ID for Complete IDiots, digested

John Crace, at the Guardian, has a nice series of “digesteds“.  I’m no John Crace, but I’m going have a go at digest of Dembski’s article at ENV,  Conservation of Information Made Simple, because it seems to me that Dembski could use an editor with a big blue pencil.

Conservation of Information Made Simple by William A. Dembski – digested read:

The structure and laws of the physical world permit intelligent multicellular life. Therefore the universe itself, can be viewed as the solution to the problem of making life possible.

When we talk of searching for solutions, we are talking about the probability finding one of a small relatively small set of solutions at the end of one of many different possible searches. Clearly, the probability of finding a solution will increase if we have information as to where to look. But finding the information as to where to look may be as difficult as finding the solution.

Bacteria sometimes evolve to be capable of utilizing a new food source, for example, nylon-digesting bacteria.  So we can say they have gained information.  But it is not new information, it has come from the environment – in this case, nylon-filled pools.

You can think about probabilities as information costs.  A high probability has low information, but a low probability has high information. Information is expensive –  we pay fees to agencies that will increase the probability that we will get what we want. Or you could buy all the lottery tickets, and increase the probability of winning to 1, but it would have cost more than the price of the jackpot.

We call this “conservation” of information because that the best we can do is break even. But sometimes we do worse, and the cost of making the search easier is higher than the cost of the original hard search. After all, some search strategies may that steer us away from solutions. So information can only be lost, not gained, when we try to improve our search strategy.

The No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems say that no search is better than blind search, when the target is unspecified.  Conservation of information says that some searches are better than others, but only because of the additional information that the search is employing to boost its performance.

It also suggests that an object and the search for an object are not separate. We only become aware of an object when aspects of it become salient:  “to be perceived is to be an object of search.”  It therefore follows that to be is to be an object of search. Also, search can itself be an object of search.

This is why I regard the multiverse as incoherent: the known physical universe is knowable because it is searchable. The multiverse is unsearchable, therefore unreal.

Conservation of information can be formulated as: raising the probability of success of a search does nothing to make attaining the target easier, and may in fact make it more difficult, once the informational costs involved in raising the probability of success are taken into account.

 

When Dawkins wrote WEASEL, he included the solution to the search into the his fitness function, so there was no net increase in information when the search found the solution. AVIDA, Tierra and ev do the same thing.

Ken Miller says that to increase in biological information over the course of evolution you only need selection, replication, and mutation.  But computer simulations that use selection, replication, and mutation don’t solve interesting problems, or produce  interesting patterns, unless we add information about what we want to achieve.

The fitness landscape provides an evolutionary process with information. Solutions will only be found if the fitness landscapes is smooth, doesn’t isolate local optima, and rewards complexity. So where do such fitness landscapes come from? The only answer, apart from an Intelligent Designer, would seem to be the environment.

But where did the environment get that information? Evolution is supposed to explain subsequent complexity in terms of prior simplicity, but conservation of information says that there never was a state of primordial simplicity — the information had to be there from the start. In the absence of intelligent input, the complex biological information we observe  now must have been present in the universe in some form or fashion, since the Big Bang. But the heat and density of Big Bang rules out any life form so where was the information needed for the emergence and development of life on planet Earth?

Evolutionists say that the way the environment inputs information into biological systems is by a gradual accumulation of information as natural selection locks in on small advantages, each of which can arise by chance without intelligent input. But Intelligent Design presents a Two-Pronged Challenge. On the one hand the evidence for common ancestry is weak. On the other hand, even if common ancestry is true, conservation of information is compelling evidence for intelligence design.

It would actually be quite a remarkable property of nature if fitness across biological configuration space were so distributed that advantages could be accumulated gradually by a Darwinian process. Frankly, I don’t see the evidence for this.

If biological evolution proceeds by a gradual accrual of functional advantages, instead of finding itself deadlocked on isolated islands of function surrounded by vast seas of non-function, then the fitness landscape over biological configuration space has to be very special indeed.

If evolution is so tightly constrained, then the conditions that allow evolution to act effectively in producing the complexity and diversity of life is but a tiny subset of all possible configuration spaces, and therefore itself a small-probability target.

Evolution can certainly make improbable outcomes probable, but it requires a very special kind of fitness landscape that is itself improbable. Yes, you can reach the top of Mount Improbable, but the tools that enable you to find a gradual ascent up the mountain are as improbably acquired as simply scaling it in one fell swoop. This is the lesson of conservation of information.

So what is the source of information in nature that allows targets to be successfully searched? The answer will by now be obvious: from intelligence. If intelligence is real and has real causal powers, it can do more than merely redistribute information — it can also create it. That is the defining property of intelligence.

Also, Descartes.

The digested digested:

I was wrong about organisms being improbable, given a fitness landscape searchable by evolutionary processes.  I should have said that a fitness landscape searchable by evolutionary processes was improbable.  I’d still be wrong.

