Two Lego block piles — what’s the difference, why?

_{kairosfocus

October 21, 2014

Design inference, ID Foundations, specified complexity}

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Lego Pile A:

Lego “Pile” B:

What’s the difference, and why is it there?

What does this tell us about functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information (FSCO/I), why?

So, bearing in mind this needle in haystack search challenge:

. . . also, the design inference process flowchart:

. . . and the use of coded paper tapes in older computers and Numerically Controlled machines:

Punched paper Tape, as used in older computers and numerically controlled machine tools (Courtesy Wiki & Siemens)

. . . what can and should we infer concerning the FSCO/I involved in the protein synthesis process (including the coded mRNA tape)?

What, then, does this tell us about the causal factors credibly involved in the origin of cell based life crucially dependent on protein synthesis for it to carry out its functions? Why? END

PS: As a supplement (post meeting), I would like us to reflect on the configuration of two dirt piles,

CASE C: About six miles south of where I type:

Soufriere Hills Volcano dome, Montserrat, at night

CASE D: On some beach or other:

Let’s pose the first two questions again:

What’s the difference, and why is it there?

What does this tell us about functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information (FSCO/I), why?

Comments

I'm not pretending to make a probabilistic argument, Cantor. There's the difference. Bonus points for Tu Quoque.rich_{October 22, 2014
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60 rich October 22, 2014 at 6:36 pm On FSCO/I. You keep bringing it up but not actually doing any math... So just stop. Say “It seems improbable to me” because that’s the actual argument you’re making.
On RM+NS. You keep bringing it up but not actually doing any math. So just stop. Say "It seems probable to me" because that's the actual argument you're making.cantor_{October 22, 2014
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Hi all, back again. Hope all is well. 1) On FSCO/I. You keep bringing it up but not actually doing any math. An uncharitable interpretation would be you want the trappings of a mathematical analysis but can't do one. So just stop.Say "It seems improbable to me" because that's the actual argument you're making. "We have empirically tested FSCO/I and on trillions of cases it is a reliable sign of design." Can we see some workings? 2) tjguy No one is going to give a complete and comprehensive history of life. Do you think that is a reasonable hurdle? 3) Barry@40, you've said "intelligent agency" when the precise and truthful answer is "Humans". I found this, not my area of expertise though: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20610545 Thanks all.rich_{October 22, 2014
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22 rich October 21, 2014 at 4:33 pm I’ve done no math nor science, and one can argue my methods are very subjective / nonscientific.
If that is true, then it is also true of Darwin's "Origin of Species". No math, no science. Just speculation.cantor_{October 22, 2014
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Dr Selensky, thanks. And you are right, it is somewhat amusing, until you realise what it implies. Trust things go well back home in la Rodina. (Did I get that part right?) KFkairosfocus_{October 22, 2014
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PS: Functionally specific complex organisation and associated information, are reliable indicia of design vs blind chance and mechanical necessity. The objectors above and elsewhere are desperately trying to tiptoe around that issue. And such can be reasonably quantified, e.g. the common file size reports are for functionally specific files, and we can construct a threshold metric: Chi_500 = I * S - 500, bits beyond the solar system threshold (use 1,000 for the observed cosmos) I is a reasonable info metric, S is a dummy variable normally 0, for not credibly functionally specific, and goes to 1 if on objective grounds functionally specific. If S = 1 and I exceeds 500 Chi_500 goes positive and will reliably indicate design, on grounds highlighted int eh OP info graphic on sampling search spaces, and the base of trillions of observed cases in point. Design is the only known and only needle in haystack plausible cause of FSCO/I.kairosfocus_{October 22, 2014
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Great post Kairos Looks like some people have hard time detecting design. I wonder if on the way from work to home they try to "unlock" a pile of construction garbage instead of their car. :)Eugen_{October 22, 2014
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C, remember there are different senses of "natural" out there, the issue is signs of the ART-ifical as opposed to the result of blind chance and mechanical necessity without need for intelligent contrivance in the direct creation process. Dirt piles and Lego block piles are in the context of discussion exchanges to highlight the issue of functionally specific configs vs those that are not. KFkairosfocus_{October 22, 2014
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GP @ 47 So, I understand that it does resemble a castle and that we're comparing it to something that we do know. I guess what I'm trying to understand is that the purpose of all of this is to decide on the ability of something to be different in such a way that it must not be natural. It makes sense in my head that in order to help prove ID of some type you have to show that something is not naturally occuring. I think that it's like the human mind. It's not like anything you see in nature, there are no acts of animals that compare with the acts of humans, I'm talking about buildings, organizations, cities, roadways, etc. and not eating, drinking, shelter. To me that shows that the human mind is unnatural and something that is unnatural needs an explanation. kinda like the people that go crazy about UFO's So from your comment, an item can give information about itself, but it seems that if an item shows information that doesn't exist, then the point is to show that the information must have come from somewhere else. I'm just a businessman and not a scientist so I'd rather focus on reality than probability. pretending something is possible at a 10^-280 chance really just means it's impossible and can only even exist in a realm where reality doesn't exist. kinda like the box with 10,000 coins and they get randomly launched into the air. There is no way that it will actually end up all heads. especially if it gets extrapolated to the amount of complexity we see in the entire earth so with regards to finding something that was weird, the sand castle or any other sculpture, I don't know of a sciency way to show it's unnatural, but you can look at it and know that it isn't natural. So how do you do that?MrCollins_{October 22, 2014
