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.
What’s the obsession with “see”? Of course you can measure the curvature of space. It has measurable attributes. Unlike designers.
If some ID advocate comes up with some sttributes of the designer — something equivalent to the curvature of space, something that differentiates the designer from the process of evolution — then ID could be conidered science.
You cannot possibly be that dense. If your purported intelligence is not disembodied, then where in the observable universe is the “embodiement”? What’s your excuse for trying to weasel out of habeas corpus for your intelligencer’s body?
Of course, like most if not all IDists, you contradict yourself almost every time you talk, depending on which question you’re trying to deflect. Here you contradict yourself with your very next reply:
So here you are claiming that intelligence is indeed a disembodied phenomenon. Something that cannot be seen, or directly perceived in any way because it has no substance, but which like gravity we deduce from its “effects … on material phenomena”
Make up your mind. Get your story straight. Your purported intelligence is either “embodied” or “disembodied”, Choose one or the other and stop trying to weasel out of it.
William J. Murray,
William, if you only accept things you can see, then you have no basis for accepting Newton’s theory of gravity either. To avoid hypocrisy, you should extend your radical skepticism to ID (the Designer is unseen) and indeed the divine.
As much as I’d like there to be one more atheist in the world, I’d rather you learnt the slightest thing about science. We would not have the wonders that surround us (and that we type on) if science was a study of things only seen with the eyes.
If on the other hand, you accept the validity of inference, your reply “can we see curved space?” is a non sequitur.
Either way, you can consign to the dustbin talk of “spooky action at a distance” in relation to gravity. Glad to have helped.
Great. Then you’ll happily link us to your comment at UD where you insist to your friends StephenB, GPuccio, & Kairosfocus that they must support their specific claim that:
Since that is the exact same claim we make, without what you consider sufficient support {which results in your repeatedly lecturing us about “orinciple of supporting claims”} you should avoid causing us to see you as a hypocrite when you fail to lecture your friends for the exact same offense.
Where is your lecture to them for their “unsupported claim” about Darwinian processes re finch beaks? Where indeed.
It seems that ID has moved, not just beyond the point where it can be studied by earthly science, but beyond the point where the English language cannot describe its key aspects.
Intelligence (or The Intelligence) is neither “embodied” nor “disembodied”. (I’m not sure how that comports with the rules of right reason promoted at UD)
Elsewhere on this very forum, Gregory insists that there is some descriptor other than “non-natural”, or “supernatural” pertaining to that which is not “natural”. Unfortunately, he omits to tell us what it is.
Dave Hook makes the same mistake so many other of his ilk here make, which I’ve already commented upon. He seems incapable of understanding when one is using the debate technique of arguing from your opponent’s perspective when he says:
“William, if you only accept things you can see, then you have no basis for accepting Newton’s theory of gravity either. To avoid hypocrisy, you should extend your radical skepticism to ID (the Designer is unseen) and indeed the divine.”
Dave, my point was in reply to the Darwinist diatribe that they do not see any intelligent beings interacting with matter to produce biological features, so they have no reason to think intelligent input is required. Intelligence, like gravity, is something one must infer from the behavior or pattern of matter and is not something one can directly observe.
Therefore, if an arrangement of matter, like biological features, has the pattern appearance of having been intelligently pushed around (which virtually all evolutionary biologists of note readily admit), then it is reasonable and even necessary to challenge those who claim that intelligence is not required to to sufficiently explain such an appearance.
“You cannot possibly be that dense. If your purported intelligence is not disembodied, then where in the observable universe is the “embodiement”? What’s your excuse for trying to weasel out of habeas corpus for your intelligencer’s body?”
Where is the “embodiment” of the intelligence that created the great pyramids? Or the book War and Peace? Can you show it to me? Can we run some tests and find those particular emodiments?
That I do not know where, when or even how any particular intelligence is “embodied” doesn’t mean that I claim it is “disembodied”. Did they know how gravity would be “embodied” when they proposed that 90% of the mass of the universe was currently unobserved and unaccounted for? Were they proposing “disembodied” gravity? Or were they saying that because of the patterns they observed in matter, there must be more matter (or mass) in the universe than they could currently observe, even if they didn’t know how such mass was “embodied”?
