there. THEN, if you want to go on and ask, "Does this puzzle have any reasonable solution?," then it's a fun riddle to play with.
I appreciate your acknowledging the ... :- O ... factor, of the idea that the universe is "only" 10^80 atoms big, and "only" 10^15 seconds old. Because with the improbabilities we are playing with -- cosmological constants, sequencing of DNA, etc -- it's weird that so few people have ever even thought about the X/Y fraction. They usually just assume the universe is *infinite* for our purposes.
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For those who haven't seen the wiki page, here's an excerpt. Ironic that Wiki uses the word "unfathomably" here :- )
Probabilities[edit]
If there were as many monkeys as there are atoms in the observable universe typing extremely fast for trillions of times the life of the universe, the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably minute.
Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has a chance of one in 676 (26 × 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only a chance of one in 2620 = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 (almost 2 × 1028).
In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small as to be inconceivable. The text of Hamlet contains approximately 130,000 letters.[note 3] Thus there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10183,946,[note 4] or including punctuation, 4.4 × 10360,783.[note 5]
Even if every proton in the observable universe were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons no longer exist), they would still need a ridiculously longer time - more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer - to have even a 1 in 10500 chance of success.
To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10360,641 universes made of atomic monkeys.[note 6] As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers." This is from their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys.[3]
In fact there is less than a one in a trillion chance of success that such a universe made of monkeys could type any particular document a mere 79 characters long.[note 7]
.......
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So what's tougher for a blind universe: typing one sentence of Hamlet, or creating the first strand of DNA?
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The original strand of DNA -- here, or across the galaxy, the original strand that gave rise to the "galaxy-seeding" alien race -- had to get there without help. There were no monkeys there to type that one :- )
Thats just the thing though. The chimpanzee will never type Hamlet, but it 'did' once it evolved into humans. We are just at the point where we are starting to understand how things happened. I don't think we understand enough about life to get into the idea of recreating the chain of life. We don't have a frame of reference either than Earth. Maybe once we look under the surface of Mars or deeper into the waters of Europa we'll have somewhat of a better idea. Or maybe we aren't capable of figuring it out.
That chimpanzee is basically our younger sibling. 6 millions years younger than us, with a 98%, 99% identical DNA code. But since we are the most intelligent beings on earth so far, it 'feels' like the gap between monkey and man is vast. If a superior species existed on earth how ridiculous would some of our pursuits look to such beings? Think about how inferior chimpanzees look to us and consider that from evolutionary standpoint that creature is barely discernible from us.
So much of what prominent scientists espouse as Fact, and Irrefutable Truth, are anything but. Far, far too many times I see so-called intellectuals revert to ways of thinking which are utterly indistinguishable from those which lead to ---> God did it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with 'God did it,' in my opinion and without any condescension whatsoever, but the whole idea of scientific inquiry is to lay actual, hard, immutable information bare for all to see. Faith, as it is understood by us Westerners, is different than study. Contemplation is different than experimentation. We, as humans, need both in order to keep our minds balanced, but one cannot just simply say, "given long enough periods of time, it's inevitable that " without taking some leaps that reality doesn't appear to even be capable of providing (like the time scales considered by the excerpt above).
It does actual disservice to those who haven't yet grappled with the almost unthinkably finite nature of existence as we understand it. Inevitable' is probably the worst word in that whole sentence about monkeys, now that I'm looking at it. Define inevitable: does that mean something that will almost certainly happen within this universe's lifetime (I would probably endorse this usage)? Or does it mean that, given an infinite amount of time (which is impossible to acquire) that it would most certainly happen (this, unfortunately, seeks to break very real laws of physics which say the universe - or at least this version of it - WILL die at some point in the future, so I couldn't endorse this usage)?
I thoroughly enjoy this particular though, as you put it, of a galaxy-seeding alien race. Think about that project's scope for a moment; you're going to fling genetic material across the galaxy so that it can get a chance to take root anywhere, and everywhere, it might possibly do so. Talk about re-engineering the cosmos :-)
Chalk down another thing scientists don't really understand.
There's a difference between a scientific question that needs time and research -- vs -- a philosophical paradox. :- )
"We're little children entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. We know someone must have written those books. We don't know how. We dimly suspect a mysterious order, but don't know what it is." - Einstein
It's not like a little more research will change the small number of atoms in the universe, or its young age, or the mind-boggling improbability of so many of the things going on inside it. I'd say we're crystal clear that (1) a lot of it shouldn't be here. Yet (2) it is here. A universe of paradoxes.
