In 2015, Winston Ewert, William Dembski and Robert Marks published a paper entitled Algorithmic Specified Complexity in the Game of Life.
The paper was a wreck. We examined it here at TSZ and found well over 20 substantive errors in it.
ID supporter Eric Holloway describes it as a “neat paper”. I describe it as an “abysmal mess”.
Eric has been touting the virtues of ASC here at TSZ, so now is a good time to reopen the discussion of this paper.
phoodoo:
Are you dumb enough to believe that anything physical must have a weight?
I just wanted to save this comment for posterity, in case keiths just realizes what he wrote.
phoodoo — master of the imaginary gotcha.
Old anecdote on software in fighter planes:
There is a an engineer responsible for tracking the weight of all components for a plane being designed. One asked the programmer for the weight of the software in the plane’s computer. “None” replied the programmer.
Later the weight engineer came back with a box of punched cards (this is an old story), pointing out that punched cards have weight.
“You misunderstand.” replied the programmer. “The software is in the holes.”
Physicalism says scientific theories should be constrained by fundamental physics and that scientific ontologies should include only the entities of fundamental physics and those entities that supervene (including emerging) from them.
The entities of fundamental physics are energy, fields, and (for now) spacetime. Maybe information too.
We thingify.
Are numbers things?
The number of sides on a polygon?
The number of digits in the expansion of pi?
What little sense phoodoo used to make seems to have finally evaporated, and now he’s demanding the weight of empty space between atoms(because it must have a weight otherwise it’s immaterial and supernatural?) Or something.
I’ve read a fair amount of arguments and definitions of natural vs supernatural, material vs immaterial, physical vs nonphysical, but I’ve never come across the idea that materialism/physicalism/naturalism is the claim that everything has a weight or a mass. In phoodoo’s magical fantasyland this is somehow the ultimate killer of materialism.
I’m not even sure it’s supposed to make sense. Another defining attribute of phoodoo’s supernaturalism is revealed. It’s undetectable and unknowable, and now also unintelligible. The less sense it makes, the more supernatural it is.
Rumraket,
You are the one claiming “your nature” is a physical thing, I am just trying to get to the bottom of what that physical thing is. If it doesn’t have a mass, what does it have that makes it a physical thing?
Phoodoo, why do we have brains? What does the brain do, what’s it’s job? Why are the senses connected to it?
Rumraket,
To help you figure out what “your nature” is?
I rest my case.
Nothing is a problem for problem fictionalists 🙂
No, that is why we must discover mathematics. We can make conjectures and then prove them right or wrong. If math was just made up, then all conjectures would have any truth value we want them to have. None of the most rigorous engineering and science disciplines would work. The fact that engineering and science work so well, and you can read this comment, proves that math is ‘out there’ and not merely a human construct.
That’s silly, Eric. The fact that mathematical objects are invented does not mean that one can’t apply rules to them or demand consistency of them.
Eric,
You seem to be a problem fictionalist with respect to the EDM paper we’re supposed to be discussing in this thread.
One might ask whether the physical constants are rational, and ask how many are required to completely describe the universe.
Mathematics doesn’t exist ‘out there’ as some kind of ‘thing’ by itself. It needs human brains and human thought to exist. What does exist out there by itself is stuff and the relations and processes between different bits of stuff. Maths, as in physics, can describe that stuff and those processes, but it doesn’t have to. It can quite easily describe stuff and processes that don’t actually exist in our world.
Like so many, you too are confusing the map with the territory. Our reality is the territory, maths is the (or rather, a) map. And just like we can draw maps of imaginary lands, we can build maths of imaginary realities. Just like maps, maths is a human construct.
We prove mathematical conjectures right or wrong using systems of logic – which themselves are human constructs. As you will know, being a mathematician, there is no requirement to adopt a system of axioms corresponding to our reality. For instance we can develop geometry based on various curvatures of space – not all of which will correspond to the curvature of the space we actually live in.
Furthermore, we can develop types of maths that don’t honour the type of logic that we usually adopt in our daily lives, e.g. types of logic that don’t contain the law of non-contradiction.
Insofar as engineering works, this is because in developing it we have chosen to use those types of maths that actually reflect the relations and processes existing in our world. Just like when you go on holidays to Spain it pays to bring a map of Spain, not one of Middle Earth.
faded_Glory,
Is an ocean wave a thing or a process?
