Dembski seems to be back online again, with a couple of articles at ENV, one in response to a challenge by Joe Felsenstein for which we have a separate thread, and one billed as a “For Dummies” summary of his latest thinking, which I attempted to precis here. He is anxious to ensure that any critic of his theory is up to date with it, suggesting that he considers that his newest thinking is not rebutted by counter-arguments to his older work. He cites two papers (here and here) he has had published, co-authored with Robert Marks, and summarises the new approach thus:
So, what is the difference between the earlier work on conservation of information and the later? The earlier work on conservation of information focused on particular events that matched particular patterns (specifications) and that could be assigned probabilities below certain cutoffs. Conservation of information in this sense was logically equivalent to the design detection apparatus that I had first laid out in my book The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998).
In the newer approach to conservation of information, the focus is not on drawing design inferences but on understanding search in general and how information facilitates successful search. The focus is therefore not so much on individual probabilities as on probability distributions and how they change as searches incorporate information. My universal probability bound of 1 in 10^150 (a perennial sticking point for Shallit and Felsenstein) therefore becomes irrelevant in the new form of conservation of information whereas in the earlier it was essential because there a certain probability threshold had to be attained before conservation of information could be said to apply. The new form is more powerful and conceptually elegant. Rather than lead to a design inference, it shows that accounting for the information required for successful search leads to a regress that only intensifies as one backtracks. It therefore suggests an ultimate source of information, which it can reasonably be argued is a designer. I explain all this in a nontechnical way in an article I posted at ENV a few months back titled “Conservation of Information Made Simple” (go here).
As far as I can see from his For Dummies version, as well as from his two published articles, he has reformulated his argument for ID thus:
Patterns that are unlikely to be found by a random search may be found by an informed search, but in that case, the information represented by the low probability of finding such a pattern by random search is now transferred to the low probability of finding the informed search strategy. Therefore, while a given search strategy may well be able to find a pattern unlikely to be found by a random search, the kind of search strategy that can find it itself commensurably improbable i.e. unlikely to be found by random search.
Therefore, even if we can explain organisms by the existence of a fitness landscape with many smooth ramps to high fitness heights, we have are left with the even greater problem of explaining how such a fitness landscape came into being from random processes, and must infer Design.
I’d be grateful if a Dembski advocate could check that I have this right, remotely if you like, but better still, come here and correct me in person!
But if I’m right, and Dembski has changed his argument from saying that organisms must be designed because they cannot be found by blind search to saying that they can be found by evolution, but evolution itself cannot be found by blind search, then I ask those who are currently persuaded by this argument to consider the critique below.
First of all, I think Dembski has managed to mislead himself by boxing himself into the “search” metaphor, without clarifying who, or what, is supposed to be doing the searching. When I am struggling to understand an argument, and unclear as to whether the laws lies in my own understanding or in the argument being made, I like to translate the argument into E prime, and see whether, firstly, still makes sense, and secondly, leaves out some crucial information (information that has been “smuggled out” of the argument, as it were :)). In A Search for A Search, Marks and Dembski write:
A search’s difficulty can be measured by its endogenous information defined as
IΩ=−log2p
where p is the probability of a success from a random query. When there is knowledge about the target location or search space structure,
Translated into E-prime (avoiding the verb to be and the passive voice), this becomes:
We can measure the difficulty of a search by its endogenous information, which we define as
IΩ=−log2p
where we represent the probability that the searcher will find the target using a random query as p. When the searcher knows the location of the target, or a way to find the location of the target, the probability of finding it will increase, and we define this increase in probability as the active information [possessed by the searcher].
See what I did there? E-prime forces the writer to specify the hidden doer of each action, and, in this case, reveals that the “active information” is that possessed by the searcher at the start of the search. But who is the searcher? And how does the information transfer take place?
Now, the searcher doesn’t need to be an Intelligent (i.e intentional) Agent. It could be a mechanical algorithm, or physical system, that results in something that is special (if not formally specified) in some way (a cool pattern, a functioning organism, a novel feature), and also something that is unlikely to just turn up (“blind search”). So in keeping with the mathiness of the paper, well denote the Searcher as S, and the special result (which could be one of many possible results that we’d consider Special) as R (I want to avoid T for Target, which I think is another siren that may lure us to the rocks instead of the deepwater channel).