123 thoughts on “ID for Complete IDiots, digested

  1. Yes, DNA_Jock. There is no way to assert that chance is either sufficient or insufficient to place the necessary information into chemistry or the landscape.

    ID doesn’t claim the information is in the chemistry or the landscape, and doesn’t rely on chance to explain the information necessary to (1) generate a self-replicating machine, or (2) generate novel biological function.

    Now, do you see?

  2. A few clarifying (hopefully) definitions:

    The probability, p, of a Target pattern, or small class of patterns, turning up on one blind draw = the number of Targets/total number of possible patterns.

    InformationDembski associated with the Target = negative log of p.

    Probability that the Target could arise by Chance = 1-(1-p)^N, where N is the number of tries. If N is large enough, even a low probability/High Information pattern will probably eventually up by Chance. Hence the need for multiverses if we want to ascribe a low p universe to Chance.

    But William agrees we can’t compute p for our universe.

  3. William J. Murray:
    Elizabeth said: “Good idea, but the impasse would be easily resolved if you would answer these questions:”

    Not if one or both of us is suffering from ideological blindness.

    Do you agree that Dembski is defining Information as the negative log of the probability of the observed pattern (e.g. a life-permitting universe) turning up by Chance (i.e. a single random “blind” draw?)

    Yes.

    Excellent.

    If yes,


    Do you agree that we therefore cannot compute the InformationDembski of a life-permitting universe?

    If by this you mean we cannot compute the chance that the required information will be present in the chemistry and landscape in our universe, then yes.

    I meant exactly what I asked. But let me phrase it very slightly differently:

    Do you agree that without a value for the probability of a life-permitting universe, we cannot compute the amount Information (using Dembski’s formula) that a life-permitting universe contains (i.e. one with physics and chemistry necessary for life)?

    If not, why not?

  4. Perhaps one thing that should be clarified here is that a life-permitting universe is not the same as a life-generating universe, and a novel-biological function permitting universe is not the same as a novel-biological function generating universe.

    We’re not talking about the information necessary to permit life, or the information to permit novel biological function, but the information necessary to create those things.

    We live in a universe that permits the existence of 747’s and computers; we do not live in a universe that plausibly manufactures those things without intelligence. Dembski is making a case against chance as a creative explanation, not a “permitting” explanation.

  5. William J. Murray:
    Perhaps one thing that should be clarified here is that a life-permitting universe is not the same as a life-generating universe, and a novel-biological function permitting universe is not the same as a novel-biological function generating universe.

    Yes, indeed, and I’ve taken that point. But right now, I just want to make sure we are clear on this aspect of Dembski’s argument, and Dembski talks about the probability of a “life-permitting universe”:

    Dembski: If the possibilities connected with search now seem greater to you than they have in the past, extending beyond humans to computers and biology in general, they may still seem limited in that physics appears to know nothing of search. But is this true? The physical world is life-permitting — its structure and laws allow (though they are far from necessitating) the existence of not just cellular life but also intelligent multicellular life. For the physical world to be life-permitting in this way, its laws and fundamental constants need to be configured in very precise ways. Moreover, it seems far from mandatory that those laws and constants had to take the precise form that they do. The universe itself, therefore, can be viewed as the solution to the problem of making life possible. But problem solving itself is a form of search, namely, finding the solution (among a range of candidates) to the problem

    That’s all I’m concerned with right now.

    Once we have established whether or not we can compute the Information represented by a life-permitting universe (which ours surely is), and therefore, how hard the search for such a universe would be, then we can perhaps talk about whether, given our life-permitting universe, life remains Improbable.

    But Dembski, right there, in that paragraph, is representing our precisely configured world as a “solution” that needs to be found, from a “range of candidates”.

    My point is that we CANNOT KNOW THE RANGE OF CANDIDATES. So Dembski, on this point at any rate, appears to be disagreeing with both you and me. – he seems to assume that there IS a “range of candidates” and that therefore this observed, finely configured-for-life universe is a low-probability “solution” to the problem of “finding” a “life-permitting universe.

    So, do you still agree with me, that we cannot compute the difficulty of this search (and thus the ultimate “information debt”), for the simple reason that we do not know the “range of candidates” from which our universe is drawn, as you seemed to earlier?

    Or do you agree with Dembski that we can (or at least assume it is large)?

  6. Lizzie’s point holds regardless of what attribute we discuss. We have no examples of alternate universes from which to calculate probabilities.

    Whether we live in a life generating universe is something to be settled by experiment.

  7. Here’s Dembski again, from later in that same piece:

    In the information-theory literature, information is usually characterized as the negative logarithm to the base two of a probability (or some logarithmic average of probabilities, often referred to as entropy). This has the effect of transforming probabilities into bits and of allowing them to be added (like money) rather than multiplied (like probabilities). Thus, a probability of one-eighths, which corresponds to tossing three heads in a row with a fair coin, corresponds to three bits, which is the negative logarithm to the base two of one-eighths. Such a logarithmic transformation of probabilities is useful in communication theory, where what gets moved across communication channels is bits rather than probabilities and the drain on bandwidth is determined additively in terms of number of bits. Yet, for the purposes of this “Made Simple” paper, we can characterize information, as it relates to search, solely in terms of probabilities, also cashing out conservation of information purely probabilistically.

