Human Evil, Music, Logic, and Himalayan Dung Heaps

_{GilDodgen
July 6, 2011

Intelligent Design

3}_{Categories
Intelligent Design}

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When I was in college I studied classical piano with Istvan Nadas who was a Hungarian concert pianist and a student of Bela Bartok. Istvan was a miraculous survivor of one of Hitler’s death camps. The stories he told me still haunt me to this day.

The commandant of the death camp liked to play Bach over the loudspeaker system while he had random inmates shot or hung, just for fun and entertainment. Nadas told me about the horror of listening to Bach while he watched his fellow inmates being machine-gunned to death in front of him. Nadas told me, “I knew every note of that music and could play it on the piano, but I also knew that if they discovered I was a concert pianist they would break all my fingers so I could never play the piano again.”

Nadas’s death camp was eventually “liberated” by the Russians. Istvan was one of only 150 survivors from a camp of thousands. He weighed 90 pounds and was suffering from dysentery and other diseases. While the Russians were transporting him on a train to what he knew would be a Russian internment camp he managed to jump out of the train as it slowed in the mountains. Under machine-gun fire he fled into the trees, was helped my local residents, and was eventually smuggled by an African American GI under a tarp in the back of a jeep through Check Point Charlie.

Nadas eventually discovered that every member of his extended family had either been gassed or otherwise tortured and exterminated by the Nazis, or shot by the Russians, with one exception: his mother, whom he eventually tracked down in Italy after the war.

One evening, after a concert at the university while I was studying piano with Nadas, which was conducted by a guest “contemporary composer” — it was just a bunch of random cacophony, very painful to listen to, but sold as legitimate music — I asked Nadas what he thought.

“It is a Himalayan dung heap,” he replied. (Nadas spoke six languages fluently, and had a way with words.) This phrase stuck in my mind, and it’s the perfect description of something so obviously stupid that it represents a pile of crap of Himalayan proportions.

The students and faculty applauded the Himalayan-dung-heap “music” because no one had the courage to point out the obvious, except for Nadas.

This is a perfect metaphor for Darwinism. Very few people in academia have the courage to point out the cacophony and illogic of Darwinian speculation.

It takes the courage of someone like Nadas, who was willing to jump off a train in the mountains under machine-gun fire, to tell the obvious truth.

Comments

Dr Liddle, I see that you have made a response at 46. I will catch up and read it later. -cheerzUpright BiPed_{July 8, 2011
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Null, I think you might have mis-posted from another thread.Upright BiPed_{July 8, 2011
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Dr Liddle, From my previous post to you, I have assumed that we came to some valuable agreements, based upon your responses. For instance we agreed that the presence of information has specific requirements. To my mind, these requirements are the primary agreement needed in demonstrating that information did in fact arise from your simulation. Those requirements consist of the presence of discrete representations, as well as the discrete protocols needed to decode them. I make the above assumption from the following exchange:
BIPED: In retrospect, when I stated that recorded information requires symbols in order to exist, it would have been more correct to say that recorded information requires both symbols and the discrete protocols that actualize them. Without symbols, recorded information cannot exist, and without protocols it cannot be transferred. Yet, we know in the cell that information both exists and is transferred. LIDDLE: Yes. And I like that you refer to “the cell” and not simply “the DNA”. BIPED: This goes to the very heart of the claim that ID makes regarding the necessity of a living agent in the causal chain leading to the origin of biological information. LIDDLE: Let me be clear here: by “living agent”, are you referring to the postulated Intelligent Designer[s]? Or am I misunderstanding you? BIPED: ID views these symbols and their discrete protocols as formal, abstract, and with their origins associated only with the living kingdom (never with the remaining inanimate world). Their very presence reflects a break in the causal chain, where on one side is pure physicality (chance contingency + physical law) and on the other side is formalism (choice contingency + physical law). Your simulation should be an attempt to cause the rise of symbols and their discrete protocols (two of the fundamental requirements of recorded information between a sender and a receiver) from a source of nothing more than chance contingency and physical law. LIDDLE: Cool. I like that. BIPED: And therefore, to be an actual falsification of ID, your simulation would be required to demonstrate that indeed symbols and their discrete protocols came into physical existence by nothing more than chance and physical law. LIDDLE: Right. BIPED: The question immediately becomes “how would we know?” How is the presence of symbols and their discrete protocols observed in order to be able to demonstrate they exist? For this, I suggest we can use life itself as a model, since that is the subject on the table. We could also easily consider any number of human inventions where information (symbols and protocols) are used in an “autonomous” (non-conscious) system. LIDDLE: OK. BIPED: For instance, in a computer (where information is processed) we physically instantiate into the system the protocols that are to be used in decoding the symbols. The same can be said of any number of similar systems. Within these systems (highlighting the very nature of information) we can change the protocols and symbols and the information can (and will) continue to flow. Within the cell, the discrete protocols for decoding the symbols in DNA are physically instantiated in the tRNA and its coworkers. (This of course makes complete sense in a self-replicating system, and leads us to the observed paradox where you need to decode the information in DNA to in order to build the system capable of decoding the information in DNA). LIDDLE: Nicely put. And my intention is to show that it is not a paradox – that a beginning consisting of a unfeasibly improbable assemblage of molecules, brought together by no more than Chance (stochastic processes) and Necessity (physical and chemical properties) can bootstrap itself into a cycle of coding:building:coding:building: etc. BIPED: Given this is the way in which we find symbols and protocols physically instantiated in living systems (allowing for the exchange of information), it would be reasonable to expect to see these same dynamics at work in your simulation. LIDDLE: Yes, I agree. Cool! BIPED: I hope that helps you “get to the heart of what [I] think evolutionary processes can’t do”. LIDDLE: Yes, I think so. That is enormously helpful and just what I was looking for.