At UD StephenB stakes his claim:
Support the claim that one must always understand the context of a message in order to know that it is, indeed, a message.Describe a specific context, the absence of which would make it impossible to know if a meaningful message consisting of 100 characters was designed by an intelligent agent.
Here’s 283 characters.
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I read his challenge as saying any meaningful message consisting of 100+ characters is self-evidently designed and no understanding of the content is required to determine if the message is designed.
As I can’t post at UD, perhaps StephenB would like to post here what he makes of the above potential message and if it is indeed “intelligently designed”?
Another idea: Start with a 100+ character ‘message’. Encrypt it using the One-time pad scheme with a random key of the same length as the original message.
How will StephenB determine, without access to the pad, whether the original ‘message’ was intelligently designed or just random characters?
StephenB
Ah, so an alien sending a message that you are unable, for whatever reason to understand, is categorized as “no real attempt to communicate”.
Got it. So the message has to be in English for you to understand it’s a message, and then you can understand the contents of the message.
On this very site I provided two strings of equal length that appeared, superficially, very similar. One was designed (by evolution) to be incompressible, the other was simply random.
Not one single person at UD determined which was which, or even that there was any significant difference between them.
So in light of that StephenB, I’ve already demonstrated what you are asking for.
In fact, to those with the proper “context” to understand that string it’s immediately recognisable. Those people might not know what it does (what message it conveys), but the fact remains that it’s recognisable and obviously so.
Or is it. Dunno, perhaps StephenB can help me out.
I see five sets of tits being squeezed and then a singular breast.
“(.)(.).(.)(.)(.)(.)..(.)(.)(.)..(.)……(.)”
Clearly the message is intended for me. The witness of the unholy spirit of atheism tells me the message is that if in some historically contingent circumstance, the evidence I have available to me should run against atheism, I don’t think that contradicts the witness of the unholy spirit.
I would like to thank William Lane Craig for showing me how to “reason” backwards from a preconcieved conclusion.
How can a “message” not be the product of an agent? Seems like a remarkably ill-conceived problem.
Does he mean a string of 100 characters comprising meaningful data?
But to play the game, I submit the Voynich manuscript.
KF chimes in and, predictably, misses the point:
So, once you have recognised the message as a message you can say it’s a message!
Very profound.
Please apply those metrics to the string in the OP.
Try to stay on topic KF.
What’s the FSCO/I in the string in the OP KF?
JoeG @ UD
So context is not required, but it is.
You might want to talk to KF about that as my understanding is that if the FSCO/I is measured in a sequence of symbols that value will tell you if it is designed or not. Above X, designed for sure, if less then maybe.
Fer’instance? Like if a message is printed on a paper, you know that intelligent agency was involved?
This whole “design detection” seems little more then pointing out the obvious so far.
Didn’t we already have this discussion?
The first problem is recognizing that there is a message being communicated to begin with, that in fact the “noise” is not just a random pattern of lights or DNA bases or whatever.
As everyone here has already stated, StephenB and the IDiots have skipped several huge steps when they “start” with typographical symbols and then try to analogize from there.
I bet I provided this example last time this topic arose, but it’s worth repeating: This picture contains a message:
http://geocaching.bittingclan.com/gc20pwr/GC20PWR.png
I know it contains a purposeful message, because I’ve found the message. But if you had not been told that it did, if you hadn’t had any reason to want to examine it further, how would you know?
It could be a star map … or a bacterial culture plate … or a graph of hurricane intensities … are all those messages from the Designer, the way IDiots assume DNA is a message from the Designer? Really, they are ALL MESSAGES? Really, how do you know?
Given enough time, a sequence that appears to be of intelligent design will be produced by any generator. That should be uncontroversial, but of course the OECs seek to discredit the infinite monkeys hypothesis.
Only partially related, it amuses me that there probably is a 5 sigma scientific discovery that is a false positive.
Indeed — that’s why they think that one has to be stunningly, almost impossibly ignorant and/or stupid, or else utterly blinded by the “ideology” of “materialism”, in order to not see what is obvious.
The bait-and-switch here is hardly sophisticated:
(1) we have non-inferential knowledge that some things are designed (i.e. we can reliably distinguish between designed things and non-designed things).