    Probabilities, treated as information used to facilitate search, can be thought of in financial terms as a cost — an information cost. Think of it this way. Suppose there’s some event you want to have happen. If it’s certain to happen (i.e., has probability 1), then you own that event — it costs you nothing to make it happen. But suppose instead its probability of occurring is less than 1, let’s say some probability p. This probability then measures a cost to you of making the event happen. The more improbable the event (i.e., the smaller p), the greater the cost. Sometimes you can’t increase the probability of making the event occur all the way to 1, which would make it certain. Instead, you may have to settle for increasing the probability to qwhere qis less than 1 but greater than p. That increase, however, must also be paid for. And in fact, we do pay to raise probabilities all the time. For instance, many students pay tuition costs to obtain a degree that will improve their prospects (i.e., probabilities) of landing a good, high-paying job.

    So Dembski is saying that an event of probability 1 is “free”, whereas a low probability event has a “cost” – and that if you “pay” the cost, in say, an assisted search (e.g. evolution), that only moves the cost back to finding evolution in the first place, and if you find that by inventing a chemistry that will find evolution, then you have to “Pay” for the chemistry, right back to the configuration of a life-permittign universe (one with the right contants for the formation of heavy elements).

    But, as we agree, once we go back that far, we can’t compute the probability any more. The probability of a life-permitting universe could be 1 (in which case it is “free” in Dembski’s word, and there is no “debt”) or it could be infinite, in which case it is NOT “free”, and must be “paid for”, either by postulating an Intelligent Designer, or, possibly by an infinite number of universes (unlimited purchase of lottery tickets).

    Therefore, and this is the crux of my argument against Dembski: he has not shown that there is infinite regress of the debt burden – he has not shown that the debt does not reduce to 0 at Big Bang. It might not – but he just assumes that it doesn’t, by assuming a “range of candidates” from which our universe, with its life-giving properties, was selected.

  8. If by this you mean we cannot compute the chance that the required information will be present in the chemistry and landscape in our universe, then yes.

    Commenting as a mathematician, yes we can compute that probability. It is 1. Our universe exists and has whatever information is needed. So we observe that it is a certainty, so the probability is 1.

    If the information content of the universe is the negative log of the probability, that makes the information content zero (which seem correct to me, in spite of all of the posturing by ID proponents).

    If you really want an answer, other than 1, for the probability, then you need a sample space; that is, you need to hypothesize a multiverse. But we cannot do that because, as the ID proponents keep telling us, hypothesizing a multiverse is an evil atheist-materialist scheme to undermine their religion (the religion that they say plays no role in ID).

  9. Neil Rickert: Commenting as a mathematician, yes we can compute that probability.It is 1.Our universe exists and has whatever information is needed.So we observe that it is a certainty, so the probability is 1.

    If the information content of the universe is the negative log of the probability, that makes the information content zero (which seem correct to me, in spite of all of the posturing by ID proponents).

    If you really want an answer, other than 1, for the probability, then you need a sample space; that is, you need to hypothesize a multiverse.But we cannot do that because, as the ID proponents keep telling us, hypothesizing a multiverse is an evil atheist-materialist scheme to undermine their religion (the religion that they say plays no role in ID).

    William seems to agree that we cannot compute a probability (other than 1) for the observed universe, because we don’t have a sample space.

    However, at the moment he doesn’t seem to see that that totally obviates any need for an evil materialist to postulate multiverses to escape the “information debt”, apparently because he does not see that if the p of the observed universe is 1, its negative log p is zero, and there is no “debt” to pay.

    And yet William insists there is a “debt”, even though he agrees that there is no way of computing it, and that one of its possible values is zero.

  10. William J. Murray:
    . . .
    1) ID does not require that chemistry- on its own – can plausibly produce the highly contingent, coordinated information required to spontaneously produce a self-replicating organism. Materialists require this. For materialists, chemistry must be so coordinated by chance.

    2) ID does not require that a smooth fitness landscape exist in order for the self-replicating organism to produce novel, complex functionality.Materialists require this. For materialists, the landscape must be so coordinated by chance.

    3) ID does not require chance to explain the highly contingent, coordinated information necessary to (1) create a self-replicating machine, or (2) generate novel, complex, biological functionality.Materialists require chance be their high-contingency generator.
    . . . .

    (Bolding mine.)

    This is exactly why evolutionary theory is scientific and ID is not. ID doesn’t require anything. It makes no testable predictions. It is unfalsifiable.

  11. Also:

    Patrick: William J. Murray:
    . . .
    1) ID does not require that chemistry- on its own – can plausibly produce the highly contingent, coordinated information required to spontaneously produce a self-replicating organism. Materialists require this. For materialists, chemistry must be so coordinated by chance the laws of physics.

