An Eye Into The Materialist Assault On Life’s Origins

I find this very interesting. As it turns out, there is indeed an “immaterial vital force” that is unique in living systems, and found nowhere else in chemistry. It’s called information. Chemistry is the medium; information is the message.

In the beginning, the physical universe was created in a flash of light at a certain instant of time, or so says a certain ancient author. This was ridiculed as being preposterous by scientific consensus until the microwave background radiation signature was discovered. The flash of light was ultra-high-energy gamma radiation, which decayed into microwaves over a period of 14 billions years.

So, as it turns out, observations about such things as vital forces being unique and essential in living systems, and the universe being created in a flash of light should not be discarded out of hand.

A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, if unjustified extrapolations are made from it.

I find this very interesting. As it turns out, there is indeed an “immaterial vital force” that is unique in living systems, and found nowhere else in chemistry. It’s called information. Chemistry is the medium; information is the message.

An excellent insight!

So many of you have worked tirelessly in the face of unjustified persecution. The resistance is way beyond legitimate debate.

We laymen and women (who appearently believe more in ID each day because of your work) thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, and God bless you…

I remember hearing Paul Nelson interviewed by Hank Hannegraff regarding the Unlocking the Mystery of Life DVD. I was stunned by what I was hearing. It was very easy to follow. I remember thinking, ‘why was none of this perspective on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic’???

I ordered it.

I was already sitting down, tired from cheering and jumping up and down durring the video; but, when I got to the question and answer segment and heard Dr. Meyer explain his illustration about the lack of difference in mass between an empty CD and one containing information I was hooked. That is a powerful illustration.

At that point, I stood back up with hands on my head. Like a modern day ‘doubting Thomas’ my emotions had me proverbially on my knees declaring, ‘My Lord and my God’! I had believed a lie for so long, as taught in basic high school science classes and the popular media.

Dean Kenyon’s comparison between DNA’s bits per cubic millimeter and our micro chips was also very illustrative. The whole thing was and is spot on.

I asked my dentist once about the whole problem of DNA evolution since DNA is needed before evolution can occur. And if I you all don’t mind me saying so myself, I did a masterful job of framing and asking the question.

My dentist understood the matter perfectly and the look on his face was priceless. He gets right to business now and has not really spoken to me since.

If only the establishment had such wisdom. Keep your wits and let their persecution make them ashamed to attack you. You folks are reaching many.

On The Origin Of Origins

Dark Matter-Energy And “Higgs”?
Energy-Mass Superposition
The Fractal Oneness Of The Universe
All Earth Life Creates and Maintains Genes

A. On Energy, Mass, Gravity, Galaxies Clusters AND Life, A Commonsensible Recapitulation
http://www.the-scientist.com/c......page#2125
The universe is the archetype of quantum within classical physics, which is the fractal oneness of the universe.

Astronomically there are two physics. A classical physics behaviour of and between galactic clusters, and a quantum physics behaviour WITHIN the galactic clusters.

The onset of big-bang’s inflation, the cataclysmic resolution of the Original Superposition, started gravity, with formation – BY DISPERSION – of galactic clusters that behave as classical Newtonian bodies and continuously reconvert their original pre-inflation masses back to energy, thus fueling the galactic clusters expansion, and with endless quantum-within-classical intertwined evolutions WITHIN the clusters in attempt to delay-resist this reconversion.

B. Updated Life’s Manifest May 2009
http://www.physforum.com/index.....ntry412704
http://www.the-scientist.com/c......page#2321

All Earth life creates and maintains Genes. Genes, genomes, cellular organisms – All create and maintain genes.

For Nature, Earth’s biosphere is one of the many ways of temporarily constraining an amount of ENERGY within a galaxy within a galactic cluster, for thus avoiding, as long as possible, spending this particularly constrained amount as part of the fuel that maintains the clusters expansion.

Genes are THE Earth’s organisms and ALL other organisms are their temporary take-offs.

For Nature genes are genes are genes. None are more or less important than the others. Genes and their take-offs, all Earth organisms, are temporary energy packages and the more of them there are the more enhanced is the biosphere, Earth’s life, Earth’s temporary storage of constrained energy. This is the origin, the archetype, of selected modes of survival.

The early genes came into being by solar energy and lived a very long period solely on solar energy. Metabolic energy, the indirect exploitation of solar energy, evolved at a much later phase in the evolution of Earth’s biosphere.

However, essentially it is indeed so. All Earth life, all organisms, create and maintain the genes. Genes, genomes, cellular organisms – all create and maintain genes.

Dov Henis
(Comments from 22nd century)

The Dark Matter sends me messages every night . . .

Lock, I know exactly how you feel.

We’ve all been lied to, and now they are threatened by it.

Perfect.

Dov Henis,

Genes are THE Earth’s organisms and ALL other organisms are their temporary take-offs.

***

The early genes came into being by solar energy and lived a very long period solely on solar energy. Metabolic energy, the indirect exploitation of solar energy, evolved at a much later phase in the evolution of Earth’s biosphere.

This is a very interesting thesis. Are you saying that genes originally existed on their own, and not as a part of some organism’s DNA? How is this possible??

Hey Dov, not being flippant here, I really have to point this out.

When you say there are two physics (astronomically or otherwise) and in the next or previous breath, refer to the ‘oneness’ of the universe (fractally or otheriwse) it sounds to me like you are reiterating a very old prinicple and trying to frame it with new language.

Many out here understand the principle well (and respect its mystery too).

You are acknowledging both the unity and diversity of reality as a whole. We just call it the trinity. It is not a new concept.

In my estimation yours is a kind of trinitarian materialist point of view. Another piece of evidence for those of us who understand that materialism is simply another religion. Even your post (in it’s entirety) has a very abstract religious flavor to it along the lines of, ‘I am the alpha and the omega. The beginning and the end.’

You are on to more than you may realize and I understand very well. The only difference I would encourage you to study is in the language. With one language, reality and its self originating qualities is expounded upon as a living being. Therefore life and being originate in Him. He is not simply the origin of life and truth, but as Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life”.

In your language, reality is not personal in the sense of being, but just is. The way you express it contains a presupposition that reality is not a ‘who’ but a ‘what’.

Interestingly it takes a ‘who’ (in this case you) to say it. Many others have preceded you in what I consider to be this error.

I have observed for some time (and I think this is right) that science has demanded that the language be framed in the kind of presupposition that you yourself are using. I wonder if you are conscious of it?

The philosophy in question (materialism) works well for science when uderstanding cause and effect relations in many areas. But to use it absolutely and apply it to ultimate reality in terms of origins is not science at all but strictly philosophy or metaphysics if you prefer.

Your comments are not really observations at all. They are speculations. They are possibilities that have the quality of a declaration. The kind of declaration that logically can only be truely made [with conviction] by a man who thinks himself God.

That being said, your comments show not only tremendous intelligence, but a simultaneous lack of perception regarding the necessity of the simple framework in which the mind must, at once, be inarguably anchored if those ideas to be meaningfully and consistently stated.

Congratualations on discovering the trinity. Now stand up and declare yourself to be the universe (and its reality and origin) incarnate like Jesus did, and you’ll have some real attention.

Since I can never stop writing I might as well add that at some point, materialism will reach that point. A man (or more likely a plurality of ‘mankind’) will declare himself to be God, not just implicitely as is so common now, but outright and boldly.

Then… many on the sidelines will have to make a choice. Is Jesus God, or is this ‘new man’ who unknowingly says the same thing as Jesus?

Or… maybe it’s just coincidence?

Lock: I had believed a lie for so long, as taught in basic high school science classes and the popular media.

I was once in exactly your situation. I took it on unquestioning faith that what I was taught in school and told by academic intellectual types was true, and that there was no point in even considering challenges to Darwinian orthodoxy, because the only people who do so are mindless, uneducated, low-IQ religious fanatics.

A friend, whom I respected because of his transparent wisdom and exemplary ethical lifestyle (despite the fact that he was a Christian and I thought belief in God was a destructive delusion), suggested that I read Michael Denton’s Evolution, A Theory in Crisis.

This suggestion came after a brief conversation in which I tried to convince him that, once upon a time, a self-replicating molecule came about, and then random changes and reproductive selection explained everything after that. He said, “I won’t try to convince you, but I recommend that you read Denton’s book.”

I read Denton’s book, just as Michael Behe did. I slapped myself on the forehead and exclaimed: “Crap! I was conned!”

Here’s what I want to know: Why did so many people I respected and told me that they loved me indoctrinate me with an obvious lie?

Be nice Herb. I once stood in his shoes. Though not complete, there is an answer to your question that is at least logically consistent.

All dov has to do is put materialism into correct perspective (not the absolute ahead of the philsophy that anchors it) to understand for himself. For the most part, he is making valid logical extentions.

The imagination involved will be culled with time. My gut tells me he will not however be shamed into submission.

We can’t win playing the game so common amongst the ID haters. This person seems a layman in the fray. Your question is legitimate, I just thought it obviously rhetorical, so I sensed a ‘touch’ of cynicism.

I believe idiots deserve some grace, because I most assuredly am one.

Gil writes: “Here’s what I want to know: Why did so many people I respected and told me that they loved me indoctrinate me with an obvious lie?

First of all, don’t get the wrong idea. I haven’t been to church in a month. I haven’t read my Bible for two months. Been in a real desert lately, dreaming of how good it was in Egypt, and watching the Egyptians play with heathen abandon. I am dead serious about this. I am a nobody…

That being said, yours is the kind of question that I have only found an answer to in scripture. Here’s what immediately came to mind when I read it because the intellect fails me when faced with understanding such questions.

John 14:27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

So I guess they do care for us Gil. Like the best lies, they are half-truths. There is a touch of real love in them. It is a distortion of true caring.

It is populism, fear of man, and wanting to have a ‘good name’ in the community. It is politics, peer pressure and the inability to see how subtle and intense the pressure actually is. It is taking the easy road… and why not?… everyone else is doing it!

But the clock does run out, collectively and individually.

Proverbs 18:24 A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

I wish I could take the easy road. I hate to confess that I miss it. I still do, and then my conscious convicts me instantly. ‘Oh wretched man that I am’ etc… an alien in what was once ‘my kingdom’.

Why is my cross so heavy when all of its weight was born for me? Obviously there is much I do not yet understand or just simple faith that has yet to grow.

Sorry for the nakedness Gil, all of this you already know…

Lock@11.

“Why is my cross so heavy when all of its weight was born for me? Obviously there is much I do not yet understand or just simple faith that has yet to grow.”

Matthew 11:28-30 (King James Version)

28Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

29Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

30For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Jude 1 20But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. 21Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.

Romans 10:17
17So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Just thought I’d share this with you. God bless.

It amazes me that when scientists tried to test Oparin’s theory, they were going against a scientifically established fact (that life only comes from life, which was established in the Middle Ages). They theorized that if conditions differed in the past, life could slowly have come from nonlife.

Intelligence and advanced education were required (of the scientists) to study and even begin to explain what occurs at the molecular level in our cells. Is it reasonable to believe that complicated steps occurred in a “prebiotic soup” first, undirected, spontaneously, and by chance?

Correction to post #8 just in case there are any theological hair splitters like me out there…

I did not mean to express that Jesus is the universe incarnate or that he claimed to be. What I meant is that He is reality (God) incarnate and claimed to be so.

It is the materialist along the lines of Dov’s comments who would be claiming to be the universe incarnate. That is the equivilant of what Jesus claimed but from a materialist angle.

Anyway, I wanted to make that clear for any who noticed the problem.

Lock,

Correction to post #8 just in case there are any theological hair splitters like me out there…

Thanks for clearing that up before the thread got derailed into a theological quagmire.

Words mean things. It could easily have been genuine problem if not understood. I’m may be an idiot, but I am not stupid…

To Lock at #8 … the unity and diversity of reality as a whole.

Jumping Jupiter. What on earth does all that stuff mean ? Does it mean anything ?

What does it mean?

I generally wouldn’t expect a materialist (if you are one) to ask questions about meaning. It is far more relative to the existential elements of life than the cerebral. That’s ok… our emotional life must cohere with our intellect as well.

Do you expect coherence and meaning?

Appearently you do… And that shows that you are demanding the very principle discussed in order to question it. Can you see that?

It’s fine if yours is a genuine question. But it is quite appearent that you asked the question rhetorically, not in order to actually test the validity of what I said, but to cast doubt upon it by simply raising the question.

Very bad approach in serious objective debate, and very common in todays courtroom dramas and political satire TV.

I really do want to get this right… So you want me to take all of the diverse concepts referenced only implicitly in my abstract response to Dov, and show how they can be unified into a meaningful whole?

If so, you should now understand why it is relevant… because we seek it in everything. The coherence between to or more clues (or witnesses) is necessary to truely know ‘anything’. And I am not talkig about absolute knowledge. I mean even minimal knowledge.

The questions that mattered to me most with regard to nature, reality, and the universe, were how to unify our observations with our philosophical options regarding origins. I didn’t understand my confusion then as I do now, so be mindful that I am looking back with the benfit of hindsight. Then, I didn’t even know what it was I wanted, but now I believe I wanted my philosophy to match my science. It was not only an intellectual puzzle and desire, but one that would bring tremendous existential peace as well. That did not happen as an atheist, or a pantheist. I did not find it in LSD. Believe me I tried.

I did not find it until I considered Christianity with all my all my heart, all my mind, and all my strength.

What was your question again?

To Lock.

I did not find it until I considered Christianity …

I thought it was a parody up until that last line. The Jesuits would love you.

Thanks for playing Graham…

Next!

Lock,

You may have to just ignore Graham. There are those that come here and actually have something meaningful to say. They are vital and interesting, particularly when the conversation focuses on the physical evidence for agency involvement in the Universe and Life within it.

Then there are those, like Graham, who in their indefensible certainty, cannot question themselves for any reason whatsoever. Your willingness to do so, and to voice it openly, is anathema to him – a delighful example of what is to be mocked for his personal entertainment.

Your strength he sees as a human weakness. One stemming from the stupid ideas of old. His weakness he perceives as a glorious strength – a triumphant victory in the name of reason.

And so it goes…

To Lock/Biped.

You have goaded me into one more response. Please explain:
In my estimation yours is a kind of trinitarian materialist point of view.

trinitarian materialist ?

‘kind of’ yes!

Ms Barb,

Pasteur’s theory that life only comes from other life was a mid-19th century idea, that was advanced against the idea of spontaneous generation.

Since this idea logically breaks down at any theory of biogenesis, whether natural or divine, I don’t know that scientists looking into OOL experiments, such as testing if Oparin’s coacervates could form in primitive conditions, really suffered any criticism from this direction. If you can quote an example, it would be helpful.

Naka,

Very soon man will likely be able to manufacture Life in a lab. When he does, then Life will have followed Life – as it were.

Pasteur will not be embarrassed by this, given that Life didn’t just pop up in a bucket of goo.

I am almost certain this is the idea in Barb’s comment. Surely, you see the distinction.

Upright BiPed, you have provided the second step of the ID two-step proof via OOL.

Step 1. If life cannot be artificially manufactured, life is too complex to have evolved ==> therefore ID.

Step 2. If life can be artificially manufactured, life is created by intelligence ==> therefore ID.

Nakashima-san:

Pasteur’s theory that life only comes from other life was a mid-19th century idea, that was advanced against the idea of spontaneous generation.

And the science of the 21st century has confirmed that only life begets life.

Mr Deyes,

Darwin’s theory generated the much-needed fodder to ‘extend’ evolution backward’ to the origin of life.

This sentence is an example of the difficulty I have in distinguishing your ideas from Dr Meyer’s ideas. It sounds as if you are saying that the concept of evolution was accepted in some other, more conteporary context, and then Darwin came along and pushed the idea of evolution back in time to the very origin of life. Who holds that position? You? Dr Meyers? Darwin?

I have read Huxley’s lecture “The Origination of Living Beings” and I find no notion similar to that implied here.

Huxley was clear that science had made little or no progress on the experimental front, which he did understand pretty clearly. (It almost seems as if the Miller-Urey experiment could have been conducted 90 years ealier.) He also doubted that ‘historical’ evidence from fossils had come close to the origin of life, based on an argument from apparent complexity. That is the opposite of what is said here of Huxley. Huxley was not confident of the simplicity of the cell and therefore the origin of life. He was quite aware of the problems and distance still to go. But he was confident that science was the right method to cover that distance.

Mr Biped,

I am almost certain this is the idea in Barb’s comment.

Barb-san’s comment was one paragraph implying evidence of difficulty that scientists had, and one paragraph of incredulity. I tried to address a mild factual error and question the existence of the evidence.

That life didn’t pop out of a bucket of goo, that is certainly the idea of at least part of Barb’s comment.

“But he was confident that science was the right method to cover that distance.”

Nakashima, are you here slipping in a materialist definition of “science”? Do you mean that Huxley was confident that it was chance and necessity sans design all the way down?

Is confidence in science and confidence in materialism the same thing?

Naka,

“Barb-san’s comment was one paragraph implying evidence of difficulty that scientists had, and one paragraph of incredulity. I tried to address a mild factual error and question the existence of the evidence.”

It seems that incredulity is a shared trait. As far as the question of evidence for the spontaneous generation of life, I think the weight of the evidence is overwhemingly in Barb’s favor.

You may have empirical information to the contrary that you wish to share, and I as just one casual observer, look forward to your presentation.

I hardly slept a wink last night; these words stuck in my mind and wouldn’t let go:

I find this very interesting. As it turns out, there is indeed an “immaterial vital force” that is unique in living systems, and found nowhere else in chemistry. It’s called information. Chemistry is the medium; information is the message.

I tried and tried, several approaches but couldn’t find my way. There must be an explanation for this, or are we really dealing with supernature – that as far as I can understand, is beyond reach of observation by us? Is this the next step of ID theory?

I’ll try to formulate the question uppermost in my mind:

Is this “immaterial vital force” that is unique in living systems something like ‘glued’ to or somehow mysteriously integrated with the (biological) information, making information in living systems qualitatively different from information elsewhere, say in a computer?

Let’s make a thought experiment: Reverse engineering of a biological system by first creating a string of ACGT code in a computer. Next, our hypothetical machine converts the computer code into a real, chemical string of DNA. Then, inserting this artificially created information in whatever biological environment suitable, would that information now not contain and express the unique immaterial vital force, would it not function like ‘regular’ DNA?

There are a lot of other questions about this subject buzzing in my mind right now but I guess that’s enough for now but I am looking forward to learning more about this fascinating subject. Are we about to see a real breakthrough in ID research?

Mr BiPed,

You may share Barb-san’s incredulity, I will share Huxley’s confidence. Science seems to be progressing in this area along the path he outlined 150 years ago.

Information may not be the same thing as the old vitalism or élan vital (or morphic resonances in the writings of Rupert Sheldrake), but I suspect that the latter is as necessary as the first. The information in the design of a machine does not give it the will to live, nor has anyone ever come up with a theory as to how it could. ID argues that information/design arises only from intelligence.

Another subject is whether life and mind are more than mere information instantiated in some mechanism.

Rude-san,

I think Huxley was arguing that ordinary organic chemistry, advancing step by step without recourse to the divine (or to design) would eventually provide an experimental proof that life could arise from inorganic sources, sufficient to convince that life did, in fact, arise from inorganic sources earlier in Earth’s history.

The essay I linked to earlier is quite short, and lacking strong evidence to discuss he goes on at length about the methods of science.

Naka, your comment seems to be lacking the all-so-evasive evidence for the spontaneous generation of Life.

Middle Island-san,

That’s all well and good—yet when you say, “But he was confident that science was the right method to cover that distance,” you are subtlely equating science with materialism. On this site, one should think, that is part of what’s being debated—not presupposed.

A picky point, no doubt, but do you think I’d get by with anything like that on a Darwinist site?

Cabal, I think a good cure for insomnia is to realize that some terms are used carelessly and equivocally here, information and immaterial being two of them.

Dembski and Durston base their definitions on the classical concept of information, which is nothing more than a log-transformed view of probability. That would be well and good if they tightened up their idea of probability (given what, and according to whom?) and then stuck to the definitions, but somehow the terms get mysticized.

A blank disk weighs the same as a full disk, says Stephen Meyer, so information is immaterial. But why should we expect probabilistic outcomes to have weight? And who says that a blank disk isn’t a probabilistic outcome? And what substantial (so to speak) meaning does immateriality have if it’s proven true by the existence of any mathematical concept or abstraction?

And equating information with the elan vital seems a semantic jump that would clear Fonzie’s shark by a mile. I think we can ask the ID community to wake us when they’ve nailed down their terminology, and sleep in for a long, long time.

” they’ve nailed down their terminology”

It’s the same terminology that Watson and Crick used in 1953 and which is used in every biology departments all over the planet.

jerry:

” they’ve nailed down their terminology”

It’s the same terminology that Watson and Crick used in 1953 and which is used in every biology departments all over the planet.

It’s not the terms, it’s the usage. Do you think that Dembski’s, Dodgen’s, etc. usage of the terms information and immaterial is well-defined and unequivocal, and that biology departments use the terms in the same way?