That I do not know how the intelligence that created a thing happened or happens to be embodied has zero relevance to whether or not the thing in question displays the hallmark qualities of intelligent design.
In people.
Where are these people? Please point them out to me – the ones that are responsible for the great pyramids or the book War and Peace.
So you are placing history on the same plane of reality as mythology? Good luck with that. I understand your point, but I also understand why it isn’t a very interesting point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:L.N.Tolstoy_Prokudin-Gorsky.jpg
William, I’m curious: since you freely admit you can’t identify the embodiment of this supposed “intelligence” that pushes some atoms around (but, oddly, not all atoms for some reason), could this “intelligence” be embodied in demons or ghosts?
William, I’m curious: since you freely admit you can’t identify the embodiment of this supposed “intelligence” that pushes some atoms around (but, oddly, not all atoms for some reason), could this “intelligence” be embodied in demons or ghosts?
Of course. You can find these people with google.
Science schmience. It’s all just Social Text.
Actually, you’re just incoherent.
And how did you manage to spell my name wrong when it is in front of you?
Perhaps WJM allows himself to entertain the possibility that some/all artefacts generally supposed to have been made by humans now dead are in fact artefacts of non-humans, or even disembodied intelligences.
It fits.
I suspect WJM will protest and note that I’ve merely pointed him to a picture that is clearly just a disembodied representation. I can only shrug at such retorts, recognizing that the reliance on such sophistry says something about the actual viability and credibility of the UD perspective. For instance, I would then have to wonder – assuming WJM did use such a retort – what he meant by the word “picture” and why such a term makes the question ironic.
William, I think you are simply wrong when you say that Dembski is arguing his opponent’s perspective. Have you actually read the paper?
I mean, it’s possible that I am mistaken about this, but please consider it possible that you may be.
And my son, reading your posts, suggested I do a Find & Replace of “ilk” by “elk”.
Just thought I’d mention it 🙂
Arguing from your debate opponent’s perspective? Doesn’t that involve trying to find agreement on terms and such? Asking questions about interpretations?
It’s tedious, but it would be interesting to see.
I think Mike has a bead on this when he argues that those who argue against mainstream science should first understand it.
The only ID advocate who seems to meet that qualification is Behe and oddly enough he accepts common descent.
I think it’s disingenuous to suggest an equivalence between dead people and hypothetical entities having no listable attributes.
What makes ID not science is not the current absence of biology designers, but the absence of any attributes. We know hat humans are capable of and can identify relics of things made by dead humans because they resemble things made by living humans.
In a thousand years archaeologists could judge the likelihood of superman being a real person. We have no equivalent way of judging the existence of the putative designer of life..
Applying this to a real mystery, we have arguments about the identity of Shakespeare. We will never know the full truth, but we are not including ghosts or invisible gray elephants in the list of possibilities.
Lizzie, please tell your son he has just been awarded “Post Of The Day”. 😀
I think people do follow his word salad, to the extent that it’s coherent at all. What he’s trying to do is insert lawyer-ese “plausible deniability” into every statement he makes: “I do not concede” when he for practical purposes does, and “I take no position” when he does nothing but imply a position.
Sure.
No, I’m pointing out that discerning the pattern of intelligent design doesn’t rely on being able to point out the “embodied” intelligence responsible for it.
It’s a trivially, obviously apparent point, one I shouldn’t even have to make – except that anti-theists will contort, deny, obfuscate, red herring and straw man the obvious in order to avoid any salient point – no matter how trivially obvious, including denying the LNC and even the LOI, to avoid any inference that leads anywhere near a path they think leads to god.
I haven’t claimed that any intelligence is “not embodied”. Whether or not one can list the physical attributes of an “embodied intelligence” is entirely irrelevant to recognizing the characteristics of matter that has been pushed around by intelligent causation.
I think I follow his argument fairly well. I just don’t find it very interesting. He’s at approximately the same place that gpuccio was when he quit posting (at UD as well as here).