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - With these agreements in hand, it seems that the primary question now on the table is getting your simulation to ascend to the appropriate structure required for the transfer of information. After all, not just any structure will do. Here I am not speaking to the initial conditions of your simulation, but only the end result. Whatever the initial conditions of the simulation I will leave to your expertise, with the only caveat being that the simulation operates in good faith with the claim that chance and natural law are the only causal forces allowed to impact the output (the simulated environment). As to that structure, I think it is important to take a full accounting of what is observed in nature. Again, I am not speaking here of your initial conditions (or whatever reaction pathways your simulation may take in the process of leading up to the rise of information) but only speaking of the structure of the final condition once attained. In that regard it seems that we should highlight two or three observations (some we’ve already discussed). The first of those is the presence of certain discrete objects. Here I am, of course, talking about the discrete representations and protocols. Both of these objects should be fully observed as such in your simulation, and I think we’ve discussed them well enough to understand what they are. If there is any ambiguity remaining, then we can certainly discuss them further. The second structural item has to do with a necessity that the output of information transfer must be dynamic, based upon the input of that information. If the output is not dynamically driven by the representations being given at the input, then the input cannot be seen as informative to the output. Thirdly, to facilitate this dynamic property, there must be a necessary break in the causal chain. This break is exemplified within the cell by the simple fact that proteins are not created from nucleotides. In other words, if you plucked the ribosome from the cell’s protein synthesis machinery, and put yourself in its place, in one direction you would see sequences of nucleotides coming in for translation, and in the other direction you would see sequenced amino acids floating off into the distance to be folded into proteins. One of these marks the input of information (representations instantiated in matter) and the other is the output (a process being dynamically altered by the input). But these are two entirely separate causal chains (if I may use that word). The first causal chain is the sequence of representations, which I say is the product of design, and you contend is the result of chance/necessity. It is made up of nucleic acids. The second causal chain is the bonding within the resulting polypeptide. It is made up of amino acids. The amino acids and the nucleic acids do not interact. They are connected at this dynamic break only by the protocol itself, which I say is the product of design, and you say is the result of chance/necessity. Regardless of who is correct, this dynamic break in the causal chain must be represented in the simulation. Lastly, there is the structural entailment of information always necessarily being ‘about’ something. Therefore, the output (being driven by the input) must serve some identifiable necessary function within the system. In a living system, one of those necessary functions of information is to create the protocol required to make the system work. Given that your simulation is designed to demonstrate the origin of information, it is at least reasonable to think this will be a function of the information within the simulation as well. By doing so, this entailment will be satisfied. So, in order to fully demonstrate the rise of information, this is the structure your simulation must ultimately assume. And as you will note, none of these have anything whatsoever to do with measuring or quantifying information (either by ‘this person’s metric’ or ‘that person’s theory’). The question is simply “Is information present?” To answer that question, these are the observable entailments that would indicate that it is.Upright BiPed_{July 8, 2011
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I mean, I know you disagree about evidence, but the burden of proof is usually to those making the claim for the existence of something, rather than on those who do not accept the claim. No, the burden of proof is 'usually to those' making a claim, period. 'There is no God' is a claim. 'Naturalism is true' is a claim. 'Theism is false' is a claim. And just who has what 'burden of proof' isn't made clear to begin with. The Maverick Philosopher had a good mini-series on this. But you are right, “atheism” is not verified. It’s very hard to verify a null. So? "Gosh, it's hard to verify the atheism!" So... What, then we just treat atheism with kid gloves then? There's no good evidence for the position, there's no proof of it, but that's okay, let's go easy on them? No. I would think that 'it's very hard to verify this position' would, at the very least, suggest someone should be hesitant before committing to it. In fact, I'm tempted to think the old chestnut of 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' may pop in here. Atheism, the claim that there is no God or gods, is an extraordinary claim. Where's the extraordinary evidence? If 'It's tough to get the evidence!' flies as a defense here, it flies everywhere. A-theism is surely the default in the absense of evidence for a theos? And what's the default in the absence of evidence for naturalism, or atheism? No, just what 'the default' should be is itself the stuff of debate. But atheism is by no means the default view. Though I offer this much up: Can one reasonably infer just how much confidence a person has in their position by how strenuously they insist that they are under no or minimal obligation to defend and argue for their position? I would think the fact that so many atheists squirm at the very prospect of having to actually present and defend their idea, or shoulder any burden of proof, says quite a lot.nullasalus_{July 8, 2011
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Might I offer a suggestion? Begin with something both can agree upon as being clearly representative of the thing in question, whether that be a system within the cell (DNA - Ribosome - Protein) or something artificial, or whatever. Then let Elizabeth attempt to come up with a minimalist version of it that she thinks can be reached by Chance+Necessity sans intentional Design. Just an idea.Mung_{July 8, 2011
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oops sorry, forgot to explain the above: it's my belated response to a post by Upright BiPed on a thread whose title I have forgotten!Elizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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Upright BiPed:
I think we may be talking past each other here. I was indicating that the ribosome does not change its state as you had suggested in your previous post. Instead, it assembles polypeptides based upon the informational sequence given to it by mRNA. It does so by bringing the mRNA sequence together with the charged tRNA, which has an amino acid bound on one end of the molecule and an anti-codon discretely positioned on the other (isolated from the amino acid). In response to this you return to say that you’ll make sure the “original informational sequence” is left unchanged (except for any random variation that may impact it). (?!?!) What “original informational sequence” are you referring to? For there to be an informational sequence, it would require that arbitrary symbols and discrete protocols already be established – the rise of which is the very thing that you wish to demonstrate.
