ID Foundations, 21: MF — “as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation” . . . a root worldview assumption based cause for rejecting the design inference emerges into plain view

_{kairosfocus

December 24, 2013

Atheism, Design inference, ID Foundations, Philosophy, specified complexity, worldview}

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In the OK thread, in comment 50, ID objector Mark Frank has finally laid out the root of ever so many of the objections to the design inference filter. Unsurprisingly, it is a worldview based controlling a priori of materialism:

[re EA] #38

[MF, in 50:] I see “chance” as usually meaning to “unpredictable” or “no known explanation”. The unknown explanations may be deterministic elements or genuinely random uncaused events which we just don’t know about.

It can also includes things that happen as the result of intelligence – but as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation.

But, just what what is the explanatory filter that is being objected to so strenuously?

Let me present it first, in the per aspect flowchart form that I have often used here at UD, that shows it to be a more specific and detailed understanding of a lot of empirically grounded scientific methods of investigation.

Galileo's leaning tower exercise, showing mechanical necessity: F = m*g, of course less air resistance. NB: He did a thought expt of imagining the light and heavy ball tied together, so on the "heavier must fall faster" concept, the objects now should fall even faster. But, shouldn't the lighter one instead have retarded the heavier? As in, oopsie. The expt may have been done and the heavier may have hit just ahead, as air resistance is as cross section but weight is as volume. (HT: Lannyland & Wiki.) — Galileo’s leaning tower exercise, showing mechanical necessity: F = m*g, of course less air resistance. NB: He did a thought expt of imagining the light and heavy ball tied together, so on the “heavier must fall faster” concept, the objects now should fall even faster. But, shouldn’t the lighter one instead have retarded the heavier? As in, oopsie. The expt may have been done and the heavier may have hit just ahead, as air resistance is as cross section but weight is as volume. (HT: Lannyland & Wiki.)

One that explicitly invokes mechanical necessity as first default, then on high contingency rejects it — if a lawlike necessity is at work, it will produce reliably similar outcomes on similar initial circumstances, just as a dropped heavy object near earth’s surface has initial acceleration 9.8 N/kg due to the gravity field of the earth.

However, this does not cover all phenomena, e.g. if the dropped object is a fair common die that then falls to a table, it will tumble and settle to read a value from the set {1, 2, . . . 6} in a way that is close to the mathematical behaviour of an ideal flat random variable.

But also, chance and necessity cannot cover all outcomes. Not only do we routinely experience being intelligent designers — e.g. by my composing this post — but we often see a class of phenomena which is highly contingent but not plausibly accounted for on chance. For, if we see 500 – 1,000 bits or more of functionally specific complex organisation and/or information [FSCO/I], the needle in haystack challenge faced by the atomic resources of our solar system or cosmos will be overwhelmed by the space of possible configurations and the challenge of finding cases E from narrow and isolated target or hot zones T in such spaces, W.

Citing Dembski’s definition of CSI in No Free Lunch:

p. 148: “The great myth of contemporary evolutionary biology is that the information needed to explain complex biological structures can be purchased without intelligence. My aim throughout this book is to dispel that myth . . . . Eigen and his colleagues must have something else in mind besides information simpliciter when they describe the origin of information as the central problem of biology.

I submit that what they have in mind is specified complexity [[cf. here below], or what equivalently we have been calling in this Chapter Complex Specified information or CSI . . . .

Biological specification always refers to function . . . In virtue of their function [[a living organism’s subsystems] embody patterns that are objectively given and can be identified independently of the systems that embody them. Hence these systems are specified in the sense required by the complexity-specificity criterion . . . the specification can be cashed out in any number of ways [[through observing the requisites of functional organisation within the cell, or in organs and tissues or at the level of the organism as a whole] . . .”

p. 144: [[Specified complexity can be defined:] “. . . since a universal probability bound of 1 [[chance] in 10^150 corresponds to a universal complexity bound of 500 bits of information, [[the cluster] (T, E) constitutes CSI because T [[ effectively the target hot zone in the field of possibilities] subsumes E [[ effectively the observed event from that field], T is detachable from E, and and T measures at least 500 bits of information . . . ”

So, design thinkers reject the default explanation for high contingency– chance — if we see FSCO/I or the like. That is, we infer on FSCO/I and related patterns best explained on (and as known reliable signs of) design, to just that, intelligent design:

Accordingly, I replied to MF at 59 in the OK thread, as follows:

____________

>>> the pivot of the issue is now plain from MF at 50 above:

[re EA] #38

[MF:] I see “chance” as usually meaning to “unpredictable” or “no known explanation”. The unknown explanations may be deterministic elements or genuinely random uncaused events which we just don’t know about.

It can also includes things that happen as the result of intelligence – but as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation.

Here we have the root problem, that for MF, design reduces to chance and necessity.

Also, I would not go along fully with MF’s definition of chance {“uncaused events” is a very troublesome concept for instance but my focus here is,} having identified that chance processes come about by two major known physical processes:

Chance:

Tumbling dice — a chaotic phenomenon thanks to eight corners and twelve edges interacting with uncontrollable surface roughness etc. (HT:Rosendahl, Flicker)

TYPE I: the clash of uncorrelated trains of events such as is seen when a dropped fair die hits a table etc and tumbles, settling to readings in the set {1, 2, . . . 6} in a pattern that is effectively flat random. In this sort of event, we often see manifestations of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, aka chaos, intersecting with uncontrolled or uncontrollable small variations yielding a result predictable in most cases only up to a statistical distribution which needs not be flat random.

TYPE II: processes — especially quantum ones — that are evidently random, such as quantum tunnelling as is the explanation for phenomena of alpha decay. This is used in for instance zener noise sources that drive special counter circuits to give a random number source. Such are sometimes used in lotteries or the like, or presumably in making one time message pads used in decoding.