So what would it actually mean for S to be in possession of Active Information that would make R more likely? Well, let’s take some concrete examples. Let’s say S is Lizzie looking for her car keys, and the Search Space is her house. If Lizzie pats every square inch of surface in her house with her eyes closed, and with no clue on which surface she might have left her keys, her probability of finding them on any given pat will be 1 divided by the number of square inches of space in her house. But if she knows she left them on the kitchen table (i.e. knows the location, or a subset of possible locations that must contain the location), or knows that if she thinks back and remembers what she did when she last came in from the car (knows how to acquire knowledge of the location), hee probability of finding them will go up considerably, in other words, 1 divided by the number of places she has to pat will be quite small.
But let’s say R is not an object, like keys, but some kind of physical pattern or configuration with some rare property, for example, a run of 500 coin tosses in which the product of the runs-of-heads is large (i.e. one of a rare and specified subset of all possible runs of 500 coin tosses), as in my thread here. We can compute (as we do in that thread) just how large IΩ is for patterns of coin tosses with a given magnitude of product-of -runs-of-heads by computing how rare those patterns are when generated by real tosses of a fair coin, and can regard R as any patterns with an IΩ value over some threshold. So what would we have to do to make R more likely? Dembski and Marks quite reasonably, say that anything we do to make R more likely will itself be something less likely than a simple coin-tosser (and coin-tossings are fairly common, therefore fairly likely). Well, we could get a human being to sit down and work out a few runs that had high IΩ values, and manually place them on the table. In which case, presumably Dembski and Marks would argue, the human “searcher”, S, would now be in possession of Information commensurate with, or greater than, the Information IΩ . Which I am happy to accept (whether such an agent is rarer than a coin-tosser, I don’t know, but probably, and in any case in this scenario we are positing something – an intelligent human being, which may itself by much less probable than say some simple physical process that by which coin-like objects regularly fall off cliffs).
But let’s now say that instead of Lizzie using her intelligence to work out a good run, and then lay it down manually, Lizzie wants to set up a system that will, all by itself, with high probablity, result in – find – a run of coin-tosses with high IΩ. To do this, she decides (as I did) to write an evolutionary algorithm, in which the starting population consists of a population of runs of 500 coin-tosses generated by a quasi-coin-tossing method (each successive coin toss independent of the previous one, with .5 probability of each being heads), i.e runs that are the result of “blind search”, but on each iteration, the members of the population of runs “reproduce”, with random mutations, and those runs with the lowest product-of-runs-of-heads are culled, leaving the higher performers in the game for the next round.
Clearly this is an informed search. Lizzie has constructed a “fitness landscape” in which runs that have more of the desired feature (high product-of-runs-of-heads) are “fitter” (more likely to breed) than ones with less of it. So we can picture this “fitness landscape” as a histogram, in which there are a great many short bars, representing runs with smallish, products-of-runs-of-heads; a few very short bars, representing runs with extremely small products-of-runs-of-heads, and a range of taller bars, with the tallest bar representing the run with the maximum possible product-of-runs-of-heads. However, that is not all she has to do. So far, the fitness landscape has no specified structure. The bars are all jumbled up, with high ones next to low ones, next to medium sized ones.
This is what the fitness “landscape” would look like if the randomly mutated offspring of each of successful run had a product-of-runs-of-heads that was unlikely to resemble that of the parent run. The fitness landscape is “rugged”, and R will remain improbable
Note that in this example, we have both a genotype – which is the run of coin-tosses itself – and a phenotype – which is the product-of-runs-of-heads. The fitness criteria only applies to the phenotype, and it turns out that in this system that quite similar-looking genotypes can have very different products-of-runs-of-heads, resulting in a very rugged fitness landscape.
This means that original Searcher, Lizzie, the Intelligent Designer, needs not only to Design a fitness function (a system in which the closer a phenotype is to R, the more likely it is to reproduce), i.e. the fitness histogram, but also something that will arrange the bars of the fitness histogram in such a way that the population of runs-of-coin-tosses is can “move” from the lower bars to the higher – make it into a smoother, less rugged, “landscape”. To do this, she must ensure that the ways in which offspring can differ genetically from their parents includes ways in which they can inherit not just the phenotype but the genotype.
