29th Oct: I have offered a response to Gpuccio’s challenge below.
I think this is worth a new post.
Gpuccio has issued a challenge here and here. I have repeated the essential text below. Others may wish to try it and/or seek their own clarifications. Could be interesting. Something tells me that it is not going to end up in a clear cut result. But it may clarify the deeply confusing world of dFSCI.
Challenge:
Give me any number of strings of which you know for certain the origin. I will assess dFSCI in my way. If I give you a false positive, I lose. I will accept strings of a predetermined length (we can decide), so that at least the search space is fixed.
Conditions:
a) I would say binary strings of 500bits. Or language strings of 150 characters. Or decimal strings of 150 digits. Something like that. Even a mix of them would be fine.
No problem with that.
b) I will literally apply my procedure. If I cannot easily see any function for the string, I will not go on in the evaluation, and I will not infer design. If you, or any other, wants to submit strings whose function you know, you are free to tell me what the function is, and I will evaluate it thoroughly.
That’s OK. I will supply the function in each case. I note that when I tried to define function precisely you said that the function can be anything the observer wishes provided it is objectively defined, so, for example, “adds up to 1000” would be a function. So I don’t think that’s going to be an issue!
c) I will be cautious, and I will not infer design if I have doubts about any of the points in the procedure.
I am not happy with this. If the string meets the criteria for dFSCI you should be able to able to infer design. You can’t pick and choose when to apply it. At the very least you must prove that the string does not have dFSCI if you are going to avoid inferring design.
d) Ah, and please don’t submit strings outputted by an algorithm, unless you are ready to consider them as designed if the algorithm is more than 150 bits long. We should anyway agree, before we start, on which type of system and what time span we are testing.
I don’t understand this – a necessity system for generating digital strings can always be expressed as an algorithm e.g Fibonacci series. Otherwise it is just a copy of the string. Also it is not clear how to define how many bits long an algorithm is. Maybe it will suffice if I confine myself to algorithms that can be expressed mathematically in less than 20 symbols?
And anyway, I am afraid we have to wait next week for the test. My time is almost finished.
That’s OK. I need time to think anyway. But also I need to get your clarification on b,c and d.
The confusion was a result of attempting to use your definitions, which are very ambiguous.
“Presenter” is unambiguous since it is has one unqualified use and that is to say, “This is what the data looks like”.
“Generator” also has one unqualified use, and that is, “This is what decided the informational content of the data.”
Gpuccio 370
I making a different challenge. You have repeatedly referred to the many, many times that the dFSCI/design link has been proven. I am challenging you to describe one of those times outside the unreal context of Noddy challenges on blogs put together or selected by people whose motivation you can easily guess. Remember how you defined the test: there must be someone who does not know the origin who detects FSCI and then later finds out the origin.
As far as the other challenge is concerned. I thought I had met it but your are quite creative in thinking of reasons why a string has not got dFSCI. It is easy to get 100% specificity if there are no positives. I am little tired of that game. That’s why I want to hear about all these real world examples!
Gpuccio 372
Yes I am sorry – I misremembered what happened and was too lazy to look back and check. But this example beautifully illustrates the pointlessness of these Noddy examples. You knew it was source code that performed a very specific function. You knew that Mung was an ID proponent who would not struggle very hard to think of natural processes that might produce strings with unusual functions. You didn’t need to establish dFSCI to infer it was designed! Show me how dFSCI works when we are not playing games. Actually more to the point – show me how it improves on Bayesian inference. After all I am not saying we can’t detect design.
But we have empirical evidence on both our sites where your terms have caused confusion!
Why would you even consider continuing to use terms in a way that confuses not only me but others you have been trying to have a debate with?
If it is important to you to have people understand your points, listen to their feedback about your communication methods, especially in a case where their mother tongue might be your second language.
If your intention instead is to confuse those you are trying to have a debate with, then continue the way you have been.
Gpuccio
I did. My first three strings were a mixture of designed and naturally produced. You couldn’t tell which was which. You still can’t.
By referring to the activities as games I don’t mean they are silly but they are different because people have specific motives. But more to the point – you repeatedly said before we embarked on this that there were many, many cases of dFSCI which have all proved to be designed. When challenged you seem to try any other response than describing a single one.
It’s not a case of being kind or even emotional, it’s a case of respecting the other party enough to make an attempt to clarify what you are actually trying to say.
If you were teaching something to a child and they said they didn’t understand you, would you just keep repeating yourself instead of adapting yourself to your listener?
ID is doomed to fail at the start if your side claims arrogance as an effective communication method.
