Well, for me, there was only emotional disagreement between RW and EY. And, EY explanation did not make it through completely to RW.
To summarize the second part of the video:
RW: Can it be that evolution of the Earth biosphere is purposeful?
EY: Yes, but that’s very improbable.
That’s it. Isn’t it?
And by the way, RW was doing a very good argument! I saw that when I finally understood what RW was talking about, trying to compare a fox to the Earth. Because, you see, I too do not see that much of a difference between them—provided that we agree on his conditions:
a single fox is presented to a viewer (that is, one fertilized cell, which starts to replicate right away)
viewer is completely ignorant of natural context/surroundings in which this fox lives on Earth
viewer does not even know it is from Earth or whatever else; viewer is not provided any information about this cell whatsoever
well, we would have to somehow provide this fox with oxygen and food and etc. -- let’s imagine we managed to do it without exposing much of its natural surroundings
Now, thinking of a fox this way, I can see that a fox and the Earth are very alike.
both start with something more simple (one cell vs. single-cell organisms),
eventually grows into something more and more complex (fox vs. current biosphere),
consists of various tissues and “particles”, which are in turn quite complex things in itself
And an argument of EY, about “particles” in fox not “eating” each other, while particles on Earth (foxes) eating other particles—it comes from our subconscious, we feel that it’s bad since rabbit dies, so we clearly see a distinction since within our organism nothing actually “dies” in that sense. But if we look at the Earth as a single organism, we can think of this event (fox eating rabbit) as exact analogy of “blood eating oxygen and then transferring it to muscles”—except that with blood it is straightforward, and with biosphere food chain has way more nodes.
So, I am trying to interpret here, but another thing I think EY meant in the video, is: purposefulness of the biosphere (or panspermia to that effect) may well be the case, but from the point of view of our current body of knowledge, this idea just replaces existing hard-to-answer questions by other equally hard-to-answer questions.
I guess, if humans had a chance to view the Earth with its complete context, or even better—see other cases of similar biospheres life (and death) -- just as we saw many lives of many foxes and other organisms on Earth—then we would be able to judge it as purposeful or not, and panspermia hypothesis would not be so useless.
Well, for me, there was only emotional disagreement between RW and EY. And, EY explanation did not make it through completely to RW.
To summarize the second part of the video:
RW: Can it be that evolution of the Earth biosphere is purposeful? EY: Yes, but that’s very improbable.
That’s it. Isn’t it?
And by the way, RW was doing a very good argument! I saw that when I finally understood what RW was talking about, trying to compare a fox to the Earth. Because, you see, I too do not see that much of a difference between them—provided that we agree on his conditions:
a single fox is presented to a viewer (that is, one fertilized cell, which starts to replicate right away)
viewer is completely ignorant of natural context/surroundings in which this fox lives on Earth
viewer does not even know it is from Earth or whatever else; viewer is not provided any information about this cell whatsoever
well, we would have to somehow provide this fox with oxygen and food and etc. -- let’s imagine we managed to do it without exposing much of its natural surroundings
Now, thinking of a fox this way, I can see that a fox and the Earth are very alike.
both start with something more simple (one cell vs. single-cell organisms),
eventually grows into something more and more complex (fox vs. current biosphere),
consists of various tissues and “particles”, which are in turn quite complex things in itself
And an argument of EY, about “particles” in fox not “eating” each other, while particles on Earth (foxes) eating other particles—it comes from our subconscious, we feel that it’s bad since rabbit dies, so we clearly see a distinction since within our organism nothing actually “dies” in that sense. But if we look at the Earth as a single organism, we can think of this event (fox eating rabbit) as exact analogy of “blood eating oxygen and then transferring it to muscles”—except that with blood it is straightforward, and with biosphere food chain has way more nodes.
So, I am trying to interpret here, but another thing I think EY meant in the video, is: purposefulness of the biosphere (or panspermia to that effect) may well be the case, but from the point of view of our current body of knowledge, this idea just replaces existing hard-to-answer questions by other equally hard-to-answer questions.
I guess, if humans had a chance to view the Earth with its complete context, or even better—see other cases of similar biospheres life (and death) -- just as we saw many lives of many foxes and other organisms on Earth—then we would be able to judge it as purposeful or not, and panspermia hypothesis would not be so useless.