    2) ID does not require that a smooth fitness landscape exist in order for the self-replicating organism to produce novel, complex functionality.Materialists require this. For materialists, the landscape must be so coordinated by chance the laws of physics..

    3) ID does not require chance to explain the highly contingent, coordinated information necessary to (1) create a self-replicating machine, or (2) generate novel, complex, biological functionality.Materialists require chance the laws of physics be their high-contingency generator.
    . . . .

    Which gets us back to the probability of the observed laws of physics. Which we can’t compute.

  12. WJM seems to both admit and deny that evolution works. That seems to be the position of nearly all ID advocates recently. They would be horrified at Newton for extrapolating the laws of planetary motion from the behavior of cannonballs on earth. Microgravity but not macrogravity.

  13. William J. Murray:
    Yes, DNA_Jock. There is no way to assert that chance is either sufficient or insufficient to place the necessary information into chemistry or the landscape.

    ID doesn’t claim the information is in the chemistry or the landscape, and doesn’t rely on chance to explain the information necessary to (1) generate a self-replicating machine, or (2) generate novel biological function.

    Now, do you see?

    The list of things that ID does not claim is long, and only serves to highlight its non-scientific nature (see Patrick and Lizzie above). Dembski appears to be claiming that the universe has some property X, which is unlikely.
    Do you agree that Dembski is making such a claim?
    Do you agree with Dembski?
    And please, no “If, by whiskey” responses.

  14. petrushka:
    WJM seems to both admit and deny that evolution works. That seems to be the position of nearly all ID advocates recently. They would be horrified at Newton for extrapolating the laws of planetary motion from the behavior of cannonballs on earth. Microgravity but not macrogravity.

    Well, for the purposes of argument, I don’t think it matters whether Dembski (as he seems to suggest right now) concedes, or doubts, that evolutionary search may result in highly Improbable targets, or whether he concedes, or doubts, that terrestrial chemistry could result in evolutionary search.

    His case seems to be that even IF, the right kind of evolutionary search could find complex life-forms, and even IF that special kind of evolutionary search could be found by Chemistry, there must still be a Debt, because (he claims) the cost of a good search is always at least as great as the cost of blind chance in the first place.

    And that the further “back” we go, the more acute (he claims) this debt problem becomes.

    Except that he appears to assume that the observed universe (i.e. one with the chemistry that maybe can produce the special evolutionary search that maybe can produce complex life) is only one of a subset of a “range of candidates”.

    And yet, without quantifying that “range of candidates” he cannot estimate the debt.

  15. I don’t think he assumes that ours is only one of many universes. I don’t think he considers it important whether the searching is going on inside or outside the universe. I think he’s trying to find a way to say what’s really important to him.

    How many times have your attempts at clarity/precision been seen at UD as obfuscations or semantic games? I think the reason is very clear. You and they are interested in talking about different things. For instance, when you read Dembski, you encounter certain concepts, and you would like to talk about whether in fact those concepts are sound, and if not, why not. However, when many at UD read Dembski, they see words like “chance” and “probability” and “evolution” and “guided” and “intelligence” and they totally get what he’s trying to say in a way that you don’t. They get what’s important to him, and they want to talk about it, because it’s important to them too.

  16. sholom:
    I don’t think he assumes that ours is only one of many universes.I don’t think he considers it important whether the searching is going on inside or outside the universe.I think he’s trying to find a way to say what’s really important to him.

    Well, that last thing is probably true, and I didn’t say that Dembski is “assum[ing] that ours is only one of many universes” – but he is, explicitly, proposing that ours is one of a range of candidate solutions to the problem of a “life-permitting” universe – i.e. one within a large search space.

    We really do need to distinguish between the proposition that there are multiple universes, and the problem (or sheer incoherence) of attempt to estimate the “probability” of the only universe we know.

    How many times have your attempts at clarity/precision been seen at UD as obfuscations or semantic games?I think the reason is very clear.You and they are interested in talking about different things.For instance, when you read Dembski, you encounter certain concepts, and you would like to talk about whether in fact those concepts are sound, and if not, why not.However, when many at UD read Dembski, they see words like “chance” and “probability” and “evolution” and “guided” and “intelligence” and they totally get what he’s trying to say in a way that you don’t.They get what’s important to him, and they want to talk about it, because it’s important to them too.

    Well, sure, but Dembski is writing an academic paper here, not a sermon. It needs to make internal sense.

    And it doesn’t. As becomes abundantly clear when you actually nail down his definitions. To his credit, Dembski makes his definitions explicit. However, in so doing, he reveals the flaws in his argument.

    If people at UD want to equivocate with multiple meanings of “chance” and “probability” and “intelligence” and “information”, and bask in glow of thinking someone is making logical sense, well, that’s their choice. But if they want to have a rigorous analysis, which they claim they do, then they need to define their terms explicitly, and when Dembski does so, use those definitions when evaluating his arguments.