(2) cells look exactly like designed things (except for all the differences, but never mind that), and don’t look at all like non-designed things (except for all the similarities, but never mind that);
(3) Therefore cells were almost certainly designed, it would take massive evidence to show that they were not, and there’s nothing in biology that yet meets that evidentiary burden.
Of course all the work goes into defending (1), and that’s where we get all this business about information, codes, authors, intentions, and so on. Then (2) gets slipped in there — and pay no attention to the inherent flaws in all arguments from analogy, nothing to see here, keep on moving! — and then we get (3).
Indeed, quite so.
But this time the slight wrinkle is that StephenB has make a specific claim that can be met and (to my mind) already has been met as I’ve provided a “message” without context.
Can it be demonstrated by StephenB to be a product of intelligent design?
Will he change his mind if not, if it is indeed such a product?
JoeG @ UD
The message I have provided is embedded in a webpage which is displayed via a computer. All designed entities.
Therefore the message is designed.
Therefore an image of random static displayed in such a manner is also designed.
Then please demonstrate that claim or withdraw it! Use FSCO/I to tell me if an intelligent agency brought that string into existence?
But, of course, it’s context is a web-page, therefore it’s designed. So FSCO/I adds nothing.
To be honest, Joe, I think it’s you. You claim that FSCO/I can be used to tell me if an intelligent agency created that string, but of course you won’t be able to actually demonstrate that.
So make all the claims you like, only the ones you can actually demonstrate matter.
JoeG
Hmm, I must have missed where you used FSCO/I to determine if that string was designed. You said it could be used to do that, yet seem reluctant to do so.
Science: Make a claim, demonstrate the truth (or not) of that claim.
ID: Make a claim. Repeat that claim.
JoeG 10:11 am:
JoeG 10:40 am :
Chortle.
And if not, there’s always the Bible Code procedure for teasing messages out of random text.
Are these folks claiming that they have some way of telling whether a message is a message (as opposed, say, to random noise)?
If I use an encryption algorithm and encrypt a 250-character message such as a passage from Shakespeare, and I also take a random string of 250 characters, generated from white noise, are they claiming to be able to apply dFSCO/I (or however it’s spelled) to tell which one is the Shakespeare and which one is the noise?
If so, a very strange assertion.
Not strange at all, considering the context.
I suggest we ask StephenB to suggest a well designed experiment as the formal definition of his challenge. Give us a procedure.
JoeG on his blog says:
The point rather is, JoeG, that if we replace the input of “random noise” with “radio telescope data” can you use FSCO/I to tell the difference between the two?
As far as I can determine, they are saying that the “context” is not separate from the “content”.
So, for example, we receive a series of bits from a radio telescope. Those bits must have been transmitted to be received. The “context” is “beamed into space” and even if we can’t understand or translate the “message” we know it involved intelligent design because of the “context” or rather delivery mechanism.
People like JoeG seem unable to separate the map from the territory, as per my previous comment. Messages printed out are designed, irrespective of the content of the actual message, so it *must* have had agency involvement to be printed!
It seems to me they are now abandoning the “FSCO/I > X == Design” idea.
Perhaps Joe or someone at UD could answer whether a digitized image of a river pebble is designed. Or perhaps a digital mapping of the pebble.
JoeG,
What, those two strings I generated before? Sure people saw them. For example, we talked about it here, me and you!!
And you said that they were both obviously designed because they were print outs on paper.
Chortle X 2.
Taking Joe G’s “reasoning” to it’s logical conclusion, any data I read on my computer is designed because, you know, I’m reading it on a computer. I could hook up a USB thermometer and record temperature data over a period of time, and Joe G would argue the temperature data was designed.
Absolutely.
also, any experiment shows design because experiments are designed.
Why am I reminded of computers being air-dropped out of aircraft? Oh yes!
Ah, the Liberace of LS_DYNA!
It seems to me that since the ‘message’ used as an example has been typed on a keyboard its already problematic as an example.