It all boils down to action by an entity that cannot be detected except by Dembski’s Explanatory Filter. That’s the detector that detects Design Waves.
An entity that has no attributes that could be tested is simply boring. Ghosts and invisible gray elephants can exist side by side with the world as seen by non-believers and produce no inconvenience whatsoever.
I think I’ll name the Designer Harvey.
Well, Gary, the issue isn’t whether the Designer exists, but whether the search for regularity in nature is productive.
It’s as simple as that. If regularity is found, the existence of a designer is moot. One gains nothing by affirming or denying the action of a Designer.
That’s why ID claims are boring.
WJM:
The ‘effects’ of intelligence which you would wish to equate to those of gravity are (on empirical grounds) incapable of acting on matter other than through the medium of nerves and muscles. Nothing ‘spooky’ about it – unless you can isolate the ghost in the machine, it is as much chemistry pushing atoms as a plant growing through a crack in the sidewalk. You can’t ‘see’ osmotic pressure either
So it remains a hopeless analogy. I get it, I just don’t buy it. Demonstrate intelligence acting on objects without their being touched, and you might have a case for equivalence. ( I can spy all manner of ‘gotcha’ scenarios you might like to try, but I’d hope not to have to go rabbit-holing).
Without that, it is like the ‘crystal energy’ in the books my wife reads. “It’s not energy as we might understand the term … ” It’s not bloody energy then!
Forget it – I don’t subscribe to the infinite multiverse.
Alan Miller said: “The ‘effects’ of intelligence which you would wish to equate to those of gravity are (on empirical grounds) incapable of acting on matter other than through the medium of nerves and muscles.”
I didn’t claim that there weren’t any nerves or muscles attached to any intelligence. However, since you have made a positive assertion above, please support your claim that intelligence is incapable of acting on matter other than through the medium of nerves and muscles.
Also, while you are at it, please tell me how intelligence acts on nerves and muscles to get them to do what it wants them to do, if the only way intelligence can act on matter is through nerves and muscles.
Or do you think that “nerves and muscle” are not made of matter?
As I’ve said, William, using normal scientific methodology, we cannot demonstrate a negative. We cannot demonstrate, nor, therefore, conclude, that “intelligence is incapable of acting on matter other than through the medium of nerves and muscles”. We could attempt (if we had grounds for thinking true) to demonstrate that it does, but not that it doesn’t.
Speaking personally, I don’t think intelligence “act[s] …on matter …through nerves and muscles. I think intelligence is the word we give to a kind of behaviour an organism exhibits as a result of nerves and muscles interacting in response to endogenous and exogenous signals.
I am confident that they are.
I added the parenthetical “on empirical grounds”. That is, it has never been reliably demonstrated that it can act on matter ‘at a distance’. I accept the possibility that it can do so, but I see no burden to prove the negative, and await an empirical demonstration of the positive claiim.
Yes, precisely the ‘rabbit-holing’ I had in mind. The debate over internal Cartesian dualism notwithstanding, you cannot interact with the outside world other than through impulses sent from your nervous system (which includes the brain) to various muscles. Give it a whirl. Wherever the physical implementation starts, it stops at the boundary of your body. Whatever ‘ordering’ you do, you do with your muscles.
Even if the ‘ghost’ survives death, this does not legitimise ascribing to such ghostly intelligence the capacity to create matter with appropriate physical constants, nor to shift it about, with or without the expenditure of energy. Which is where you demand that I demonstrate that it can’t, I presume.
I was using the term rather loosely, of course – more succintly rendered as that initial “i”. This is what people tend to identify with when they abstract the notion of intelligence – a free-floating “i”. They have a firm view on the answer to Hofstadter’s rhetorical “Who Shoves Whom Around in the Careenium?”.
Do automated, computerized factory assembly systems operate in a way that is recognizably intelligent, by your definition of the term, Elizabeth? How about chess programs? Do they exhibit intelligence?
