I repeat my invitation to Dr. Winston Ewert to join us here for discussion of several questions I raised. It helps immensely to display mathematical formulas, rather than talk about them vaguely. However, he has replied at Uncommon Descent, where that is impossible. I’m genuinely astonished to see:
Active information per query is defined to be the active information divided by the number of queries used to extract that information. We have commonly used the quantity of average active information per mean query which is the active information divided by the expected number of queries required to extract the information. English claims that the active information per query “seems unrelated to active information” but since the active information per query is simply the active information divided, its rather odd to claim they are unrelated.
In “Active Information in Metabiology” (2013), Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks define active information per mean query as
![\[I_\boxplus = \frac{I_\Omega}{\overline{Q}},\]](http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/wp-content/ql-cache/quicklatex.com-a500251e950f6ff824cc6a0a8ef3cf51_l3.png "Rendered by QuickLaTeX.com")
where 
and 
denote, respectively, the endogenous information and the mean number of “queries” a “search” requires to “hit the target.” (I’ve corrected a typo in Equation 6.) Clearly, endogenous information, not active information, is divided by the mean number of queries.
What am I missing, Dr. Ewert?
To head off trivial munging, I’ll note that
which appears in Equation 6, is undefined. Obviously the lowercase 
was supposed to be uppercase 
.
By all signs it looks like Ewert was only waving a slice of beef in front of y’all’s noses, but never meant to give it to you.
🙁
To the contrary, I offered to serve up the beef with a smile. Dr. Ewert and his colleagues can see from my questions why I have no problem being uncharacteristically polite. The math is on my side, not theirs.
The provably correct answer to my first question indicates that ID theory is self-contradictory. That is, active information differs from negative specified complexity by an additive constant. If ID theorists don’t get what they want from one of the measures, they can simply switch to the other. Dr. Ewert says:
I find it “rather odd,” to use his term, that they wouldn’t do so when asked outright about it.
The correct answer to my second question indicates that the studies of “active information” (which is not information) in computational evolution and metabiology do not even address active information. The “conservation of information” theorem applies to “active information” (still not information), not to endogenous information per average number of queries. The talk about “conservation of information” in the studies is not warranted by the mathematics.
I’m having trouble working up a head of steam to go into this further. Frankly, I don’t see much interest here in anything that lends itself to proof, rather than recreational disputation. DiEb commented at UD on the preoccupation with Luftschloss. Babelfish knows the idiom. It’s nothing to do with beef.
This is what I meant, sort of, when I said “beef”. You are replying to Ewert and carefully refuting him as if his claims were beef. But Ewert is not going to answer to your refutation in any shape or form, because it was never his intention to make it about beef, only give an appearance of it to certain onlookers.
By the way, Luftschloss can be amazing. Remember the very last shot of Disney’s Snow White?
No, I didn’t. LOL.
The bit of piety prior to the resurrection is fun.