Information is well defined. Immaterial is immaterial to biology.

Jerry @ 37:

It’s the same terminology that Watson and Crick used in 1953 and which is used in every biology departments all over the planet.

Oh, and you’ve checked them all, have you?

Here, take a look at this, and you’ll see it’s hardly so cut and dried as you think:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy: Biological Information

What does T-A-G mean?

dbthomas, that’s an interesting link. I’ve often wondered why Dr. Dembski and others in ID have ignored important writers such as Susan Oyama, whose The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution is an important work in developmental systems theory.

Nakashima-san:
“Since this idea logically breaks down at any theory of biogenesis, whether natural or divine, I don’t know that scientists looking into OOL experiments, such as testing if Oparin’s coacervates could form in primitive conditions, really suffered any criticism from this direction. If you can quote an example, it would be helpful.”

Let’s look at some criticisms on OOL projects, including the Miller-Urey experiment.

“Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment.” Stated in 1864 by Pasteur himself. He demonstrated unequivocally that even minute bacteria didn’t form in sterilized water protected from contamination. No experiment, to my knowledge anyway, has ever produced life from nonliving matter.

Dr. Stanley Miller himself was quoted in the magazine Scientific American as stating: “The problem of the origin of life has turned out to be much more difficult than I, and most other people envisioned.”

Miller was straightforward in a paper published two years after his experiment: “These ideas are of course speculation, for we do not know that the Earth had a reducing atmosphere when it was formed.” (Journal of the American Chemical Society, May 12, 1955).

Some 25 years post-experiment, Technology Review (April 1981) noted that: “Little evidence has emerged to support the notion of a hydrogen-rich, highly reducing atmosphere, but some evidence speaks against it.”

Scientific American in 1991 noted that: “Over the past decade or so, doubts have grown about Urey and Miller’s assumptions regarding the atmosphere.”

Many still hold that the Earth’s early atmosphere was reducing (containing little oxygen) because laboratory experiments showed that chemical evolution would be inhibited by oxygen. So, despite the evidence to the contrary, the early atmosphere was reducing, scientists originally thought, because spontaneous generation of life could otherwise not have taken place. That is circular reasoning.

My incredulity stems from watching intelligent scientists conclude, without evidence, that life just happened in an uncontrolled environment, by chance, when they cannot even create life under controlled conditions in a technologically advanced laboratory.

It’s simple common sense.

Also, consider the underlying import of such faulty reasoning. “Scientifically it is correct to state that life cannot have begun by itself. But spontaneously arising life is the only possibility that we will consider. So it is necessary to bend the arguments to support the hypothesis that life arose spontaneously.” Look, I don’t claim to be a philosopher, but I know a logical fallacy when I see one.

Barb @ 42:

Many still hold that the Earth’s early atmosphere was reducing (containing little oxygen) because laboratory experiments showed that chemical evolution would be inhibited by oxygen.

Yeah, that’s the ONLY reason anyone thinks Earth was oxygen-poor initially. Regardless of the exact details of composition, it is in fact quite well-known that oxygen was not common on the early Earth because there is evidence that such was the case.

Ever heard of the Oxygen Catastrophe?

You may want to look here as well:

History of Earth

and also here:

Paleoclimatology

After that, give Google Scholar a spin.

jerry:

Information is well defined.

Excellent! Is Gil referring to probabilistic, algorithmic, or some other definition of information in #1? How far back do we have to regress conditions when we measure CSI? Bayesian or frequentist?

Immaterial is immaterial to biology.

You responded to my comment about the terms information and immaterial. What terminology were you referring to when you said that it’s used in every biology department?

Just a note on this analogy regarding empty vs. full CD’s.

Technically, there’s no information on either. The information lives only in the mind of the programmer(s) and the end-users.

When you physically take apart a CD which when viewed on your computer has pictures of the moon stored on it, you don’t see the pictures. You don’t really see anything at all. Instead you see *representative* bits, either ones or zeros. “Representative”, because in actuality you would see electrons frozen in place on one side or another (assuming you looked REALLY closely). For a “one” is information that’s not really there. And a “zero” is a different kind of information that isn’t really there either.

In the end, and again I’m being quite literal here, there’s no *information* on the CD itself. Only a series of electrons, that when decoded by a *mind* (and only a mind) can be *assembled* into information.

One might argue that it’s a computer that decodes the bits, but this is only true on the surface. Because when reduced down, there was a programmer’s mind responsible for the computer itself. So even here, it’s the mind of the programmer that contains the *information*. Assume for a moment that there were never programmers and never computers but there were, by some freak cosmic accident, this same CD with electrons on either one or another side. In this case there would be no moons. There would be nothing on it. The electrons would be *literally* randomly dispersed on the CD. There would be *no* information on it.

When considering the cell, I always wonder *how* in the world those little buggers process, decode, and then produce error-free output of the information hidden in DNA. They’re like tiny computers reading, decoding, and producing output of DNA as if it were source code.

So in the end, information comes from *minds* and only minds (as far as I know). DNA is information. It seems to me the most likely source of said information is a Mind.

(Second post ever….see you again next year

Lock @ 3

I was already sitting down, tired from cheering and jumping up and down durring the video; but, when I got to the question and answer segment and heard Dr. Meyer explain his illustration about the lack of difference in mass between an empty CD and one containing information I was hooked. That is a powerful illustration.

My understanding is that, on the master CD at least, information is etched into its surface by a laser beam as a series of microscopic “pits”. If that is true then the disc with information should actually be fractionally lighter than a blank by the amount of material burnt away.

Of course, a simple thought experiment shows it could go either way. If I were to write this post on a sheet of paper with a pen, the additional information would cause the paper to become marginally heavier by the amount of ink on its surface. On the other hand, if I were to use a knife to cut out from the paper the letters making up this post, the addition of the same information would have made the paper lighter by the amount of the paper removed.

Does this tell us anything other than information requires a physical medium in which to be stored?

Out of interest, did Dr Meyer discuss the nature of information or explain the various ways in which it is defined?

A blank disk weighs the same as a full disk, says Stephen Meyer, so information is immaterial.

But what about punch cards? Do they contain information of negative weight? Or is the same amount of CSI stored with positve weight in the punched out pieces? Just wondering.

SOooOOooOoooo….what does T-A-G mean?

“Here, take a look at this, and you’ll see it’s hardly so cut and dried as you think:”

Thank you, I rest my case.

“Excellent! Is Gil referring to probabilistic, algorithmic, or some other definition of information in #1? How far back do we have to regress conditions when we measure CSI? Bayesian or frequentist?”

Why don’t you try something simple like the common use of the term in every day English. I haven’t got a clue what you are talking about but whatever it is, it is not necessary to understand the simple information concept used in biology. You would have no trouble explaining it to a 10 year old.

Now, the article on biology and information from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses this very simple form of information as well as some more esoteric forms. But all you need is the extremely simple form.

Upright, what the hell are you talking about?

I can think of a number of possibilities:

a. You’re it
b. Thymine Adenine Guanine
c. The Almighty God
d. Technical Advisory Group
e. Talented And Gifted
f. T=20, A=1, & G=7, and 20-1-7=12, therefore T-A-G means ‘L’
h. A small label I often find attached to my clothing
j. Graffiti
k. A brand of body spray
l. Triglyceride
m. A small tumor

and lastly:

n. Transcendental Argument for God

As an utterly wild guess, I’ll say that final one is what you’ve been fishing for.

Jerry @ 48:

Thank you, I rest my case.

How so? You implied @ 37 that biology used the term uniformly:

It’s the same terminology that Watson and Crick used in 1953 and which is used in every biology departments all over the planet.

That’s one definition, as the page I pointed you too shows, but it’s not the only one. So as I see it, you’re case isn’t resting. It died.

Oh, I know why you think you’ve made a point: because biologists as a whole haven’t “nailed down their terminology”. What matters, though, is whether particular biologists use their preferred definitions consistently, and whether or not the definitions themselves are clear and unambiguous.

“I find this very interesting. As it turns out, there is indeed an “immaterial vital force” that is unique in living systems, and found nowhere else in chemistry. It’s called information. Chemistry is the medium; information is the message.”

I don’t see how this is concluded from the article necessarily, but I’d like to understand this viewpoint. This idea of information I thought I had a handle on because genes have information stored on them.

Is this a broader and different definition of information than as it relates to genes?

To me the laws of the universe aren’t information. Information would have to include having the fingerprints of intelligence, evidenced by breaking the physical universes laws, as regards natural processes acting on their own.

Oh, looks like I was wrong. This is why you think you’ve made a point:

Why don’t you try something simple like the common use of the term in every day English.

You seem to think the Watson/Crick formulation of ‘biological information’ is relying on the everyday sense of the word. I don’t see how. For one, a decent dictionary will show you that there are many non-technical senses of the word. For two, that’s a fairly specific description of DNA coding:

So the argument in Godfrey-Smith (2000a) and Griffiths (2001) is that there is one kind of informational or semantic property that genes and only genes have: coding for the amino acid sequences of protein molecules. But this relation “reaches” only as far as the amino acid sequence. It does not vindicate the idea that genes code for whole-organism phenotypes, let alone provide a basis for the wholesale use of informational or semantic language in biology. Genes can have a reliable causal role in the production of a whole-organism phenotype, of course. But if this causal relation is to be described in informational terms, then it is a matter of ordinary Shannon information, which applies to environmental factors as well.

That’s not what people usually mean by “information” in the everyday sense. It’s much more restricted.

Seversky, you may be right about the disks. I don’t know for sure. It was my understanding that CDs have the layer displaced but not removed in any way.

But suppose there is a difference in mass, was it put there by a natural process or an intelligence?

As another example, what is the difference in the mass of my monitor as a result of these letters you are reading, as oppossed to mere background?

The argument I prefer is a newspaper (leaving aside the obvious intelligent origin). It isn’t the ink, or paper that contain the information. It is the arrangement of them. Same with the CD whether the mass is the same or not. In principle, the material (as you said) can only be the medium. But in saying so, you have made the distinction.

As for information requiring a material medium… how could I falsify your claim?

Science has proven the existence of forces that cannot be directly observed (dark matter etc). Why is it assumed they are material?

What is matter? You do not even know what matter is Seversky, and niether do I. Maybe matter requires an immaterial medium and you have it backwards. There is little more dangerous, than certainty amongst, men.

On the DVD Meyer did not go into the different definitions of information. It is my assumption that the DVD was not produced in order to sell materialistic counterarguments. In the same way, I do not expect (nor do you) that documentaries on the Discovery Channel will give arguments for design in order to challenge the prevailing view of the producers.

I discovered the definitions and arguments you elude to very quickly when deciding to share ID with others here in virtual land. I have done my share of head knocking over it all.

Just not here. But I do like your spunk!

Lock: you’re overfocusing on the ‘material’. That’s the classic way of defining materialism: it’s all about matter, which people usually think of in terms of stuff they can pick up. No one really uses it that way anymore, though. How could they, given E=MC2? A more current and accurate term would be ‘physicalism’. Thus, you can encode information on actual matter like a CD or DVD or Blu-Ray, but it can also be transmitted using a wifi link. In either case, you have to have some sort of physical medium, and the ‘arrangement’ of that medium corresponds to the original data, whatever that was. The machinery which encodes and decodes the data doesn’t have to understand a thing about the content. It only has to encode and decode in a well-defined and consistent fashion.

Seversky,

FYI, etching on the surface will not cause the disc to be lighter. The laser will slightly melt the plastic, meaning the density of the plastic around the etched area will change. There is no loss of atoms on the disc, just uneven density.

My understanding is that, on the master CD at least, information is etched into its surface by a laser beam as a series of microscopic “pits”. If that is true then the disc with information should actually be fractionally lighter than a blank by the amount of material burnt away.

In the below example, there would be an unperceptible weight change depending on the weight of the ink dyestuff and water. If lighter than the cellulose of the paper, then more difficult to detect.

But this is still meaningless in terms of identifying information. Weighting paper could only establish that it was altered, not that it contains information.

A coffee spill could also change the weight of the paper but would not contain any information, besides the fact that coffee was spilled on the paper.

Of course, a simple thought experiment shows it could go either way. If I were to write this post on a sheet of paper with a pen, the additional information would cause the paper to become marginally heavier by the amount of ink on its surface. On the other hand, if I were to use a knife to cut out from the paper the letters making up this post, the addition of the same information would have made the paper lighter by the amount of the paper removed.

Goodness gracious dbt,

Have a Tagamet…take a Calgon bath.

I was asking a simple question composed of four words. I truly am sorry that you’ve been so moved.

I asked the question because I was all caught up in the validity of arguments here at UD. With your pronounced list of 7, 8, 9 answers – little did I know that you would not know the context of the question I posed. I simply asked:

“What does T-A-G mean?”

Have a Tagamet…take a Calgon bath.

I was asking a simple question composed of four words. I truly am sorry that you’ve been so moved.

Umm, moved? If by that you mean ’somewhat perplexed’ then..OK. Also: Tagamet? Heartburn medication doesn’t really make sense in that context. Valium or xanax would have been better. Tagamet does have T, A, and G in it though, so there’s that I guess.

[L]ittle did I know that you would not know the context of the question I posed.

Which is why I asked what the hell you were talking about.

BTW, I’m changing my wild guess: I’m going with ‘Thymine Adenine Guanine’, being as it is a stop codon and also because it seems like a pretty on-topic option. If that’s so, then the answer you’re looking to get is: “Stop.”

I still can’t rule out the religion-related options though, as they are equally if not more on-topic for UD.

So, T-A-G is an acronym for thymine-adenine-guanine that means “stop”.

That is very interesting, don’t you think?

But, I am worried about the permanence of your answer, that being: T-A-G is a name we give to these physical chemicals which means “stop”.

For instance, we as humans call the chemical iron by the name “Fe” in the atomic table. And if we all died tomorrow – and no humans existed at all – then “Fe” wouldn’t have the slightest bit of meaning to it. After all, it’s only a name we gave it.

Would T-A-G still mean “stop” if we all died tomorrow?

Barb-san,

@42 you give some interesting quotes, but none of them support your original contention that OOL scientists looking into Oparin-style coacervates suffered criticism based on Pasteur’s biogenesis theory.

Rude-san,

With respect to equating science and materialism, I was not trying to state my opinion, I was trying to convey the position of Huxley in his essay. As I said, the essay is quite short, and it is interesting to see the view of a Victorian scientist on the definition of science, and how it differs from the issues and vocabulary with which we have become familiar.

Mr BiPed,

Naka, your comment seems to be lacking the all-so-evasive evidence for the spontaneous generation of Life.

Indeed. We have made progress on understanding the problem since Huxley’s day, but less progress on solving the problem. Still, we have made some progress, and by very crude methods. That is heartening.

We also have other lines of reasoning which Huxley did not imagine. Cellular automata such as Evoloops show that life can arise spontaneously in a universe with different laws.

Now the appropriate ID response to Evoloops would be to point out that the rules of that universe were intelligently designed. This is certainly true, and it would be an interesting piece of research to sample CA rulespace to see how common are universes that support life. This would be in line with what Wolfram called “A New Kind of Science”.

While I was unable to find a quote from Huxley to support the position of Dr Meyer (or is it Deyes’?) from the OP, I have found this from Haeckel. It derives from his History of Creation, 1876, translated into English here.

Through the discovery of these organisms [Monera], which are of the utmost importance, the supposition of a spontaneous generation loses most of its difficulties. For as all trace of organization-all distinction of heterogeneous parts-is still wanting in them, and as all the vital phenomena are performed by one and the same homogeneous and formless matter, we can easily imagine their origin by spontaneous generation.

The above refers to what Haeckel called plasmogeny, the creation of cells from a fluid mixture of organic material. This he considered no great leap, compared to autogeny, the creation of the organic materials necessary for plasmogeny from purely inorganic materials. (see p. 415-416)

Having not read Signature of the Cell, I don’t know if Dr Meyer actually references these or similar materials. Perhaps someone who is already reading the book (Mr Joseph?) can confirm for us.

Upright @ 63

Would T-A-G still mean “stop” if we all died tomorrow?

TAG doesn’t mean ’stop’ at all. We say ’stop codon’ because it describes its function. It simply doesn’t match any tRNAs, but does react with proteins called release factors, and so translation stops. The ribosome doesn’t need to ‘know’ its ‘meaning’.

TAG isn’t even the only stop codon. There’re also TGA and TAA. And, in some cases, these stop codons don’t even stop translation at all, but instead cause non-standard amino acids to be added to the polypeptide chain.

So, if we all died tomorrow, the canonical stop codons would still cause translation to stop (most of the time), and atoms with 26-proton nuclei would still form rust when combined with oxygen in the presence of sufficient moisture and participate in countless other reactions, just as they always have. The labels are for our convenience. The molecules and atoms don’t care. They just react.

Footnote:

“Jus a pass thru” . . . and took a look at DBT’s linked from Stanford Enc of Phil on bio-information. Here’s the intro section:

______________

>> Biological Information
First published Thu Oct 4, 2007

During the last sixty years, the concept of information has acquired a strikingly prominent role in many parts of biology. This enthusiasm extends far beyond domains where the concept might seem to have an obvious application, such as the biological study of perception, cognition, and language, and now reaches into the most basic parts of biological theory. Descriptions of how genes play their causal role in metabolic processes and development are routinely given in terms of “transcription,” “translation,” and “editing.” The most general term used for the processes by which genes exert their effects is “gene expression.” Many biologists think of the developmental processes by which organisms progress from egg to adult in terms of the execution of a “developmental program.” Other biologists have argued for a pivotal role for information in evolution rather than development: John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary (for example) suggest that major transitions in evolution depend on expansions in the amount and accuracy with which information is transmitted across the generations. And some have argued that we can only understand the evolutionary role of genes by recognizing an informational “domain” that exists alongside the domain of matter and energy.

Both philosophers and biologists have contributed to an ongoing foundational discussion of the status of this mode of description in biology. It is generally agreed that the sense of information isolated by Claude Shannon and used in mathematical information theory is legitimate, useful, and relevant in many parts of biology. In this sense, anything is a source of information if it has a range of possible states, and one variable carries information about another to the extent that their states are physically correlated. But it is also agreed that many uses of informational language in biology seem to make use of a richer and more problematic concept than Shannon’s. [I add: That is, "information" here is about FUNCTION and complexity!] Some have drawn on the teleosemantic tradition in philosophy of mind to make sense of this richer concept.

A minority tradition has argued that the enthusiasm for information in biology has been a serious theoretical wrong turn, and that it fosters naive genetic determinism, other distortions of our understanding of the roles of interacting causes, or an implicitly dualist ontology. [I comment: What about an implicit materialist ontology imposed by today's Magisteria as the "definition" of science?] Others take this critique seriously but try to distinguish legitimate appeals to information from misleading or erroneous ones. [I remark: And, how does one do that without begging questions, given that say DNA does use a discrete state string based code, which functions algorithmically in expressing proteins etc . . . ?] In recent years, the peculiarities of biological appeals to information have also been used by critics of evolutionary theory within the “intelligent design” movement. >>

______________

The last paragraph reveals a lot — especially about the motives of the critics, and about the lack of substance of the criticism. (I find it also telling how ID criticisms of a priori materialist theories on evolution have been presented!)

I also find the use of scare-quotes very revealing.

After all it is not the mere chemistry of forming a D/RNA chain of monomers that has given rise to the contextually meaningful genetic code, including the significance of TAG. And TAG takes its significance in the context of an algorithm that uses a coded string in DNA and mRNA to sequence amino acids in a protein chain, TAG telling it when to quit adding to the chain.

Finally, Shannon Information is really a metric of capacity to carry information, not of contextual functionality. But, when that capacity is put to work as just described, and we see that over 1,000 bits of capacity are used up in a code based algorithmic context, we can easily see that the number of possible configurations involved exceeds ten times the SQUARE of the number of states the 10^80 atoms of our observed cosmos could cycle through across its thermodynamically reasonable lifespan.

On search space reasons, that leads to such isolation of islands of function that random walks and associated blind mechanical forces are simply not cr5edible explanations of origin of function. But, routinely, we know that intelligent agents produce such strings, e.g. every contextually meaningful English text string on the Internet of more than 143 characters of ASCII code is beyond the threshold.

So, since there is no good evidence that life function can be packed into less than 1,000 bits [indeed the minimum observed for independently viable life forms is about 600 k bits] then we have only one good candidate for origin of bio-functional information: intelligence.

As the just excerpted shows, the objection to this inference is not scientific but philosophical: a priori commitment to materialism, now often enforced by institutional power games that have provided tendentious redefinitions of science, a la Lewontin and his fellow members of the US national Academy of Sciences. These fail to tell us, that such redefinitions lack historical and philosophical warrant.

So, as we look on, it is plain that much of the above is a matter of distractions and deflections. Which is sad, burt revelaing ont eh real balance ont eh merits.

