Shallit’s Chronic Foot-in-Mouth Disease

_{William Dembski

November 27, 2009

Intelligent Design}

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Jeff Shallit | Thomas Nagel | Steve Meyer

I knew Jeffrey Shallit as a reasonable computational number theorist at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. When it comes to ID, however, he simply can’t think straight. Repulsed by Thomas Nagel’s high praise of Stephen Meyer’s SIGNATURE IN THE CELL (noted here at UD), Shallit calls Nagel a fool and then cites as evidence Nagel’s acceptance of Meyer’s claims about information:

Meyer claims, over and over again, that information can only come from a mind — and that claim is an absolutely essential part of his argument. Nagel, the brilliant philosopher, should see why that is false. Consider making a weather forecast. Meteorologists gather information about the environment to do so: wind speed, direction, temperature, cloud cover, etc. It is only on the basis of this information that they can make predictions. What mind does this information come from? SOURCE

Perhaps Shallit has not read Meyer or is just being willfully obtuse, but Meyer stresses over and over again in his book the difference between specified and unspecified information. Shallit here confuses the two.

Comments

hummus man:
Good thing you didn’t ask him the number of bits of information in a cake. He probably would have just counted up the alphanumeric characters in the recipe and given you that number.
Why would he do that? He would first have to break down those characters into bits. And then, as I have said before (several times) that would only give you the minimum amount of information required. measuring information/ specified complexity So easy only an evolutionitwit couldn't do it...Joseph_{November 30, 2009
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Joseph:
I ask him how many bits of information are required for “wind” and he responds with weathermen use thousands of bits of information to make their forecat!
Wow, that is pretty silly. Good thing you didn't ask him the number of bits of information in a cake. He probably would have just counted up the alphanumeric characters in the recipe and given you that number.hummus man_{November 30, 2009
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jitsak, If the theory of evolution is any type of example then no one needs rigorous definitions as that "theory" sure as heck doesn't have any.Joseph_{November 30, 2009
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I have been over on Shallit's blog- man that dude is totally clueless! I ask him how many bits of information are required for "wind" and he responds with weathermen use thousands of bits of information to make their forecat! This guy is sooo stupid it makes me wonder how he made it this far in life...Joseph_{November 30, 2009
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Mung,
You seem just as uninformed about bioinformatics as Zachriel. Guess I’ll have to find that and re-post it.
Please do. While you're at it, could you also provide a rigorous definition of active information? Thanks for your help.jitsak_{November 28, 2009
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That is bad news for the thousands of scientists working in the field of bioinformatics.
You seem just as uninformed about bioinformatics as Zachriel. Guess I'll have to find that and re-post it.Mung_{November 28, 2009
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Borne,
As a computer scientist, I can say that this is utterly false! So where’s your own honesty?
You are a computer scientist? What's a computer scientist? In what journals can we find your major publications? Thanks for your honesty!jitsak_{November 28, 2009
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Sorry, the last two lines are mine.jitsak_{November 28, 2009
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Mung,
trekky, they have no rigorous concept of their own which they can show to be relevant to biology, so they ridicule Dembski instead, who at least makes an attempt at rigour, even though his work is independent of biology. That is bad news for the thousands of scientists working in the field of bioinformatics.
jitsak_{November 28, 2009