Which is philosophical, rather than scientific.
Fascinating thought, Doc - embarrassingly, despite my interest in countering atheists, I've never run across the actual numbers that likely disprove the theory that life evolved randomly.
::daps::
I keep an Indonesia/Carribean/Red Sea mashup coral tank, and know a little bit about lower life forms. The lowest form of life is either the cyanobacteria or the diatom. Both of these can take the crown as the original primordial ooze. Edited to add: Wikipedia says cyano takes PO crown. Sorry diatoms.
Cyanobacteria has destroyed many aspiring reefers.
A diatom is a single celled plant that makes a little glass shell and replicates. A cyanobacteria is a bacteria/plant that does the same thing as a diatom, but without the glass shell. Take a closer gander at these things:
Cyanobacteria
Diatom
The parts of a Cyanobacteria
The point of this, is that primordial ooze is fantastically complicated stuff, and it is alive. The figure n E 5000 probably wasn't referring to primordial ooze, it was referring to DNA. Last I checked, DNA does not a cyanobacteria make. It has a lot of other working parts. Also, the E 5000 figure doesn't solve the problem that if there was a near infinite amount of chances, and a cyanobacteria was made, it would still be dead.
My convictions on abiogenesis were never that strong, it just seemed plausible enough I never looked much deeper. (Typical) Showing the 'simple' math is persuasive. I honestly don't know what to think...every 'thinker' seems to assume intelligent design is a given, but from who or what. If god does/did manipulate the universe, that would assume he/she/it had a purpose. For what? All of the universe for just us...other universes for just them..what an interesting use of space. I think I need a quite place to sit...
No one expects to be reading about baseball and have their 'world view' changed...I wish I could accurately describe how rewarding that is. I knew this site was good, but dang you're expanding horizons and you didn't have to humiliate me to do it, thanks.
His first thought would likely be: "Who made (designed, if you will) him that and where can I get one?" I'd like to see the Chimp create a line of Hamlet with quill and ink. Or a stick and a pile of termites maybe?
In 30-odd years of discussing this subject, that is the most concise, forceful statement of the "complete cell" problem I've run across.
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All apologies: the original "Living Cells vs the Universe" petition didn't include your idea for two reasons: (1) to "simplify" into the simple contrast of [number of trials] vs [improbability of success] background, and (2) I'm illiterate as it pertains to simple life forms. :- ) Glad you ain't.
Glad I don't have to take you on in court. ... unless it's on the Great Silence subject :- )
When a real thinker runs into some information he hasn't run across before, what more honorable reply is there, than to say "Hadn't seen that! Tell me more" ?
Then, naturally, we grab somebody on the other side *we respect* (as opposed to a 'debunker' / cynic) and find the best possible case against. Only thing left: to come to a conclusion.
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The God of the Gaps protest has traction, if leveled against someone who says, "I don't understand this, so I'm invoking Intelligent Intervention." But this isn't a situation where we do not understand. We DO understand the Infinite Monkeys paradox. And we see that intervention must have occurred.
Just like if we walked into a pool room and there were 500 dice, all laying with the 6's face up. We understand, and we say 'Ah. Somebody arranged them that way.'
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Hope you're kidding about the 'humiliation.' This was an admirable exchange all the way through.
Of course it was your original post Montucky that gave me the excuse to pose the Infinite Monkeys question. I expected it to draw an irritated reaction, but lo and behold the Think Tank fully appreciated the fascination it brings. Chalk one more up for the Think Tank.
As to what the Intervener's purpose might have been, that might also be an interesting topic. You frankly admit that you just hadn't thought about it much, which is great. Personally I have thought about it much ;- ) including an investigation of Eastern thought on it and so forth.
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Here's one place I think you can show that Einstein was out to lunch: on the subject of Deism. (He also was a lousy chess player, LOL.)
P1. The moon is made out of ---- > dirt. What is dirt, to Deity?
P2. Mankind, with free will, the capacity for love, creation, and unpredictability, is less interesting than dirt?
Concl. It's not feasible to posit a Creator who is fascinated by the Periodic Table ... but bored by SABRMatt and Mojician.