GEM of TKI

PS: Mr Huxley of course was Darwin’s Bulldog, and a champion of what he called “agnosticism,” which boils down to a sophisticated, “softened” version of atheism. So, when Nakashima-San says above that “he was confident that science was the right method to cover that distance [from first life to its origins] . . . ” we may properly challenge that “science” does not imply or entail “materialism,” but can properly infer to the artificial (i.e. intelligent) as an empirically credible explanation where warranted. At least, if it is to be an unfettered (but intellectually and ethically responsible) pursuit of the truth about our world, in light of evidence and reasoned dialogue on the significance of such evidence.

PPS: DBT re:

TAG doesn’t mean ’stop’ at all. We say ’stop codon’ because it describes its function. It simply doesn’t match any tRNAs, but does react with proteins called release factors, and so translation stops. The ribosome doesn’t need to ‘know’ its ‘meaning’

And so, TAG under normal circumstances is a halting instruction, like a NO-OP loop can function as a part of a halting phase in a machine language program. The transistors and associated components in an MPU do not “understand” machine code either, they just implement it according to a built in algorithm [these days, through a lower level program, microcode]. That does not prevent machine code from being code in an algorithmically oriented language. Last, NO OP can also be used for other purposes.

In short, you are straining at gnats while swallowing camels here.

PPPS: those who want a good overview on the protein synthesis algorithm could look here. Wiki — on the theory of a picture being worth 1,000 words — has two good diagrams here and here. Notice the advance “tape”, read-express [append to aa chain] cycle the latter illustrates. Cf the diagram with animation here on magnetic tape action. [Magnetic tape and heads do not "understand" meanings either, indeed they just carry out electromagnetic interactions. In an irreducibly complex organised framework that physically implements information transfer.]

“You seem to think the Watson/Crick formulation of ‘biological information’ is relying on the everyday sense of the word.”

Yes, I do and all your machinations are just reinforcing what I have been saying. You seem to think that because a word has more than one meaning that you have a gotcha. But all you are doing is making my point as I said when after reading the long article that “I rest my case.” Because the word “information” has many connotations you think that somehow it makes one wrong when one uses it in one of its every day uses.

We use the term information here all the time and it is consistent with what Watson and Crick meant, it is consistent with how a major part of the Stanford Encyclopedia discusses it and it is consistent with an every day use of the word which is why Watson and Crick used it immediately in 1953 even before they had any comprehension of the mechanism for which it might be valid.

Your behavior in this is just a typical anti ID way of trying to impugn someone with anything one can possibly conjure up. Instead of having a positive conversation, the anti ID MO is to see how one can prove someone else wrong or try to make them look foolish. It is not even subtle any more and it gets tiresome dealing with such childish manners. It also reinforces that the pro ID people have legitimate things or else the argument would be about that instead of inconsequential minutiae.

Keep up the irrelevant sniping. It makes our case easier for those who are trying to learn.

Dbt, yes you ar exactly right: It has nothing to do with us.

But we know about how rust happens. The question then becomes how does it mean “stop”?

Nakashima,

Meyer’s Ph.D. at Cambridge was on the history of the Origin of Life debate so he had access to nearly everything at a primary source level. The relevant source for Huxley according to Meyer is

On the Physical Basis of Life1 (1868) and can be found at

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE1/PhysB.html

Actually, the Huxley source was published in 1869 in something called the Fortnightly Review. From Wikipedia

Fortnightly Review was one of the most important and influential magazines in nineteenth-century England. It was founded in 1865 by Anthony Trollope, Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, and six others with an investment of ?9,000; the first edition appeared on 15 May 1865.[1] George Henry Lewes, the partner of George Eliot, was its first editor, followed by John Morley.

Mr Jerry,

Thank you for that source on Huxley. It appears to be the text of a talk he gave in Scotland, perhaps later published.

In any case, it makes two points of note. One is that Huxley thought protoplasm to be complex, and expressed a sense of wonder at the complexity he saw under a microscope. The second is that he saw the ability of plants to metabolize raw materials as a proof that life is built from these same materials.

However, this essay does not contain the idea, referred to in the OP, that Huxley thought the protoplasmic cell to be so simple that its origin was a simple matter.

Mr Jerry,

BTW, where does Dr Meyer say that is the appropriate source? In Signaure of the Cell?

“BTW, where does Dr Meyer say that is the appropriate source? In Signaure of the Cell?”

Yes.

kairosfocus:

On search space reasons, that leads to such isolation of islands of function that random walks and associated blind mechanical forces are simply not cr5edible explanations of origin of function. But, routinely, we know that intelligent agents produce such strings, e.g. every contextually meaningful English text string on the Internet of more than 143 characters of ASCII code is beyond the threshold.

I’ll challenge this claim every time I see you make it, which is often.

In cases where the vast spaces between targets are demonstrably functionless (and that means no information that aids in finding the target, since such guidance would constitute function), we humans consistently fail. For anyone who disagrees, the challenge is still open to find a 32 character sentence (capital letters and spaces only) whose MD5 hash is cb6ba5a8daf75b7d50fef95cecae78d7.

jerry, appealing to the everyday usage of the term “information” seems a poor way to support for your claim that “information is well defined”. If the everyday usage is well-defined, what is the definition? Is it well enough defined to base a scientific argument for design on the existence of information?

Regardless, ID theorists like Dembski and Durston do not use the term in the everyday sense, at least not consistently. For instance, Dembski uses it often in the Shannon sense: “Thus we define the measure of information in an event of probability p as -log2p”. According to Dembski, the randomness of a coffee spill endows it with information. (Dembski’s typical example is an ink spill.) Other ID proponents say the opposite.

Shannon information is certainly more well-defined than the everyday usage of the term, but Dembski leaves crucial assumptions unresolved, without which even Shannon information is ambiguous. For instance, who or what is the receiver whose uncertainty is reduced by the message? Shannon information is explicitly subjective — that is, the probability is Bayesian. ID arguments sometimes treat probability as subjective (as in the spilled ink), but then inconsistently posit conclusions that are supposedly objective (as in design inferences).

This is just a long restatement of the points I made above, which, in all of your scoffing, you haven’t addressed.

Lamark writes: “To me the laws of the universe aren’t information. Information would have to include having the fingerprints of intelligence, evidenced by breaking the physical universes laws, as regards natural processes acting on their own.”

When I read your remarks, it reminded me that C.S. Lewis pointed out that a person interfering with the trajectory of a cue ball would not break the laws of physics. And studying the laws would not help us understand why the cue ball moved apart from our predictions.

The point is that the physical laws were not broken, and that nature readily accomodated the supernatural (as opposed to unnatural) event. One cannot even call the interference logical or lawful. It is just will.

As for information, it may be a simple way of showing oneself and giving the strong impression that there is more going on than just cause and effect explicable by natural causation.

In a way, that is information too. It would be like getting someones attention by throwing pebbles from the sidelines. Pebbles don’t fly on their own. But admittedly, it is not the type of information being discussed with regard to DNA.

Seems to me that God covers all the bases. He provides digital information in the DNA as a clue, and also makes nature absurd enough as to not be intuitable by the assumption that it can ultimately explain itself.

As far as evidence (or information) of a designer, it’s not that it is unreasonable to conclude that some entity threw the pebbles to alert you of their presense, it’s that we may not want to believe there is some unseen personality watching our every move. It is preferable for many to make absolute, the relative fact that nature can explain ’some’ phenomenon.

Makes one wonder… is God hiding or us? Does God put on fig leaves or us?

Hope that is somewhat related to the topic…

Footnote:

(Pardon a response on a specific challenge, this is not intended to allow the thread to be side tracked through distractive objections.)

Re Rob @ 79:

In cases where the vast spaces between targets are demonstrably functionless (and that means no information that aids in finding the target, since such guidance would constitute function), we humans consistently fail.

Rob, you here misrepresent the issue; perhaps because there is a fundamental divergence of perspective.

In fact functionality in an “island “may vary from minimal to maximal, including a “mountain range” so to speak. Using our intellect and imagination, we routinely create systems that exhibit “likely to succeed patterns”, up to a neighbourhood of complete success.

We THEN do trial and error tests to get more and more function until we get satisfactory results, through debugging and development.

To see what I am talking about, consider a microcontroller development or more generic program writing exercise.

We do not start with random code and configurations, then arbitrarily change to see what happens. We DESIGN, we initially implement, we test from modules out to systems, and when we are in development, with a multi-fault environment, we see a cluster of difficulties that challenge us due to that multiplicity.

In short, designed systems are developed based on intelligently directed, targetted search that can recognise fractional success and identify bugs then remove them. This is a commonplace of engineering work.

But, in the evolutionary materialist model of the biological and pre-biological worlds, we do not have the luxury of playing with partial [module level] functionality and logical structure based testing to then adjust towards a predefined target. Functionality has to emerge on its own, without “clues” that move us from non-function to initial function. No multi-part, organised function all at once, no “fitness” to reward. And, to suggest that there is a smooth string of easily accessed neighbouring functions that takes us indirectly from basic chemicals in credible prebiotic soups to integrated life forms, or that between major body plans there is a similar path, is an assertion without empirical warrant on observations in the real world.

In that context your hash function challenge is irrelevant. (Design theory does not posit to have created a one size fits all super decoding algorithm. As my note long since says in the first section: FIRST identify a function, which specifies the complex data, then check the required storage capacity. In effect if the function is such that we are looking at 1 k bits plus, on inference to best explanation in light of experience, it is designed.)

Now, too, in your onward linked, you make an unsupportable assertion:

kairosfocus:

[By contrast we know that intelligence routinely generates such FSCI.]

[Rob:] Who is “we”? It certainly doesn’t include me. In the UD FAQ, you refer to “massive evidence” of this, but I see none. It certainly isn’t documented anywhere . . .

Rob, one type of function happens to be contextually responsive English text using ASCII code.

The whole Internet stands in demonstration that it is documented that text strings meeting that criterion of function of more than 143 characters on our observation are invariably products of intelligent design.

Similarly, source code for a real world program will illustrate the same pattern, i.e we also have a major industry worth of documentation.

So, to disestablish the claim, all you need to do is to provide a credible case of 143 or more ASCII characters comprising function information along lines such as above, and which credibly came about by lucky noise and/or forces of mechanical necessity. that such counter-examples are persistently missing underscores the force of the original point. (And BTW, that is the point I made at my single comment in the relevant thread at 104.)

Most likely, by “documentation” you mean stuff published in the current peer reviewed literature and passing the vetting and censorship of the Lewontinian materialist establishment.

That is immediately the fallacy Galileo exposed 400 years ago: appeal to Magisterium, rather than to objective real world evidence, on a matter that can be settled directly by observation. But, even so, the recent work of Abel, Trevors et al, as well as a fairly lengthy list of other publications document the underlying point.

Especially, once we recognise that “FSCI” is a DESCRIPTIVE TERM, not a “suspect” novel terminology.

Namely, we do have such things as functionally specific, complex information bearing or expressing entities, which are fairly easy to observe: your posts and mine are cases in point.

And, in the qualitative sense, these have long been identified as relevant to OOL. For instance, here is Orgel in 1973 on the distinguishing mark of cell based life:

In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures which are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity. [L.E. Orgel, 1973. The Origins of Life. New York: John Wiley, p. 189.]

What design theorists such as Dembski have done is to in one direction, generalise: (i) specified complexity, not just bio-functional complexity, and in another direction, per Able, Trevors et al, (ii) to have defined dimensions in which such can be evaluated: orderly, random and [algorithmically] functional sequence complexity.

And so, this is also actually somewhat relevant to the point of this thread.

GEM of TKI

PS: It will help to document what is going on rhetorically, to cite the weak argument corrective no 28, on FSCI:

. . . FSCI is actually a functionally specified subset of CSI, i.e. the relevant specification is connected to the presence of a contingent function due to interacting parts that work together in a specified context per requirements of a system, interface, object or process. For practical purposes, once an aspect of a system, process or object of interest has at least 500 – 1,000 bits or the equivalent of information storing capacity, and uses that capacity to specify a function that can be disrupted by moderate perturbations, then it manifests FSCI, thus CSI. This also leads to a simple metric for FSCI, the functionally specified bit; as with those that are used to display this text on your PC screen. (For instance, where such a screen has 800 x 600 pixels of 24 bits, that requires 11.52 million functionally specified bits. This is well above the 500 – 1,000 bit threshold.)

On massive evidence, such cases are reliably the product of intelligent design, once we independently know the causal story. So, we are entitled to (provisionally of course; as per usual with scientific work) induce that FSCI is a reliable, empirically observable sign of design.

Observe from the highlights, what was cited by Rob, and what was omitted that would have given a highly material context. For, it would be plain from the context, that I am speaking of directly observable cases, not today’s peer reviewed literature and the power games connected thereto.

PPS: The weak argument corrective no 28 responds to the challenge: What about FSCI [Functionally Specific, Complex Information] ? Isn’t it just a “pet idea” of some dubious commenters at UD?

In so doing, it provides a sufficiently adequate and exemplified description of what functionally specific complex information is, that on fair comment, it is quite evident that Rob’s remarks to Jerry at 80 above are also ill-founded, dismissive, and improperly unresponsive to easily accessible information.

PPPS: I should clarify — Rob cited me from 104 in the other thread, and referred to the weak argument corrective no 28 by implication.

Still waiting…on the question of how does T-A-G physically mean “stop”.

UB:

Here’s a little 101 level thought or two on processors, courtesy NWE’s rewrite and completion on the Wiki article:

A central processing unit (CPU), or sometimes simply processor, is the component in a digital computer that interprets computer program instructions and processes data. CPUs provide the fundamental digital computer trait of programmability, and are among the essential components in computers of any era, along with primary storage and input/output capabilities . . . . The fundamental operation of most CPUs, regardless of the physical form they take, is to execute a sequence of stored instructions called a program . . . There are four steps that nearly all von Neumann CPUs [the common stored instruction, sequential execution type] use in their operation: fetch, decode, execute, and writeback.

This implies that we need an algorithm, a data structure for string instructions (and operational data), machines to fetch, decode and execute. And, such must be in an integrated irreducible complex — for a given architecture — that will start, cycle and terminate appropriately (with the additional requirement that o/ps must be appropriately dispatched to where hey are needed).

Now, let’s see:

data & instruction storage — DNA

code — genetic code (for protein assembly)

fetch — messenger RNA (and the associated algorithm for that!)

decode and execute — ribosomes and transfer RNA

dispatch — endoplasmic dispatch systems, with “headers” that instruct for given AA strings, etc etc.

In that context TAG usually means: terminate chaining, initiate folding and dispatch.

So, it’s just about as physical as a microprocessor that does similar things with silicon circuits and electrical signals. And the physical is just as incidental to the underlying issue: we are dealing with information processing, not physics and chemistry primarily, save as the “physical layer.” (Resemblance to layer-cake information and communication models is NOT coincidental.)

That’s what materialists are in denial over, especially as we have a dominant industry full of empirical evidence to see that such entities are only observed to be created by intelligent designers.

That grinding noise you hear is the sound of materialistic cognitive dissonance in the morning.

GEM of TKI

“That grinding noise you hear is the sound of materialistic cognitive dissonance in the morning.”

We do get a lot of that around here as they go over everything with a fine tooth comb to see what they can snipe at each day. What goes through such minds. Whatever it is, it is not pretty.

Nice post at 87 KF.

“That’s what materialists are in denial over, especially as we have a dominant industry full of empirical evidence to see that such entities are only observed to be created by intelligent designers.”

A new Darwinist mantra “It would appear that the appearance of design is more apparent than ever, but a real designer wouldn’t design like that.”

Upright @ 86:

Still waiting…on the question of how does T-A-G physically mean “stop”.

I already mentioned the basic mechanism: tRNAs don’t bind to the stop codons, but release factors do. Thus, translation stops. Maybe you just forgot about that what with all the hundreds of words of intervening KF material. Anyway, if you want more detail (and not superficial analogies to silicon microprocessors), it’s not particularly hard to find. Google’s pretty useful for that sort of thing, I hear.

kairosfocus:

In short, designed systems are developed based on intelligently directed, targetted search that can recognise fractional success and identify bugs then remove them. This is a commonplace of engineering work.

So now I’m confused. Do you or do you not claim that we observe humans finding sparse functional targets in vast seas of non-functionality?

Design theory does not posit to have created a one size fits all super decoding algorithm.

The point of the hash challenge is to hopefully present a case in there is no previous FSCI to guide us to a solution. I chose a cryptographic hash so there wouldn’t be an algorithm to reverse it. If there were such an algorithm, then would applying it to the hash constitute the creation of FSCI from scratch (assuming that the output is meaningful text)?

kairosfocus:

[By contrast we know that intelligence routinely generates such FSCI.]

[Rob:] Who is “we”? It certainly doesn’t include me. In the UD FAQ, you refer to “massive evidence” of this, but I see none. It certainly isn’t documented anywhere . . .

Rob, one type of function happens to be contextually responsive English text using ASCII code.

The whole Internet stands in demonstration that it is documented that text strings meeting that criterion of function of more than 143 characters on our observation are invariably products of intelligent design.

I’m not disputing that humans write stuff on the internet. I’m disputing that “we know that intelligence routinely generates such FSCI”. I stated my reasons already, but I’ll repeat them.

Assuming that FSCI is well-defined, how do we know that the FSCI in the output of a process was generated by that process? Can we conclude that a web server generates FSCI because it outputs meaningful text? How about WEASEL, or ELIZA, or A.L.I.C.E.?

If we all know that humans generate FSCI, how did we go about determining that humans generate it as opposed to merely reshuffling it?

(As an aside regarding the Orgel quote, it’s interesting that ID proponents repeatedly use a quote that demonstrates Dembski’s equivocation. “Complexity” in Dembski’s “specified complexity” has nothing to do with uniformity or the lack thereof.)

kairosfocus:

For instance, where such a screen has 800 x 600 pixels of 24 bits, that requires 11.52 million functionally specified bits. This is well above the 500 – 1,000 bit threshold.

Since you’ve repeated this, I’ll bring up some obvious questions regarding your calculation.

1) A screen of text is highly compressible. How did you know to base the calculation on uncompressed rather than compressed pixel data?

2) How did you know to use the storage size of the pixels rather than of the text itself? If you were to choose the latter, how would you know what encoding to assume?

3) What function did you choose as the basis of your calculation?

4) Why did you not include in your calculation all screens that serve the same function?

5) Why did you not include in your calculation all screens that serve any function?

6) How would you determine that a screen serves no function? Doesn’t even a blank screen or a screen full of noise serve the function of indicating that your monitor or video adapter is broken?

For, it would be plain from the context, that I am speaking of directly observable cases, not today’s peer reviewed literature and the power games connected thereto.

I’ve never directly observed a human generating FSCI. That kind of event seems, at best, something we would infer by calculating the amount of FSCI before and after, and comparing the two. Do you think most people have done that? I know I haven’t, especially since I have no idea how to create the FSCI that goes into the design process.

Correction in the last sentence above: I have no idea how to calculate the FSCI that goes into the design process.

That’s OK ROb: no one knows how you create it either, so that probably technically correct.

Maybe I am completely wrong but I get the impression that Dr. Dembski never talked about FSCI`but rather sticks to the term CSI that he coined. Or did I miss something?

kairosfocus, with regards to the charge of context shifting that you’ve made over several comments in two threads:

I never said, insinuated, or thought that you claimed documented evidence. The comment that you’re complaining about challenges any supposed evidence, including observational, of humans creating FSCI. That none is documented is a minor point. If you agree with it, can we move on to the bulk of the argument in the subsequent paragraphs?

I have no intention of arguing my interpretation of “we” in FAQ#28, which may be wrong but is in good faith. I’d like to resolve your grievances and move on to the challenges to your claims. If I have misrepresented your position in any way, please clearly state the false position that I attributed to you and I will retract it.

Rob:

Pardon an observation: I find your onward responses astonishing, as though we are inhabiting two different worlds.

Knowing that you are a longstanding commenter at UD, I confess I am tempted to immediately infer to selective hyperskepticism or even willful obtuseness trying to shift a burden of proof beyond the limits of reasonable exchange. But, the principle of charity in communication forces me to instead first infer to fundamental gaps in communication; probably driven by the impact of worldview level commitments on your part that make ID concepts particularly hard to grasp, and even make it hard to see what should be obvious facts. (After all, Galileo’s objectors sometimes refused to look through his telescope or in some cases seem to have objected to optical aberrations and used those to dismiss the reliability of the instrument, regardless of the demonstrated performance on ships coming into harbour.)

I will comment on some key points, in the hope of clarifying some gaps in understanding on basic ID related empirical observations, descriptive concepts and inferences drawn therefrom:

1] 92: Do you or do you not claim that we observe humans finding sparse functional targets in vast seas of non-functionality?

As we both know, humans are intelligent and undertake targetted foresighted searches.

