The Creation of Man

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

Hi everybody on this beautiful forum!

Have you had this feeling that the world becomes as you expect it and even more so? Like you open a book and read exactly as you thought, only in better wording. Here are several excerpts from Hoyle?s ?The intelligent universe? (1983). Please note that I had had no idea or heard anything about evolutionary vector viruses when I posted a couple of blogs about that possibility.

?In pre-Copernican days, the Earth was erroneously thought to be the geometrical and physical center of the Universe. Nowadays, in seemingly respectable scientific circles, the Earth is taken to be the biological center of the Universe ? an almost incredible repetition of the initial error. Yet noting is clearer than the fact that all life processes are cosmic in their scope.?

?The Darwinian theory of evolution is shown to be plainly wrong. Life has evolved because biological components of cosmic origin have been progressively assembled here on Earth. These components have arrived from outside, borne in from the cosmos on comets.?

?Bacteria can survive in the extreme conditions of outer space. In contrast to what we are told by NASA, it looks as if the Viking missions in 1976 proved that life does exist on Mars, and there is now conclusive evidence that life exists throughout the solar system.?

?The key to understanding evolution is the virus. The viruses responsible for evolution and the viruses responsible for diseases are very similar. They are different sides of the same coin.?

?The only space travelers are cosmic microorganisms ? the components of the creation and evolution of life.?

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Harte\")</div>

Zoomerz,
Thanks for reiterating my statement in a technical way. We are disussing beginnings here.
H[/b]

Harte,

I did not invent the time loops, naturally. I said also that I would not take my origin idea to the bank yet. However it is also obvious, though, that there are discussions in quantum physics and cosmology about time loops and travel; and causality is no more mechanistic Newtonian?s causality, this is why many worlds and self-consistency principles pop up, to come to terms with causality. I just mentioned that life is likely to begin in a very controlled environment of an advanced lab only. When in a thousand years or sooner, here on Earth, we make a cellular organism from scratch in a vial, then after another billion years or so, when the manufactured guy grows smarter and spreads over the Universe, will he/ she still be asking this stupid question what came first, like egg or chicken? I just made a point. Do you like my answer to the egg ? chicken question: spore came first, then chicken and then egg? DNA may be formed on clay, alright, but it is bound to be some specially formulated clay in a lab, and the sequence had to be written first, BTW.

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

From F. Hoyle ?The intelligent Universe? 1983, p.213:

?I think we must abandon our preconceptions to appreciate what is happening. It the familiar past-to-future time-sense were to lie at the root of biology, living matter would like other physical systems be carried down to disintegration and collapse. Because this does not happen, one must conclude, it seems to me, that biological systems are able in some way to utilize the opposite time-sense in which radiation propagates from future to past. ...

If events could operate not only from past to future, but also from future to past, the seemingly intractable problem of quantum uncertainty could be solved.?

 

[StarLord]

Re: The Creation of Man

Dmitri,
What about viewing them just like oil and water, while you might be able to mix them, they do not actually lose their individual uniqueness nor do they actually combine?

Harte,

What about time loops being a actuality only *after* humans come on to the scene? Then we don't have nothing making something.

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

StarLord,
I like your analogy with oil and water. When you mix them you lose the track of the origins. I guess consistency in quantum physics is strange but nice. I like the symmetry of future and past; I also like to think that plants can somehow feel the future; good for them, because they cannot move and are bound to a place for often a hundred years or more. The book by F. Hoyle, which I highly recommend, gives more of a theoretical physicist?s insights into the nature of life, its origins and evolution. I thought viral upgrades are needed to support integrity of life systems, he says the information from the future can be used besides. This is by far the best (if not the only) book on theoretical biology that I have read. I am for more directed ways of evolution though. He suggests new genes like cosmic rain: many get many. I think ETs are more specific; genome comparisons should show. The thing is, this 95%+ of non-protein-coding DNA in the genomes, which was regarded redundant or silent until very recently, turns out now to be, almost all of it, expressed at RNA level. This points out to much higher specificity of genomes hence much more careful assembly of them, not like throw them a bunch, and some will grow in something.

 

[Harte]

Re: The Creation of Man

Harte,

What about time loops being a actuality only *after* humans come on to the scene? Then we don't have nothing making something.

