rhetoric

Sometimes, one of UD’s frequent objectors makes an inadvertently telling objection that deserves highlighting in order to publicly document what we are up against. In this case, AK has provided us with TWO, as headlined. Accordingly, over the past several days, I responded in the Skeptical Review thread. This morning, on seeing doubling down, I have further responded and I now highlight for all to see: KF, 125: >> . . . let us go back to your context from 64 above: “the ID technique [–> that’s already a Big Lie agit prop tactic and slander] that you excel at called the Gish Gallop [–> diagnostic, terrible sign], made famous by Duane Gish and others [–> root-slander]” and again at Read More ›

It seems we cannot escape epistemological questions when we address ID issues. AK opens the squeaky-hinged door yet again in the US National Association of Scholars thread. My comment: KF, 9: >>[AK,] I see your: If they are published in reputable peer reviewed journals, they are scientific findings. We need to distinguish key terms and address underlying issues on logic and warrant. Truth (following Ari who got it right) says of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not — accurate description of reality. As potentially knowing, rational and responsible subjects, we face the challenge that we are finite, fallible, morally struggling (is is not ought) and too often ill-willed. To credibly know objective Read More ›

For some time now, GP has had up a post on defending intelligent design. In following its discussion off and on (it’s budget season here), I see that the definition of design is on the table for discussion. I think I can help (and while I am at it — just noticed, contribute to BA’s dissection of the Only Human Intelligence Allowed fallacy), and I think it worthwhile to headline a comment: KF, 310: >> it seems the definition of design is up again as an issue. The simplest summary I can give is: intelligently directed configuration, or if someone does not get the force of “directed,” we may amplify slightly: intelligently, intentionally directed configuration. This phenomenon is a commonplace, Read More ›

Darwinian Ken Miller is promoting his new book, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will. In a guest column at Scientific American, he claims that the use of the term “Darwinism” is a slur against science: A number of purposes are served by reducing an entire scientific field to an “ism” based on the name of its founder. The first is obvious. Evolution then becomes an ideology, not a field of science. This view is on full display at the lavishly appointed Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, where visitors are assured that scientific data can be interpreted in two ways—from a Darwinist perspective, or from a creationist point of view. Because both depend only Read More ›

By 2012, the longstanding Encyclopedia Britannica had published its last print edition. Microsoft’s Encarta has long since bitten the dust, and so has Collier’s notable effort. Wikipedia, like it or lump it — mostly the latter — seems to have taken over that go-to first source slot. Indeed, for a great many subjects a Wikipedia article will dominate a Google search (or the like), to the point where one gets the impression that if it is not in the top three or so references, that was programmed in by the search engine’s programmers. And yet, as PJ Media reports, co-founder and original author of Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view [NPOV]” policy, Larry Sanger has gone on record, regarding Wiki’s entrenched Read More ›

As was recently discussed, contrary to objections being made, the concept of blind search and linked search challenge in a configuration or state space is a reasonable and even recognised concept. As we explore this concept a little more, an illustration may be helpful: With this in mind, we may again look at Dembski’s arrow and target illustration from NFL, p. 11: Now, let us ponder again Wiki on state space search: >>State space search is a process used in the field of computer science, including artificial intelligence (AI), in which successive configurations or states of an instance are considered, with the intention of finding a goal state with a desired property. Problems are often modelled as a state space, Read More ›

While we’re on a roll on AI and its import at the hands of evolutionary materialistic scientism dressed in a lab coat, BA77 has linked a comic strip — see here (main site here; cf. twist on The Cave currently top of the heap) — that is at first funny then soberingly serious: As in, where do you think these issues fit in: And perhaps Engineer Derek Smith’s model has a few points to ponder as we think about the higher order, supervisory controller in the cybernetic loop: Food for thought. END PS: Could I put up for reflection the notion that the human soul is at the interface of spirit and body, including Brain and CNS?

