Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC)

I posted this video in a different discussion, and David Bailey suggested I repost it in its own thread so I'm doing it here.


If you want to go deeper here's the back material to that episode.



I believe there are many conspiracies out there. After all a conspiracy is simply three or more people seeking to do something illegal or harmful in a secretive way.

AND we have to look at systemic effects in how this plays out. It is not an either/or proposition of systems vs. conspiracies but and/both.

The facts are most people are not in on the conspiracies. And on that idea this concept of the DISC (distributed idea suppression complex) very succinctly describes how that can operate in our institutions. While this may not describe the whole picture it explains part of it on why science is locked in materialism, psi is not believed in, etc.

Hope you find it useful as I have.
 
I can think of so many scientific/medical issues which seem to have been suppressed using the mechanism described in that video:

1) The whole issue of the existence of paranormal phenomena is a great example. Dean Radin has run an experiment for years, which uses standard psychology lab techniques to show that people become dimly aware of startling events for a period of time up to 4 seconds before a computer has generated a random number to 'decide' to produce this event. This is known as 'presentiment' and has been repeated by others. Dean Radin has also been able to reanalyse data from certain other experiments - designed to show completely different effects - which show the same thing. Somehow this story isn't worth a mainstream discussion!

2) Some years ago I was having difficulty walking for reasons that ultimately turned out to be statin side-effects. These are supposed to be rare and normally trivial, yet as yet big pharma are still making a great profit out of selling these drugs. I could have been exceptional, but as soon as I realised what had bugged me, I went online, and the stories came pouring out, and it turned out there are medical doctors writing about these issue and being ignored as far as possible. Here is just one book that exposes this scandal:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Statin-Nat...swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1584035884&sr=8-1

Dr Kendrick has managed to remain a doctor in the NHS, even though clearly a lot of powerful people would like him out.

3) Some years ago, an astronomy academic called Halton Arp found evidence that the red shifts of seemingly distant objects might not be translatable into their distance from Earth. This discovery threatens to wreck a great deal of research the depends on those distances. He had the greatest difficulty getting this information out, and indeed in obtaining telescope time, once the significance of his research became clear.



4) As you will see, if you look at my thread here on Skeptiko about Michael Behe's book, it looks as though the theory of evolution by natural selection is deeply flawed, but nobody wants to mention that in polite society!

Etc etc.

David
 
Regarding evolution, I haven't seen that thread, but have you read or heard of Perry Marshall's Evolution 2.0 book or $10 million prize? https://evo2.org/ I personally know the guy. And he is fighting up against the wall of scientism and even media not covering it, though I'm happy to say he's slowly making some ground with it.
I rather suspect evolution 2.0 is a fudge, but I'll take a look at Marshall's book if you recommend it.

If you could tempt your friend on here, it would be great, but SKEPTIKO may be a bit 'left field' for him, but of course he could join under a pseudonym. If you are Perry Marshall, you can always let me know by PM - I can keep a secret :)

I think some academics try to damn evolution by RM+NS, but then claim to have an alternative, just to give themselves wriggle room to avoid being labelled 'woo woo'.

If natural selection will not work as the engine, I think you absolutely need something else. Here is my thread, and I would also recommend Behe's book.

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/behes-argument-in-darwin-devolved.4317/

Does Perry Marshall have a response to Behe's book - particularly the central argument that what he describes as 'poison pen muations' are far more likely that constructive mutations and these progressively degrade the genetic information in a cell.

Incidentally, I am not a Christian, and do not belong to any religion, so I don't know what the form the intelligence that drives evolution does take. Life on Earth might even be the result on multiple intelligence's cooperating and maybe sometimes competing. That might explain the various evolutionary arms races between predators and prey.

I am also not a biologist - I took chemistry to PhD level and then became a software designer. In the mid 1970's computers seemed a much more exciting field, and I had done a fair bit of programming as part of my PhD.

I also think that whatever their form, this intelligence is presumably high but finite. Think for a moment of the Cambrian explosion. Many forms appeared then, and only a few were kept. It is as though the designer tried out a few possibilities and selected the best. Infinite intelligence would let the designer jump to a final design in one go!

