Occasionally, there is a need to make a note for record, and to document what we have to deal with here at UD.
I do so now, as I have just learned how I have been slandered at The Skeptical Zone by Petrushka, as one who would censor for mere disagreement. (Joe, thanks for watching my 6.)
This is the key part of the comment at TSZ from last evening, that I must correct for record:
As I predicted, mphillips has disappeared. I have no idea why, but it happened right after KF threatened bannation. How do you respond when the moderator accuses you of immorality for disagreeing?
Petrushka may not acknowledge it but s/he has a duty of care to be accurate, truthful and fair in public discussion.
Such is a premise of a civil society, one characterised by liberty not license. The abuse of liberty that demands to do as it pleases in disregard of the rights of others, is the surest means to destroy liberty that I know of, by creating anarchy that leads to a breakdown that then opens up the way for those who seize power on the promise of restoring order.
History is littered with cases in point, and our whole civilisation seems to be going down that sad road.
The only reasonable preventative, is to police the civil order, in defense of civility.
As I have publicly noted this more than once, Petrushka et al know or should know that I do not hold moderation power at UD (and have at times disagreed with the moderation policy or actions over the years, as will be normal).
And it should be quite plain that so far as I can see, especially in regards to what I have said, there has been no threat of banning of MP — much less for mere disagreement; only of publicly correcting repeated strawman caricatures loaded with ad hominems; which would be painful. It is better to yield to the invitation to self correction, having been cautioned on what one’s errors are, than to have to be publicly corrected for willful error.
I will publicly note that banning for good cause, related to disruptive or deceitful trollish behaviour, is a reasonable act in defense of civility. Similarly, as of the time of this posting, I have no knowledge of MP being banned by UD, but doubt that such has happened. A far more likely explanation is a sick sock puppet slander game, as will be explained below.
{U/D at 8:07 am, the blog owner confirmed that MP has NOT been banned.}
(Of course, if UD’s moderators, unbeknownst to me have banned MP, I would like to hear from them. I do know that for cause of disruptive behaviour, MP was quite openly and with an explanation, put on moderation, where comments had to be manually approved. On returning to reasonable behaviour after several attempts to ignore the correction, this was lifted. MP knows that and Petrushka knows or should know that.)
On the information in hand, what seems to have happened is that the persona MP was a disposable sock-puppet, from the first.
The sock puppet persona was used to make a series of strawman claims at UD, and when correction and responsible behaviour were called for, it was apparently abandoned.
Only, to see Petrushka, the partner in crime, popping up elsewhere with the sort of propagandistic, irresponsible and deceitful assertions we see above.
All along, it seems the hidden agenda was to set up the sort of false accusation I have clipped above, and to pretend that the strawman caricatures complained of by several commenters at UD, were unanswerable.
That snide suggestion is false.
What is more, it is quite plain that the underlying challenge is that a strawman caricature of design theory has been set up that misleads many who do not know better. And, it is plain that the objectors — for all their boasts — have a serious problem with understanding and consistently accepting key methods of science.
In this case, it is worth the while to be a bit more specific.
In recent days at UD, a certain MP turned up as an objecting commenter, working in obvious partnership with a certain former commenter here, Petrushka [who IIRC, was banned for cause].
Over the course of an exchange in several threads, it became quite evident that MP was resorting to the now notorious trollish trifecta pattern of red herrings led out to strawman caricatures and poisonous ad hominems ignited through incendiary rhetorical sparks, used to polarise the atmosphere and frustrate serious discussion.
This thread — from here on (the SECOND comment) — lays out the pattern quite clearly.
In the end, after repeatedly pointing out strawman caricatures of design arguments to no avail, I appealed to MP to rethink and correct, holding back on going to a full bore expose and probable sharp exchange on points of correction.
Here is how I spoke in warning in the thread, at 47:
Are you even aware of how insistently you are caricaturing my views and those of others, or of how irritating that becomes, when such is laced with implicit personal attacks?
Are you so willful in ignorance that you cannot yield to repeated correction?
Or, are you willfully and knowingly — as a propaganda act — distorting the views and smearing the character of those you disagree with, for purposes that obviously are otherwise indefensible?
Let’s ask one basic question: do you understand what inference to best, empirically grounded explanation in light of tested reliable signs is about?
If you don’t know what it is, and do not care enough for fairness to those with whom you differ, to get such things straight, that is bad enough. (I invite you to again look here, taking particular note of the deer track photo, and taking time to think about what you see there.)
I need not elaborate on what you would be doing if you know better but insist on distorting those who hold views you object to.
Until that is resolved, it is pointless trying to discus merits.
But, you need to know that you are setting yourself up to be a poster child of how some objectors to design theory caricature what they object to.
