{"id":1802,"date":"2013-04-05T18:57:09","date_gmt":"2013-04-05T17:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/?p=1802"},"modified":"2014-05-30T03:59:24","modified_gmt":"2014-05-30T02:59:24","slug":"id-for-complete-idiots-digested","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/id-for-complete-idiots-digested\/","title":{"rendered":"ID for Complete IDiots, digested"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Crace, at the Guardian, has a nice series of “digesteds<\/a>“.\u00a0 I’m no John Crace, but I’m going have a go at digest of Dembski’s article at ENV,\u00a0 Conservation of Information Made Simple,<\/a> because it seems to me that Dembski could use an editor with a big blue pencil.
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Conservation of Information Made Simple\u00a0by William A. Dembski \u2013 digested read:<\/h1>\n

The structure and laws of the physical world permit intelligent multicellular life. Therefore the universe itself, can be viewed as the solution to the problem of making life possible.<\/p>\n

When we talk of searching for solutions, we are talking about the probability finding one of a small relatively small set of solutions at the end of one of many different possible searches. Clearly, the probability of finding a solution will increase if we have information as to where to look. But finding the information as to where to look may be as difficult as finding the solution.<\/p>\n

Bacteria sometimes evolve to be capable of utilizing a new food source, for example, nylon-digesting bacteria.\u00a0 So we can say they have gained information.\u00a0 But it is not new information, it has come from the environment – in this case, nylon-filled pools.<\/p>\n

You can think about probabilities as information costs.\u00a0 A high probability has low information, but a low probability has high information. Information is expensive –\u00a0 we pay fees to agencies that will increase the probability that we will get what we want. Or you could buy all the lottery tickets, and increase the probability of winning to 1, but it would have cost more than the price of the jackpot.<\/p>\n

We call this “conservation” of information because that the best we can do is break even.<\/em> But sometimes we do worse, and the cost of making the search easier is higher than the cost of the original hard search. After all, some search strategies may that steer us away from solutions. So information can only be lost, not gained, when we try to improve our search strategy.<\/p>\n

The No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems say that no search is better than blind search, when the target is unspecified.\u00a0 Conservation of information says that some searches are<\/em> better than others, but only because of the additional information that the search is employing to boost its performance.<\/p>\n

It also suggests that an object and the search for an object are not separate. We only become aware of an object when aspects of it become salient:\u00a0 “to be perceived is to be an object of search.”\u00a0 It therefore follows that to be is to be an object of search. Also, search can itself be an object of search.<\/p>\n

This is why I regard the multiverse as incoherent: the known physical universe is knowable because it is searchable. The multiverse is unsearchable, therefore unreal.<\/p>\n

Conservation of information can be formulated as: raising the probability of success of a search does nothing to make attaining the target easier, and may in fact make it more difficult, once the informational costs involved in raising the probability of success are taken into account<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When Dawkins wrote WEASEL, he included the solution to the search into the his fitness function, so there was no net increase in information when the search found the solution. AVIDA, Tierra and ev do the same thing.<\/p>\n

Ken Miller says that to increase in biological information over the course of evolution you only need selection, replication, and mutation.\u00a0 But computer simulations that use selection, replication, and mutation don’t solve interesting problems, or produce\u00a0 interesting patterns, unless we add information about what we want to achieve.<\/p>\n

The fitness landscape provides an evolutionary process with information. Solutions will only be found if the fitness landscapes is smooth, doesn’t isolate local optima, and rewards complexity. So where do such fitness landscapes come from? The only answer, apart from an Intelligent Designer, would seem to be the environment<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But where did the environment get that information? Evolution is supposed to explain subsequent complexity in terms of prior simplicity, but conservation of information says that there never was a state of primordial simplicity — the information had to be there from the start. In the absence of intelligent input, the complex biological information we observe\u00a0 now must have been present in the universe in some form or fashion, since the Big Bang. But the heat and density of Big Bang rules out any life form so where was the information needed for the emergence and development of life on planet Earth?<\/p>\n

Evolutionists say that the way the environment inputs information into biological systems is by a gradual accumulation of information as natural selection locks in on small advantages, each of which can arise by chance without intelligent input. But Intelligent Design presents a Two-Pronged Challenge. On the one hand the evidence for common ancestry is weak. On the other hand, even if common ancestry is true, conservation of information is compelling evidence for intelligence design.<\/p>\n

It would actually be quite a remarkable property of nature if fitness across biological configuration space were so distributed that advantages could be accumulated gradually by a Darwinian process. Frankly, I don’t see the evidence for this.<\/p>\n

If biological evolution proceeds by a gradual accrual of functional advantages, instead of finding itself deadlocked on isolated islands of function surrounded by vast seas of non-function, then the fitness landscape over biological configuration space has to be very special indeed.<\/p>\n

If evolution is so tightly constrained, then the conditions that allow evolution to act effectively in producing the complexity and diversity of life is but a tiny subset of all possible configuration spaces, and therefore itself a small-probability target.<\/p>\n

Evolution can certainly make improbable outcomes probable, but it requires a very special kind of fitness landscape that is itself improbable. Yes, you can reach the top of Mount Improbable, but the tools that enable you to find a gradual ascent up the mountain are as improbably acquired as simply scaling it in one fell swoop. This is the lesson of conservation of information.<\/p>\n

So what is the source of information in nature that allows targets to be successfully searched? The answer will by now be obvious: from intelligence. If intelligence is real and has real causal powers, it can do more than merely redistribute information — it can also create it. That is the defining property of intelligence.<\/p>\n

Also, Descartes.<\/p>\n

The digested digested:<\/em><\/p>\n

I was wrong about organisms being improbable, given a fitness landscape searchable by evolutionary processes.\u00a0 I should have said that a fitness landscape searchable by evolutionary processes was improbable.\u00a0 I’d still be wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Crace, at the Guardian, has a nice series of “digesteds“.\u00a0 I’m no John Crace, but I’m going have a go at digest of Dembski’s article at ENV,\u00a0 Conservation of Information Made Simple, because it seems to me that Dembski … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-information-theory","category-intelligent-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}