In his well-known work, No Free Lunch, p. 11, ID Researcher William A Dembski has illustrated the search challenge concept in terms of an arrow hitting a target amidst a reference class of possibilities. In so doing, he reaches back to the statistical mechanical and mathematical concept of a phase space “cut down” to address configurations only (leaving out momentum), aka state space.  He then goes on to speak in terms of probabilities, observing: >>. . . in determining whether an event is sufficiently improbable or complex to implicate design, the relevant probability is not that of the event [= E] itself. In the archery example, that probability corresponds to the size of the arrowhead point in relation to the Read More ›

This is a theme of increasing significance for the ID debate, but also it has overtones for an era where AI technologies may be driving the next economic long wave. Which is of instant, global importance, hence the Perez idealised Long wave illustration: However, this is not about economics (save, as a context for major trends) but about AI, Intelligent Agents as conceived under AI and the intersection with ID. Intelligent Design. Where, it is important to recognise that the concept of intelligence and of agency we will increasingly encounter will be shaped by the dogmas of what is often termed, Strong AI. Techopedia summarises: >>Strong artificial intelligence (strong AI) is an artificial intelligence construct that has mental capabilities and Read More ›

The Voynich manuscript has long been a mysterious object, seemingly a medicinal or magical survey of plants, or someone’s play on such documents, but written in an unknown alphabetic script: AI is now being brought to bear on the matter.  According to phys dot org: >>U of A computing science professor Greg Kondrak, an expert in natural language processing, and graduate student Bradley Hauer used artificial intelligence to decode the ambiguities in human language using the Voynich manuscript as a case study. Their first step was to address the language of origin, which is enciphered on hundreds of delicate vellum pages with accompanying illustrations. Kondrak and Hauer used samples of 400 different languages from the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” Read More ›

For some time now, objector DiEb has been raising the question, what do we mean by speaking of “search” in the context of evolutionary search. At 311 in the parody thread, she [IIRC] remarks: >>Search is a central term in the work of Dr. Dr. William Dembski jr, Dr. Winston Ewert, and Dr. Robert Marks II (DEM): it appears in the title of a couple of papers written by at least two of the authors, and it is mentioned hundreds of times in their textbook “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics“. Strangely – and in difference from the other central term information, it is not defined in this textbook, and neither is search problem or search algorithm. Luckily, dozens of examples of Read More ›

One of the problems that keeps on cropping up here at UD and elsewhere is as captioned. Accordingly, I just noted to JDK et al in the “complaining” thread as follows: ___________ This means, we need a plumb-line test. In this case, the actual history of the founding of science and of the views and approaches of its pioneers. No definition of Science that cannot accept the work and approach of the founders of scientific methods and disciplines across centuries can be correct. So, here is Newton in Opticks, Query 31: As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in Read More ›

The opportunity is open and it is time to seize the day. So, I think a comment in a discussion with GP and Dionisio should be headlined: >>My observation is those who are closed minded, indoctrinated and hostile will simply flare up in anger at anything that threatens their favoured evolutionary materialistic scientism or their comfortable fellow-traveller views calibrated not to get them in hot water with the domineering atheists. The issue then is, how well cultured they are. The cultured play at subtle rhetorical games pivoting on evasions and how could you concern trolling which provide more or less respectable “good cop” cover. Then come the “bad cops” who try to run riot, bully, intimidate, slander and stalk. I Read More ›

Sometimes, an issue comes to a head, and there is then need to deal with it. The headline inadvertently shows that we are at such a juncture and the post yesterday on time to take the lead is therefore timely. For, the underlying problem at work on ID is that there is an often implicit but sometimes quite explicit ideologically loaded redefinition of science at work. Accordingly, I think it appropriate to headline my response to Seversky, including the onward accusation of religious bias: KF, 28 (in reply to 21): >>Strawman soaked in ad hominems and set alight to cloud, confuse, poison and polarise the issues: a lot of this reads like complaining because science isn’t coming up with observations Read More ›

In the Tabby’s Star “extraordinary claims” follow-up thread, one of the usual objector personas tried to pounce on the corrective: To do so, he tried to counter-pose the concept of Bayesian analysis, then professes to find that a discussion of the difference between risk and radical uncertainty is little more than meaningless verbiage. This is, however, little more than a play to keep going on business as usual in science in the teeth of warning signs: Where, we must also reckon with the subtleties of signals and noise: I have responded onward and think it worth the while to headline: Applicability to ID and many other areas of concern should be obvious. END