Informatics

. . . that is, the design inference vs. the broader scientific investigation of a world of life and cosmos that are infused with complex, functionally specific information and complex, functional organisation? In the Turing test thread, just now, I raised this issue in responding to GP and SA . . . and I think this is worth headlining: ______________________ >>Perhaps, it is time to look at ID in a micro sense and a macro/general sense — a fashion that is now 100+ years old in the sciences, with Relativity as the leader (as is proper and fitting). The micro theory of ID is focussed on the design inference and its empirical/analytical warrant. This is the core, when can we Read More ›

Evo-Info: Some Things Computers Will Never Do: Nonalgorithmic Creativity and Unknowability: See also: Evolutionary Informatics Lab: A look inside Follow UD News at Twitter!

Our Physicist and Computer Scientist from Russia — and each element of that balance is very relevant — is back, with more.  MOAR, in fact. This time, he tackles the “terror-fitted depths” of thermodynamics and biosemiotics. (NB: Those needing a backgrounder may find an old UD post here and a more recent one here, helpful.) More rich food for thought for the science-hungry masses, red hot off the press: _________________ >>On the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the context of the origin of life Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) This note was motivated by my discussions with Russian interlocutors. One of UD readers here has asked me to produce a summary of those discussions, which I am happy to do now. I Read More ›

I was sad to recently realize that Hubert Yockey passed earlier (in January) this year. Hubert Yockey, though he personally was against Intelligent Design, made many contributions to science that many of us within the ID community view as pro-ID work. I wanted to take a moment to appreciate and reflect on his contributions as they relate to ID.
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UD has a broad and deep pool of readers and occasional contributors from across the world that have a lot to say, things that are well worth pondering. In this case, I am more than happy to host a guest post in which physicist and computer scientist ES (who hails from Russia) argues the thesis: No linguistic processing occurs in the case of memory of a material that is exclusively explainable in terms of physical interactions between particles of that material, whereas the basic architecture of life is inherently linguistic. Let us now ponder: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Biological memory vs. memory of materials [Eugen S, UD November 7, 2016] Contemporary technology allows us to make self-deploying structures that can revert to their Read More ›

This video is from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism 2016 conference held earlier this year. It deals with using non-naturalism in order to improve the quality of machine learning programs using a technique called “imagination sampling.” The results of a limited test run are given.

From Kirk Durston at Contemplations: There are countless people who use the following rationale to justify why there was no need for an intelligent creator behind life – evolution has had a near-infinite number of trials in which to create the full diversity of life, including its molecular machines, molecular computers, and digitally encoded genomes. Here, we will take an opportunity to examine these points more closely. In other scientific disciplines, the first step one must take before figuring out a solution, is to establish the boundary conditions within which a problem must be solved. Since we should require the same standard of scientific rigour from evolutionary biology, let us calculate an extreme upper limit for the total number of Read More ›

Recently a criticism was leveled against Dembski’s 2005 paper Specification: the pattern that signifies intelligence. As is often the case, if you read the criticism carefully, you will realize that, even though he says Dembski is wrong, it turns out that the more exacting answer would favor Dembski’s conclusion more strongly, not less.
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From ESSSAT (European Society for the Study of Science and Theology), “a scholarly, non-confessional organization, based in Europe, which aims to promote the study of relationships between the natural sciences and theological views.” By Philippe Gagnon. Here. Warning: ESSSAT uses a retarded system where one can sort of see the article shaded, without getting rid of the .pdf box. So if you want to know what the guy said, you have to download it, and it could be hanging around in storage memory forever. I knew this review of Dembski’s Being as Communion would be a hit piece when Gagnon put intelligent design in sneer quotes. The term is sufficiently well known that no quotes are needed, a fact he Read More ›

Readers, do you remember: What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness? And Being as Communion? Here’s a new one: It From Bit or Bit From It?: On Physics and Information (The Frontiers Collection) The essays in this book look at the question of whether physics can be based on information, or – as John Wheeler phrased it – whether we can get “It from Bit”. They are based on the prize-winning essays submitted to the FQXi essay competition of the same name, which drew over 180 entries. The eighteen contributions address topics as diverse as quantum foundations, entropy conservation, nonlinear logic and countable spacetime. Together they provide stimulating reading for all physics aficionados interested in the possible role(s) Read More ›

Retired British doctor Jon Garvey wrote an interesting review some months back at Hump of the Camel of William Dembski’s Being as Communion: Evolution, then, is legitimately viewed as an algorithmic search, which is agreed at least by those who produce evolutionary algorithms to simulate it. As is well known, Dembski utilized the then recently-proven “No Free Lunch” theorems to say that, when all factors are considered, no type of search is better than random search, including evolutionary searches. More recently this led him to postulate a Law of Conservation of Information, or actually to consolidate the idea, first put forward by Nobel-prizewinner Peter Medawar in the 1980s. Medawar had shown, as others before him, that in mathematical and computational Read More ›

There are many ID’ers who complain about the AVIDA simulation, and I for the life of me can’t figure out why this is so.
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Sorry if this post is a bit for computer programmers, anyway I trust that also the others can grasp the overall picture. Evolutionists claim that what it takes to evolution to work is simply “a populations of replicators, random variations on them, and a competition for survival or resources”. Today we will try to partially layout how to simulate on computer such process. First off, we need the replicators, i.e. digital programs able to self-reproduce. In informatics jargon, a computer program able to self-reproduce, i.e. to produce as output a copy of its source code is called a “quine”. Therefore in a sense a quine is a little, minimal digital “bio-cell”. You can write the code of a quine in Read More ›