Intentionality versus Absurdity argument [Segue from Nonman Society]

  • 4 Replies
  • 4766 Views

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Inshallabel

  • *
  • Emwama
  • Posts: 15
  • "present" = the future's past + the past's future
    • View Profile
« on: January 03, 2015, 11:49:18 am »
[EDIT Madness: Title]

posted this here due to tangentiality of it

Assuming that the reality we live in is "random" is a large assumption based on no evidence whatsoever.
Quote from: Wilshire
If you're looking to debate scientific semantics, check out the Science subforums, theres a lot of good stuff there (and potentially a few other persons who might engage you there). Though, it might be good form to cite some evidence yourself if you're calling out someone else for not doing so ;).

!!!ATTENTION ALL MODS!!!  I realized how unnecessarily long and dumb this post was and how it probably leads this thread down a whatchamacallit.  Tangent. 
Also I realize I come off as a douchebag here, I don't actually take what I am saying too seriously or think I am actually right.  I am just really tired, it is really late, and somehow I found a keyboard in front of me, which are all circumstances which set my asperger's on fire.
PLEASE delete from this thread and move somewhere else if necessary.


But, for the sake of hubris and vanity I'm going to argue that you actually can prove that assuming the reality we live in is "random" is an assumption based on no evidence...  and that you can actually prove this without citing any evidence.

Quote from: mrganondorf
in an evolutionary setting, everything hinges on coincidences
But what is Coincidence?
Random versus Non-Random {or Neither}.  Coincidence versus Intentional {or Neither}.
It is difficult to discern.
Although perhaps Science or Reality somehow does not care whether or not we consider it Random or not, Intentional or not.
These are subjective ideas, and aren't based on any kind of mathematical rule or logical razor.
{How would one measure Random or Coincidence versus Intent, and if one could Find something Random or Intentional, how could they be certain that they were not overlooking a prior condition that rendered this finding incorrect?}
Coincidence v Intent are just personal assessments of a situation, given a fairly minimal amount of information. 
To say that Reality is Random is an assessment based on no evidence, although to say that Reality is Not Random is similarly a large assumption. 
You can point this out without having any evidence of your own.
Why?
Because every individual has their own approximation of what constitutes "coincidence" or "randomness".  And if anyone claimed to have evidence, that evidence would only be arbitrarily utilized to reinforce their claim of randomness.  The evidence itself is merely "evidence".
It doesn't argue for or against randomness or the nature of reality without a human lens. 
So we don't really need evidence to point out that someone else's position lacks evidence if that position is just an assumption based on feeling.

Quote
Fast forward to the set of circumstances that created our planet.
But in order to "fast forward" you must admit that these circumstances were framed by a set of circumstances that preceded it.
Ex. The circumstances that created our planet were framed by the circumstances that created our sun, and etc., ab initio {or at least until you reach a set of circumstances in which all subsequent sets are embedded, which is close enough to initio for most}. 
Quote from: Ajencis, The Third Analytic of Men
If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing.  Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.
Is this world coincidental or intentional? 
Can any human make a concrete claim in one direction or the other?
Or is all appraisal of such values ultimately a subjective sliding scale of human emotional gradient?

Every intervening moment in spacetime that creates the environment we inhabit today was preceded by one that set the stage for its development, until there was at some point a set of circumstances that framed all following circumstances.
The firmament that sets the stage for the stage for the stage for the stage for the stage.

Otherwise the "Set of Circumstances" which illustrate coincidence is just arbitrarily partitioned off from surrounding Circumstances for the sake of being able to call events Random or Not-Random. 

This is like you looking at yourself as a baby and saying, "Fast forward to set of circumstances that created this baby.  Just the right number of this, and the right number of that to allow this baby's existence.  It is a random phenomenon, a complete and utter coincidence that this baby exists."  You do not, however, look at what set of circumstances immediately preceded the baby, i.e., its period of fetal incubation, its zygote-form, it's embryo.
You just arbitrarily looked at a small slice of spacetime and assumed that the conditions that generated a phenomena were random, which was just your personal assessment, when really the decision to label something as random or non-random isn't based on evidence because what is Real is Real... regardless of whether it was Coincidental or not.