...What I'm getting at here is that it is possible that life in our universe came from time travellers. If it did, those travellers were from a different universe since a thing cannot create itself...
QUOTE]

Starlord,
As you see, I have already agreed that this is indeed possible. My only objection is that I don't see how these humans could have come on the scene in the first place to seed their own past with life, unless they are from a parallel universe.

...Because this does not happen, one must conclude, it seems to me, that biological systems are able in some way to utilize the opposite time-sense in which radiation propagates from future to past. ...

(From Fred Hoyle "The Intelligent Universe" p. 213)

Dmitri,

"... the trouble we can now see with most of the fundamental questions about life and the origin of the universe is that they are asked back to front. It is far less diffcult to grapple with the issues in a future to past sense, because then we approach the ultimate cause instead of receding from it: the ultimate cause being a source of information, an intelligence if you like, placed in a remote future." (from Fred Hoyle "The Intelligent Universe" p. 214, my boldface italics)

I think Hoyle's idea may have some merit. I don't see how you get life creating itself from this though. Hoyle is talking about an itelligence placed in the future that is influencing quantum events in it's past. From this, I guess the question of where life ultimately comes from becomes the question "How was this intelligence placed there?" Notice his use of the term "ultimate cause". He is not talking about life from the future inventing itself in the past. He is talking about life in the future inventing us in it's past. Otherwise there is no "ultimate cause". Hoyle mentions some of this inconsistency on page 243 of this book in his example of a person going into the past to arrange that his ancestors never meet. Since the decision made in the traveler's head (an electrical phenomenon succeptable to quantum fluctuations) is being controlled from the future, the proper decision is made and logical consistency is maintained. It is obvious from this example that Hoyle will brook no violations of causation. He just looks at it backwards. The intelligence in the future he speaks of cannot be us, for that would make inconsistent the very logical consistency he spoke of in his example.

H.

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

Harte,

I have been trying to come to terms with these ideas about life origins since very recently, actually a couple of weeks before my first post in this forum. A long time ago, probably 15 years or so back, I just figured natural selection on random variation is not an option, but I did not question common descent and the tree of life, I actually worked on phylogenetic trees, in the meantime thinking Lamarckian mechanisms should be most topical, but they would not explain the origin of new functions anyway. Then very recently I have rejected the single trunk tree, and have been trying to make sense of the ID papers and books, so I have little thought through so far. Here are a couple of points. I thought many worlds are not physically connected and will never be in the context of the concept. When we talk past ? present ? future(-space) how do we mean different or parallel universes if we have points of physical connections? Is it not like a four-bedroom house, with a utility room made into another bedroom, with several additions?

What bothers me most in Hoyle?s system is that he suggests two ways that direct evolution while either would be OK to me. This is not to say that there may not be even more than two, it is just how to bridge them. I mean viruses as vectors of evolution on the one hand and signals from the future on the other. This starts from the seeming conflict that life forms deteriorate by mutations with time unless they have means to fight chaos of thermodynamics. If life is being directly upgraded by viruses/ bacteria this solves the problem. If life has the property, even at quantum level, to accommodate information from future, this too solves the problem, without the need for viral upgrades. It seems, without viruses, pertinent molecules of life should behave according to and towards future biochemical-physiological solutions, thus build more information and complexity on the way to realizing these future states. This alone would explain evolution. All needed molecules are here at hand in the cell, moving, kicking each other looking for something better. Vs. viruses come from a very long way, likely from ET, maybe future ET. Maybe this is because our DNA does not yet have enough means to create new long chunks of itself however hard it looks ahead and forward to it.

 

[Harte]

Re: The Creation of Man

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Dmitri\")</div>

Harte,
... I thought many worlds are not physically connected and will never be in the context of the concept. When we talk past ? present ? future(-space) how do we mean different or parallel universes if we have points of physical connections? Is it not like a four-bedroom house, with a utility room made into another bedroom, with several additions? ?[/b]

Dmitri, I can't be sure how well versed in the quanta you are. I am only a layman but I can explain the Many Worlds theory. Here are two experiments, one a thought experiment and another that has been conducted many times under laboratory conditions with the same results.