What about a sound wave, a thing or a process?
I vote process, but they reflect ambiguity in language.
petrushka,
All of them?
If you recall the discussion on UD about this topic, even many of the faithful there admitted that what we discover are regularities in our universe, and we invented a language called mathematics to describe them. It’s the regularities that are “out there”, while the math lives in human minds.
This is an important distinction. If you reify mathematics and claim it is “out there”, you might convince yourself that some grand cosmic mathematician might exist, and that would be a mistake.
Eric might say that begs the question.
Are Higgs bosons out there? Or are they just concepts we invent to predict the results of LHC?
I agree with the rest of your post. Regardless of whether or not math objects exist, we choose the math needed to build successful scientific models. Math must serve science, not the reverse.
Eric and his ID brethren believe we can choose the math to describe reality by armchair contemplation. In the Game of Life paper, this is reflected by the probability distribution chosen . Keith discusses this in his early post in this thread.
I’m not convinced that objects exist, at least not objects that satisfy our intuitive, billiard ball image.
Obviously, it is convenient and useful to see and manipulate objects, but it is sometimes useful to think of things as relationships, depending on circumstances.
Circumstances such as doing physics.
I prefer this approach as well, mainly because it seems more elegant to me. It’s often called “structuralism” and can be applied to both science and math entities.
But even with structuralism, there is still a separation between viewing structures as merely concepts we use in our predictions versus things that exist in the world.
There are those who prefer objects to structures as the fundamental entity, But no such philosopher or physicist these days thinks that the fundamental objects, ie quantum entities are anything like billiard balls.. The various QM no go theorems make untenable the billiard ball view of objects as entities with simultaneously exact properties, eg position, spin, and momentum.
I believe that these are labels we humans attach to particular combinations of matter and processes. Our brains, minds if you like, work by discriminating and classifying the phletora of impressions we observe with our senses, and devising shortcuts to help in understanding and communication. Ultimately, what we call waves is just matter in motion.
When we go down to the very deepest levels I agree that the nature of ‘stuff’ becomes uncertain and hard to grasp. However, at ordinary human scales we all think of matter as made up of particles, be it molecules, atoms or elementary particles. I think this is a good enough classification to use in the debate about natural and supernatural, or materialism versus idealism. Even the staunchest proponent of the existence of the supernatural surely isn’t going to deny the existence of matter as well?
I agree that thingifying is useful. It may be a necessary behavior for living.
Doesn’t mean that spooky behavior of matter is demarkable; doesn’t support dualism.
Gravity, magnetism, electromagnetism, radiation, are all spooky behaviors having regularities that allow us to subsume them into the natural order of things.
Brains will eventually be subsumed into the natural order, although I don’t see any guarantee we will produce artificial humans.
The trend is toward the production of artificial slaves and artificial police. Those seem to be lucrative.
I pretty much agree with this as well. Nothing seems to exist, when you look close enough. And as far as I am concerned, its even more evidence that the world isn’t just chaos that got lucky.
Why wouldn’t the staunchest of immaterialist deny the existence of matter?
You have just now walked back your entire premise of the physical vs. process delineation worldview. But your caveat is that, but from human perspective somethings look more like physical things than others. That’s rather silly right?
Its like saying, well, just squint, then somethings are physical, and somethings we just call physical.
Everything we see is just energy. Its all just in different forms. This whole business about some things can be described without time, and somethings can’t is meaningless (but you fooled Jock at least).
The very fact that energy can become conscious, even when it is made of nothing permanent, I would think would be enough to give anyone with an open mind pause to consider the supernatural. But not the faithful skeptic of course. No, no, their skepticism is that special kind, that kind that contains no skepticism about their beliefs whatsoever.
If we cannot choose what is consistent, then consistency is ‘out there’.
The basic point is that not everything in mathematics is our choice. There is something else out there we have no control over that determines the outcomes of our choices.
Similar sort of argument against idealism or solipism. I cannot walk through walls and for some reason I cannot make all my alter egos on this forum agree with me. There is something else ‘out there’ besides just my own choice in the matter.
Not quite correct. We know that any given stochastic hypothesis produces a certain probability distribution, and straightforward mathematics allows us to infer the hypothesis’ distribution probably doesn’t describe reality in favor of an alternate hypothesis. It is sort of the contrary of what you are saying.