Quote
Right distance from sun, right number of comets depositing water on the surface after it cooled, Jupiter to shield us from most asteroids.
Again, with everything being JUST the right amount of this or that, {generated by a preceding series of circumstances of incredibly precise material minutiae} it could be just as easy to say that it could not have possibly been a coincidence that things turned out the way they did.
What is so coincidental about a system of objects, compounds, molecules moving through space and time to generate structures like the Solar System we inhabit? 
The fact that conditions were so perfect still sounds almost Biblical in nature, even if you don't necessarily have an anthropocentric Creator Deity. 

Quote
Then life,  primordial soup with enough organic material to spontaneously form amino acids, single cells forming, single-cells evolving into everything.
Again, there's not really any clear indication that this combination of hydrogen/carbon/nitrogen/oxygen {prime elements of amino acids} is either terribly coincidental or terribly intentional. 
Neither is there any indication that there being "enough" of these materials is even the most remarkable or coincidental feature of the formation of amino acids {and life}.
The amount of objects, materials and mass in our universe doesn't seem either scarce or superfluous, it just is.

The presence of organic compounds was framed by a long chain of events that preceded them and set the stage for their development.
The mass and characteristics of the atoms hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen were framed before their development by the mass and characteristics of protons, neutrons, and electrons.  {And on down to quarks, bosons and leptons, etc...}

The characteristics of tiny protons results in their development of hydrogen, which generates mass, causing more hydrogen to condense,, which in turn generates massive structures like the Sun {nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium, based solely on the weight and nuclear force of particles that are smaller than individual ATCG codons in our DNA}.
Does not seem very coincidental.  Although does it necessarily need to be coincidental or intentional?  Random or non-random?
 
In fact its kind of remarkable {IMO} that organisms are "programmed" into existence via a process of acute molecular representation and material re-appropriation that somewhat resembles binary {on/off 100011010100 versus gene on/gene off ACCTGACCTG}.
http://www.genome.gov/glossary/index.cfm?id=78 - link for whomever interested.

The Universe is Irregular, or "Misshapen" {i.e. mass distributed unevenly, non-uniformly} in such a particular way that everything that currently exists exists.
All of the great gulfs between stars and galaxies, massive interstitial darknesses of vacuum and void, are positioned perfectly for our existence.
And for this conversation.
Whether it was intentional or random is a whole different question entirely... albeit not one that ever really changes the reality of what we inhabit.

Quote
I'm sure that if you look at it all as a whole, its a giant chaotic system, which to me is the scientific equivalent of coincidence.
A giant chaotic system that generates smaller systems with the molecular precision to appreciate the giant chaotic system in such a fashion... 
doesn't seem very chaotic...  Although this is just my opinion.
Although I don't think chaotic or chaos is a good way to describe the system...
IMO like the entire concept of a System is antithetical to the adverb Chaotic. 
If this were all just giant chaos why would a system be developed out of it in the first place? 
How could chaos generate a System to begin with instead of just remaining continually chaotic?

And as for all of this science-like stuff, I make a point of it mainly because I think... maybe... just maybe there might be something in it that is actually related to all of this epic fantasy... 
I remember in an interview Bakker saying he likes to subvert genre conventions while simultaneously appealing to those audiences...
he said that instead of thrillers he writes anti-thrillers, instead of fantasy: anti-fantasy.
Considering that the author has said something like this we may have to be a little bit more skeptical in our approach to his books as fantasies that are entirely removed from our own reality.  We may have to attempt to look at them as something that is somehow not actually a fantasy... aggh I am getting ahead of myself here though.

Assuming reality is random?  I say y'don't have the evidence for it! 
My evidence?  I don't need any, naturally. 
YOU exist and your assumption exists. 
Are YOU random?  Are YOU non-random?
OR are YOU just YOU?
BOOM!  oh yeah.  wham.  just blew your mind.
haha okay ridiculous I know whatever I am going to sleep now.