I ask you to correct yourself, before I have to take stronger measures in correction.
Notice, in correction, not banning.
Notice also, that we now seem to see the other shoe dropping over at TSZ, in what walks like, quacks like and smells like a propaganda play.
The warning in 47 was ignored, and from 57 on I proceeded to take what would have been the first stages of a corrective exercise.
Notice, that to date MP has yet to show that s/he understands the scientific method of explaining the unobserved on best explanation in light of observed dynamics and effects/traces in the present that are paralleled by signs evident from the otherwise unobservable.
As was pointed out in a recent ID foundations post, this is a pivotal principle of design theory.
It also happens to be pivotal to astro-physics and the attempted reconstruction of the origin of life, body plans, and our solar system as well as the wider cosmos.
Wherein lieth the rub.
For, if one objects to the use of this method in design theory, one is then facing the objection that one has undercut his own claims and is in disagreement with the whole way that origins sciences are supposed to work.
Which does not exactly comport well with the commonly seen talking point that design theory is a matter of ignoramuses and worse trying to discredit the real professionals in their consensus on origins, developed to the point of practically being undeniable fact.
But, if one can slip and slide off on a red herring distractor from such inconvenient truth, and then go off to a handy strawman caricature soaked in ad hominems, that can be set alight to cloud, confuse, polarise and poison the atmosphere. Especially, for those those who are running on rage over in the Internet’s all too numerous Darwinist fever swamps, not reason.
In correction, let me clip a case in point on the sort of strawman tactics I am speaking about, from 65 in the thread:
While we await MP’s answer to the root challenge, the following exchange with Joe as clipped at 43 above, will show some of the strawman tactics and demand for Darwin by default that are going on:
[Joe:] Living organisms exist.
Necessity and/ or chance cannot account for the origins of living organisms.
Living organisms fit the criteria for designed objects.
Living organisms were designed.[MP:] How have you determined that Necessity and/ or chance cannot account for the origins of living organisms when you don’t know how living organisms originated? On what are you basing this claim?
Sure, we know intelligent beings like us can (potentially) create life. That does not mean that that’s how it happened and to do that you’d have to do as I suggest, rule out any alternatives. And to do that you’d have a complete knowledge of physics and knowledge of the trajectory of every particle in the universe.
A few notes:
1 –> The background is of course that per a massive body of experience, we observe causal patterns in our world that trace to mechanical necessity (law), to randomness leading to stochastic distributions (chance) and to intentional intelligently directed configuration (design).
2 –> In fact, in say physics, we have large bodies of theory that address the first two and the related studies in engineering and computer science and information theory are riddled through and through with the third.
3 –> Next, we can observe and study the processes in action and see the pattern of traces they leave, noting — as could be explored here on in context [also cf. here and here on] as MP was invited to read but has plainly ignored — the differences between, say:
i: heavy, unsupported objects near earth’s surface tend to fall at 9.8 N/kg
ii: if such an object is a fair die, it can be dropped and will tumble to read values from 1 to 6 more or less per a flat distribution, or we could generate text at random using various mechanisms
iii: such a die may also be loaded, which could bias outcomes, or it could be manually set to a value, or of course text can be intelligently generated as is this post
4 –> Now it turns out that these processes often have characteristic consequences, most notably degree of contingency and how the space of possibilities is sampled.
5 –> Necessity leads to natural regularities, of low contingency. That is how we establish laws like the law of falling objects.
6 –> From large experience, high contingency traces to chance and/or choice. For instance, consider a black box that emits successive bits on an output line:
|| BLACK BOX ||–—> o/p bit train . . .
7 –> We may not examine the box but we may infer on its innards and mechanisms from its output. (Way back, I recall a class exercise in IPS on such a BB, duly painted black.)
8 –> Similarly in a lot of science, there are many things we cannot directly observe, but must infer on from observable traces. Star physics is a classic, since Newton and before.
9 –> Now, BB is monitored, and across time seems to give bits that are 1/0 in no particular order, and in a long fast train. Along the way we hit on the bright idea of hooking it up to adevice that searches for ASCII text patterns. Lo and behold, some short word matches occur, and after a time, “2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years” [per Wiki], we find 24 matching characters:
RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r”5j5&?OWTY Z0d…
10 –> BB has emitted a fairly long text string, evidently by chance! But, such a string is well within the FSCI threshold of 500 bits or about 72 ASCII characters of 7 bits each. The explanatory filter expects this.
11 –> Now, lo and behold, one morning we find that BB has emitted the ASCII text string for this comment.