If you are watching a video of your favorite scientist giving a lecture, do the images and sounds issuing forth from your television indicate insufficient explanation without reference to intelligence? Have you ever seen my muscle and nerve – my “organism” self, or are you only aware of my text on a screen? Does the text you read on your screen give you warrant to infer that some kind of intelligence is necessarily included in a sufficient explanation of that text, regardless of if that intelligence fits your preconceived notion of how it must appear, or what it must be attached to?
Of course it does.
It is a trivial matter that we can recognize the product of intelligence in matter without having to observe an intelligence attached to muscles and flesh; the whole “disembodied” intelligence, or “who is the designer” or “where is the designer” or “what is the designer made of” is nothing but rhetorical – juvenile, even – avoidance of admitting even the most obvious, trivial matter in service of ideology.
It’s fairly easy to recognize the products of a designer we can see and observe doing the design and manufacture of a product.
So why is it so difficult for you to recognize that biological diversity is the result of a well studied process?
It is further a trivial matter to hypothesize non-human artifacts of intelligence that we would recognize as such should we stumble across them. This doesn’t mean that there will be no false positives or false negatives, just as there is no assurance in any set of explanations. We wouldn’t have to see any organisms of any sort present or to rightly infer that some phenomena outside of known human interaction was the product of some form of intelligence.
This is why we infer that other creatures on Earth, like dolphins and other mammals, have intelligence to some degree – because we recognize how they push matter around into patterns characteristic of intelligence.
The rhetorical rebuttal that “the only form of intelligence we know is human” or “all you are doing is recognizing patterns of human behavior” is another tired, juvenile tactic of denial and dismissal. It is trivially apparent to anyone not confounded by ideology that we would probably be able to recognize at least some phenomena as intelligently design even if humans were not suspected to be the creators of said phenomena, whether or not any “organisms” were around.
So far, such systems do not self-replicate and evolve, so I would classify them as limited automatons. I haven’t seen anything like life come from a known designer.
Even biologists who are self-admitted materialists/Darwinists, and are anti-ID, admit that biological features give the almost overwhelming impression of having been designed by some form of intelligence. Elizabeth here goes so far as to define intelligence as iteration with variation and selection, which by definition would make biological features intelligently designed.
Why should she bother to define intelligence in such a manner unless she also realizes that there must be a causal correlation between intelligence and the generation of novel biological features? Instead of having “intelligence” as being an exterior property, she internalized intelligence as the processes of evolution to explain why biological features appear the way they do.
This is an explicit admission that biological features appear intelligently designed if one is going to define “intelligent design” as that which one believes produced those biological features. Other biologists warn against others giving in to the “illusion” of design, or claim such apparent design is only a mimicry generated by non-design forces. This all explicit admission that something looks designed by intelligence that doesn’t appear to have been created by humans.
If there is going to be honest debate, the childish stall, denial and dismissal tactics have to stop. Of course there is reasonable warrant to seriously consider that intelligent design may be a necessary part of any sufficient explanation of novel, functional biological features.
To say “well, there’s no apparent reason to even consider intelligence, so there’s no reason to vet non-intelligent agencies as sufficient” is not only patently ludicrous, it just reduces the exchange to childish levels.
Which simply says that variation and differential reproductive success can result in the storage in the genome of sequences that work. That accumulates information (using at least on popular definition of information).
So evolution is somewhat intelligent.
Of course? Sez who? Sez you? Pfft. Nonsense. There’s no of course about it. You’re the one (well, you and the rest of your IDist friends) who have yet to make the case that there is anything whatsoever to consider in your phantasm of Designer meddling in the origin of biological features (intelligent or otherwise). Until your discourse rises to the level of “reasonable warrant” then you’re just pulling a cheap trick with your false “of course”
Sez the child who entered this conversation by whining that we make him sick to his stomach.
No effectors
No effect
In some ways, yes, we can now design “smart” systems. That’s why we call them “smart”, although I don’t think either of those are terribly good examples (the chess program may be closer, I don’t know much about chess programs). But we certainly can design (yes, I said design) that can learn and show a minimally flexible approach to solving problems.
