Re: The Creation of Man
The beef with evolution is that to accept it as creating new information and working per se we need this world somewhere where random change leads to increased complexity or minimized entropy. In this world we would not need to pay for lunch, we would just wait till it cooks and servers for us. I think it is more or less weird.
As to the grandfather paradox, I would argue that creation and redistribution of life in time does not produce it. It is close to what is called a predestination paradox or a causal loop. It exists when a time traveler is caught in a loop of events that "predestines" him to travel back in time. In the predestination paradox they say a time traveler impregnates this great-great grandmother and thus causes his later existence with the necessity to travel back in time in order to exist etc. This paradox seems in some way the opposite of the grandfather paradox, in which a time traveler's act prevents his own travel to the past by canceling his own existence. Igor Novikov self-consistency principle suggests that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can. Here one can also dispute and say that causality is violated, but the case is weaker than in the grandfather paradox. Some people may say this contradicts free will. It is for reasonable will, I would argue. It may imply some convergence of the pasts, but it should not lead to a single trajectory. In the example with the time traveler and his great-great grandmother, another guy may have been more lucky in relations with the time-traveler?s ancestor, still the time traveler would be born anyway. Similarly, life could have been brought to earth from another source from future or present, or even several sources, it may indeed. Then life has multiple root ancestry. Causality in physics is weird anyway, but a free lunch world would be more weird.
Nice talking Harte,?In the ordinary Intellegent Design and Panspermia theories, the puzzle of the origin of life remains unsolved. Only the origin of life on earth is explained. Dmitri wishes to explain the origin of life in the universe by utilizing a timeloop having no beginning or end, similar to the question that is at the heart of the grandfather paradox. My thinking is, if you are going to use some weird time loop that throws causation out the window, then what's your beef with evolution. It's a lot less weird.
The beef with evolution is that to accept it as creating new information and working per se we need this world somewhere where random change leads to increased complexity or minimized entropy. In this world we would not need to pay for lunch, we would just wait till it cooks and servers for us. I think it is more or less weird.
As to the grandfather paradox, I would argue that creation and redistribution of life in time does not produce it. It is close to what is called a predestination paradox or a causal loop. It exists when a time traveler is caught in a loop of events that "predestines" him to travel back in time. In the predestination paradox they say a time traveler impregnates this great-great grandmother and thus causes his later existence with the necessity to travel back in time in order to exist etc. This paradox seems in some way the opposite of the grandfather paradox, in which a time traveler's act prevents his own travel to the past by canceling his own existence. Igor Novikov self-consistency principle suggests that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can. Here one can also dispute and say that causality is violated, but the case is weaker than in the grandfather paradox. Some people may say this contradicts free will. It is for reasonable will, I would argue. It may imply some convergence of the pasts, but it should not lead to a single trajectory. In the example with the time traveler and his great-great grandmother, another guy may have been more lucky in relations with the time-traveler?s ancestor, still the time traveler would be born anyway. Similarly, life could have been brought to earth from another source from future or present, or even several sources, it may indeed. Then life has multiple root ancestry. Causality in physics is weird anyway, but a free lunch world would be more weird.