So it is not an “admission” to note that we are capable of finding targets in large config spaces. IT IS AN OBSERVED AND IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTIC OF US ACTING AS INTELLIGENT AGENTS. (Which is why for instance, the cited case of a screenful of functional information comprising 11 million bits or so, illustrates just how deeply isolated in configurations paces artifacts can be. 11 mn bits specifies 2^11 mn ~ 8.96 *10^3,311,329 possible configs.)

The problem — as I EXPLICITLY pointed out above — is that chance and necessity under an evolutionary materialist paradigm cannot credibly undertake such foresighted searches, and indeed, that is precisely a point where Mr Dawkins, in discussing Weasel 1986, acknowledged that it was “misleading”:

Although the monkey/Shakespeare model is useful for explaining the distinction between single-step selection and cumulative selection, it is misleading in important ways. One of these is that, in each generation of selective ‘breeding’, the mutant ‘progeny’ phrases were judged according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success. [TBW, Ch 3, as cited by Wikipedia

In short, you are here plainly tilting at a strawman of your own manufacture.

2] The point of the hash challenge is to hopefully present a case in there is no previous FSCI to guide us to a solution.

Again, the point of functionally specified complex information — ever since Orgel introduced the concept — is that first, function must be OBSERVED, which acts as the specification for the complex information. Absent identified function, the default assumption is that the string of bits is probably meaningless, i.e. unspecified and exhibiting random sequence complexity. (Show us that your hash function produces a performance that is vulnerable to modest disturbance, then show us wheter or no we are looking at more or less than 143 ASCII characters in the hash string. If the hash were specifically fucntional and longer than 143 ASCII characters, we could reliably infer formt hat specific strign that it is designed. the use of so strtingent a cioriterion for complexity is to make sure that chance on the gamut of our observed comsos could not reasobnably produce the effect.)

Boiling down: sadly, strawman again.

3] I’m not disputing that humans write stuff on the Internet. I’m disputing that “we know that intelligence routinely generates such FSCI”.

Back to 101: when we see a text string of 143 or more ASCII characters that functions as contextually responsive or appropriate text in English, we may draw out certain conclusions:

a –> The string is highly specified, as it functions in ways that sharply constrain the alphanumeric values of digits in the string S1, S2, . . . S143, . . . Sn. (That is, it conforms with the rules of English text and is meaningful in the context, which locks it out of the vast majority of the configuration space of a string of length n of 128-state [= 7 bit] characters.)

b –> Such strings are plainly informational in the Shannon sense of information carrying capacity, and onward in the sense of function in a context. (E.g. this post responds to your comments at 92 etc and provides corrective information, in English, up to the odd typo or two, etc. . . . i.e. we have a beach of function leading up to the peaks of optimal function in an island of functionality. Beyond a certain point, too many typos and other errors would destroy the function, i.e. the string is vulnerable to modest perturbation.)

c –> Such a string is — as a matter of easily observed fact — routinely observed as produced by intelligent agents, e.g. comments in this thread; and indeed, there is an Internet full of cases in point. So, insofar as FSCI relates to such cases and other similar cases of identified function that is vulnerable to moderate perturbation and encompasses at least 500 – 1,000 bits of associated carrying capacity, it is well warranted to conclude that “we know that intelligence routinely generates such FSCI.” (We could revert to Durston’s FSC metric or Dembski’s CSI metric, but such sophisticated mathematics are not needed on so obvious a matter.)

d –> Moreover, at the 1,000 bit threshold, we are discussing 2^1,000 possible configurations or about 10^301. This is ten times the SQUARE of the number of quantum states of the 10^80 atoms of the observed universe across a thermodynamically reasonable lifespan. That is, considering the observed cosmos as a whole as a search engine, it would not be credibly able to scan as much as 1 in 10^150 of the available configs, making this a “lottery” that is unwinnable on the cosmic scale. [Not even by buying up all tickets that our cosmic-scale resources allow us to.]

e –> But, intelligent agents routinely use their imaginations and cognitive abilities to generate such text strings.

f –> Extending to similar strings used for programs used for digital information processing systems, the same basic considerations apply.9Even, to long enough hash strings.)

g –> And, it turns out that protein codes in DNA etc [in aggregate for any observed organism] are cases in point of such algorithmic, code-bearing functionality that is vulnerable to modest perturbation, so are also credibly designed.

4] Assuming that FSCI is well-defined, how do we know that the FSCI in the output of a process was generated by that process? Can we conclude that a web server generates FSCI because it outputs meaningful text? How about WEASEL, or ELIZA, or A.L.I.C.E.?

FSCI is sufficiently well defined to be recognisable, indeed, we are dealing with a case of a descriptive term as used by Orgel, which has been somewhat elaborated and given criteria that allow us to analyse why functionally specific complex information bears a certain significance. This — pace your clever word choice — is not a mere ASSUMPTION, it is a fact — whether or not it is a welcome one for those who argue that chance + necessity are sufficient to explain [away?] cases of “apparent” design..

In the case of software, the software is patently itself a case of FSCI, and is designed. We know that directly as well.

We further know that a server is a programmed entity, which is not carrying out decisions of its own volition, but simply mechanically executes a program, through in the end switching logic states and assocated voltages in circuits. [This gets us into the issue that there may be onward worldview level IMPLICATIONS of observing the reality of FSCI as a credible sign of design. This has no relevance to whether or not that is a good empirical evidence of design, save to those who having already made up their minds that mind beyond matter is impossible, and will use that Lewontinian a priori materialistic criterion to reject evidence that does not fit it. We can only hope that such will be willing to face the implications of ending up in absurdities on their worldview's premises.)

[ . . . ]

5] If we all know that humans generate FSCI, how did we go about determining that humans generate it as opposed to merely reshuffling it?

Sure enough, the worldview level issue now emerges: are we just computers, mechanically playing out our own programming? [Genetic and/or environmental . . . cf here for the implications of answering that "yes."]

The first level of answer is that we ourselves exhibit FSCI so are evidently designed.

Second, in our experience, we are conscious, enconscienced, minded creatures, who find ourselves making choices and originating things with a breadth of range that transcends the credible reach of programming. Decision-making creatures, notoriously, are rational but are not predictable, nor reducible to outcomes scatterinfg along a mechnical probabilistic statistical distribution.

So, if we are conscious of acting in ways of reason, value and decision, what worldview bests accounts for that?

(And, neurological reductionism boils down t o self-referential incoherence and emergentism runs into the barrier that in effect it is argument by magical poofery: once matter and information reach a certain level of complexity, materialists ASSUME or ASSERT that conscious mindedness and morality etc “emerge.” Real cases of emergence such as how Na and Cl form common salt, have dynamical processes that we can trace.)

So, the real answer is that we should be at least open to the possibility t hat the apparent creative enconscienced reasoning and deciding consciousness that we experience and which is a premise of all intellectual activities such as science, is real. (And we should face the apparent self-referential incoherences of assuming reductionistic materialism, as well as demanding adequate dynamics from emergentists. noting as well that reductionism and emergentism are in reality flip sides of the same materialistic coin.)

6] regarding the Orgel quote, it’s interesting that ID proponents repeatedly use a quote that demonstrates Dembski’s equivocation. “Complexity” in Dembski’s “specified complexity” has nothing to do with uniformity or the lack thereof.

On the contrary, Orgel showed and summarised that there is a characteristic of cell based life that is sharply distinct from the order of crystals or the haphazardness of a mass of organic tar. A distinction that cries out for adequate definition and explanation.

Dembski provided one model, using the default case for probabilistic distributions per the Laplacian principle of indifference: save where we can identify a reason to bias an outcome across a contingent set, it is reasonable to assume that each possible configuration is a likely as any other. Such can be modified of course if such reason is presented. And, any mathematically sophisticated person should know that much. And, in fact, if we see for instance Bradley’s presentation on Cytochrome C here, we will see that he and many others do reckon with non-uniform distribution cases, as has been long since published and presented; indeed, it has long been accessible two clicks away in my appendix 1, point 9, my always linked. (This raises an issue of responsible as opposed to misleading comment by informed commenters.)

BOTTOMLINE: Such cases reduce the average information carrying capacity per physical bit-storing unit, but on the scope of the relevant cluster of information bearing entities in life [remember we start observed independent life forms at 300,000 4-state elements], it makes no material difference.

In short the much touted objection on “uniformity” is a strawman argument.

7] 93, A screen of text is highly compressible. How did you know to base the calculation on uncompressed rather than compressed pixel data?

A 800 x 600 pixel screen with 24 bits per pixel is not going to be compressed below 1,000 bits of information capacity. Redundancy does not undo the fundamental issue.

Strawman of immateriality, again.

8] How did you know to use the storage size of the pixels rather than of the text itself?

Both the pixels of the screen and the text on it exhibit FSCI (and it does not matter the precise underlying operating system or text encoding scheme or pixel encoding scheme — though these days these are pretty much standardised), i.e this is a red herring.

9] What function did you choose as the basis of your calculation?

Rob, you have a PC screen in front of you as you read this. ASK: What function is it carrying out right now?

(In short, onlookers, this has now plainly deteriorated into selective hyperskepticism to the point of self referential absurdity. Sad to see. But, it tells us just how compelling the case that FSCI is a god sign of intelligence is on the merits.)

10] Why did you not include in your calculation all screens that serve the same [or any] function?

Because we have a particular screen in front of us, and that screen uses digital strings of information to perform an observed function. In so doing, it uses in excess of 1,000 bits of information carrying capacity, and it is vulnerable to modest perturbation of said strings.

In our observation — despite tortured objections to deny the obvious and evident — such entities are known to be designed. And, on the search space constraints, only design is a credible candidate for such an entity.

So, it becomes an apt illustrative case of how FSCI is a reliable sign of intelligence. So apt, that you — sadly — have reduced yourself to self-referential absurdity in trying to deny its force.

11] How would you determine that a screen serves no function? Doesn’t even a blank screen or a screen full of noise serve the function of indicating that your monitor or video adapter is broken?

We need not try to identify non-function: the question of FSCI arises when we identify a particular case of function that uses over 500 – 1,000 bits, and is vulnerable to modest perturbations. As has been plain from the outset.

12] I’ve never directly observed a human generating FSCI.

Including yourself when you created the posts 92 – 93 etc?

In short, you are now in self-referential absurdity.

13] 94, I have no idea how to calculate the FSCI that goes into the design process. 97, I never said, insinuated, or thought that you claimed documented evidence. The comment that you’re complaining about challenges any supposed evidence, including observational, of humans creating FSCI. That none is documented is a minor point.

We can calculate, using several approaches — of which the above is a simplest illustration — the FSCI of entities that function based on information. Indeed, there is now at least one table of 35 values of such for proteins in the peer reviewed literature, by Durston et al, as is linked form weak argument corrective no 27 above on this page.

In short, neither leg of your claim can stand up. (And, in the earlier comment you did make claims about “documented” evidence, which I corrected by pointing out that the given evidence that is relevant is the PC in front of you and the Internet full of cases of FSCI.)

14] I have no intention of arguing my interpretation of “we” in FAQ#28, which may be wrong but is in good faith.

Onlookers, the reference of “we in weak argument corrective no 28 should be obvious ,as should the fact that a reasonable working definition 9complete with illustrative case) was presented ahead of the long string of objections answered above:

FSCI is actually a functionally specified subset of CSI, i.e. the relevant specification is connected to the presence of a contingent function due to interacting parts that work together in a specified context per requirements of a system, interface, object or process. For practical purposes, once an aspect of a system, process or object of interest has at least 500 – 1,000 bits or the equivalent of information storing capacity, and uses that capacity to specify a function that can be disrupted by moderate perturbations, then it manifests FSCI, thus CSI. This also leads to a simple metric for FSCI, the functionally specified bit; as with those that are used to display this text on your PC screen. (For instance, where such a screen has 800 x 600 pixels of 24 bits, that requires 11.52 million functionally specified bits. This is well above the 500 – 1,000 bit threshold.)

On massive evidence, such cases are reliably the product of intelligent design, once we independently know the causal story. So, we are entitled to (provisionally of course; as per usual with scientific work) induce that FSCI is a reliable, empirically observable sign of design.

Ther meaning of “we” is plain and in a plain context.

__________
Finally, observe onlookers: TO DATE, OBJECTORS TO THE FUNCTIONALLY SPECIFIED SUBSET OF COMPLEX, SPECIFIED INFORMATION ARE PATENTLY UNABLE TO GIVE US A CASE WHERE FSCI HAS BEEN CREDIBLY CREATED BY CHANCE + UNDIRECTED MECHANICAL NECESSITY. But, as we have highlighted, from the PCs in front of each of us, to the Internet we are all using, to the comments we are putting up in this thread, we exemplify just how FSCI in our observation is routinely the product of intelligent design.

The very nature of the objections, as well as the resulting absurdities, tell us what the true balance of the case on the ever so plainly merits is: we are entitled to (provisionally of course; as per usual with scientific work) induce that FSCI is a reliable, empirically observable sign of design.

GEM of TKI

PS: the above set of corrective responses is not directly relevant to the original focus of the thread, but illustrate how the materialist frame of thought leads them to reason as they do on origin of life, which is a case of origin of bio-functional information well beyond the reasonable threshold of complexity.

PPS: Sparc, it should be easily evident that the case where specification is by observed function is a subset of the general set of complex specified information. Similarly, many cases of irreducible complexity — and BTW fine-tuned adjustment to operating point of a composite system — are also addressing subsets of CSI. (It is possible for something to be IC without being otherwise complex enough to pass the thresholds for CSI or FSC or FSCI.)

Mr KairosFocus,

For practical purposes, once an aspect of a system, process or object of interest has at least 500 – 1,000 bits or the equivalent of information storing capacity, and uses that capacity to specify a function that can be disrupted by moderate perturbations, then it manifests FSCI, thus CSI.

So if I write a GA system where the population members are competitors in an iterated prisoners dilemma with competitions running up to 1000 iteratioins, then you are satisfied that FSCI is being created by the GA? Each member is 1000 bits long, each bit stands for the action to take (cooperate=1, defect=0) in the current iteration. Fitness is the score of the individual at the end of an iterated competition with another member of the population.

Nakashima-San:

So if I write a GA system . . .

the program and the machine on which it runs are storing and expressing the FSCI, which shows (per the lines of evidence on inference to best explanation as repeatedly outlined) that they are artifacts of intelligent design.

In outright identifying the — obviously, highly intelligent — author of the relevant GA, you have thereby acknowledged that.

GEM of TKI

PS: I am very much open to the possibility of a created self conscious, reasoning and freely deciding — thus morally bound as well — intelligence, even to one that we can create [hopefully someday soon]; but GA’s are not credible candidates for that.

Mr Kairosfocus,

the program and the machine on which it runs are storing and expressing the FSCI, which shows (per the lines of evidence on inference to best explanation as repeatedly outlined) that they are artifacts of intelligent design.

As far as you have gone, I agree with you. But you have stopped short of claiming that the population members (either the first or last generation) are my creation, which is a good thing. Had you done so, you would have fallen into the same confusion that Mr Gil Dodgen has demonstrated. The program can explicitly construct the initial population from random bits taken from well known URLs. Further, (and I hope not to confuse the issue) the small GA program could allocate a million population members in each generation, each a million bits long. I didn’t construct this terabit of FSCI.

I have a question for KF . . . As a student of such simulations and their weaknesses. I have to agree with much of what you said. However, I have one objection. This objection stems from the work of GilDodgen and the type of simulations he does.

Gil has, correctly, pointed out that all said simulations cannot be worthwhile because they do not take into the true reality of nature and the randomness of it . . .

So when you take your machine that is running a simulation and expose it to radiation or chemicals that might impact the simulation and the machine itself running the simulation . . . does this increase or decrease the FSCI?

Nakashima-san:

Following up briefly.

the program is designed to undertake a targetted search within the reasonable scope of resources of the cosmos, and on a fitness landscape that is not based on islands of fucntion in vast config spaces that are non-fucntional and have no beacons to broadcast the “right” direction to move in. FSCI in the relevant context becomes a consideration when we are addressing config spaces that are large and comprise isolated islands of function.

It is enough for me that the GA is itself FSCI (programs being informational entities), and that the machine on which it runs exhibits FSCI. They therefore exemplify the pattern that FSCI originates in intelligent design per our observational experience.

GEM of TKI

90DegreeAngel:

The issue of impact of randomness on a designed object is of course a complex one.

If it has enough redundancy in it, it may be robust enough to still function even with moderate damage to the information. (Think here of error correcting codes.)

Insofar as there is damage to functional bits — and, beyond a threshold, an error correcting code or the like will be overwhelmed — the number of actually functional bits will be falling as damage occurs, and ability to recover function in the teeth of further damage will also be falling.

With the degree of intricacy of function we are talking about, the threshold by which functionality fails will occur long before the number of bits that are undamaged falls below the 500 – 1,000 bit rule of thumb threshold. (Notice, experiments point to auto-disintegration of bio-function for independent life forms once the number of base pairs falls below about 300,000.)

This of course bears more than a passing resemblance tot he concerns under Sandfor’s genetic entropy.

GEM of TKI

Mr Kairosfocus,

FSCI in the relevant context becomes a consideration when we are addressing config spaces that are large and comprise isolated islands of function.

I’m not sure what you are saying. Does this context invalidate whether something is FSCI or not? I thought 1000 bits was pretty large, but we can make the example gigabits in size if you prefer. 2^10^9 is a pretty big config space. How big do the ‘cliffs’ have to be around these islands before something becomes FSCI?

kairosfocus@98:

So it is not an “admission” to note that we are capable of finding targets in large config spaces.

Computers and nature can find targets in large config spaces too.

But I didn’t ask whether we’re capable of finding targets in large config spaces (and I didn’t say anything resembling “admission”). The question is whether we can find sparse FSCI targets without any FSCI to guide us.

In short, you are here plainly tilting at a strawman of your own manufacture.

I asked a yes/no question on whether you make a specific claim. How that constitutes a strawman is beyond me.

Again, the point of functionally specified complex information — ever since Orgel introduced the concept — is that first, function must be OBSERVED, which acts as the specification for the complex information.

The hash challenge has nothing to do with identifying FSCI. It’s a challenge to see if you can generate FSCI without using existing FSCI. (Or more accurately, FSI, since the ratio of target size to search space size is less than 153 bits.)

Back to 101: when we see a text string of 143 or more ASCII characters that functions as contextually responsive or appropriate text in English, we may draw out certain conclusions:

I have never disputed that responsive text is FSCI. I accept that arguendo, so there’s no need to defend that claim.

“we know that intelligence routinely generates such FSCI.”

Your 7-step argument does not address my reasons for disputing this claim, so I’ll ignore it.

This — pace your clever word choice — is not a mere ASSUMPTION, it is a fact — whether or not it is a welcome one for those who argue that chance + necessity are sufficient to explain [away?] cases of “apparent” design.

Whether or not chance+necessity are sufficient to explain cases of apparent design is irrelevant to the question of whether FSCI is well-defined. I’ve accepted, arguendo, that it is, so you don’t need to defend it.

We further know that a server is a programmed entity, which is not carrying out decisions of its own volition, but simply mechanically executes a program, through in the end switching logic states and assocated voltages in circuits.

You didn’t answer my question explicitly, but the implication is that necessity (plus, I assume, chance) cannot generate FSCI, so we can rule out computer programs as originators of FSCI. Have I interpreted you correctly?

kairosfocus@99:

Second, in our experience, we are conscious, enconscienced, minded creatures, who find ourselves making choices and originating things with a breadth of range that transcends the credible reach of programming.

The reach of programming is quite vast. Unless we can solve the halting problem, we’re within its reach. As to the credible reach of programming, that depends on who or what the programmer is.

Decision-making creatures, notoriously, are rational but are not predictable, nor reducible to outcomes scatterinfg along a mechnical probabilistic statistical distribution.

Rationality entails some degree of predictability. A perfectly rational person is guaranteed to make one of a set of optimal decisions. It’s only within that set that their choice is unpredictable. And certainly human behavior is predictable to some degree, even some irrational behaviors.

Any set of outcomes constitutes a statistical distribution, and distributions are often used to predict human behavior. To say that human choices are not “reducible to outcomes scattering along a mechanical probabilistic statistical distribution” begs the question of whether human choices are mechanical, whatever that means.

So, the real answer is that we should be at least open to the possibility t hat the apparent creative enconscienced reasoning and deciding consciousness that we experience and which is a premise of all intellectual activities such as science, is real.

Now we’re to the heart of the debate. It sounds like you’re positing something like libertarian free will, and it seems that some such idea is a necessary in order to conclude that humans create FSCI as opposed to merely storing and expressing it. So instead of it being obvious and universally observed that intelligence creates FSCI, it turns out to be a conclusion based on an LFW-like metaphysic. That has been my point from the beginning.

So I repeat that I have never directly observed a human generating FSCI, a statement that you earlier called “self-referential absurdity.” Now you say that we should be at least open to the metaphysic from which we can conclude that humans generate FSCI. It seems that your stance has softened considerably.

kairosfocus@99:

Real cases of emergence such as how Na and Cl form common salt, have dynamical processes that we can trace.