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#12 trekky In the course of your studies here are two things to think about: 1) Being prescriptive is not a property of an object or the information it embodies - but is a function of the use of that information or the effects it has. Indeed an item of information can be both descriptive and prescriptive and sometimes both at the same time. For example, if you discover an ancient recipe in an old book - for some people this is a description of how food was made, for others it is a prescription for making that item of food. 2) There is an important ambiguity in the use of the word "prescribe". A vast range of natural phenomena determine how other natural phenomena turn out. The precise position of a pattern of rocks in a stream may determine the flow of water downstream and consequently the pattern of erosion on the shores. You could say that the pattern of rocks is information which prescribes the pattern of erosion. On the other hand we normally use "prescribe" not just to mean "determines" but to imply there are one or more people who deliberately arranged the information with the end goal in mind. E.g. if someone cleverly positioned the rocks to get exactly the pattern of erosion they wanted. The question is what kind of prescriptive information is found in DNA. Is it a vastly more complicated version of the rocks in the stream or is it planned with an objective in mind. To label the DNA as prescriptive information does not do anything to settle this question and may cause confusion between the two senses. I would like to write a small essay on "semantic" as well. But this will do for the moment.Mark Frank_{November 28, 2009
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Thomas Nagel also wrote a very interesting article in Philosophy & Public Affairs entitled, Public Education and Intelligent Design. Here's the link: http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/papa_132.pdf (I apologize if this was already covered in an earlier post.)Wellington_{November 28, 2009
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#11 Borne Is the piece you quote from Meyer's book? It contains a number of references to what are presumably items in a bibliography or notes - but as you do not include the bibliography or notes it is hard to follow them up.Mark Frank_{November 28, 2009
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Trekky: Sorry for the "friendly fire" I sent your way. I misunderstood when you said the above opinions were not your own. Any friend of Casey is a friend of mine!Gage_{November 27, 2009
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Hey Borne, thanks for your response. Please read my follow up comment after my first one. I am not a darwinist. I'm someone who is trying to learn about ID, I've just received and begun to read Meyer's book, "signature in the cell". I really love his writings, ideas and his general charismatic and ideal behaviour as a respected scientist. I watched that debate he had with Ward, Ward came off like a typical darwinian fool who hardly had any relevant scientific arguments. Anyways thanks ever so much for more explanation on information theory, I now have more direction in my studies. Casey Luskin has also been very helpful by emailing me some papers/articles also. Anyways, thanks again.trekky_{November 27, 2009
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trekky: Sheesh! You just demonstrated the meaning of the word "obtuse". You are both confused and ignorant of the subject you attempt to address. So let me try and help you out here by laying some ground work explanations:
Semantic (meaningful) information has two subsets: Descriptive and Prescriptive. Prescriptive Information (PI) instructs or directly produces nontrivial formal function (Abel, 2009a). Merely describing a computer chip does not prescribe or produce that chip. Thus mere description needs to be dichotomized from prescription. Computationally halting cybernetic programs and linguistic instructions are examples of Prescriptive Information. “Prescriptive Information (PI) either tells us what choices to make, or it is a recordation of wise choices already made.” (Abel, 2009a) Not even Descriptive semantic information is achievable by inanimate physicodynamics (Pattee, 1972, 1995, 2001). Measuring initial conditions in any experiment and plugging those measurements appropriately into equations (e.g., physical “laws”) is formal, not physical. Cybernetic programming choices and mathematical manipulations are also formal.