Well, this is exactly why I wanted to thorough thrash out the "problem statement" before we proceed. My own view - or perhaps "hunch"- is that the reason that IDsts regard evolutionary scientists as missing a Glaringly Obvious Fact (and therefore assume at best stupidity and/or ignorance, and at worst deliberate dishonesty) while conversely evolutionary scientists regard IDists as Completely Missing The Point (and therefore assume ditto) is not because they disagree on some level at which the disagreement can be resolved in favour of one or other to the satisfaction of both, but because they have very different "problem statements". And it may well be that if we can agree on the problem statement, the answer to which of us is right will become obvious to both of us, without need for further demonstration or argument. But I’m looking forward to my project, so I hope there will still be case to be made! Unfortunately, the converse is probably true as well - that we don't manage to agree on the problem statement, or, worse (for me!) we appear to agree with it, and I produce a demonstration that I think supports my view, and then we find that actually we didn't actually agree in the first place! So while this is time-consuming, I don't think it is time-wasting, and while it may seem as though I being evasive, I'm not. One of the reasons I've enjoyed being here, and am grateful for the opportunity, is that I think that during at least some conversations, we have made some progress in drilling down to that place where the fundamental disagreement lies. But I don't think we are quite there! I hope when we get there, there will be an interesting problem to solve, but it may be that at that point, it simply makes a noise like a hoop and rolls away. Which, actually would also be cool, come to think of it :) So, preliminaries over.... Let’s regroup: My original claim was that I could demonstrate that Darwinian processes could generate information “from the start”. For that we needed an operational definition of both “information” and “Darwinian processes”. For the latter, I have operationalized “Darwinian processes “ as comprising of no more than Chance and Necessity. I haven’t done this formally, but I’ll do so now: “Chance” processes will be generated by a random number generator with a flat distribution, and will govern the movement of elements in my model, in a manner analogous to Brownian Motion. “Necessity” processes will govern the conditions under which the basic elements of my model bind and/or repel each other. These will be laid out at the start, and will not be changed during the running of the model – the “chemistry” of the system. I should note at this point that I will be doing some heavy “designing” of the “Necessity” laws, but that they will not include designing an unfaithfully self-replicating self-replicator. It will not, in other words, be a genetic algorithm, at least in the beginning (I’m hoping one will emerge). If so, Darwinian processes will take over, which I will operationally define as self-replication with heritable variance in probability of successful reproduction in the current environment. So that leaves “information” to operationalize. Meyer’s account of Shannon information is as a reduction of uncertainty, regardless of whether the message has meaning. He gives as an example:
Consider two sequences of characters: “Four score and seven years ago” “nen ytawoi jll sn mekhdx nnx” Both of these sequences have an equal number of characters. Since both are composed of the same 26 letter English alphabet, the amount of uncertainty eliminated by each letter (or space) is identical. The probability of producing each of these sequences at random is identical. Therefore, both sequences have an equal amount of information as measured by Shannon’s theory. But one of these sequences communicates something, while the other does not. Why?
So it seems that Shannon information supplies us with some aspect of what we want to measure, and is what Dembski calls Complexity. But it is missing something that we want to include in there, which we might refer to as “meaning”. The following has been redrafted, in light of our recent conversation You have talked about meaning in terms of “symbols” which we defined as something like the mapping of protocols (which I take to mean “stuff to be done”) on to some intermediate carrier-of-meaning from some source. Dembski, talks about “specification” in terms of compressibility (“ease of description”) which is interesting because on the whole it is negatively correlated with Shannon information content. But Meyer talks about specification in terms of “producing a specific effect”, which may be closer to your definition. Now, it seems to me that any self-replicating entity is a “sender” of information to its copy, in this sense. Encoded within the parent entity is the information required to specify the protocols that will build its daughter entity. However, when, early on, I presented what I called my “Duplo Chemistry” – in which fairly well specified information (enough to ensure that a fairly faithful copy of the original was built) that was also moderately complex (it was an essentially random sequence of units), this was rejected (by kairosfocus anyway) as not being adequate. Two things were missing (at least from the prototype): one was that the sequence did nothing except specify its copy; it did not enable something to happen that would make the sequence’s survival more likely; secondly the coding was a direct template with no equivalent of tRNA – no equivalent of a unit that translates from a sequence with no direct function in maintaining the system to a building block that does. In my original plan, I was not going to attempt that last thing. I was going to attempt to devise a simulation that started with no more than a Physics-And-Chemistry (Necessity) on the one hand, and stochastic energy, in the form of Brownian motion (Chance), but from which self-replicators emerged and evolved. However, I can see that there is some point to building in this “symbolic” layer, and I’m trying to think of a way of implementing this! I can see how it might be done, but it will certainly make the job a little harder (and was not, in fact, part of my original claim, as I was thinking in terms of Dembski’s notion of “specificity” rather than Meyer’s and yours). But are we getting closer to something that might satisfy you if I achieved it? PS: We can probably agree that when DNA (which is one of the main information sources that is transmitted from cell to cell) is transcribed, the portion that has been signalled to be transcribed is temporarily "unzipped" by helicase i.e. its state is temporarily altered, its hydrogen bonds being broken, so that it becomes two single strands instead of one, exposing the bases so that they bond with their complementary RNA bases, ie. the separate DNA strands form a template, or jig, on which the RNA is assembled; eventually the complete RNA strand is released and the DNA strand reforms into its starting configuration. This is what I meant when I said DNA is not "inert" - its state at the beginning and end of the process is unchanged, but it undergoes a state change during the process.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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Dr Liddle:
It concerned the principle of information being created by “Chance and Necessity”. To discuss that we need an operational definition of “information” (also, incidentally, of Chance and Necessity) . . . . What I cannot do is “show the rise of information proceessing [where did "processing" come in?] by means of chance and law” without an agreed operational definition of those terms. I’ve been trying, with the help of Mung and kairosfocus, to drill down to an operational definition of those terms.
