(Sorry this is so long – I am in a hurry)
Gpuccio challenged myself and others to come up with examples of dFSCI which were not designed. Not surprisingly the result was that I thought I had produced examples and he thought I hadn’t. At the risk of seeming obsessed with dFSCI I want assess what I (and hopefully others) learned from this exercise.
Lesson 1) dFSCI is not precisely defined.
This is for several reasons. Gpuccio defines dFSCI as:
“Any material object whose arrangement is such that a string of digital values can be read in it according to some code, and for which string of values a conscious observer can objectively define a function, objectively specifying a method to evaluate its presence or absence in any digital string of information, is said to be functionally specified (for that explaicit function).
The complexity (in bits) of the target space (the set of digital strings of the same or similar length that can effectively convey that function according to the definition), divided by the complexity in bits of the search space (the total nuber of strings of that length) is said to be the functional complexity of that string for that function.
Any string that exhibits functional complexity higher than some conventional threshold, that can be defined according to the system we are considering (500 bits is an UPB; 150 bits is, IMO, a reliable Biological Probability Bound, for reasons that I have discussed) is said to exhibit dFSCI. It is required also that no deterministic explanation for that string is known.”
(In some other definitions Gpuccio has also included the condition that the string should not be compressible)
These ambiguities emerged:
Some functions are not acceptable but it is not clear which ones. In particular I believe that functions have to be prespecified(although Gpuccio would dispute this). Also functions which consist of identifying the content of “data strings” (a term which is itself not so clear) are not acceptable because the string in question could have been created by copying the data string.
The phrase “no deterministic explanation for that string is known” is vague. It is not clear in how much detail and how certainly the deterministic processes have to be known. For example, it appears from above the possibility that the string in question might have been copied from the string defining the function by some unknown method is sufficient to count as a known deterministic explanation. This implies that really it is sufficient to be able to conceive of the very vague outlines of a determinist process to remove dFSCI. I think this amounts to another implicit condition: no causal relationship between the function and the string.
Lesson 2) dFSCI is not a property of the string.
It is a relationship between a string, a function and an observer’s knowledge. Therefore, it may be that dFSCI applies for a string for one observer with a certain function but not for another observer with a different function. The rules for deciding which function are not clear.
Lesson 3) The process for establishing the relationship 100% specificity of dFSCI and design is not commonly found outside examples created by people to test the process.
Gpuccio says thisabout the process:
“To assess the dFSCI procedure I have to “imagine” absolutely nothing. I have to assess dFSCI without knowing the origin, and then checking my assessment with the known origin.”
When challenged he was unable to name any instances of this happening outside the context of people creating or selecting strings to test the process as in our discussions. This is important as the dFSCI/design relationship is meant to be an empirical observation about the real world applicable to a broad range of circumstances (so that it can reasonably be extended to life). If it is only observed in the very special circumstances of people making up examples over the internet then the extension to life is not justifiable. To give a medical analogy. It might well be that a blood test for cancer gives 100% specificity for rats in laboratory conditions. This is not sufficient to have any faith in it working for rats in the wild, much less people in the wild. Below I discuss what is special about the examples created by people to test about the process.
A Suggested Simplification for dFSCI
dFSCI says that given an observer and a digital string where:
1) The observer can identify a function for that string
2) The string is complex in the sense that if you just created strings “at random” the chances of it performing the function are negligible
3) The string is not compressible
4) The observer knows of no known deterministic explanation for producing the string
Then in all such cases if the origin eventually becomes known it turns out to include design.
Given the rather lax conditions for “knowing of a deterministic mechanism” that emerged above, surely (2) and (3) are just special cases of (4). If (2) or (3) were present then deterministic mechanisms would be conceivable for creating strings.
So the dFSCI argument could be restated:
Given an observer and a digital string where:
* The observer can identify a function for that string
* The observer cannot conceive of a deterministic explanation for producing the string
Then in all such cases if the origin eventually becomes known it turns out to include design.
Conclusion
There are two main objections to the ID argument:
A) There are deterministic explanations for life.
B) Even if there were no deterministic explanations it would not follow that life was designed
For the purposes of this discussion I will pretend (A) is false and focus on (B)
No one disputes that it is possible to detect design. The objectors to ID just believe that B) true. The correct way of detecting design is to compare a specific design hypothesis with alternatives and assess which is provides the best explanation. This includes assessing the possibility of the designer existing and having the motivation and ability to implement the design. If no specific hypothesis is available then nothing can be inferred.
