As promised earlier today, here is the vid of Dr Marks on Information and search success:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
This clip will be especially revealing:
So also will be this:
And now, the challenge is on the table — where are ever so many celebrated algorithms bringing info in to the search problem? (Hint: algorithms as a rule are designed.) END
I have a question about this. Let’s assume that the universe IS an Avida like program. That means that humans are a product of the algorithms of it and therefore do NOT create new information. Even code is not “new information”. This seems to make the whole concept of information a self-refuting. That also means our own algorithms from within the system do not create new information. So therefore, if by the world-view of the athiest, you just proved not only that human beings do not create new information, which destroys the positive case for intelligent design, but it also seems to show that information doesn’t even exist in the first place. Can someone tell me where I have gone off track?
Hmmmm, how about “information doesn’t even exist” is information. If you count being self-referentially incoherent as going “off track,” that might be a place for you to start looking.
I mean that still didn’t answer my question. If the supposed “God” made this universe than it would be that of the Avida program or similar. If we see that within the Avida program information is not created than how can we assume we create information if we live with-in a similar system. It’s a paradox that is quite nerve racking and I would appreciate a less sarcastic response.
FJ:
I have been too busy to monitor this, forgive that.
I will say that you start with an assumption that is deeply questionable, so the problem is the assumption not its implications.
Every worldview must stand on its own bottom and any worldview that implies that like the matrix the world we live in is a grand delusion, decisively undercuts its own self, as it undermines trust in our minds, senses and consciousness. Such can be ruled out as not credible absent direct evidence which by their very nature they undermine, and so they are self referentially incoherent. We need not worry about such.
I suggest that no material, algorithmic or chance driven and/or merely mechanically necessary system is capable of generating FSCO/I, so that the very existence of this — cf the posts in this thread — is evidence that there is more to reality than such things want to imagine. Using your mind to imagine and construct a notion that undermines the mind, is its own refutation.
So BA’s comment that your very statement of denial is illustrative of the self referentiality and self undermining, is apt.
And, we see one of the uses of design theory, it puts us back in a reasonable domain of thought where our mindedness is significant.
(And the latest headlined silliness on how split brain people sometimes act in confused and split ways disproves that mind is more than brain wiring and processing is its own refutation, likewise. As in, so, your own wiring and the like are leading you tot hat view. Ooopsiee!)
KF
So we as humans are creating information?
What if you could design a computer program so that it could create intelligence. And that intelligence started creating. Is it only at that moment that information is being created from within the program?
I wouldn’t so much say that humans create information as say that humans are a conduit through which information can enter this universe that otherwise wouldn’t be here. IMO, humans draw information from an unlimited source and instantiate it into physical representation here.
William J Murray, and you would have some rather impressive empirical support for that belief that there is a source for knowledge:
Gifted people being able to instantaneously know answers to complex problems is also something that argues forcefully against the notion that our minds are merely the ’emergent’ products of molecules in motion;
The boy in this following video rivals, or surpasses, Nikola Tesla as an example of innovative ideas coming fully formed to the mind without any need for trial and error:
At the 11:50 minute mark of this following video 21 year old world Chess champion Magnus Carlsen explains that he does not know how he knows his next move of Chess instantaneously, that ‘it just comes natural’ to him to know the answer instantaneouly.
This ability to ‘instantaneously’ know answers to complex problems has long been a very intriguing characteristic of some autistic savants;
Quotes of note:
The following video gives deep insight into how serious the problem of ‘knowledge acquisition’ is to the worldview of atheistic materialism:
The following video is far more direct in establishing the ‘spiritual’ link to man’s ability to learn new information, in that it shows that the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores for students showed a steady decline, for seventeen years from the top spot or near the top spot in the world, after the removal of prayer from the public classroom by the Supreme Court, not by public decree, in 1963. Whereas the SAT scores for private Christian schools have consistently remained at the top, or near the top, spot in the world:
Of related note:
BA77: The intuitive insights of geniuses are proverbial, and the same Tesla would build a new AC machine in his head, run it there for two weeks then take it apart again and inspect the wear. That beats the IC engineers who used to lay out ICs in their heads in 3 d. KF
What I also find interesting is how the search for a search that can find the target is at least as difficult a search as the search itself – targetting a search that can target the information.
If that is true, one wonders how difficult it would be to find a search process that can produce virtually unlimited amounts of information as humans can apparently do. Any of us can trivially throw out immense strings of specified information (as text) beyond the beyond search capacity of billions of universes, and yet finding just such a search mechanism (as if Darwinism was ever up to the task) is at least as hard as the search itself.
That capacity in itself, it seems to me, directly implies that humans have access to a non-physical, unlimited source of information, and have a spectacularly unlikely means of instantiating it into the physical world as thought, text or spoken word.
WJ:
I have been remiss.
S4S implies an incremental scan of the power set of a set — its set of subsets. Cardinality of a power set for a set with n members is p = 2^n. Where of course the match between spaces and possible search algorithms becomes a real headache. Some searches will even be anti-searches.
Substituting a blind search in the power set is not going to be a better answer, period.
KF