And it turns out that point-mutations are not very good at doing this. So, being an Intelligent Designer, Lizzie thinks again, and adds some a different kind of mutations – she includes adding an extra coin-toss to random positions in the run, and then trimming the end to keep it the same length. Now, it turns out, offspring are much more likely to resemble their parents phenotypically as well as genotypically, and the fitness landscape histogram has arranged itself so that similar height bars tend to be adjacent to each other, and the “landscape” is quite smooth.
However, there are still deep valleys between peaks, and populations tend to get “stuck” on these local maxima – they find themselves on a high-ish histogram bar, but the only route to a yet higher bar is across a valley. In other words, a given genotype may be quite fit, but the only way its descendents can ultimately be fitter is if some of them are less fit, and with the culling of the unfit being fairly ruthless, this is a low probability event. In practice, in this example, this is because runs with lots of three-head and four-head segments are quite fit, but to convert a genotype with lots of threes and fours into much fitter one with mostly fours, by point mutation or insertion only, too often involves first breaking up some of the fours into a one and a three, which lowers the fitness.
So she thinks yet again, and now she includes snipping out pairs of segments and swapping their positions; and duplicating segments, where a segment is repeated, over-writing another segment, and deleting a segment entirely and replacing it with random heads or tails.
And lo and behold, this new system system tends to produce R much more readily (with higher probability), and not only that, the very highest possible peak is reliably achieved. This set of mutational methods has resulted n a fitness landscape in which there are at least some sets of bars in the histogram that form a series of steadily ascending steps, from the low bars to the very tallest bar of all. The peaks are high, the landscape is smooth, and the valleys are shallow.
So the take home message for me was: my successful fitness landscape, consisted of three Designed elements –
- the fitness criterion, by which fitness is defined, which is the same as defining R;
- the relationship of genotype to phenotype, which ensures that fit parents tend to have fit offspring, and makes the landscape smooth,
- the variance generation mechanisms are such that the valleys are shallow.
Now, Dembski and Marks would say, presumably, that in my final set up, with several variance-generating mechanism, and which reliably produced R, i.e. making R a high probability result, itself contains at least as much information as that represented by R patterns when R could only be generated by old-fashioned coin-tossing runs.
And we know that that Active Information came from Lizzie, an Intelligent Designer. I was the original Searcher, possessing Information as to how to find R, and I transferred that Information into my fitness landscape, which in turn became the Searcher, and which reliabley led to R.
But is an Intelligent Designer the only possible source of such information?
Let’s imagine that some future OOL researcher, let’s call her Tokstad, discovers a chemical reaction, involving molecules known to be around in early earth, and conditions also likely to be present in early earth, that results in a double chain polymer of some sort, that tends to split into two single chains under certain cyclical temperature conditions, whereupon those single chain atracts with monomers in the soup to become double chains again, but now with two identical double chain polymers where before there were one. And let’s say, moreover (as we have some clues here), that this soup also contains lipids that form into vesicles that tend to expand, become unstable, then divide, and which, moreover, it being soupy and all, enclose some of these self-replicating polymers. Let’s further suppose that the polymers don’t replicate with absolute fidelity – bits get added, chopped off, shorter chains sometimes join up to form longer chains, etc, and finally, let’s suppose that certain properties of some of these varied chains (length, constituent monomers) affect osmotic pressure differences between the vesicle and the soup, and/or the permeability of the vesicle to monomers in the ambient soup, affecting the vesicle’s chances of dividing into two, and of its enclosed polymers self replicating successfully.
It’s quite a big suppose, and possibly impossible, but not beyond the bounds of chemically plausible science fiction.
But here is the point: IF such a system emerged from a primordial soup, it would be a system in which:
- There was a fitness function (some polymer containing vesicle variants replicate more successfully than others).