In reply to MF’s attempt to reduce design by intelligence to the other two sources of cause, I suggest that this approach radically undermines the credibility of mind as a thinking and knowing function of being intelligent humans, in a reductio ad absurdum. (Cf my remarks here yesterday in reply to Dan Barker’s FFRF and my longstanding observations — in the end they go back to the mid 1980′s in answer to Marxist materialism as well as evolutionary materialism — here on.)

Haldane sums up one of the major problems aptly, in a turn of the 1930′s remark that has often been cited here at UD:

“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [[“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]

Let me clip my more extended discussion:

___________

>> 15 –> In short, it is at least arguable that self-referential absurdity is the dagger pointing to the heart of evolutionary materialistic models of mind and its origin . . . . [It can be presented at a much more sophisticated way, cf. Hasker p. 64 on here as an example, also Reppert, Plantinga and others] but without losing its general force, it can also be drawn out a bit in a fairly simple way:

a: Evolutionary materialism argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature; from hydrogen to humans by undirected chance and necessity.

b: Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws of chance and/or mechanical necessity acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of happenstance initial circumstances.

(This is physicalism. This view covers both the forms where (a) the mind and the brain are seen as one and the same thing, and those where (b) somehow mind emerges from and/or “supervenes” on brain, perhaps as a result of sophisticated and complex software looping. The key point, though is as already noted: physical causal closure — the phenomena that play out across time, without residue, are in principle deducible or at least explainable up to various random statistical distributions and/or mechanical laws, from prior physical states. Such physical causal closure, clearly, implicitly discounts or even dismisses the causal effect of concept formation and reasoning then responsibly deciding, in favour of specifically physical interactions in the brain-body control loop; indeed, some mock the idea of — in their view — an “obviously” imaginary “ghost” in the meat-machine. [[There is also some evidence from simulation exercises, that accuracy of even sensory perceptions may lose out to utilitarian but inaccurate ones in an evolutionary competition. “It works” does not warrant the inference to “it is true.”] )

c: But human thought, clearly a phenomenon in the universe, must now fit into this meat-machine picture. So, we rapidly arrive at Crick’s claim in his The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994): what we subjectively experience as “thoughts,” “reasoning” and “conclusions” can only be understood materialistically as the unintended by-products of the blind natural forces which cause and control the electro-chemical events going on in neural networks in our brains that (as the Smith Model illustrates) serve as cybernetic controllers for our bodies.

d: These underlying driving forces are viewed as being ultimately physical, but are taken to be partly mediated through a complex pattern of genetic inheritance shaped by forces of selection [[“nature”] and psycho-social conditioning [[“nurture”], within the framework of human culture [[i.e. socio-cultural conditioning and resulting/associated relativism]. And, remember, the focal issue to such minds — notice, this is a conceptual analysis made and believed by the materialists! — is the physical causal chains in a control loop, not the internalised “mouth-noises” that may somehow sit on them and come along for the ride.

(Save, insofar as such “mouth noises” somehow associate with or become embedded as physically instantiated signals or maybe codes in such a loop. [[How signals, languages and codes originate and function in systems in our observation of such origin — i.e by design — tends to be pushed to the back-burner and conveniently forgotten. So does the point that a signal or code takes its significance precisely from being an intelligently focused on, observed or chosen and significant alternative from a range of possibilities that then can guide decisive action.])

e: For instance, Marxists commonly derided opponents for their “bourgeois class conditioning” — but what of the effect of their own class origins? Freudians frequently dismissed qualms about their loosening of moral restraints by alluding to the impact of strict potty training on their “up-tight” critics — but doesn’t this cut both ways? Should we not ask a Behaviourist whether s/he is little more than yet another operantly conditioned rat trapped in the cosmic maze? And — as we saw above — would the writings of a Crick be any more than the firing of neurons in networks in his own brain?

f: For further instance, we may take the favourite whipping-boy of materialists: religion. Notoriously, they often hold that belief in God is not merely cognitive, conceptual error, but delusion. Borderline lunacy, in short. But, if such a patent “delusion” is so utterly widespread, even among the highly educated, then it “must” — by the principles of evolution — somehow be adaptive to survival, whether in nature or in society. And so, this would be a major illustration of the unreliability of our conceptual reasoning ability, on the assumption of evolutionary materialism.

g: Turning the materialist dismissal of theism around, evolutionary materialism itself would be in the same leaky boat. For, the sauce for the goose is notoriously just as good a sauce for the gander, too.

h: That is, on its own premises [[and following Dawkins in A Devil’s Chaplain, 2004, p. 46], the cause of the belief system of evolutionary materialism, “must” also be reducible to forces of blind chance and mechanical necessity that are sufficiently adaptive to spread this “meme” in populations of jumped- up apes from the savannahs of East Africa scrambling for survival in a Malthusian world of struggle for existence. Reppert brings the underlying point sharply home, in commenting on the “internalised mouth-noise signals riding on the physical cause-effect chain in a cybernetic loop” view:

. . . let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, together cause the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts . . . [[But] if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and [[so] we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be, the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions. [[Emphases added . . . ]

i: The famous geneticist and evolutionary biologist (as well as Socialist) J. B. S. Haldane made much the same point in a famous 1932 remark:

“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [[“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]

j: Therefore, though materialists will often try to pointedly ignore or angrily brush aside the issue, we may freely argue: if such evolutionary materialism is true, then (i) our consciousness, (ii) the “thoughts” we have, (iii) the conceptualised beliefs we hold, (iv) the reasonings we attempt based on such and (v) the “conclusions” and “choices” (a.k.a. “decisions”) we reach — without residue — must be produced and controlled by blind forces of chance happenstance and mechanical necessity that are irrelevant to “mere” ill-defined abstractions such as: purpose or truth, or even logical validity.