That's a philosophical, not religious, argument there. But Deists are driven to this position by the problem of Pain. I sympathize deeply.
Warmly,
Jeff
Gonna go on a tangent for a moment, but I have a point.
A lot of us use Windows. I don't, but a lot of people and software use Windows.
And we also know that Windows has a huuuuge amount of bugs and issues that are constantly patched.
More locally, we all remember BSODs and crashing and getting mad at computers because of it.
So, why don't we just fling Windows out the door and come up with something that just 'works'?
Well, you could, but it's fairly epic in scale to the computing environment when it happens.
The problem is that *software* that runs on Windows actually depends on features of an OS, including the bugs that are invisible until they're 'fixed'.
In my mind, I think we don't really have the blueprints to life totally mapped out yet and as a result, we can't create life without understanding the small shortcuts that take place in the underlying code.
As a result, I don't find the DNA question to be to baffling statistically.
There's a lot going on and there's going to be a lot of shortcuts that may undercut the physics.
How many shortcuts do you need, to get from 10^2900 to 10^15 or so?
We don't need life 'totally' mapped out to understand that DNA requires more than 50 codons. :- ) Why do you need to be a mechanic, to understand that you'll never manufacture a V-8 engine out of three nuts and bolts? We don't get to resort to "our knowledge is limited" on that question. Our knowledge is not limited. We know that you can't make an engine out of three bolts.
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A simple sense of proportion here is the key. ... OK. count half of the base-pairs as irrelevant. Give every base-pair an 80% predisposition to be correct. Give the positive outcome every assumption you can think of. Where does the probability of a random DNA strand wind up after we massage it? 10^500?
And, as Mojician said, supposing the molecules did happen to string together towards a DNA strand ... what do you do about the fact that a membrane has to coalesce around it at the right moment, that it needs all of the other mechanical components that any living cell has?
And it has to luck into those other components at the right instant.
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This article had a simpler idea, though. Many folks just hadn't thought about how few dice rolls they get. Most times people just assume the number of trials is 'effectively infinite.' :- ) Not hardly.
Remember: 80 characters of Hamlet (one sentence) would never occur with the monkeys. Are we going to posit a DNA strand that is simpler than those 80 English characters?
Not sure if this point has been addressed but it may also be that the development of eukaryotic cells with mitochondria (which seem to be prerequisites for the development of multicellular organisms) is also a rare/unique event.
BTW, chimps only have 94% DNA commonality with humans (still a lot). However, I've never understood what that means really or how it is measured. Does that mean we have the same number of genes (we have different numbers of chromosomes)? I doubt that. Most of our DNA is non coding... Maybe there's a lot of commonality in the non coding sections and less in the coding sections? The numbers thrown out just are so nonspecific and undefined.
It quickly goes over my head :- ) but I've heard folks really stack up these unique events in biology ... left- and right-hand molecules, photosynthetic cells vs not, cells with flagellum vs not, gene origin vs protein origin, and so forth. Always enjoy listening to a couple of literate biologists discuss that. Maybe you and Mojo and Rick could do that :- )
If we do get that first "diatom" out of the primordial soup, what about those other evolutionary miracles in front of us before we get to a tree of life that we observe nowadays. It starts to boggle your mind when you realize that you have not one such Origin of Life problem to deal with, but several.
Not into biochem, so personally can't contribute much on that (maybe you'd like to expand?). But I've heard that DNA is needed for life, and I can divide 10^95 by 10^3000 :- )
One thing is that the probability doesn't really matter because life happened.
Whether that probability is small or not doesn't affect whether it happened or not (it did) or whether it's possible or impossible (it is possible).
The probability doesn't really fascinate me or make me go wow nor does it make me think of a higher being.
Now that I have that on the table, I can talk about the numbers.
Please note that I haven't been a scientist for a decade because I ended up becoming an Economist and not a Chemical Engineer.
10^80 is the number of all *Hydrogen* atoms in the Observable Universe and 80% of that is Hydrogen, but everything else is heavier elements.
But heavier elements exponentially reduces the count of pieces interacting in the system; Helium is basically two Hydrogen atoms, Carbon 16, etc.
And that doesn't account for the fact that complex elements also have Neutrons, so each one of those plucks out a Hydrogen from the count.
So, even if 8x10^79 atoms are (still) Hydrogen, 2x10^79 are tied up in 'active ingredients' that can actually foster life.