- There is a link between genotype and phenotype (similar polymers have similar effects on the properties of the vesicle)
- There are several different ways in which genetic variance can arise (duplicating, adding, deleting, replacing)
In other words, we would have, potentially, a system in which is located, according to Dembski, Active Information in the form of a smooth fitness landcape, shallow valleys, and high fitness peaks representing vesicles with high IΩ (unlikely to emerge spontaneously were the chemistry to be something that did not provide these parameters).
So we have a Informed Searcher and an R, but no Lizzie, just the fitness-landscape itself, spontaneously arising from primordial chemistry. So how do we measure how much Information that Search contains? Well, that depends on how improbable the conditions that generated the components of the fitness landscape: the polymers, the vesicles, cyclical temperature changes, the chemical properties of the atoms that make up the molecules themselves, actually are. In other words: in how many, of all possible worlds might such conditions exist?
AND WE HAVE NO WAY TO CALCULATE THIS.
We do not know whether they are the result of an extraordinarily fluke (or Intelligent Design) by which, out of all possible universes, one in which this could happen was the one that eventuated, or whether this is the only possible universe, or whether an infinite number of universes eventuated, of which only those that have properties that give rise to polymer chemistsry result in intelligent life capable of asking how intelligent life itself originated.
But that’s not an argument for ID from probability and statistics, it’s an argument for ID from metaphysics.
Alternatively, if Dembsk and Marks are relying on Tokstad not discovering conditions in from which can emerge fitness landscapes in which ever-fitter self-replicators are the result, then they have backed a perfectly falsifiable horse.
But the important point is that observing effective fitness landscapes in the natural world does not, and cannot, tell us that there is an external source of Information that must have been transferred into the natural world. All it tells us is that the world that we observe has structure. There is no way of knowing whether this structure is probable or massively improbable, and therefore no way, by Dembski’s definition, of knowing whether it contains Information. It seems to me it does, but that’s because I don’t define Information as something possessed by an event with low probability, and therefore don’t attempt to infer an Intelligent Designer from data I don’t, and can’t, possess.
“Life-permitting” is not the same as “Life Producing”. IMO, it has not been shown that law + chance are sufficient explanations for the emergence of life. Because an aquarium permits fish to live doesn’t mean it generates fish.
I take that point.
Aren’t we getting close to a universal negative? Could the designer, using zero wavelength radiation make it all happen – Sure(!?). Or ‘an infinitely smart designer sets up a completely deterministic universe’ would also qualify as design. But we’ve stepped outside of science at this point.
Just as one steps outside of science when one asserts that Chance & Necessity are sufficient causes for that which they have not been so demonstrated.
Your view is that science produces certainty. Something science has never claimed and never will.
What science does do is assert that regular processes are more likely than causation by invisible geay elephants.
I have no such view about science, and if science were to claim that “regular process are more likely than causation by invisible geay elephants”, it would be incumbent upon science to demonstrate support for this claim.
WJM
A rather preposterous demand.
“I (WJM) declare that I have no position on whether process X requires Intelligence in addition to the physical forces of ‘nature'”.
“But I ( a random ‘materialist’) seriously doubt that this rather specific and empirically limited cause has the power to underpin the entire universe, or even that subset we term Life. I have been given nothing to persuade me even marginally toward the neutral position other than some guff about a priori materialistic blinkers.”.
WJM: “It is up to you to support your claim. Me, I’m neutral, so I don’t have to support anything”.
What kind of evidence would interest you?
I am equally required to support any claim I make.
Evidence that supports the claim made.
One claim implicitly made is that intelligence has the capacity to manipulate matter outside of a nervous/muscular system in order (for example) to create ‘searchable’ fitness landscapes via the fundamental constants of physics. Do you have any support for that claim?
I think you may be misinterpreting scientific claims. Science cannot claim negatives. Nobody can claim: material processes alone account for observed instances of evolution.
I gave those examples as I thought they were non-contentious – they are observed instances of evolution occurring, in real time, with no intelligent agent manipulating anything to our knowledge.
Of course we cannot rule out the possibility that a disembodied intelligence is doing something important, but we have no need to postulate one, as we can actually observe the processes of selection in action (have you read The Beak of the Finch?).
Examples? Hypothetical examples.
We observe phenomena and extrapolate. That’s how we can claim that Pluto orbits the sun, even though it hasn’t completed an orbit since discovery.