(NB: The conclusions of such “arguments” may still happen to be true, by astonishingly lucky coincidence — but we have no rational grounds for relying on the “reasoning” that has led us to feel that we have “proved” or “warranted” them. It seems that rationality itself has thus been undermined fatally on evolutionary materialistic premises. Including that of Crick et al. Through, self-reference leading to incoherence and utter inability to provide a cogent explanation of our commonplace, first-person experience of reasoning and rational warrant for beliefs, conclusions and chosen paths of action. Reduction to absurdity and explanatory failure in short.)

k: And, if materialists then object: “But, we can always apply scientific tests, through observation, experiment and measurement,” then we must immediately note that — as the fate of Newtonian Dynamics between 1880 and 1930 shows — empirical support is not equivalent to establishing the truth of a scientific theory. For, at any time, one newly discovered countering fact can in principle overturn the hitherto most reliable of theories. (And as well, we must not lose sight of this: in science, one is relying on the legitimacy of the reasoning process to make the case that scientific evidence provides reasonable albeit provisional warrant for one’s beliefs etc. Scientific reasoning is not independent of reasoning.) >>
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In short, there is a major issue that materialism is inherently and inescapably self referentially incoherent, undermining its whole scheme of reasoning.

That is a big topic itself.

But, when it comes to the issue of debates over the meaning of chance and inferences to design which implicate intelligence, it is an underlying assumption that plainly leads to endless debates.

In this context, however, the case of 500 coins in a row on a table reading all H or alternating H and T or the first 72 characters of this post in ASCII code, strongly shows the difference in capacity of chance and design as sources of configurations that come from independently and simply describable clusters that are deeply isolated in a space of configs that are such that the atomic resources of our solar system cannot credibly search a big enough fraction to make it reasonable to believe one will stumble upon such configs blindly.

In short, there is a major and directly experienced phenomenon to be accounted for, self aware conscious intellect and related capacities we subsume under the term mind. And this phenomenon is manifest in capacity to design, which is as familiar as composing posts in this thread.

Such designs are well beyond the capacity of blind chance and mechanical necessity, so we have good reason to see that intelligence capable of design is as fundamental in understanding our empirical world as chance and as necessity.

Whatever the worldview consequences — and I think they are huge.>>>

____________

In short, it seems that one key root of objections to the design inference is the notion that intelligence needed for design in the end reduces to cumulative effects of blind chance and mechanical necessity.

Only, that runs into significant self referential incoherence challenges.

A safer approach would be to recognise that intelligence indisputably exists and indisputably exerts capacities not credibly observed to emerge from blind chance and mechanical necessity. Indeed, on inductive and analytic — needle in haystack — grounds, it is arguable and compelling that certain phenomena such as FSCO/I are reliable signs of design as cause.

Then, we run into the challenge that from its very roots, cell based life is chock full of such signs of design, starting with the genetic code and the size of genomes, from 100 – 1,000 kbits on up.

Then, the observed cosmos itself shows strong and multiple signs of being fine tuned in ways that enable the existence of cell based life on terrestrial planets such as our own — where fine tuning is another empirically grounded sign of being designed.

So, there are good reasons to extend the force of the design inference to the origin of cell based life and of major body plans for such life, and to the origins of the observed cosmos that hosts such life. END

__________

F/N: I must update by posting this all too aptly accurate debate summary by no less than UD’s inimitable WJM, done here on Christmas day as a gift to the blog and world. WJM, I CANNOT let this one just wash away in the stream of comments! (You ought to separately headline it under your monicker.) Here goes:

Typical debate with an anti-ID advocate:

ID advocate: There are certain things that exist that are best explained by intelligent designed.

Anti-ID advocate: Whoa! Hold up there, fella. “Explained”, in science, means “caused by”. Intelligent design doesn’t by itself “cause” anything.

ID advocate: What I meant is that teleology is required to generate certain things, like a functioning battleship. It can’t come about by chance.

Anti-ID advocate: What do you mean “by chance”? “By” means to cause. Are you claiming that chance causes things to happen?

ID advocate: Of course not. Chance, design and necessity are the three fundamental categories of causation used to characterize the outcomes of various processes and mechanisms. You’re taking objection with colloquialisms that are commonly used in mainstream science and debate. Here are some examples of peer-reviewed, published papers that use these same colloquialisms.

Anti-ID advocate: Those aren’t real scientists!

ID advocate: Those are scientists you yourself have quoted in the past – they are mainstream Darwinists.

Anti-ID advocate: Oh. Quote mining! You’re quote mining!

ID advocate: I’m using the quotes the same way the authors used them.

Anti-ID advocate: Can you prove it?

ID Advocate: It’s not my job to prove my own innocence, but whatever. Look, it has been accepted for thousands of years that there are only three categories of causation – necessity, or law, chance and artifice, or design. Each category is distinct.

Anti ID advocate: I have no reason to accept that design is a distinct category.

ID advocate: So, you’re saying that battleship or a computer can be generated by a combination of necessity (physical laws) and chance?

Anti-ID advocate: Can you prove otherwise? Are you saying it’s impossible?

ID advocate: No, I’m saying that chance and necessity are not plausible explanations.

Anti-ID advocate: “Explanation” means to “cause” a thing. Chance and necessity don’t “cause” anything.

ID advocate: We’ve already been over this. Those are shorthand ways of talking about processes and mechanisms that produce effects categorized as lawful or chance.

Anti-ID advocate: Shorthand isn’t good enough – we must have specific uses of terms using explicitly laid-out definitions or else debate cannot go forward.

ID advocate: (insert several pages lay out specifics and definitions with citations and historical references).

ID advocate: In summary, this demonstrates that mainstream scientists have long accepted that there are qualitative difference between CSI, or organized, complimentary complexity/functionality, and what can in principle be generated via the causal categories of chance and necessity. Only intelligent or intentional agency is known to be in principle capable of generating such phenomena.

Anti-ID advocate: OMG, you can’t really expect me to read and understand all of that! I don’t understand the way you word things. Is English your first language? It makes my head hurt.