Odds-wise, calculating life coming out of 10^80 Hydrogen is misleading because that closed system can't create life.
As we know it, we need Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen and some other stuff to make it all work.
So, really, the system isn't nearly as large to create life.
But that only matters if you approach it from the end that having MORE of something means it's LESS likely to have more results.
That's suggested by the model that's been presented.
---
Yet, in most natural law observations, that's not true.
For instance, most chemical systems with MORE things will give you MORE interactions in the same space of time.
Let's look at the Ideal Gas Law, a simple model of how gasses act in a simple system.
PV=nRT
Basically, it's an equation that can give you a rough estimate of any of the variables involved.
P is Pressure, V is volume, n is number of atoms, R is the Ideal Gas Constant and T is temperature.
R is a Constant, but if you know any 3 of P, V, n or T, you can calculate the remaining variable.
So, for this exercise, say more Pressure means more Work (or more things happening).
And to calculate Pressure, you'd change the equation to...
P=(nRT)/V
So, if you INCREASED only n, you'd end up with more pressure and more work in the system.
Raise it exponentially and the Pressure goes up the same way.
--
The dice roll isn't necessarily a perfect thought experiment because you're not talking about one person rolling 10^80 dice.
You're talking about a system where 10^80 dice are running into each other and each item has it's own odds of becoming a part of a more complex system.
By the time you have 1 living something and that reproduces, you have another active roll going and each branch of that is going to exponentially reduce the odds as well.
Which makes me feel that a straight odds is a misleading.
Monkeys on keyboards writing Hamlet isn't really an accurate analogy to atomic happenstance.
We're propping up monkeys as random character sequencing.
The connections between letters is bound by human interpretation, but the letters themselves have no inclination to line up correctly.
That's why Reykjavík and Eyjafjallajökull are perfectly logical in Icelandic, but practically useless in English.
Nothing is forcing Eyjafjallajökull to be spelled that way except Icelandic people who named a mountain.
Monkeys are never going to sequence 'The undiscovered country from whose bourn' because there's nothing to force that to happen.
'U' doesn't have to be before an 'n' except when it's spelling 'undiscovered' and 'country', etc.
Yet, the assembly of molecules isn't random; it's very specific and only bonds in certain ways.
Gold doesn't interact with much other non-metals because it's a noble metal.
Carbon will *never* covalently attach with Xenon because of Xenon's noble electron configuration.
Conversely, carbon bonds with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc. easily because of their electron configuration.
Ionic states and the strength of bonds are what drives the potential energy in fission or tuna fish sandwiches.
A DNA nucleotide IS simpler because, given its atomic and chemical properties, it has less options to wire up than the letter G.
++ One thing is that the probability doesn't really matter because life happened.
Whether that probability is small or not doesn't affect whether it happened or not (it did) or whether it's possible or impossible (it is possible).
The probability doesn't really fascinate me or make me go wow nor does it make me think of a higher being.++
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In the context of this discussion, your implied first sentence is --- > "This entire topic is irrelevant, because we already know life happened without outside intervention." No, we don't know that. This reasoning is circular, and it is a refusal to consider the real issue.
There is nothing scientific about holding a vote, and declaring the universe to be materialistic. Science is a method of inquiry, a way to investigate. I don't get to pound my gavel on this philosophical issue, any more than you do. Logic and facts decide, not assumptions.
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After this simple declaration that materialists "win," no matter what the formula says --- > you then vaguely suggest ways in which the formula might not be so daunting. Next post...
You point out that with ATCG base pairs, we have a baseline 1/4 chance of getting the next step right, by random chance. With English characters, it's 1/26. Bang! The odds are better for DNA than for the monkeys.
However, after you discuss the first variable -- 1/4 vs 1/26 -- you then fail to discuss the second variable: the EXPONENTS involved in 80 characters of Hamlet vs. 5,000 base-pairs of DNA.
...........
You do suggest interesting thoughts as to why the dice might be loaded. This was given in the original article as one of the three responses that biologists usually resort to. However, it is unfair for you to analyze my formula without analyzing your own.
My original question to you was: Go ahead, with my blessing, and give each base pair an 80%, or 90%, or 95%, chance to be correct "because assembly isn't random." Fine. Do that, load the dice, but still calculate it. What probability do you get then? What is 4/5 to the 3000'th power? What is 9/10 to the 3,000th power?