Do all real cases of emergence have dynamical processes that we can trace?

In short the much touted objection on “uniformity” is a strawman argument.

You’re conflating two unrelated points regarding uniformity. My point had nothing to do with the fact that Dembski’s null hypotheses are virtually always uniform distributions. The strawman accusation is tiring, especially when it stems from your own misunderstanding.

A 800 x 600 pixel screen with 24 bits per pixel is not going to be compressed below 1,000 bits of information capacity

So when you say “11.52 million functionally specified bits,” do you really mean 11.52 million functionally specified bits?

Strawman of immateriality, again.

You’re an intelligent person, so you certainly knows what “strawman” means, and yet you repeatedly level the charge against me without telling me how I’ve misrepresented your position. I even explicitly asked for you to clearly state any position that I have falsely attributed to you so I can retract it. The olive branch was ignored, and I continue to get accusations of strawman. I’ve said before that you’re a good man, kairosfocus, and I believe that, but your brand of “charity in communication” seems strange to me.

A few more points:

- You might want to follow Dembski’s example in including all outcomes that meet the given specification (or function in your case) in your calculation. Dembski does it that way for a good reason.

- This would require that you explicitly state a function, rather than just saying that something is functional. The information on my computer screen has many functions, and there is a different quantity of CSI associated with each function, according to Dembski’s definitions.

- You might also consider incorporating specificational resources as Dembski does, also for a good reason.

- You didn’t answer my question as to whether a blank screen is functional. Ditto on the screenful of noise. Do you not see the relevance of these questions?

- How do we use the FSC of proteins to calculate the amount of FSCI that goes into a design process? What would be a ballpark figure for the amount of FSCI that went into creating, say, this sentence?

- Please point me to the documentation that shows that humans generated the FSCI in my PC and in the internet, as opposed to humans being conduits for that information. Thank you in advance.

Nakashima-San:

Again, once we deal with ~ 500 – 1,000+ bits of information storage capacity to carry out a function, the point is that we cannot exhaust the configuration space or even search out a significant fraction thereof. (The entire universe we observe would not be capable of searching out 1 in 10^150 of the space. The implied odds of getting to any one block of 10^150 configs are like marking just one atom for just one instant in the entire history of the observed universe, then getting into a time and space travelling spaceship and going anywhere in the history and locations of the observed cosmos at random, and on the very first try, we pick up the marked atom at just the right instant of time. That’s why this is a practically unwinnable lottery.)

So, random walk based processes of generating contingent outcomes — and remember, mechanical necessity does not generate high contingency but plays out along trajectories shaped by initial and intervening circumstances — become irrelevant, once we are looking at the sort of recognised functionality that is vulnerable to modest perturbation.

For instance take a prebiotic soup model, with empirically plausible monomers in it.

To move from such soups to metabolic and/or genetic functionality on chance + necessity only requires spontaneous generation of relevant co-adapted macromolecules, and that these be configured together in the “correct” relationships in spaces of order 10^-6 m scale. As I discuss in my App 1, point 6 in the always linked, the configuration space is daunting, and the result is that the odds of getting to such life on the gamut of our observed cosmos are not materially different from zero.

But, we know by routine observation — e.g. posts in this thread (pace Rob’s reiterated objections . . . ) — that intelligences routinely produce FSCI-bearing functional systems.

So, on inference to best empirically anchored, current explanation origin of life (the nominal focus of this thread) is best explained by intelligent design.

GEM of TKI

Rob:

Pardon, but, you are recirculating already answered objections, with a few twists and turns. The unanswered reductio challenge still remains.

You are a known intelligence, and the very posts you just put up are instances of original, i.e. creative and more or less contextually responsive text in English of more than 143 characters. In short, all the documentation you really need is sitting there in front of you, and is the product of your own recent creative action.

Similarly, you would have done much the same had you put up source code.

And that answers to the basic issue directly: computers are programmed mechanisms, designed and developed by intelligent agents. They can be programmed to carry out targetted searches of large configuration spaces, but once the spaces get big enough, they do not do so successfully by random walks in a sea of non-function dotted by isolated islands of function. Instead, they step by step carry out preset routines, and in so doing address targets based on preset algorithms. (The relevance of this to the theme of this thread has just been discussed in my response to Nakashima-San.)

By contrast a human in a general language or programming situation exhibits volitional spontaneity and creativity: s/he is not spitting out shuffled pre-programmed contextually pre-programmed responses a la Turing’s test, or by random shuffling, but is creating genuine non-pre-existing novelty.

[That's why so-called expert systems don't work so well outside of narrow contexts where more or less exhaustive rules and cases can be constructed (typically resulting in rather predictable outcomes) and/or deep searches across contingencies can be undertaken. Humans -- a case of observed intelligences -- don't need more than a fuzzy idea and some practice with examples to begin to create successful novel information-rich entities. (Think here on Chomsky et al on the way even infants generate novel sentences.) And, given the critical significance of surprise in many real world situations, that difference is vital. OPTIMAL answers are usually brittle; indeed since we have bounded rationality, the GIGO principle applies -- a programmed optimum for a model may well leave out key unanticipated information from the environment. A classic case is say an expert aircraft landing system that does not factor in a case where an earthquake has cracked a runway. A common-sense using student pilot will spot that something is wrong, but a machine will go right ahead and will crash the plane. Or, check out the performance of OCR systems and Spell checks or Grammar checks. If you trust an OCR to get it fully right, you deserve the result you will get; observe, we then use a human proof reader to correct the output. Why is that? And, why it is that humans can usually read ordinary handwriting (the mess created by doctors is an exception here . . . ), but computers run into serious difficulties trying to do that?]

As to the reiterated assertion, insinuation or implication that FSCI is not well defined so can be dismissed, I again point to the simple rule of thumb description/model from weak argument corrective 28:

For practical purposes, once an aspect of a system, process or object of interest has at least 500 – 1,000 bits or the equivalent of information storing capacity, and uses that capacity to specify a function that can be disrupted by moderate perturbations, then it manifests FSCI, thus CSI. This also leads to a simple metric for FSCI, the functionally specified bit; as with those that are used to display this text on your PC screen. (For instance, where such a screen has 800 x 600 pixels of 24 bits, that requires 11.52 million functionally specified bits. This is well above the 500 – 1,000 bit threshold.)

The example: a PC screen such as the one you are reading this on is also still quite relevant and again raises the need to address what is literally right there in front of you.

Rob, how did the PC in front of you generate the windows, graphics and text on it — by [A] chance plus necessity undirected by decision-making creative intelligences [as we observe and experience them -- debates and dismissals over "libertarian free will" notwithstanding (onlookers BTW, cf what happens when we revert to materialist reductionism, here)], or [B] by a process of mechanically — i.e without common sense intervening — executing a known intelligently designed program acting on inputs, in the end through using organised circuits and voltages? So much so that it is often said: GIGO — garbage in, garbage out.

(I also note that for instance, “life” and many other key entities in science have no generally agreed precising definition, but are still very useful and important SCIENTIFIC entities. That is, I give you a counter example to the notion that entities that have no precising definitions are not proper conceptual entities and can be dismissed. [In fact, we form concepts by abstracting intuitively from examples and then seek to construct descriptions and definitions in words, testing against examples to see if they are reliable enough to use. This then becomes the foundation of quantitative MODELS -- observe we are not here addressing realities -- which can be used where relevant and reliable. I here assert that the just above model is adequately reliable to be used as a criterion of functionally specific complex information and its empirically credible source. Without needing to go beyond the fact that we OBSERVE certain entities -- including ourselves -- that are creatively intelligent and in that intelligence often significantly differ in actions from programmed behaviour and/or from randomness or mechanical necessity of nature. Specifically, [a] necessity gives rise to low contingency. [b] High contingency has the known sources: (i) stochastic, undirected contingency (= chance) and (ii) intelligence, which often shows its presence by rational, decisional behaviour that is creative and in some cases wise as opposed to merely otpimising on a narrow model. FSCI as just simply modelled is a known, routinely observed artifact of such intelligent action, per millions of cases as can be seen on the Internet.])

It seems to me that a cycle of endless debates over words and terms and objections can only really be resolved by reiterating the still unanswered challenge:

Rob, you need to show us a case where undirected chance + necessity (i.e nature acting freely) has credibly created say a 143 character string of text in English (up to a typo or two) that responds to a real world situation. No libraries of chainable prepackaged responses or preset text strings or generating rules, or targets and rules of improvement by proximity without reference to functionality in a context of isolated islands of function, or the like, etc.

This or the like has long since been on the table [for months to years here at UD], and the resort to every artifice of debate but the simple production of an empirical counter-example demonstrates clearly that you have no such good counter example.

And that in turn goes to the heart of the issue in this thread: materialistic models of origin of life are based on maximally improbable scenarios, and are often insisted on in the teeth of the known routinely observed source of the functional, specified complex information observed ever since Orgel et al to be a key and discriminating characteristic of life.

GEM of TKI

PS: For those troubled by the issue on whether or not I am in agreement with Dembski, note that islands of function (and archipelagos) are target zones where once one reaches the beachline, hill climbing algorithms such as modest chance variation + differential performance leading to culling on “best performers” will be applicable.

My point in giving a simple rule of thumb with a 1,000 bit info storage capacity threshold on observed functional information, is that by specifying a criterion of such vastness that the cosmos will not be able to search more than an incredibly tiny speck of it, no reasonable islands of function will be credibly accessible through whatever is comparable to an unaided random walk in the ocean. No beacons, no wafting winds, no wafting currents, no wandering birds that allow one to know one is in the neighbourhood and which direction to go when they go home to roost on evenings, etc. In short, no active warmer/colder information that rewards non-function on proximity.

Once we do that, we will very soon see that the reasl problem with OOL and later on body plan level biodiversity is that there is no reasonable way to get tot he shores of initial function on undirected chance + necessity. That is the conundrum that has needed to be answered by evolutionary materialism advocates for years at UD [and elsewhere], and which still stands unanswered.

Pardon a test:

Testing blockquote.

single block

Next, double:

first level block

second level block

Back to level 1

Ordinary

(To see how my formatting went wrong.)

Odd . . .

kairosfocus,
Thank You for the time, patience and effort, you put into explaining the intricacies of ID. I know many times those you are trying to instruct are belligerently unreasonable to the point of making it seem talking to a brick wall would be more profitable, but there are those of us who do listen to you. So keep up the good work.

Here is a song for you;

Mandy Moore – You’re My Only Hope – A Walk To Remember

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6zzKZTZ6Ro

Mr Kairosfocus,

So, random walk based processes of generating contingent outcomes — and remember, mechanical necessity does not generate high contingency but plays out along trajectories shaped by initial and intervening circumstances — become irrelevant, once we are looking at the sort of recognised functionality that is vulnerable to modest perturbation.

Indeed, that is why it is vitally important to understand the difference between a random walk, which has little hope of exploring the space within the life of the universe, and methods based on populations and history. For genetic algorithms, this difference is captured in John Holland’s Schema Theorem. Briefly, the Schema Theorem says that exponential growth can conquer a large space. Compound interest wins again!
There are caveats, of course, otherwise the NFL Theorem would be violated. If the space is structured in such a way that it is arbitrary (history has no predictive value) or deceptive (prediction from history leads to a place where you are worse off than before), then GAs will do no better than, or worse than, random search, and NFL is preserved.

Is the space of proteins (for example) amenable to GA search, arbitrary, or deceptive? One clue is the success of other predictive processes in that space. Any success in predicting protein function from sequence would be indicative that this space is, in fact, amenable to GA search.

I agree that this discussion of protein space (or a similar RNA space) may be of ultimate interest. But in the meantime, if I could just clarify that per your definition of FCSI, FCSI is generated by the processes of a GA running on a suitably large problem? I beleive this is the position of Dembski and Marks in their LCI work, though they are still struggling with the question of tracing the sources of the FSCI.

bornagain77,

Mandy Moore – You’re My Only Hope – A Walk To Remember

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6zzKZTZ6Ro

Thanks for posting the inspiring video! She could be a great ambassador for ID. I wonder if she is a believer??

Concerning biological vitalism and how it has been straw-manified by atheistic materialists, it helps to read the works of Lionel Beale and Hans Dreisch. They can be found at Internet Archive.

BA:

Thanks.

GEM of TKI

PS: I ask you to contact me (through the always linked).

Nakashima-San:

First, I excerpt Wiki on GA’s:

Genetic algorithms are implemented in a computer simulation in which a population of abstract representations (called chromosomes or the genotype of the genome) of candidate solutions (called individuals, creatures, or phenotypes) to an optimization problem evolves toward better solutions. Traditionally, solutions are represented in binary as strings of 0s and 1s, but other encodings are also possible. The evolution usually starts from a population of randomly generated individuals and happens in generations. In each generation, the fitness of every individual in the population is evaluated, multiple individuals are stochastically selected from the current population (based on their fitness), and modified (recombined and possibly randomly mutated) to form a new population. The new population is then used in the next iteration of the algorithm. Commonly, the algorithm terminates when either a maximum number of generations has been produced, or a satisfactory fitness level has been reached for the population. If the algorithm has terminated due to a maximum number of generations, a satisfactory solution may or may not have been reached.

The highlights should show the core problem with using GA’s and their claimed inspiration in “evolution” to then seek to justify evolutionary materialism: CIRCULARITY, on multiple levels.

That is why I have highlighted the issue of first getting TO the beaches of functionality before one may climb to peaks of function by whatever hill-climbing method one may wish, including e.g. modest random variation and steepest ascent, etc.

In short, before you can speak of differential reproductive success, you first have to get to a viable and reproducing organism, for first life and then for major novel body plans. That is why the tree of life icon is missing its tap root, and that is why there is no good mechanism for major branching. (What explains minor variations does not account for the information threshold issue and the organised fine-tuned irreducible complexity issue.)

In that context, sure GA’s can move you around — by design BTW — within an island of function, but the issue is not there; it starts with: how do you get tot he shores of function in a very large non-functional space, without recourse to injection of active information?

And that BTW is where the NFL issue comes up: you don’t get the required information to create that initial functional organised complexity based on multiple complicated interacting parts for free; unless you are willing to resort to incredible luck indistinguishable form magic or materialistic miracles.

In that context, FSCI would not be so much “created” by a genetic algorithm, as created by its intelligent designer. And, by Intelligence, I mean this, courtesy Wiki as cited in the glossary above:

“capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn.”

PCs and the genetic algorithms we load into their active memories do not reason, plan or solve problems; they simply execute mechanical instructions mechanically, without thought or understanding. Computers mechanically executing instructions based on their architecture are not using language in the sense that we do, as we see form the distinction that computer “languages” are artificial languages.

And, computer “learning” is a loose analogy.

And all of that applies to GA’s, whether such are used to study protein folding or antenna design. (Recall also that proteins are useful because a certain cluster of related information-rich, step by step assembled polymers will fold to mutual key-lock fitting shapes, and in so doing will fulfill key steps in the workings of life. To get to that cluster of nano-machines and their functional organisation puts us well beyond the threshold that the FSCI concept highlights.)

GEM of TKI

Mr Kairosfocus,

Thank you for the Wiki quote. I think I have edited that page in the past, so it is good to know that someone finds it useful.

In repeating that the FSCI must have come from the programmer you are overstepping the conclusion of Dembski and Marks. The LCI paper simply concluded that the active information came from one of the inputs, without giving a method of determining which. If you have a solid way of differentiating between the active information input by the programmer and the active information input by the random number generator, you have solved a very interesting problem for ID.

And that is a problem that is relevant here. You chose to highlight the word ’stochastic’, you could also highlight the word ‘random’, and then you would see that the ‘mechanical’ perjoratitve is not apt.

So we come round again to this islands of function idea. Let me ask you plainly again – does the fitness landscape have to have islands of function before the functional context generates FCSI? Is there a measure of landscape ruggedness for which you can say “Above this value for this metric, FSCI exists, below this number it is merely CSI.”

Nakashima-san,

Can you show us a random number generator arising via nature, operating freely?

That would help your case…

Well, I can’t exactly show them to you, Joseph, but since I assume you accept the existence of atoms, two words: radioactive isotopes.

Mr Joseph,

random.org

Personally, I am not convinced true randomness is necessary. As in many things evolutionary, I’m pretty sure it is a relative measure that matters, not an absolute measure. A pseudo-RNG with a period longer than the age of the universe (for example) would serve just as well. Better in some sense, because experiments are repeatable, using the same seed.

This focus on relative applies to fitness. of course. There is no absolute fitness landscape that all population members experience equally in GA systems that focus on competition rather than targetted search. This another argument against “islands of function”. An absolutely low function can still be a strong relative function.

Onlookers:

A few footnotes:

It is fairly clear from the telling rhetorically strategic silence on the point above that advocates of abiogenesis and/or body plan level macro-evolution have no clear empirical evidence of the following originating by undirected chance and mechanical necessity tracing to blind natural forces:

1 –> Computer languages, codes, algorithms and organisation of data structures.

2 –> Functionally specific, complex information (and broader specified complexity)

3 –> Irreducible complexity (especially that based on finely-tuned mutual adjustments to meet at an operating point).

Each of these is well known and routinely observed to be the product of intelligent design. As well, the challenge to find target zones of function in the relevant configuration spaces with vast seas of non-function, rapidly exhausts the search resources of our observed cosmos. So, such phenomena, credibly, are reliable signs of intelligence.

Why that inference is being so stoutly resisted is because of its possible worldview level implications, not anything to do with its empirical weight. (In other words, a la Lewontin et al, we see that an imposed a priori commitment to materialism is blocking and censoring out the inference to what would otherwise be the obvious best explanation.)

Now, a few points above require a note or two:

a] N, 123: In repeating that the FSCI must have come from the programmer . . .

As the above shows, I am not making an a priori commitment (which is what he highlighted indicates) but an inference to best, empirically anchored explanation.

That is, I have made a scientific rather than a philosophical inference — it is evolutionary materialism that has introduced a priori censoring commitments on this subject, cutting off the evidence from speaking.

b] If you have a solid way of differentiating between the active information input by the programmer and the active information input by the random number generator, you have solved a very interesting problem for ID.

A random number generator of course is strictly capable of making an avalanche of rocks down a hillside fall into any particular shape, including the shape: WELCOME TO WALES.

However, as I have pointed out long since, the number of possible at-chance configurations that do not fulfill any linguistically meaningful configuration are so much more abundant in the config space than those that do, that we do not expect to see such.

This is the same basic reasoning that underlies the statistical form of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

By contrast, intelligent designers routinely arrange rocks to form such complex, linguistically functional configurations, and do many other similar things. the inference to best explanation is therefore obvious,a nd is a longstanding design theory technique.

c] does the fitness landscape have to have islands of function before the functional context generates FCSI?

Again, ever since Orgel in 1973, it has been well understood that complex functional organisation is distinct from mechanically generated order, and randomness. (Cf here the Abel et al cluster: orderly, random and functional sequence complexity.)

In that context, the concepts of complex specified information and as a relevant subset functionally specified complex information, are relevant.

Further to this, since complex function resign on complex co-adapted and configured elements is inherently highly vulnerable to perturbation, such functionality naturally shows itself as sitting on islands in a sea of non-function. That is, the description of islands in a sea of non-function is not arbitrary or suspect, but empirically well-warranted. (We do not write posts here by spewing out letters at random . . . )

d] DBT, 125: two words: radioactive isotopes.

A sample of radioactive material does not generate and issue random NUMBERS, it simply has atoms that decay stochastically.

Since we have observed and analysed that stochastic pattern (and others like it, e.g. Zener or sky noise), we then use our intelligence to create machines that generate random numbers using the outputs of that stochastic behaviour. (And we can also make pseudo-random number generators that can more or less convincingly mimic that behaviour.)

Joseph is clearly right:

Can you show us a random number generator arising via nature, operating freely?

That would help your case…

Also, we do not routinely observe such random number generators routinely issuing King Henry V’s speech or the like. We do see intelligent agents routinely issuing linguistic and algorithmic organised sequences that exhibit FSCI.

e] N, 126: There is no absolute fitness landscape that all population members experience equally in GA systems that focus on competition rather than targetted search.

Again, the islands of functionality in a sea of non-function pattern is a natural one for organised complexity. And, absence of function is fairly obvious empirically. (Indeed, we may simply observe that organisms die on modest perturbation of functional organisation.)

f] An absolutely low function can still be a strong relative function.

The material issue is not competition among functional states of whatever high of low level, but to get to initial function without intelligent direction.

The insistence on starting from the shores of islands of function simply underscores that there is no cogent answer on getting to such a shoreline without intelligent direction.

GEM of TKI

Sorry for the late return to the thread.

dbthomas, in my question regarding the stop codon you redirected me back to your previous post at 68. My response at 73 was so brief because I literally had 3 minutes before my plane took off. I am now happy to return your post at 68 for a closer look.

You say:

TAG doesn’t mean ’stop’ at all. We say ’stop codon’ because it describes its function. It simply doesn’t match any tRNAs, but does react with proteins called release factors, and so translation stops. The ribosome doesn’t need to ‘know’ its ‘meaning’.

