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Example of...information rich structures

You said, "Give me an example outside of the case under investigation and show me information-rich structures that we know scientifically arose from ONLY natural laws and randomness."

Ok. Fractals Go read Choas, by James Gliek (1988). Great book. It shreads the irreducible complexity concept, 10yrs prior to the introduction of the ID movement. But it also provides good underpinnings for philosophical concept of ID. Please let me know if you have questions. Oh, btw, fractals and chaos theory helped lead me back to faith.... But I come to ID from a agnostic Deist (not Theist) POV, with a strong background in analytical science.--ghost 21:47, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hi ghost. I actually took a college class on chaos theory as part of my math degree and read the book you recommended... and perhaps even more interesting to our discussion, William Dembski was leading researcher in chaos theory. (Says so in the Preface to The Design Revolution.)

Fractals are very interesting, but how do they show that they transmit information? DNA/RNA transmits data to each cell telling it how to function, much like html or C++ code tells your computer how to function. Chaos theory, to the best of my knowledge, is simply the study of non-linear equations and what systems governed by such dynamics would operate like. There isn't any transmission of information, that I know of.

But I'm even more curious as to how Chaos theory brought you from agnosticism to deism. I have several good friends who are deists, as well.

Always glad to discuss such matters. David Bergan 22:19, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Because fractals are arguably the most efficient information storage & transmission system in mathmatics. That's why I was working with Iterated Systems 10yrs ago. And now things are getting interesting. My interests forced me to ask myself a philosophical question: Natural systems are transmitting huge amounts of data. Amounts that appear to exceed the bandwidth needed for reproduction. Therefore, something else is going on. What is it, and why is it happening? This led me to view fractals as the signature of the Divine. But I keep my personal philosophies, ID friendly as they are, tempered by the knowledge that they teeter on the brink of the Razor. I don't want to see ID in my sons' schools. I want them making their own decisions. If those decisions bring them to faith, wonderful. If not, who am I to question the wisdom of Free Will? This is why I end up in both camps.--ghost 12:50, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Interesting. Sounds like the new wave in vector graphics. So fractals can be used to transmit information just like we can use electric impulses, paper and ink, or smoke signals... However that's not the same as an information transmitting mechanism. Just because intelligent beings can encode their message (the picture) in fractals, send it over the internet, and then decode it on the other side isn't saying anything new except that fractals are potentially a much more sophisticated way of doing it that we currently have. Or am I misuderstanding you? David Bergan 21:00, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You're missing my point, my friend. Have a look at the fractal structures in the back of your hand. Interesting how they follow the same patterns of construction as the neural network in your brain. I don't believe in coincidences. What I'm saying is, fractals give us Deists a means of addressing the issue of irreducible complexity. By seeing the fractal patterns repeat on atomic, microscopic, and astronomic levels I find my Lego in the sand....and the universe looks likes it's made out of them....even the sand...and it's beautiful.--ghost 21:39, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Welcome back. 8-) --ghost 5 July 2005 20:13 (UTC)

London? LOL, you know anyone who needs a job in the IT field, have them kick me a resume.--ghost 6 July 2005 15:42 (UTC)

Signature

Um, Dave, did you change your signature? It now reads A Big Asshole. If so, that's um....interesting.--ghost 19:45, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

LMAO. Ok, np then. ...And I thought I was the only one with a sense of self-depreciating humor. LOL. I was way wrong. Touche.--ghost 19:53, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

ID

I'm pretty sure your edits are going to be RV'd by FW and others. They sound a little too much like an apologetic. At anyrate, the article is about ID not the telological argument. I will try to find away to get the point that you want to make across, but quoting ID'ers books isn't the way to do it.--Tznkai 6 July 2005 16:41 (UTC)

I have a policy of RVing any change that eats a refrence, but I don't ignore the changes made. While I believe that Aquanius's proofs are pertinent, the intro is probably not the best place for them. I'm thinking about creating a new section on the interactions of philosiphy and ID but its rather foggy right now. Anyway I understand your position is that ID only posits that a designer can be infered scientificly?--Tznkai 6 July 2005 16:50 (UTC)

Great job with the new section! I'm restoring an older intro because I think the langauge is more neutral (claim is sometimes pejoritive), but feel free to tweak with it--Tznkai 6 July 2005 17:00 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words and approaching intelligent design with such a level head! Its a pain in the ass I know since as a result of the raging public debate ID's definition has gone through as many reinventions as Madonna! Hold fast, I know FW probably agrees with us, but is concentrating on a diffrent section of ID. Don't let it get you down!--Tznkai 7 July 2005 19:25 (UTC)

Contact

So the "Intelligent Designer" is unobservable/unfindable and that's the beef.

