Does Science Piss Off God?

[Al_U_Card]

Then it looks like we are back to "Does god piss off Science?...." :)

[mike777]

To get back to the Title question. Does Science Piss Off God?

I think the answer is clearly no!

 

Of course if you do not believe there is such a thing as God the question is nonsense but for those that believe there is a real, involved God this is an excellent question.

 

For those who may have forgetten, the original sin is eating from the Tree of Knowledge against God's orders. Keep in mind Abraham founded 3 major religions following God's order to go and kill his son!

 

 

God put the Tree along with Adam and Eve in the Garden and said do not eat the fruit of knowledge. Now I find that an interesting discussion. :)

[mike777]

Does Science Piss Off God?

 

Note to answer the question you really need to discuss God, assuming He exists and His Nature.

 

 

1) Assume God exists if not discussion thread over.

2) Assume God abhors Sin.

3) I do not see anyone who shows or debates Science, per se, science=Sin.

4) church and science

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13598b.htm

5) church and sin

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14004b.htm

[doldridg]

There are a number of problems:

• 
   
  
• Evolution is not a water-tight theory and like 'Intelligent Design' it can't be definitively proven.
   
  
• Whilst there isn't much scientific evidence around supporting the 'Intelligent Design' model, there is quite a bit around that would tend to indicate that a pure evolutionary model does not fully explain who we are and how we got here.
   
  

It is completely understandable why people like Pat Robertson want 'Intelligent Design' to be presented as an alternative theory to evolution in schools.  Such people want to maintain market-share for their religion and can't afford to have impressionable 9th-graders fed the evolutionary theory as fact (as some teachers are want to do) with the associated risk of those children turning away from Christianity.

Creationists love to pretend that their lies about science stand on the same ground as the science itself. The fact is, there is zero evidence supporting special creation. There are mountains of evidence supporting evolution (literal mountains).

 

People like Pat Robertson are sleazy heretics, trying to sneak your teachings into school science classes by legislative fiat in contravention to the U.S. Constitution, which they hate.

 

So-called "intelligent design theory" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to sneak the standard creationist lies about evolution into the school curriculum.

 

Proposing to impose lies on children is evil. Lying itself is a sin. Teaching people to sin, implying that they must do so in order to be saved is heresy, by definitions older than the church herself. These people are neither Christian nor conservative. They are radical rebels, conspiring to undermine the democratic institutions that have protected us from events like the 30 years war. And their religion is heterodox not orthodox. The state is under no obligation to support or promote it. In fact, in most Western constitutions, the state is specifically prohibited from promoting it. This state is also, of course, also usually prohibited from supporting or promoting any orthodox denominations as well (but not always).

 

Creationism has allied itself with certain pseudo-conservative politics, notably those of the far right wing, which, while criticizing the overspending of left of center politics, conducts vast overspending of its own. It is damaged goods, from start to finish.

 

It is time, in America, and in any other nation infected with this heresy, to talk of common sense and plain honesty.

[barmar]

Very interesting article in the New Scientist

 

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/d...in-the-lab.html

fascinating

 

of course, this could just be god testing our faith by doing this on purpose :)

I also think it's quite interesting.

 

The part about something happening around generation 20,000 that allows this trait to evolve 10,000 generations later reminds me of something I think I read in "Endless Forms Most Beautiful". The early history of life has several watershed periods when some major change appeared, and they allowed new forms of evolution to follow. The most obvious is the development of sexual reproduction, but possibly more significant may be the introduction of Hox and regulator/suppressor genes. The general idea is that these are a form of "evolving evolvability", and they have exponential benefits on the evolution process.

[mike777]

There are a number of problems:

• 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
• Evolution is not a water-tight theory and like 'Intelligent Design' it can't be definitively proven.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
• Whilst there isn't much scientific evidence around supporting the 'Intelligent Design' model, there is quite a bit around that would tend to indicate that a pure evolutionary model does not fully explain who we are and how we got here.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  

It is completely understandable why people like Pat Robertson want 'Intelligent Design' to be presented as an alternative theory to evolution in schools.  Such people want to maintain market-share for their religion and can't afford to have impressionable 9th-graders fed the evolutionary theory as fact (as some teachers are want to do) with the associated risk of those children turning away from Christianity.

Creationists love to pretend that their lies about science stand on the same ground as the science itself. The fact is, there is zero evidence supporting special creation. There are mountains of evidence supporting evolution (literal mountains).