Actual experiment:

Cut a thin slit in a piece of paper and place it in front of a screen or some other such thing like a white wall or another whole piece of paper. If you shine a light at the slit and look at the light projected through the slit onto the screen you will see a blur of light (if you placed the slitted paper exactly right, you could see a projection of what your light source looks like - like a pinhole camera). This is exactly the pattern you would expect if you consider light to be made up of photons. It is exactly the pattern you would get if you threw a trillion baseballs at an opening in a picket fence, for example, or shot a trillion bbs through an opening.

Cut a second slit in the same paper, fairly close to the first slit and shine a light at both slits. Then look at the projected light pattern behind the slit on the screen. You may expect to see a larger blur, perhaps made up of two overlapping blurs, but you would be wrong. You will see an interference pattern made up of light and dark stripes, exactly as if you were forcing waves through the two openings and the crests from one opening were reinforcing the crests from the other opening while the troughs from one opening were reinforcing the troughs from the other opening, and every variation between.

Quantum mechanics explains this problem by considering the position of a photon (or any other particle) to be a function of what is called a probability wave. Since we don't know the exact position of each photon, that is we don't know which slit each one went through, there is only a probability that a particular photon went through a particular slit and it is this uncertainty that causes the interference pattern when we expect to see a blur. Feynman at this point explains that perhaps each photon took every possible path simultaneously.

BTW, this experiment has also been conducted with electrons that were fired at the slits one at a time, and still the interference pattern emerged. So lets consider for the rest of this experiment that we are using the electron gun and shooting only one electron at a time.

I know this is wordy and somewhat dull but it's about to get interesting.

If you put some kind of electron detector at one (or both) of the slits, you could determine which slit an electron went through and eliminate the uncertainty. When we do this, the interference pattern disappears and is replaced by the two overlapping blurs we expected to see when we first cut the second slit! The only change we have made here is detecting which slit the electron passes through, yet the projection on the screen behind the slits has completly changed. This is famously known as the Two-Slit Experiment, a rather mundane name for such a fantastic finding.

Thought experiment:

Imagine you have refined a piece of radioactive material in such a way that it has a 50% probability of emitting a bit of radiation every minute. The material is currently in a lead-lined box with a lid you can open with some remote control mechanism. Imagine you put the box inside another lead-lined box that contains a vial of cyanide, currently stoppered. Connected to the cyanide vial is another mechanism (with a radiation detector) to open the cyanide vial if any radiation is detected. Now put your cat in the large box with all the mechanisms and close it up. Then, using your remote control, open the container with the radioactive material for exactly one minute, and then remotely close it again. Is the cat dead?

We would think that the cat has exactly a fifty-fifty chance of being dead. Quantum mechanics says the cat is both dead and alive. That is, since probability is the rule in quantum mechanics, and there is no reason to pick one probability over another, the cat exists in a sort of overlapping of universes to many worlds theorists, and the cat exists in a strange probabalistic sense to other theorists. According to the many worlds theorists, once you open the box, you determine which universe will contain both you and the live cat or you and the dead cat. This experiment is called Schroedinger's Cat, after one of the pioneers in quantum mechanics.

Using the electron detector in the first experiment, and opening the box in the second, is what most quantum physicists call "collapsing the probability wave." Those that subscribe to the many worlds theory (and there are quite a few) interpret these actions as a splitting off of a seperate universe. In the first example, you have created a universe (by using an electron detector) where electron "a" went through slit "b" and etc. In the second example, you have created a universe where your cat is alive (or dead, depending on what you find when you open the box). The other outcomes (dead cat or live cat) are just as valid and also exist. In fact, the cat was both dead and alive until you opened the box, that is, these two universes still overlapped up to the point that the box was opened.

Many worlds theorists consider that there are several overlapping universes, a universe for every quantum probability that exists. In this theory, we are living in a multiple universe where the only universes that don't overlap with ours are the ones that resulted from us making a quantum determination, such as detecting which slit an electron went through.