As you know, the probabilities are still effectively the same: millimeters worth of trials vs. miles worth of unlikelihood to be traversed.
Unfortunately, you offer vague suggestions as to ways my own formula might be improved -- but you do not present your own formula to the audience, which I asked you to do. As you, I, and the audience knows here, those alternate formulas would lead to the same implications. We are just not going to get the odds down to 10^15, not when we need 5,000 base pairs.
Randomly typing a simple sentence of Hamlet is far less likely than 1/10^15, and the analogy is useful in terms of setting a sense of scale. However we try to muddy the water, the "real" situation here is that one diatom is vastly more complex than is one sentence in English.
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It doesn't look like you and I are going to move closer to middle ground Ice m'friend; I'm guessing we two are going to move further away as we talk. So, I'll give you the last word.
The audience is then free to sift through the ideas as they see fit. This is a sharp crowd; nobody is able to hide anything up their sleeves on this stage. :- )
Cheers,
Jeff
You're assuming that I wrote that without the paradox in mind, but that's not the case.
What I'm stating up front is that this question doesn't affect my existence or faith or spirituality or morality.
I'm still amazed at the construct of the Universe, but I don't invoke a higher being because it doesn't cross my mind or doesn't allow me to sleep better at night or whatever drives one to accept the existence of a higher power.
I don't reject outside intervention, but I also don't see it just because a system is complex.
--
For me, it's like this.
Let's say we're talking about an amazing cake.
One way you can explain why the cake is amazing is by saying that the someone who made it is AMAZING and AWESOME and end it there.
Another way you can explain it is to study it and find out that the ingredients are special, and the person worked 10 years at a bakery in Paris, and he tried hundreds recipe variations, and he gets the flour from a special mill and has it ground to an exact specification, etc.
Or maybe the cake is just awesome :)
The problem with a materialistic universe (ie that that all things, including people, are nothing more than molecules in motion) is that material follows deterministic (or probabilistic) laws of physics. Accepting an materialistic universe means you have to accept several direct implications which most people find unpalatable in the extreme
A deterministic universe means, for starters:
-free will (of any type or of any definition) is an illusion
-consciousness is an illusion
-choice is an illusion, and therefore there can be no meaning in that kind of universe
This has significant ontologic and ethical implications. If all actions, decisions, "choices", emotions, opinions are in fact determined, then there can be no room for ethics. An ethical precept tells us that we "ought" to behave in a certain way. However, "ought" presupposes that there is an option; you could choose one course of action or another. In a deterministic universe, there is no option... the outcome is determined. Therefore, words like "ought", "good", "better" etc loose all meaning.
Basically, therefore, if you believe that we have any agency at all, or that life has any meaning at all, or if you believe that certain actions are "good" or "better" than other actions, you already implicitly believe in something outside of the physical world, something that does not follow the laws of causal determinism.
Nobody treats their daughter like she is just molecules in motion.
So our definition of life, here, is "biological life as we know it". Too narrow, perhaps?
If we humans succeed in creating true AI - a non biological, sentient intelligence that can alter its own source code (i.e. evolve), self replicate (reproduce) and largely control it's own destiny then is that life?
I think that the problem with going straight to impossibly long odds on probabilities is that assumes everthing is random. It feels like if we understood even a few steps along the way the odds would shrink.
Whether we revive cells in cryobiology (Mammoths don't come back to life when the arctic warms) or theorize monkeys with Smith typewriters. We can't function without it. It's very difficult for me to understand how to consider it unnecessary for the creation of life. We seek intelligent life throughout the universe, but ignore it in our own little corner of it. My brain is incapable of imagining a universe without it. I have intelligence, but that's it? Where and how did I get it?
The wow factor I get is the "...by the time you get 1 living something, and it reproduces..." Whoah, wait! "And it reproduces!" Get me to a pay phone, I'm calling my editor. Hold the presses there. We're dealing with a real mastermind, Sherlock.
Maybe my cramped brain is incapable of conceiving intelligence as something that came out of nothing, and sentience originating by natural processes in my species (at least in elevated forms). Yeah, I'm going to seek the guy who made the amazing cake. I'm not going to imagine he doesn't exist. I can't even go there.
Honest question, but being essentially non-religious, it's hard for me to understand the idea of God, religion and faith.