This sells the process a little short don’t you think? Firstly, we have to look at the phenomena of “stop” in context, which you seem to have completely ignored. The missing context centers around a chain of nucleotides in DNA that symbolically represents the proteins and processes that are required for living tissue to successfully operate. A function must exist which brings about an orderly end to the process of protein synthesis when the process has completed the sequencing of amino acids in a protein. That function within the process is brought about by a chemical signal along the chain of nucleotides which has the specific intent to end the process. The key word here is process. No one is suggesting that a bucket of thymine, adenine, and guanine means “stop”. However, within the context of reality, it would be hard to argue that a stop codon is merely a human description, and not an actual signal within the process indicating that the end of the amino acid sequencing is complete (so “stop” the sequencing).

You say the T-A-G triplet (once transcribed) “simply does not match any tRNAs” and then go on to say release factor proteins come into play. How fortuitous is it that those release factors (and the tRNAs themselves, etc) just happened to be synthesized and waiting inside the cell.

Once again, you have discarded the context. This phenomenon is taking place within a cell (actually within a certain part of a cell). That cell has constituent parts which exist there for the specific and organized purpose of cellular function. The specialized release factor proteins are part of the system. They, nor any other constituent parts of the cell, would exist there at all if “stop” did not mean “stop”. In other words, they all required “stop” to mean “stop” so that they can be part of the process where “stop” means “stop”.

To assert that the resulting mechanical effect of the stop codon is the cause of the stop codon is to say that the effect of the cause is the cause itself, and perhaps even the cause of the cause. In a system that is well known to be physico-dynamically inert (particularly in regards to the actual sequence of amino acids, such as T-A-G) that assertion has of certain ring of intent to it.

I can suppose that if I asked why the coding of the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome exists in the order they do; you could simply answer “so that humans are made”. And if I argued that it could not rationally come to be organized by a mechanism that operates at maximum uncertainty (like chance) then you could simply posit the long period of time that Life has existed on Earth. You could then make a meaningless appeal to selection as the organizing force. Both of these explanations would, of course, ignore that the sequencing of DNA has no physical cause to exist at all, and that organized complex life began on Earth almost immediately after the planet cooled.

Perhaps if my hastily posted question (as I was in the airport) could have been more specific, then perhaps your response would have been less trivial and more useful. ID proponents are looking to materialists to provide material explanations that are based on what is known about material causes (and to not contradict what is already known about material causes).
Perhaps you could have given us an empirical example of other naturally occurring complex algorithms where such analogous phenomena as a “stop” codon exist. Do you have any such examples?

Any of you guys remember “Bathybius”? This was a most important materialist assault at the time. Because of Bathybius, we were all supposed to stop believing in God and so on. Evolutionists said it was a vast sheet of living proto-blob under the oceans, from which all life sprung. It was discovered by Huxley, but then the whole thing turned out to be a scam. Read about it here:

Bathybius

Or here Bathybius

Huxley realized that he had been too eager and made a mistake. He published part of the letter in Nature and recanted his previous views. Later, during the 1879 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he stated that he was ultimately responsible for spreading the theory and convincing others. Most biologists accepted this acknowledgement of error.

I find it strange that some sites never credit Huxley for admitting and retracting his error. Perhaps it doesn’t fit their dramatic preconceptions.

dbthomas,

Just how is radiactive decay a random number generator?

Nakashima-san,

I used to work in the encryption industry.

Our products used random number generators.

The old stuff used a noisy diode. That noise was then input to a flip-flop or counter and the output was the random number generated from that noise.

It took design engineers to create it.

Joseph,

Do you believe that randomness does not occur in nature save for the inventions of intelligent agents?

Kf

Are proteins numbers? Have numbers been observed to exist outside of human culture?

Can stochastic processes affect DNA replication in a way that can be approximated numerically with the aid of random number generators?

BillB,
Joseph seems to be saying that his process directly outputs “random numbers” whereas the radioactive decay process only outputs “yes, decay has happened” or “no decay” – i.e. 1 or 0 with a variable, unpredictable time between each 1 or 0 (of course, the average decay time is predicable, leading to the “half life” concept).

Just not “random numbers” as such, e.g

344543
7938284596
238957438564

etc

Is that about the size of it Joseph?

Out of interest, Joseph, what is the range of random numbers that your diode can generate?

Ok, shorter KF

NO, I am not going to answer your questions.

PPS – Lewontin!

Mr BillB,

Your point could be equally well addressed to Mr Joseph. Random number generators are abstractions, part of a model of a reality that may in fact depend on Brownian motion or some other mixing process. Is anyone going to argue that Brownian motion is intelligently designed, or that each perturbation is the finger of the deity?

Yes, always Lewontin because he is the poster child of all the trolls on this site.

Mr Kairosfocus,

A few footnotes:

It is fairly clear from the telling rhetorically strategic silence on the point above that advocates of abiogenesis and/or body plan level macro-evolution have no clear empirical evidence of the following originating by undirected chance and mechanical necessity tracing to blind natural forces:

There is no point “above”. my question to you, which this word smog is trying to avoid, is about your definition of FSCI.

Mr Kairosfocus,

a] N, 123: In repeating that the FSCI must have come from the programmer . . .

As the above shows, I am not making an a priori commitment (which is what he highlighted indicates) but an inference to best, empirically anchored explanation.

That is, I have made a scientific rather than a philosophical inference — it is evolutionary materialism that has introduced a priori censoring commitments on this subject, cutting off the evidence from speaking.

You will need to provide more detail in step 2. Your ‘inference’ is one that Dembski and Marks cannot acheive, you are on the brink of making ID scientific in a way even Lewontin would approve of.

Mr Kairosfocus,

This is the same basic reasoning that underlies the statistical form of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Which is apropos of exactly nothing. What is your procedure for differentiating active information sourced in the RNG from active information sourced in the code provided by me?

Mr Kairosfocus,

c] does the fitness landscape have to have islands of function before the functional context generates FCSI?

Again, ever since Orgel in 1973, it has been well understood that complex functional organisation is distinct from mechanically generated order, and randomness. (Cf here the Abel et al cluster: orderly, random and functional sequence complexity.)

In that context, the concepts of complex specified information and as a relevant subset functionally specified complex information, are relevant.

Relevant, agreed, but how defined? You are not making progress towards a detailed definition. You have objected to examples which you believe do not exhibit “islands of function”. By what metric can anyone make that distinction?

Further to this, since complex function resign on complex co-adapted and configured elements is inherently highly vulnerable to perturbation, such functionality naturally shows itself as sitting on islands in a sea of non-function. That is, the description of islands in a sea of non-function is not arbitrary or suspect, but empirically well-warranted. (We do not write posts here by spewing out letters at random . . . )

Warranted, but how measured? Alliteration is not explanation.

Mr Kairosfocus,

Also, we do not routinely observe such random number generators routinely issuing King Henry V’s speech or the like. We do see intelligent agents routinely issuing linguistic and algorithmic organised sequences that exhibit FSCI.

Again, apropos of nothing. A GA is not just an RNG. But perhaps you would like to return to a discussion Polonius’ speech and its generation? That went so well for you.

Mr Kairosfocus,

(Indeed, we may simply observe that organisms die on modest perturbation of functional organisation.)

And this is relevant to abiogenesis, how?

you don’t seem to be grasping the essential point that there is no absolute sense of function in discussing chemical evolution. There are only relative rates of reaction.

Mr kairosfocus,

The insistence on starting from the shores of islands of function simply underscores that there is no cogent answer on getting to such a shoreline without intelligent direction.

This completely misses the point of how fitness landscapes based on competition, and selection based on relative fitness, obviate arguments based on “islands of function”.

It doesn’t matter if one molecule’s reactivity is low. If it is twice another molecule’s, then the first molecule will capture twice the resources over time for its reaction products.

Sensei

Is anyone going to argue that Brownian motion is intelligently designed, or that each perturbation is the finger of the deity?

I wouldn’t be at all surprised!

According to some here we must boil our computers if we want to accurately model Brownian motion.

Question of the day. Has Nakashima actually said anything in all his recent posts or are they much ado about nothing?

Kairosfocus, keep up the good work. You seemed to have upset Nakashima with your relevant logic and facts.

Maybe Nakashima and most of the other anti ID people should retire to an appropriate cul de sac to discuss their ideas.

Mr jerry,

Sadly, no. It has been mostly about nothing. Mr Kairosfocus advanced a very interesting idea about FSCI but seems unwilling to follow it up and discuss its implications.

A discussion of GAs where fitness is decided by competition, rather than nearness to a prespecified target, and with selection based clearly on relative fitness, would be very valuable to many readers of UD (including myself, of course). It would move us past the insufferable WEASEL rag doll immensely.

From the OP:

“…Leon Urey and Stanley Miller who used a spark discharge apparatus to make the three amino acids- glycine, alpha-alanine and beta-alanine.

I do hope that Meyer gave a more accurate accounting than that.

In an interview, when questioned about the yield of his experiments, Miller replied:

“Just turning on the spark in a basic pre-biotic experiment will yield 11 out of 20 amino acids. If you count asparagine and glutamine you get thirteen basic amino acids. We don’t know how many amino acids there were to start with. Asparagine and glutamine, for example, do not look prebiotic because they hydrolyze. The purines and pyrimidines can alos be made, as can all of the sugars, although they are unstable.”

11 is more than 3.

(from http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/NM/miller.php)

“Chemistry is the medium; information is the message.”

It is a true shame then that this amazing “vital force” can be tinkered with by replication enzymes making mistakes.

“A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, if unjustified extrapolations are made from it.”

How unintentionally prophetic.

I understand that a value of 500 bits for FSCI indicates certain design.

Is there an example of something with 499 bits of FSCI? I’m interested see examples of the value of FSCI in actual examples as it’s spoken so much about.

Can anyone give me an example of something with

1 Bit of FSCI
350 bits of FSCI
499 bits of FSCI
501 bits of FSCI
1,000,000+ bits of FSCI

and explain how you came to that figure? That would be great.

Nakashima,

Most of us here believe that FSCI is a impediment that the anti ID people cannot get over/around/through. It is easy to understand and the proposition that it does not occur in nature, excluding life and intelligent activity, seems an almost impossible hurdle for naturalistic processes to deal with. Because of this difficulty we get lots of double talk here from the anti ID contingent and precious little thats deals with this very simple idea. Stereotypical troll behavior.

It does not seem that GA’s are relevant to abiogenesis because genetic algorithms (which I know next to nothing) are dealing with stuff that already exist in a cell and I assume a GA is looking for some sort of improvement. A GA could get you non functional FSCI or in essence not FSCI since it does not have function and thus, the organism would die. Or it could get you modified FSCI which is not very interesting in the evolution debate and which happens all the time and is a big ho hum. Sometimes the modified FSCI has a different function and this is interesting and only a small ho hum.

What it cannot seem to get is a completely unrelated FSCI because as kairosfocus says, they are rare and there is nothing functional in-between so no organism could continue to exist when the GA took the organism off the reservation and into no man’s land where nothing can survive. Or else the thing being modified is not functional (duplicated genomic material) and the GA modifies this non functional element till it eventually stumbles on to a far away island of functionality. This latter part is what I understood the Gouldian worshipers believe and has upset some Darwinian worshipers here.

That is my layman’s understanding of kairosfocus thoughts and GA’s and it seems to make sense to me. There really isn’t any such thing as a GA or a search in nature but only a continual production of modifications which natural selection sweeps aside except maybe a rare exception as hoped for by the anti ID enthusiasts. Of the latter, the examples are few and very far between and nearly always trivial. Occasionally and I mean occasionally we get a big drum roll, breathless expectations and then presentation of what in the long run is minutiae.

So tell me where I am wrong so I do not write an invalid synopsis next time.

Jerry,
Can you give me an example of something with 499 (not designed), 500 (designed) and a million bits of FSCI?

an almost impossible hurdle for naturalistic processes to deal with

I note you say “almost”. You don’t rule it out 100% then? Why not?

“Can you give me an example of something with 499 (not designed)”

No, I doubt anything exists of this complexity that was also functionally specified could ever arise naturally. You would be hard pressed to find something of a few bits that wasn’t designed. The number was picked because it is so large that no possible combination of atomic states since the Big Bang could lead to it.

“500 (designed”

probably any of your posts here

“million bits of FSCI?”

a typical short thread here

“an almost impossible hurdle for naturalistic processes to deal with

I note you say “almost”. You don’t rule it out 100% then? Why not?”

Because it is theoretically possible for all the atoms to end up in one corner of the room at the same time. There is a greater than zero probability so it is not impossible. If we were in an universe that was eternal, then all is possible.

We are dealing with rhetoric here and while I never say absolutely, the actual probability is quite low, requiring thousands of zeros past the decimal place before you get to a non zero integer.

Mr jerry,

Very happy to respond to you, sir.

First, as Mister Kairosfocus has reminded us, specified complexity has its roots in the OOL literature. I for one have no objection to deriving CSI from specified complexity.

FSCI seems to be KF’s private term, often used here, picked up by a few others. That is fine, as far as it goes, but to be taken seriously outside this blog it needs a clear and concise definition. Otherwise it will fall into the category of terms such as phlogiston, protoplasm and “I know it when I see it” vagueness.

It seems that FSCI is measurable in bits, according to KF’s frequent usage. So it would seem amenable to precision. I believe this is exactly the kind of precision that ID studies needs to earn its place in the scientific communirt. My encouragement is genuine.

Just as FSCI is an abstract concept, and can be applied to many non-biological models, so genetic algorithms are abstractions that can be applied in a variety of contexts. They do not model or rely on a close analogy to the cell. The broader term Evolutionary Computation is more apt, since it focuses on the of evolutionary operators – a population, history, variation and selection.

So the first point is that if FSCI is truly an important concept, it should be applicable to an abstract GA, just as much as beaker of chemicals. I’m not implying that abiogenesis research is being done by anyone today via GA, though there are some relevant efforts.

More to the point are KF’s frequent claims that abiogenesis is akin to solving a 1000 bit problem. Well, some 1000 bit problems are not very hard, and others are. (BTW, GAs can be used to solve problems up to a gigabit in size, larger than the human genome. Larger than the potato genome!!) How do you tell the difference? It seems to me that KF has identified FSCI equivalent problem hardness with “islands of function”.

Again, the term needs a precise definition to be useful. Some problems have obvious islands of function and some don’t. I’d be perfectly happy if KF said he is working towards some FSCI metric such as (# of bits in the solution) * (hardness), with a strict definition of hardness.

To bring this back to abiogenesis, it remains to be proven that actual chemical evolution happens under appropriate circumstances, and whether it is a ‘hard’ problem. Exactly what ‘islands of function’ means in prebiotic conditions is unclear. Having confirmed Oparin’s guesses, chemists must try to find support for hypercycles and NK landscapes. The success or failure of that kind of investigation will confirm whether prebiotic chemistry has the ‘islands of function’ which KF asserts that it does, by analogy with today’s biochemistry.

In summary, FSCI and GAs are both abstractions from real biology, and claims are made for them on abstract problems that people hope are relevant to chemical systems. But if you want to advance our understanding of the world, you have to be a bit more precise, than we have seen heretofore. My questions have been meant to help that happen.

Dear Nakashima,

Sorry to jump into your thread, but Functional Information (which is equivalent to FSCI) is defined by Hazen: here.

Also, earlier this week we had a breakthrough in which we would be able to directly relate functional information (FSCI) to Active Information (which is the metric developed by the EIL, and seems most amenable to use with GAs and searches in general.) I’m guessing it will be the topic of an upcoming paper.

Atom

Mr Atom,

Thanks for the reference! But I am not sure if Mr Kairosfocus will agree that the two definitions are equivalent, because there is no discussion of “islands of function” in Hazen’s functional information.

Good luck withyour work at EIL!

Mr. Nakashima,

Yes, there is no mention of that. I had the impression that KF’s usage was consistent (and equivalent) with Hazen’s, since I’ve seen him in the past relate FSCI to the work of Durston, Abel and Trevors which use either Hazen’s formulation or one very similar. I’ll let him answer if he had a different usage in mind. (If he did, I apologize for interrupting the flow of conversation with an inaccurate reference!)

Atom

Mr Atom,

A contribution is never an interruption!

Nakashima,

Sorry, but FSCI is a very simple concept. In the genome think transcription and translation. A string of DNA is FSCI if it enables the formation of some unrelated but useful entity through some set of intermediary processes. How difficult is that to understand.

Some DNA is junk and leads to nothing. It is just a repeat of probably useless information as opposed to useful information or FSCI. DNA which is FSCI leads to a protein or a RNA polymer which has function within the cell. Someone who dabbles in GA’s can not be that dense that this is not obvious.

This is now literally Biology 101. Because we recognize the similarity of this process to language and computer programming, and give it a name, does not mean that it is not meaningful if others do not use the same name. Others have made the same assessment that it is information, it is complex, it specifies a function of some other entity. If it makes you happy, call it the Nakashima transform system.

As indicated other processes that follow this pattern are language and computer programming. Each requires an intermediary system to specify another entity that has function.

To measure the complexity of the DNA string just as one measures the complexity of a word, sentence, paragraph, line of code, module or program one calculates the likelihood of the sequence of symbols, or in the genome, the DNA sequence to assess its likelihood.

You obviously know this, but you demand exact precision feigning that this is not a scientific concept that could go the way of phlogiston when in fact it us used everywhere, every day in biology. There is no worry it will disappear because you and others do not like our definition. As I said use your own definition.

I find this amusing and wonder why you and others persist in this charade. What could be the root of this faux concern for the inappropriateness of this ID concept? We could start a whole thread on this topic.

Thank you Nakashima. Then I will venture one more contribution.

If you find the 2007 PNAS Hazen paper:

Functional information and the emergence
of biocomplexity
Robert M. Hazen, Patrick L. Griffin, James M. Carothers, and Jack W. Szostak

…they do in fact make reference to “Islands of Functionality”:

Islands of Function.
What is the source of the reproducible
discontinuities in Figs. 1 and 2? We suggest that the population
of random Avida sequences contains multiple distinct classes of
solutions, perhaps with conserved sequences of machine instructions
similar to those of words in letter sequences or active RNA
motifs (52).

Page 5

So I think KF is in fact using Hazen’s simple formulation.

Atom

Let me provide a brief history of FSCI from my point of view. The term CSI is a term developed by Bill Dembski. Anyone with a different understanding on its origin pleas chip it. Dr. Dembski tries to formulate through mathematics a rigorous definition of design using this concept of CSI. As a new comer here in 2005 I watched as people used the term CSI but witnessed what I describe as a floundering to describe it precisely in a non mathematical fashion. I still don’t understand the concept because I believe it only makes sense in terms of the mathematics.

Early in 2007, there was another long discussion of just what CSI was with no apparent agreement by anyone on just what it meant. Then two things happened. Bfast said it was his understanding that CSI just was information that specified something else. That made sense to me. Well that explained DNA, sentences and computer programs but did not explain bridge hands, certain coin flips, or Mt. Rushmore. Well in a way it describes Mt. Rushmore but not perfect bridge hands, patterns in supposedly shuffled decks of cards, choices by political party members, or coin flips with specific patterns etc.

At the same time kairosfocus came out of lurking and started contributing here and described the functional complex specified information. It was then obvious. Dembski was trying to be too general and develop a system that would determine for all entities whether they were designed or not while in terms of evolution the interest was much more narrow. There was no need for this more generalized concept that seemed to befuddle everyone. The information in DNA met this very narrow case of specified information so why bother with CSI since it was problematic.

Hence, the focus on FSCI or FCSI. It is simple to understand and some calculations can be done on the sequences without too much trouble. No one realized at the time that OOL researchers such as Hazen was focusing on this same concept in trying to understand how life arose. They were relating sequence complexity to functional information.

But we have been inundated with mock complaints by the anti ID people ever since trying to steer the discussion to the more general CSI concept which is less well defined. And a typical complaint is that our definition is not used in real science thus it is bogus. It is an interesting game the anti ID people play and I often wonder what drives them to do such things. They must obviously know how simple and appropriate the concept is yet they go on and on about its lack of scientific background or its imprecision when the concept lies at the foundation of biology.

If Theodosius Dobzhansky were to make an honest statement about biology it would be “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of functional complex specified information.” That would be a more accurate statement than the one he made.

Some further footnotes:

I see a considerable exchange over FSCI (the functionally defined subset of CSI) happened yesterday.

Jerry has just captured the essential point, given what we know about how cell based, DNA and RNA-using life operates:

“Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of functional complex specified information.”

In that context, it would be useful to remind ourselves of Orgel’s original remark from 1973, as already noted at 82:

In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures which are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity. [L.E. Orgel, 1973. The Origins of Life. New York: John Wiley, p. 189.]