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Niw, thanks, there may be millions or quadrillions or a googol of possible Castle designs of course, but by comparison with configs to 1-lego block cells in the space of possibilities, a drop in the bucket. KFkairosfocus_{October 22, 2014
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Excellent post kairosfocus, as always. I offer this very simplified count of the difference between pile A vs. B. Suppose each Lego piece has volume = 1 cm^3 and the castle space available has volume = 1 m^3 = 10^6 cm^3 (Lego slot). Suppose there are 100 different types of Lego piece (shape, colour...), included the void Lego (= no piece). Now serialize these 3-dimension 10^6 Lego slots in a 1-dimension slot string. There are 100^(10^6) = 10^2000000 different configurations possible. Pile B (order) has probability 1 / 10^2000000 to spontaneously occur (infinitesimal). Differently, the set of piles similar to A (chaos) has probability (1 - 1 / 10^2000000) =~ 1 to spontaneously occur (practically certain). This difference in probability leads us to infer design.niwrad_{October 22, 2014
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kairosfocus- rich doesn't want quantification. He just wants to be a pain.Joe_{October 22, 2014
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Rich, you spent was it about 1/2 this thread on demanding quantification. I gave an outline at 26 above, after I came out of the meeting that "started" 5 mins after the post and ran until I could get back. In effect, the DWG file size in the context of identified functional specificity gives an answer, where any general pile of bricks would have done just as well for pile 1. But, pile 2 is NOT just any pile, you yourself provided an identifying context. KFkairosfocus_{October 22, 2014
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TJG: Good catch. We have empirically tested FSCO/I and on trillions of cases it is a reliable sign of design. On the needle in haystack analysis, it is maximally implausible for blind chance and/or mechanical necessity to give rise to it on gamut of solar system or observed cosmos. On origins science, we do not have direct, independent access to the actual past so we must reason on traces and signs in light of observed causal patterns capable of accounting for things like those traces . . . the vera causa principle. Either:
I: we abandon origins investigations as hopeless (but there is a desire to teach a certain school of thought on claims it adequately accounts), or II: we show on separate good grounds (not a priori evolutionary materialism) that design is impossible at times in question, or III: we allow the FSCO/I etc to speak in its own right as evidence of design.
To demand separate direct evidence of designers in a context where we know in advance that such is not possible is unreasonable, selective hyperskepticism. To further demand that we refuse to entertain the only known, reliably inferred and needle in haystack plausible cause of FSCO/I in favour of blind faith in what is implausible per needle in haystack and not observed, is ideological question-begging. To demand that we treat such as though they adequately account for what they don't is hypercredulous . . . trust us, believe our materialist just so stories. (First, show us the ability of blind chance and/or mechanical necessity to effect the designs, then you have something serious to put on the table . . . ) Such failure to reason consistently and on evidence, but instead to impose ideologies and demands known to be unreasonable, is utterly, inadvertently revealing. Good catch. KFkairosfocus_{October 22, 2014
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GP: Just from the suspiciously uniform but non-repetitive asymmetric pattern of surfaces and features in the sand castle -- too many straight lines and arcs of circles or circles, rectangles, cuboids and the like -- I would be suspicious. BTW, in lure fishing, too much uniformity is to be avoided, the fish get suspicious: straight lines, overly steady speeds and overly regular noises. Hence the famous Darter used in surf fishing, which is designed to erratically dart especially in a zone with currents and waves . . . BTW, a real bugbear to design and build. IOWs, to use your abbreviation, even smart fish make a design inference on known design patterns and don't bite! KFkairosfocus_{October 22, 2014
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MrCollins: The point is not that it does not resemble anything in nature, but that it does resemble a castle. If a castle has no meaning from me, there is no specification. Any configuration can be considered unique, is complex enough to be unlikely. Any deck of cards is probably unique. That is not the point. The point is that some subsets of configurations are specified. So, any sand "sculpture" which resembles in detail a complex form of something which exists independently, would be specified as a sculpture resembling an independent object. That point has been discussed recently here: https://uncommondescent.com/design-inference/intelligent-design-basics-information-part-iv-shannon-ii/ I quote, for example, from my post #23 in that thread: "We can derive information from any object about the object itself. So, any object is a source of information about itself. But that does not mean that the object conveys meaningful information about something else. A DNA protein coding gene certainly can give us information about itself, like any other object: it is a molecule, made of atoms, and so on. It has molecular weight, and so on. But the sequence of nucleotides in it is all another matter: it describes something else, a functional protein. With the correct procedures, it can convey that meaningful information to a protein synthesis system, and indeed it does exactly that in the cell. So, a water molecule is a molecule, but it has no meaningful information about anything else. A protein coding gene is a molecule, but it conveys in its symbolic sequence a very meaningful information about something else."gpuccio_{October 21, 2014