We cannot say the alternate hypothesis is the absolute truth, but we can say it is a much better description of reality than the chance hypothesis. Whatever is the truth of the matter, it must be at least as good as the alternate hypothesis in order to displace it.
So, in reference to the game of life, some hypothesis other than intelligent design must do at least as well. They’ve shown that a uniform distribution is certainly not adequate, but perhaps there is another. However, to make that case, the other distribution must be defined. It cannot just be conjecture.
The mathematics behind this can all be done quite comfortably in an armchair, which is part of why I prefer it. Gives me something to do on my long commutes 🙂
Eric,
Consistency is a property, not an object. Whether a system is consistent depends on the rules we create for it. We can create both consistent and inconsistent systems, but we concentrate on the the former because we find them to be more interesting and useful.
Earlier choices constrain later choices. If we’re defining the natural numbers, and we specify that a) every natural number has exactly one successor and b) that the successor of 1 is 2, then we’ve locked ourselves out of defining any other number — say 37 — as the successor of 1.
Physical reality can also constrain our choices. If we’re trying to keep track of how many sheep we have, then we need a system that will allow for operations such as counting, addition, and subtraction. If you sacrifice a sheep to Yahweh, you subtract one from the total. This hardly means that the number one has special existence in some platonic realm outside of time and space.
Earlier choices, physical constraints, etc.
Eric,
Then how can it influence the physical world? At what point does it bridge the physical/nonphysical gap, and by what mechanism? Be specific.
It’s a problem for platonists, but not for fictionalists.
Eric, tries to spin the Game of Life paper:
They were trying to do the exact opposite, Eric. Oops.
Amusing that Eric can’t bring himself to admit how bad the paper actually is.
A reminder of EDM’s bogus assumption regarding the uniform distribution as a substitute for the “physics” of Life:
phoodoo,
I haven’t walked back on anything at all. My main point is that lots of people incorrectly reify thoughts, concepts and processes that happen in their brains as if these have actual, independent and external existence separate from ourselves. To be clear, these reified things are not things at all but mere thoughts, i.e. processes in our brain and therefore processes of matter.
That is the issue, not if what we call matter is in the final analysis made up of little billard balls or not. That is a side discussion. Moreover you seem to think that I pose a duality between matter and process, as if everything somehow has to be te one or the other. In reality of course I constantly make it clear that the world is made up of both processes and matter.
We have seen people think that the ideal triangle exists somewhere ‘out there’, separate fom thoughts in our minds. People think that maths exists somewhere ‘out there’, separate from thoughts in our minds. People think that the supernatural exists somewhere ‘out there’, separate from thoughts in our minds.
When you ask them where exactly these things exist all you ever get is armwaving. Well, here is the rub – I know where they exist, and they don’t.
The thing is that I’m sure Eric and I agree that at least maths exists in our minds when we think about it. In addition to that shared belief, Eric & co have another belief, which I deny, that maths also exists somewhere else, separate from our thoughts.
That is an assertion for which never any evidence has been presented. It is not me who has to prove the negative, it is for the platonists to demonstrate their case. They haven’t managed to do so in thousands of years so I am not holding my breath.
I agree that concepts of things exist in our minds. But whether or not the things themselves exist independently of us is different.
There are arguments that math entities exist and which do not invoke the supernatural. They are discussed in philosophy of math.
One standard naturalist argument involves the indispensability of math to our best science. Roughly, it says that if we take Higgs Bosons to exist because they are indispensable to our best science, we should be willing to take math entities used in our best science, like real numbers and functions, to be exist as well.
The indispensability argument is controversial, but there are many philosophers who support it. One argument supporters use is that our philosophy should be consistent with how scientists act, and scientists consistently act with this approach to math.
I don’t know if you have any interest in philosophy. If so, the wiki article is an overview of phil of math. There are recent undergrad intros to phil of math if your want more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics
Section 5.1 introduces the indispensability argument.
How exactly would you expect somewhere to explain to you the location of supernatural? Its like saying, explain to me where other universes exist. If you can’t explain where, they don’t exist.
I guess I can say with the same confidence as you, they don’t exist. Because of skeptic faith.
Well, how do you know it exists at all? Is it just a logical inference, it must exist? Or is there some facets of reality that can only be explained by it? What is it that convinced you that it existed in the first place? If you believed all along, what is it you believe in? Specifically?
The location is not so important, rather how you get there. Or, even more basically, how you know there is a there there at all!
