Difflugia wrote: ↑Sun Dec 15, 2024 6:00 pm
I always wondered how you thought the taxicab fallacy applied to so many non-fallacious arguments, but now I get it.
Props
Since you personally see agency everywhere you look, you assume everyone else does, too.
Ehhh. Everyone else "should".
If a defendant is in court and pleads not guilty, and the prosecution plays a recording that is clear as day of the defendant committing the crime, then the jury
should find the defendant guilty.
Now, whether or not they will is a different story, but they
definitely should.
Order, function, and complexity emerge in various forms from a number of natural systems without requiring an intelligent agent.
See, that's where you are wrong.
Going back to Penrose's 10^10^123 equation/number.
That is a number which describes the precision needed for even any chemistry to exist, much less life.
So, the order and precision had to be there from the very beginning of the big bang, which means that those low entropy conditions had to be there from the moment the big bang.
But we know that this isn't how entropy works, because if you start off with a big bang you are supposed to have high entropy...and this is proven by virtually any experiment that you conduct.
If you throw a deck of cards in the air, you expect to see the chaos of random cards floating in no specified order, thus, high entropy.
What you don't expect to see is the floating cards beginning to land in specified order in the formulation of a card house.
Same thing with letters; if you had 24 tiny pieces of paper and you wrote dedicated every letter of the alphabet to every piece of paper...and you scrambled all the letters and tossed the letters in the air, you do not expect the papers to fall to the ground, formulating words and/or sentences.
But that is precisely what we have with the fine tuning of our universe..we are talking mathematical precision, from the initial conditions, to the precision of the constants and parameters.
This is cosmic engineering, amigo.
It would be a taxicab fallacy if scientists claimed that certain natural processes foundational to evolution did require an intelligent agent, but then argued that evolution itself didn't. One might be able to argue that arguments behind theistic evolution are guilty of the taxicab fallacy, for example.
Ok, so let's see how my logic works..but let's set the framework first.
Tell me if you agree with this premise..
A physical entity with sentience, is more complex than a thinking entity
without sentience.
Do you agree with that premise?
Since scientists posit no intelligent agency at all anywhere in the process, it's not a taxicab fallacy.
I understand your assertion, and we are about to test those logical waters with the question above.
The theory of evolution is built on (and indeed has proven) mechanisms for creating order, function, and complexity that are built on natural laws alone and require no intelligent agent.
Unproven assertion that isn't backed by observation, experiment, or prediction.
You may think their conclusions are wrong, but they're not fallacious.
We will see about that as the discussion moves forward.
Claiming that the theory of evolution is built on a taxicab fallacy is like arguing that adding two marbles and two marbles gives us four marbles every single time only because there's a leprechaun that makes sure that there are four marbles. From there, though, you want to claim that the rest of mathematics must necessarily arise from non-leprechaun principles, because leprechauns are silly.
Even if you think that leprechauns are responsible for basic addition and emergent evolutionary complexity, however, scientists and mathematicians aren't arguing that.
I wasn't necessarily talking about evolution, but since you mentioned it we can add that to the fallacious junkpile as well.
I got 99 problems, dude.
Don't become the hundredth one.