specified complexity

For some little while now, RDF/AIGuy has been advocating a strong AI claim here at UD.  In an exchange in the ongoing is ID fatally flawed thread, he has said: 222: Computers are of course not conscious. Computers of course can be creative, and computers are of course intelligent agents. Now before you blow a gasket, please try and understand that we are not arguing here about what computers can or cannot do, or do or do not experience. We agree about all of that. The reason we disagree is simply because we are using different definitions for the terms “creative” and “intelligent agents” . . . This seems a little over the top, and I commented; but before we Read More ›

In recent days, this has been a hotly debated topic here at UD, raised by RDFish (aka AI Guy). His key contention is perhaps best summarised from his remarks at 422 in the first understand us thread: we do know that the human brain is a fantastically complex mechanism. We also know that in our uniform and repeated experience, neither humans nor anything else can design anything without a functioning brain. I have responded from 424 on, noting there for instance: But we do know that the human brain is a fantastically complex mechanism. We also know [–> presumably, have warranted, credibly true beliefs] that in our uniform [–> what have you, like Hume, locked out ideologically here] and repeated Read More ›

Just heard on the Caribbean’s traditional 7:00 am BBC morning news, award of a Nobel Prize to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells The Nobel press release remarks: The 2013 Nobel Prize honours three scientists who have solved the mystery of how the cell organizes its transport system. Each cell is a factory that produces and exports molecules. For instance, insulin is manufactured and released into the blood and chemical signals called neurotransmitters are sent from one nerve cell to another. These molecules are transported around the cell in small packages called vesicles. The three Nobel Laureates have discovered the molecular Read More ›

Today marks a full year since I issued an open challenge to Darwinists to ground their theory and its OOL extension and root, in light of actually observed capabilities of blind watchmaker mechanisms of chance and necessity through an essay I would host here at UD. The pivot of the challenge is the modern version of the very first Icon of Evolution, Darwin’s Tree of Life (which in an incomplete form is the ONLY image in original editions of Origin of Species), here typified by a case from the Smithsonian:   I first did so in an exchange thread, specifically responding to Jerad, then headlined it some days later. In lieu of prompt serious replies, I set up Wikipedia articles Read More ›

How do we distinguish systems formed by natural laws, from stochastic processes, and from systems designed by intelligent agents? See Demski’s Explanatory Filter at ARN and at the IDEA Center. Now at Harvard’s Molecular Systems Lab, Peng Yin is currently focused on engineering programmable molecular systems that are inspired by biology, such as the information-directed, self-assembly of nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) structures and devices, and on exploiting such systems to do useful molecular work, such as probing and programming biological processes for imaging and therapeutic applications

Longtime design objector AF has just issued an inadvertently revealing challenge in the Info by accident thread: AF, 224: >> And in the spirit of Carthago delenda est if anyone has a testable hypothesis of “Intelligent Design”, that would be good, too!>> This is brazen, and utterly revealing. Cato’s “Carthage must fall” was a declaration of implacable ruthless enmity that led to the final destruction of Carthage through a third war in a century, on a flimsy excuse. Here is my response at 225 (images added): KF, 225: >> AF has been at UD from the beginning. Eight years. He therefore full well knows — it having been stated in his presence umpteen times — that, for instance, a clear Read More ›

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 ›

The ID interpretation of No Free Lunch theorems argues that Darwinian processes on average will not do better than chance processes for the emergence of biological complexity. As has been debated at UD, it’s not merely a question of what is possible, but what we should reasonably expect. For example, see: The Law of Large Numbers vs. KeithS, Eigenstate, and my other TSZ critics. The Genetic Entropy hypothesis by creationist John Sanford argues that biological complexity is gradually going out of the human genome and possibly the entire biosphere. I provided cursory analysis that lends credence to both the ID interpretation of No Free Lunch theorems and the Genetic Entropy thesis here: The price of cherry picking for addicted gamblers Read More ›

Thus, a scientist may view design and its appeal to a designer as simply a fruitful device for understanding the world, not attaching any significance to questions such as whether a theory of design is in some ultimate sense true or whether the designer actually exists. Philosophers of science would call this a constructive empiricist approach to design. Scientists in the business of manufacturing theoretical entities like quarks, strings, and cold dark matter could therefore view the designer as just one more theoretical entity to be added to the list. I follow here Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote, “What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of Read More ›

Even though I’m an Advantage Player, I would never dream of hosting illegal dice games and fleecing people (I swear never, never). But, ahem, for some reason I did take an interest in this product that could roll 6 and 8 at will! [youtube 3MynUHA6DTs] Goodness, that guy could earn a mint in the betting on 6 and 8! 😈 The user can use his key chain and force the dice to certain orientations. As far as I know the dice can behave as if they are fair if the remote control is not in force. For the sake of this discussion, let us suppose the dice will behave fairly when the remote control is not in force. Suppose for Read More ›

This my third installment of a discussion I began here and continued here on the validity of the claim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, or what I call the EC-EE claim. In the first installment we looked at the EC-EE claim itself and asked whether the EC-EE claim is an example of an EC-EE claim that failed to live up to its own standard. In the second installment, we looked at what exactly are the extraordinary claims being made by ID that so require such extraordinary evidence, or is it Darwinian evolution that is really making the extraordinary claim and so far has failed the EC-EE test? In this third post I want to look at the evidentiary side Read More ›

Over at the KF blog, we have recently been entertaining some ghosts from our civilisation’s past, who are concerned about its present and now sadly likely future in light of the sad history recorded in Acts 27, of a sea voyage to Rome gone disastrously wrong because the voyagers were manipulated into venturing back out at Fair Havens, when they ought to have been wintering. That is, while democracy is obviously better than realistic alternatives, there is nothing sacred or necessarily sound and wise about majority rule (even when minorities are heard out, respected and protected — as seems increasingly to be fading away . . . ), especially when the majority view has been manipulated by agenda driven interests. Read More ›

In all things there are two different kinds of characteristics: quality and quantity. While quantity is relatively easy to define, quality is difficult to define or specify. Consider an apple. It is easy to grasp what is the difference between one apple, two apples, three apples… only an integer number changes, representing the amount of apples. Differently, it becomes hard to define in detail what an apple is, what are its essential properties and its intrinsic attributes, ─ in a single word ─ what is its quality, which distinguishes it from anything else. This is more true more the thing investigated is complex and rich of information and organization. Often a quality of a thing is related to its shape. Read More ›

In Illustra Media’s Darwin’s Dilemma, there is a clip on proteins as islands of function in amino acid sequence space: [youtube h38Xi-Jz9yk] Food for thought. As a stimulus to such, let us next note how the bloggist Wintery Knight has given an interesting summary of the challenges involved if a chance-dominated process is invoked for a hypothetical 100-AA polypeptide: Let’s calculate the odds of building a protein composed of a functional chain of 100 amino acids, by chance. (Think of a meaningful English sentence built with 100 scrabble letters, held together with glue) Sub-problems: BONDING: You need 99 peptide bonds between the 100 amino acids. The odds of getting a peptide bond is 50%. The probability of building a chain 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 ›