Shannon measured only probabilistic combinatorial uncertainty. Uncertainty is not information. ... PI prescribes and controls physical interactions so as to create and engineer sophisticated formal function. The latter is the subject of both cybernetics and systems theory. ... No random number generator has ever been observed to generate a meaningful message or a non trivial computational program. No physical law can determine each selection either. If selections were dictated by law, all selections would be the same. This would make recording PI impossible. Uncertainty (measurable in bits) is necessary at bone fide decision nodes. But bits of uncertainty cannot measure purposeful choices, the essence of PI. The regularities described by physical laws oppose uncertainty and information potential. Law-like behaviors manifest a probability approaching 1.0, while maximum binary uncertainty approaches a probability of 0.5 in the opposite direction. Maximum quaternary uncertainty (with four independent and equiprobable possibilities) approaches a probability of 0.25. Neither physicodynamic law (necessity) nor random coursing through mere “bifurcation points” can explain the formal semiosis and pragmatic controls of PI. ... Formal rules, not laws, govern the combinations and collective meaning of multiple tokens in a Material Symbol system (MSS) (Rocha, 1997 6069). ------------ Sign systems do not arise spontaneously from highly-ordered, low-informational, law-like behavior. In addition, sign systems do not arise from the heat agitation of molecules. Sign systems in human experience arise only from choice contingency at successive decision nodes, not chance contingency or necessity (Trevors and Abel, 2004).
Get it? It isn't hard. You seriously need to learn how the word "information" is used in reference to biological information systems - look up "semantic biology" or "biosemiotics". Hint: DNA is an information processing system. It has not only "bits and bytes" as it were, but programs - programs never write themselves! It has syntax, semantics, pragmatics and every other attribute of natural language. Thus no language can arise by random processes. Do you see it?
“Information – whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal – always arises from an intelligent source.” But this is the same old bogus ID claim that is repeated endlessly and endlessly, and it’s not true. At least it’s not true if you understand “information” in the sense that it is understood by mathematicians and computer scientists.
As a computer scientist, I can say that this is utterly false! So where's your own honesty? The kind of information that arises from random processes is not semantic and it is not prescriptive. It is merely statistical.
Artificial life investigators and most applied biologists accepted this reality early on. Steering is required to achieve sophisticated function of any kind. Much of the life-origin research community, however, continues to “live in denial” of this fact.
And this last part applies to you and your mentors in Darwinism very well. There is no such thing as semantic information without a mind at its origin. That is true by very definition of "semantic information"! Shannon info is one thing Descriptive Information is another and Prescriptive information something else altogether as shown above. If you can't see the difference then at least stop blaming ID's for your own intellectual incapacities. DNA also contains another kind of info. - meta information. Do you have a clue what that implies? Hint: meta-information is information about other information. Like a recipe for making a cake. The ingredients are not themselves the information, the algorithm for using them is. Can you not see that such information can only exist or come from a mind with purpose? Like most Darweens you, have a one track, mind with no understanding of either "honesty" - your useless and false ad hom against Meyer - or information as applied to bio. As for your "And they claim ID is not religious!", can you say irrelevant?! What does Meyers views or even motives have to do with anything?! Do your own questionable motives have anything to do with whether what you say is true or not? Dawkins is an adamant atheist, so? Does that mean nothing he says ever makes sense? Does that change whatever is true of his biology? Do actually think before writing? Does not appear so. Maybe you should check the context and then, without checking your brain at the door, look again at your inane ID/religious statement. Do you even understand why your statement is both irrelevant and false?Borne_{November 27, 2009
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trekky, they have no rigorous concept of their own which they can show to be relevant to biology, so they ridicule Dembski instead, who at least makes an attempt at rigour, even though his work is independent of biology. You have to unparse what they say. You can't rebut/refute something that isn't there. Until they come up with a theory of their own, the theory of Dembski and Meyer is the only thing going, which makes it the best thing going.Mung_{November 27, 2009
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Gage That wasn't my rant, I just posted it because I wanted to show what Shallit was saying about Stephen C Meyer. Personally I love Steve Meyer's work, I've just begun reading his book. I wanted to know whether ID proponents have a good rebuttal to evolutionists' arguments when they say that specified complexity is only recognised by Dembski and Meyer. I've seen them ridicule ID's definition of information and instead talk about concepts such as Kolmogorov complexity etc. If anyone can refute their argument here, I would love to read it. Thankstrekky_{November 27, 2009
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Repulsed by Thomas Nagel’s high praise of Stephen Meyer’s SIGNATURE IN THE CELL (noted here at UD), Shallit calls Nagel a fool and then cites as evidence Nagel’s acceptance of Meyer’s claims about information
I love stuff like this. And Nagel if he chooses to responds will make Shallit look like a fool.Mung_{November 27, 2009