So is the dFSCI claim above true and if so does it provide a valid alternative way of detecting design?
The trouble is that there is dearth of such situations. One of the reasons for this is that digital strings do not exist in nature above the molecular level. At any other level it is only a human interpretation that imposes a digital structure on analogue phenomena. The characters you are reading on this screen are analogue marks on the screen. It is you that is categorising them into characters. So all such strings are created by human processes. It follows that design is a very plausible explanation for any such string. People were involved in the creation and could easily have designed the string. If you add the conditions that the function must be prespecified and there should be no causal relationship between the function and the string then design is going to be by far the best explanation. It goes further than that. It also means there almost no real situations where someone is confronted with a digital string without knowing quite a bit about its origin – which is presumably why Gpuccio can only point to examples created/selected by bloggers.
What about the molecular level? Here there are digital strings that are not the result of human interpretation. Now human design is massively implausible (except for a few very exceptional cases). The problem now is that carbon chains are the only digital strings with any kind of complexity and these are just the one’s we are trying to evaluate. There are no digital strings at the molecular level with dFSCI except for those involved in life.
So actually the dFSCI argument only applies to a very limited set of circumstances where a Bayesian inference would come to the same conclusion.
Rich,
It doesn’t. For example, .12112111211112111112… is non-terminating and non-recurring, but it is definitely not exhaustive.
With pi, nobody knows.
He probably thinks that the Behe objection kills the cumulative argument — he may not realize that he’s implicitly assuming that the mutations are individually neutral or deleterious and only are advantageous when all of them are present.
Petrushka,
Yes, though gpuccio would no doubt respond that any physically realizable random number generator could not generate the complete works of Shakespeare within the lifetime of the known universe — hence the universal probability bound.
And even if pi turns out to be exhaustive in the required sense, gpuccio could argue similarly that a physically realizable ‘necessity mechanism’ for generating the digits of pi couldn’t create the works of Shakespeare within the allotted time.
However, this would mean adding yet another qualification to his patchwork argument: Instead of
…it would have to be:
And of course, it still ends up being an argument from ignorance.
Joe,
I don’t think so. I think the underlying assumption is that today’s organisms are the final, specific targets of evolution, and required every mutation leading up to them (and no others) occurring in the specific order they happened (and no others). If you think this way, then of course the chances of every organism just randomly hitting such a tiny target so inerringly is going to seem preposterous.
What escapes them is the baffling concept that evolution has no target, that each organism followed a sort of drunkard’s walk to get where it is, and that this directionless process continues nonstop.
Flint,
I think that’s right. Take this comment of Eric’s, for example:
Throughout that thread, Eric keeps trying to prespecify humans as the target, and wd400 keeps remindiing him that evolution has no target.
The projection of intention seems nearly impossible for some people to overcome. So Eric might be saying that whether you pick up each card as it’s dealt, or wait to pick them all up at once, the chances of getting THAT specific bridge hand is the same, and equally absurd.
So the assumption here is that whichever hand you were dealt was the specific INTENT of that deal. That each organism represents a prespecified goal. And this presumption of intent pretty well requires an intelligent designer, who must generate the specification His design must meet.
Gould speculated at one point that what lies behind this is a matter of hubris. Some people just can’t deal with the notion that humans (like every other organism) are the current, contingent and accidental product of a directionless process. Maybe that’s partly correct, but I think it’s more a matter of people having goals, intentions, and plans at multiple levels behind everything they do. The thought of NOT having any intention just can’t compute.
And here we are asking them to accept a process that not only lacks intention (incomprehensible as that may be), but that nonetheless produces things like us in all our profound functional complexity. We can speak of feedback, but to the Design crowd that can only refer to comparing intermediate results to final goals and “steering” to stay on the road.
One can, however, generate a pretty good encryption key simply by specifying the starting point within the digits of pi. It is not beyond ordinary means to calculate a portion of pi, starting with any arbitrary point in the sequence. This could be XORed with the message to be encrypted or decrypted.
So the encryption key would simply be any random integer having 150 bits or so.