Doesn't the opposite extreme of God end up with the same problem? If everything is as God made it, his plan, his starship, etc... You end up with the same problems you describe here. Free will (of any type or of any definition) is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, choice is an illusion, and therefore there can be no meaning in that kind of universe, etc. Religion just happens to have a opposing construct that conveniently allows you to deviate from His plan.
(At least how I understand it as an outsider... Most Japanese aren't even deists or agnostic, let alone religious.)
I'm not trying to create an equation, because I simply don't have the knowledge to assemble the mathematics.
But I don't agree with is that you start off with a ping-pong ball atomic model of the universe and use time as the only variable to create a very large number.
Essentially, you're telling me that this complex universe didn't change any other variable other than time and we waited for the cake to bake?
The universe as a static roll of 10^80 atoms over 10^15 seconds over a static volume X and calculating a huge pile of organic molecules just off that doesn't pass the sniff test.
The model of the Observable Universe with the Big Bang Theory postulates that all 10^80 was literally in an unfathomably small volume (some say 10^-30 and smaller compared to now).
Then, assuming this is a correct scientific model, the stuff expands over 10^15 seconds to where we are now, whilst having a lot of things happen in just the first 1 billion years.
If the nature of the universe is equally distributed and linear, you could say that the order of 10^3000 is unscalable.
But if you 'load the dice' at different stages (e.g. creation of heavy elements, creation of molecules, creation of organic molecules), and do it exponentially, I'm not convinced that it is mathematically impossible.
Even with the most basic chemical rate models (which I assume don't really work in nuclear reactions, but anyways), experimentally, you can have reactions rates that are the square of the number of atoms available in a reaction.
Even with just an assumption that it applies to Hydrogen (it doesn't), (10^80)^2 gives you 10^160... Suggesting you can potentially have another 80 orders of random sequencing available just because.
I would really like to model this out more on a scientific level, but I just don't have enough knowledge to create said model.
But analogizing the fact that it's mathematically impossible for a bunch of steel to end up as the Eiffel Tower without humans and applying it to the universe just seems a bit incredulous to what is already an amazing construct, whether it happened with or without assistance.
Ice's arguments line up with what I've been thinking (but he has the words and scientific knowledge to actually verbalize it). The probability question is a tough one to overcome if you are thinking of it as a single dice roll progressing linearly, single file. But what if there are billions and billions of dice rolls happening simultaneously many times per second. The probabilities become more palatable. And to Ice's point, once you get a hit on one, that opens up an exponential next level of new combinations to be formed, etc.
That's why i'm sympathetic to Ice's argument that the Shakespeare Monkeys not being a great analogy.
I will say though Doc, that I've never quite thought of the origin question in the way you've put it. Similar to others in this thread, the math of it all puts my assumptions more into question than I had assumed they were. Very good stuff. I'll fully acknowledge that I'm sympathetic to Ice's line of thought here, but willing to admit it's not iron clad in my own mind. Thanks for this thread, it's super interesting.
I have this argument with my wife periodically. It's Luther vs. Erasmus, replayed in our living room,while we attend and worship at the same Church and the same God.
I just noticed I assumed in calling you Iceman that you are not a female. Hmmm....not sure what my unnoticed sexism means, but interesting.
We know, for example, that some chemical reactions are vastly preferred in this universe over others...and that many of the preferred reactions involve the essential building blocks of biological life. In other wise...we know that the Earth was a nice little pile of building blocks that already defies Doc's random model and that the building blocks like to react with each other non-randomly. In fact, we believe, now, that the Earth is not a random planet...that the way solar systems form, there should be lots of rocky planets in the habitable zones of lots of stars even in this galaxy (and we just found some in the last month orbiting red dwarf stars) and that, when you model solar system formation, many of the rocky planets in the models get water because water is really easy to form and stable in any temperature and pressure within reason...so the universe is extremely bloated with ice and water and there should be plenty of it to put on rocky planets as a new solar disk cools and planets form. So the random model is not a good one to use.
I would, however, argue that even if the chemical processes that produced life are loaded toward being much more likely, the odds of going from something that is not alive to something that is alive even after combinations are made seem impossibly small. Even if you could make a virus RNA strand randomly form in ooze, it would be dead...you have to have more than RNA to have life...you have to have RNA that is energized and active. We have no idea how the first nucleic acids became active.