    And right now, William Murray is saying (and I pretty well agree) that we can’t estimate the probability of the observed universe under a non-design null. Dembski’s argument hangs on the supposition that we can, and that it is infinitessimal.

    So there is a clear contradiction, that, if ID proponents were interested in the validity of their own case, they need to sort out. If William is right (and in this instance I think he is) then Dembski’s Law of Conservation of Information falls apart, and so does his entire oevre pretty well, seeing as he (Dembsk) has conceded that some assisted searches (e.g. evolution with smooth high-dimensioned fitness landscapes) can find rarer targets (i.e. patterns with CSI).

  17. Perhaps more basic than a search for a search would be a search for a bridge. A linguistic bridge.

  18. I’ll try a different tactic.

    Many scientists – including Hawking – look at the various cosmological constants and wonder why they are what they are, and not something else? We find out that if you nudge even one of these cosmological constants just a bit off of its mark, you get what is almost universally agreed to be an uninhabitable universe.

    These constants are known commodities, so hypothetically adjusting their values represents what would reasonably be a chance distribution of said values up and down their resident spectrums. Do we know all of these variant values are available to whatever generated the universe? Certainly not – but we work with what we have available and extrapolate from there. It is as reasonable process as we can in theorizing about why the universe is the way it is, and not what one can easily imagine would nearly infinite other ways completely inhospitable to life.

    Stephen Hawking takes this so seriously he wrote a book and engineered a theory for the express purpose of explaining why our universe should appear so precisely tuned for life. Many other scientists have done the same thing, mostly by theorizing some form of actual multiverse to account for the apparent fine-tuning of our universe.

    When a scientist like Hawking posits a multiverse response to answer the question of the apparent fine-tuning of this universe, he is making a tacit attempt to satisfy the very search debt that Dembski is talking about. They are, essentially, admitting that they believe it is intolerably unlikely that our universe has the attributes it has by chance (meaning, if the fundamental values could have been anything other than what they are now), so they work hard on creating a theory that expands the likelihood, where all such universes are being, or have been generated, and we just live in the “happy accident” universe.

    So Dembski responds by extending his information theory of searches to these proposed universe-generating ideas. Dembski himself holds that a multiverse is unsearchable and therefore unreal, but even so, the problem for Hawking and others is that no matter how far one kicks the information debt back, it’s still there – even to whatever Hawking theorizes to be generating so many universes. IOW, if a materialist kicks the search debt back to the “variant of our universe’s force constants” chance mechanism, as many like Hawking do, then Dembski’s search rule applies because of the probabilistic structure they themselves have theorized.

    Not one Dembski has theorized; he surely doesn’t believe in a multiverse, or in the “probability” that ours was generated; he believes ours was specifically created on purpose. So then what probabilistic resource is Dembski referring to to provide the negative log that would define the informational content of chemistry here in our universe that would generate life? Why, the multiverse scenario Hawking and others employ in their vain attempt to solve what they recognize (at least tacitly) as the very search debt Dembski has revealed in his law of conservation of information.

    Now, here’s Elizabeth – Hawking and others who employ the multiverse probabilistic scenario answer to fine tuning be damned! – saying that Dembski is the one appealing to a probabilistic resource he cannot demonstrate exists to show that there is a search debt owed because of a multiverse scenario Dembski doesn’t even believe exists!

    No, Elizabeth. Dembski’s point is that IF Hawking and other “probabilistic resources” multiverse theorists are correct, THEN the search debt they have tacitly admitted exists is still owed. The mere presence of such a multiverse still has not paid the price of the search. A probabilistic resource doesn’t pay the debt, it just moves it back a notch.

    Now here you, Elizabeth – Hawking and others who employ the multiverse probabilistic scenario answer to fine tuning be damned! – say, hey, we don’t factually know how likely this universe is, so we don’t have to account for it .. um, I mean, we don’t have anything to account for. The universe just is the way it is. Probability = 1. Account paid in full.

    Fine tuning, Schmine Schtubing. Hawking is an idiot, right? So after their “multiverse” challenge to answer fine tuning, Dembski points out that they still haven’t accounted for the necessary search information, then Elizabeth completely misunderstands, mischaracterizes the context and claims that it is Dembski that has posited that a probabilistic resource exists that would render our chemistry full of “Dembski” information as the negative log of probability.

    No, Dembski did no such thing. Dembski did not posit the probabilistic resource; Hawking and others did. All Dembski has done is point out that even so, the search debt has still not been paid.

    Typical materialist dodge, denial, dismissal, and stall. There is no fine tuning! Okay, maybe there is, but hey- we have a multiverse to account for it – we have the probabilistic resources to account for anything. Oh, it still doesn’t account for it? Well, we don’t have to account for it because there’s no way to tell how unlikely it is. We have nothing we have to account for! Why are you creationists acting like you know what the probabilistic resources are for the universe? What a bunch of rubes!

    Nothing to see here, folks! Move on.

