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Why birds do not fall while sleeping

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Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#91

Post by smusamashah »

nkrisc wrote: post #89
smusamashah wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you notice these flaws you are seeing it in very very short term. What we are today is what eventually worked for a million years. The design you see today is the way it is because it had to be robust enough (including those problems) to survive to this day. The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

Yes, you’re describing evolution.

I am. I am also saying you can not design us any better than what we are today. You can't look into next billion years. Whatever becomes of us at the point will the best design at that point. The optimal design you are suggesting has zero guarantees to keep working.

If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#92

Post by protonbob »

9dev wrote: post #90
smusamashah wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you notice these flaws you are seeing it in very very short term. What we are today is what eventually worked for a million years. The design you see today is the way it is because it had to be robust enough (including those problems) to survive to this day. The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

GP is arguing for something else though, namely that intelligent design is a fallacy. It’s advocacies argue that god created humans a mere 10k years or so ago, which obviously implies we didn’t evolve over millions of years, but were in fact created with inexplicable flaws. It’s all bullshit, of course, but there are people believing that.

"It’s advocacies argue that god created humans a mere 10k years or so ago". This is false. There are plenty of ID advocates that believe in a scientific timeline, albeit, just with some intelligent guidance.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#93

Post by nkrisc »

protonbob wrote: post #92
9dev wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP is arguing for something else though, namely that intelligent design is a fallacy. It’s advocacies argue that god created humans a mere 10k years or so ago, which obviously implies we didn’t evolve over millions of years, but were in fact created with inexplicable flaws. It’s all bullshit, of course, but there are people believing that.

"It’s advocacies argue that god created humans a mere 10k years or so ago". This is false. There are plenty of ID advocates that believe in a scientific timeline, albeit, just with some intelligent guidance.

Which is conveniently unverifiable.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#94

Post by protonbob »

Crazyontap wrote: post #12

When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.

All of the data that has gone into AI has been intelligently created. Also, there are plenty of intelligent people cleaning the test data and guiding its training.

That is basically the entire premise of intelligent design. Not that there is no evolution, but that it is a guided process.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#95

Post by nkrisc »

smusamashah wrote: post #91
nkrisc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you’re describing evolution.

I am. I am also saying you can not design us any better than what we are today. You can't look into next billion years. Whatever becomes of us at the point will the best design at that point. The optimal design you are suggesting has zero guarantees to keep working. If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.

You could if you were an intelligent designer designing humans completely from scratch a mere 10,000 years ago after you created the universe.

Which is the absurdity I’m pointing out.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#96

Post by smusamashah »

nkrisc wrote: post #88
lpat wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty weak argument against intelligent design. 1. The designer does not have to be "omniscient" only intelligent. Some people believe in it's omniscience but I don't think it's a requirement. 2. How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs? 3. You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and te…

> How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs? Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form. > You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings…

Flaws is a wrong way to put these things you notice.

Would a perfectly and optimally designed being get no diseases? won't die? won't fall?

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#97

Post by nkrisc »

delichon wrote: post #86
nkrisc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fascination with “intelligent design” is cherry-picking. The is no shortage of “unintelligent design” in the natural world. Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure. Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in in…

I consider myself an intelligent designer but have to make compromises in design all the time. The only kind of designers that don't are ones with cartoonish super powers like deities.

That’s the marketing trick behind “intelligent design”. Now it sounds so reasonable!

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#98

Post by SamPatt »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #28
Crazyontap wrote: post #12

When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.

AFAIK key insight into evolution is not randomness but rather sheer amount of compute. Specifically, evolution is a massively parallel flood algorithm that will try every single mutation. Barely any of them will have positive impact on organism fitness, but some will.

Also worth pointing out that billions of years already sounds like a long time to humans, but once you grasp how quickly everything is moving at the cellular or molecular level then it becomes a really reallllllly long time.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#99

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

smusamashah wrote: post #87
nkrisc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fascination with “intelligent design” is cherry-picking. The is no shortage of “unintelligent design” in the natural world. Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure. Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in in…

When you notice these flaws you are seeing it in very very short term. What we are today is what eventually worked for a million years. The design you see today is the way it is because it had to be robust enough (including those problems) to survive to this day. The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

That is precisely the point he is trying to make....

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#100

Post by lpat »

nkrisc wrote: post #88
lpat wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty weak argument against intelligent design. 1. The designer does not have to be "omniscient" only intelligent. Some people believe in it's omniscience but I don't think it's a requirement. 2. How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs? 3. You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and te…

> How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs? Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form. > You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings…

> Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form

Only if you assume the designer had infinite time, knowledge and resources. But life on Earth did not have to be created by some omnipotent god who created universe. It only requires more advanced intelligence than us. Although theoretically even we may reach this level in the future with advances in bioengineering.

> This is all beside the point that there’s no evidence of any kind for intelligent design, only supposition based on nothing more than intuition and feelings.

Depending on what you consider "evidence" the same sentence could be said for evolution. There are many arguments in favor of intelligent design like for example no viable mechanism of randomly evolving genetic code. I wouldn't say it's as open and shut case as you make it seem.

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