Both you and Upright BiPed constantly reject clarification of your arguments insisting our side is just trying to win a debate on semantics.
If instead you just answered questions as asked, you would actually be typing less and putting the pressure on our side to answer your clarified position.
Our side will win by default if another Dover comes up simply because you will refuse to clarify anything requested by the other side of the lawsuit.
I’ve just made a clear prediction that any onlooker will see come true.
This explains a lot.
OMG, the irony of choosing that title! 🙂
If one does not share someone else’s misgivings about a specific X, Y or Z, one is therefore not allowed to term oneself ‘skeptical’ in the general sense? “If you were really skeptical, you’d think exactly like me!”
People generally more readily accept ideas that are coherent and have been tested and accepted by the ‘expert consensus’, but are skeptical over notions advanced by laymen. The reasons should be obvious. But that acceptance is always provisional, and the consensus is not always complete. Many scientists disagree on junk DNA, say, or the hominid tree, and many historical controversies have rumbled on for decades before the conclusive experiments broke the deadlock.
The essence of science is skepticism. Every hypothesis is subjected, frequently by its own proponent, to a battery of logical and empirical investigation to see if it stands up. Every lunchtime research seminar, every paper submitted is subjected to similar, often vigorously dispensed skepticism.
But there comes a point at which that old ‘provisional assent’ thing comes into play. I’m not skeptical about evolution – that a process of inheritance with mutation leads inexorably to continual change is about as incontrovertible an idea as I can think of, mathematically, empirically and computationally demonstrable. Whether that mechanism is enough to explain modern forms and their diversity is slightly less clear-cut – but I think it is. And in the absence of a better mechanism (and some magic can-do-anything entity out of some fairy story is not a ‘better mechanism’) then I’m afraid I’m far more skeptical about supposed ‘challenges’ to evolution than I am about the ‘mainstream’.
If the challengers did not do such a piss-poor job of articulating their challenges, spending less time playing word-games, bluffing and whining about the ‘rules’ and ‘a priori materialism’ and cherry-picking results they believe (generally wrongly) make the ‘mainstream’ look weak, and more time
1) properly understanding the position they are trying to attack
2) actually coming up with something coherent in favour of their own hypothesis
then they might get somewhere. Till then, I remain skeptical.
Gpuccio 379
me:
Gpuccio
I think that rather makes my point! Any other response rather than describe a single one.
Incidentally none of the examples you offer have dFSCI as I understand your rules.
1) You have failed to define the function for any of them.
2) I know the origin of the first one – so that is no good. Remember you said it would not be necessary to imagine I didn’t know the origin.
3) The second could have a natural or a designed origin and may or may not be complex as it could be an encrypted version of a naturally generated string.
4) The third can easily be created by a natural mechanism.
What about this?
People are trying to understand your points, because we need a good understanding of exactly what you are trying to say, in order to generate a proper response.
Why would you bother to formulate your “dFSCI” argument if your only intention was for it to be accepted by those who already share your convictions?
Clearly they don’t need convincing, we do.
The same goes for Upright BiPed and his semiotic theory of ID.
The arguments are clearly not for your side, they’re directed at us.
Do you think Dembski writes his books for those people that already share his view?
If your terms are vague to the very audience you are trying to reach, why would you continue with them?
You have might a false negative if you decide the part you cannot read from a human point of view is not designed.
As an example, it might be the header for the communications packet that ensured the data payload was properly received by a slave terminal.
Suspiciously, the bottom unreadable portion could be a trailer for this packet and/or the header for the next one.
Even worse is the fact that you have a false positive here for any data string you handle in this manner, since the content of the string was not “specified” by me for you to receive, it was “specific” only to you, which means you painted a target around the arrow.
Since I had no intention of conveying that “specific” message to you, it fails the ‘S’ portion of “dFSCI”.
As an example, you could have gotten:
And then:
That would be like the “intelligent designer” assembling portions of DNA out of order and yet expecting that “string” to be functional.
At this point it may probably not be “functional” as well as being not “specifically” intended.
We are really discussing ID as it applies to biology and the sonnets are analogies.
I can live with Shakespeare out of order, but not my DNA.
But then you have failed a design connection!
The whole point of “designing” something is to get the result you intend.
If you don’t get the result you intend, your design has failed to meet its specified functionality.
If you’re saying a designer would accept a result that exists in a “set of results”, then any improbability assigned to a “target” in a “search space”, drops drastically.
If the “intelligent designer” of life is willing to accept one of a number of “configurations” for his “designs”, then Behe, kairosfocus and Dembski can no longer use the improbability argument.