First of all, operational definitions are themselves a suspect matter, given the fate of logical positivism and its verifiability principle. In effect the principle failed its own test and self destructed in a spectacular own-goal. Also, we have given enough to work on over and over again. Okay, one more time. Definitions, IMHO, start with concepts, often identified on recognising a pattern in key example[s] and close enough family resemblance. That is why I have consistently provided the pattern of given examples: 1] Mechanical necessity issuing in lawlike regularity: --> e.g. a heavy dropped object falling under g, reflecting . . . --> the dynamics of gravitation as a capital example in point where F = dP/dt = m*d2x/dt2, more familiarly F = m*A, where m is constant. --> Classically, ideally reducible to a Diff eqn, initial conditions, parameters, playout as one solves the eqn, plugging in parameters, initial conditions etc. --> hence, Laplace's handy little demon. --> this sort of reduction is a classic paradigm for physics, the hardest of the hard sciences. 2] Chance, issuing in stochastic distributions of outcomes on distributions reflective of random variable models: --> if the dropped heavy object above is a die, the story does not stop with falling and with maybe air resistance slowing down a bit towards a terminal velocity. When it hits, it has edges and corners plus energy. --> it will tumble and settle essentially at random to values from the set {1, 2, . . . 6}, on a near flat random pattern on average if the die is fair. --> This traces to clashing uncorrelated streams of cause-effect, so that under similar initial conditions, outcomes radically diverge across a distribution, statistically distributed contingency producing patterns similar to mathematical random variable distributions. --> Quite common in thermodynamics settings,such as the random motion of molecules, the driving force of diffusion, brownian motion, etc etc. --> under quantum circumstances, similar random distributions occur. --> relevant to something like dna strings, if a binary output device has a random distribution [Zener noise or sky noise flattened by a PRBS generator will work . . . but a pseudo random source by itself is not good enough], it can be used to generate ascii text strings at random, which can be tested for production of intelligible text. --> So far, and as repeatedly cited, a 24 symbol ascii text string has been produced, from 1 in 10^50 possibilities:
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters ad infinitum . . . . The theorem concerns a thought experiment which cannot be fully carried out in practice, since it is predicted to require prohibitive amounts of time and resources. Nonetheless, it has inspired efforts in finite random text generation. One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according to an article in The New Yorker, came up with a result on August 4, 2004: After the group had worked for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey-years, one of the "monkeys" typed, “VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t" The first 19 letters of this sequence can be found in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". Other teams have reproduced 18 characters from "Timon of Athens", 17 from "Troilus and Cressida", and 16 from "Richard II".[21] A website entitled The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, launched on July 1, 2003, contained a Java applet that simulates a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end. For example, it produced this partial line from Henry IV, Part 2, reporting that it took "2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years" to reach 24 matching characters: RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r"5j5&?OWTY Z0d...
--> to rise above modelling micro evo, models of the claimed power of evolution will need to show how a functional entity that metabolises and self replicates can credibly arise within cosmos scope resources from a plausible prebiotic soup of chemicals interacting under known chemical and physical mechanisms, including the relevant codes, and algorithms --> Similarly, they will need to show how a one celled ancestral organism could so transform itself by chance driven processes and blind mechanical necessity that it can give rise to embryologically feasible complex body plans within the resources of a solar system, or if a cosmos is assumed, it needs to show how many solar systems of suitable type would arise to provide a scope of resources. 3] Intelligence, issuing in purposeful, functionally specific, complex organisation of parts in a whole in the face of highly contingent possibilities --> text in this post is an example 4] Information: --> Wiki's definition as rearranged in the UD glossary:
“ . . that which would be communicated by a message if it were sent from a sender to a receiver capable of understanding the message . . . . In terms of data, it can be defined as a collection of facts [i.e. as represented or sensed in some format] from which conclusions may be drawn [and on which decisions and actions may be taken].”