Keiths, good (non raven or banana) point. But that string is perhaps compressible, which may also be a factor? I’m not sure.
WRT Compressibility (A CSI attribute):
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=67800
Also:
http://www.quadibloc.com/crypto/mi0613.htm
“Since pi contains so many existing examples of random strings of digits, could we take a random string of digits, and compress it by turning it into a set of pointers to where its component sequences occur in pi?
The answer is no, since if we take a random sequence of five digits, on average one would have to go through the first 50,000 digits of pi to find a match for it.
Thus, the description of where something is hidden in pi is, almost always, as long as the thing itself.”
My example does not attempt anything like this. It merely points to a potentially infinitely long apparently random string that can be used for encryption.
pi is treated as a very large set of one-time pads that can be recreated simply by specifying the starting point. Since the number of potential starting points is greater than the number of particles in the universe, the key is pretty safe.
But it is possible to find any digit of pi without computing the intervening digits.
There’s a funny moment in the eric/wd400 thread when eric asks:
Mung responds, intending to mock evolution:
When Mung thinks he’s right, he’s wrong, and when he thinks he’s wrong, he’s unintentionally right.
wd400 agrees with Mung’s inadvertently correct comment:
Poor Mung. He’s his own worst enemy.
But one of our best allies! 🙂
That’s the first time I’ve seen an ID advocate get it right.
Like this (though it’s all Greek to me)
The discussion of what number and kinds of genetic changes are needed for changes during evolution shows the weakness of gpuccio’s argument. In saying that dFCSI is never observed to arise by RV+NS gpuccio prejudges numerous issues, such as
Of course we don’t know the details in most cases, but studies of experimental evolution and evolutionary genomics are making progress in particular “model” cases.
Advocates of ID prejudge these issues, and of course do so in ways that make evolution as difficult as possible.
gpuccio’s argument is confined to cases where we need large numbers of changes in one gene. And in saying that dFCSI can be relied on not to be achievable, to the extent that we can use it routinely as a criterion to decide what can be done by RV+NS gpuccio is assuming that enough is known for many of the above issues. And that the answers make evolution extremely difficult to achieve.
Contrast that with William Dembski’s argument, his Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information. It was supposed to be a mathematical theorem that proved that evolution could not create CSI (alas, it was not proven, and turned out also to be in the wrong form to show that CSI could not be achieved). But at least it was an attempt at a mathematical theorem that would work no matter what the patterns of fitness interactions were, no matter how many genes needed to accumulate the changes.
By contrast gpuccio’s assertion of impossibility prejudges us to be in a situation where RV+NS cannot do the job. In cases where we don’t know, it declares dFCSI present, and argues that this is a reliable indicator of the impossibility of change by natural selection. It is therefore an unreliable argument.
If understanding evolution were the goal (?!), I do think GP et al would gain traction by playing around with GAs, instead of regarding them as a manifestation of intelligent interference, and therefore irrelevant.
If you have a fitness function, whether ‘intelligently devised’ or even completely cryptic, and a bunch of strings, the likelihood of survival in a pool of such strings is entirely dependent on what else that pool contains. If you are a ‘good string’ in a sea of crap, you will more likely persist, having a selective advantage. That very same string, in a pool stuffed with fitter competitors, will sink without trace. How could one possibly know the selective advantages of a series of amendments, without reconstructing the complete historic setting, genome, ecology and all? Both function and [dis]advantage are entirely contextual.
But by playing with a GA – starting with the neutral case, and gaining a basic understanding of the inevitability of ancestry-fixation in a finite world left to its own devices – one would hopefully gain a much better understanding of the population process (and avoid all that horrible maths :))
One could build upon that, adding mutation and selection but also biologically real ‘methods’ such as recombination, transposition, segment duplication and excision etc. Even against the same fitness landscape, these introduce a very different pattern to the connectedness of functional points in that landscape compared to a naive serial-point-mutational view, which is what many assume ‘darwinism’ to be up against.
I’ve been doing exactly that Allan (playing around with a GA) and one thing that struck me was how hard you have to work to make the population not evolve towards fitter populations. I was expecting the opposite before I began.
As soon as there is differential reproduction it begins and only by turning up the “noise” to biologically infeasible levels does fitness level off or decrease.
I am speaking here about increasing “digital” “information” due to a self-replication function and how you believe “dFSCI” could deal with it.
