Often Intelligent Design is accused by some evolutionists of not being able to perfectly calculate the complex specified information of a system. From that accusation some ID opponents directly infer that ID has no scientific status. In my opinion this accusation and its corollary is a pure demagogical pretest, a weak excuse.
See the following image (sizes are not real):
The image shows, from left to right, a clothespin, a bike and a bird. To whoever uses such pretest against ID I ask this simple question: what is more complex, more organized, between a clothespin and a bike? What do you answer? Do you answer clothespin is more complex? No, you answer the bike is more complex. Did you need some perfect calculation to answer? No. Why no perfect calculation is necessary? Because it is evident that a bike is a set containing more complex functions, more organization, than a clothespin. A clothespin has a unique function: to press thin materials between its two arms by means of a spring.
Again, if I ask you what is more complex between a bike and a bird, what do you answer? The bird, because a bird is a set containing far more complex functions and organization than a bike.
All this means that perfect measures are not always necessary when we analyze sets or hierarchies of functions like bike and organisms. An approximate measure is sufficient to establish an ordering about their complexity. In the above picture this ordering is symbolized by two “<" signs. Therefore the order of complexity is indubitably: "clothespin < bike < bird".
Of course, this doesn't mean that scientific efforts to improve complexity measures are useless. The countless measures of complexity and organization content developed so far represent an important contribution to science. No one denies that and ID gives its contribution to the task. But indeed the multitude of these measures shows the unavoidable matter of principle: as just said in another previous post of mine, perfect quantification of quality is impossible.
Happily, it is not necessary an (impossible) perfect quantification of quality to somehow grasp quality and do some ordering among different levels of qualities in the things and systems. So the excuse that ID is nonsense because it cannot perfectly quantify design is a weak one. Who uses such excuse to deny design in nature makes us to recall again Romans 1:
“…for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”
Often Intelligent Design is accused by some evolutionists of not being able to perfectly calculate the complex specified information of a system.
My understanding is that the issue is not that you cannot calculate CSI perfectly, it is that you cannot calculate CSI at all.
Roy
Here are few short video clips from the recent documentary “FLIGHT”:
Here is a short video which highlights the much greater level of sophistication, in engineering, that the bird wing has over the airplane wing:
along that note:
and the fossil evidence is far more antagonistic towards the Darwinian scenario than Darwinists are willing to let on;
The following recent article was just plain neat to learn about:
Verse and Music:
As to the undreamt of level of complexity being dealt with in living systems, compared to human technology, the comparison to our most advanced machines, in all honesty, is not even close. Michael Denton puts it this way:
In fact the ‘simplifying assumptions’ of Darwinists,,
,,, these ‘simplifying assumptions’ of Darwinists have been some of the main conceptual obstacles in conveying to students just how immensely more complex the cell is than anything man has ever made.
And although video animations of molecular biology have been a very useful tool in getting the message across to students as to some of the undreamt complexity being dealt with in the cell,,
,, these animations still fall far short of truly impressing upon us the immensity of the complexity being dealt with in molecular biology over and above what man has ever designed. For instance, although the molecular animations give the impression that there is plenty of room in the cell, the reality of the situation in the cell is far different,,
But why do the molecular animations show such a ‘roomy’ cell when the actual situation in the cell is far different?, i.e. far more cramped? The fact of the matter is that, despite the stunning advances that have recently been made in molecular biology, we are still grossly ignorant of many of the intricate processes of the cell.
Thus, in all honesty, it is simply completely disingenuous for Darwinists to try to impose their ‘gross oversimplifications’ onto what is happening in the cell since it is, in fact, a gross mis-caricaturization of what is actually happening in the cell, and is far more apt to slow down, and even mislead, future research, than it ever to providing a fruitful, and accurate, conceptual basis for students (and scientists) studying cells seeking to unravel more mysteries of the cell!
Verse and Music;
Thanks bornagain77
Along the lines of recognizing design in nature from signs, there is another important quote by Jesus about birds, lilies and humans (Matthew 6,26):
Doubtlessly those words should be interpreted in a ID perspective of recognition of design in nature. In fact the “clothes” of birds, lilies and humans Jesus speaks about are symbolically their very bodies. So that, at the very end, the Jesus’ suggestion is to consider the complexity of the bodies of the living creatures, be they birds, lilies or humans, and an ordering or hierarchy of increasing organization.