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I think perhaps we should go back a few steps to set some examples to build on for those who want to disagree. Here's my example. Let's say you are the first and only human on earth and have been around for several years. One day you came to a sandcastle, like the one in the picture above, on the beach. The question is would you consider it natural or unnatural. I personally would consider it unnatural because it does not match or resemble anything I've seen in nature. We can then progress from thereMrCollins_{October 21, 2014
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rich: You say: "You’ve omitted recursive forces, Barry. I think DNA could be constructed from RNA and recursion. Which of the categories of the filter does that fall into?" I will take your statement seriously, even if it is not very clear what you mean. I will interpret it as "I think DNA could be constructed from some necessity mechanism present in natural systems". OK? Now, let's clarify. We are not talking, here, of the DNA molecule itself. That would be like talking of the existence of the Lego bricks themselves, which in a sense are difficult to explain, as it is difficult to explain the existence of nucleotides or even of a DNA chain. But that's not what we are discussing here. So, let's say that we accept the Lego bricks as already in the system, ans we accept the DNA nucleotides, and some biochemical system that can synthesize them, as part of the system. We also accept some natural mechanism which can "shale up" the bricks, IOWs we accept that random variation happens in the system. That's another way to say that our system already includes living cells which reproduce (we are nor debating, for the moment, OOL, but simply evolution). OK? So, what we are trying to explain is not the Lego bricks, but their configuration. Not the pieces, but the castle. Bot DNA chains, but DNA chains which code for functional proteins. OK? So your statement becomes: "I think DNA chains coding for functional proteins could be constructed from RNA and recursion." (or any other necessity mechanism present in the system). Of course, if that were true, it would fall into the filter category: "Natural regularity, law like necessity". But the statement is simply not true. Obviously, you made the proposal, so it's up to you to show how recursion, or any other mechanism, can explain the configuration of protein coding genes. I will make only a very simple comment: in our efforts to engineer new proteins (indeed sacrcely successful up to now) we can do two different things (or a mix of the two): 1) Apply our knowledge of biochemistry and of how proteins fold to build some functional sequence in a "top-down" procedure. That is extremely difficult, and requires a lot of previous knowledge and a lot of intelligent computational resources. So, you should show that some necessity mechanism already exists in the biological system which has detailed knowledge of the biochemical laws, of how proteins fold, and a lot of intelligent computational power. Good luck. 2) Try to engineer a functional protein by starting from existing sequences and applying controlled random variation and intelligent selection for some biochemical activity to them. That can be more efficient, but it requires some starting configuration which is already "specific" (either because it was engineered top-down, or because we simply start from some already existing functional state which is near to what we want to achieve). It also requires the choice of a specific biochemical activity to be searched, and a very efficient way to measure it even at very low levels, and to select outcomes according to the measured activity. IOWs, intelligent selection. Please note that the simple application of intelligent selection to random configurations can give some result, but that those results are very gross and limited (see the famous Szostak paper about ATP binding). Anyway, what you have to show is simply that in biological systems there is some well defined mechanism which can apply intelligent selection for specific activities to existing configuration which are good starting points for that activity. Or, IOWs, that NS operating on RV can work efficiently to generate the 2000 protein superfamilies we know of starting from some unrelated sequence. The alpha and beta chains of ATP synthase will be a good starting point for your explanation. OK, it's your turn.gpuccio_{October 21, 2014
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F/N: recursion ~ looping. Hence, repetition, not functional aperiodicity such as in complex proteins or program code or text or CAD DWG files, etc etc. Tangent, trending red herring. Let us get back on track. KFkairosfocus_{October 21, 2014
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Rich @27
I think DNA could be constructed from RNA and recursion.
"I think" is not a scientific statement. We think it could not be constructed from RNA and recursion. Opinions are fine. Beliefs are fine. Your Materialism comes down to this? What you THINK? That's it? How scientific is that?! If you could only perform an experiment to demonstrate that your faith in recursion and natural forces acting on RNA. This would show that your beliefs have a real basis in reality. Wouldn't that be great? Oh, and then you could not only tell us but show us by experiment that RNA could also emerge by totally blind, random natural forces.tjguy_{October 21, 2014