So...either the universe was built by an intelligent designer (God)...or the activation of live nucleic acids is a non-random process that we do not come even close to understanding...which might STILL point to the existence of God (what are the odds of the universe having just the right rules to favor life?)
Love the conversation. I am interested in a starting point for the Eastern perspective, any you recommend? I have read many T. Lobsang Rampa books, which he claims, flatly, "yeah, UFOs have been here and will continue to come here". I wanna say he mentions something about seeing one melting out from a remote glacier in the Himalayas. Anyway, I would love to read more eastern perspectives because Rampa says, 'take my word for it', then makes a bunch of astounding claims. Love that guy, I have to admit, what a life...
The humiliation quip was a light jab at the others blogs who likely would've hung me for 'being wrong', but you graciously pointed me to more information. Again, I can't begin to explain how refreshing that is. SSI is, to me, more than a baseball blog and offers some shelter from the rest of the 'net.
I'd say that leaves it to where a third party can assess and decide. +1 :- )
... but my reply was concrete: if you'd care to try a back-of-the-envelope calculation *using* loaded dice ... all roads lead to Rome.
I cheerfully agree that there is no way to know exactly what the "loading" of the dice is. But I've explained why the "loading" factor is irrelevant to this problem in the grand scheme of things, and intended to give you the last word, so ... thanks. :- )
I think that's a very interesting topic Grizzly. And how important these days? Very!
In the Dune series, how long ago now?, Herbert rotated much of the series around the galactic commandment "Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of man" :- )
That is definitely a great Konspiracy Korner in itself. My own conviction tends towards Sheldrake's: that AI machines will *never* become self-aware. That's a shocking position on Sheldrake's part, and in my mind the "coefficient of confidence" is low. Would be a great discussion, though.
They state my own convictions on it with too much accuracy. :- ) Would be 'piling on' to follow up.
Thanks guys.
Much of my adult contemplation has been around this general territory.
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By the way, I have a lot of respect for the Japanese paradigm, Ice. Your culture seems to be able to live in great peace and harmony, relative to the U.S., and the secular nature of it integrates with the harmony. In many ways, it almost seems unique. My sincere admiration.
Your question is 100% legitimate, one that we *should* ask and grapple with, IMHO.
"The Art of Happiness" by the Dalai Lama. Probably $10 on Amazon, or something.
Buddhism is the pivot point for religious* thought in the Eastern Hemisphere, though:
Hinduism has more adherents, and
The current Dalai Lama is an atheist, LOL.
In that book, the Dalai Lama does a simply masterful job of conveying its essence in a very short, light, pleasant, readable book. Read that book and you'll understand basic Eastern thought very well.
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And, it will make your life better and, um, happier. :- ) Buddhists attend to the problem of "paying attention to constructive things," and do it with massive focus.
For me, that's a small subset of the things that Christianity teaches. But within that subset, it's almost totally consistent with Christianity (suggesting that if there is spiritual Truth, this may be part of it).
Buddhism is "middle ground" or a "bridge" between people who have been entirely secular, and people who have been very spiritual. So if you remain interested in spiritual investigation after discussing Buddhism, we're also in perfect position to ask "What do other schools of thought add to that?"
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Since you asked, you might or not be interested in two speeches I recently gave, which cover some overlap territory between Christianity and Buddhism. They are interpretations of New Testament scripture, so be forewarned. :- ) Speech 1 and Speech 2 Speech 1 is "lighter" and speech 2 addresses some ways I tried to apply this Buddhist-style "constructive thinking" to my recent medical situation.
Cheers,
Jeff
... for a rational view of Meaning and Conscience. Lewis, an atheist, was troubled by the question of "How had I got this idea of Right and Wrong?" Beautifully stated, Dr. G.
If I *did* believe that "molecules in motion" produced the universe, that might be my #1 question: how did guilt and conscience evolve? Of what possible benefit is it to an organism? Lions don't feel guilty about killing the cubs of the previous Alpha Male. If they did, they would be selected AGAINST.
That ain't just me. Charles Darwin pointed his finger at "shame" as the key biological difference between humans and all other animals.
There are responses to that, but they're all pretty silly IMHO. Lewis thought that this very question was the key to the universe, from man's standpoint.
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Your last line, "Nobody views their daughter as random molecules" ... also an understatement of a critical point. Through a parent's eyes, we see a lot of things that we simply cannot see otherwise.