Heres the example I would use to illustrate this problem
We receive a radio signal from space. It consists of pulses at an exact interval. Is this a message? If we first decide that no natural phenomena can produce such a pattern we can be 100% sure its a message and we can even read the message. It reads “we are here” If on the other we determine that natural phenomena can produce such a pattern the likelihood its a message drops to zero.
I commented on that UD thread that the word “Yahweh” appears in several proteins (using the single letter designation for amino acids) and asked if that was a message. I pointed out that most artists simply sign their name on their works. No one seemed to think it was. I think it was StephenB who remarked that it was merely the length of the message that mattered. If we found a sequence in some unknown protein in an obscure microbe that read “Iam Yahwehthegreatandmercifel” (there is no ‘u’) would this count as a message? I certainly would find a remarkable coincidence!
JoeG
I think I must have missed this step in the EF, the calculation of CSI and FSCO/I. Can you provide a reference to the ID literature where the source of the object under question is considered?
I guess it does shortcut the process somewhat.
Q: Where did this object come from?
A: A factory
Ergo it was designed!
I suppose you are right. The only way to be sure we can avoid doing “this and this” to the data is to channel it straight into our minds directly.
Joe, could you explain how that could be done for, say, radio telescope data?
Until then we’ll have to just put up with transforming raw data into something we can use with out non-radio enabled brains.
Sure they do. For example, I measured which way the wind was blowing once an hour.
N, E, E, E, N, N, N, E, E, W, E, E, E, N
That “character sequence” exists regardless of if I turn it into such a string or not. It simply reflects the way the wind is blowing. Is that character sequence designed then? That I’ve happened to translate it into a ASCII based representation does not change the underlying data it represents.
As I said above, you seem to have given up on the whole “FSCO > X == Design” idea. Now it’s “is it blasted? Not design. Narrow band = design”. Nothing about the content of the message itself used to determine that.
I don’t think so. Guess what I have access to.
Can you describe an experiment that would not require ‘intervention’? I’ve not seen many experiments that assemble themselves.
If you can really do that, why not apply it to the “Wow!” signal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
It’s narrowband, so by your own words must be designed. Now confirm that by examining the data itself.
I and some commenters before me have asked how StephenB could distinguish between a random string and encrypted meaningful information.
But on a closer read I see that StephenB was asking whether we could find a context such that with it, one could tell whether a string was designed, but without it one couldn’t.
The case of an encrypted phrase would seem at first sight to be such an example. With knowledge of the encryption system, we can undo it and read the string.
But there is a catch. StephenB said that the string had to be a “meaningful” string. I think that means that it has to be somehow useable, even before you assess whether it is designed. Given that, telling a random string from an encrypted passage from Shakespeare would not be an example refuting him.
Right?
Right.
And to my mind that usability and meaning comes from prior knowledge. They never include those bits in their calculations I’ve noticed.
To someone else that usable string could be meaningless without that priming.
My example is not the result of an encryption or similar process.
But the whole point is to see whether Design can be inferred in evolving systems. There the “meaning” would be biological function which leads to adaptedness, hence highish fitness. It would not be a matter of whether we can see the meaning, as long as the bird could fly or the fish could swim.
The inference of Design would have to made by finding some pattern that could only be from Design, or finding that this high a fitness could not be achieved by non-Design forces.
StephenB
I’ll just note that the ” the design would be evident regardless of the context” argument I’ve addressed before with an example of a caveman wandering round a ice cave, a “giants causeway” type structure, a crystal cave and a modern city centre.
The design would be “evident” to Ug in all of those places.
Other then that, well, it’s just not worth bothering with. Not sure what I was thinking with the OP.
Actually, I’ll just bother with this:
There is a (type of) machine in my example. It (could) perform an obvious (to some) function.
Yet it appears that it is impossible to know whether or not it was designed by an intelligent agent.
Anyway, what a load of baloney.
Are designed things designed? According to StephenB they are.
OMagain,
If we don’t have any context, can we just invoke the NFL theorems, and say that no algorithm is better than any other at determining whether a string was designed or random? Or is that being too naughty?
The question is:
Describe a specific context, the absence of which would make it impossible to know if a meaningful message consisting of 100 characters was designed by an intelligent agent.
