Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
errrrr....
As enthusiastic as I am in supporting science, I find the crudity of this being treated as a "breakthrough" deeply disturbing. This is primordial soup except you swapped "chemistry evolves into biology" for "physics evolves into biology". the former dates back to the USSR at at least 1922 and is a pretty basic application of dialectical materialism to the issue in terms of the evolution of states of matter from lower to higher levels of complexity with some advanced maths and computing thrown in. I'm not even using any sources other than Wikipedia and that should not be the level of scientific discussion. its positively medieval and primitive in that computers are being treated as credible when you could have used philosophy instead. This is so simple I wouldn't be surprised if this was taught at Soviet Pre-school biology class.
Can someone please tell me I'm missing something here? you're all scaring me.
Don't make me change your moniker to Debbie Downer!While it is an intriguing speculation, the specifics of running a computer code to test it would make so many assumptions that the result would be useless.
That said, systems that are far from equilibrium will often produce very high levels of complexity. Whether that complexity is enough to be considered to be 'life' is a very different thing.
Don't make me change your moniker to Debbie Downer!
There's exciting potential usefulness here.
And to top it off, there's no mention of you know who in the thread.
Convinced of anything?Good point.
This is something I would *like* to have be true. But I am not at all convinced by this 'demonstration'.
Convinced of anything?
Neither am I.
But I like the idea, & hope for the best.
Now if you can just eliminate heat death of the universe, we'll be all set.I actually have a more general piece of speculation.
Suppose that the 'physical constants' can actually vary, but that their dynamics is such that they stabilize on values that maximize complexity of the resulting universe. In that case, life would be inevitable and the universe would be as interesting to study as possible.
There go all the 'fine-tuning' arguments!
Now if you can just eliminate heat death of the universe, we'll be all set.
From the depths of despair to Mr Cheerful in one afternoon!I fancy the idea that once the universe gets below a certain density the quantum fluctuations will be such that new universes 'bud off', starting the whole process over.
Me thinks forms of 'accurate,' 'reflection,' 'actuality,' are overused here. You might as well say we have no 'actually accurate reflection;' and leave it at that.The problem I see here are the parameters of the computer model. And the question of how accurately they reflect actuality. And my very strong suspicion would be that we don't have sufficient knowledge of actuality in this case to create an accurate reflection of it's behavior. And that, instead, a program has been constructed based on how the theory being proposed would work in reality, if it is an accurate proposal. But it is the nature of computer programming to do what it is set up to do. And if set up"correctly", the results are inevitable, whether they reflect the actuality of the phenomena being modeled, or not.
In a general sense I agree that life is an inevitable consequence of physics. How could it be otherwise? And yet that doesn't make it any less transcendent, or metaphysical.
Not everyone accepts Soviet style dialectical materialism, even among scientists. Philosophy is a poor judge of things like these.
So the difference between science and pseudoscience is that sciences uses a turbo-charged calculator to develop the same hypothesis 100 years later?
No, the difference is that science actually tests its ideas, attempting to show when they are wrong. Pseudoscience tends towards confirmation bias.