OMagain,
I could probably give you about twenty reasons, but let’s just go with the low hanging fruit.
You have energy, universal constants, laws of physics that are unchanging, and material objects that can think and realize their own existence. Assuming this is totally meaningless and uncoordinated seems like about the most intellectually vacant and incurious worldview one could possibly have. I mean truly only the most ardent skeptic could possibly lack such a tremendous amount of skepticism.
Other universes may or may not exist, but until they can somehow influence what is going on in our universe it matters not a jot. So, I am quite happy to state that their existence has not been demonstrated and therefore we should proceed on the understanding that they don’t exist. Being right or wrong on this doesn’t make the slightest difference to anything.
Now, a supernatural that allegedly influences what is going on in our reality is a very different beast, especially if people claim to know what it wants and use that to influence my life. At that point there are some serious questions that you will need to answer before your claims have legitimacy.
BruceS,
The Higgs Boson has got mass, right? Therefore it is what I call ‘stuff’. The math we use to describe it is our human tool to try and model that particular little bit of stuff so we can understand it a bit better (and all that is a process that exists in our brains). If there were no more humans, the Higgs Boson will still exist, but the math we used to describe it will be gone. This seems so blatantly obvious that I don’t really want to spend time reading philosophy only to find out that nobody has demonstrated it to be false.
phoodoo,
How do you get from that list to “the supernatural exists”?
Are you claiming that none of those things could exist apart from a supernatural cause? If so, why?
That sounds interesting. Let’s.
OK
Not ok. Universal constants are conceptual, and they consist of numbers that have to be added to equations in order for the equations to fit some data. Since this depends on the data, there’s some possibility that these constants are not “universal.” They’re also circumscribed to whatever kind of data the equations are supposed to describe. Thus not universal in the sense that they don’t fit in every equation.
The laws of physics are equations fitted to some data to try and thus describe the phenomena related to the collected data, and, hopefully, other instances of the phenomena. So, who knows if they can change or not? Newton’s “law” of gravitation is superseded by Einstein’s equations. So, maybe the same underlying phenomena, under different circumstances, behaves differently?
OK
There’s a few things wrong here. For one, the kind of meaning you seem to refer to is in the eye of the beholder. Being the product of a capricious god (ahem, I mean, a “gracious” god), sounds meaningless to me, yet it surely sounds meaningful to you. You might fail to realize that it’s just your personal preference, but it still is your personal preference.
Now, “uncoordinated”? It cannot possibly be all uncoordinated. Otherwise we would not be able to write equations to describe some phenomena and think of it as if it were “unchanging laws,” etc. I doubt anybody could defend a position claiming that everything is “uncoordinated.”
I cannot understand this sentence. It might be the implied multiple negatives that deprived it of meaning (semantic meaning, that is).
I would posit that if Platonic ideal forms exist, their properties would be compatible with the physical world and not depend on formalism.
Aha! that is indeed the question. One that has puzzled Leonid Levin and Eugene Wigner to no end. I’ll let you make some guesses.
Exactly, so we agree. There is something else besides our own choices that determines the outcome.
Is this thing physical? If so, then, as faded_glory asks, where is it? I posit it is nowhere, thus cannot be physical.
Consequently, there is ‘something else’ and it is nowhere, thus the physical world cannot be all of reality.
Yes, you are correct. The uniform distribution does not provide a correct design inference for the CP-pulsar because it does not represent the true chance distribution.
This is not a flaw in the concept of ASC, however. It is a flaw in the application. So, this example does not disprove ASC, nor disprove its ability to provide a design inference.
Perhaps you want to argue we can never adequately account for the true chance distribution. But, that is true for any scientific theory. We can never be 100% sure about any model we come up with, so science is left with inference to the best explanation. And that means the explanation is sometimes wrong. This is not a problem with the explanatory filter or ID. This is just a fundamental limitation on empirical inference.
And, the upshot of showing the deficiency of the uniform dist. for the CP-pulsar is it shows an application of the design inference can be falsified. Thus, the design inference at least meets that requirement for scientific theories, contrary to those who say ID cannot be tested and is thus not science.
Eric:
keiths:
Eric:
In other words, you have no idea. That’s why immaterialism, whether in terms of minds/souls or of mathematical objects, cannot compete with physicalism. The interaction problem is too steep an obstacle.
Eric:
Not sure how you got that from
An earlier choice is a choice.