Yep, that's pretty much it.

In your opinion how would natural science treat a radio signal repeating prime numbers like the one in Contact?

if you're just talking about pulses (1 pulse, pause, 2 pulses, pause, 3 pulses, pause, 5 pulses, pause,...) then I would view it as an interesting transmission of unknown origin. The point of natural science, in my opinion, is to become trained in learning when to stop your narative of something. i.e:

We are recieving a signal from deep space which consists of pulses which sequence through the first thousand prime numbers and then repeats. no further information is known.

It is possible that this sequence is the result of some weird natural phenomenon. pulsars rotate and pulse EM waves. it could be that several pulsars are pulsing in sync and generating the sequence. (take several wave generators at different frequencies, put them together, and they generate beat frequencies.)

The difference is that natural science does not rule out something simply because it is improbable. there may be a way you could put a bunch of pulsars and black holes and other astronomical objects in some specific relationship such that the overall result is that they generate a sequence of prime numbers and then repeat. Since natural science doesn't know if this can be done, it doesn't rule it out. Just because something is "highly improbable" by our definition, does not mean it is "impossible".

The signal implies that there is an intelligent being on the other end, but we still haven't observed that being.

No, it doesn't 'imply', it allows for an intelligent being on the other end. If NASA detected something like this coming from the moon, you'd be damn sure that we'd be sending a ship there to check it out. If SETI detected this sequence from deep space, you'd be damn sure we'd be trying to send a message back, or looking for the schematics of a spaceship embedded in the sidebands of the pulses.

The problem here is that, at best, ID allows for an intelligent designer to be the cause for some thing we cannot explain naturally. But that is as far as it can ever go. We could send a ship to the moon to investigate the signal and discover that the Chinese had a secret moonshot and their ship's radio, modulated by the onboard computer, was malfunctioning. Or the investigation could uncover a monolith like 2001, with the inscription "Greetings, Earthlings, you've finally passed your test".

ID can never send a ship to investigate. It will never know with that level of certainty. Therefore it is stuck in the place of allowing for an intelligent designer.

But, as I tried to explain before, science itself allows for a divine. Science does not say "there is no God", it only says "There is no need to use a rain god to explain meteorology".

If you're familiar with the "stacked deck" idea, science basically assumes that the rules of the card game are constant and unchanging, but it doesn't rule out the possibility that God may have stacked the deck. It's just that science can't know either way. FuelWagon 8 July 2005 15:58 (UTC)

Ok, so sticking with the radio signal example, three questions:

The signal presents two options, either aliens sent the signal or its a natural (ie. pulsar/black hole/etc) phenomenon. I'm pretty sure I know your answer to this, but just to be certain, tell me, Do you think science rules out the alien explanation until we meet an alien...

A sequence of prime numbers is a sequence of prime numbers. nothing else gets ruled out or ruled in. it goes back to that nothing further is known approach. FuelWagon 01:48, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

or does it hold both explanations as legitimate possibilities?

You skew that statement with the word legitimate, which has many meanings, and if I were to say it were a "legitimate possibility", I'm afraid that you'd take the word "legitimate" to mean more than intended. I'll say "nothing is ruled out", or that it is a "possibility" (without the qualifier "legitimate" to possibly skew things unintentionally.) The idea that the prime numbers are from extraterrestrials would be an untested hypothesis at best. FuelWagon 01:48, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

If in investigating the natural explanation, they find out that pulsars/black holes/etc cannot make up an irregular sequence like the prime numbers, does that make the alien explanation any more favorable to science?