Comments

Just to avoid misunderstandings, I want to clarify that my second quote in my post 492 is of RDFish, not Mark. I put it there to allow everyone to verify if what Mark says (in the first quote) of RDFish's statement (in the second quote) is true.gpuccio_{January 25, 2014
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Mark Frank:
Actually I think everyone in this debate is sincere with one exception whom I shall not name.
It is obvious that neither Mark nor RDFish are sincere- or if they are then they have proven they do not belong in this discussion. If Mark was sincere then he would just step up and show us how his position, which is the reigning paradigm, does it- as in provide some positive evidence for it so we can see what Mark will accept. That way he cannot backpeddle when IDists prove that our level of evidence is far superior to his.
The church steeple argument is perfectly analogous to ID.
Only to a moron, and here you are.Joe_{January 25, 2014
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Mark:
Of course there are large differences between lightening hitting church steeples and computers solving problems. But the question is are they relevant differences. You think so. I don’t. I think that when you strip away all the irrelevant philosophy and unnecessary mathematization the essence of the argument is the same.
I have no comments about that. Again, let everyone decide for oneself.gpuccio_{January 25, 2014
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Mark: You say:
I think RDF was using “aimed” as pretty much synonymous with designed to describe the conclusion people might come to – not as a description of what happened from which we might deduce design.
I don't agree. Let everyone decide for oneself:
The church steeple argument is perfectly analogous to ID. 1) The pattern of lightning strikes could not be accounted for by lawlike cause 2) The pattern of lightning strikes could not be accounted for by chance 3) The lightning was aimed at the churches, and there is only one sort of thing that can aim anything: an intelligent agent. Can tornados aim things? Can erosion aim things? No – only intelligent agents can aim things, and so the firm conclusion of ID scientists in the 18th century would be, by the exact same reasoning you use today, that an intelligent agent was responsible for the pattern of lightning strikes.
gpuccio_{January 25, 2014
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Gpuccio I think RDF was using "aimed" as pretty much synonymous with designed to describe the conclusion people might come to - not as a description of what happened from which we might deduce design. Of course there are large differences between lightening hitting church steeples and computers solving problems. But the question is are they relevant differences. You think so. I don't. I think that when you strip away all the irrelevant philosophy and unnecessary mathematization the essence of the argument is the same.Mark Frank_{January 25, 2014
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Mark: If I understand you well, you think that the difference between lightening hitting church steeples and a computer solving a complex problem is an illusion? I have no doubts about your intellectual honesty, but sometimes I wonder about your lucidity of thought. Seriously.gpuccio_{January 25, 2014
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Mark: That lighting hits church steeples does not mean that it is aimed at them. A correct ID reasoning would never say that we infer a designer because lightening is "aimed" at church steeples. That would be a circular argument. We could say, if that were true (but it is not!), that we infer that lightening is designed (and therefore "aimed") because it hits the church steeples, because designed things are the only things that preferentially hit a tall building, and because there is no other law that explains that fact. All that is obviously untrue. There is nothing in hitting tall buildings that is specific of a design. Indeed, the simple observation of the link between lightening and a very simple property like being tall strongly suggests a necessity mechanism, a law (which, as we know, is the best explanation for that kind of regular phenomena). Therefore, I will say it again. The argument is stupid. And RDFish's defense of the argument is, at best, dogmatic, at worst... I will not say it.gpuccio_{January 25, 2014
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#482 Gpuccio Thanks for the vote of confidence in my intellectual honesty which is mutual. Actually I think everyone in this debate is sincere with one exception whom I shall not name.
ID is about detectable design. The lighting and church steeples are not an example of detectable design. What must be falsifiable is not the generic notion that an intelligent agent could do anything, but the very specific notion that some kinds of outputs, and particularly functional complexity, cannot be generated in a non design system. That can well be falsified, but has never been falsified.
I understand your point. My point (and I suspect RDF shares this) is that the difference between the steeple example and functional complexity is an illusion. I don’t think functional complexity is a property of an output but rather a mathematical abstraction from the relationship between a specific hypothesis, a supposed target, and an output. We have discussed this endlessly and I doubt you want to go over it again. I seem to remember in the past the you recognised that CSI (as defined by Dembski) is not a real property of an outcome but simply a measure of a relationship between a particular chance hypothesis and an outcome. You also were reluctant to support the case that FCSI was a definable property (remember the size of the moon being just right to eclipse the sun). You drew your sand in the line as it were at dFSCI and said this is a real property and there we agreed to differ.
Moreover, I would invite you to observe how RDFish, whose interventions you are so ready to compliment, in his post #475, point 5, recurs to an obvious and very unfair “trick”, using the word “aim” completely out of the blue, just to second his confounding “argument”.
I don’t see this at all. “Aimed” is just a different way of saying that the bolts were designed to hit the steeples. Dembski repeatedly describes design as aiming at a target.Mark Frank_{January 25, 2014
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@kf:
Such cause-effect as modified by noise chains simply are not reasoned choice or thought or knowledge.
Well, I see the problem. It's a problem lot's of threads at UD and TSZ have: people (you, me, ...) use different semantics and then they talk past each other. It's a neverending story.JWTruthInLove_{January 25, 2014
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RDF,
It looks like you’re having a hard time keeping your train of thought. Nobody is ignoring or denying any of our understanding of molecular biology, and very obviously my argument has nothing to do with lightning per se.