Of course Jesus was eminently an IDer ante litteram. Not by chance he was also the “son of the carpenter“, a precise symbolic reference to his “father”, the Great Designer of the universe.
Atheistic materialism is a rebellion against the obvious. Only a fool can look at the nanotechnological marvels in a single cell and say “There is no design necessary here.”
Roy
For certain systems (e.g. proteins) ID theory can provide CSI calculations that give a good idea of the improbability of a naturalistic origin of them. Indeed in these days some are speaking of proteins as “miracles”.
niwrad, interesting post. I made a similar point here:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ted-shack/
Barry Arrington
Yes, both your excellent previous post and my actual one somehow say the same thing: often the obvious doesn’t need advanced mathematics, and – as you again rightly stated in your post “Doing My Duty” – “design is obvious”.
Roy as to your understanding:
Perhaps you should convey your understanding to Nobel prize winner Jack W. Szostak
and also covey it to Kirk Durston PhD:
William J Murray:
Exactly. In the same time atheistic materialism is a rebellion against the Truth. This is not good for the rebels because:
Forgive my layman approach to this:
It seems to me that quantifying CSI would be as silly as quantifying comedy. Are they not both qualitative attributes? Are qualitative attributes not as significant in our experience as quantitative ones?
Enlighten me here!
Hi Roy,
Leaving CSI aside, perhaps you could explain how inanimate nature selects for utility?
Bateman
Your comment is thoughtful. Quantification is always reductive and simplifying. Per se it is possible to couple or map a number to anything in many ways. Also a comedy, when is written in text format, could be grossly quantified. For example, simply by counting the number of characters. Obviously – you object – we lose the main thing: the meaning of the comedy. You are right: the qualitative attributes are more significant in our experience than quantitative ones. But methodological naturalism would pretend to develop a purely quantitative science. A nonsense and a non-science.
I would love to see how a purely quantitative science could be used to explain science itself.
Although ‘classical’ encoded information, such as the encoded functional information Szostak and Durston have quantified in molecular biology (as noted in post 10), and such as the encoded classical information which Marks, Dembski and company have quantified in a more nuanced, elegant, fashion here in their refutation of evolutionary algorithms,,
Although these definitions for classical functional information are good as far as they go as to clearly demonstrating the sheer implausibility of the atheistic Darwinian scenario as to generating functional information, in fact a single instance of what are perceived to be purely material processes generating functional information would be enough to falsify Intelligent Design in most people’s mind,
Although these definitions for classical functional information are good as far as they go as to clearly demonstrating the sheer implausibility of the atheistic Darwinian scenario as to ever generating functional information, they still fall far short as to quantifying the total information content inherent in a cell. Many people, such Bateman and Roy have done in this thread, due to the transcendent nature of information,,
such people, such as Bateman and Roy, may hold that it is impossible to get a more precise measure on the functional information inherent in the cell, than that which has thus far been demonstrated, but such people would be wrong in their presupposition as to what is possible in the measure of the information inherent in the cell. Due to the tight similarity of the equations entropy and information,,
Due to this tight similarity, between the equations of entropy and of information, a much more rigid approximation has been worked out for the functional information inherent within a cell. The information content that is derived in a ‘simple’ cell, when working from a thermodynamic perspective, is as such:
For the calculations, working from the thermodynamic perspective, please see the following site:
Some people have argued, even though the equations are the same, that there is no ‘real’ connection between thermodynamics and information, but that false claim was recently put to rest:
Thus the equations of information and thermodynamics, though almost certainly still in rough form, are physically demonstrated to be interchangeable and thus a much more precise measure of the functional information inherent in a ‘simple’ cell (and for life in general) can be worked out from the thermodynamic perspective.