It is these and other facts about quantum mechanics that make me tend to prefer the multiple timeline theory of time travel. The process of collapsing the probability wave is akin, in my mind, to traveling into the past. If a future version of myself traveled into the year 1982 for example, and attended my first wedding, that would create a new universe because in this universe that did not happen.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Dmitri\")</div>

What bothers me most in Hoyle?s system is that he suggests two ways that direct evolution while either would be OK to me. This is not to say that there may not be even more than two, it is just how to bridge them. I mean viruses as vectors of evolution on the one hand and signals from the future on the other. This starts from the seeming conflict that life forms deteriorate by mutations with time unless they have means to fight chaos of thermodynamics. If life is being directly upgraded by viruses/ bacteria this solves the problem. If life has the property, even at quantum level, to accommodate information from future, this too solves the problem, without the need for viral upgrades. It seems, without viruses, pertinent molecules of life should behave according to and towards future biochemical-physiological solutions, thus build more information and complexity on the way to realizing these future states. This alone would explain evolution. All needed molecules are here at hand in the cell, moving, kicking each other looking for something better. Vs. viruses come from a very long way, likely from ET, maybe future ET. Maybe this is because our DNA does not yet have enough means to create new long chunks of itself however hard it looks ahead and forward to it. [/b]

Hoyle has confused me for a long time. His refusal to accept the Big Bang (a term he himself coined in derision) seemed like grasping at straws. His idea of some intelligence "placed in the distant future" also seems like a stretch. Who would he have us believe "placed" this intelligence in our future? Anyway, perhaps it is easier to influence the past batch-wise, that is to create these virus vectors all at once instead of manipulating quantum fluctuations in atoms making up DNA strands on a continuous basis. The information creating the viruses could be sent in a single batch, perhaps conserving energy or resources the future intelligence wishes not to waste.

To me, the problem with life coming from our future is twofold. First, according to my belief in the multiple timeline idea, no time traveller that comes to our universe is from our future. My second objection you know well, for I have stated it many times in this thread.

That is not to say that life here could not have come from a future. I can see some intelligence that evolved in some other universe perfecting the technology to look at other universes and finding a universe that had never developed life. I can see this intelligence traveling into the past of this barren universe and seeding life there. I mean, that's a little out there for me but I certainly wouldn't say it was impossible.

Ye gods this is a long and wordy post. Delete it if you want Mods.

Harte

 

[StarLord]

Re: The Creation of Man

This brings up a rather sticky point. We know that simply 'viewing' a experiment causes changes on a quantum level, right?

Haven't they gone a step further and found that the 'normal' paths that quarks take can be altered even when the experiment is Thought about?

Who's to say that ET has changed our environment simply by just visiting and 'viewing' what goes on here?

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Harte\")</div>

?The information creating the viruses could be sent in a single batch, perhaps conserving energy or resources the future intelligence wishes not to waste?.
That is not to say that life here could not have come from a future. I can see some intelligence that evolved in some other universe perfecting the technology to look at other universes and finding a universe that had never developed life. I can see this intelligence traveling into the past of this barren universe and seeding life there. I mean, that's a little out there for me but I certainly wouldn't say it was impossible?.

Harte[/b]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"StarLord\")</div>

This brings up a rather sticky point. We know that simply 'viewing' a experiment causes changes on a quantum level, right?

Haven't they gone a step further and found that the 'normal' paths that quarks take can be altered even when the experiment is Thought about?

Who's to say that ET has changed our environment simply by just visiting and 'viewing' what goes on here?[/b]

Thanks for your points, Harte,
Thanks for your reflections on quantum mechanics. I am not in physics myself either, just working in biology. Some things seem universal however.
A single batch could not have worked because more diverse and complex life needed oxygen to be created in the atmosphere by some specific bacteria in billions of years, and then soil had to form for plants and terrestrial animals to exist, and so on. This takes time. Another suggestion, although it may seem weak, is that they may have needed more time developing things themselves, especially if they are not on the carbon basis and have not been modeling themselves.

StarLord,
I would say they could have. That would be difficult to prove though. Bacteria and viruses jump to mind because we see them everywhere around and inside us and we learn how genomes seem to be rearranged with their incorporation. It should be proved in our time. It is knocking on the door, but Darwinism does not let it in for fear to be kicked out immediately soon to a great discomfort for the majority of the occupants.
-Dmitri