--> Information can be observed from coded patterns of glyphs organised on meaningful rules such as in the text of this post --> Symbol distributions can be used in a metric, I = - log P --> functional specificity can be identified from vulnerability to perturbation or conformity to tight vocabulary and rules of meaning constraints etc --> complexity can be identified from a threshold that makes chance based random search on a gamut of available resources an ineffective strategy to get to tight zones of interest. In short if a monkey type test will overwhelmingly be likely to fail we are in the zone of relevant complexity. --> Putting together and using the log reduced Dembski chi metric: Chi_500 = I*S - 500, bits beyond the solar system threshold +++++++++++++ The challenge under these circumstances is to generate a system with sufficient capacity to do something analogous to metabolism, building structures under instruction, on taking in energy and simple parts as components, while being able to replicate itself under the same conditions. Components must be able to be joined together in several ways each, and must be able to decouple within reasonable energy resources in the system, even from the "right" combination -- cf here death and decay etc. Or simply lego bricks. Once a simple system self assembles on chance plus necessity, it may hill climb as it leased on chance variation and differential success at replication. Only, the hill climbing has to be innate to the system, either coded in spontaneously, or emerging as a natural property. For a simple test, the usual random number generators commonly available will be acceptable, but the real run for serious results should use a genuine random number source. That would I think be a rough first pass test. Others may want to refine or correct. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{July 8, 2011
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Original ThreadMung_{July 8, 2011
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Perhaps start here:
Dr Liddle, I have looked over your post at 17, but to be completely honest with you, I don’t see the dire connection between these questions and the conversation we have been having. Perhaps these questions are arising in your mind as a result of reading “Sig in the Cell” – which is all fine and good – but they don’t seem to directly bear on the topics we had been discussing. Perhaps you can set me straight on the implications of these questions to the larger set of topics in our previous posts. To help make the connection, I will post the bulk of your last substantial post from the previous conversation.
Upright BiPed Hope that helps.Mung_{July 8, 2011
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Upright BiPed:
Offended? Yeah, I know the feeling. I am more than happy to call off the dogs Dr Liddle.
No problem :) Just let's try to communicate OK?
Just don’t try to abandon the previous conversation so that we can spend the next eternity arguing over Dembski and Meyers. And, do you think I care in the least that you think an material intelligence of some disembodied sort exist in the whatever whatever. I don’t. I want you to show the unguided rise of a discrete representation and the protocol to decode it within a system.
Well, I didn't claim to be able to demonstrate that (not least because I don't know what it means). But, sure, I'm happy to continue where we left off. Will this thread do? Seems a bit of a hijack. But first, remind me of the claim (in my words) you want me to defend. I know you've done it before, so your search skills are better than mine.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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Upright BiPed:
LIddle:
You claim that compressibility, probability and complexity have nothing to do with the conversation I was having with you. Well it may well be true that they did not come up, but to claim that they have “nothing to do with it” seems to me to be utterly astonishing!
Knock yourself out, Liz. Tie them to the previous conversation at the point of the previous conversation, and I’ll recant. Otherwise, I will note that you said NOTHING in your last post that had anything to do with the previous conversation.
I'm not asking you to "recant", UBP, I'm pointing out their relevance to any demonstration of information generation by Chance and Necessity!
So what kind of information could this be? Well, the owner of this blog, a man at the forefront of the ID movement, defines that information in terms of complexity, compressibility and probability.
We weren’t talking about “kinds” of information, Liz, we were talking about the phenomena of information ITSELF, how it exists, and how it is tranferred. This doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Dr Dembski, Liz.
Oh. Well, I misunderstood.
Not one thing.
So how can those concepts have “nothing to do” with those topics?
You already participated in that conversation, Liz. You already know how.
No, I don't. OK, then, back to the drawing board: How are you defining information here? Because without a definition of information, we can't discuss how it comes into existence or is transferred, can we?Elizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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back later....Upright BiPed_{July 8, 2011
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A long long time ago I said I was going to leave that up to you two to work out. I was just an interested bystander. I did however wonder at why you at first chose Shannon information and then discarded it.Mung_{July 8, 2011
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Elizabeth Liddle:
but the answer I was preparing for you was based on my reading of the Signature in the Cell, which I believe you recommended...
iirc, it was Chris Doyle who suggested you read SitC. [sorry, it's the lawyer in me] Or is it Friday, "just the facts maam."
I’ve been trying, with the help of Mung and kairosfocus, to drill down to an operational definition of those terms. Don't drag me into this, lol! A long long time ago I said I was going to leave that up to you two to work out. I was just an interested bystander. I did however wonder at why you at first chose Shannon information and then discard it. Shannon information requires symbols and protocols, I believe. Am I wrong? diagram
Mung_{July 8, 2011
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Offended? Yeah, I know the feeling. I am more than happy to call off the dogs Dr Liddle. Just don't try to abandon the previous conversation so that we can spend the next eternity arguing over Dembski and Meyers. And, do you think I care in the least that you think an material intelligence of some disembodied sort exist in the whatever whatever. I don't. I want you to show the unguided rise of a discrete representation and the protocol to decode it within a system.Upright BiPed_{July 8, 2011
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Mung:
Elizabeth. Your claim, as I understood it, was that you could provide a demonstration by which it would be shown that a system of information and information processing could arise by some combination of chance and necessity sans intelligence.
sans intentional Design. Not sans intelligence.
You cannot. You will not.
I cannot, indeed, without an agreed operational definition of the terms.
The attempt to now shift the burden of proof is intellectually dishonest.
I am not attempting to shift the burden of proof.
I have no doubt that we can provide the relevant quotes and links to the originals should it be necessary.