You simply must know your target in advance for the “design” argument to work.
No, what you have done is make a “functional description”, not a “functional specification”.
As an example, if someone asks kairosfocus to look at an electronic circuit and find out what it does, he could perform tests and then render his description of how it operates.
If the builder of the board then disagrees and quotes his “functional specification” as stating a completely different functionality, KF gets to say, your “specification” has not been met.
What KF cannot do, is proclaim that what he has observed is the “functional specification”, as clearly he had no way of knowing what was actually intended.
A design that has an unintended result, has not been “specified”.
Our problems with gpuccio are mainly in trying to understand what he means.
At one point it seemed that gpuccio, Joe and I agreed that “dFSCI” was not dependent on its origin. Soon after that, Joe and I both seemed to think that gpuccio had made statements to the effect that in certain cases, “dFSCI” was dependent on its origin.
Further on I found out that gpuccio didn’t mean origin of the string as much as he meant the “content” of the string, but he doesn’t use terms as I understand them.
It’s the same sort of confusion with Upright BiPed’s use of “arbitrary”.
Using the term “materially arbitrary” however, is as clear as using the term “aggressively passive”.
Please don’t anyone ask me to clarify what the word “passive” means as you could easily Google it and get a clear definition. 🙂
Allright.
Imagine a pool of 1000 text strings you could choose from.
Half of the strings are proper English sentences and the other half are random nonsense.
The odds of my randomly sending you a valid text string is 1 in 2 but the odds of my sending you any “specific” message from that pool is one 1 in a 1000.
Now let’s apply it to biological “design”.
If I as the “intelligent designer”, have a pool of “genetic code” that contains the “information” to make corn bug resistant and also the code to make it 12′ tall, and my intention is to make the corn bug resistant, I must send you that “specific” code.
An IDist cannot in this case, look at a field of 12′ tall corn and say, “There is no way corn can so quickly change from being 8′ tall to being 12′ tall without being “designed” that way.
As the “intelligent designer”, I would have failed in this case as the “design” I intended, clearly did not get into the organism.
That is the whole point of these discussions, that ID is a “theory of intent”, and should not accept “random variation” as acceptable evidence of “design”, which is what would have happened in this case.
Despite the facts that the strings themselves qualify as “dFSCI”, you cannot claim “design” unless you know what the designer’s intentions were.
Joe, please help.
Yes, this comment has confused me again, and this time, I would like to ask Joe to look at it and explain it to me, because again you have told me something I did not expect based on all your previous comments.
I thought I understood you, but I don’t.
Joe, does this make sense?
ID is based on 100% intent on the part of the designer.
It can be no other way if ID is claiming that “random” changes cannot navigate a search space and find informational configurations that result in the diversity of life as we see it.
ID’s claim of strength relies on the clear focused determination of an “intelligent designer” to clearly “design” “biological information”.
Regardless of why an “intelligent designer” would involve himself in “biological design”, ID clearly promotes his involvement as being necessary to overcome search space improbabilities.
If the “intelligent designer” accepts randomness as an element of design, why can’t IDists?
If the “intelligent designer” does not accept randomness as an element of design, then he must be very specific in intent.
Just to be “clear”, a “method” can be as short as 16 bits. 🙂
What do you mean “so”?
You claimed it would take a lot more.
Like this: Memory[x] = 0xF2; Memory[x+1] = 0xAE;
Those 16 bits are the machine code for “REPNE scansb” for an x86 CPU which will search through sequential memory, i.e. a “string”, until a match is found.
I have “defined” a search “method” that takes only 16 bits to perform a very specific function.
I would not do a simulation at the programming language, i.e. source code level, it would be done with real functional object code which would be significantly below 500 bits for simple “methods”.
As an example, the function of ‘XOR’ing two registers takes one byte (8 bits), in most micros.
Strings of instructions could be chained together into “objects”.
Clearly, this is an analogy to biological function, not an equivalence.
You keep misunderstanding that computer programming languages as seen by the programmer do not exist in text format at execution time.
Even interpreters do not at run-time, execute ascii text, but rather tokens like the p-Code used by the old Sage computers, so claiming 80 bits of complexity for 10 characters is misleading as the tokenized executable code might be smaller or larger.
For instance, the “return’ command in “C” does not necessarily generate any more code than typing “ret” in an assembler language.
The point is, “methods” can be arrived at below the UPB limit of 500 bits, below 150 bits and below 16 bits.
The improbability argument does not apply to “computer” structures any more than it does to biology.
The quote marks mean that the “object” I am building is not a one-to-one equivalent of what is required for objects as seen from the source-code level by a programmer.