The message of 100 characters (or possibly more) is 100 full bar rests on a musical score. Rests represent silence. Musical symbols are meaningful.
The specific context is: 4′ 33″ by John Cage
Many non-intelligent sources can produce long periods of silence, so it is impossible to tell if the silence is intelligently designed without the context..
rossum
rossum,
In fairness to the IDers, you’re switching the message mid-argument.
Many non-intelligent sources can produce periods of silence, but not many can produce musical scores consisting of 100 full bar rests.
The question requires a “meaningful message” as input, so the required characters have to be meaningful. Actual silence is not a character, nor is a short length of recording tape or a segment of memory holding part of a sound file. At a stretch, the space character might represent silence.
The letters of the alphabet represent sounds as well, since letters are pronounceable. I doubt if Stephen B wanted to exclude all alphabetic strings. My answer merely represents sound using a non-alphabetic notation.
rossum
The 283 characters in the OP came from an entry in the Obfuscated Perl programming competition.
Those that know Perl already would probably realize that obfuscated perl hardly bears thinking about.
When executed on the command line it prints “Perl 4 the win” or something like that. I can’t actually find the source of it right now, and it needs some old version of Perl to actually run.
There are plenty of other, similar, examples out there.
http://www.drdobbs.com/the-fourth-annual-obfuscated-perl-contes/199101795
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_another_Perl_hacker#Examples
This one is crazy (and works on the command line with perl -e)
Output: just another perl hacker
It prints a phrase. I wonder what Barry Arrington has to say about such things. No doubt he recognised them as the product of intelligent design by running them through the Explanatory Filter, by following the trail blazed by Salvador Cordova.
To me it more illustrates the core point of context in design detection. It’s so embedded in our everyday life that they seem unable to realise that when they recognise Shakespeare there is a bit more information used then the words on the page. Add all that information in, suddenly there’s more then a paragraph on the page.
I don’t think so. UD seems to prove that every day, albiet unwittingly. They have an algorithm and claim to use it. But never, um, do. I think that Dr Dr Dembski understands all of this far better then KF, BA et al which is why he stays aloof from the usual suspects at UD. In fact, he “admitted” that for one of his papers evolution had to work, or his paper was incorrect.
Better for ID for Dr Dr Dembski to say nothing then correct or contradict the faithful!
rossum,
Yes, and that’s my point.The challenge was:
In the example you gave, the “meaningful message consisting of 100 characters” is the sequence of 100 full bar rests. The silence is not the message; it is something that a musician will produce when interpreting the message.
So when you write…
…you are no longer talking about the original, 100-rest message.
Then any piece of pronounceable text fails your test. “It is something a typist will produce when interpreting the sound of one of Shakespeare’s plays.” The play, as pronounced by the actors is different from the symbols on paper.
Even the representation of a DNA sequence fails. “It is something a biochemist will produce after analysing the chemistry of a piece of DNA.”
StephenB asked for a meaningful message consisting of more than 100 characters. Characters do not have an inherent meaning. The symbol “+” means addition in Europe and the number 4 in Chinese characters. The symbol “V” is a letter in Roman script and the number 7 in Arabic script. For any character to be meaningful there needs to be an agreed meaning of the character. If that is not the case then the initial challenge is impossible, since without assigning meanings to the characters there can be no initial “meaningful” message. If that is the case then StephenB’s challenge reduces to, “Show me an even prime number greater than two.”
rossum
rossum,
The challenge applies to the sequence of symbols, not to their vocalization.
To return to your original example, you are arguing that a person cannot listen to a period of silence and determine whether that silence is “meaningful” without additional context. That’s true, but it doesn’t address StephenB’s challenge, which was:
In other words, given the meaningful sequence of 100 characters, describe a context without which you couldn’t determine that the sequence was designed.
A stretch of silence is not a sequence of 100 characters, though it can be specified by such a sequence.
Then the sequence is 100 space characters (U+0020)
rossum
rossum,
Okay. Then to answer StephenB’s challenge, you just need to describe a specific context, the absence of which would make it impossible to know if that sequence were designed by an intelligent agent.
I have an answer, but I won’t spoil the fun by revealing it yet.