Extrapolation is not certain, but it is better than invisible entities doing unspecified things at unspecified times and places.
“Without a metric?”
This is a fundamental denial based on continued refusal on the part of ID/creationists to learn basic science; particularly physics and chemistry.
What possible metric can one show to someone who refuses to look at even the most easily observable properties of matter.
The present generation of ID advocates – as exemplified by the folks over at UD – has no knowledge of their intellectual history that is rooted in the misconceptions and misrepresentations handed to them by Henry Morris and Duane Gish.
Granville Sewell is still using the same misconceptions; and not one of the people over UD can think of a single example from chemistry or physics that demonstrates what atoms and molecules do.
Nobody in the ID/community will do even a high school level calculation that calls into question the notion that it is all “spontaneous molecular chaos” down there, as ID/creationist Guru David L. Abel asserts.
Instead, ID advocates keep “proving” that there is no possible way that atoms and molecules can do things by using tornados-in-junkyards, letters and numbers, and junkyard parts as models for atoms and molecules.
Does anybody in the ID/creationist community ever examine their “analogies” and ask themselves whether or not they are appropriate?
Early caricatures of scientific concepts by Morris and Gish were political ploys and taunts to get scientists to debate them. But the ID/creationist community has come to believe, and continues to reinforce, their own misconceptions; so it is no wonder they believe things like “there is no metric.” How could they know if they don’t learn about what it is they are criticizing?
It is not true that scientists who have followed ID/creationism don’t understand ID/creationist arguments; we understand them all too well, even better than ID/creationists do. And what we learn from that understanding is that ID/creationists are still working with the same set of misconceptions and misrepresentations generated by Morris and Gish.
ID advocates simply cannot distance themselves from these early YEC’\s whom they claim to despise. You all have exactly the same memes; memes that know nothing of science. And “philosophizing up in the air” is not a substitute for well-grounded, quantitative knowledge of the facts and evidence.
It’s true that OOL is a big ticket item not yet bought and paid for.
There are two or three reasons for provisionally accepting abiogenesis.
One is that it’s the only researchable game in town. Invisible gray elephants cant be the subject of research.
Another is that research makes slow but continuous progress on OOL.
Another is that historically, the assumption of regular processes has paid off, even when it has taken centuries to find regularities — as with theory of gravity.
I will concede that my bias toward methodological materialism is a bias. I’m biased toward methods that get results. I’m quite willing to accept results from any method that works.
I simply disagree with this, William. I do not think it is “incumbent upon science” to demonstrate that the apparent causal chain is more likely than some non-apparently causal chain – not only that, but not even possible with current scientific methodology. It would be like asking science to demonstrate that the earth being billion years old is more likely than it having been created last Thursday, with the appearance of age. Science cannot falsify unfalsifiable alternatives.
And a disembodied causal Intelligence is simply not falsifiable. Nor verifiable.
From your extensive post above, William, you seem to be conceding that given the reality of physics and chemistry that we know, biological evolution is a reasonable explanation for the current patterns of life. You’re simply stepping back a bit, and saying “B-b-but Intelligent Design created the substrate!”
Since evolutionary theory has never made any sort of claims about the origin of the substrate, only about the process of life’s development upon that substrate, it would seem the debate about evolution is over as far as you are concerned. If you want to start a new discussion about the Big Bang and the origin of the Universe, that’s fine. But the biology part seems to be something you’ve given up on.
BTW, iteration and modification are not searches, they are simply repetition with variation. Variation is not something you have to search for, it’s unavoidable. Repetition likewise. Life doesn’t search for targets, it stumbles into unseen holes.
I don’t understand why WJM says the search debt is not paid. The search debt is paid by energy and energy gradients. Living things ether eat other living things or they convert sunlight (or the equivalent) into food.
My problem with “Searching for a search” is more basic than yours, Lizzy: You are arguing that it is not applicable to biology, while I say that it doesn’t even work in the mathematical setting which he has chosen himself: Dembski’s and Mark’s “The Search for a Search”: Trying to work out one of their examples.
llanitedave said: “From your extensive post above, William, you seem to be conceding that given the reality of physics and chemistry that we know, biological evolution is a reasonable explanation for the current patterns of life.”