Let me help you find your mark: Universal observations in modern biology (like those related to how the cell translates information into physical effects) support the design argument hands down, and you don’t like that. In response, you have a propensity (let’s call it an affair) towards fabricating arguments that allow you to avoid and minimize those universal observations. Actually, it all stands to reason -- and one of your leading tactics in dealing with these observations is to appeal to what we don’t know. You’ve done this in various ways, and in various conversations, on this very thread. But you can’t point to a competing explanation that’s better supported by the evidence (i.e. because you have zero counter-examples), so you simply assume that a counter-example exists, and then you point to the fact that we haven’t found it yet. And apparently, you think you can heap enough merit on this deformity of logic, if you can just keep talking and dancing, to the point that it has the power to render ID a non-scientific trainwreck. I was complimenting Stephen for his demonstration of how readily you humiliate yourself in defending this position. He argued that it was established that no variation in chance/law could “run off with the jewelry” and you came back to say: “We have established NO SUCH THING! … Nobody knows every example of law/chance”, explicitly implying that there could be a variation in chance and law that might run away with the jewelry – and thereby any inference to an act of agency is summarily tarnished and invalid. Are you caught up yet? That’s when you turned to chastise me for complimenting Stephen. You quickly summed me up as “dimwitted” and you were going show me why my focus on the material observations in biology was “completely wrongheaded”. To accomplish this, you whipped out your ole Church Steeple story, where you want me to recognize how 18th century observers didn’t understand why lightning might tend to hit church steeples, so they applied unsupported beliefs to what they saw. By hearing this lesson, you suggested that I would come to know the “fundamental problem with ID”. Apparently it doesn’t occur to you that I am not the proponent here with no material evidence to back up his claim. My comment back to you was: “You want to ignore our uncontroversial understanding of how information is translated from DNA inside the cell (demonstrated in biology labs around the world) by appealing to an 18th century vision of lightning.” This is exactly what you want, and is exactly why you brought it up. The whole damn thing is laughable, but it’s sad that you are so serious about it.
You’ve made two errors here. First, I never appeal to unknown material processes as an explanation of anything.
SB: We have already established that no variation of law chance (such as a tornado) can run off with jewelry RDF: “We have established NO SUCH THING! … Nobody knows every example of law/chance” You do it all the time, and one of your favorite tactics to keep it going is to hang anything you can think of on the design inference (supernaturalism, dualism, libertarianism, non-empiricism, yadda yadda) and tell us that there are no observations within ID arguments that prove materialism false. But since there are no observations that prove materialism true, these are all an appeal to unknown material processes. The tactic serves your purposes because ID proponents have to waste so much time and energy prying away whatever ism you’ve tagged ID with at the time. Meanwhile, the real issue is that ID arguments are not without solid physical evidence. When you are presented with that evidence (such as the material conditions required to translate information in the cell), the argument is not invalidated by the fact that there are no counter-examples to it. To the contrary, it’s generally increased by the fact that there are several lines of evidence that all point to the same conclusion. There are things in nature that are best explained by the act of an agent, as opposed to unguided material processes.
And second, you most certainly have no knowledge of conscious minds that exist or have existed in anything that is not a human being (or other complex organism).
Good grief, more of the same. Haven’t we been over this enough for you? Not being able to identify an agent at the origin of life does nothing whatsoever to diminish the value of our universal observations. The capacity to organize the living cell via the translation of information requires a mechanism capable of organizing the unique material conditions I outlined for you (several times). I also gave you the reasoning behind the inference, and after having to press you on this issue since Oct/Nov of 2013, here are you own words: ”I agree completely: Our inability to “identify an agent” at OOL does nothing to “diminish or mitigate” your observations.” So let it rest. Here’s the deal. There are two competing claims. There will likely never be any evidence to prove either claim to any standard of scientific certainty. All we have to go on is the material evidence in hand. Every single example we have of *what class of thing* is capable of explaining that evidence stems from a) the living kingdom, and b) an intelligent agent. I made these distinctions clear in my posts. On the other hand, there is no evidence whatsoever that unguided processes can explain either set of observations. Chief among those observations is the capacity to establish a set of local relationships across the required physical discontinuity between the representations and their effects within the system. The system simply cannot function without these physical discontinuities being preserved via relationships. The cell cannot attain its organization without them. The relationships are the regularities of the system, making the operation of the system observable to us. They are not reducible to inexorable law acting on the material that makes up the system, but reducible only to the organization of systems that transcribe and translate information. In addition to this, the system also requires the establishment of operational constraints on top of the mapping of the relationships. And like the discontinuities themselves, these constraints cannot be derived from inexorable law acting on the material that makes up the system. So without the benefit of any organization stemming from any translated information, these specific material conditions (not found anywhere else in the physical world except in the translation of language and mathematics) must be met. None of this goes away just because we cannot identify an agent at the origin of life.
My church steeples argument clearly shows the dual mistakes that ID makes, which are (1) To imagine that we already understand everything about natural laws, and (2) Thinking that appealing to a conscious mind to explain whatever we currently cannot explain is somehow justified by this complete knowledge.
This is silly. As for your #1, ID does not “imagine that we already understand everything about natural laws”. What ID assumes (at least the argument I present) is that we know how nucleotides are translated into polypeptides. Given that the data is published in every biology textbook on the surface of the planet, and that we’ve already passed out several Nobel prizes for the discoveries, and that laboratories around the world depend of that knowledge being correct – it isn’t much of an assumption. And as for your #2, (setting aside that you once again assume ignorance in order to discount established knowledge) nowhere in the argument (I presented) do I make any commitments to a conscious mind. Frankly, I believe that there are brilliant persons who can demonstrate the virtual necessity of a conscious mind (at least for establishing the second set of conditions I presented) but it is not a requirement of making a valid inference. - - - - - - - - - - - - - The real problem RDF is that all the evidence in the world will have no impact on you; you’ve set yourself up to be immune to it. It’s a shame, so I am bowing out. Its a safe get, your next round of objections, when all boiled down, will be no different than your last.Upright BiPed_{January 25, 2014
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OOPS: added link.kairosfocus_{January 25, 2014
