Mathematics

Can I find examples that can fit any of the four following descriptions? Are some even impossible in principle? [Assume first that the artifact in question has high improbability (like a set of a million coins or as stream of a million bits) or high Shannon entropy. Also assume by “disordered” I mean Kolmogorov simple or algorithmically simple or possessing low algorithmic entropy. Curiously (as far as I know), organization cannot be measured in terms of either Shannon entropy nor algorithmic entropy, it is a transcendent feature that can perceived almost only through subjective specification. Further, thermodynamic entropy isn’t even considered in any of these cases (and may not even be applicable)]. 1. ordered and organized 2. ordered but disorganized Read More ›

One evening at the Fitz Tunica casino, a lady playing blackjack at my table confided to me, “I’ve lost $500,000 playing blackjack. The entire inheritance my father left me,”. Her bankruptcy is like the bankruptcy of Darwinism. [Fitzgerald’s casino in Tunica, Mississippi] Let us call her Jane, as in Jane Doe. As I tried to collect myself at the shock of this revelation, not knowing what to say, I asked, “did you have fun?” Jane’s eyes beamed as if she had just seen angels, “Yes! I’d do it over again. The fun was like nothing I’d ever known betting $500 a hand.” 😯 Her story is not unique. Dealers tell me of patrons losing hundreds of thousands. One lady won Read More ›

I went through a great deal of trouble to contest the idiosyncratic claim of a critic at TheSkepticalZone who said: if you have 500 flips of a fair coin that all come up heads, given your qualification (“fair coin”), that is outcome is perfectly consistent with fair coins, Comment in The Skeptical Zone This critic (who goes by the handle “Eigenstate”) would probably keep singing the same tune if we were dealing with 500,000,000 fair coins. I said this was wrong, and KeithS disagreed and demanded I make a retraction. See his comments here in SSDD: a 22 sigma event is consistent with the physics of fair coins?. I insisted the expectation value of 50% heads has to be respected, Read More ›

SSDD – Same Stuff, Different Darwinist. This time someone said at skeptical zone: if you have 500 flips of a fair coin that all come up heads, given your qualification (“fair coin”), that is outcome is perfectly consistent with fair coins, Comment in The Skeptical Zone So if someone has 500 fair coins, and he finds them all heads, that is consistent with expected physical outcomes of random flips? 😯 I don’t think so! Correct me if I’m wrong but if you have 500 fair coins, the expectation is 250 coins will be heads, not 500. Now if you have 261 of the 500 coins heads, that is still within a standard deviation of expectation, and thus would still be Read More ›

There are two versions of the metric for Bill Dembski’s CSI. One version can be traced to his book No Free Lunch published in 2002. Let us call that “CSI v1.0”. Then in 2005 Bill published Specification the Pattern that Signifies Intelligence where he includes the identifier “v1.22”, but perhaps it would be better to call the concepts in that paper CSI v2.0 since, like windows 8, it has some radical differences from its predecessor and will come up with different results. Some end users of the concept of CSI prefer CSI v1.0 over v2.0. It was very easy to estimate CSI numbers in version 1.0 and then argue later whether the subjective patterns used to deduce CSI were independent Read More ›

(previous, here) There has been a recent flurry of web commentary on design theory concepts linked to the concept of functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information (FSCO/I) introduced across the 1970’s into the 1980’s  by Orgel and Wicken et al. (As is documented here.) This flurry seems to be connected to the announcement of an upcoming book by Meyer — it looks like attempts are being made to dismiss it before it comes out, through what has recently been tagged, “noviews.” (Criticising, usually harshly, what one has not read, by way of a substitute for a genuine book review.) It will help to focus for a moment on the just linked ENV article, in which ID thinker William Dembski Read More ›

Albert Einstein, who was struck by the astonishing organization of the cosmos, said: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” and asked “How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?” I have to deduce that Einstein hadn’t an understanding of traditional metaphysics. Otherwise he would neither have spoken about the comprehensibility of the universe as “the most incomprehensible thing” or a “miracle”, nor he would have been surprised that math is so “appropriate to the objects of reality”. In fact metaphysics postulates “universal intelligibility” (nothing is unknowable in principle). The comprehensibility of the world is Read More ›