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From: MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Paradoxes
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2025 19:35:59 +1100
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On 16/01/2025 8:19 am, LDagget wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 8:04:55 +0000, MarkE wrote:
> 
>> Potential paradoxes are of particular interest because if unresolved,
>> they may indicate not just difficultly but impossibility.
>>
>> Benner's framing remark is noteworthy: "Discussed here is an alternative
>> approach to guide research into the origins of life, one that focuses on
>> 'paradoxes', pairs of statements, both grounded in theory and
>> observation, that (taken together) suggest that the 'origins problem'
>> cannot be solved."
> 
> Seems to me that framing things as paradoxes is a transparently
> deceptive sophistry.
> 
> It displaces the actual argument's details to a categorical that
> pretends
> to be a fundamental problem. Thus we get chicken and egg paradoxes.
> Can't
> get one without the other --- see it's a paradox. Or you get sophistry
> like
> zeno's paradox, or the liar's paradox. They are games on sets up by
> language
> that superficially sounds fair and reasonable but ultimately embed a
> hidden
> absurdity in their premises.
> 

Interesting that you go directly to pejorative and dismissal.

And yet, for example, Eigen's paradox "is one of the most intractable 
puzzles in the study of the origins of life,"* which rightly identifies 
"a fundamental problem" and is decidedly not "transparently deceptive 
sophistry". A similar assessment holds for other OoL paradoxes named by 
Benner and others.

Your haste to categorise Benner's statement as such seems to me to be, 
ironically, transparent sophistry.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)