Nope.
It’s really interesting how you guys almost to a man and almost always fail to recognize and process certain conventions of discussion and debate, such as when one is speaking from his opponent’s hypothetical perspective.
Supposing that such information is in the chemistry, or is in the landscape, for the sake of a further argument to show how even that doesn’t relieve you of the search price, is not conceding that such information is present or that such a landscape exists.
Elizabeth said: “I simply disagree with this, William. I do not think it is “incumbent upon science” to demonstrate that the apparent causal chain is more likely than some non-apparently causal chain – not only that, but not even possible with current scientific methodology”
(1) Apparent to whom?
(2) If it is not possible to vet whether or not necessity & chance are sufficient categorical causes for a thing, one shouldn’t claim they are sufficient categorical causes for a thing.
William J. Murray,
Murray:
It’s really interesting how you guys almost to a man and almost always fail to recognize and process certain conventions of discussion and debate…
It’s really interesting how you lump one person who didn’t follow your word salad with everybody on this site in a derogatory manner. Kindly consider, for a moment, that your discourse is not always as clear as you think it is.
Who is claiming they are sufficient? Why would anyone make such a claim about unfinished and open-ended research?
However, based on what we know and can observe, there is no reason to stop research. There has been, and continues to be, steady progress. “Apparent” in the context of research on evolution and the origins of life means that all the evidence points in the same direction. Why not follow the arrow and see if we can figure it out?
Is that of no interest to you?
“Sufficiency” is a concept better applied to mathematics and logic, not to open-ended and ongoing research making steady progress in areas that are still opening up to our investigations. It’s labor intensive and takes time; so what?
Are you claiming that there is no information in chemistry or the environment relevant to the evolution of life?
Lizzie,
I said: “If by “evolution” you mean “evolution unguided by intelligence”, no, that has never been shown to be possible. It has only been assumed to be the case.”
You said: “What about the Galapagos finches? Or the nylon-eating bacteria? Or the peppered moths?”
Unless you are claiming that the evolutionary throughput characterized by the Galapagos finches, nylon-eating bacteria, or peppered moths are examples a sufficient evolutionary explanation sans intelligence, you have no reason to offer them up in response to my post. That you then say you thought them “non-contentious” examples of the sufficiency of necessity & chance as causal categories again is a de facto claim that necessity & chance (evolution without intelligence) is a sufficient explanation.
If you are going to claim that Galapagos Finches et al are examples of the sufficiency of necessity and chance to generate such features, then I suggest you support y our claim – or if not, withdraw it.
Being able to describe the physical events of A through Z without referring to intelligence doesn’t mean intelligence was not required to get to Z. Because you don’t notice an intelligent agency at work doesn’t mean intelligence was not required to get the job done.
Because you don’t notice an intelligent agency at work doesn’t give you the reasonable capacity to assert that the product can be achieved without intelligence. You are free to describe physical processes; you are not free (in a fair debate) to characterize those processes as unintelligent unless you can substantiate that characterization beyond “well, I didn’t notice anything I thought was intelligent affecting the outcome”.
No.
Mike Elzinga asks: “Who is claiming they are sufficient?”
Elizabeth. She offered up Galapagos Finches et al as supposedly uncontested examples of the sufficiency of unintelligent causal explanations for generating such evolutionary throughput.
Mike Elzinga says: ” “Apparent” in the context of research on evolution and the origins of life means that all the evidence points in the same direction.”
What direction is that?
Mike Elzinga asks: ” It’s labor intensive and takes time; so what?”
So, one shouldn’t make claims they don’t have the time or available labor to support.
What is it with “sufficiency” in your mind? Who uses “sufficiency” as a justification for doing research?
Who uses “sufficiency” in any kind of exploration?
And why are researchers obligated to place any high priority on “intelligence” as a cause when all research and evidence to date don’t require it?
Given the history of scientific research, the necessity of teleological explanations and the intervention of “deities” continue to diminish.
If they are not needed, why clutter up our understanding with unexplainable willfulness by “intelligences” about which sectarian exegetical wrangling always diverges?
