Patterns

Posted on January 24, 2013 by James Cross
universe

The Network of the Universe

In the movie Signs, a former Episcopal priest played by Mel Gibson discovers crop circles in the fields on his farm. The crop circles are the first signs of an impending alien invasion. As the movie plays out, however, the real signs of the movie are events and misfortunes which seem to have no meaning at the time they occur. A driver falls asleep at exactly the right moment to run off the road and strike Mel Gibson’s wife. The wife’s last words as she dies pinned between the vehicle and a tree. The daughter’s obsession with filling glasses with water and leaving them around the house. The brother’s failed baseball career and a bat hung on the wall to celebrate a long home run. The son’s asthma which causes him to unable to breath as the alien tries to poison him with gas.

Although Signs is only a good (not great) movie, it is a movie I enjoy watching and re watching. The movie speaks to the great mystery of patterns in our lives and in the world – how things unfold and seemed to reveal their meaning over time.

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Posted in Consciousness, Origin of Life, Time | 5 Comments

Predictions Are Very Hard

Posted on January 19, 2013 by James Cross

Predictions are very hard, especially about the future – Niels Bohr but often attributed to Yogi Berra

The latest paper to predict the inevitable collapse of civilization comes from Paul Ehrlich: “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?”

Ehrlich has a history of making dire predictions and fortunately he has been mostly wrong about almost all of them. In The Population Bomb, he predicted massive famines in the 1970’s. Ehrlich’s prediction then were remarkably like those of Thomas Malthus over a hundred years earlier. The inevitable growth of population would outstrip food production and eventually epidemic, famine, or war would intervene to correct the imbalance. Given the spectacular failure of his predictions, we might expect Ehrlich to be more cautious. Yet his latest predictions are mostly along the same lines as his previous predictions with the added nuance of climate change thrown into the mix.

Should we take these predictions at all seriously?

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Posted in Climate change, End Times, Futurism | 12 Comments

The Algorithmic Origins of Life

Posted on December 22, 2012 by James Cross

Sara Imari Walker and Paul C. W. Davies have a great paper out that I would like to call attention to. It is called the “The Algorithmic Origins of Life” and can be viewed in its entirety by downloading the PDF. Davies has written a large number of relatively accessible books that deal with some of the big issues like the origin of the universe and the origin of life from a scientific standpoint. He is often called upon in interviews and panels as a sort of intermediary position between believers in God and Creation Science and atheists and scientists. I must caution that this particular paper is relatively technical so I will hit some of the highlights for you.

Theories about the origin of life fall into two general categories – genetics first or metabolism first.  Both of these approaches focus mainly on the chemistry of life; however, since genetics and metabolism are both required for life as we know it, this creates a sort of chicken or egg problem. Walker and Davies try to get beyond this problem by redefining the problem in terms of information. They argue that what makes life different from non-life is that in life “information manipulates the matter it is instantiated in.”

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Posted in Consciousness, Origin of Life | 7 Comments