Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

William Dembski

Ten (or so) Pro-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read

On the Design Disquisitions YouTube channel, I’ve posted a new video where I recommend several books of interest, specifically pro-ID literature. Most of the suggestions may be familiar to you, but hopefully there are a few that you’ve not read before. I also give a brief summary of the content of each book. I don’t claim that the books mentioned are necessarily the best, but I think anyone who wants to join the discussion needs to be familiar with some of these. Let me know what you would add to the list! Ten (or so) Pro-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read

Bill Dembski on what John Archibald Wheeler got right and wrong about “it from bit”

Dembski agrees that the universe is, at bottom, information but proposes “informational realism” as a sounder approach to unpacking the idea. Read More ›

William Dembski: Artificial intelligence understands by not understanding

Dembski continues to reflect on Erik J. Larson’s new book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (2021). He recalls his experiences learning to write boilerplate for a psychology chatbot back in 1982. Read More ›

From Bill Dembski: Automated driving and other failures of AI

Dembski: in the cossetted and sanitized environments that we have constructed for ourselves in the U.S., have no clue of what capabilities AI actually needs to achieve to truly match what humans can do. The shortfall facing AI is extreme. Read More ›

Bill Dembski on how a new book expertly dissects doomsday scenarios

Dembski: "At the end of the discussion, however, Kurzweil's overweening confidence in the glowing prospects for strong AI's future were undiminished. And indeed, they remain undiminished to this day (I last saw Kurzweil at a Seattle tech conference in 2019 — age seemed to have mellowed his person but not his views)." But Larson says it's all nonsense. Read More ›

Eric Holloway: Why Bell’s theorem matters

Especially to conservation of information theory: This brings us to a more general result known as the conservation of information. Design theorists William Dembski and Robert J. Marks defined the law of conservation of information in their 2009 paper “Conservation of Information in Search” and then proved the result in their follow-on 2010 paper “The Search for a Search”. The conservation of information (COI) says the expected active information produced by any combination of random and deterministic processes is guaranteed to be zero or less. Active information is itself the difference between two different probability distributions. We can see the conservation of information is a generalization of Bell’s no-go theorem in quantum mechanics. It contrasts the difference between two probability Read More ›

Bill Dembski on the primacy of information for science

The conversation with Fred Skiff, chair of the physics department at the University of Iowa examines why information is the most basic object of study in science and how Conservation of Information naturally leads to the conclusion that intelligence is the ultimate source of information. Read More ›

Could information be—at long last—the missing “dark matter”?

One physicist now suggests that this “fifth state” of matter (the other four non-dark states are solid, liquid, gas, and plasma) might be information. But then information must be a physical thing… Read More ›

Bill Dembski remembers Phil Johnson (1940–2019)

Dembski begins by reminding us of the book, Darwin’s Nemesis (2006), which introduced Johnson as “the leading figure” in the intelligent design movement—which he was. Johnson was perhaps the first person after David Berlinski to just ask, point blank, never mind religion or whatever, why does all this tabloid-level nonsense rule biology? Read More ›