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JWT: A machine of relevant form would be a computer that implements deterministic software on deterministic hardware as modified by chance based stochastic processes. These are cause-effect bonds and noise influences, perhaps bubbling up from quantum stochastic effects. Such cause-effect as modified by noise chains simply are not reasoned choice or thought or knowledge. Computation, at best is GIGO limited, as the recalls of early Pentiums showed, someone made a design error in I think it was the floating point processor. Computation is no less blind and non-rational than mill wheels grinding against one another. Our experience of ourselves as rational, knowing, warranting, morally governed creatures decisively undercuts any such picture, not least by the self referential absurdity of claiming to have reasoned warrant that you know that rationality and knowledge are impossible. That is what the position being objected to directly implies, but it is usually not admitted in a context other than one which is under ideological control. In such, it is usually presented as the problem of explaining how consciousness emerged from brain tissue with its organisation. How, not if. Big begged questions. As to mind and matter, I again point to evidence that matter is inherently contingent, requiring a necessary and immaterial being as root cause. With fine tuning setting up a cosmos in which the sort of C-chemistry cell based life we enjoy is possible pointing to purpose and design, thus a mind that is necessary, thus eternal. One that contemplates certain necessary truths such as 2 + 3 = 5. (There are many necessary, eternal truths, that are best explained as contemplated by an eternal mind. On speculative possibilities, cf.
here.)
I do not claim to know just how embodied intelligences that are conscious, enconscienced and designing such as us came to be in terms of mechanisms. But just as I know myself and requisites of reason, knowledge and morality, I have reliable confidence that we are sufficiently free, responsible, minded creatures. And I have shown cause, in outline, as to why the explicit or implicit denial of such freedom is absurd. KFkairosfocus_{January 25, 2014
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JWTruthInLove: You say: "We do exactly what we are programmed to do by the designer." Isn't that denying free will? Just to understand.gpuccio_{January 25, 2014
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Mark: I have great confidence in your intellectual honesty, so I will try some further clarification. ID is about detectable design. The lighting and church steeples are not an example of detectable design. What must be falsifiable is not the generic notion that an intelligent agent could do anything, but the very specific notion that some kinds of outputs, and particularly functional complexity, cannot be generated in a non design system. That can well be falsified, but has never been falsified. Moreover, I would invite you to observe how RDFish, whose interventions you are so ready to compliment, in his post #475, point 5, recurs to an obvious and very unfair "trick", using the word "aim" completely out of the blue, just to second his confounding "argument". Obviously, the simple fact that lightening preferentially falls on church steeples, or more generally on tall buildings, is in no way an a priori example of "aiming". To aim implies an intelligent agent who aims. So RDFish, whose intellectual honesty, but not smartness, I am sometimes tempted to doubt, is using the wrong word to make some circular reasoning, invented by none other than himself, appear as an ID reasoning, which obviously it is not. So that he can apply his false "argument" to his false "ID reasoning". If you want, you can compliment him again.gpuccio_{January 25, 2014
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@kf: I don't deny free will.
Do you see the self-referential incoherences involved in denying us sufficient freedom of mind to be able to reason
Would it be incoherent for a machine to say, that it has free will? We do excatly what we are programmed to do by the designer. Do you have evidence to the contrary?JWTruthInLove_{January 25, 2014
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RDF, Declaring victory and going home in absence of a seriously cogent argument is already a strong index of having washed out on the merits. As you should know but probably will not acknowledge, your whole excessively long rhetorical exercise over this past month boils down to a twist-about, turn speech accusation meant to distract attention from the implications of the a priori imposition of materialist premises that effectively assume that design is IMPOSSIBLE at relevant origins points, and even that design must reduce to GIGO limited computation on computational substrates full of FSCO/I that are per assumption to somehow originate on blind chance and necessity. This, already being a patent absurdity. And, as for the notion that self-aware designing consciousness emerges from/reduces to computing hard and software, however developed, this is an unpaid IOU. Before asserting or assuming such, first show it empirically. (You cannot even get to the computational substrate by blind watchmaker mechanisms that meet the vera causa test that explanations of the unobserved past of origins must be based on causes shown to be adequate to create the effects that are in the traces of the past we can see. FYI, we do see design and conscious mind in the present, and so such is possible. FYFI, such is the ONLY empirically grounded needle in haystack plausible explanation of FSCO/I, so we are epistemologically entitled to take FSCO/I as a strong sign of design and of entities capable of such in the past. And as this includes the root physics of the cosmos, it entails that we have no right to dismiss mind beyond matter, indeed capable of designing a cosmos fine tuned for C chemistry, aqueous medium, coded info using cell based life.) To do that a priori ideological imposition of assumed or implied materialism [whatever your formal worldview profession, that is what you have done, as the MF cite in the OP makes plain], you have studiously refused to face the inductive logic, empirically grounded foundations of the design inference and have resorted to insistent ideologically loaded strawman caricatures. What you have therefore inadvertently done is to underscore the fundamental irrationality of a priori evolutionary materialism, especially in the form where it is stuffed into a lab coat and smuggled in the back door then presented as a "mere" methodological constraint -- i.e. sets up as censor on scientific thinking. Fail. KFkairosfocus_{January 25, 2014
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JWT: Do you see the self-referential incoherences involved in denying us sufficient freedom of mind to be able to reason, know and make choices to love and respect others? If your system of thought claims to be knowledge and to be reasonable (as does science) then if it implies denial of sufficient freedom to reason and think, it defeats itself . . . claiming to know based on evidence and reasoning that reasoning and knowledge effectively are not possible. Cf OP above. So, if we claim to be able to think, reason and know -- and on good reason -- we claim to be sufficiently free to be able to do such. And, if we claim to be able to love, respect and choose the right, as say our courts imply, we claim to be sufficiently free to be responsible . . . think of what an insanity defence is saying. KFkairosfocus_{January 25, 2014
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@kf:
If we do not have sufficiently free choice to be responsible, we cannot be rational (we would be unable to actually reason), knowing (we could not warrant) or moral/morally accountable (we could not responsibly choose).
Yes, if you have no free will, you would be just following the code the designer implemented, like a normal, designed, complex machinery. Can anyone name anything, that has free will (except for God)?JWTruthInLove_{January 25, 2014