If the initial “information” in a self-replicator is below the UPB but the functionality of the self-replicator leads to an increase in “information” to an amount above the UPB, then self-replication would be another mechanism that would invalidate “dFSCI” as a design detection tool.
The key component in evolution is the ability to self-replicate, and I think “dFSCI” faces a problem if self-replication is taken into account.
I think this coupled with the fact that most of those folks forget or ignore all the related drunkards that went extinct from mutations that didn’t provide enough use in given environments or simply those organisms that didn’t get to pass on their genes. These two groups are just as significant to the existence of the organisms we have today and are part of the reason that the target concept is unnecessary.
GAs wreck the neat mathematical arguments of the ID movement, which is why Dembsky tries so hard to cast them as “searches” and why gpuccio simply defines them as irrelevant.
Figures don’t lie.
kairosfocus.
Search UD for “replicator”.
You are still our most effective ally at UD! 🙂
So are compressible strings OK?
I cannot believe you have made that charge.
1) I have asked, and got clarification from you, that “dFSCI”, is an attribute that is not dependent on its origin. Full stop. Period.
2) That means the only thing you can look at when assessing “dFSCI” for a string, is the string itself.
3) The assertion of positive or negative for the presence of design, is done after “dFSCI” has already been asserted, but before its origin is known.
4) That means that if I can deliver you a string that looks as if it was designed, I don’t have to tell you how I generated that string before you have to assess design or non-design.
5) If you assert design, but get that answer wrong, the use of “dFSCI” as a design detection tool is not valid.
6) Because we have agreed that the “dFSCI” of a string is not dependent on its origin, I don’t have to tell you how the string came to be until you tell me whether you think it has been designed.
Is that clear enough?
I wrote:
gpuccio responds:
Okay, I see that in this statement of your argument you specify that the time span applies to necessity mechanisms:
However, your later statements of the definition of dFSCI, such as the one I quoted above, do not make this clear:
The “dFSI greater than the threshold” criterion takes the time span into account, because the time span factors into the threshold. However, your “no deterministic explanation” criterion, as stated, does not take time into account. You should add the temporal qualifier.
And in either case, as I said, your dFSCI argument remains an argument from ignorance:
1) gpuccio isn’t aware of a ‘necessity mechanism’ that explains X to his satisfaction;
2) therefore X exhibits dFSCI;
3) gpuccio says that everything to which he has ever attributed dFSCI has turned out to be designed, when the origin is known;
4) therefore X is designed.
The argument hinges on your ignorance in #1. This is easy to see, because if you knew of a necessity mechanism, then you wouldn’t infer design. It is only your ignorance of a necessity mechanism that leads to a design inference.
P.S. It’s hard to keep up with all of the changes you have made to your argument. It would be helpful if you would maintain a compact summary of your argument, keeping it up to date with the latest changes, and reposting it periodically so that readers can easily refer to it.
Mark asks gpuccio:
gpuccio petulantly replies:
In other words, not only is dFSCI itself hopelessly subjective, but the entire argument is hopelessly subjective. Gpuccio is not claiming that dFSCI is a reliable indicator of design; he’s only claiming that dFSCIgpuccio is a reliable indicator of design!
Gpuccio is making claims about history. If we cannot disprove his claims about history, he wins by default. Bad science, Intellectually bankrupt.
I claim Lincoln was shot by garden fairies masquerading as John Wilkes Booth. If you can’t prove me wrong, I win. I disallow all traditional testimony because all witnesses were deceived by the fairies. Prove me wrong.
But of course, “you can’t prove me wrong” is the support on which ALL supernatural-based arguments rest.
gpuccio’s argument boils down to “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”
Allan Miller said:
But by playing with a GA – starting with the neutral case, and gaining a basic understanding of the inevitability of ancestry-fixation in a finite world left to its own devices – one would hopefully gain a much better understanding of the population process (and avoid all that horrible maths 🙂 )
*** curmudgeon mode on ***
Smile when you say that (oh, I see, you did). These days genomics students rush off to simulate without seeing whether the question can be addressed by doing some actual algebra. We are rapidly approaching a situation where the theoretical population genetics literature of the past 100 years cannot be read by the very people who would need it the most. They may ultimately be unable to rederive Hardy-Weinberg Proportions — instead they will confirm them by simulation.