  19. [Note – I wrote this before reading WJM’s post above. It addresses some of the issues, but is not a response to it – I can’t write that quickly!].

    As Mike Elzinga might point out, the philosophical, even the mathematical arguments, only take you so far, and you have to take some account of the actual properties of the universe(s).

    What we appear to be completely bound by are a set of fundamental forces, deriving from the quantum numbers of fundamental particles. We could hypothesise that these numbers may be infinitely variable, and that space of universes infinitely explored by ‘real’ Big Bangs, but equally, this may be the only occasion in which a universe ‘popped’ into existence, by unknown means. Or, an infinity of universes may have been so popped, but they all have the same quantum numbers, because that’s the property ‘stuff’ has, and any variation among universes is dependent only on the amount of ‘stuff’ – ‘mass-energy’ – generated.

    Who knows. Ultimately, this is the universe we have, and it is slowly crystallising and equilibrating. From an initial low-entropy state, scads of energy and no matter, the ‘stuff’ of the universe has formed from local energy traps. Quarks bind each other through the strong force, and the nucleus is stabilised by the inability of neutrons to decay when packed with protons (they do so rapidly when free), the electrostatic force brings charged electrons to proton-containing nuclei, creates molecules, gravity binds mass …

    All of this condensation is accompanied by the dissipation of energy. It never disappears, it simply becomes unavailable, spread out. When matter responds to a field of force, it gives out energy. Now, the ‘debt’ that WJM refers to is intimately associated with the redistribution of energy. If [in this one universe] a distribution of matter-energy occurs that one might consider ‘unlikely’, it is invariably (on investigation) found to be associated with the borrowing of a distribution of matter-energy elsewhere, adopting a configuration that is more ‘likely’. And I mean invariably. Energy distribution is coupled, such that the ‘debt’ of unlikelihood in one place is fully repaid by an increase in ‘likelihood’ elsewhere. The net state of the overall system does not – and cannot, according to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics – become less ‘likely’.

    This includes those actions that we would ascribe to the ‘force’ of intelligence. Computers, 747’s, unlikely p0ker hands, are all generated with an overall net balancing of the books. Net entropy stays the same or increases.

    So Dembski is making what appears to him to be an obvious claim about what intelligence can do, but to me it is an extraordinary one. He is claiming that it can result in an ‘unlikely’ distribution that matter/energy alone cannot access, without any requirement to pay that debt by an increase in ‘likely’ (more equilibrated) elsewhere. Ironically, he would have intelligence make its own (free) lunch. But intelligence needs three square meals a day.

  20. William J. Murray:
    I’ll try a different tactic.

    Many scientists – including Hawking – look at the various cosmological constants and wonder why they are what they are, and not something else? We find out that if you nudge even one of these cosmological constants just a bit off of its mark, you get what is almost universally agreed to be an uninhabitable universe.

    These constants are known commodities, so hypothetically adjusting their values represents what would reasonably be a chance distribution of said values up and down their resident spectrums. Do we know all of these variant values are available to whatever generated the universe? Certainly not – but we work with what we have available and extrapolate from there. It is as reasonable process as we can in theorizing about why the universe is the way it is, and not what one can easily imagine would nearly infinite other ways completely inhospitable to life.

    Stephen Hawking takes this so seriously he wrote a book and engineered a theory for the express purpose of explaining why our universe should appear so precisely tuned for life. Many other scientists have done the same thing, mostly by theorizing some form of actual multiverse to account for the apparent fine-tuning of our universe.

    When a scientist like Hawking posits a multiverse response to answer the question of the apparent fine-tuning of this universe, he is making a tacit attempt to satisfy the very search debt that Dembski is talking about. They are, essentially, admitting that they believe it is intolerably unlikely that our universe has the attributes it has by chance (meaning, if the fundamental values could have been anything other than what they are now), so they work hard on creating a theory that expands the likelihood, where all suchuniverses are being, or have been generated, and we just live in the “happy accident” universe.

    Right: so you presumably retract your claim that the probability of the observed universe is unknowable, and consider that Stephen Hawking’s authority is good enough to allow us to conclude that it’s probability is low (that it it is only one of a tiny subset of possible universes).

    Well, it’s a theory, and as you imply below, it suggests one of two things:

    1. That there is an Intelligent Designer
    2. That it is only one of many universes, and that there are are an infinite number of trials (rendering what would otherwise be highly improbable, virtually certain).

    As I said, if this is Dembski’s argument, it is simply the fine-tuning argument, and has nothing to do with biology, or Darwin, or anything else.

    So I’m glad we agree on that point.

    So Dembski responds by extending his information theory of searches to these proposed universe-generating ideas. Dembski himself holds that a multiverse is unsearchable and therefore unreal,

    Which makes no sense. Why should only searchable things be real? Is Intelligence searchable? Is Intelligence real? Is God searchable? Is God real?

    What does “searchable” even mean in this context?

    but even so, the problem for Hawking and others is that no matter how far one kicks the information debt back, it’s still there – even to whatever Hawking theorizes to be generating so many universes.

