Rational thought. Rationale is what you’re creating to buoy your beliefs.
No, I’m just saying that your subcontracting your moral and intellectual life to men who pooped worms, like daily. You wouldn’t go to a first century inhabitant of the Middle East for advice on economics, medicine, architecture or city planning. But for some crazy reason, you think they figured out the perfect description of the creation of the world?
They didn’t know what pi was, but they know the origin of the universe. Like I said, weird.
A dream or hallucination is a personal experience. So the more you explain the muddier your explainations get to me. I can’t vision a supreme being like you prefer to think of one. It just doesn’t add up, what you say of him seems to have to come out of your own desires and mind. I think that is your right,but is not what my idea of a Supreme bieng would be like.
And biblical writers were pretty ignorant for the first century. China had steel and prototype ninjas while the new testament writers were rolling around in sick and farting the alphabet.
That is your belief, not a fact, so in truth you should state it is as your belief. I have heard believers accuse non- believers who are at peace, that they just lost their conscience.
You have a strange definition of information. Care to provide a reference?
Using your text file example, if you encode it with a simple replacement code (F for A, R for B, etc), you will get a new file the same size, but when you compress it, the result is bigger than the original when compressed. So by your definition, it has more information, but clearly there is no more information. It is the same message in a different form.
A couple normal definitions of information: From Information - Wikipedia “Information, in its most restricted technical sense, is a sequence of symbols that can be interpreted as a message.” And “knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance” the first definition from INFORMATION Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com.
So the random data you provide does not provide information by these definitions. If you interpret the random bits as letters, they will look like garbage, not anything comprehensible.
I could post a file that has gigabytes of random data, but it would contain no information.
Sure. You posted a link to the Wikipedia entry on Information, but if you had instead looked at the Information Theory page you may have even found it yourself. Right near the top, it says
“A key measure of information is known as entropy, which is usually expressed by the average number of bits needed to store or communicate one symbol in a message. Entropy quantifies the uncertainty involved in predicting the value of a random variable.”
What this means is that a more complex set of data, one that has a lower probability of occuring, has more bits of information.
If the result after compression is a larger file, that tells you there is more information in it. When you did a simple letter substitution, that didn’t add much information, but it probably did add a little. It made the resulting text file less probable, harder to compress, more entropy.
paul32, you’re out of your league here. You should probably sit back and read the thread before you put your foot in your mouth even more. A file that has gigabytes of random data has the most information. Here, I’ll get you started: which of the following two strings of data has more information?
Just saying that CurtC is absolutely correct. A basic misunderstanding is confusing meaning with information. In a sense meaning reduced the amount of information.
I do acrostics. One of the ways you solve them is to guess the words in the meaning based on several letters and context. They have meaning, but less information than if the “word” was a set of random letters, in which case you’d need to solve all the clues to get the word.
As for substitution, if all letters were substituted, the amount of compression would be the same. (It might be different if only some were.) And if the resulting coded message had the same structure as English words, it can often be easily decrypted. (Another common puzzle.)
So did theologians, because the Bible says the world is flat. There are still Biblical literalists, today, who hold that the world is flat, because the Bible says so. (Check out the Biblical Astronomy web sites for other amusing Biblical versions of cosmology, such as the modern geocentrists and the proponents of the geostationary theory.)
Not quite: the compression schema, itself, is “information” and if you don’t know it, you don’t have access to the compressed data. You have to add the information that describes the compression schema, and that brings us back to par.
And I could post a file that has gigabytes of “real” information – say, the Wikipedia – but which is encoded using a random key – and you would not be able to tell it apart from a “truly” random file. The appearance of randomness is no guarantee of “true” randomness.
In fact, the worth of a file of data is in your inability to differentiate it from a truly random file!
Here’s an example: there is a movie reviewer. Trouble is, he hates movies. He rates ALL movies “two thumbs down.” There is another, a really nice guy, and he rates ALL movies “two thumbs up.” Finally, there is one who judges movies on his best aesthetic sense, and, by and large, rates them about 25% two up, 25% two down, and 50% up/down.
The first two guys are conveying no information to us! We don’t even need to read their reviews. We know, in advance, what they are gonna say!