Of course the ID folks have it even easier — they don’t even pay attention to simulations.
*** curmudgeon mode off ***
There are no guarantees that we were the “goal” of evolution either.
I think one of the reasons ID needs the search space argument is their belief that we were the goal that had to be reached.
But we start with simple functionality which is reachable.
Even looking at it from a “digital information” point-of-view, a simple replicator can be “reached” below the UPB.
I so want to make a joke about Dover but I won’t.
Mung, I thought you would see the analogy between “inheritance” in OOL’s and inheritance through biology.
Gpuccio 505
You wrote:
I was referring to OMTWO’s example of a string with dFSCI that was not designed. You reacted by saying it was very, very interesting which I took as an acceptance that it was an example worth taking seriously. I was hoping you might go on to either accept it was a counter-example or explain why not. To be honest I am now so confused by what dFSCI is that I don’t expect a clear-cut answer – but I thought your answer might throw some light on your reasoning.
Gpuccio 512
I will leave the ideology bit. But this is still interesting:
I am glad you are confirming that you adopt position a) and thus avoiding circularity. If you remember all this stemmed from my assertion that whether something had dFSCI could be true of one observer but not of another and true at one time and not true at another. If dFSCI is “relative to what can be assessed by observers from a careful observation of the string” then this appears to follow because different observers with different background knowledge and skills often come to different conclusions after careful observation. Do you really want to deny this fact of human nature? (I never used the word subjective).
As you decide what counts as dFSCI , and your definition appears to alter in the face of counterexamples, it is hard to falsify! But it certainly sounds like it is relative to you.
It is a troublesome area for some of us! I have done my best to get to grips with the mathematical theory, but I will ever be challenged in that department – and I’m by no means alone. I just find simulations more easily grasped. Nonetheless, the basic stuff – neutral substitution, the influence of effective population size on the power of selective differential – is indeed well within the grasp even of duffers like me. But I learnt a lot the day I coded up a neutral model, and realised what people had been attempting to tell me about Selection/Drift. It does help to shine light on the equations, for us unfortunates who don’t perceive their elegance directly.
Certainly very hard to argue with a mathematical formulation. One way would be to turn it into a simulation fractionally closer to reality, and see if the inevitable algebraic simplifications have obscured something vital about ‘real’, space-occupying populations. But ID-ers seem unaware that there even is a mathematical theory.
No self-replicator worth the name can fail to provide at least one of those. If it never mutates, it has 100% heritability – a guarantee – but indeed it cannot evolve, and can only be selected if another replicator with a different capability is in competitive existence locally, up until the point one eliminates the other.
If its heritability is < 100%, it cannot avoid evolving – genetic change in time, both in lineage and in the population – unless it is fitter than all possible variants reachable from it, and remains eternally so regardless of any changes in the environment.
GP is a veritable dFSCI-IC Oracle!
“Ask me any question you like. I only give true answers … when all results are in. As part of that process, I may give a provisional answer that is superseded by my final verdict. In this way, retroactive revision of my earlier opinion, I avoid false positives.”
Your points about the usefulness of simulation as an aid to understanding the mathematical theory, and as a check whether complicating the model invalidates conclusions of the theory, are well-taken.
Here is a teaching program I use for the former. Enjoy.
Joe, take note.
That means you cannot logically make the following conclusion.
“2” must be assessed before “1c” if “dFSCI” is not dependent on its origin.
“dFSCI” cannot be qualified on the basis of its origin.
This what frustrates me, that I can get you to agree that “dFSCI” is not dependent on its origin, but as soon as you use it as a tool, you tell me that you check the origin first.
Joe and I both believe “dFSCI” is independent of origin and it must be in order for the string to qualify as “testable for design”.
Gpuccio 539
You are always assuming things are clear! I never for a moment took this as ironic.
The fact that it is a prime is not relevant
I don’t for a moment suppose you will accept it is dFSCI. I am grow less and less sure what the criteria are for dFSCI anyway. I just want to see what explanation you come up with this time.
I’ve come up with what I believe is a pretty solid way of testing any alleged protocol for determining dFSCI.
Step one: Encrypt a chunk of English-language text.
Step two: Generate (N-1) additional character strings, of the same length as the encrypted text generated in Step One, by throwing random characters together.
