From ResearchID.org

Eric A. Peterson

Administrator

ResearchID.org is the web's leading edge in and academic source for design theory research. There is a call for theoretical and philosophical papers, articles/essays, definitions. Critical first principles are developing within ID that stem from ontological and scientific questions. For your first contribution go here. To read more about this site go here [1]

Articles submitted: Teleology, Platonic dualism

Interests: 

• Induction in empirical laws, Lockean primary qualities in theoretical laws
• Theoretical 'terms' and theoretical 'entities.'
• Rudolf Carnap's The Nature of Thoeries (1966)
• Prescriptive/functional information in self-organizing living systems.
• Flow of causation in information, Information Theory.
• Dembski's "intelligent causation". See Teleology bibliography
• Empirical correlation, nomic necessity, prediction, anomolies.
• Immaterial attribute of information: materialism fails to explain it.

Reside in beautiful Tempe

Education: BS, Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University 1989

Machine Tool Sales Engineer, mfg. plant liquidator in MI, former Naval Aircrewman,'80's

Platonist: mathematical propositions, primary (math-measured) qualities of objects exist independently of our minds as well as time and space; because the properties of the circle or triangle were not invented but rather discovered.

Psychophysical Dualist: Immaterial mind and matter, thought imposed on matter to specify a subset of knowledge, information, in order to attain a complex, functioning structure.

Natural Theist: What are the attributes of intelligent causation? An immaterial realm that chooses, mind recording its thoughts to originate the living world. Prescriptive genetic information is "abstract, conceptual" and thus immaterial. An abstract, nonphysical realm exists within the working DNA molecule. Materialism cannot fully explain the origin-of-life. The intelligent design war is now between the Informationists(teleologists) and the Anti-informationist(Darwinists)

Favorite Quotes

"I place great emphasis on a title and a first sentence. I view my audience as a shy and reclusive trout, my task is to cast out a fly so vivid and appealing that all else fails and he takes the bait." -some editorial page editor, on writing

"However, they (metaphysicians) consider it unphilosophical to assume, without argument, that only what science studies is real." -William James Earle

"What dualism really claims is that not everything that exists is of the right sort to be studied by the physical sciences." ibid

"The cell's nanometer-scale machines are...incredibly sophisticated, and they, not their manmade counterparts, represent the pinnacle of nanotechnology. Yet scientists have no general theory for their assembly or operation." The Biological Frontier of Physics

"Even if RNA or DNA were inserted into a lifeless world, they would not contain any genetic instructions unless each nucleotide selection in the sequence was programmed for function. Even then, a predetermined communication system would have had to be in place for any message to be understood at the destination."Chance and Necessity Do Not Explain the Origin of Life by J.T. Trevors and D.L. Abel.

"No direct physicochemical causative link exists between codon and its symbolized amino acid in the physical translative machinery."- Three Subsets of Sequence Complexity and their Relevance to Biopolymeric Information by David L Abel and Jack T Trevors

"Prescriptive information either instructs or directly produces nontrivial optimized algorithmic function at its destination. Prescription requires choice contingency rather than chance contingency or necessity. Organization requires prescription, and is abstract, conceptual, formal, and algorithmic. Organization utilizes a sign/symbol/token system to represent many configurable switch settings. Physical switch settings allow instantiation of nonphysical selections for function into physicality." Self-organization vs. Self-ordering Events in Life-origin Models by David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors July 2006

"Switch settings represent choices at successive decision nodes that integrate circuits and instantiate cooperative management into conceptual physical systems. Switch positions must be freely selectable to function as logic gates. Switches must be set according to rules, not laws. Inanimacy cannot “organize” itself. Inanimacy can only self-order." ibid

"Information, thought recorded on matter, always exists for the sake of something else, a purpose or goal."- Eric Peterson

"The philosophical writer...follows the trade not of a Jeweler but of a lens grinder." -R.G. Collingwood

"A bull in a china shop performs work though he neither creates nor organizes."

"That thing's got more smoke and mirrors than a Harry Potter movie."

"Him neither did the Gods make a digger nor a ploughman, nor wise in anything else." - Homer on philosophers

"For he in a sense knows what instances fall under the universal."- Aristotle on philosophers.

“Information is information, neither matter nor energy. Any materialism that fails to take account of this will not survive one day.” -Norbert Weiner, MIT Mathematician

"Aristotle links the concepts of investigation--first principles--to reality as the causes of the particulars."- philosophy textbook.

"To see why CSI is a reliable indicator of design, we need to examine the nature of intelligent causation." - William Dembski, Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information

"Scientists seek to discover the unchanging principles beneath the changing world--Plato's Parmenidean realm--like the boiling point of Fe." -Eric Peterson

"It turns out that the vitalists were right in a sense. Living matter is fundamentally different than non-living matter. Living matter requires information."-William Dembski, The Information Revolution

"Unlike deliberate or artificial selection, it (NS) does not have any preferred outcomes or ultimate goals, and it cannot encourage features that might be useful in the future unless they are already adventageous now"- What is Evolution?

"Each event is totally independent of the other."- David Berlinski on random mutation, Mathematician, Princeton University

"Metaphysics has its uses too(under this head I include, for example, the notion of a vital force, of "protoplasm" and of final causes--the idea that the purpose that an organ or a behavioral episode fulfills can exercise a sort of causal traction which caused it to come into being (as Aristotelian teleology envisages)." -P.B.Medawar The Limits of Science

"When the truth is evident parties and factions cannot arise." -Voltaire

"There are two worlds, the perceiving and the nonperceiving." - Galileo on the math-measured properties of objects.

"The information content of a structure is the minimum number of instructions needed to specify the structure." -Leslie Orgel

"Ideology holds greatest sway where knowledge is least. Emotion and dogma rush in to fill the gap left by uncertainty." - E.D. Hirsch Jr. The Philosophy of Composition

"Oh Socrates, that poverty-stricken windbag who contemplates everything in the world but does not know where his next meal is coming from." - Plotinus

"Does it follow that philosophers and their readers are doomed to roam a stylistic desert, and munch cactus as the sole article of their diet?" -Brand Blanshard on the dryness of philosophy