 

People like Pat Robertson are sleazy heretics, trying to sneak your teachings into school science classes by legislative fiat in contravention to the U.S. Constitution, which they hate.

 

So-called "intelligent design theory" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to sneak the standard creationist lies about evolution into the school curriculum.

 

Proposing to impose lies on children is evil. Lying itself is a sin. Teaching people to sin, implying that they must do so in order to be saved is heresy, by definitions older than the church herself. These people are neither Christian nor conservative. They are radical rebels, conspiring to undermine the democratic institutions that have protected us from events like the 30 years war. And their religion is heterodox not orthodox. The state is under no obligation to support or promote it. In fact, in most Western constitutions, the state is specifically prohibited from promoting it. This state is also, of course, also usually prohibited from supporting or promoting any orthodox denominations as well (but not always).

 

Creationism has allied itself with certain pseudo-conservative politics, notably those of the far right wing, which, while criticizing the overspending of left of center politics, conducts vast overspending of its own. It is damaged goods, from start to finish.

 

It is time, in America, and in any other nation infected with this heresy, to talk of common sense and plain honesty.

1) of course if there is not God.....then all of this is nonsense or worse cruel lies.

2) But if you accept there is a God, an involved God who abhors Sin.....then you need to show in your discussion that is where you start. :)

3) if you start there may or may not be God...then It seems you need to start with God yes or no..:)

4) If you start with science....and what means a theory, test, acceptance, retheory, retest...that is great....np,

5) even Catholics..assume God is logical as opposed to illogical.

[luke warm]

Very interesting article in the New Scientist

 

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/d...in-the-lab.html

i have a question that probably has a simple answer... has this evolutionary tweak occurred in the past? iow, i would suppose there have been millions of 31,500th generations of e coli at a few points in time, did those evolve also? and if so, why weren't they in the lab and not the devolved species?

 

be gentle, it's a serious question

[mikeh]

Very interesting article in the New Scientist

 

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/d...in-the-lab.html

i have a question that probably has a simple answer... has this evolutionary tweak occurred in the past? iow, i would suppose there have been millions of 31,500th generations of e coli at a few points in time, did those evolve also? and if so, why weren't they in the lab and not the devolved species?

 

be gentle, it's a serious question

I think that this is an excellent question. I don't pretend to know 'the answer', but a few thoughts arose from a read of the article.

 

1. All of the bacteria were descended from a single original bacterium and were raised in isolated cultures, with no exposure to bacteria that had, 20 years ago, slightly different genetic makeup. So the environment is very artificial. And it contained few elements that might make survival problematic.. indeed, the environment was deliberately engineered to be hospitable to the bacteria, from what I could infer. This is unlike the 'wild'.

 

2. The mutation enabled the bacteria possessing the mutation to enjoy a reproductive advantage over the non-mutated variants, because it enabled them to metabolize a nutrient that the others could not. This nutrient might well NOT have been present if and when 'wild' variants developed the mutation and thus the mutation may not have afforded any reproductive advantage. A single mutated specimen in the wild, possessing no inherent advantage over the millions of non-mutated bacterium is unlikely to see its mutation spread. See point 6

 

3. Even if the nutrient were available to a wild mutant, it may be that so many other nutrients were available in bountiful quantities, that the ability to metabolize one extra source of nutrients afforded no meaningful advantage, compared to the millions of other variants against which the mutant was competing for reproductive success.

 

4. Maybe the mutation comes at the expense of some other quality that is important in the wild but unimportant in the sheltered environment of the petri dish (or its equivalent). That might be true of the final mutation or of an intermediate mutation.

 

5. The fact that the original mutation occurred thousands of generations before the final one suggests that there has to be a continual line of descent from the original bacterium. It may well be that, in the wild, that few bacteria are able to replicate for 10,000 generations. After all, if every bacterium now in existence were able to replicate (more than 1000 times a year) and if each and its replicants survived, then the colony would very quickly weigh more than the entire planet! So maybe the odds of the mutant 'strain'.. which has to survive long enough for a series of mutations to accumulate.. lasting in the wild is simply too low.

 

6. I am no mathematician and am acutely aware that some of the posters are, so it is with some trepidation that I suggest that I have read that mutations, even if they afford some reproductive advantage, tend to die out if they arise in a large population, and that most evolutionary change is thought to occur in smaller, isolated sub-groupings of a population.. and that this has been shown to be mathematically sound. Han, Helene etc... please help me out here, assuming I am correct... btw, I think I read of this in the context of life-forms that reproduce sexually and I don't know if this is still valid for asexual reproduction.