12 –> Should we assign that to chance also, or rule out an intelligent source, save only if:
you’d have to do as I suggest, rule out any alternatives. And to do that you’d have a complete knowledge of physics and knowledge of the trajectory of every particle in the universe.
13 –> Well, maybe I am a random BB, but the same obviously extends to the posts by MP.
14 –> That is, we can see the self-referential absurdity, in a world where MINDS — as opposed to brains — are inherently not observed. (We infer mind from the behaviour of certain bodies, as say the Glasgow Coma Scale discussed here highlights.)
15 –> We thus see the selectively hyperskeptical demand for an evolutionary materialist Darwin default, and how it leads to self-referential incoherence. (Cf here at IOSE.)
16 –> A more reasonable approach would ask, how can we tell the difference, reliably. The simple answer is to impose a joint criterion of functional specificity AND complexity. That puts us in a domain where we have a sufficiently large space of possibilities that islands of function will be deeply isolated making it maximally unlikely that chance based random walks will hit on shores of such islands, per the well known pattern exhibited by chance samples of populations.
17 –> The reality of such islands of function is commonly challenged, but it should be fairly clear to the unprejudiced and reasonable inquirer, that where we have multiple parts that in effect form a pattern of nodes and arcs that must be well matched, properly places and integrated to function, only very limited ranges of arrangements will work.
18 –> WLOG, and courtesy AutoCad etc, that can be reduced to arrangements of string structures: . . . -*-*-*- . . .
19 –> That means the random text test has astonishingly broad relevance.
20 –> As a useful rule of thumb, our solar system of 10^57 or so atoms is our practical universe, and for fast chemical reaction rates as step-size, a space for 500 bits will be sufficiently large that by estimate the sample size will be comparable to one straw to a cubical haystack 1,000 LY on the side. If such a stack were superposed on our galaxy ( comparably thick) centred on Earth, and such a sample were made, with all but certainty the reliably predictable outcome — at a level of assurance comparable to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, statistical grounding — would be: straw, not anything else.
21 –> So, MP’s demand is in effect that we swallow a statistical miracle — actually, an astonishingly long train of such — in preference to inferring design when we see the actual relevant BB’s output: the digitally coded information system in the heart of cell based life, which starts at about 100,000 bits and goes on to billions.
22 –> The reason for that is obvious: a priori materialism, or being a fellow traveller to that.
23 –> That is why there is a repeated strawmannish projection of question-begging conclusion jumping [in the teeth of repeated correction as can be seen in this and other recent UD threads], and it is the reason for demanding what MP knows no empirically based investigation can deliver: an absolute proof by elimination of all alternative possibilities.
24 –> It is also the evident reason why MP has studiously avoided discussing the logic of warranting knowledge claims by provisional inference to best, empirically grounded explanation leading to inferring credible cause on empirically reliable signs.
25 –> But the problem for MP here is that this is the key scientific method for studying origins and many other cases where we cannot make a direct observation. And, it is quite clear from MP’s general level of discussion that s/he knows this or should know this. (Hence the MORAL challenge MP faces, of willful neglect of duties of care to truth and fairness. And this problem reminds us of the issue that evolutionary materialist ideology, since the days of Plato in The Laws, Bk X, has been notorious for opening the door to ruthless nihilistic factions and their cynical notion that might and manipulation make ‘right.’)
___________
Okay, something to chew on while we wait for MP to actually seriously address the merits.
Of course, MP never turned up to reply, once s/he had a need to address the use of inference to best explanation on empirically reliable sign on the table and some clear cases of strawman caricature.
Since another caricature was spread about in several threads and probably elsewhere, let me also clip how I addressed it from 66 in the thread:
In addressing UB by presenting an alleged summary of UB and the design view, MP gives another illustration of the problems, at 149in the Craig crushes Ayala thread (it is also reproduced elsewhere):
X1. All irreducibly complex systems are designed. [–> Misrepresentation, cf Behe, who talks of the challenge to Darwinian mechanisms]
X2. All semiotic systems are irreducibly complex.
X3. Therefore, all semiotic systems are designed. [–> Misrepresents the actual case: it is sufficiently complex complex organisation and information that function linguistically, algorithmically or cybernetically that are in actual view]Y1. A system involving representation(s) and protocol(s) is a semiotic system. [–> Distorts by failing to give context: symbols imply a system of representation and a protocol for communication, codes implies language and language is universally observed — where we can see the source — to come from mind. Similarly, algorithms are purposive and linguistic, involving in our experience mind, so there is a reason for an inductive inference that is not hasty.]
Y2. Protein synthesis involves a representation and a protocol. [–> in fact we have digital data storage in DNA, the algorithmic transcription process involving several C-chemistry cellular nanomachines, the gated transfer of these to the ribosome, the similarly algorithmic code based step by step assembly of protein chains, the chaperoned folding and the Golgi apparatus etc for routing and more. This is a case of ducking the key details by making a simplistic summary. What do we know about automated, control tape driven assembly plants?]
