MATT, replying to my post of 11 February at 11.02: I apologize for how much time this took. It appears I had another of my "episodes" where a line of thought snaked in and I followed it assuming that you could read my brain. 
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> I have a similar problem, on which I blame my failure to write the symphonies and concertos the world has been waiting for. 
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> We're in agreement on the subject of determinate language, though I remain puzzled by Nietzsche's cross-eyed focus on subject and predicate when the problem of linguistic determinacy arises out of the whole process of finding words to denote realities. I didn't know the Hawaiians had no word for "goodbye". I thought they used "aloha" for both hello and goodbye (it should be obvious from the situation which is which). There's no special word in my wife's native language either (Urhobo). It would be a lot more significant, though, if a culture had never developed a word for "evil", or "god". Come to think of it, goodbye is actually "God be with you" (a bit like "adieu" and "adiòs"). Yet another example of how terms become established and we forget about their actual meaning. At this rate, atheists should never say goodbye! 
> -I'll admit that in the section I quoted, the chapter in context was dealing with psychologists and philosophers--but specifically Decartes and his Cogito Ergo Sum. In the same chapter he had a similarly vicious attack against physicists and scientists at large. So, although I characterize him fairly--I'm probably moving him a bit out of context in that passage. Regardless, it was a bad idea as your follow-up post shows that I did a bad job in my message. -> I can see that the selfishness surrounding the "I" (a pronoun, by the way, not an article) is a barrier to Buddhist enlightenment, in which case the ego has to exercise control over the id. Re-reading our original posts, though, I think my difficulty was in seeing how you linked this to the philosophy of "here and now". Probably not important. 
> -Never once will I ever say that the knowledge of my own language is even... "good." I'd be honest in saying that I couldn't even conjugate a verb without looking it up. -> You say "all things we view as causes and effects are as such because we built them to appear that way". Doesn't that negate about 90% of science? I agree, of course, that "the objects in a language are never to be considered the same thing as the entity they describe", but that's not quite the same argument, is it?-Yes, I especially mean that for science. Everything we know we know by language. Everything we know by science as well. If we never had language our state would be little changed over the course of the ages, and while I'll always argue for creature comforts, there's something to be said about a hard life.


>What's the textbook view of exaptation?-I don't know whose term it was, but it is as I described. A morphologic entity that arrives with no usefulness tothe organism and then many many years later is used in an advancement.


> Behe testified under oath that he "did not judge [the asymmetry] serious enough to [have revised the book] yet."[34]
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> Four years isn't enough, eh?-
I don't think that the asymmetry problem is serious. I've been aware of the parallel approaches for quite a while, and they mirror each other. From my book experience I doubt the publisher wants to put in a minor correction, unless the book is under major revision.
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> The judge in the Dover trial wrote "By defining irreducible complexity in the way that he has, Professor Behe attempts to exclude the phenomenon of exaptation by definitional fiat, ignoring as he does so abundant evidence which refutes his argument. Notably, the NAS has rejected Professor Behe's claim for irreducible complexity..."
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> What's a good refutation of exaptation that DOESN'T try to remove it via definition?-The problem is that the entire phenomenon of exaptation is totally unexplained by Darwin. Why should a morphologic change appear 100,000 years before it is finally used? Why is it maintained if it provides no function at the time? The judge in his final opinion quoted up to 2/3rds of the winning side's brief. I am sure he didn't have the background knowledge to raise the questions I've raised. And finally exaptation is not a refutation of Behe. To me it has always looked like pre-planning in the genome.

1) That "consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of cells" is self-evident, since we know cells are involved in the process. But does the process emerge from the cells, are the cells used by an immaterial identity that controls the process, or is it a mixture of both?
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> 2) That "who we are is the result of highly connected cells" is also self-evident, since the body has an enormous influence on our identity, but this is not enough to describe, explain or account for consciousness or identity, unless we are to regard ourselves as automata.
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> 3) The statement that consciousness is immaterial but has a physical cause could just as well read "consciousness is immaterial but has a physical manifestation". We don't know whether an immaterial element sets the physical element in motion or vice versa, but I have the impression that most of the time "I" make the wheels roll. "I" am of course a collection of highly connected cells, but back we go to 2).
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> If one day you and your computer buddies build a machine that is conscious, sentient, imaginative, creative etc., the mystery may be solved. I'm aware that such a project is in the pipeline, but you know what a sceptic I am. I'll believe it when...if...-There's a third option, prompted my Nietzsche and seems to apply to your skepticism:-"There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties,"; for example, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, "I will"; as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as "the thing in itself," without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that "Immediate certainty" as well as "absolute knowledge" and "the thing in itself," involve a contradictio in adjecto, I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!"-It appears here that you are arguing purely from the realm of abstract theory. I will posit here that your claim in 3 can be rightly thrown out. If I read this correctly, you're stating that if we build a conscious machine that exhibits the same level of creativity as a human, it still wouldn't verify anything about materialism because there would be no way to tell the difference between a consciousness created by the individual processing units and some immaterial force swooping down and making the computer act like a human? -Your skepticism seems to live purely in a theoretical realm; it makes no practical difference whether or not the machine was sparked to life by an outside force or not, because we have no reason to believe that explanation. To me, practicality supersedes the theoretical. We both agree that there would be no way to know if an immaterial force animated the machine (or ourselves.) I say then, this gives us the right to throw it out as a valid explanation--because though it is possible in the realm of theory it isn't testable in the real world, and thus forever beyond our reach. -I see a deeper explanation of my more "Buddhist" perspective is in need--maybe it needs its own thread. In regard to human problems and human conditions; a prime cause is meaningless. The only thing that truly matters is the here in now. In both Buddhism and Nietzsche, they would read this search a fool's game because the current nature and state of humanity is an aberration; In Buddhism the thought "I think" is delusion. If you're familiar with Freud, "I think" comes only from the ID and I think it would be right to say that Buddhism thinks of consciousness similarly to the ID and that is why they practice "here and now." In Nietzsche's terms, all of this is the result of a language based on subject and predicate: our language is necessarily deterministic, this necessarily means that we then try to think of everything as deterministic (even when its not) and according to Nietzsche, the quest for truth (as you appear to be applying it) is tripped up in a pocket of your own creation--language has lead you down a false path. Skepticism is useful, but at the point where skepticism stops being feasible in the here and now we should abandon it. Sometimes you appear to hold to skepticism beyond that which is reasonable. Why would your alternative explanation in 3 be any more reasonable? -David's idea of a creator is akin to simply pointing and saying "I see God," and that's it. To me, even theology must have practical uses; and though I also agree that to a greater or lesser degree man creates his own meanings (even if its taking someone else's) David's view leaves zero practicality. It doesn't actually inform us (because at this state he admits it is faith) nor does it give us any basis to do--anything at all. I can't DO anything with it. In practical terms, it has absolutely zero impact on anything we do. And at least in my terms, I measure the value of an idea in terms of its usefulness.