Of supplemental note: Encoded ‘classical’ information such as what Dembski and Marks demonstrated the conservation of, and such as what we find encoded in computer programs, and yes, as we find encoded in DNA, is found to be a subset of ‘transcendent’ (beyond space and time) quantum entanglement/information by the following method:,,,
That quantum entanglement can be used as a ‘quantum information channel’ is noted here:
Moreover, in a development that is completely antagonistic towards the reductive materialism that neo-Darwinism is based upon, using the ‘quantum information channels’ of quantum entanglement, a particle and/or photon can be reduced to quantum information and instantaneously teleported to another location in the universe,,
In fact an entire human body can ‘theoretically’ reduced to quantum information and teleported:
for comparison sake:
In the preceding video they speak of having to entangle all the material particles of the human body on a one by one basis in order to successfully teleport a human. What they failed to realize in the video is that the human body is already ‘teleportation ready’ in that all the material particles, all the DNA and Proteins, of the human body are already ‘quantumly entangled’:
Also of note, quantum entanglement requires a non-local, beyond space and time, cause in order to explain its effect:
Moreover, quantum entanglement/information is ‘conserved’:
Moreover,,,
So where does this conserved ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum information go upon the death of our temporal bodies?
Verse and Music:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_woo
I recommend the above article bornagain.
TheisticEvolutionist, I’m always amazed, given your handle, that you, as far as I can tell, take the atheistic position in your posts. Now you have sunk so low as to cite the notoriously atheistic site of rational wiki. Do you also want to reference the rational wiki article on intelligent design while you are at it?
Anything other than materialism is woo woo, If you disagree,,,
http://www.facebook.com/photo......38;theater
Rationalwiki is not an atheistic website, it’s true lots of atheists run that site, but there are some theist and deist editors as well. It is a website that is anti-pseudoscience that is all. I’m sorry but 90% of the stuff you paste in is pseudoscience. You have done some good as occasionally you have the good anti-Darwinian paper or papers against Neo-Darwinism such as from Denis Noble that you paste in but you ruin it all by linking to pseudoscience. The majority of your stuff is links to young earth creationists, or quantum woo about quantum physics proving a soul. Sorry but it’s quackery mate. You have fooled yourself. It doesn’t make intelligent design look good.
As for the rationalwiki article on ID, I have no problem with it. The design argument to me is strictly philosophical. It’s not science in my opinion it’s not testable and it makes no predictions… so if people want to call it pseudoscience they can. The only thing I have in common with IDer’s is anti-Darwinism.
TheisticEvolutionist, funny that atheists on rational wiki (and apparently you) are in lock step in deriding anything that contradicts their/your naturalistic philosophy (and/or your indefinable theistic philosophy). Do you also happen to call Max Planck, the father of Quantum Mechanics, and also the scientist who brought Einstein out of obscurity, a pseudo-scientist?
Perhaps Schroedinger should also suffer the wrath of your, and your atheist buddies, materialistic scoff?
Perhaps Nobel prize winner Eugene Wigner is also not worthy of your (ahem) highly esteemed approval either?
TheisticEvolutionist, whether you find it incredible or not, consciousness is far from being reduced to material causation as even the atheist Nagel admits,,
Thus in actuality, despite your seeming dogmatic adherence to materialism (despite your handle), it should be of no surprise to you that consciousness is found to be integral/foundational to quantum mechanics (and reality in general,,
You can stick your head in the sand if you want, but I will follow the evidence!
the argument for God from consciousness can be framed like this:
Bornagain what you are doing is quote mining old books for one line or two from the early 19th century. It is an appeal to authority to be quoting those scientists. You ignore most their scientific work but only quote anything from them which you believe proves God or something supernatural. These are old quote-mines. There are millions of scientists that believe quantum physics has nothing to do with consciousness or proving the existence of deities but you will ignore them.
Erwin Schrödinger was heavily influenced by Vedanta and Hinduism. He read the Bhagavad Gita in his youth, he was philosophical idealist. This is an extreme minority amongst physicists. There’s other as well such as Arthur Eddington;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.....n#Idealism
I have read them all. There’s no evidence for idealism, it’s a philosophical argument that goes back 1000s of years to eastern philosophies.
Which God? And I fail to see how that is an argument for any God. IMO You are wasting all your time on this philosophical mumbo jumbo in an attempt to prove God when you could be learning about science.
TheisticEvolutionist, tell you what, for me to care what you think or say, you can simply provide the hard evidence that shows consciousness arising from a materialistic basis. Until then your opinion in this matter (or ID in general) means less than nothing to me!