    Well no. If there are gazillions of actual universe, the debt is paid. There’s only a debt if we have limited trials – a Universal Probability Bound, which Dembski claims can be calculated. But you can’t calculate a supra-Universal Probability Bound, so there’s no way of knowing whether you have enough tries to make our universe likely or not.

    I’m not especially bothered either way – I’m quite happy to accept that perhaps the world was brought into being in order to beget life, and carefully chosen to be sure it would do so; but I don’t see any terribly good reason to prefer that scenario over the perfectly viable alternative that there are gazillions of universes so ours was bound to pop up eventually. In other words, grounds for optimism, whatever your preferred solution, but no grounds for an empirical inference.

    IOW, if a materialist kicks the search debt back to the “variant of our universe’s force constants” chance mechanism, as many like Hawking do, then Dembski’s search rule applies because of the probabilistic structure they themselves have theorized.

    No. See above. Now there is no UPB.

    Not one Dembski has theorized; he surely doesn’t believe in a multiverse, or in the “probability” that ours was generated; he believes ours was specifically created on purpose.So then what probabilistic resource is Dembski referring to to provide the negative log that would define the informational content of chemistry here in our universe that would generate life? Why, the multiverse scenario Hawking and others employ in their vain attempt to solve what they recognize (at least tacitly) as the very search debt Dembski has revealed in his law of conservation of information.

    This is rather confused. Let’s say you have a six-sided die, and you subject it to tests to ensure that its centre of gravity is dead in the centre – you conclude it is fair. Someone throws it, and throws a six. You think, fair enough, a six was fairly probable. Now you take a million-sided die, and you do the same. It comes down as a six again. Now the person has a 1/million chance of throwing a six. They throw a six.

    You find this highly suspicious. Either they put it down deliberately, six-side up, or they threw it a gazillion times, and called you when they got a six. Either is possible.

    But you did not need to throw it yourself a gazillion times to figure out that the chance of a six was one-in-a-million. You just weighed it carefully.

    Physicists have weighed the universe carefully, and concluded (for now – things may change) that it looks like one of a vast number of possible universes, none of which may have exist (cf have been thrown). But that doesn’t tell us whether this one turned up because a Designer laid it six side up, or whether it’s the result of a gazillion throws. Positing a gazillion throws is not the same as figuring out that the die is fair and has a million sides. The fluky-tuning inference was made, IIRC, long before anyone suggested that this might not be the only universe.

    Now, here’s Elizabeth – Hawking and others who employ the multiverse probabilistic scenario answer to fine tuning be damned! – saying that Dembski is the one appealing to a probabilistic resource he cannot demonstrate exists to show that there is a search debt owed because of a multiverse scenario Dembski doesn’t even believe exists!

    No. I’m saying that we don’t know that this is not the only possible universe (that’s a popular current supposition, but could be trumped by future discoveries, precisely because it is not based on sampling, but on inferences from cosmological observations), but that it may be. But that if it isn’t (it’s a rare one), there is no way of knowing whether we have enough Money to Pay the Debt, because we have no supra-universal probability bound.

    In short: we don’t know for sure there’s a debt (and the debt has very little to do with Dembski’s No Free Lunch story anyway – it’s simply, as I keeps saying, the Fine tuning argument, nothing to do with biology), and, if there is, we have no way of knowing whether we can pay it (how many tries we have).

    Just as we don’t know when our guy phones to say he’s thrown a six, whether he cheated, or kept on throwing till he got one – either way will work.

    No, Elizabeth. Dembski’s point is that IF Hawking and other “probabilistic resources” multiverse theorists are correct, THEN the search debt they have tacitly admitted exists is still owed. The mere presence of such a multiverse still has not paid the price of the search.A probabilistic resource doesn’t pay the debt, it just moves it back a notch.

    This is incorrect. A “probabilistic resource” can easily pay the debt, provided it’s substantial enough. That’s why it’s called a “resource”. If it’s finite, it may not be enough, and Dembski claims that within this universe, the resource is finite, and not enough to explain life by “Blind chance”, which no-one argues. But once we are talking about the probability of the universe itself, we have no idea as to whether the probabilistic resources is limited or not. So there’s no notch to move back to. As long as your probabilistic resources exceed a threshold, even a highly improbable event becomes a near-certainty i.e. wipes out the debt. This is basic probability math. I think you are confusing the Dembski’s “back a notch” argument by which a search strategy that reliably leads to a Target at one level requires a Search at the next. But all searches can be solved (bought outright), even by a Blind search if the Searcher has enough opportunities such that any location is very unlikely to remain unsearched, i.e. enough “probabilistic resources”.

    Now here you, Elizabeth– Hawking and others who employ the multiverse probabilistic scenario answer to fine tuning be damned! – say, hey, we don’t factually know how likely this universe is, so we don’t have to account for it .. um,I mean, we don’t have anything to account for. The universe just is the way it is. Probability = 1. Account paid in full.