Feel free, but I'm not sure it will help. I'd rather the original thread was re-opened and we can read the conversation in context.
If you don’t care for the way I characterized your claim, how would you state it?
Much as you did, or there are alternative formulations of it. I'm not sure which version of it is the urtext. But as my first attempts got befouled on definitions of information, it's important to get that properly operationalised first. It seems very clear to me that there isn't even a shared understanding on this site as to how information, in an ID context should be defined conceptually, even, and until we do that, we can't operationalize it. I'm not going to spend time programming a demonstration without a clear agreed metric for whether or not I have succeeded.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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LIddle:
You claim that compressibility, probability and complexity have nothing to do with the conversation I was having with you. Well it may well be true that they did not come up, but to claim that they have “nothing to do with it” seems to me to be utterly astonishing!
Knock yourself out, Liz. Tie them to the previous conversation at the point of the previous conversation, and I'll recant. Otherwise, I will note that you said NOTHING in your last post that had anything to do with the previous conversation.
So what kind of information could this be? Well, the owner of this blog, a man at the forefront of the ID movement, defines that information in terms of complexity, compressibility and probability.
We weren't talking about "kinds" of information, Liz, we were talking about the phenomena of information ITSELF, how it exists, and how it is tranferred. This doesn't have a damn thing to do with Dr Dembski, Liz. Not one thing.
So how can those concepts have “nothing to do” with those topics?
You already participated in that conversation, Liz. You already know how.Upright BiPed_{July 8, 2011
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Upright BiPed
Because the previous conversation had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with those topics. You had stated that you could demonstrate the rise of information processing by nothing more than chance and law. And I was describing the particulars of that phenomenon in order that –if– your simulation were successful, then it might be regarded as a true falsification of one of ID’s central tenets. That conversation was centered on the actual physical observations of information instantiated in matter – that of symbolic representations, the protocols necessary to decode those representations, and so on.
Well, that is exactly what was at issue, if you remember - how to devise an operational definition of information that would allow an independent observer to test whether I had fulfilled my claim. We had not got there.
But clearly that conversation came to a point that no longer suited you. After initially making some headway, you began to go off into delirium about how the chemicals involved would change states, and what not. I then reminded you that the ribosome does not change states as an observed effect of information processing. Neither does the discrete sequence. When Yockey said that there is nothing in the physico-chemical world that even looks like reactions being governed by sequences, he was correct. We were not talking about changing states, Liz, we were talking about something entirely different in nature – the processing of sequenced representations and their protocols.
My claim did not concern the ribosome. It concerned the principle of information being created by "Chance and Necessity". To discuss that we need an operational definition of "information" (also, incidentally, of Chance and Necessity).
And that is precisely were the train left the track. The stipulations involved in actually showing the rise of information were just simply too much to overcome, and you reacted to it in order to defend yourself from being shown incapable of defeating the very ID tenet you sought to demonstrate.
Well, no.
Anyone who cares to read the dialogue can easily see that. Your responses became more off base, and then simply slowed to nothing more than a drip. You even mentioned to other people that you would ‘soon’ have a response. You’ve been stalling ever since. And please save me the dung about losing track of ‘this’ and not enough time for ‘that’. I have seen you make literally dozens upon dozens of posts on this forum in the past three weeks.
Yes indeed, Upright BiPed, but the answer I was preparing for you was based on my reading of the Signature in the Cell, which I believe you recommended, and by the time I had my response drafted, the thread was closed to comments. I am happy to post it in some other thread. In the mean time I summed it up in a recent post (again, I can't remember which thread).
The reason you stopped the previous conversation is because you had nothing to say in front of the evidence as we find it. I even went to the trouble to post our last substantive exchange in order to get the conversation back on track. But now, unfortunately, you want to double down with topics irrelevant to the issues at hand. The grass is certainly greener over there (away from the evidence), but you discredit yourself as a price to pay.
I have to say, I find this a little offensive, Upright BiPed. One of the reasons I struggled with my response (still unposted) to you, was not because I "had nothing to say in front of the evidence as we find it" but because I was trying to find some common ground so that we could at least agree on some common definitions and a problem statement. That was why I found Meyer useful. If I have discredited myself in your eyes, I guess I have to live with that, but I can only say that you have completely misread me.
You cannot show the rise of information processing by means of chance and law, and despite your protest, you haven’t the gut to admit it. (Such an admission can not be integrated with your position, so guess what that means?)
No. What I cannot do is "show the rise of information proceessing [where did "processing" come in?] by means of chance and law" without an agreed operational definition of those terms. I've been trying, with the help of Mung and kairosfocus, to drill down to an operational definition of those terms. They remain somewhat problematic, IMO.
All your considerate politeness aside, to stand there and say you won’t hear of any charges of ‘intellectual dishonesty’ is no less expected than was the necessary change in topics of conversation.
I should hope it was not unexpected, Upright BiPed. When you accuse an honest person of dishonesty, expect to hear the charges denied.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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Boy, is a thread on dung heaps ever appropriate here.Mung_{July 8, 2011
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Upright BiPed, you can be as frank as you like, but I do not accept your charges. You claim that compressibility, probability and complexity have nothing to do with the conversation I was having with you. Well it may well be true that they did not come up, but to claim that they have "nothing to do with it" seems to me to be utterly astonishing! My claim, to quote your quotation of my words, was:
my position is that IDists have failed to demonstrate that what they consider the signature of intentional design is not also the signature of Darwinian evolutionary processes.