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Rich @12
Design inferences aren’t hard or that controversial in domains where we have familiarity and design / designer knowledge, I think.
So Rich, you are saying that the design inference is invalid unless we have knowledge about who the designer is? I guess that means that SETI is out of luck! Any design inference they make will be invalid unless we have actual knowledge of the designer? Is that what you are saying? Personally, I think that is a pretty weak argument and is not likely to convince too many people except those who really want to believe in Materialism. We could switch the tables and ask you to tell us why you will not even allow the design inference to be an option. If you have some real evidence that a designer is impossible, that would be one thing, but it certainly seems like it should be an option. Even if we can't determine the identity of the designer at this point, why does that mean that the design option should automatically be eliminated? I'm having trouble following your logic here and it really does seem like you are just trying to avoid the obvious conclusion. It's no wonder you don't want this taught in school. Everyone would see right through it and Materialism would look silly!tjguy_{October 21, 2014
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rich:
I think DNA could be constructed from RNA and recursion.
Great, we await your experiment and peer-reviewed article that supports that claim.Joe_{October 21, 2014
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rich
You’ve omitted recursive forces, Barry. I think DNA could be constructed from RNA and recursion. Which of the categories of the filter does that fall into?
Category 1: Is it contingent? Recursive is defined as “relating to or involving the repeated application of a rule, definition, or procedure to successive results” In other words a “law-like process.” First, you don’t get to start with RNA. Second, as in all historical sciences we are looking for an abductive inference – what is the “best” explanation for the data. Here we have a complex digital code. “Recursive forces” have never been observed to generated a complex digital code. Conversely, intelligent agents create complex digital codes routinely. So I ask you: Cause A (recursive force) has never been observed to account for phenomenon X Cause B (intelligent agency) is routinely observed to account for phenomenon X We have an example of phenomenon X (digital code). Setting aside our metaphysical commitments, what is the best explanation for this particular example of phenomenon X? Hint. It does no good to say “recursive forces” are a “possible explanation;” therefore they are the best explanation for phenomenon X. We are looking for the best explanation, not all possible explanations. Therefore, even if I grant that recursive forces are a possible explanation (which I do not BTW), it simply does not follow that they are the best explanation.Barry Arrington_{October 21, 2014
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Querius #34 #37 You have convinced me!Box_{October 21, 2014
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It's pretty amazing the choice that must have been involved to gather legos all of the same color for some of those structures [patterns, forms, shapes, designs].Mung_{October 21, 2014
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And, of course I'm fully prepared to defend my castle with logic, artifices, personal attacks, moving goal posts, and anything else for what is undeniably The Truth of the Evolution of Legos! ;-) -QQuerius_{October 21, 2014
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Very illuminating. Thank you kf. What is the form of a lego? How many legos does it take to make a pile of legos? Isn't this just simply a difference in the number of legos involved? I bet if you dump enough legos on top of Lego Pile B you won't be able to tell the difference.Mung_{October 21, 2014
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LoL!@ Box 32- Nice. The sweet thing about here is we can ignore them. It is our choice to try to engage them even when they cannot engage reality.Joe_{October 21, 2014
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Obviously, the Lego castle proves evolution! Here's why. 1. Each piece was formed by some incompletely understood process, called the Origin of Legos (OOL). 2. By the shape of each piece, we can demonstrate that certain conjunctions of any two blocks are more stable than others. When squeezed together blocks can require a lot of energy to separate. 3. Over billions of years of random collisions, it is more likely that the more stable configurations will outlast the less stable ones. Large arrangements are likely to incorporate smaller arrangements than other large arrangements. As long as there is a supply of the Building Blocks of Lego, the largeer arrangements will continue to grow. This is a ratcheting function. 4. Wall-shaped arrangements are less likely to suffer disruption during random interactions (shaking) than arrangements with ends sticking out. 5. The "castle" shape appears to be designed, but it could have been anything---a fire station, a fortress, a university, or a nearly infinite number of other recognizable structures. 6. While we're not currently observing a lot of new structures being created, this is due to the slow processes involved. Sometimes when a piece is removed, the structure's overall utility is improved, and we have observed a few examples of these. 7. There's no such thing as Intelligent Play. It's not necessary since we can demonstrate each intermediate step can occur naturally through random collisions. 8. There are lots of parts left over from evolution, which we call "junk Legos." Anyone who doesn't agree is anti-science, anti-math, and an idiot who imagines some huge child-in-the-sky fairy tale. -QQuerius_{October 21, 2014
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Tintinnid, sandcastle, Lego castle, quartz structure are all designed. What is your point?ppolish_{October 21, 2014
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