But the second guy, whose reviews are (externally) indistinguishable from random reviews, actually conveys the most information. He’s the one worth reading before you want to go see a movie.
You need to do a little more reading on basic information theory; you’re working under a couple of misconceptions.
IF I were to want to posit some ‘evidence’ of design/creator/GOD - I would never posit ‘Creativity’ as said evidence - it’s far too subjective and is not ‘equal’ or ‘avialable’ to all equally - as has been noted so many times before.
IF I were to posit some particular ‘item’ as evidence - I would go with mathmatics -
Mathmatics is
a) available to all equally - it is always the same, no matter what else you may/may not believe
b) it is never changing - while we may make leaps and bounds in the precision to which we can calculate things - the basic principles never change.
c) it is fully objective - it is open to proof and testing and is never subject to the whims of ‘men’.
d) It even has a system for talking about things that are in principle impossible - even defined as irrational - and even with those ‘impossible’ things, can be used to prove what is ‘possible’.
e) it is fully logical.
I think that would come about as close to ‘evidence’ for a ‘God’ as you can get - but it would never prove any of the ‘Gods’ that men choose to worship - as it is fully neutral in all respects.
It is what it is - it is the alpha and the omega - the beginning and the end.
The pagan Romans and Greeks were also big on cleanliness.
It is also as close to the infinite as we can ever get. We can prove that there is no end to the prime numbers, for instance. Number theory is ineffable, and even kind of mysterious. Why are there primes and non-primes? It’s as if the properties of numbers were created in the instant of the cosmos’ creation itself. Is “2 + 2 = 4” true in all universes? Or could there be a cosmos where math is radically different?
If pi were equal to 3, would “circles” look like hexagons?
And yet, if you will forgive me, even the most mysterious, most Pythagorean treatment of the mystery of mathematics does not seem to lead in the direction of a knowing, caring, personal God. It leads, more, I think, to abstract deism, perhaps even toward an “idiot” creator, a mind so austere that it can grasp the highest properties of numbers, but cannot comprehend humanity. An Azathoth, not an Apollo.
It also leads to more silly questions about God’s own limitations. Can he make one plus two not equal three?
(There was a “Tom the Dancing Bug” cartoon where God-Man did just that. The universe promptly unravelled, but he didn’t care, and flew back home to watch “Four’s Company” on tv.)
A circle isn’t dependent on what pi is; pi is dependent on what a circle is. A circle would look like a circle regardless of what the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter ended up being.
The physicist-mathematician Leon M. Lederman once quipped: “The physicists defer only to the mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God (though you will be hard pressed to find a mathematician that modest).”
Mathematics explains the universe and the natural laws for its existence. Its a rigorous language that explains theoretical and emperical concepts. But its principals were not handed down to man on stone tablets. It’s a language man developed over millenia. If we were not here to develop this language and appreciate its elegance, the universe would still exist and be no less elegant or less subject to natural laws. So mathematics may be the proverbial tree that falls in the forest.
Furthermore, if the universe and everything was created by a mathematician-god, wouldn’t that imply that even he was subject to the laws of mathematics? Which in my mind begs the question, who established those? And also, because it’s funny to me, imagine a universe created by an interpretive-arts-god.
Well, it was a quip. But, more seriously, is it possible for a universe to exist, with such rules of geometry (perhaps a differently curved space?) that pi is 3.0?
Ha; that gives me an image of a bunch of ninja garbed guys in a swordfight being observed by a studious-looking Chinese guy with glasses and a clipboard, taking performance notes. “Hmmmmm; needs 15% more ninjutsu.”
Oh nice statement, but you “forget” to enlighten us as to where in the bible the book says the earth is flat. Let me help you.
Isaiah 40:22 speaks of the earth being round. Pick up any bible and see that thousands of years ago the Hebrews(and later Christians) had no doubt about the earth being round. In Latin: or′bi ter′rae.
Now as for the smart Europeans…they were afraid for centuries to sail too far West because they thought they’d fall off. And i agree many other religions would have us believe the earth sits on the back of elephants standing on a turtle.
But not the bible.
**...and you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free.**
*John 8:32*