 

I am morally certain that there may be other explanations and that some (at least) of the above may be flat out wrong... but I like the question!

[Winstonm]

i have a question that probably has a simple answer... has this evolutionary tweak occurred in the past?

 

My understanding is that a mutation occured in the 10,000 generation but the citrate+ ability was not expressed until the 31,500 generation - showing that total ramdoness led to the evolution of a sophisticated apparatus.

 

In other words, WTF trumped ID

[irdoz]

My understanding is that a mutation occured in the 10,000th generation but the citrate+ ability was not expressed until the 31,500 generation - showing that total randoness led to the evolution of a sophisticated apparatus.

 

I think the change that occurred was a 'potentiating' mutation - rather than a mutation which conferred the cit+ ability but where the expression was delayed.

 

Rather than the change being some single point mutations or a simultaneous rare combination of point mutations that led to a survival advantage it's more likley to have been some phenomenum like genome duplication where a whole genome gets duplicated during replication (this is still a 'mutation' of course). These sort of phenomena are thought to be more significant in evolution than single point mutations. Let's say there are 2 food sources in the medium but e.coli only have an enzyme for breaking down one - but this enzyme is close in shape and configuration to the enzyme that would be needed to break down the other food source. If the genome for this enzyme got duplicated then the 'potential' arises for 2 different enzymes - but only e.coli with the duplicate genomes have this potential.

What's significant about these stored generations is the potential to understand the sequences of events at a molecular level that led to such a large change.

 

6. I am no mathematician and am acutely aware that some of the posters are, so it is with some trepidation that I suggest that I have read that mutations, even if they afford some reproductive advantage, tend to die out if they arise in a large population, and that most evolutionary change is thought to occur in smaller, isolated sub-groupings of a population.. and that this has been shown to be mathematically sound. Han, Helene etc... please help me out here, assuming I am correct... btw, I think I read of this in the context of life-forms that reproduce sexually and I don't know if this is still valid for asexual reproduction.

 

Im not a mathematician or population biologist/geneticist either. My understnading is that a phenomenum known as genetic drift occurs in small populations where the population loses a lot of genetic variability and and mutational changes are likely to become population wide quickly. In large sexually reproducing populations however, the increasing population wide incidence of mutations which confer a small survival advantage can take a huge number of generations to be seen - and can often die out if the survival advantage is not significant enough.

[luke warm]

i have a question that probably has a simple answer... has this evolutionary tweak occurred in the past?

 

My understanding is that a mutation occured in the 10,000 generation but the citrate+ ability was not expressed until the 31,500 generation - showing that total ramdoness led to the evolution of a sophisticated apparatus.

 

In other words, WTF trumped ID

you don't find it peculiar, even a little, that such a change in e coli hasn't occurred in the billions of years leading up to now, resulting in a quite different specimen in the lab?

[helene_t]

has this evolutionary tweak occurred in the past? iow, i would suppose there have been millions of 31,500th generations of e coli at a few points in time, did those evolve also? and if so, why weren't they in the lab and not the devolved species?

Q: What is the probability of this same mutation having occurred in the past?

 

A: Depends mainly on the complexity of the mutation. In E. Coli, the simultaneous mutation of up to some 4 I think (maybe 5) specific nucleotides is likely enough to have occurred before in a single bacterium, while more complex mutations would have to build up through several generations and therefore depend on the ability of intermediate states to survive. Suppose as a simple example that abc has evolved from ABC. There are six different paths if only one substitution is allowed per generation:

ABC->ABc->Abc-abc

ABC->ABc->aBc-abc

ABC->AbC->Abc-abc

ABC->AbC->abC-abc

ABC->aBC->aBc-abc

ABC->aBC->abC-abc

The more of the paths that are viable the more likely it is to have occurred before. For more complex changes the number of paths is much higher (for example there are 720 paths for a six-step substitution) so how many of these paths consist only of intermediates that would have been likely to survive for many generations is critical.

 

Q: Suppose it has occurred. Would descendants of that mutant still be alive today?

A: Probably not since the wast majority of bacteria have no descendants beyond a few generations. Even if it has descendants today, those might be a small minority not discovered by science (the microorganisms that have been classified so far are just the tip of the iceberg) or they may have lost the novel feature again. (See also Mikeh's post. There may never have been a natural environment favoring the same mutations as were favored in the lab).