You should look at Alex's recent interview with Donald Hoffman, who claims to have a mathematical proof that given evolution by RM+NS, our sense organs don't describe reality faithfully. Of course you can turn that round and say he has a proof that assuming our sense organs do give a faithful representation of reality, they can't have evolved by RM+NS! If that proof is sound, it might suggest that a proof that evolution cannot work by RM+NS is feasible, because what is true for the evolution of sense organs would probably also be true of the evolution of the brain and human reason.

David
 
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It'll take me some time to go through the Behe thread. In the meantime, in a nutshell, Evolution 2.0 is not about NS + RM being the route. Instead the cell itself is intelligent. It has other tools, epigenetics, transposition, horizontal gene transfer, symbiosis, etc. that allow evolution to proceed. (From there then natural selection would be relevant.) Its not random at all, or scarcely so, but is based on the intelligence of the cell itself.

My guess is Perry wouldn't come on here. But to get an example I did interview him for my podcast.
https://healthsovereign.com/understanding-dna-and-evolution-2-0-for-health-with-perry-marshall/
https://healthsovereign.com/science-taking-200-years-to-correct-itself-with-perry-marshall/

And that second part touches on the DISC. In fact so does Perry's experience. The guy is a marketer and Christian, not a biologist. He's come from a different field completely, sidestepping the DISC, and created the biggest scientific prize ever. Meanwhile, he has gotten the backing of biologists and other scientists doing so.
 
It'll take me some time to go through the Behe thread. In the meantime, in a nutshell, Evolution 2.0 is not about NS + RM being the route. Instead the cell itself is intelligent. It has other tools, epigenetics, transposition, horizontal gene transfer, symbiosis, etc. that allow evolution to proceed. (From there then natural selection would be relevant.) Its not random at all, or scarcely so, but is based on the intelligence of the cell itself.

My guess is Perry wouldn't come on here. But to get an example I did interview him for my podcast.
https://healthsovereign.com/understanding-dna-and-evolution-2-0-for-health-with-perry-marshall/
https://healthsovereign.com/science-taking-200-years-to-correct-itself-with-perry-marshall/

And that second part touches on the DISC. In fact so does Perry's experience. The guy is a marketer and Christian, not a biologist. He's come from a different field completely, sidestepping the DISC, and created the biggest scientific prize ever. Meanwhile, he has gotten the backing of biologists and other scientists doing so.
I am listening to the second of your two links. I like the conversation I am hearing (except for the ads!). It essentially amplifies on the whole DISC question, and it is nice to hear how open you both seem to be about the follies of modern science. For example you mention 'dark matter' which could equally well be an indication that the Newtonian/GR equations do not work at very long distances. I feel that physicists tend to explain away anomalies with ideas like 'dark matter' because they assume their equations are fundamental, they don't need to think like earlier scientists and recognise that an equation might only have a certain range of validity - think of PV=nRT! If GR were a less exalted theory, people would say "this theory is useful, but seems to break down at galactic scales, and also in situations of extreme density which produce singularities!".

However, I'd like to explore this idea that the cell is intelligent, and the idea that this somehow solves (or might solve) all the problems that the Intelligent Design crowd are throwing up. Incidentally, people like Michael Behe are respected biochemists, and they write about biochemistry - I think their ideas should be accepted as valid alternative theories.

I guess my first question is, if you want to get away from RM+NS, can you do it in the various ways you mention?

1) Epigenetics is amazing, and it introduces all these markers that get stuck on the DNA (and also on the histones) that moderate the expression of the DNA within a multi-cellular organism and down a few generations. Now maybe this helps organisms to evolve (assuming there is some way of taking the information encoded in those tags and moving it to a permanent location), but this whole mechanism had itself to evolve - so epigenetics means were are more flexible organisms than we thought - but all that extra flexibility had to come from somewhere.

2) I am sure the other mechanisms you mention are important, but those genes that got transferred (say) had to appear from somewhere. The ID crowd have estimated the density of useful proteins in 'protein space' - every possible sequence of amino acid residues. They conclude that the evolution of this set of basic proteins can't be explained by cell intelligence or any of these fancier ideas, because that requires the pre-existence of yet more extreme complexity.