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#476 VB Although most people would now reject the conclusion of ID scientists about lightening and church steeples that explanation has still not been falsified. If someone was to propose that a divine intelligence of unknown powers is directing the lightening at the church steeples for unknown reasons it would be impossible to falsify the proposal even now.Mark Frank_{January 25, 2014
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Hi RDF
Can tornados aim things? Can erosion aim things? No – only intelligent agents can aim things, and so the firm conclusion of ID scientists in the 18th century would be, by the exact same reasoning you use today, that an intelligent agent was responsible for the pattern of lightning strikes.
The one positive take for IDsts is that your argument demonstrates that ID can be falsified. Someone better let Mark Frank know . Vividvividbleau_{January 25, 2014
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Hi StephenB,
The last thing I recall, I completely destroyed your ridiculous and obsessive claim that ID presupposes libertarian dualism
I have already explained to you:
RDF: The difference is between analyzing the structure of the EF per se on one hand, and using the EF to analyze some particular observation on the other hand. With respect to the latter, you are correct: One does not presuppose “real teleology”, but rather concludes it after eliminating other causes. But with respect to the structure of the EF itself, there is a presupposition that “real teleology” is a valid conclusion that should be adopted whenever some observation can’t be otherwise explained.
And you said:
SB: OK, that is a very clear answer and I apologize for missing it.
Yet now, because you have nothing left but deceit and desperation, you pretend I made no such clarification on the matter that you even acknowledged as being very clear. That is quite dishonest of you, but I guess you dualists tend to lose control of your "passions" and indulge in sins like this, huh? SB loses point #1
3) And demonstrated that you know absolutely nothing about Michael Behe’s work, which you grudgingly conceded.
Oh no, yet more mendacity from you! Here is our actual conversation on the matter:
SB: Also, do you believe that Michael Behe, who is also a major ID proponent, presupposes libertarian dualism? RDF: Does Behe define “real teleology” that way? I don’t know what definitions he uses SB: Does Behe presuppose the existence of libertarian dualism (by your definition) or does he presuppose any other metaphysical principle in any way? If so, how? RDF: I’m sure I just got through telling you that I do not know about Behe’s definitions of these terms. SB: You are evading the question RDF: Good grief, Stephen – I am telling you honestly that I do not know the answer to your question!! I’ve never read much from Behe – just some of his quotes from the Dover trial and stuff about irreducible complexity. If you’d like to talk about Behe’s opinion, why don’t you simply tell me what it is?
And now you pretend that I "grudgingly conceded" not knowing Behe's opinion on this matter? What is wrong with you? Don't you realize that all of our responses are actually stored on this page, and we can go back and retrieve them, so I can show that you are simply lying about our conversation?
If you are a glutton for punishment and would like to revisit either subject, I will be happy to respond to anything you have to say.
Yes, please respond to your two dishonest mispresentations that I have just documented right here in black and white. SB loses point #2
RDF: ….to your inability to understand that the metaphysical conjecture of intelligence as something that is irreducible to material processes is impossible to demonstrate empirically. SB: Are you still singing that tune?
You haven't even come close to rebutting this obvious point. Dembski's EF requires that to conclude design, one must demonstrate that intelligence is irreducible to materialist processes, and nobody is capable of demonstrating that. SB loses point #3
OK, let’s try something else. The placebo effect is not a conjecture.
After pretending for days that you needn't demonstrate mind/body dualism, you now throw up this insanely confused canard about placebos being evidence for mind/body dualism? 1) You've now flip-flopped yet again, conceding that mind/body dualism IS central to ID, after denying it over and over again and calling the mind/body problem irrelevant. If it's irrelevant, why are you trying to defend it now? 2) Even worse for you (as if you needed a worse beating) the placebo effect is equally consistent with materialism and mind/body dualism. SB loses point #4 If you would like to debate the point that the placebo effect is equally consistent with materialism and mind/body dualism, I'd be very happy to, but only on the condition that you concede that you actually must defend mind/body dualism in order to ID. And sure, you can throw in ESP, NDEs, Lourdes miracles, ghosts, goblins, or whatever other evidence you'd like to bring up.
It has little to do with superstitions about lighting bolts coming out of the sky.
The church steeple argument is perfectly analogous to ID. 1) The pattern of lightning strikes could not be accounted for by lawlike cause 2) The pattern of lightning strikes could not be accounted for by chance 3) The lightning was aimed at the churches, and there is only one sort of thing that can aim anything: an intelligent agent. Can tornados aim things? Can erosion aim things? No - only intelligent agents can aim things, and so the firm conclusion of ID scientists in the 18th century would be, by the exact same reasoning you use today, that an intelligent agent was responsible for the pattern of lightning strikes. Nobody here has even tried to rebut this argument. SB loses point #5. SB: 0 RDF: 5 Cheers, RDFish/AIGuyRDFish_{January 24, 2014
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And just when I thought RDFish couldn't be any more of a jerk:
Whether or not you think it is “stupid”, the steeples argument clearly shows the dual mistakes that ID makes, which are (1) To imagine that we already understand everything about natural laws, and (2) Thinking that appealing to a conscious mind to explain whatever we currently cannot explain is somehow justified by this complete knowledge.
(1) Not one IDist that I know of imagines that we already know everything about natural laws. Dembski readily admits that future knowledge may upset the design inference of today. But that is true of all scientific inferences. (2) That RDF would even think that is what occurs proves he is just a jerk on an agenda The appeal to a conscious mind, ie an Intelligent Designer, is based on our knowledge of cause and effect relationships. But then again you don't seem to understand how science works...Joe_{January 24, 2014
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Hi RD RDF
Now that I have truly backed you into a corner, I see you have failed to respond to my last post.
The last thing I recall, I completely destroyed your ridiculous and obsessive claim that ID presupposes libertarian dualism and demonstrated that you know absolutely nothing about Michael Behe's work, which you grudgingly conceded. If you are a glutton for punishment and would like to revisit either subject, I will be happy to respond to anything you have to say. If, in the meantime, you think you have made some good points that I missed, just present them one at a time and I will try to illuminate your mind.
I’m very happy to leave our debate there – you have lost every point,
We all know that that you claim victory even when you are getting creamed. It's part of your schtick.
....to your inability to understand that the metaphysical conjecture of intelligence as something that is irreducible to material processes is impossible to demonstrate empirically.
Are you still singing that tune? OK, let's try something else. The placebo effect is not a conjecture. It cannot be explained solely as a material process. If you would like to try, have a go at it.