 

Evolution is an extremely creative and extremely wasteful process. Everyday billions of new genes are "invented". Most of them are "forgotten" because they have no survival value to their owner who therefore dies without passing the gene on, but even those genes who actually "improve" the organism may be weeded out by bad luck.

[helene_t]

mutations, even if they afford some reproductive advantage, tend to die out if they arise in a large population, and that most evolutionary change is thought to occur in smaller, isolated sub-groupings of a population.. and that this has been shown to be mathematically sound.[....]I think I read of this in the context of life-forms that reproduce sexually and I don't know if this is still valid for asexual reproduction.

The concept of "population size" is most meaningful for sexually reproducing species, where it can be taken as "number of potential mates". For asexual species it can only mean "number of individuals assigned to the same category" which is somewhat arbitrary.

 

Anyway, it makes sense what you write, assuming that we are talking about two alleles of two different non-linked genes that are beneficial only by working together, say the genes for the enzymes of two stages of the metabolism of a particular food. In a large population they will drift apart.

 

Also, if it concerns a recessive mutation, it may never be expressed in a large population.

 

OTOH in a large population more beneficial mutations occur. I don't think one can generally say that small populations are more innovative, but I might be wrong.

[irdoz]

you don't find it peculiar, even a little, that such a change in e coli hasn't occurred in the billions of years leading up to now, resulting in a quite different specimen in the lab?

 

It probably has - but only in the particular conditions that exist in the labatory does the change confer a survival advantage leading to its persistence.

 

 

Depends mainly on the complexity of the mutation. In E. Coli, the simultaneous mutation of up to some 4 I think (maybe 5) specific nucleotides is likely enough to have occurred before in a single bacterium, while more complex mutations would have to build up through several generations and therefore depend on the ability of intermediate states to survive. Suppose as a simple example that abc has evolved from ABC. There are six different paths if only one substitution is allowed per generation:

AAA->ABc->Abc-abc

AAA->ABc->aBc-abc

AAA->AbC->Abc-abc

AAA->AbC->abC-abc

AAA->aBC->aBc-abc

AAA->aBC->abC-abc

The more of the paths that are viable the more likely it is to have occurred before. For more complex changes the number of paths is much higher (for example there are 720 paths for a six-step substitution) so how many of these paths consist only of intermediates that would have been likely to survive for many generations is critical.

 

(Note ; I think all the AAA's should be ABC's). This sequential point mutations model of evolution perhaps predicated at some point on simultaneous mutations is probably less significant than larger genetic mistakes (such as genome duplication) in evolution. 15000 human genes are thought to have resulted from duplication errors. There is controversy about how significant genome duplication is but to illustrate how it works using your example...

 

The problem with ABC->ABc->Abc ... -> abc by many different pathways etc is that you lose the functionality of ABC which is often essential.

 

If instead ABC becomes ABCABC - two genomes instead of one - then ABC can persist and its copy can mutate freely without necessarily losing any functionality and might ultimately produce an abc - and the 'survivability-functionality' of the mutations in the copy may not be so significant provided you have the original ABC.

 

There is a well documented case of genome duplication in monkeys (http://www.umich.edu/~zhanglab/publications/2002/Zhang_2002_NatGenet_30_411.pdf) where the duplication is thought to have occurred millions of years ago. I have no idea what molecular processes are happenng here in the E.Coli - but the stored generational samples may unlock a lot of clues.

[helene_t]

The problem with ABC->ABc->Abc ... -> abc by many different pathways etc is that you lose the functionality of ABC which is often essential.

 

If instead ABC becomes ABCABC - two genomes instead of one - then ABC can persist and its copy can mutate freely without necessarily losing any functionality and might ultimately produce an abc - and the 'survivability-functionality' of the mutations in the copy may not be so significant provided you have the original ABC.

Yes, agree with that. Another example is the whole genome duplications in flowering plants. Those events do not occur very often but when they do they may allow a lot of new species to evolve in relatively short time.

 

Anyway, the nucleotide substitutions are important, too, since otherwise after a genome duplication we would be stuck with two identical copies of the original genome.

[hrothgar]

i have a question that probably has a simple answer... has this evolutionary tweak occurred in the past?

 

My understanding is that a mutation occured in the 10,000 generation but the citrate+ ability was not expressed until the 31,500 generation - showing that total ramdoness led to the evolution of a sophisticated apparatus.