Step three: Use the candidate dFSCI-detecting protocol on all N strings.
If the candidate dFSCI-detecting protocol actually does what it says on the label, it shouldn’t find any dFSCI in any of the (N-1) random strings, and it should find some dFSCI in the encrypted text. Therefore, a valid dFSCI-detecting protocol should be able to distinguish encrypted text from a random character string.
Want to give it a shot, gpuccio?
Gpuccio 537
But there is a crucial difference.
1) If a bunch of scientists at time t think that something is the case and then they discover they something contradictory at time t+1 then they were wrong at time t.
2) According to your definition if a group find something has dFSCI according to that group’s current knowledge at time t and then that group leans of a new necessity mechanism at time t+1 then it is still true that that string had dFSCI at time t. You can define it the other way if you like – but then the fact that something with dFSCI is designed becomes circular.
Take an Italian string of text and translate it to English.
You now have a string with two different configurations, whose intended meaning can be understood by gpuccio.
Try that with DNA and you will find your translated configuration will “mess things up”.
DNA is not as “arbitrary” as human language.
Gpuccio 540
What other sense did you have in mind?
So given that, do you accept the rest of the paragraph (which I will repeat here)?
To spell it out a bit more precisely. Do you accept that the dFSCI of a string could be true of one group of observers but not of another group at the same time (because of their different knowledge and skills) and true at one time and not true at another because of different knowledge and skills at the two times?
Mung, you should be replying to Cubist.
I don’t get your point. Are you implying some sort of circularity?
keiths:
gpuccio:
Cool your jets, gpuccio. Your hot temper is making you look foolish again.
“Hinges on” does not mean “hinges on exclusively.” If you look at other comments of mine (this one, for example) you’ll see that I explicitly mention the function and dFSI criteria.
The first two aspects are useless, because everybody knows (for example) that the hemoglobin gene has a function and is too complex to have arisen through pure RV. These are questions that no one is asking on either side of the debate. The only part of the dFSCI concept that carries any significance is the “no known necessity mechanism” part, and that is nothing but a reflection of your current state of knowledge.
It’s a textbook argument from ignorance: Gpuccio is not aware of a “necessity explanation” for X that he considers satisfactory. Therefore there is no such explanation, and X is designed.
Gpuccio,
You seem to be switching between two inconsistent uses of the term ‘dFSCI’. Mark is pointing this out and asking you to choose one or the other. You can’t have both.
In your most recent comments, you seem to be referring to what I will call “objective dFSCI.” Objective dFSCI is something a sequence either has or doesn’t have, relative to a system, a timespan and a function. What any particular observer thinks at any particular time is irrelevant. You may think that X has dFSCI, and I may think that it doesn’t, but only one of us is correct. You may think today that it has dFSCI, and you may change your mind next week when I show you a new “necessity mechanism,” but the true answer doesn’t change. “Objective dFSCI” is a property of the sequence itself (relative to the system, the timespan and the function). It is not a property of the state of knowledge of any particular observer or observers. Objective dFSCI is not dFSCIgpuccio or dFSCIkeiths. It is just plain dFSCI.
You seem to be referring to objective dFSCI when you write things like the following:
Or:
Yet for dFSCI to be objective, you would need to change the definition you’ve been using all along. In particular, this criterion:
…would need to be changed to this in order to make dFSCI an objective concept:
Obviously we can never be absolutely certain that no necessity mechanism exists, so our assessment of dFSCI depends on what we know at any given time. However, our assessment of dFSCI is just that — an assessment. Assessments can change, but the true answer to the question “does X have objective dFSCI relative to this particular system, timespan and function?” remains always the same.
Now consider “subjective dFSCI”. Subjective dFSCI is the kind of dFSCI you’ve been talking about throughout most of these threads. It’s the kind of dFSCI whose definition includes:
If I know of a necessity mechanism that explains X, then X truly does not have dFSCIkeiths. But if you are unaware of my necessity mechanism, then X truly does have dFSCIgpuccio. It is subjective. It depends on the state of knowledge of the observer. The assessment is the true answer.
Subjective dFSCI is what you’re referring to here:
Just to hammer the point home, let’s use an analogy. A number is prime if it has no factors other than itself and 1. A number is primekeiths if keiths knows of no factors other than the number itself and 1. A number is primegpuccio if gpuccio knows of no factors other than the number itself and 1.