My “objects” would be more equivalent to a string of DNA followed by a “stop codon” but they would still be structures of “methods”.
Really?
Make sense of this.
That is pseudocode meant to illustrate that memory loc [x] will contain the byte F2 and the next sequential byte will contain AE.
If you do a memory dump or look at the memory with an ICE you will see the word, F2AE in memory, which is the machine code for “REPNE scansb”, a very powerful instruction for 16 bits.
If you set the program counter to x, it will directly execute that instruction.
Sigh. 🙂
You have NOT shown an XOR of two registers but rather one reg with the data at memory location 12H.
Most micros encode “reg|reg” operations in one byte, i.e. 8 bits, while the x86 takes two.
The whole point of this was to show how few bits are needed for functionality and that the UPB is not an issue that would in any way prohibit it.
I thought using a computer analogy with you might work but you simply don’t have anywhere close to the low-level CPU background of someone like kairosfocus, which would be needed to be able to understand the analogy.
Your attempts at computer analogies fail badly. Do NOT try again. 🙂
BINGO!
“dFSCI” is not a tool that is useful for differentiating “all at once design” from “a bit at a time” evolution.
0 if by land; 1 if by sea; a single bit can make history.
Some things dFSCI does not do:
1. It does not measure how many bits or sequence characters have been modified from a non-functional starting state.
2. It says nothing about the history of the sequence.
3. It says nothing about the cause of the history.
4. It says nothing about neighboring sequences or the possibility of incremental paths.
When we take the trouble (of which there is a lot) to test every possible one step variation on a functional sequence, we find that most point mutations have no effect at all. Or at least that is the finding of recent research. What does that say about needles and haystacks?
Yes, and a single bit at the other end can put you into a completely different search space! 🙂
In biology, the replication of the “information” allows subsequent generations to inherit the “functionality” of their parents.
Duplication of any portion “information” or the “addition” due to combination, causes an increase in the length of the “information”.
This extra “information” doesn’t need to do anything in order to be passed on to the next generations.
At some point, a single bit change in that added “information” can “activate” that added “information” and cause a sudden “increase” or change in functionality.
As kairosfocus has hinted many times, replication is the key to sudden growth in information and functionality.
You also have to understand that physics/structure plays an important role in preserving certain constructions from change.
It is the physics and configuration of certain circuits in electronics that preserves “information” in the sense that once they “turn on”, you lose the ability to turn them off until you “kill” the circuit by turning off the power.
Tell KF I mentioned “latching”. 🙂
Mung,
Mung, is gpuccio right?
You are not surprised because you don’t know any better!
You should seek kairosfocus’s help to understand those things that your “Sesame Street” computer course didn’t prepare you for. 🙂
Wow Mung, you’ve become a very effective critic of gpuccio’s “dFSCI” theory.
I didn’t know you were on our side! 🙂
You’ve defined “information” as being arbitrary.
Gpuccio’s challenge still stands. No one here has even come close to a refutation.
Mung,
Or relish?
Gpuccio’s challenge still stands. No one here has even come close to a refutation.
You said that already. What’s to refute? He claimed to have a method to determine design for strings. I don’t see anyone outside UD buying it, and I haven’t seen him coming up with the goods.
Mung,
This is where gpuccio failed, by withholding a declaration of “design” based not on the format of the string, but rather where it came from.
Firstly, a string either has “dFSCI” or it doesn’t.
Based on that, “design” must be true or false.
Following that, if a string that appears to have “dFSCI” is found to be the result of non-design, “dFSCI” is not an indicator of design.
Refuting the claim that the definition of dFSCI is circular.
Yes, my position on “dFSCI” is none circular, and gpuccios’s is circular!
gpuccio will not grant that a string has “dFSCI” depending on how it came to be.
According to gpuccio, if that how is due to design, “dFSCI” is an indicator of design.
Do you agree with this statement?
Toronto:
So what is your definition of dFSCI, how does it differ from gpuccio’s definition of dFSCI, and why is your definition not circular while his is circular?
I would not say that dFSCI is therefore not an indicator of design. I would say that the inference to design is weakened according to the proportion in which such strings are observed empirically to be the product of unintelligent causes.
no response?
When you say something new, perhaps. What you ask in this comment is what has been discussed at great length here already.
The problem you (and all other ID proponents have) is that you fail to realise that the onus is on you to deal with the points raised with regard to (in this example) dFSCI.
You are asking Tornoto what *his* definition of dFSCI is? Bizzare.
Perhaps you should read the entire thread again…..