 

In other words, WTF trumped ID

you don't find it peculiar, even a little, that such a change in e coli hasn't occurred in the billions of years leading up to now, resulting in a quite different specimen in the lab?

Nope

 

Simplicity is a virtue...

 

Superfulous organs, pathways, and the like are often evolutionary liabilities and get removed from the system.

 

Consider cave fish / salamanders as a simple example:

 

It takes a lot of energy to build / operate an eyeball. This organs is completely useless in a pitch black cave. Guess what happens when a colony of fish spends enough time living in a cave? No more eyeballs.

 

In a similar vein, its very unclear whether an ability to prcess citrate would provide sufficient advantage in the wild to filter on this genotype... Sure, this mutation might occassionally pop up, however, unless its doing some real good it would probably not establish itself. If it did establish itself it might very well disappear again.

[Winstonm]

i have a question that probably has a simple answer... has this evolutionary tweak occurred in the past?

 

My understanding is that a mutation occured in the 10,000 generation but the citrate+ ability was not expressed until the 31,500 generation - showing that total ramdoness led to the evolution of a sophisticated apparatus.

 

In other words, WTF trumped ID

you don't find it peculiar, even a little, that such a change in e coli hasn't occurred in the billions of years leading up to now, resulting in a quite different specimen in the lab?

No.

Neither do I believe it sinister that this happened now in a lab.

[jtfanclub]

you don't find it peculiar, even a little, that such a change in e coli hasn't occurred in the billions of years leading up to now, resulting in a quite different specimen in the lab?

Part of the definition of E. coli is that it can't process citrates. So if it had mutated into something that can process citrates (like amoebas or humans) then it wouldn't be E. coli any more.

 

It's like saying "Isn't it odd that lizards in billions of years have never mutated to lose their limbs?" They have. We just don't call them lizards any more. We call them snakes.

[luke warm]

you don't find it peculiar, even a little, that such a change in e coli hasn't occurred in the billions of years leading up to now, resulting in a quite different specimen in the lab?

Part of the definition of E. coli is that it can't process citrates. So if it had mutated into something that can process citrates (like amoebas or humans) then it wouldn't be E. coli any more.

 

It's like saying "Isn't it odd that lizards in billions of years have never mutated to lose their limbs?" They have. We just don't call them lizards any more. We call them snakes.

now that makes sense

[Al_U_Card]

Isn't it just another one of those "mysterious" ways? :blink:

[barmar]

you don't find it peculiar, even a little, that such a change in e coli hasn't occurred in the billions of years leading up to now, resulting in a quite different specimen in the lab?

Part of the definition of E. coli is that it can't process citrates. So if it had mutated into something that can process citrates (like amoebas or humans) then it wouldn't be E. coli any more.

Right. There's an article in this month's Scientific American about how we determine what is and isn't a species, and asexually reproducing organisms cause lots of headaches for taxonomists.

 

In the real world we look at traits like the food an organism can metabolize. On the other hand, it's hard to argue that the "child" of an E. coli is not another E. coli, as is its grandchild, great grandchild, and so on for thousands of generations. After enough mutations you eventually have to decide that you've got a different species, but evolution is usually so gradual that it's normally impossible to pinpoint the moment that speciation happened.

 

It's like the transition from day to night. Noon is certainly daytime, midnight is nighttime, but around dusk there's no exact moment when you can say "A second ago it was light, now it's dark." In fact, nature has very few exact dividing lines. Humans like to have them, but they're usually set arbitrarily for convenience (e.g. using the 18th or 21st birthday as the transition from child to adult for legal purposes).

[helene_t]

There's an article in this month's Scientific American about how we determine what is and isn't a species, and asexually reproducing organisms cause lots of headaches for taxonomists. [.....]

In fact, nature has very few exact dividing lines.  Humans like to have them, but they're usually set arbitrarily for convenience (e.g. using the 18th or 21st birthday as the transition from child to adult for legal purposes).

Yes, this widespread obsession with putting things in categories is a pet peeve of mine. To some extent because of my work as a medical statistician, I have to deal with data that have been corrupted by people who think it's smart to reduce continues scales such as blood pressure into arbitrary categories such as "low, normal, high".

 

Just read a part of Ernst Mayr's "The growth of biological thought". He asks the question why Darwin came later than Newton while Darwin's problem was easier to solve. His answer is that the Darwinian revolution needed a major philosophical shift because the idea of one species evolving from another contradicts the Platonian doctrine of essentialism which had dominated Western philosophy from the antique until quite recently.