> I've gone over exactly why Dembski's premises are wrong, he's calculating the odds of a single linear combination of events, as if there was only a single attempt at each step. This clearly wouldn't be the case with or without a designer. His formula also doesn't talk about time, which is something that he would absolutely need to provide. -
I know he doesn't use time, but that is the "climbing Mt. Improbable" approach, which implies given enough time anything can happen. But Dembski's approach, in which he combines proteins to make a flagellum, involves so many thousands of required units, he comes up with those improbable numbers. The flagellum is very complex and has what I would call bushings and rotors as well as the sliding molecules that make up a wavy flagellum itself. It is in every sense a micro-motor.- I'm not such the one-time shot is such a bad approach in theory, with only 10^18 seconds of history to the universe, and the time for life to work on itself and make a flagellum starts only 3.6 billion years ago (not figuring the available seconds used before the need for a flagellum arose in evolution. We probably had amoebas first). If one 'climbs', what do we get first, a useless rotor, sliding proteins? I see this as irreducible complexity, a la' Behe. The inbetween stages are impossible to imagine if they present no function to help preserve them as time passes.They must develop simultaneously and provide some meaningful use. On the other hand there are exaptations in evolution, which look like pre-planing, hang around useless for as much as 200,000 years and then a use is found. Evolution describes these things with no Darwinian explanation, except from folks like J. Shapiro, who talks about changes driven by environmental challenges. But 200,000 years earlier? (I think I'm right, in my memory, that the human larynx dropped in position, that much earlir before speech developed).


> > And Dembski solved that problem incorrectly skewing his result by 100 orders of magnitude (against himself, I add). I reiterate that the fact he's not willing to fix an error (that would even work in his own favor) means he's deliberately dishonest. That book's been in print for over 10 years and no errata has appeared on his website to address this. I still don't know why you care to quote him, he is beyond contempt in my view. -
The error is 10^65, reducing the odds against chance: 10^-288 to 10^-223, if I remember the numbers correctly. Either way chance has 'no chance' And it appears that Dembski has a giant ego. My source:-http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/tdr.html


> And Dembski solved that problem incorrectly skewing his result by 100 orders of magnitude (against himself, I add). I reiterate that the fact he's not willing to fix an error (that would even work in his own favor) means he's deliberately dishonest. That book's been in print for over 10 years and no errata has appeared on his website to address this. I still don't know why you care to quote him, he is beyond contempt in my view. -David: "one should be able to calculate the odds against chance from that point. Dembski did it for the flagellum, and he found enormous odds. I just don't know enough math to even try". -I don't care if he made an error. My point was, obviously, he had some way of using necessary proteins to make such a calculation for 'chance',and by your own discussion his odds were more enormous that he stated. The discovery of the error only makes his point stronger, it seems to me, as it increases the odds against 'chance'. You are quite overly emotional about Dembski.


> I too find a false dilemma here, although in my case I take a more Buddhist view: There is also the possibility that our world simply *IS* with no distinction needed as to whether or not it was or wasn't created. We could be projecting a prime cause because we want there to be. (I'm not refuting the big bang here, only that IT wasn't the true beginning of the universe, if one even exists.) -Right. Alan Guth reminds us in his book, The Inflationary Universe, that we have no idea WHAT went bang! 
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> This goes back to Seth Lloyd's book... at the minimum I can safely make the claim that the universe needed no creator up until the point where abiogenesis is needed. -I don't think you are that safe. We can still argue that the Big Bang was a caused event by a diety. We have no proof the BB was spontaneous. All we can know is that it occurred. the rest is guesswork.