A quote from the books, while Kellhus is making his way from Ishual to Sobel {my emphasis}.
Quote from: R.S. Bakker, TDTCB, p. 7
     On the afternoon of the seventeenth day, a twig lodged itself between his sandal and foot.  He held it against storm-piled clouds and studied it, became lost in its shape, in the path it travelled through the open air - the thin, muscular branchings that seized so much emptiness from the sky.  Had it simply fallen into this shape, or had it been cast, a mould drained of its wax?
« Last Edit: February 22, 2015, 03:17:30 pm by Madness »
"Here" and "Now"
is inevitably rendered
"There" and "Then"

Wilshire

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Old Name
  • *****
  • Enshoiya
  • Posts: 5935
  • One of the other conditions of possibility
    • View Profile
« Reply #1 on: January 03, 2015, 07:44:28 pm »
posted this here due to tangentiality of it
Tangents are the life of the forum, its easy to move things later if it is necessary. Also, your post was fine, and not any of the things you mentioned in bold above. No worries :).
----


Really hate to say it, but I didn't really follow most of that. Sorry :(


At the very least, I can say that given an essentially infinite amount of time, space, material, and chances, literally everything is possible. Like the multiverse stuff, someplace there is a set of variables that provide every possible outcome, be it a 1/5 chance, or 1 in a billion. To me its not only possible, but entirely likely, that eventually somewhere, someplace in this univer randomly formed life as we know it. THe shear number of stars, and the billions of exoplanets we now know of, seems perfectly consistent with coincidence.

Coincidence and random are interchangeable, aren't they?


A quote from the books, while Kellhus is making his way from Ishual to Sobel {my emphasis}.
Quote from: R.S. Bakker, TDTCB, p. 7
     On the afternoon of the seventeenth day, a twig lodged itself between his sandal and foot.  He held it against storm-piled clouds and studied it, became lost in its shape, in the path it travelled through the open air - the thin, muscular branchings that seized so much emptiness from the sky.  Had it simply fallen into this shape, or had it been cast, a mould drained of its wax?


This quote has been debated, specifically your bold, many a time.
The best part, for me, about Bakker's TSA is the sheer possibility of it. Some much goes on, is said and isn't said, that the reader is left to glean meaning from nothing, and nothing from meaning. Its a vast labyrinth of thought, and discounting possibilities is likely the first step in our self delusion, but its at the same time necessary since you (I) can't follow all paths of logic at once. New perspectives, new people, always add something to the conversation, which is why this forum (or others like it) is so utterly necessary for this series.
One of the other conditions of possibility.

SilentRoamer

  • *
  • The Smiling Knife
  • Great Name
  • *****
  • Posts: 480
    • View Profile
« Reply #2 on: January 13, 2015, 04:02:37 pm »
The Universe is not misshapen or irregular. If it was it would invalidate the principal of homogeneity which is a fundamental principle of most current cosmological models.
« Last Edit: January 13, 2015, 08:20:10 pm by SilentRoamer »

Inshallabel

  • *
  • Emwama
  • Posts: 15
  • "present" = the future's past + the past's future
    • View Profile
« Reply #3 on: January 16, 2015, 05:49:12 pm »
Wilshire:
Yeah in re-reading this even I am not entirely sure what my main point was.
I guess it was a vague Intentionality versus Absurdity argument, although perhaps reality functions without either anthropocentric notions.
Oh well, tons of logical fallacies and inconsistencies abound.

SilentRoamer:
I am not a physicist but if the Universe were not misshapen, not irregular, doesn't that imply that it would be even or static?
What accounts for processes of change if the Universe were regular, homogeneous, matter and energy distributed evenly throughout it?
"Here" and "Now"
is inevitably rendered
"There" and "Then"

SilentRoamer

  • *
  • The Smiling Knife
  • Great Name
  • *****
  • Posts: 480
    • View Profile
« Reply #4 on: January 20, 2015, 03:46:04 pm »
When I say the universe is "homogenous" meaning it is regular, you have to account for scale of distributions - so essentially if you take a big enough patch of the Universe (say at the Galactic cluster scale) then most other pieces of Universe look similar (in terms of matter and energy content and distribution scale). The cosmological principle however can be applied to Universal laws which were an emergent property of the Big Bang. Taking inflation into account it seems unavoidable that isotropy would be king.

The processes of change operate on a small enough scale to not affect the overall homogeneity of the Universe. There have been theories, such as the Great Attraction and with the cold spots in CMB but nothing which has by its existence refuted the principle of isotropy.