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Trekky: Those are the closest things to lies you can come up with? You make a pretty weak case if you ask me. And I don't believe many ID people or Christians would agree with your Martin Luther quote. If you are looking for "ends justify the means" thinking, its the other side where you'll find much more of that (try Climategate for starters!) Instead, what your rant demonstrates is a philosophical incompatibility between your worldview and ID. Bottom line: Steve Meyer is far more gracious and respectful of his opponents and their arguments than perhaps anyone on the other side is (Michael Ruse being one of the better ones).Gage_{November 27, 2009
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Oh btw my previous post isn't my opiniontrekky_{November 27, 2009
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Stephen Meyer's Honesty Problem ________________________________ Like most intelligent design advocates, Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, has a little problem telling the truth. I first encountered his dissembling at an intelligent design conference held at Calvin College in May 2001. Meyer had written in 2000 that "Systems that are characterized by both specificity and complexity (what information theorists call "specified complexity'') have "information content''." The only problem is, information theorists don't use the term "specified complexity" and they don't refer to "specificity" when discussing information. At the time, there was precisely one mathematician who was pushing the term "specified complexity", and that was William Dembski, who tried (but failed) to create a new, mathematically-rigorous definition at information which (were it coherent) would be at odds with how information is defined by other mathematicians and computer scientists. I went up to Meyer at the conference and asked him, "You wrote that 'information theorists' (plural) talk about specified complexity. Who are they?" He then admitted that he knew no one but Dembski (and Dembski himself is not much of an information theorist, having published exactly 0 papers so far on the topic in the peer-reviewed scientific literature). So the use of the plural, when Meyer knew perfectly well that information theorists do not use the term "specified complexity", was just a lie - and a lie intended to deceive the reader that his claims are supported by the scientific community, when they are not. (Another anecdote: while I was waiting in line to ask Meyer this question, I was behind a woman who couldn't wait to meet Meyer. She gushed as she shook his hand, saying she was so honored to meet the man who was responsible for recruiting so many people for Christ through his work. He smiled and thanked her. And they claim ID is not religious!) Meyer was also caught dissembling about the "No Child Left Behind" education bill, falsely claiming that it obligated Ohio to teach about alternative theories. Now Meyer is back with a new book, and an op-ed in the Boston Globe to help flog his book. In the op-ed, Meyer claims, "Information - whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal - always arises from an intelligent source." But this is the same old bogus ID claim that is repeated endlessly and endlessly, and it's not true. At least it's not true if you understand "information" in the sense that it is understood by mathematicians and computer scientists. For example, in the Kolmogorov theory, any random source produces information. But then again, Meyer, with his little honesty problem, doesn't seem too concerned with the truth. What's important is, as that woman ahead of me in line told him, saving souls for Jesus. Martin Luther once said, "What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church...a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them." It seems that Stephen Meyer would agree. http://recursed.blogspot.com/2009/07/stephen-meyers-honesty-problem.htmltrekky_{November 27, 2009
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Yup, anyone who understands computer software well should know the difference between the measurements that are taken of chaotic events and the precision sequencing required to get a job done right. I think that this is why so many of us software developers are avid IDers.
Darwin proponents again and again display a particular form of obtuseness which betrays a near complete lack of understanding of the nature of human design, let alone design as a general concept. Shallit is a case in point. They have no understanding of design, but by gum, they know when they don't see it! I'd say that the apparent crappiness of the CRU climate modeling source code doesn't exactly illustrate a genius-level understanding of design, either.Matteo_{November 27, 2009
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How is it even possible that highly educated and supposedly intelligent people, like Shallit, can also be so incredibly lame-brained at the same time?! The guy needs to go back to school and take "Information 101". Such an glaring error of conflation is inexcusable from Shallit. However, it isn't surprising, since most materialists make that mistake everywhere in their thinking. And that is because the metaphysical nature of information surpasses their own metaphysical concepts! :-O Go figure.Borne_{November 27, 2009
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Shallit:
Meteorologists gather information about the environment to do so: wind speed, direction, temperature, cloud cover, etc. It is only on the basis of this information that they can make predictions. What mind does this information come from
Perhaps he's a conspiracy theorist who thinks sinister foreign goverments are using weather control as a weapon :-)steveO_{November 27, 2009
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Yup, anyone who understands computer software well should know the difference between the measurements that are taken of chaotic events and the precision sequencing required to get a job done right. I think that this is why so many of us software developers are avid IDers.bFast_{November 27, 2009
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