And by that I meant (as became clear in our conversation) that the kind of information IDists claim cannot be generated except by Design could in fact be generated by evolutionary processes. So what kind of information could this be? Well, the owner of this blog, a man at the forefront of the ID movement, defines that information in terms of complexity, compressibility and probability. So how can those concepts have "nothing to do" with those topics? It seems to me they are absolutely fundamental, and, because they are, I continued to explore them in your absence with Mung, kairosfocus and others, and also continued to read Meyer's book, who also references them frequently. I'll deal with the rest of your post in a moment.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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Upright BiPed:
You had stated that you could demonstrate the rise of information processing by nothing more than chance and law. And I was describing the particulars of that phenomenon in order that –if– your simulation were successful, then it might be regarded as a true falsification of one of ID’s central tenets. Yes. We were told that we could expect a falsification of a major tenet of intelligent design. We're waiting. Lacking one, we're awaiting the retraction of your claim that you could/would provide one. That would be the honest thing to do.
Mung_{July 8, 2011
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"I’d be even more interested in a short summary of the rebuttal. Here ya go: EL: I can show the rise of information processing by nothing more than chance and physical law, falsifying a major claim of ID. UB: You'll need to show the rise of discrete representations and protocols, since that is how information is instantiated in matter and tranferred. So get after it! EL: Err...I think that intelligence is deeply nested in the universe of contingencies for outcomes of compressibility, and specified foresight, and repetitive stuff.Upright BiPed_{July 8, 2011
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Elizabeth. Your claim, as I understood it, was that you could provide a demonstration by which it would be shown that a system of information and information processing could arise by some combination of chance and necessity sans intelligence. You cannot. You will not. The attempt to now shift the burden of proof is intellectually dishonest. I have no doubt that we can provide the relevant quotes and links to the originals should it be necessary. If you don't care for the way I characterized your claim, how would you state it?Mung_{July 8, 2011
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Dr Liddle, Allow me to be frank. The entirety of your last post was one long line of moribund cow squeeze. You have now accomplished the ideologically-necessary turn that all ID critics are forced to take when the discussion is allowed to become too honest, and too real. In your response above you mention: Complexity? Probability? Compressibility? Let me ask you a question. You mention (and I agree) that at one point in the discussion we were making progress on the issues. So, take a guess as to how many times the concepts of “complexity”, “probability”, and “compressibility” came up in that conversation? Exactly, none. Not even once. Why? Because the previous conversation had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with those topics. You had stated that you could demonstrate the rise of information processing by nothing more than chance and law. And I was describing the particulars of that phenomenon in order that –if– your simulation were successful, then it might be regarded as a true falsification of one of ID’s central tenets. That conversation was centered on the actual physical observations of information instantiated in matter – that of symbolic representations, the protocols necessary to decode those representations, and so on. But clearly that conversation came to a point that no longer suited you. After initially making some headway, you began to go off into delirium about how the chemicals involved would change states, and what not. I then reminded you that the ribosome does not change states as an observed effect of information processing. Neither does the discrete sequence. When Yockey said that there is nothing in the physico-chemical world that even looks like reactions being governed by sequences, he was correct. We were not talking about changing states, Liz, we were talking about something entirely different in nature – the processing of sequenced representations and their protocols. And that is precisely were the train left the track. The stipulations involved in actually showing the rise of information were just simply too much to overcome, and you reacted to it in order to defend yourself from being shown incapable of defeating the very ID tenet you sought to demonstrate. Anyone who cares to read the dialogue can easily see that. Your responses became more off base, and then simply slowed to nothing more than a drip. You even mentioned to other people that you would 'soon' have a response. You’ve been stalling ever since. And please save me the dung about losing track of ‘this’ and not enough time for ‘that’. I have seen you make literally dozens upon dozens of posts on this forum in the past three weeks. The reason you stopped the previous conversation is because you had nothing to say in front of the evidence as we find it. I even went to the trouble to post our last substantive exchange in order to get the conversation back on track. But now, unfortunately, you want to double down with topics irrelevant to the issues at hand. The grass is certainly greener over there (away from the evidence), but you discredit yourself as a price to pay. You cannot show the rise of information processing by means of chance and law, and despite your protest, you haven’t the gut to admit it. (Such an admission can not be integrated with your position, so guess what that means?) All your considerate politeness aside, to stand there and say you won’t hear of any charges of ‘intellectual dishonesty’ is no less expected than was the necessary change in topics of conversation.Upright BiPed_{July 8, 2011
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Upright BiPed
Dr Liddle, You made a claim against ID, and then had that claim shown to be false. That was a process you yourself participated in. You are now avoiding a simple recognition that your claim has been addressed.
Please show me where my claim was shown to be false.
That is intellectually dishonest.
It would be if it were true. I will happily confess to missing posts, missing the point, ignorance, and even obtuseness. But I am not going to accept the charge of intellectual dishonesty. If you think my claim was rebutted, I'm interested to know where. I'd be even more interested in a short summary of the rebuttal. Thanks. LizzieElizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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Upright Biped
Dr Liddle, it is now a recorded fact on this forum (over the course of three or four threads) that you have not only been given some central claims made by ID proponents, but have also been given the reasoning as to why ID proponents claim that these observations are artifcts of design and cannot be assigned to purely material processes.