You don’t hide from your sectarian motives by not talking about deities. The history of ID/creationism is crystal clear. Even if the socio/political history wasn’t there, we can identify the connections by its inherited memes and misconceptions.
I wonder if an ID proponent who was actually interested in discourse might consider the space of all ‘possible snowflakes’, and its relation to the ‘information’ present in a given volume of water vapour?
A litre of water vapour contains enough ‘information’ to generate every snowflake that ever existed or ever will or could exist – not all at once, of course. We are assured that every snowflake that ever existed was unique (though how would one verify such a claim 😕 …), and yet, simply by allowing water vapour to freeze in certain ‘natural’ conditions (though how could we ever verify their naturalness :?), we know that trilateral symmetry will emerge, repeatedly and ad infinitum (though how could we …).
Is there any way to test a claim that the information for each separate snowflake – forming, in toto, a rugged landscape, non-navigable but stuffed with ‘targets’ – is present in a litre of water vapour? Obviously there is a molecule in there with a tendency towards hexagonal structure on cooling, entirely derivable from its baryonic composition and the interplay of its orbiting fermions (perhaps the freezing nucleus has a part to play) … but is there something else in there – ‘information’?
I am well aware that life is not crystalline, but if we are looking to tease out ‘information’ as a quality separate from matter/energy, but associated with it, this thought experiment may help illustrate the fundamental difficulty of that view. Or not.
“But, Isaac, I don’t see any “gravity”. We’ve never noticed any such invisible chains keeping objects attached to the earth. Why should we consider something that cannot even be seen? Where is gravity located? Where did it come from?
You’re suggesting spooky action at a distance, Isaac. We have no reason to think such a thing exists. Why should we look for the effects of something we cannot even see interacting with other things?”
You want to use 17th century thinking as an argument? Is that where your “scientific” understanding lies?
Do you know what a field is in physics? Do you know how it has been made an objective, quantitative concept?
Mike Elzinga asks: “Who uses “sufficiency” in any kind of exploration?”
Are the gravitational forces from known local objects a sufficient explanation for the wobble of a star or planet? If not, then maybe there is another, unseen local object. Let’s investigate!
Are natural causes a sufficient explanation for the death of this person? If not, then we have a crime to solve!
Are the given reasons sufficient to explain the behavior of a person? If not, perhaps they are lying or leaving something out.
Are the load bearing beams of a ceiling sufficient to hold the weight of another story? If not, then we must fortify the beams.
Is the amount of water and sodium intake of patient X sufficient for maintaining good health? If not, then perhaps we should increase their intake.
Is there a sufficient amount of chemical X to provide a sufficient degree of reaction Y to acquire the necessary quantity of the resulting force/state?
The question of and problem of supplying or finding sufficient cause permeates the entire world of human endeavor. Well, at least most all rational human endeavor. I would guess that irrational people are relatively unconcerned with sufficient cause.
A poor analogy. Clearly, the interaction of matter with gravity can be observed routinely. It is not an undetectable phenomenon. (Nor, of course, is basic, common-or-garden, brain-based ‘intelligence’).
Allan Miller can see gravity. Even superman can’t do that.
Why are you accusing researchers of doing things they don’t do?
Do you really think scientists are as naive as you imply?
Come on William; your lack of understanding of ontological and epistemological issues is beginning to show.
Can you articulate an objective, quantifiable procedure that means “observe” in the case of, say, a gravitational field?
You are just being silly. The interaction can be observed, even if the field cannot (because it does not produce photons).
“Intelligence” means God (Since 1987).
Yes, Alan. We infer that gravity is affecting matter because of the effects. We don’t actually see gravity, now do we? We must infer that gravity (whatever it is – gravitons? curved space-time?) is in play by the behavior of material phenomena. IOW, if large amounts of matter clump up in space and form a sphere, we didn’t actually see gravity – for all our intents and purposes, it is a disembodied spirit committing spooky action at a distance. We see outcomes of material sequences and infer that gravity is a necessary part of any sufficient explanation for that behavior.
Now, I can describe the sequence of material events without referring to gravity at all. I could claim that it’s not statistically impossible for matter to clump up into spheroids in space on it’s own by chance. And to keep together by chance. And to rotate around suns in a pattern by chance. Given enough universes, anything is possible, right?