I leave you with my church steeples argument, which clearly shows the dual mistakes that ID makes, which are (1) To imagine that we already understand everything about natural law, and (2) Thinking that appealing to a conscious mind to explain whatever we currently cannot explain is somehow justified by this complete knowledge.
The connection between conscious minds and the production dFSCI is unmistakable. It has little to do with superstitions about lighting bolts coming out of the sky. But thank you for playing.StephenB_{January 24, 2014
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Hi StephenB, Now that I have truly backed you into a corner, I see you have failed to respond to my last post. I'm very happy to leave our debate there - you have lost every point, from your mistakes regarding ID's ability to infer conscious agency from the evidence (even Dembski thinks you're wrong!) to your inability to understand that the metaphysical conjecture of intelligence as something that is irreducible to material processes is impossible to demonstrate empirically. I leave you with my church steeples argument, which clearly shows the dual mistakes that ID makes, which are (1) To imagine that we already understand everything about natural law, and (2) Thinking that appealing to a conscious mind to explain whatever we currently cannot explain is somehow justified by this complete knowledge. Cheers, RDFish/AIGuyRDFish_{January 24, 2014
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Hi NetResearchMan,
Your arguments all seem to reduce to the belief that “unknown natural laws” can explain all known phenomena (for example lightning strikes).
You don't understand my argument at all. Not one of my arguments ever rests on the belief that unknown natural laws can explain anything, of course. My current argument rests only on the obvservation that it is not possible to show that anything is irreducible to material processes, just as it is impossible to show that nothing is irreducible to material processes.
Your faith in methodological naturalism is a metaphysical assumption, not a fact.
I'm not a materialist, and you will find not a single quote from me suggesting that I am.
And even if you grant that some unknown set of natural laws made the appearance of life inevitable, you’ve just created a regress, because you have to ask where the intelligent design present in those laws (which clearly would have to be extravagantly fine tuned and deeply complex) came from.
I propose no explanation, so this has nothing to do with my argument. However, you might note that suggesting some unknown supernatural (or non-natural) cause certainly doesn't avoid a regress any more than suggesting some unknown natural cause. Cheers, RDFish/AIGuyRDFish_{January 24, 2014
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Hi Upright BiPed,
You want to ignore our uncontroversial understanding of how information is translated from DNA inside the cell (demonstrated repeatedly in biology labs around the world) by appealing to an 18th century vision of lightning.
It looks like you're having a hard time keeping your train of thought. Nobody is ignoring or denying any of our understanding of molecular biology, and very obviously my argument has nothing to do with lightning per se.
This entire issue (where you entered the conversation) is very straightforward, Mark. Relying on an appeal to unknown material processes as a means to avoid what we already know to be true, is an appeal to potential ignorance in place of established knowledge.
You've made two errors here. First, I never appeal to unknown material processes as an explanation of anything. And second, you most certainly have no knowledge of conscious minds that exist or have existed in anything that is not a human being (or other complex organism). My church steeples argument clearly shows the dual mistakes that ID makes, which are (1) To imagine that we already understand everything about natural laws, and (2) Thinking that appealing to a conscious mind to explain whatever we currently cannot explain is somehow justified by this complete knowledge. Cheers, RDFish/AIGuyRDFish_{January 24, 2014
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Hi gpuccio,
Your church steeples argument is stupid.
This is one of your more cogent arguments - well done! Whether or not you think it is "stupid", the steeples argument clearly shows the dual mistakes that ID makes, which are (1) To imagine that we already understand everything about natural laws, and (2) Thinking that appealing to a conscious mind to explain whatever we currently cannot explain is somehow justified by this complete knowledge. Cheers, RDFish/AIGuyRDFish_{January 24, 2014
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vivid
You are making a logical argument based on an empirical observation. It is either law chance or something else (LNC). However no matter how sound your logic there maybe green cheese in the moon thus your conclusion (inference) is not empirical although logical.
No, I am making a logical argument based on categorical definitions. IF it cannot be law/chance, THEN it cannot be reduced to (be nothing else but) law/chance. Put another way, IF it is not law/chance, THEN it cannot be ONLY law/chance. Those are different ways of saying what I said earlier:
If it cannot be law/chance, then cannot be reduced to law/chance. That should be obvious.</blockquote.
StephenB_{January 24, 2014
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SB here is what I mean. SB
law/chance cannot be law/chance. If it cannot be law/chance, then it cannot be reduced to law/chance. That should be obvious.
You are making a logical argument based on an empirical observation. It is either law chance or something else (LNC). However no matter how sound your logic there maybe green cheese in the moon thus your conclusion (inference) is not empirical although logical. This explains RDF's response. RDF
What is obvious is that after screaming that ID would never PRESUPPOSE that there is some sort of cause that is not law/chance, you proceed to simply PRESUPPOSE that there is just such a cause. Good grief!
Logical arguments are indeed presupposed (self evident) and cannot be empirically verified. Since the top of the food chain of knowledge for RDFi is empirical, science is empirical, your appeal is not based on empirical knowledge rather on a supposition i.e.the law of non contradiction. Anything non empirical such as inferences are not scientific thus ID is not science. But if the rules of right reason (non empirical knowledge) are at the top of the knowledge food chain ones perspective about these things are quite different. As much as RDF wants to stay away from philosophical arguments... hmmmm? Vividvividbleau_{January 24, 2014
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vivid:
It is RDF’s term and like you I was not clear what he meant by that so I italicized it . What I took it to mean in the context of the full quote is that it is the highest form of knowledge we have when coupled with consensus. Not the only type of knowledge but the best type. That is what separates science from philosophy.
I thought that might be where the idea is coming from. The idea of "generated knowledge" comes from the social sciences and especially from "Social Construction Theory." According to this paradigm, we do not receive knowledge so much as we create it. Many who hold this view believe that there is no such thing a generalizable knowledge at all and that everything we know we create "in context." Thus, one group creates one kind of knowledge and another group creates another kind of knowledge. With this paradigm, there are no universal truths and no absolute morality. It is a self-centered and anti-intellectual way of perceiving the world. I would not recommend it to anyone.StephenB_{January 24, 2014
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