Bornagain, I have no problem with materialism. Everything is made of matter. Science deals with the material world. If you see my posts on the non-religiously motivated dissent from Darwinism thread there are many materialists that have rejected Darwinism. I’m sorry but there’s no evidence quantum physics has proven the soul or any of this other mystical stuff. I hope there is life after death it would be awesome but there’s no scientific evidence for it.
Funny TheisticEvolutionist, I ask you for hard evidence for a materialistic origin of consciousness and you give me none. In fact, despite what you may believe, you can give me no evidence for what you falsely presume to be your ‘scientific’ position:
But instead of you honestly admitting this blatantly obvious point that you have no ‘scientific’ evidence for the reductive materialistic position (i.e. that consciousness can ’emerge’ from a material basis), you disingenuously try to turn tables around and falsely claim there is no evidence from quantum physics for a ‘soul’ (or for ‘mystical’ consciousness I presume). Yet, despite your overt denialism (which matters not one iota to the actual ‘scientific’ evidence at hand) that is precisely the ‘scientific’ evidence we have in hand from quantum mechanics. Shoot, the double slit experiment itself, as ‘simple’ as that experiment is, provides solid evidence that the universe cannot be reductive materialistic in its basis.
In the following video Anton Zeilinger, whose group is arguably the best group of experimentalists in quantum physics today, ‘tries’ to explain the double slit experiment to Morgan Freeman:
Prof. Zeilinger makes this rather startling statement in the preceding video:
Dr. Henry, physics professor at John Hopkins university, bluntly states the implications of Quantum Mechanics here;
But quantum mechanics has now gone far beyond the ‘simple’ double slit experiment:
If you have trouble accepting the implications of the preceding video, don’t feel alone, Nobel prize winner Anthony Leggett, who developed Leggett’s inequality to try to prove that an objective material reality exists when we are not looking at it, still does not believe the results of the experiment that he himself was integral in devising, even though the inequality was violated by a stunning 80 orders of magnitude. He seems to have done this simply because the results contradicted the ‘realism’ he believes in (realism is the notion that an objective material reality exists apart from our conscious observation of it).
Thus TheisticEvolutionist when you say ‘there’s no evidence quantum physics has proven the soul or any of this other mystical stuff’, you are either colossally ignorant of advances in Quantum Mechanics (as well as its history) or else you are just simply lying! Either way I don’t care what you believe for you have more than proven to me, on these pages, that you could care less about what the hard evidence actually says and that you will believe what you want believe no matter what the evidence says to the contrary. Good luck with all that, but please don’t try to pretend to me that you are being objective in you analysis of the evidence for you clearly are not! Now if you choose to respond to this post, all I ask is that you respond with actual experimental evidence refuting the experimental evidence I have presented thus far for I truly could care less what your personal opinion is in this matter! ans only care what the evidence actually says!
Music and Verse:
The inability to calculate other quantities in all cases hasn’t prevented their acceptance. In the same ballpark as CSI is information-theoretic entropy, -1 * sigma(p * log(p)) for a set of symbols and their probabilities.
Consider this calculation for a sentence from my post. Depending on whether you consider it as English text or ASCII bytes, you will get different answers. Depending on what probability distribution you choose for the symbols, you will get different answers. Do you treat each possible sentence as a symbol, or each character?
So is the concept of information-theoretic entropy therefore useless? Is it “not science” because we can’t unambiguously calculate it to 50 decimal places in every conceivable application? Of course not. But it’s a common tactic to set the bar unreasonably high if you disagree with the idea…we’ve come to expect it of our detractors.
I don’t that you can’t calculate CSI is particular cases. It does seem, to me, to be a problem that calculating CSI requires you to the probability that the thing you are talking about might have arisen by evolutoin (that’s “the probability of being in a given target zone in a search space, on a relevant chance hypothesis”).
If calculating CSI requires us to know the probability the thing in question arose by evolution, how does it help us test evolution?
TheisticEvolutionist maintains
Really?
– Is time made of matter? Does it exist?
– How much does time weigh?
– How would you measure the physical dimensions of consciousness? In square or cubic millimeters?
– Does honesty exist? Is it made of the same atoms as dishonesty or different atoms?
– Does Plank’s constant exist? What is it made of?
– How about programming languages? If you weigh a computer, erase the programs on it, and then reweigh the computer, there is no detectable difference in weight, right?
Really?
– So is the research on the origin of the moon to be considered Science? After all, the moon as it was forming no longer exists in the present, and is not observable.