These are excellent examples of something that we know for sure doesn’t contain machinery on the one hand, pllus added SmartStuffTM on top. The whole thing is material, but we can describe the behaviour as “smart” – in other words the smartness is an emergent property of the material gadget, not an add on.
Now, before you jump to the conclusion that I am saying that smart machines are like human intelligence – I’m not. Not right now. What I am saying is that smartness is a capability that can be a property of machines, but emerges from their material arrangement, it isn’t an add on.
And these machines can be pretty smart – in fact some virtual “machines” (e.g. GAs) can design things that defeat human designers, or differentiate between patterns that humans cannot differentiate between. Human designers may be able to design these machines, but the machines are then able to out-design the humans. That’s why humans use them.
Not sure quite what you are asking here, but clearly I think that if I watch a scientist on television explaining something, that the explanation comes from an intelligent human scientist.
Clearly, all I have seen of you, William, is the text that you cause to appear on my screen (also out of my printer – I bought your online book).
I’m lost trying to parse the necessarilys and sufficients here. But, simply, if I read text on screen that is allegedly by you, I infer, with a high degree of confidence, that the author of those texts is a human being. Or possibly an elk.
And I haven’t ever claimed that we can’t.
But that doesn’t mean that I assume that the intelligence I infer as responsible for the product wasn’t the property of some material thing, probably human.
No, it isn’t, William. For a start, I am more than happy to “admit” – stipulate – that we can, given certain scenarios, infer a designer from a product that looks designed, even if we have no nerves-and-muscle (or even bones) of a biological designer before us. .
For a second, the reason I ask is not “juvenile” at all. If we find a pattern in matter that appears to indicate some unexpected factor, we do not stop there – we may give it a name: “dark matter” for instance – and from there, derive hypotheses about what properties it might have, and how these could be tested (gravitational lensing, for instance). And if I were an ID person (i.e. if I were convinced, as I am not, for perfectly good reasons) that the patterns we observe in nature really did indicate some intelligent but unknown Mind out there, not apparently associated with any biological organism, or even non-biological thing-with-a-brain, I would be very excited indeed. And the first thing I would want to do is to speculate how it might interact with nature, and whether it might interact with me. Have you read Hoyle’s The Black Cloud? That’s a lovely fictional account of how one might scientifically start to characterise an Intelligent Agent that one had inferred as the best hypothesis on offer to account for one’s data.
But I simply don’t see this happening in ID circles, or at any rate, very rarely. I see, on the one hand, indignant denial that ID has anything to do with identifying the inferred Designer (why the heck not? If it’s a valid inference, don’t you want to know more?) and on the other, strong implications that the inferred Designer is something to do with religion, or, at any rate, morality, and thus, one assumes, off limits to investigation.
Which is utterly contradictory. Either ID is legitimate science, and you guys actually want to do the next step and find out whether the Designer was a Hoyle Black Cloud, or something else, and figure out where you are likely to see such patterns and where not where the Designer hangs out, for instance, and where it does not, and just what kinds of things it affects, and what it does not, whether it answers requests, as Hoyle’s did, etc – whether it is benign, or malign, in its attitude to the intelligent meat things it has made.
Or ID is simply theistic apologetics gussied up as science, but revealed not to be by the simply observation that nobody is interested in finding anything out about the Designer they are so sure they’ve found, because they are so busy telling “evolutionists” off for being atheistic materialists (which in many cases is not true, as you well know).
I give you credit, William, for at least having some kind of theory, about what the Intelligence might be, and how it might behave, or interact. I don’t think it’s viable, myself, because I think that the idea that Intelligence is an emergent property of biological organisms is a highly predictive one (i.e. makes testable predictions that are borne out by data).
But at least you are prepared to put it on the table. Now, please return the courtesy and stop attributing to me views I do not hold.
Can I also invite you to read my post here:
You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood something I said, and we should clear it up.