The phrase "more favorable" is dangerous. An untested hypothesis is an untested hypothesis. The error you are committing here is basically taking the assumption that the only possible explanations are a few, enumerated possibilities: Aliens or black holes. Nature doesn't work like that. Forensics can take the approach that given there are 2 suspects who could have committed the crime and by some other means you rule out one of them, the odds are the other person is the guilty one. You can probably get a criminal conviction with that approach. But Nature doesn't work that way. There are not simply 2 possibilities, there are an unknown number of possibilities. and when you take "unknown" and rule out ONE, then you still get an "unknown" as a remainder. with 6 billion years of history, it is impossible to remove one and make any sort of real-world connection to say the other options are "more favorable". FuelWagon 01:48, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

What if, instead of prime number pulses, the radio signal pulsed a morse Code English message "Our warriors are coming and we will conquer the Earth."? When the signal carries a coded message, does that imply an encoder on the other side?

ah, but the flagella on bacteria do not have a stamp on the bottom that says "Made in Heaven" or similar. If biologists found that stamped on individual cells, we wouldn't have an argument. What you have is a very strange, mathematical, repeating, sequence of pulses coming from outer space. nothing further is known. and the pulses are such that many think they could have a completely natural explanation and others think it must be aliens. The only other caveat is that the folks who think they're natural in origin have a lot of astronomical data to back them up showing how other very odd, complex, mathematical, repeating sequences have been shown to be produced by black holes and pulsars. It's just that they haven't come up with a configuration that explains this one yet. FuelWagon 01:48, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

PNRS, human. PNRS, human. PNRS-->human. The only problem is that your analogy at this point no longer correlates to the real-world thing it was supposed to analogize. It isn't that we have detected PNRS's twice and found they were generated by humans, therefore the third PNRS we detect is probably human. Rather, the real world knowledge that we have around how life developed on Earth would describe an analogy that says we detected several PNRS's, and they all turned out to be generated by natural phenomenon. Somewhere in the ID article, it says that ID is not meant to replace (insert laundry list of evolutionary bits and pieces), and that those bits and pieces have already been shown scientifically to be part of a natural process. Those are PNRS's that were proven to be generated by an odd arrangement of pulsars, not alien lifeforms. The flagella on bacteria is just another PNRS in this analogy. And while we may not scientifically be able to explain them yet, we have several other complex PNRS's that we know were created naturally, so rather than leap to the conclusion that "a designer created flagella", science says "no further information known". There's a concept that feels like you aren't grasping here: science is patient in the face of an unknown. science deals with the unknown all the time. But just because something is unknown doesn't mean science finds it neccessary to leap to a conclusion or redefine itself. natural science has defined itself as empirical, observable, repeatable knowledge. And that's worked pretty good for the last couple of centuries, even though when the first natural scientists came about, they knew practically nothing, and everything was unknown from a rigorous, scientific point of view. If one were to look at ID from a purely scientific point of view and ignore all the political intent, ID is so impatient "to know" that it discards centuries of scientific practices to find some answer based on subjective measures like "legitimate possibility" or "probable explanation". Science is far too patient to give up so quickly in the face of an unknown natural phenomenon. FuelWagon 13:15, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm currently interested in just the principles involved in the radio signal scenario... and what conclusions inductive reasoning leads to.

I don't think it would be proper inductive reasoning to see a PNRS is caused by some intelligence, another PNRS is caused by intelligence, and to induce that the third PNRS is probably caused by some intelligence. There are unknown possible ways to generate a PNRS, and they cannot be ruled out simply because experience shows a couple other examples. This feels like the political approach to space shuttle launches about 10 years ago. Back in the day, designers speced the space shuttle to be safe for launch within a certain range of temperatures. Florida has uncooperative weather and often goes outside the safe range. Politicians wanted the shuttle to launch because it's good for elections. So, they pressure the upper management of NASA to launch outside the designed safe range. This happened a number of time without problem. At some point, management decided that the designers were wrong, and that a couple of launches outside their declared safe range meant that the real safe range was much wider. This continued for a few more launches until a space shuttle exploded on launch because it was too cold. If you shuffle a deck and pull 3 or 4 face cards in a row from the top of the deck, you can't really make any sort of probability measure as to what the next card will be. it could be a deck of only face cards. It could be many full decks. it could be a stacked deck. probabilities can't be determined off of a few rolls of the dice. two cases showing the PNRS was from an alien planet is not enough to make any sort of real probability estimate on the third PNRS. This is playing on a "gut feeling" that people have when they're playing roulette. casino's will post the last 20 rolls. Some gamblers will see these numbers and look for some sort of "pattern" and bet based off of that, on the "gut feeling" that the roullette wheel has some bias. They may even win a few times. But the casino is better off if the wheel is truly random, so any "patterns" is purely coincidental. FuelWagon 17:13, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

And now for something completly diffrent.

