Aha! If I disable Toolbar Buttons and Prevent Autoplay, then almost everything works! Except Ghostery.

A couple more examples of how randomness can lead to information, and how simple rules can lead to complexity:

- Conway's game of life - a cellular automata with 3 simple rules. But if you create a random pattern and watch it run, you'll see that eventually it settles down into several different structures, such as blocks and blinkers and gliders. This is information forming from randomness. The system is even Turing Complete.

- Neural networks - essentially a huge mathematical formula with hundreds or even thousands of individual parameters, such that changing them by a small amount only changes the output by a small amount. The network is given inputs (for example, images of a letters), and the outputs (e.g. a list of probabilities representing how likely each letter is to correspond to the input) which are compared to the expected outputs in a way that produces a “score” measuring how close they are. The parameters are then adjusted in a way to try to increase the score. Doing this many times leads to a formula that can accurately read text (or recognise speech, or recommend youtube videos, or predict stock markets, etc), but there was no intelligent designer choosing all the parameters to make that happen, they started off random and were refined by a relatively simple process into information.
Natural Selection works in a similar way: the input = the environment, the thousands of internal parameters = DNA, score = ability to survive and reproduce, altering the parameters = random mutations

The last time that I have participated in the online BJCx course - hmm, I have to think if it was last year, or maybe was it already two years ago (I can't remember how much ago because a lot happened in 2016 in my life, ok, judging by the screen-recording videos I made at the time, it must have been in October 2015) I submitted my fun project, actually the one I was working on for past few months and I wanted to get some feedback on it, yes, that was not fair, I know because others did not get so much time to work on their fun projects, but anyway I submitted it, but I got the feedback: Needs more explanation to be able to understand what is it about. :-)

But at the time I really didn't have time to make a video to explain the project. Now, today I made my explanation video https://goo.gl/dc2zJB - in its description (under the video) there's a link to my fun project and you can play with it a bit. Thanks.
P.S.
I got an inspiration back then from a topic of evolution, watching an educational video on vertebrate eye evolution, a topic you wrote a lot these past days in this forum :-)

You're not supposed to be inspired, you're supposed to be sucked into the flame war!

MartinBraendli2 wrote:

BookOwl wrote:

DNA stores a tremendous amount of information, and from what we know of information theory information can only come from intelligence and not randomness. Since we are talking about the origin of life there can not be any natural intelligent agents to create the information, which only leaves an intelligent supernatural being. Exactly who this being is is beyond the scope of science.

This is based on the idea, that intelligence can create information. But can it?
As an example: If i have a couple of axioms (like in maths) I can combine them and deduce a “new” theorem. But even if the whole humanity hasn't thought of this theorem before, I didn't create new information. The information of my theorem was contained within the axiomata, I just discovered it.

To take your math example, couldn't you say that when you created those axioms that you created all the the information in the theorems?

MartinBraendli2 wrote:

Now If I understand you correctly, you say something like “Intelligent beings can create information. There IS information. Ergo, an intelligent being must have created that infromation”. But for this reasoning you would have to show that Intelligence can create new Infromation AND that no other process can.

Can you give an examle of intelligence creating information and not “just” discovering or combining preexisting information? I see what subjectivly new information is. A lot of information is new to me. But what would be an example absolutely new infromation?

Again using your math example, couldn't you say that creating new axioms that haven't ever been used before and seeing what theorems you can prove using them creating new information?

As to proving that no other process can create information, I would have to give that a lot more thought.

joefarebrother wrote:

A couple more examples of how randomness can lead to information, and how simple rules can lead to complexity:

- Conway's game of life - a cellular automata with 3 simple rules. But if you create a random pattern and watch it run, you'll see that eventually it settles down into several different structures, such as blocks and blinkers and gliders. This is information forming from randomness. The system is even Turing Complete.

- Neural networks - essentially a huge mathematical formula with hundreds or even thousands of individual parameters, such that changing them by a small amount only changes the output by a small amount. The network is given inputs (for example, images of a letters), and the outputs (e.g. a list of probabilities representing how likely each letter is to correspond to the input) which are compared to the expected outputs in a way that produces a “score” measuring how close they are. The parameters are then adjusted in a way to try to increase the score. Doing this many times leads to a formula that can accurately read text (or recognise speech, or recommend youtube videos, or predict stock markets, etc), but there was no intelligent designer choosing all the parameters to make that happen, they started off random and were refined by a relatively simple process into information.
Natural Selection works in a similar way: the input = the environment, the thousands of internal parameters = DNA, score = ability to survive and reproduce, altering the parameters = random mutations

1. The random starting position does eventually descend into a pattern, but does that pattern actually encode information? Creating a Turing machine in the game of life requires a very large board precisely filled with the right pattern, which was created using intelligence.
2. But there was intelligence behind creating the neural network and starting the training process, which means that the whole process couldn't have occurred without intelligence.

Both of your situations only involve random starting positions, afterwards they both proceed according to non-random rules which were created by an intelligent agent.

joefarebrother wrote:

Natural Selection works in a similar way: the input = the environment, the thousands of internal parameters = DNA, score = ability to survive and reproduce, altering the parameters = random mutations

Natural selection can only apply if there is life, it can't help get it started which is the point of my argument. The DNA (or RNA, the difference doesn't really matter) of a bacterium contains so much information that the probability of it being randomly generated at exactly the right time and place with the other chemical structures needed to create a cell is so incredibly low that it is statistically impossible.