Y3. Therefore, protein synthesis is a semiotic system. [–> of a very high degree of complex, specific functionality]Z1. All [–> functionally specific, complex] semiotic systems are designed (by X3). [strawman alert]
Z2. Protein synthesis is a [–> FSCI-based] semiotic system (by Y3).
Z3. Therefore, the protein synthesis system is designed [–> per inference to best, empirically warranted explanation].
This makes the matter look like an a priori assumption is being used to ground the claim that semiotic — effectively, meaningful coded symbol using — systems are designed. It does so by misrepresenting the conditions under which design thinkers argue for the routinely and only observed source of such semiotic systems as we see being made.
In addition, it misrepresents what design thinkers form Behe on have argued concerning irreducibly complex systems. let me cite Behe from Darwin’s Black Box, to first and foremost clear the air:
What type of biological system could not be formed by “numerous successive, slight modifications?” Well, for starters, a system that is irreducibly complex. By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the [core] parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. [DBB, p. 39]
Angus Mengue gives one pivotal reason for that, namely the need for such all-or-none functional systems to meet the following five criteria, explained with reference to the flagellum but of much wider applicability:
For a working [bacterial] flagellum to be built by exaptation, the five following conditions would all have to be met:
C1: Availability. Among the parts available for recruitment to form the flagellum, there would need to be ones capable of performing the highly specialized tasks of paddle, rotor, and motor, even though all of these items serve some other function or no function.
C2: Synchronization. The availability of these parts would have to be synchronized so that at some point, either individually or in combination, they are all available at the same time.
C3: Localization. The selected parts must all be made available at the same ‘construction site,’ perhaps not simultaneously but certainly at the time they are needed.
C4: Coordination. The parts must be coordinated in just the right way: even if all of the parts of a flagellum are available at the right time, it is clear that the majority of ways of assembling them will be non-functional or irrelevant.
C5: Interface compatibility. The parts must be mutually compatible, that is, ‘well-matched’ and capable of properly ‘interacting’: even if a paddle, rotor, and motor are put together in the right order, they also need to interface correctly.
( Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science, pgs. 104-105 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). HT: ENV.)
In short the challenge to suggested exaptation or co-option by chance to fit together and work, points to the issue that IC systems exhibit significant functionally specific complexity. A simple analysis of getting alternative possible configs by chance, or simple familiarity with the tight specificity of replacement car parts, will show the basic problem: we are looking at specified complexity barriers.
In addition, MP et al routinely ignore the issue that we have vast experience of IC systems, and how they are caused. Consistently, by design.
That is, we have good reason — taking in the previous remarks just above — to see that both IC and FSCO/I are empirically reliable signs of design as best causal explanation. To overturn that, as Newton pointed out, all that is required is to provide sound empirically observed counter-examples.
Needless to say,the sort of verbal gymnastics we keep on seeing from objectors to design theory inadvertently testifies to the basic problem: such counterexamples are strangely unforthcoming.
So, once we see that we are dealing with FSCO/I and IC in that context, we see why there is an inference to best explanation — and notice how consistently an abductive argument along the same lines that broader scientific investigations of a great many things we do not directly observe routinely proceeds is being willfully misrepresented as a question-begging deductive one in the teeth of repeated correction — namely, we have good reason to infer from sign to the signified cause.
Just as we routinely infer from deer tracks to deer as the responsible best explanation, never mind the abstract possibility that some unknown animal somehow could have the same tracks, or someone somehow could be faking etc.
So, we correct the same errors yet again.
Now see if there is any reasonable responsiveness to the correction.
That will tell us a lot about what we are dealing with.
Now, given how evolutionary materialism advocates often compare the “factual” status of their favourite theory to the orbiting of planets around the sun, etc, you would expect that MP would be eager to return to bat these points away for six across the boundary into the car park.
You would be wrong.
Chirp, chirp, chirp at UD, and the sort of irresponsible and deceitful comment by Petrushka elsewhere is what we have actually seen.
That speaks volumes, and what it tells us is that too often, we are dealing with agit-prop not honest and serious civil discourse. The kind of ruthless amoral “might and manipulation make ‘right’ . . . ” nihilism that Plato warned against 2350 years ago, and which is the reason behind the sort of fever swamp behaviour that creates hate sites that target UD’s contributors.
That speaks volumes, and none of it good.
Dr Liddle, as owner of TSZ, I call on you to clean up what is going on there; enabling of nihilism and associated ruthless faction tactics. END