 

Personally I am skeptical. I think your example with day vs night is so obvious that even the most stubborn platonist must have been open to the thought that our categorization of living things may to some extent be based on arbitrary thresholds. I would rather say that Darwin's problem was more difficult than Newton's.

 

Anyway, it is a fascinating read.

[barmar]

There's an article in this month's Scientific American about how we determine what is and isn't a species, and asexually reproducing organisms cause lots of headaches for taxonomists. [.....]

In fact, nature has very few exact dividing lines.  Humans like to have them, but they're usually set arbitrarily for convenience (e.g. using the 18th or 21st birthday as the transition from child to adult for legal purposes).

Yes, this widespread obsession with putting things in categories is a pet peeve of mine. To some extent because of my work as a medical statistician, I have to deal with data that have been corrupted by people who think it's smart to reduce continues scales such as blood pressure into arbitrary categories such as "low, normal, high".

 

Just read a part of Ernst Mayr's "The growth of biological thought". He asks the question why Darwin came later than Newton while Darwin's problem was easier to solve. His answer is that the Darwinian revolution needed a major philosophical shift because the idea of one species evolving from another contradicts the Platonian doctrine of essentialism which had dominated Western philosophy from the antique until quite recently.

 

Personally I am skeptical. I think your example with day vs night is so obvious that even the most stubborn platonist must have been open to the thought that our categorization of living things may to some extent be based on arbitrary thresholds. I would rather say that Darwin's problem was more difficult than Newton's.

 

Anyway, it is a fascinating read.

Categorizing seems to be a necessary evil, to allow efficient thought processes. The brain works by linking concepts together, and if everything were treated continuously there wouldn't be places to hang those concepts. The brain is, to some extent, digital -- a signal either does or doesn't fire across any particular synapse. Living is all about making concrete decisions: should I do X or Y?

 

I can appreciate that simplification like this doesn't make things easier for you as a statistician. But think of it from the perspective of the doctor actually making a diagnosis. Trying to juggle lots of detailed numbers in his head would be overwhelming, while dealing with things like "high/low blood pressure" or "does/doesn't have a fever" makes it manageable.

 

Perhaps it would be possible to design a brain that could keep track of such level of details. But there's little reason why evolution would have done so. Our ancestors never needed to keep detailed statistics, and categorization works extremely well for normal decision making. When you're just trying to survive, it's unlikely to make a difference how you categorize an animal that happens to be the cusp between two species -- you pick one and get on with your life.

 

Getting back to the original subtopic, I'm looking forward to reading Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer, which just arrived yesterday from Amazon.

[helene_t]

I can appreciate that simplification like this doesn't make things easier for you as a statistician.

The thing is, to me it is not a simplification. Consider the relation between two continous variables. One of the simplest things I can think of is a bivariate normal distribution. The phycisians seem to prefer something like "is X is in range A then there is a probability p(Q|A) that Y is in range Q etc. Sometimes I think intuitively in categories, but at other times I think in continous scales.

 

Sometimes a binary decision has to be made. We don't give half a heart transplant to a patient with half the need for a heart transplant. So in decision models, categories must be introduced at some stage. But what annoys me is that people seem to think that reality is made a categories.

 

I think it is mainly a language thing. Language is digital for the same reason that electronic communication protocols are. It is much easier to talk about categories than about continous scales. Even when discussing with phycisist I find it difficult to talk about continious scales, and we will often need pen and paper because the concepts can be communicated only in the form of written formulas.

 

We are generally able to handle decision processes that require thinking in continous scales, though, even though people often say things like "I related in this way to older people and that way to younger people".

 

Penrose wrote something in "The emperor's new mind" that I found intriguing. Concerning the debate of whether language is a prerequisite to consciousness, he said that philosophers often assume that to be the case while scientists/mathematicians more often assume that consciousness came first and language later. He attributed it to the fact that he as a mathematician thinks in terms of concepts that cannot be verbalized, while he suspects that philosophers who work with verbalized concepts think by the aid of an "inner voice" and therefore find it hard to imagine thinking without language.

[Winstonm]

He attributed it to the fact that he as a mathematician thinks in terms of concepts that cannot be verbalized, while he suspects that philosophers who work with verbalized concepts think by the aid of an "inner voice" and therefore find it hard to imagine thinking without language.

 

That is rather interesting. I know I am extremely language-based, i.e., I learn best from reading, and I hear an "inner voice" that comprises my thinking. I never stopped to think others may not have this same inner voice.