    Yes, if the probability of the universe turns out to look like a certainty (the only possible universe), the account is paid in full.

    If the probability of the universe turns out to look very low, then the account can only be paid in full by either a Designer, or enough tries.

    And we can’t compute the number of allowed tries once we are outside this universe. We don’t know the Bound.

    Fine tuning, Schmine Schtubing. Hawking is an idiot, right? So after their “multiverse” challenge to answer fine tuning, Dembski points out that they still haven’t accounted for the necessary search information, then Elizabeth completely misunderstands, mischaracterizes the context and claims that it is Dembski that has posited that a probabilistic resource exists that would render our chemistry full of “Dembski” information as the negative log of probability.

    With respect, William, I think it is you who have misunderstood. As I’ve said, I don’t think we can compute, for sure, from within this universe, the probability of it occurring. You at one time agreed. You have now changed your stance, which is fair enough, and said: oh but it must be improbable, or else Hawking wouldn’t be flapping around trying to find multiverses. Well, sure – a lot of physicists do think that the universal constants aren’t the only possible ones, and that therefore, this universe is “fine tuned” for life. But if that is the case, then there isn’t a “probabilistic resource” problem unless Dembski can show that multiverses cannot exist – if they can, and he doesn’t know they can’t (and Hawking thinks they can, and you think that Dembski seems to believe Hawking on the subject of fine-tuning), then he can’t say that there aren’t enough probabilistic resources, because we do not know what the multi-universal probabilty bound is, and can’t compute it.

    As for this:

    Elizabeth … claims that it is Dembski that has posited that a probabilistic resource exists that would render our chemistry full of “Dembski” information as the negative log of probability.

    Talk about misunderstanding and mischaracterising! I can’t even parse this! Far from “claim[ing] it. For Dembski, “probabilistic resources” refers to the number of opportunities you have to find a Target by blind search. And we do not know the “probabilistic resources” of the world beyond this universe (i.e. the number of universes available for Reality to search through before it got to ours). My claim is that Dembski has posited that even if this universe turns out to be one in which life is all but inevitable, given its universal constants (which may be true), it MUST be an improbable universe (i.e. one with High Information, negative log p), because of his Law of Conservation of Information (if it’s a Found Target universe, the Search must have been Expensive).

    And I say no. It’s possible that physicists may compute that it is improbable, but that inference does not flow from his Law of Conservation of Information, because his Law of Conservation is a crock, and is actually circular. He can only show that the debt will ultimately climb higher (never paid off) by regressing it back to Big Bang, and at that point, he’s stuck if it turns out that there is only one possible universe.

    And so, if tomorrow, Stephen Hawking announces that on further thought, he’s figured out the Grand Theory of Everything, and can demonstrate that the observed universal constants can be derived from a single constant, and that constant is zero, or one, something ineffably simple and that therefore the probability of this universe is 1, Dembski’s Law bites the dust. Having already proved itself redundant because until you regress it back to Big Bang, it doesn’t hold anyway – lots of searches for searches are cheaper than the Target the inner search finds.

    Typical materialist dodge, denial, dismissal, and stall.There is no fine tuning! Okay, maybe there is, but hey- we have a multiverse to account for it – we have the probabilistic resources to account for anything. Oh, it still doesn’t account for it? Well, we don’t have to account for it because there’s no way to tell how unlikely it is. We have nothing we have to account for!Why are you creationists acting like you know what the probabilistic resources are for the universe? What a bunch of rubes!

    Calm down, William. All I am saying is that we can’t infer a Creator God, or Prime Intelligence, or whatever from our observations, or indeed from frequentist statistics. A creator God or a Prime Intelligence is completely compatible with multiverses, as it would be would be with the discovery that this is the only possible universe. There is no “dodge” because there is no oncoming train. God’s existence does not depend upon there not being multiverses or there being more than possible universes.

    I have nothing against theism. What I do object to is fallacious argument for it.

    Nothing to see here, folks!Move on.

    I tend to agree.

  21. I don’t understand why you would characterise a ‘multiverse’ scenario as a ‘search’ equivalent to (say) an algorithmic exploration of a combinatorial space. It’s a lottery, not a search.

    If, due to probabilistic considerations, Life happened to be capable of arising just once in 2 billion planets, and a Universe containing 2 billion+ planets existed, Life would probably be found on at least one of them. It would not search those planets looking for somewhere to make home.

    Likewise, a conceivable ‘multiverse’ explanation (which I emphasise I do not favour) would be a set of universes in one or more of which the parameters permitted Life to arise. If you have a ‘lottery’ and enough trials, you don’t need a search.

    What then for the IDist-mocking-the materialist? “Even accepting the multiverse, the fact that a set of universes can be generated among which is one or more permitting Life is so improbable that … “.

  22. And we’re still talking ‘life as we know it’. Do we really know what other constant configurations would yeild, other than ‘not this / suitable for us’. Are their other winning hands?

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