Rules reminder:
Yes, indeed – it was a point I made years ago, using Dembki’s own definition (in which he specifically excluded the notion of intention). It’s not how I define intelligence normally, as I would normally include the capacity to form an intention, which means some mechanism for foward modelling, i.e. simulating potential course of action, and feeding back the outcome prediction back as input into the action decision, including the decision to acquire more data, or change goal. So by that definition, evolution doesn’t quite make the cut.
But if we leave out intention from the definition, specifically, as Dembski (sort of inadvertently, but nonetheless explicitly does – he thinks Intention is not a scientific concept), then yes, evolutionary processes are intelligent. Which is, I suggest, why their products look intelligently designed. As I keep saying, I think design-detection is perfectly valid science, as long as we remain aware that non-intentional quasi-intelligent processes can produce output that looks very like intentional design (until we look more closely – then we start to spot some interesting differences, not so much in the design, as in the distribution of novelties).
Yes, but remember I am using “intelligence (or “quasi-intelligence, sans intention”) in virtual scare quotes. I do not think that there is some kind of intelloplasm that generates some force field that moves molecules and ions around. I think the intelligence, in the case of both evolution (i.e. “quasi-intelligence”) and in people, is an emergent property of the whole system, not an add on. I’d even go so far as regarding the universe as “intelligent” in that limited sense. And if I was in a mystical mood.
I wish you would stop saying I am “admitting” things that I have been saying, rather loudly, and highly explicitly, for years!
Check out this thread at PT (it’s probably still at UD, but PT archived it).
Well, whether evolution gives the “illusion” of design or is “really” a designer, depends on your definition of intelligence. As I’ve said, if you take Dembski’s literally, then evolutionary processes are intelligent. If you take mine, they fall short. I don’t think evolutionary processes are intentional. If intention is intrinsic to your concept of intelligence then evolutionary processe are not intelligent – but capable of giving that “illusion” as they include much of the rest of the concept.
You are seeing stall, denial and dismissal tactics where they do not exist, William. Please consider that you may be misinterpreting what you are reading. Try to shed your assumptions about what views each of us might hold. It’s not easy, and frequently ID opponents attribute views to ID proponents that they do not hold. But that’s no reason for us not all to try to at least assume that the other may be making a point worth listening to carefully.
Right 🙂
Precisely. I love the Careenium.
May I suggest, once again, that the reason you can infer intelligent design from examining some object is that you have generally detailed and extensive knowledge of the history of the object. Design is not deduced in a vacuum, it is deduced because it fits within some known design process.
ID proponents cite SETI and forensics, for example, as cases where design is inferred without knowing the designer. But in all such cases, a history is either known or assumed based on prior knowledge – the SETI aliens will think somewhat like humans do, and the perpetrator of the crime used human methods to achieve human motives.
ID is in no way different. They start with a model of the Designer, attribute specific purposes and abilities to it, and “find” that life matches this historical model. And without such a model, a truly alien object either would exhibit no indications of design, or would have human designs projected onto it.
In the case of evolution we arr inferring design by a known process. Evolution in one of the best understood and most studied phenomena in science.
Pity that some ignore this visible elephant, stepping around it and pretending it doesn’t exist.
rhampton,
You might be interested in comment #2 here at UD:
I see. Human intuition tends towards to inferring an intentional intelligent designer, therefore ID.
Meanwhile, in the real world, no dice until your scientists and mathematicians work out how to do the business with CSI or FIASC/O or whatever metric.
Since micro-evolution does not and could not have the awareness to determine how different a child is from any given ancestor, no-one is going to find a barrier to macro-evolution either. The argument is effectively conceded as soon as you admit
micro-evolution, as all change is small changes from parent to child. From a certain perspective, all evolution is micro-evolution.
And I’ll tell you what is childish, William. Not to admit you have made an error, and have been educated. You can hardly ascribe your “spooky action at a distance” nonsense to arguing like a “Darwinist”, since those who accept evolution use modern science, and you have yet to show that it is us not you who confuse theory and observation.
Quite reasonable as a starting assumption.
However, with repeated experience, it becomes clear that sometimes the scorpion will behave like a scorpion, despite his protestations of integrity.
To continue to deny that reality is in its own way just as delusionary as clinging to creationism.