In short, Orgel makes a two-part distinction, points out examples and counter examples and draws a conclusion. In so doing, he sets the term “specified complexity” in a bio-functional (and of course — given the significance of DNA and the genetic code — informational) context. Thus, to deduce from it and explore the significance of BOTH (i) complex specified information in general, and (ii) functionally specified, complex information are plainly legitimate.

Dembski has provided a general metric, Abel et al have provided a more narrow metric on the average information per symbol [aka informational entropy] in light of observed sequences, and Hazen is using a very similar concept with a threshold of function.

The point there is that function is a macro-observable, which is compatible only with a cluster of components that are so fitted together as to be at an operating point — borrowing a term from amplifier design. This means in turn that we have a recognisable macrostate, which can be distinguished form a non-functional macrostate; thence we can in principle do comparative microstate counts, thence get to entropy metrics a la Boltzmann’s s = k ln w, so through Brillouin’s negentropy formulation, to information. Or, following Jaynes et al, we may bridge to information on the informational interpretation of entropy as I excerpt on and discuss in App 1 my always linked. Onward, as Bradley et al following Yockey et al show [observe my point 9 in that appendix], this ties into the CSI concept in a functional context.

This state space, macro-micro distinction and compatibility leading to comparative counts and info and entropy metrics is the underlying thinking that is always at work in my discussion of FSCI.

It is also directly relevant to the issue of the origin of life: bio-function is in effect a recognisable “macro” phenomenon, which is compatible with certain configurations of biologically relevant macromolecules, which are observed as created based on digital code and energy-using informational processing and associated organisation into functional structures at operating points. Structures that are fairly easily fatally perturbed, e.g. by radiation (which mostly creates free radicals from water molecules, triggering at random thermodynamically favourable reactions, in turn breaking up that fine-tuned complex, co-ordinated functionality).

This demonstrates the reality of islands of function in a sea of non-function.

That islands of function often exist in a sea of non-function is an extension of remarks by Denton on what would happen if letters were concatenated at random in his 1985 work, and here at UD it is GPuccio [GP -- are you out there watching?] who seems to have first hit on the happy phrasing and imagery.

Now, as a result of that, we can ask about thresholds of complexity that make it utterly unlikely that such function originated by chance. The answer is that when specificity and complexity pass a threshold, it is maximally unlikely that available resources can move from plausible initial conditions [prebiotic "soups" especially] by undirected chance plus blind mechanical forces. but by contrast, it is well known that FSCI is produced by intelligent agents, linguistic and algorithmic text strings being an obvious case in point. So, the threshold is one of inference to best explanation.

For that, we know that the observed cosmos has about 10^80 atoms, and that 10^25 s and one state per 10^-43 s [the Planck time] are a reasonable cluster. So, for a unique functional state 500 bits of information [~ 3 *10^150 configs] is a good marker.

Squaring that, we have a situation where the 10^150 states reachable by the observed cosmos across its thermodynamically plausible working life would only be able to search less than 1 in 10^150 of the possible configurations, So, it is reasonable that 1,000 bits of information storage capacity [= Shannon information] in an observed functional system that is vulnerable to modest perturbation, will not be detectable by undirected processes, as sampling 1 in 10^150 of the config space is equivalent to marking 1 atom for one intant in the observed comsos, and then usign a space probe capable to time travel and traversign the entirte observed cosmos at random, and then picking up just one atom, just once, and voila, it is the marked moment for the particular atom.

But such systems are routinely produced using imagination, foresight and design by intelligent actors. And, this is a matter of easily observed empirical fact, starting with posts in this tread and the functional information displayed on your PC screen when you access it.

In short, it is maximally unlikely that on the gamut of the observed cosmos, the observed digital information based cellular life originated by chance + necessity alone. [Recall, independent life forms start out at about 300 - 500 k base pairs.]

Similarly, when we observe that major body plan innovations credibly call for leaps of 10 -100+ million bases in DNA, and associated cellular machinery to give it effect; we can infer that major body plans are not credibly explained on chance + necessity alone.

These observations are very compatible with design.

The real problem is that one possible candidate for such a designer — especially given the evident fine-tuning of the cosmos that facilitates such life — sounds a lot like the God of theism.

(And worse, in Rom 1:19 – 22 or so, a major text in the specifically Judaeo-Christian manifestation of theism, it is baldly stated that attributes of the Godhead are discernible from the features of creation, rendering men “without excuse” for rejecting God. [This is actually a point of empirical testability for that tradition, as had it been obviously failed we would hear no end of gloating on the point; but when that test seems instead to have been passed, it becomes a lot more cutting in its force.])

And that seems to explain a lot of the intensity we have seen: much is at stake, much more than merely science based on a very reasonable inference to best explanation per FSCI and its known sources, that in any other context would hardly be worth noticing.

GEM of TKI

nakashima wrote:

I find it strange that some sites never credit Huxley for admitting and retracting his error.

Even stranger is the way people gloss over a contemporary account of the Bathybius scam, such as Joseph Cooke’s, in favour that be-all, end-all fount of truth, Wikipedia.

Note to ID opponents:

Keep throwing rocks at KF. By all means, feel free to split some more hairs.

Mr Krondan,

You are free to edit Wikipedia to bring more attention to that account, if you like.

Mr Atom,

That material from Hazen 2007 is saying that islands of function exist in a particular fitness landscape, not that they are intrinsic or necessary to the definition of functional information.

As an example, if all the functional points on a landscape were arranged like Mt Fuji, gradually sloping up to a single peak, they would have the same functional information measure as a landscape where each functional point was a pole sticking up out of the sea, separated from any other pole by miles of flat surface. (That is how they were drawn by someone, Douglas Axe?)

Mr jerry,

To measure the complexity of the DNA string just as one measures the complexity of a word, sentence, paragraph, line of code, module or program one calculates the likelihood of the sequence of symbols, or in the genome, the DNA sequence to assess its likelihood.

Yes, -log2(p(x)). Wouldn’t it be nice if Mr Kairosfocus was in agreement that this simple definition was appropriate, since so many other people use it! That is all I’m asking for – agreement on a precise definition.

Or not. Mr KF could also simply declare that FSCI has no precise definition, that ‘functional’ is an adjective like ‘pretty’ – its meaning completely private.

I’m just not willing to assume I know what Mr KF means. Look at how much wrangling there was on the Weasel threads over terminology, with invented terms like quasi-latching springing up like mushrooms after the rain. I agree with Mr Atom, it is better to let the man speak for himself.

Nakashima-San:

I am not claiming that all cases of functionality follow the pattern of islands of function in a sea of non-function, only that this is relevant to certain key cases studied using the concept FSCI.

In particular, cases where modest perturbation at random will as a rule derange function. Most digital symbolic codes and code based systems are like that: change the sufficiently long string at random, and it will usually either become a non code word or inappropriate to its context. (Genetic algorithms are very particular about what they allow to change at random — the “genes” not the rest of the program or the operating system that supports it!)

Observe in this regard that there is a fair degree of error detection and correction routinely carried out on DNA in the living cell.

GEM of TKI

Mr Jerry,

Dembski was trying to be too general and develop a system that would determine for all entities whether they were designed or not while in terms of evolution the interest was much more narrow. There was no need for this more generalized concept that seemed to befuddle everyone.

That is an interesting perspective. It goes to the heart of whether FSCI is a general, abstract concept that can be calculated for bridge hands, sequences of coin flips, etc. or whether it is specific to biological contexts. This is why I spoke earlier of FSCI of the output of a computer program vs that of a beaker of chemicals.

But it seems that Mr Kairosfocus has used FSCI in very non-biological contexts, so again, I await clarification from him.

PS: Nakashima-San, please, please!

(Cf Section A my always linked where I discuss information [not to mention Appendix 3 where I speak to CSI, FSCI and related concepts in the context of their roots and relevance]; you have spoken ignorantly and dismissively.)

Furthermore, we have been discussing a very clear set of cases of observed function, which are quire publicly available: posts in this blog, the wider Internet, long enough [143 ACII character] text strings that make sense in English, program code, PC screens, assembly of a house from its parts, assembly of a flyable jet plane from its parts, DNA-RNA and the cell’s executing mechanisms.

This is not at all “private” or “imprecise.”

PPS: And, I have used FSCI in particular in contexts of complex digital information (and things reducible to that). DNA is a digitally coded information-bearing molecule that uses a four state basic code element, so it is entirely appropriate to speak of it in that light and draw comparisons to other cases of codes and algorithmic instructions.

PPPS: A bridge or poker etc hand can be so assigned a target zone that it is complex and specified to some threshold or other (though such hands in general will not pass observable universe level CSI thresholds . . . cf the calculation on Dembski’s metric in the weak argument corrective no 27). But, it has no directly observable function in a system, unlike machine code in a PC or DNA code in a cell. Right from Orgel, the latter has been a specific relevant context for FSCI as an issue. OBSERVE real world function, then look at degree of complexity and what happens on perturbing it. is it reasonable that so much complex functionality could arise by chance + necessity only? Once 500 – 1,000 bits info storage capacity is passed, that becomes a most unlikely explanation relative to the known source of such FSCI: design.

Mr kairosfocus,

I am not claiming that all cases of functionality follow the pattern of islands of function in a sea of non-function, only that this is relevant to certain key cases studied using the concept FSCI.

I agree these are the case of ultimate interest, but along the way you have made a number of claims, which I am hoping you can clarify.

In particular, cases where modest perturbation at random will as a rule derange function. Most digital symbolic codes and code based systems are like that: change the sufficiently long string at random, and it will usually either become a non code word or inappropriate to its context.

Actually, I think that the longer the string, the more likely you are to preserve function after a single letter change, but that depends very much on the problem.

In terms of chemistry, the cube-square law and the categorization of amino acids by hydrophobic or -phillic means that long strings are resistant to losses in function due to small random perturbations. This where the rubber meets the road and no amount of generalization on either side of the argument will resolve the issue, only experiment will.

(Genetic algorithms are very particular about what they allow to change at random — the “genes” not the rest of the program or the operating system that supports it!)

Sir, are you entering this as a serious comment? This is the error that led to Gil Dodgen receiving so much ridicule.

Mr Kairosfocus,

From your always linked:
As is discussed briefly in Appendix 1, Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen [TBO], following Brillouin et al, in the 1984 foundational work for the modern Design Theory, The Mystery of Life’s Origins [TMLO], exploit this information-entropy link, through the idea of moving from a random to a known microscopic configuration in the creation of the bio-functional polymers of life, and then — again following Brillouin — identify a quantitative information metric for the information of polymer molecules. For, in moving from a random to a functional molecule, we have in effect an objective, observable increment in information about the molecule.

Are these your FSCI? Can you state them explicitly.

From a subsequent post:
Once 500 – 1,000 bits info storage capacity is passed, that becomes a most unlikely explanation relative to the known source of such FSCI: design.

How pleasant to return to where we began. So a GA that evolves 1000 bit long IPD competitors is generating FSCI?

Nakashima-San:

first, the point of evoolutionary materialistic OOL scenarios is that somehow molecular noise transformed itself into DNA-driven algorithmic digital processing,and that further noise created major body plans.

We are not talking about one or two mutations at points in already functioning DNA, but 600 k bits or so of information for first life and 10’s – 100’s+ of mega bits for novel body plans.

And, if you will follow up on the links and the identified cases, I believe the key points that need to be clarified will become much clearer to you. (It now seems to me from your remarks on the log2 pi relationship, that you have not first seen what I am saying — and link from EVERY post ever made by me at UD — before criticising. That’s not cricket.)

GEM of TKI

PS: A genetic algorithm is expressing active information in it [put there by its designer], towards a target zone. It is not an original source of FSCI, though the fact that such a program will normally itself have FSCI in it, it is testimony to the reality that designers create FSCI.

PPS: Brillouin et al do create an information metric, as shown in the linked: negentropy. Jaynes et al show a link from physical to informational entropy, and Durston et al give FSC metrics that are more sophisticated versions of what the simple FSCI metric here presents.

Excerpting the just linked; two clicks away from all my recent posts at UD:

>> FSCI is also an observable, measurable quantity; contrary to what is imagined, implied or asserted by many objectors. This may be most easily seen by using a quantity we are familiar with: functionally specific bits [FS bits], such as those that define the information on the screen you are most likely using to read this note:

1 –> These bits are functional, i.e. presenting a sceenful of (more or less) readable and coherent text.

2 –> They are specific, i.e. the screen conforms to a page of coherent text in English in a web browser window; defining a relatively small target/island of function by comparison with the number of arbitrarily possible bit configurations of the screen.

3 –> They are contingent, i.e your screen can show diverse patterns, some of which are functional, some of which — e.g. a screen broken up into “snow” — would not (usually) be.

4 –> They are quantitative: a screen of such text at 800 * 600 pixels resolution, each of bit depth 24 [8 each for R, G, B] has in its image 480,000 pixels, with 11,520,000 hard-working, functionally specific bits.

5 –> This is of course well beyond a “glorified common-sense” 500 – 1,000 bit rule of thumb complexity threshold at which contextually and functionally specific information is sufficiently complex that the explanatory filter would confidently rule such a screenful of text “designed,” given that — since there are at most that many quantum states of the atoms in it — no search on the gamut of our observed cosmos can exceed 10^150 steps . . . .

6 –> So we can construct a rule of thumb functionally specific bit metric for FSCI:

a] Let contingency [C] be defined as 1/0 by comparison with a suitable exemplar, e.g. a tossed die.

b] Let specificity [S] be identified as 1/0 through functionality [FS] or by compressibility of description of the information [KS] or similar means.

c] Let degree of complexity [B] be defined by the quantity of bits to store the relevant information, with 500 – 1,000 bits serving as the threshold for “probably” to “morally certainly” sufficiently complex to meet the FSCI/CSI threshold.

d] Define the vector {C, S, B} based on the above [as we would take distance travelled and time required, D and t], and take the element product C*S*B [as we would take the ratio D/t to get speed].

e] Now we identify: C*S*B = X, the required FSCI/CSI-metric in [functionally] specified bits.

7 –> For instance, for the 800 * 600 pixel PC screen, C = 1, S = 1, B = 11.52 * 10^6, so C*S*B = 11.52 * 10^6, FS bits. This is well beyond the threshold. [Notice that if the bits were not contingent or were not specific, then X = 0 automatically. Similarly, if B A more sophisticated metric has of course been given by Dembski, in a 2005 paper . . . .

9 --> When 1 >/= ?, the probability of the observed event in the target zone or a similar event is at least 1/2, so the available search resources of the observed cosmos across its estimated lifespan are in principle adequate for an observed event [E] in the target zone to credibly occur by chance. But if ? significantly exceeds 1, that becomes increasingly implausible. The only credibly known and reliably observed cause for events of this last class is intelligently directed contingency, i.e. design.

10 –> Thus, we have a rule of thumb informational metric and a more sophisticated informational measure for CSI/FSCI, both providing reasonable grounds for confidently inferring to design. (Durston, Chiu, Abel and Trevors provide a third metric, functional bits or fits, a functional bit extension of Shannon’s H-metric of average information per symbol, here.)>>

PPS: Oops, point7 ha a less than init and clipped, sorry:

7 –> For instance, for the 800 * 600 pixel PC screen, C = 1, S = 1, B = 11.52 * 10^6, so C*S*B = 11.52 * 10^6, FS bits. This is well beyond the threshold. [Notice that if the bits were not contingent or were not specific, then X = 0 automatically. Similarly, if B {is less than} 500, the metric would indicate the bits as functionally or compressibly etc specified, but without enough bits to be comfortably beyond the UPB threshold. Of course, the DNA strands of observed life forms start at about 200,000 FS bits, and that for forms that depend on others for crucial nutrients. 600,000 - 10^6 FS bits is a reported reasonable estimate for a minimally complex independent life form.]

KF:

Just to pick you up on one point:

A genetic algorithm is expressing active information in it [put there by its designer], towards a target zone.

If you mean a target area in its configuration space then this is incorrect, the algorithm will try and maximise an agents score as given by a fitness function but how the agent it achieves this score is not normally defined by the fitness function – the phenotype is not a target. If you take a look at some of Karl Sims early work in evolving virtual creatures you see lots of different evolved solutions that arise from the same fitness function. There can be many possible configurations that qualify as ‘fit’.

Also, not all GA’s use static fitness functions, incremental approaches will use fitness functions that gradually change and embodied fitness functions are sometimes used that are a product of the agents environment rather than an imposition by an external auditor.

If FCSI enters the design via the fitness function then is it not inconceivable that all the FCSI we observe in nature is a product of natural selection, which its self is a fitness function designed by a deity?

Mr BillB,

Yes, it seems that Mr KF is willing to allow that a GA’s population members contain FCSI. I think he might agree that the best of generation 1 contains less FSCI than the best of generation N. Indeed the whole population has probably increased in FCSI.

So what is the source of this increase? Mr KF has asserted something – “[put there by its designer]“, but I have trouble following his logic. He claims to be able to make a scientific inference that it is the designer, not the RNG, the clock, the growing history, that is the source of this incremental FCSI. This is more than Dembski and Marks claim to be able to do.

Mr Kairosfocus,

Thank you for humoring me and being patient with me. I appreciate your linking to specific materials out of the large store of your always linked. I appreciate your working a calculation of an example.

I am a bit (a weak pun, very sorry) unsure why C and S are binary values. Are these also “eye of the beholder” variables? Perhaps I don’t understand what you mean by 1/0.

Let me try to work through an example – a screen displaying an image of the Mona Lisa.

C = 1, because the image is contingent. The Mona Lisa is a single point in the screen’s config space.

S = 1, because the image is specific. I’ll use the fact that it has a non-zero size when compressed to motivate this choice.

B = 11.52*10^6 bits

C*S*B = 11.52*10^6 gt 1000, therefore design!

Let’s try again to make sure I understand.

Image of static

C = 1, same as before.
S = 1, same as before.
B = 11.52*10^6 bits

C*S*B = 11.52*10^6 bits gt 100, therefore design!

It seems to me from your presentation that there is an inference to design for all B.

jerry

And a typical complaint is that our definition is not used in real science thus it is bogus.

But are leading ID researchers like Dr. Demnski using it? I’ve asked this before but unfortunately, Dr. Dembski is seemingly not following the KF’s FCSI comments.

Nakashima:

So what is the source of this increase? Mr KF has asserted something – “[put there by its designer]“, but I have trouble following his logic.

Indeed, both Nakashima and I have been trying, from different angles, to get kairosfocus to provide details on FSCI accounting practices, which appear rather ad hoc. kairosfocus has spent an awful lot of functionally specified pixels responding to arguments I haven’t made, while leaving this issue floating in the ether.

When FSCI comes from a computer, even if there random elements involved, he invariably credits the FSCI to the designer/programmer of the computer. When FSCI comes from a human, he invariably does not credit the FSCI to the designer/environment/inherited traits/randomness of the human.

The basis for this seems to be the view that computers are mechanical, preset, programmed, without thought or understanding, capable of only artificial languages, non-learning, etc., while humans are volitional, creative, spontaneous, original, decision-making, common sense, rational but not predictable, etc.

If those are the key concepts in crediting FSCI to the proper source, then the concepts need to be operationalized and incorporated into the definition of FSCI. As it is, we have no way of determining the actual source of the FSCI.

jerry:

Bfast said it was his understanding that CSI just was information that specified something else. That made sense to me./

If bfast said this, then he and you are not talking about Dembski’s CSI. Dembski defines CSI as complex specified information, not complex specifying information. The information is specified by a specifying agent. It does not necessarily specify something else.

Mr Nakashima,

You are correct. You asked if the Hazen link made reference to “Islands of Functionality”, which you took as a sign it was different from KF’s usage.

You wrote:

because there is no discussion of “islands of function” in Hazen’s functional information.

I wanted to point out that they did discuss the Islands of Function concept using their functional info in the same way KF did.

You are completely correct that they’re talking about a specific landscape. In the same way, KF is talking about specific biological landscapes.

Atom

Hey, a good opportunity to interject.

I am an engineer (software) not a scientist nor mathemetician. As such, I think in much more concrete terms than the others do.

I see CSI as a blueprint that fully describes a product. Now, if one finds a product, and generates a blueprint to describe the product this is somehow fundimentally different than if one finds the blueprint which was used to manufacture the product.

ROb, if you are suggesting that Dembski says that CSI only exists when a product is the result of the CSI, rather than the information being gathered from the product, then I think you present a valid splitting of hairs.

That said, it is my understanding that Dembski was not the originator of the term CSI. Further, I have had discussions with others who pull quotes out of Dembski’s work that suggest that he has created a definition which obligates his conclusion. I think that CSI is a concept that must belong to the world, not to Dembski alone.

I am an engineer (software) not a scientist nor mathemetician. As such, I think in much more concrete terms than the others do.

I think there is good-sized population of us engineers on this board, and precious few scientists and mathematicians. A pity, IMO.

ROb, if you are suggesting that Dembski says that CSI only exists when a product is the result of the CSI, rather than the information being gathered from the product, then I think you present a valid splitting of hairs.

Actually, the specification, according to Dembski’s usage of the term, need not precede the product. One of Dembski’s objectives in his work is to flesh out the idea of “post-specification”.