I’d continue, but if you haven’t gotten the point by now, there’s really no use.
Your discussion of the undiscovered planet supports the continued search for regular phenomena. Correct me if I misunderstand, but my understanding of intelligence is that it is irregular or capricious.
When confronted with an orbital anomaly, one could invoke established formulas and predict a yet unseen object, or one could attribute the perturbation to invisible elephants.
The same reasoning applies to biology. One can extrapolate known processes across gaps, or one could fill the gaps with imagined entities. I’m not aware of any instance in the history of science when a hypothesis involving angels or the like was profitable.
I think I get your point – that we can infer Intelligence because of the way matter is organised Intelligently.
Our point, if I can speak collectively for the unpersuaded here, is that the way matter is organised can be accounted for without postulating a disembodied Intelligence pushing it around. Indeed, gravity, and the other fundamental forces, do a pretty good job.
Of course, you could argue that those fundamental forces, or their relationships, had to be designed, in order to produce the organisation that we see – and many do (Fine-tuning argument for God). But that would be a different argument!
But apparently you are still missing the point.
Can you articulate a procedure that will objectively and quantitatively map out a gravitational field?
And after you have done that, can you articulate a procedure that will objectively and quantitatively map out your “intelligence field;” and more to the point, can you tell us how to separate the effects of intelligence from the effects of gravitation (or electromagnetism, etc.)?
How far away from a source of “intelligent intervention” does matter have to be in order for the effect to vanish? Can you put a piece paper between the matter and the source of intelligence and diminish the effect?
Do two intelligence sources attract or repel? How would you show that?
No. No. No. Einstein not Newton!
You know, matter curves space, matter moves through (the curved) space… There is no spooky action at a distance.
What we physically see also has nothing to do with action at a distance, because we don’t physically see large bodies having an effect. We don’t see the theory.
As Laplace said to Napoleon.
We can’t prove that every time an arrow is fired that God isn’t holding onto the shaft and flying in a parabola…
WJM said; If you are going to claim that Galapagos Finches et al are examples of the sufficiency of necessity and chance to generate such features, then I suggest you support y our claim – or if not, withdraw it.
Are you going to demand that UD retract their claim, and if not, why?
Frequently raised but weak arguments against Intelligent Design
ID proponents acknowledge that Darwinian mechanisms operate within a limited scope (changes in beak sizes among finches as a result of environmental pressures; development of resistance to antibiotics by certain bacteria). But they dispute that the mechanism responsible for these micro-evolutionary changes is also responsible for macro-evolutionary changes. In other words, ID proponents agree that Darwinian processes can change the size of finch beaks across generations, but they dispute that those processes are solely responsible for the existence of finches, or birds or dinosaurs, or land-animals in the first place.
The principle of supporting a claim stands for anyone making such a claim, whether one is pro or anti ID.
Elizabeth said: “Our point, if I can speak collectively for the unpersuaded here, is that the way matter is organised can be accounted for without postulating a disembodied Intelligence pushing it around. Indeed, gravity, and the other fundamental forces, do a pretty good job.”
First, I didn’t claim that any intelligence was “disembodied”, so you can stop pitching that red herring.
Second, the only way to support that any particular phenomena can be **accounted for** without recourse to intelligence is if there is a metric available that can ascertain the power of categorically unintelligent processes (chance and necessity) to generate the phenomena in question.
Since you and the others you speak for insist that there is no such metric, then your claim that such formations of matter “can be accounted for” without requiring intelligent input is nothing but bald assertion. Without a determining metric, you simply have no way of vetting chance and necessity as sufficient.
You assume it. Nothing more.
Can you see curved space?
Elizabeth said: “I think I get your point – that we can infer Intelligence because of the way matter is organised Intelligently.”
The only way to reach a conclusion that intelligence is involved (in any case) is to infer it by the way matter is being, or has been, “pushed around”. You cannot see intelligence – not even when you’re looking at a human being. You can’t see gravity, not even when you’re pitching a rock off of a cliff. All you can see are the effects of what we call intelligence or gravity on material phenomena.