Primeness is an objective property of a number. It never changes. Primenesskeiths and primenessgpuccio are subjective. They can change if our knowledge changes. I can assess the primeness of a number, and my assessment can be correct or incorrect. It can change over time as I learn more or correct previous mistakes. Though the assessment may change, the actual primeness (or lack thereof) of the number is a fixed, objective fact, waiting to be discovered.
So tell us, gpuccio: Is dFSCI objective or subjective, in the above sense? It can’t be both.
Joe,
Thanks, Joe, interesting. For today’s student, I await the XBox version!
(I visualise a toy world where one can control the parameters by twiddling actual knobs. The simulation would perpetually run replicates, which gradually fade as new ones are produced. At particular values, the probability distribution of overall runs at those values would give more lines towards the peak, with the tails represented by less frequent lines to either side. Fixation and loss would be a 2-bar histogram with a ‘reset’ switch. Twiddling the knobs would then cause a graphic shift in the breadth of the distribution or its trend, and the incidence of trails going against the general trend.
Set it off with a good trend towards fixation or loss, go on holiday for a month, and you may come back to find the ‘other’ counter had moved on, even though no replicates headed that way while you were looking. Which can only mean one thing: Interference by Person or Persons unknown.)
Thank you – very clearly put. I am wary of the word “objective” because it gets abused so much – but I think you have made it clear what it means in this context.
I will add that the objective definition results in the statement
“Everything with dFSCI is designed” being circular.
It is the other definition, which I thought Gpuccio had settled on, which avoids circularity.
Applying this to the string-world of principal interest, biology, a fundamental problem here appears to be a failure to perceive crucial distinctions between physical and logical strings (a relative of UBP’s ‘semiotic’ problem). Of course, for certain purposes, we can turn the one into the other and back again. But all logical strings are fully compressible down to a single bit, and fully interconvertible. Physical strings are not, other than via a ‘logical’ intermediate. Patterns displayed by logical strings in specific notations may be the sole raison d’etre of those strings – their role is semiotic. As such, a ‘pure-chance’ origin of a recognisable pattern may be highly unlikely. But physical strings? They have at best one representation: themselves, physical arrangements of quarks and electrons in space. It happens that certain such strings can self-replicate, through frequently elaborate mechanisms. The origin of such a property may or may not be highly unlikely. But once such a property arises, all future strings in a finite world will have been through that physical process of filtration. Unless you know you have in your hands the original replicator, you are looking at the filtered result of iterations, biased in favour of the F[unctional]. This process must be taken account of before ‘dFSCI -> design’ can be declared on any modern biological string – and it’s not up to someone else to take account of it for you, and provide the missing audit. You have to eliminate it, and show your working.
The following numbers are the same, and are all ‘logical’ strings:
555 576 1053 1422 2323 4210 20223 202120 1000101011
They are all ‘555’ in various … er … ‘encryption’ systems. It should not be too hard to figure out which encryption system I used for each. If we want to send ‘555’ down a digital comms line, the commonest encryption is the last – the longest as it happens – since ‘on/off’ is readily detected. But if one had 556 different ways of representing a bit, one could send ‘555’ in as little as 1 bit, and the same applies to anything that can be represented by a number – ie, anything. Sending 42105 elephants down a tunnel, however, requires you to send a collection of that precise size, however you may represent it in the infinite possible positional notations.
Any logical string can be represented by any other. But physical strings can only be ‘represented’ by logical strings. I could represent a physical DNA sequence as ATGGCTACC , or 143324122, or ‘
-sequence” and turn out a peptide sequence that I could also represent as “Met-Ala-Thr”. But this is not done by turning anything into a logical representation, at any stage. It’s all done by physics. When the aaRS glues a Met on the end of an AUG-bearing tRNA, it’s physics. When that tRNA docks, same thing. It may, or may not be the case that Life requires the intermediates in this physical interaction to be coded into the ‘minimal replicator’, and that only a designer can do that.
So … if one thinks that the protein translation system is fundamental to life and unevolvable, and dFSCI is a reliable indicator of design, one would expect more dFSCI in the proteins of the translation system than (say) those patterning mammalian skin. So how is it actually distributed?