Just spent some good money on C.S Lewis's works. I have the paper back version of this, I was wondering which of these you reccomended I read first? (Already read Mere Christianity)--Tznkai 15:57, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm a large fan of C.S. Lewis as well. Did you mean to rank them all 1.? He's certainly one of the most straightforward apologists. I think a criticsm he gets but doesn't deserve is about his so-called logical fallicies. I feel he was never applying formal logic, but reason and perspective. While I don't fully agree with the trilemma, that was his reasoning. Have you read the Narnia series?--Tznkai 17:39, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Narnia is definatly better as a child. I purchased "Out of the Silent Planet" but havn't read it yet. Read all of Narnia a couple times, and even watched the BBC editions on tape. As far as non fiction, I've only read a few excerpts here and there, and Mere Christianity, which paralells my own approach to my faith surprisingly closely.--Tznkai 18:40, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

The Design Revolution

Dear David, I don't think a page on this minor work deserves a place in Misplaced Pages. A small section in the Dembski article would suffice. As it's currently formatted the article could almost be a publicity blurb circulated by the publisher. Perhaps we need an RfC to encourage other editors to collaborate on a more balanced page, or alternatively a vote on deletion or merger? --Ian Pitchford 19:31, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

What is the encyclopedic justification for quotations giving only Dembski's viewpoint - or rather the particular slant on things that he wants to present in this work? The quotations don't even accurately reflect Dembski's own position as stated in other works available online. --Ian Pitchford 19:49, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

I have a background in evolutionary biology and know some of the individuals involved in the debate, but I must admit it's a peripheral interest. --Ian Pitchford 20:09, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

The ID Experience

I agree with much of what you've said here. Also, I've been astounded by the quantity, and impressed with the quality of much of your writing in the ID discussion page. One of my first impressions upon seeing your contributions was, "this guy should write a book," so I'm glad that you're considering writing one. In my opinion, since you have a lot to say, you'll probably be spending your time more effectively doing that. If you need a (pre-publication) reviewer...

Having been a contributor for a while, I'm well aware of the limitations of Misplaced Pages on controversial subjects. Perhaps the best thing that can happen is that this particular systemic deficiency of Misplaced Pages will become generally known to the public over time. I, too, have occasionally felt like I've wasted time in contending points with closed-minded editors on articles. But I've also always been keenly aware of it, and have subsequently tried to limit it as much as possible.

Unfortunately, some editors are more intent on skewing articles toward their own POV than in creating a general NPOV knowledge base, and even a relatively small number of them can harm the NPOV-ness any given article. Witness the evolution page, where its caretakers won't allow any criticism whatsoever to appear on it. (And I'm not an anti-evolutionist. It's just that no subject, but no subject, is beyond (sometimes unjustified) reproach.) When I discovered the following words from Dembski, I had already experienced it: "we are dealing with a naturalistic metaphysic that shapes and controls what theories of biological origins are permitted on the playing field in advance of any discussion or weighing of evidence. This metaphysic is so pervasive and powerful that it not only rules alternative theories out of the court, but it cannot even permit itself to be criticized. The fallibleness and tentativeness that are supposed to be a part of science find no place in the naturalistic metaphysic that undergirds Darwinism." (Intelligent Design, p. 114) Empiricism, not naturalism, is the basis of science. Science should and must go wherever the evidence leads. If an extraterrestrial intelligence of any kind seeded the earth, we'd never realize it if all we do is insist that life must be explainable through the action of natural laws alone.

As for ID, it raises several questions that I find very intriguing: Is there a metric that only a designed object could possibly meet? If so, do any (or many) natural objects—especially living things—meet that metric? Is it impossible for algorithmic processes (such as nature is supposed to be limited to) to yield the type of complexity exhibited by life?--Johnstone 00:15, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

et tu brutus

Dave, I thought we were cool after we had that whole "Contact" conversation in a "agree to disagree" sort of way. But your comment on the RFC I filed a couple days ago on an edit by SlimVirgin would seem to say you're still begrudging me. I'm sorry for any and all personal attacks I leveled at you. I can be an ass sometimes. Anyway, if there's something more you need from me to wipe the slate clean, ya gotta let me know. I'm still learning. FuelWagon 20:05, 18 July 2005 (UTC)