3) Even relatively primitive prokaryotic organisms have rather sophisticated mechanisms inside such as the infamous bacterial flagellum. Is it suggested that these cells had to have a level of cellular intelligence sufficient to conceive of such a structure and then assemble the DNA to realise the structure?

Put another way, aren't you still depending on RM+NS to kick things off?

We have somewhat intelligent robots operating on Mars. However, these machines needed to be designed, and even if some of that designing was done by computers, ultimately all of that is grounded in the ingenuity of human beings, and they need a link back home to get anything useful done.

Biologists like J Scott Turner seem to recognise the same thing, although he refers to it as 'Agency' in his book "Purpose and Desire". Indeed, I just discovered he wrote this:

https://www.esf.edu/efb/turner/publication pdfs/The pause.pdf

David
 
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The prize is about where the DNA code came from, aka the origin of life. No one knows the answer to that. The neo-darwinist idea of it being a happy chemical accident, doesn't explain anything. Neither does god did it. The aim is to find out how.

But once you have that though then the various methods of mutation/evolution and natural selection can take over.
 
The prize is about where the DNA code came from, aka the origin of life. No one knows the answer to that. The neo-darwinist idea of it being a happy chemical accident, doesn't explain anything. Neither does god did it. The aim is to find out how.

But once you have that though then the various methods of mutation/evolution and natural selection can take over.
A “code” is only a “code” if there is a predetermined end point or goal. A line of computer code sets out to make something happen by design.

The “neo-Darwinist” (lol) would not necessarily see any evidence for that. Hence the working assumption that (notwithstanding future natural or supernatural revelations) the rise of organic chemistry from star dust was a fluke, or the universe just doing what it does.
 
Logon,

As I listen to your fascinating link above:
https://healthsovereign.com/understanding-dna-and-evolution-2-0-for-health-with-perry-marshall/

I feel that your discussion could almost literally have come from various things discussed here on this forum! Let me give you my best guess at the explanation of the mystery of how a cell can use transposons to patch damage to DNA, or change the genetic code in various ways.

This reminds me tangentially of something Rupert Sheldrake commented on many years ago in his book "Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature". He quotes the example of a newt that has had the lens from its eye removed surgically! It would seem that the newt responds to this by re-growing the lens, but via a totally different mechanism than that which the animal used to create its original one!

Rupert interprets this in terms of what he calls a morphogenetic field - a 'field' that belongs to the entire species, and which somehow guides each individual member of the species. This is remarkably similar to the example of transposons being used by the cell to fix damage to the DNA.

The mystery obviously is, that you can't simply stuff the equivalent of a comprehensive repair manual into every cell. For one thing, the repair manual might itself require repair and require a meta-repair manual!

However, there is considerable evidence that our essence - our consciousness - is not bound to our bodies, but leaves us as we die (A Near Death Experience illustrates the start of this process) and spends a certain time outside the physical world, before (at least sometimes) getting reattached to a fetus. A psychology professor - Ian Stephenson found that some very young children seem to remember their previous life. He found enough cases to have the luxury of only studying those cases that met some very precise criteria - in particular, the parents should not know the family of the person who had enjoyed the previous life. Amazingly, the evidence is rather good. I noticed you made some reference to paranormal phenomena in one of those talks, so perhaps you are not coming to all this new?

Anyway, all this suggests that we all have some kind of non-material essence that controls our bodies. There is at least one physicist, Henry Stapp, who reckons he can see a way of doing this if the Copenhagen interpretation of QM is in fact the right one.

I introduced the example of the robot sitting on Mars, and this is the point. Those robots can reconfigure themselves in a variety of ways to cope with damage of various sorts. This is made possible because they are controlled from earth, by processes that eventually led back to intelligent humans. I would guess the $10 million prize will never be won - and I have a hunch someone may come up with a proof to that effect - because you simply have to invoke paranormal phenomena to explain even the simplest life.

Here is a very prolific organic chemist's view of all this:


(Note that James Tour is a fundamentalist Christian, so he would not support all of my discussion above!) You may want to start at about 8.26.

David
 
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