Some people believe that the Universe is actually a closed system created by external entities, but the external entities would be different from the Abrahamic God.

MartinBraendli2 wrote:

This debate seams a bit unfair, since its basically you (BookOwl) vs. a group. I really hope that you can view that as a challange, like playing chess against multiple people simultanously.

I don't mind it at all. I like being intellectually challenged like this.

TheAspiringHacker wrote:

Some people believe that the Universe is actually a closed system created by external entities, but the external entities would be different from the Abrahamic God.

I never said that that particular argument proved any particular god, only that an external intelligent agent was behind the creation of life. I am convinced that the God of the Bible is the one behind it, but that would have to be shown to be true by a different argument (in the logical sense, not the “everyone who disagrees with me is an stupid failure of a human being” kind of flame war “argument” which I completely despise.)

BookOwl wrote:

I never said that that particular argument proved any particular god, only that an external intelligent agent was behind the creation of life.

But this argument has a “turtles all the way down” problem. Who created God? Whatever your answer to that might be, you might just as well (more easily, in fact) apply it to the first microbes.

By the way, it's a little tricky to apply information-theoretic arguments to mathematics. Technically, any mathematical system is just a big implication: if {axioms} then {theorems}. And so in one sense it has no information at all; it's tautological. (Nevertheless, it's clear that in the ordinary sense of the word, mathematicians are creating ideas.)

I am convinced that the God of the Bible is the one behind it, but that would have to be shown to be true by a different argument (in the logical sense, not the “everyone who disagrees with me is an stupid failure of a human being” kind of flame war “argument” which I completely despise.)

Right. I still want to know why the Mafia hit man gets to go to heaven and I don't. Seems like rather a petty kind of god to me.

It's a petty kind of god because we're nothing but HIS simulation :-)
Seriously, the most unsettling part of Nick Bostrom's simulation proposition is that whoever set up the simulation that we behold as reality might have been a religious fundamentalist himself.

birdoftheday:
You're not supposed to be inspired, you're supposed to be sucked into the flame war!

I apologize to all the god/s of war, primarily to Ares, to be a rule-breaker ;-) This reminded me of when you Americans elected the husband of my fellow country-woman to be US president and I remembered the ancient Lysistrata and made this Greek-mythology based pacifistic “threats” (isn't this oxymoron?) to him in my video that US homeland security didn't notice or didn't take too seriously ;-)

BookOwl wrote:

Both of your situations only involve random starting positions, afterwards they both proceed according to non-random rules which were created by an intelligent agent.

Yes, but in my analogy between neural networks and natural selection, the non-random rules ultimately boil down to the laws of physics, which can exist without an intelligent agent.

Natural selection can only apply if there is life, it can't help get it started which is the point of my argument. The DNA (or RNA, the difference doesn't really matter) of a bacterium contains so much information that the probability of it being randomly generated at exactly the right time and place with the other chemical structures needed to create a cell is so incredibly low that it is statistically impossible.

Ah, are you suggesting that the first single-celled organisms (which would have been significantly less complex than today's bacteria) could have been intelligently designed, but natural selection still applies resulting in evolution towards all the organism around today? If so, that's technically not impossible (as scientists don't currently know much about the first few life forms), however Occam's Razor suggests it to be unlikely, and it leads to the question “What designed the designer?”
There's an interesting Futurama episode about exactly this

Totally off-topic, but, could the link on snap.berkeley.edu to my liam4 GitHub profile (“Site layout by liam4”) be updated to say “Site layout by towerofnix”, with a link to the towerofnix GitHub profile? (I changed my username, so the link now goes here, which isn't really where it's meant to go! )

_nix wrote:

Totally off-topic, but, could the link on snap.berkeley.edu to my liam4 GitHub profile (“Site layout by liam4”) be updated to say “Site layout by towerofnix”, with a link to the towerofnix GitHub profile?

No sooner said than done!

bharvey wrote:

_nix wrote:

Totally off-topic, but, could the link on snap.berkeley.edu to my liam4 GitHub profile (“Site layout by liam4”) be updated to say “Site layout by towerofnix”, with a link to the towerofnix GitHub profile?

No sooner said than done!

Thanks! That was fast

I finally broke down and did binary search in my (25) active Firefox extensions. The culprit turns out to be Greasemonkey. So I put scratch.mit.edu in its “disable on this site” list, and now I have comments and projects again! Unfortunately this means I don't have big fat periods in the comment entry box. Wish me luck figuring out exactly what the problem is so I can un-disable it!

bharvey wrote:

I finally broke down and did binary search in my (25) active Firefox extensions. The culprit turns out to be Greasemonkey. So I put scratch.mit.edu in its “disable on this site” list, and now I have comments and projects again! Unfortunately this means I don't have big fat periods in the comment entry box. Wish me luck figuring out exactly what the problem is so I can un-disable it!

Is that the only userscript? @PullJosh Does it accidentally replace dots in scripts?

Jonathan50 wrote:

@PullJosh Does it accidentally replace dots in scripts?

Definitely not. All it does is change the font of form elements (inputs and textareas) to a version of Arial that I modified to have a large period (iirc). It may change regular page text as well; I can't really remember.

@bharvey Have you taken a look in your browser's console? Any JS errors from your userscripts should end up there.

It's not just that script. I haven't yet tried enabling and disabling individual scripts. I guess that's the next step in debugging. I hate Mozilla; they keep breaking things.