From: posting-system@google.com
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 9:54 AM
To: brian@holtz.org
Subject: Re: Hawking, Penrose: Our universe, highly unlikely.

From: brian@holtz.org (Brian Holtz)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Re: Hawking, Penrose: Our universe, highly unlikely.
References: <29c16047.0112130931.344d980c@posting.google.com> <200112262010.MAA06575@lsil.com>
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"Paul Filseth" <pgxf@lsil.com> wrote

>     Here are my responses to your "found it odd... just so happens..."
> sentence.  Sep. 12: "you think it's acceptable to accuse me of
> dishonesty for saying something that's true, merely because I drew
> attention to facts that are important to me instead of ones that are
> important to you."  Nov. 11: "your busted disingenuousness detector".
> If you don't recognize them as responses to your "explanation", that's
> your problem, because they're the responses it deserved.

You've again said nothing to rebut my sentence's assertion that
of all the Turing-equivalent computational substrates, Life is
a potentially confusing or misleading one to choose because it
"just so happens to also support a menagerie of subsystems that
people talk about in pseudobiological terms." Do you counter-assert
that this could *not* reasonably be perceived as confusing or misleading?
Should we really be arguing to theists that Life, with its 
menagerie of puffers and gliders and blinkers, is an instructive 
example of a life-supporting universe simply because it is 
Turing-complete?

Now, is it really more important to you to debate how my
(I think not-unreasonable) perception led to my "seems disingenuous"
phrasing than to debate the substance of whether Life is a good
poster-child universe for an anthropic argument?  

As I told Tim Tyler on Nov 1, my original goal was just to find out
if Conway's Life had been shown to support alife by some means
other than its fundamental Turing completeness. And as I told
you on Sep 3, despite your many-years-old memory that
Poundstone said differently, "neither my understanding of
the current state of the Life art nor my recent search of the
web yield any support for your suspicion that it was more direct.
In the meantime, please forgive me if I remain skeptical that
such a method has been demonstrated."

In the interests of signal-to-noise, I'll respond to Paul's
comments about my "annoying practices" by private email.

--
brian@holtz.org
http://humanknowledge.net