When their daughter is 4 years old, *everybody* sees the problem with Madonna and Lady GaGa.
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... and it's kinda too bad that the crew here is not conversant with your career and accomplishments. You ought to at least post your email signoff or something. :- ) The fact that you'd take time to post here, between 'component separation' surgeries, always makes me smile.
...I sincerely appreciate such meaningful questions as the one posed by IceX...but the question is actually not legitimate as it applies to my faith. That is a common objection, but as I understand the Catholic view, God created a system (the universe, the mechanisms to form life, the spark of our intelligence)...but he didn't create an individualized plan for each human being...he created a "grand scheme" if you will allow the imprecise language...a vision for what we, as a people would become. He also explicitly granted us free will, precisely because if he didn't, none of this would have any meaning...we'd be slaves. Catholics do not believe in a God that tampers with our lives and drives us toward some predestined conclusion. We believe in a God that wants to be our partner...to guide us to make the right choices, not direct us to do it.
In reading A Grief Observed I see Lewis being confronted by the reality and truth of an uninvolved God. He stares at it briefly but is so invested in his role as a Christian apologist he retreats back to his original positions. The whole exercise was a bit pointless. Not having invested an entire career to a point of view, I had nothing to lose by following the truth. Not sure where I'm really headed but at this point I'm much closer to a Deist than anything else and find no small amount of humor that it was A Grief Observed that took me several steps that direction.
That's probably a bit more religious focused than the philosophical nature of this discussion. This is indeed fascinating stuff and I am impressed with the breadth of knowledge thought and consideration going on here. For me the most obvious key is life itself. Life is something magical. I see here a reference to a cake and a frozen mammoth. Neither of them are alive. The frozen mammoth has every ingredient for life but it's not alive. The fact that we cannot reanimate dead tissue is for me enough proof that life is not simply a matter of ingredients. The spark has to have come from somewhere.
Yeah - when guys like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are ringing the alarm bell, there is probably reason to look for signs of fire. Musk likens trying to create 'good AI" to summoning a demon. As in, the person doing the summoning is far less powerful than the demon that he is summoning and trusting his safeguards to protect him while he tries to compel the demon to do his bidding. Hawking says that if it becomes aware, it will almost immediately become an intelligence far beyond ours. It'll be able to make changes to its own source code with incredible speed. Google is actively developing a computer that can program itself...
Very forceful metaphor. The 'supernatural power' aspect would be there, as would the lack of empathy or compassion.
Supposing that an AI machine could become self-aware, my only remaining solace would be the assumption that it would have no motivation. The ability to 'reason' is one thing; emotions are another subject altogether.
Naturally, a programmer might attempt to simulate motivation also. Whew...
interject myself, but I've listened to a lot of Richard Dawkins' speeches - which range between knock-me-out-cold brilliant and beautiful, to anger incarnate and contempt for anyone who doesn't see things 'his way' - and one thing he points out repeatedly, and in relatively good cheer, is that the presence of largely identical DNA isn't all that surprising.
Basically, if I understand correctly, the presence of genetic material is of far less importance when distinguishing traits for specific species' than the sequence in which those genes are activated. Dogs and humans share a staggering amount of, apparently, identical DNA. Originally biologists thought this was extraneous 'junk' material, but now many of them - including Dawkins, I believe - are leaning toward the idea that there might be enough material present in a human gene to actually create a dog-like creature, if we could activate and deactivate the present material in the proper sequence. That's the current trend in cancer treatment research these days in many quarters: to simply find the gene that 'turns off' the cancerous growth's unnatural processes, rather than try killing the tissue from the outside like we do now. Just find the 'off' switch and you're good to go.
But, as Doc suggested above, humanity is like a group of kindergartners walking into the Library of Congress and going, "Wow...hey, wait a minute...why aren't there pictures in most of these books?!" *headdesk in frustration*
so I'll be offline for a few days or a week. Grr...good discussion I wanted to join. But well-played, everyone. It's been a fun read!
I am decidedly "undecided" on the origins of life.
If there is an Intelligent Designer, where did this thing come from? Almost the same as, "what happened before the Big Bang?
My simple logical thought process on questions such as these always comes back to this. Are the answers to these questions unanswerable?
Sorry if this is off topic - just another view that "is this all futile"? And if so, who cares? Life is good - no need to overthink it.