– Can you perform repeatable experiments on things that happened the past?
– Can you “weigh” arguments in grams?
Neither has quantum mechanics proven the existence of time. If fact, QM might be used to demonstrate that our time is only an illusion, and it does not actually exist.
And if time, doesn’t exist, then there can’t be motion of matter through space, so one can argue that space doesn’t exist either. And matter, at its most fundamental level is simply quantum foam, virtual matter that winks in and out of existence.
I guess you’re not left with much. Only your illusions.
Also, I hope that love, peace, and joy exist—it would be awesome, but alas, there’s no scientific evidence for those either. Depressing, isn’t it.
I bet you collect rectangular pieces of green paper called “money,” but there’s no scientific evidence that these material objects will bring you “satisfaction” (whatever that might be), but you still value them, don’t you! 😉
bornagain the mainstream scientific position by default is that the brain produces consciousness and this is backed up with countless scientific papers and evidence (just search online), do you really want me to paste in neuroscientific peer-reviews? They are only a click away on the internet. I am not making the magical claim so I do not have to do anything.
You are the one making an extraordinary claim so you must back it up with extraordinary evidence. But you have failed to this, the burden of proof is on you to prove your magical claim but you have failed. Your references are quote mines to blogspots, young earth creationist websites and YouTube websites on quantum woo, this is not scientific evidence. You have pulled most of this from your own pseudoscientific blog that attempts to prove the Christian God.
Send me a single peer-reviewed scientific paper (preferably modernish) in a neuroscience journal that has supported your magical claim of consciousness existing outside of the brain or everyday reality only existing when someone is looking at it. None exist. You talk about objectivity but almost every post you paste in Bible quotes. You start with the Bible, and if it had not been written you wouldn’t have any problem with accepting evolution or the facts about nature.
You say objective material reality does not exist when nobody is looking at it. Well then just get a video camera place it in an empty room and then come back after a few minutes, objective material reality exists my friend and it has nothing to do with needing a human observer!
TheisticEvolutionist, I don’t care about ‘default’ methodological naturalism being a ‘majority opinion’. Nor do care for your personal opinion! You have presented no hard evidence for your position that consciousness can emerge material basis, and the evidence I have presented thus far from quantum mechanics is easily traceable back to the peer reviewed sources if they are not already in fact to the sources already. It is not up to me to baby sit you nor is it my desire to change you from your beliefs. Believe what you want for all I care. The evidence I have laid out is not for you per se but is there mainly for anyone who is open minded to the possibility that materialism is not true.
sure. Just like the testes produce sperm.
Buy default, not by empirical findings. So who needs papers?
And what produces un-consciousness? Or is that just a lack of consciousness-production by the brain?
Consciousness exists, therefore there MUST be a naturalistic evolutionary explanation for it!
While Darwinists admit in deep humility that they don’t know quite ALL the answers yet, they can assure you that they’re extremely close, and that Darwinism can fill any gaps of any size, limited only by one’s imagination! 🙂
Obviously, consciousness emerges from the brain just like sperm emerges from the testes and fortitude emerges from the belly. Therefore, consciousness is in the brain.
I’ve tried to stream line the most basice definition of CSI which helps the layman (myself) understand it and undeniably prove it’s measurability.
So, a CSI system is both complex and specific. We have to distinguish between the two and also understand the they both have a happy marriage that cannot be seperated.
Complexity = simply the number of parts in the system. This is obviously quantifiable. A bicycle has 33 parts and a protein has 200 amino acids. Which has more quantity? A 1st grader can figure that out…
Specificity = This is qualitative. Each of the parts is specifically arranged so that the thing can function correctly. That is the key. You can’t say specificity is subjective, because without the parts being specifically arranged in the right order or pattern, it wouldn’t function, or it’s functioning would be degraded if the specificity is off, therefore it is objective. We observe CSI when the specified arrangement of the parts of a thing actually enables its functionality.
A CSI system, in any discipline, is noticable when functionality of that system is determined by the specific arrangement of it’s parts.
I know there is more to it than that and my bicycle and protein example is simplified. But seems to me this is not a complicated or confusing matter. CSI is in fact a reality and is in fact measurable.
I believe the simplicity of close pin < bicycle < bird is to prove this point..