And I have posted my counter-arguments.
It is a conversation that documents an increasing reluctance on your part to engage. Im happy to cut and past the converastion and its timestamps if need be.
That would actually be very helpful. I am certainly not reluctant to engage, although I do find the format of this blog somewhat difficult to navigate and keep track of (and I still have a drafted reply to you on a thread now closed to comments!) So I'm sure there have been some excellent points left unaddressed, and some counter-rebuttals uncounter-counter-rebutted. I do only get time in teaspoonfuls, and conversations have a natural tendency to, er, speciate from a common ancestor :)
It has come time for you to recant this statement: …”my position is that IDists have failed to demonstrate that what they consider the signature of intentional design is not also the signature of Darwinian evolutionary processes.”
No, I certainly will not recant it :) There's been an ongoing conversation about the nature of that signature, and a great deal of disagreement. However, on at least one thread we seemed to be coming towards some kind of limited consensus that the kind of information that people consider the signature of design is that that falls outside the generally negative correlation line between complexity (as measured as something like low probability in bits) and compressibility (the measure of which I don't think we have yet, but is essentially to do with "ease of description"). I will try to get back to those conversations (though they tend to slip off the front page, and move to new threads), but to do justice to them requires more time than I tend to have at any given slot. However, I will try to give you the substance of my argument as briefly as possible: I agree that there is a class (or region) of patterns that are part of a very large set (i.e. are highly complex) but that are also more "specified" (easy to describe, structured) than most patterns of that degree of complexity. And that if patterns of this type are observed (a living thing being an example) that we can reasonably infer that they are not the result of combinations of repetitive processes governed by simple natural laws and stochastic events orthogonal to those laws. I also agree that such patterns are likely to be the result of deeply nested contingencies, and would also suggest that they include feedback contingencies. And I would call these deeply nested contingent feedback process minimally "intelligent", involving as they do, decision trees, i.e. nodes at which outcomes depend on incoming information And it is those that I think are indicated by the "specified complexity" signature, and while I would regard them as a subset of intelligent processes, I don't regard them as very intelligent because on the whole they are immediately reactive, and do not embody much in the way of "foresight".Elizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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Dr Liddle, You made a claim against ID, and then had that claim shown to be false. That was a process you yourself participated in. You are now avoiding a simple recognition that your claim has been addressed. That is intellectually dishonest.Upright BiPed_{July 8, 2011
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Chris:
But then atheists start putting speech marks around the word ‘intelligent’ and then start looking for ways to explain away this plainly obvious evidence for Design as something that is merely an illusion, concluding that there is no Intelligent Designer(s) because chance and necessity (ie. Evolution) is capable of explaining the things you describe in your comment. Atheists even claim that their worldview is all perfectly rational and empirically verified! But that claim does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny whatsoever. That is because there is in fact nothing, not a single thing that is rational or empirically verified about the atheist worldview. So, whatever the basis for maintaining the atheistic worldview, it is neither rational nor empirical.
The reason I put scare-quotes round "intelligent" when describing, say, evolutionary processes, is, firstly, that most people don't use the word to describe evolutionary processes, and secondly, because "intentional" is, in most usages, integral to the concept. And I don't think most of the systems I mentioned are have the capacity for intention. But you are right, "atheism" is not verified. It's very hard to verify a null. A-theism is surely the default in the absense of evidence for a theos? I mean, I know you disagree about evidence, but the burden of proof is usually to those making the claim for the existence of something, rather than on those who do not accept the claim.
If it is not rational or empirical, then what is it exactly? Cultural or emotional maybe? I suggest that we need to get to the bottom of this because both parties agree that existence is absolutely amazing. But only one party has logic, reason and evidence on their side: and it’s not the atheists.
Well, obviously I disagree :) But that's the problem, isn't it? Both sides think the logic, reason, and evidence is on their own side. So simply saying so doesn't really get us anywhere!
I know that sounds a bit strong, Lizzie but that is my honest opinion. If atheism had anything rational, empirical or otherwise persuasive about it, I would have mentioned it above. And it leaves me wondering: why on Earth does Lizzie, an exceptionally intelligent, courteous and reasonable person, believe that the “great many intelligent systems” in our universe all somehow made themselves
Because (leaving aside the question as to why there is something rather than nothing, which is a rather different question to questions regarding what that something is like) I think it is a property of the universe we are in that self-organising systems tend to form. It's chaotic, in the technical sense, and what we now know about chaos is that it isn't chaotic! That it is both unpredictable and highly structured. And that what is required for chaotic structures to form is feed-back loops, in which our universe is abundant. So, if you were trying to persuade me that only an amazing God could have not only spoken the stuff of the world into existence, but also set it about with feedback loops so that it would self-organise into complex and beautiful structures, and that those structures would, eventually, include creatures capable of awe, and also of goodness, then I might buy it :) My only problem then would be the identification of that God with moral good. However, if you are trying to tell me that the the stuff of the universe can't self-organise, but has to be constantly poked and tinkered with to produce the occasional biosphere, then, no, I'm not convinced. It think the truth is far more amazing than that.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 8, 2011
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(23), "It has come time for you to recant this statement: …”my position is that IDists have failed to demonstrate that what they consider the signature of intentional design is not also the signature of Darwinian evolutionary processes.”" I don't know why she would. You've still failed to demonstrate it. What do you think your single best piece of evidence is?Grunty_{July 8, 2011
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