That said, it is my understanding that Dembski was not the originator of the term CSI.

As far as I know, he is the originator of the term, unless you count Crime Scene Investigation. He has a handful of technical definitions of the term, but he usually uses it quite loosely. Other people have differing understandings of the concept, which is certainly fine. But if the concept is to be employed in revolutionizing science, it needs to be rigorized.

R0b,

CSI is more rigorous than anything the non-telic position has to offer.

So please stop your whining.

Also this isn’t about revolutionizing science- science got to this point on the shoulders of IDists- it is about again letting scientists come to a design inference if that is what the data points to.

Mr Joseph,

You can’t come to a design inference without a rigorous, repeatable process. Mr Kairosfocus has said he can make a scientific inference.

Nakashima-san:

You can’t come to a design inference without a rigorous, repeatable process.

That is false.

First there is a design inference and only then can one hope to determine a specific process.

Ya see reality dictates that in the absence of direct observation or designer input the only possible way to make any scientific determination about the designer(s) and/ or the specific process(es) used, is by studying the design in question.

And BTW it is very repeatable that designing agencies can design and create irreducibly complex systems, information storge systems, and information communications systems.

“The information is specified by a specifying agent. It does not necessarily specify something else.”

But it could and some very interesting subsets of CSI specify other entities. Around here we are talking about the subset that does specify something else. In all cases except DNA we can identify a specifier or a likely specifier so it is not an issue that it is specified according to your understanding of CSI and has its origin in intelligence.

So let’s say we abandon the concept of CSI for the moment. Then FCSI exists on its own merits and is easy to understand and we will assume it is not related to CSI. DNA meets the definition of FCSI. There has never been any known FCSI produced by nature including life. The origin of life is under debate but by all current understanding FSCI is beyond the power of nature to produce. The only logical conclusion then is to conclude that life was probably not produced by nature because nature most likely cannot produce FCSI. Thus by default because life is based heavily on FCSI it was probably originally specified by some intelligence. So now we are back to DNA being CSI according to your definition and understanding.

jerry:

Around here we are talking about the subset that does specify something else.

Who is we? From what I can tell, you and bFast are the only ones here who think that CSI and FSCI refer to information that specifies something else, as opposed to information that is specified. Correct me if I’m mistaken in that observation.

DNA meets the definition of FCSI.

Really? Is FCSI’s complexity relative to a chance hypothesis like CSI’s is? If so, what is the chance hypothesis and how did you estimate the probabilities?

There has never been any known FCSI produced by nature including life.

That’s quite a sweeping claim. And it seems a little premature, seeing that no work on FCSI has ever been published. (Unless you think that FCSI is synonymous with Abel’s and Durston’s functional sequence complexity. If so, why introduce another term?)

Joseph-san,

As you can see on the thread above, KF-san was showing how to perform a calculation, compare the value to a standard, and from that comparison infer design. It sounds as if you think that inference proceeds with no evidence whatsoever.

Mr Jerry,

There has never been any known FCSI produced by nature including life. The origin of life is under debate but by all current understanding FSCI is beyond the power of nature to produce. The only logical conclusion then is to conclude that life was probably not produced by nature because nature most likely cannot produce FCSI.

That reasoning is perfectly circular.

ROb(186) “if the concept is to be employed in revolutionizing science, it needs to be rigorized.

If the concept is to be accepted by science it must be devoid of unacceptable baggage. A definition is called for, a definition of the kind of information which is in DNA, and not found in nature outside of that unique realm of “life”. Yet if the definition, no matter how “rigorous”, is approximately: csi = created by intelligence, it will be rejected flat out.

I propose a simple term and rigorous definition which matches DNA, computer software, and nothing found within nature other than within “life”.

FSCI – Function specifying complex information. The information must have complexity (probability less than 1 in 10^150 works for me), it must be information (as defined by Shannon, why not) and it must specify something that is functional, that does something.

I would suggest that the computer code which implements a word processor is function specifying. I would suggest that DNA, which describes (or provides a significant portion of the description) of a functioning organism, qualify as FSCI.

There, we have a rigorously defined term that should not be repulsive to the scientific community on its face.

Footnotes:

I will note on several points that seem worth underscoring, mostly for the sake of onlookers:

1] Binary variables

It is a commonplace of stastistics to have variables that identify observable or infer-able contingent circumstances and so take a binary or similar set of values.

In this case, functionality is a macro-observable, and complexity beyond 500 – 1,000 bits information storage capacity is calculable per relevant observables.

Indeed, the simple illustrative instances of (a) an ASCII text string of 143+ characters in English that responds to context (and/or a similar string in a program), and (b) the PC screen that shows the windows in which such text strings reside have been on the table from the outset.

The resistance to such examples is aptly illustrative of the underlying lack of weight on the merits for the case put by objectors to the FSCI concept.

And, by inversion, it shows us just how significant the fact of FSCI is.

2] Genetic algorithms

The first thing we need to know about such is that they are computer programs, invariably written by known intelligent agents and aptly exemplifying FSCI in the very list of statements.

So, GA’s exemplify the known source of FSCI: intelligence.

Moreover, we know that algorithms and programs, data structures etc and the machines to implement them illustrate something very significant: the instructions and their structured, organised sequences, are mechanically implemented, not based on common sense and active decision [and recall here, that we have active conscious creative rationality and decision making ability is a first fact of our experience . . . the denial of which lands us in inescapable self-referential absurdities].

So, we know that the active information in the GA that gets it to move towards peaks of performance comes from the designer, not the machine or the code.

In short, while created intelligences are a reasonable concept [we ourselves are a case in point, as the FSCI in us testifies to our origin in another intelligence], genetic algorithms are simply not credible candidates for such created intelligences.

3] Definitionitis

I have long since pointed out that EXPERIENCES AND CONCEPTS ARE PRIOR TO PRECISING DEFINITIONS, even in science. For instance, the experience, observation and concept “life” resists such stated definition to this day, but is a foundational scientific concept for a major discipline, biology. (nor indeed can everything in a discipline be defined, on pain of circularity or infinite regress. Commonsense concepts — aka primitives — must ground any discipline, call them what you will.)

What grounds our real-world work in science instead is that we may observe examples and abstract key concepts, which may be used in operational contexts to describe, explain, analyse, model predict and perhaps influence.

In that context, the concept of functionally specified, complex information [FSCI] — a subset of complex, specified information groundeed in OBSERVED function depending on complex, contingent (thus, information-bearing) organisation of elemets — has ever since Orgel’s statement in 1973 been more than adequately grounded in experience and coherent conceptualisation, with no less than two major mathematical metric models, and a simple rule of thumb heuristic.

The insistent, sometimes recycled [in the teeth of having already been adequately answered], objections and hair-splitting above are actually inadverte3nt testimony to the force and validity of this point.

[ . . . ]

4] The real issue:

Intelligent Design, as Dembski has described it, is “the science that studies [reliable] signs of intelligence.”

If there are reliable sings of intelligence, then from observed sign we may freely and on good warrant infer to the signified. FSCI is claimed to be one such sign, and on its strength, we may then infer from the observed DNA etc based information systems in cell based life to the design of such life.

But, in our day a la Lewontin, Dawkins et al, there is often a strong institutional commitment to the proposition that such design is not to be considered, as it may lend support to theistic etc worldviews, which are often viewed as marks of ignorance, stupidity, insanity or wickedness. So much so that institutions such as the US National Academy of Sciences have sought to redefine science — in the teeth of its history and significant philosophical considerations and plain ordinary facts — as in effect applied materialism.

In short, worldview level question begging and associated censorship is at work on the evolutionary materialist side; as has repeatedly been documented and exemplified (sometimes to the point of absurdity) in this blog.

5] Bottomline:

By sharpest contrast to that, FSCI is:

1–> observable and sufficiently definable to be distinguished by operational criteria

2 –> quantifiable by various metrics, in the simplest case, functionally specific bits.

3 –> In every directly known case, FSCI traces to intelligent action.

4 –> Since FSCI is associated with a topology of isolated islands of observable function in a large sea of non-functional configurations, we may distinguish functional and non-functional macrostates and [at least in principle or on a model basis] assign relative statistical weights.

5 –> On so doing, we see that undirected chance + necessity on the gamut of out observable cosmos, cannot credibly arrive at shores of function in the sea of possible but non-functional configurations. (The statistical weight of the non-functional macrostate overwhelms the functional ones.)

6 –> Consequently, that possible hill climbing mechanisms may exit that can help a population of replicating entities with low functionality hill-climb to peaks of locally maximal function, becomes irrelevant. (For, you have to first get to shores of function before you can climb the hill to optimality.)

7 –> thus, there are both positive and negative reasons to infer from FSCI as a reliable sign of intelligence to the best explanation thereof: intelligence in action.

______________

GEM of TKI

PS: bFast, a subtlety: In using 1,000 bits, the square of a binary form of the estimate of the number of states our observed cosmos could have across its thermodynamically plausible active life, I am not so much appealing to probability as search resource exhaustion: the whole universe we observe, acting as a search engine, cannot reasonably access as much as 1 in 10^150 of the config space specified by just 1,000 bits of info storage capacity.

So, even very large and numerous islands of function in such a space will be well beyond the search capacity of our observed cosmos, acting in an undirected fashion. And, the relevant spaces start way beyond that: simplest observed life uses up about 600 – 1,000 k bits for its DNA, having a config space of order 10^180,000+ cells at he lower end. the notion that some prebiotic soup out here could spontaneously create the relevant organisation and information spontaneously to get to an island of initial function then becomes utterly absurd.

And, that brings us right back to the core point of this thread, with DNA and its significance, and also the fine-tuning of the cosmos to facilitate such life, we are now dealing with not just matter and energy but INFORMATION as fundamental constituents of the observed universe.

So, just as there were hot debates on matter, waves, particles and energy,w e are seeing a hot debate on information in our day.

When the dust settles in another couple of decades, it will then be “obvious” that information is a fundamental element of the universe, and that functionally specific complex information comes from mind.

But before we get there,t eh committed materialists will be dragged along, kicking and screaming all the way as their cherished worldview collapses in the face of overwhelming evidence. (That is just what happened to the Marxists across the 1980’s; and BTW, there are still many – e.g. a certain Mr Chavez, and maybe some disciples of Saul Alinski [who was a committed Marxist, contrary to how Wiki glosses over his real views in both the bio and the review on Rules for Radicals . . . ] closer to the halls of influence and power in your homeland, too — who plot Marxist revivals!)

“That reasoning is perfectly circular.”

Absolutely not, because there were not absolutes. You do not seem to understand the difference between the “either” or “or” concept. Or the use of probabilistic statements.

It is either natural or the product of intelligence. If you have a third option, let us know what it is. If you read my paragraph closely, you will see no absolutes but probabilistic or likely statements. If nature cannot produce something, for example the Works of Shakespeare, then the likely answer is that it was produced by an intelligence.

Capice?

Or do you dispute that nature cannot produce the Works of Shakespeare? I will even give you all the monkeys you desire which is cheating on the nature can do it proposition. If you do dispute it then we can add to our list of how to characterize you.

Further footnote:

Re Sparc in the Pinker thread, to Wm A D:

Kairosfocus introduced the term FCSI (aka FSCI) on this forum. I may have missed it but do you or the other EIL members use this term. If so could you please share your thoughts on it?

Of course this is an inverted appeal to authority.

As Sparc et al have already repeatedly been informed (starting with Weak Argument Correctives 27, 28 and 29), the term functionally specific, complex information [FSCI] — and other like descriptions — is a DESCRIPTIVE reference to the phenomenon identified by Orgel in 1973, when he described how cell based life forms show specified complexity in a bio-functional context.

So long as Orgel is right when he said the following, FSCI is a legitimate term:

In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures which are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity. [L.E. Orgel, 1973. The Origins of Life. New York: John Wiley, p. 189.]

Let us zoom in just a bit:

living organisms

–> thus, the context is that of biological function int he context of the cell and its macromolecules

–> Moreover, the underlying issue is to account for the origin of such bio-function based on informational macromolecules and associated physically instantiated algorithms

are distinguished by

–> That is, observationally differentiated from two other classes

–> in context, complexity and specification

their specified complexity. . . .

–> In a biofunctional, algorithmic, digital information context

–> We mark out living systems by their SPECIFIED COMPLEXITY

–> That specification is here a FUNCTIONAL one

The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the [random] mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.

–> here we see the distinctions for living systems vs crystals and random mixtures of polymers

–> this also bring in the implication that living systems reflect a complex organisation of the component machinery that implements the activities of life

–> Should the components be damaged, or disarranged sufficiently, functionality vanishes

–> and so also we see the issue that there is an irreducible complexity of organisation and mutual adjustment to operating points in such living cells

In short, the matter has long since been clear, from ORGEL, decades before Dembski’s contribution of providing a mathematical framework for modelling and analysing what “specified complexity” means.

And, as has again just been explained, it is perfectly capable of being quantified, using the metrics by Dembski, that by Abel and Durson et al, or even a simple heuristic on functionally specific bits.

Whether or not the good folks at EIL find it useful for their purposes, FSCI is clearly a useful “glorified common sense” term for ours here at UD.

So useful in fact that objectors to ID are desperate to dismiss or suppress it.

GEM of TKI

So, GA’s exemplify the known source of FSCI: intelligence.

Yes, GA’s are algorithms designed by people. Would you regard any experiment to test an idea in Evolutionary theory or OOL as invalid because it is the product of intelligence?
The pertinent question here is firstly, how much FCSI does a GA contain, and secondly can it generate more FCSI than it contains?

genetic algorithms are simply not credible candidates for such created intelligences.

What, even GA’s created by God? Does this fact you claim mean that we have established something about the capabilities of the designer?

I’m afraid I don’t buy your ‘intelligence cannot be the result of mechanism’ argument. You haven’t provided a reason why intelligence can’t operate from a substrate that is based solely on repeatable and observable features of the universe, you just claim that if it is then nothing makes sense, so therefore it can’t be. You may be right about material intelligence lacking an immovable reference for ‘truth’ but that does not constitute proof that material things cannot produce behaviour that we would regard as intelligent, or that material processes cannot produce these entities.

I have a question. If someone uses a term to describe a phenomena that is commonly used by the scientific community but the term itself is not used by the scientific community, is that term not valid? One can claim that most are not using the term but does that make the term inappropriate.

Especially when that term is an attempt to bridge the terminology used in another discipline with a process used in the scientific community in areas of mutual interest. And further more this terminology is currently being used in similar form in some related areas of science.

“You may be right about material intelligence lacking an immovable reference for ‘truth’ but that does not constitute proof that material things cannot produce behaviour that we would regard as intelligent, or that material processes cannot produce these entities.”

I am not sure I understand what you are saying but you seem to not understand the gist of the argument. There are no absolutes on the ID side. It is all probabilistic. So nature could produce FSCI but there are two things to consider.

First, there is no evidence that it ever did. And second, there seem to be physical impediments for it to do so in terms of probabilistic resources for combinations of basic elements. Now none of this means that it will not be shown in the future by some unknown process that it is feasible. But until that time the statement that is is highly unlikely is a reasonable statement.

On the other side of the argument, there is the absolute pronouncement that intelligence may not be allowed in any scientific consideration. Or that the likelihood that an intelligent cause is greater than zero is forbidden.

ID gets accused of being absolutist when in fact it is the absolutist who are making this absolutely false statement about the people who are being reasonable in this debate.

PS: It is worth noting that — as is linked from Weak Argument Corrective 27 — Abel et al and latterly Durston et al have — in the peer reviewed literature — found a very closely related term to FSCI, to be useful in their work in biophysics. Indeed Durston et al have produced a metric and published thirty five values of FUNCTIONAL SEQUENCE COMPLEXITY in FITS, functional bits.

If Sparc et al are unaware of that, it is by failing to access and squarely address easily available and repeatedly pointed out information.

Further note (as I forgot to mention earlier): ridicule — fallacy of “truth lost in the laugh” — notwithstanding, the random variation used with GA’s is tightly controlled and that by DESIGN. The GA does not arise by chance variation of random bit strings, and the operating system on which it sits, likewise. Nor do we permit random variation of the whole program and the operating system when we use a GA. (The likelihood of crashing the system would then overwhelm whatever hoped for at random improvements one fishes for by throwing out a ring of variations on an already basically functional configuration and doing a competitive test on some metric of function or other.)

Mr Jerry,

There has never been any known FCSI produced by nature including life. The origin of life is under debate but by all current understanding FSCI is beyond the power of nature to produce. The only logical conclusion then is to conclude that life was probably not produced by nature because nature most likely cannot produce FCSI.

But now you write:
If you read my paragraph closely, you will see no absolutes but probabilistic or likely statements.

Is the word ‘never’ absolute or probabilistic?

The circularity arises from using that idea as an assumption, and then restating it as your conclusion only two sentences later.

Nakashima,

Can you please help me out? I was looking for naturally-ocurring complex algorithms that include such phenomena that would be analogous to a stop codon in DNA.

Do you know of any that I can study?

The GA does not arise by chance variation of random bit strings, and the operating system on which it sits, likewise. Nor do we permit random variation of the whole program and the operating system when we use a GA.

Strawman.

Biologists do not claim that DNA copying errors change the laws of physics. This is the same error that Gill keeps making about simulations.

Simply putting DESIGN in capitals doesn’t add anything to the argument. No one is claiming that GA’s are not designed or DESIGNED. The question, as far as mutation in nature goes, is if it occurs and to what degree. This is something we can empirically measure and then, if we are using the GA to model biology, we can apply this rate. If that model includes ‘tightly controlled’ mutation within the limits seen in nature then all we are doing is producing an accurate model of reality.

This whole notion that mutation in a simulation is somehow invalid if it is not applied beyond the simulation is just plain bizarre. If you ditched the computer and just did the math by hand would you argue that, for it to be accurate, 2+2 should not always equal 4?

Mr Jerry,

Or do you dispute that nature cannot produce the Works of Shakespeare?

Well, it has done so once already, I suppose that constitutes a sort of existence proof!

Yes, the monkeys would take a long time to bring forth Shakespeare again. But they would take an equal amount of time to produce any text of the same length. There is nothing in the glorious poetry of Shakespeare that makes him hard to reproduce, only the length of the text. Anthony Trollope would be even harder to recreate. What about the collected speeches of Leonid Brezhnev? What does that prove? We know that random walks over a large space take a long time to cross any small target. But that is not how GAs work.

BB:

1 –> Correcting a strawman: GA’s exhibit FSCI, and are known to be desinged by intelligent agents.

2 –> Where a REAL human-created artificially intelligent entity might lie: Cf Eng Derek Smith’s two-tier control MIMO cynbernetic model here. (You will see that the upper level controller is imaginative, creative and volitional, rather than merely mechanical — acting by step by step instructions and procedures triggered by necessity and/or blind chance. Figure out how to do that, build a demo model, and then let’s go build R Daneel Olivaaw!)

3 –> OOL and investigator interference: Ever since Thaxton et al laid out a ranked scale of investigator interference in TMLO [have you read this?], we have had objective criteria for identifying what is a legtitimate and what is an illegitimate degree of investigator interference. Where the OOL situation as modelled owes its performance to injected active information, it is an invalid model of the proposed chance + necessity only pre-life world. Shapiro and Orgel’s recent exchange [discussed end of Section A my always linked] points out just how both sides of the genes first and metabolism first approaches fail at this bar.

4 –> Intelligence vs mechnism and chance: the point is BB that we see that chance, mechanical necessity tracing to initial conditions and acting forces, and intelligence are three distinct OBSERVED causal factors in the world in which we live. When we can wholly explain a phenomenon without residue as the product of chance + necessity, we do not need to invoke intelligence to explain it. That’s not a matter of your subjective opinion, that is a matter of objective, massively evident fact.

5 –> Nor can you successfully reduce intelligence to chance + necessity, on pain of self referential absurdity a la Crick’s neurological reductionism or the like. You may choose to be absurd, but we then have a right to infer form your absurdity to the falsehood of your position.

6 –> And, when a position entails self-referential incoherence, it is a generally accepted conclusion that it must be false. That just happens to be the fate of evolutionary materialism and its cognates of reductionistic attempted explanation of conscious, reasoning, choosing, morally bound mind. (As the just linked demonstrates in summary.)

_____________

G’day,

GEM of TKI

Mr BillB,

We should be careful to distinguish intentional and unintentional sources of variation.

Why was the neutrino experiment that Denyse visited buried in a mine? To isolate it from unwanted sources of radiation. In the same way, I would want to run a simulation on a machine that is as bug free as possible. Scientists did not prize the Pentium floating point error when it was discovered.

But what if we did ‘permit’ random variation in the OS, even in the hardware? Lets say I run a GA on a machine made out of Jello, sitting next to Chernobyl. Would Mr KF now agree that it produced FCSI whose source was not the programmer? The whole ‘not random enough’ objection doesn’t lead anywhere fruitful, but it does expose a woeful understanding of what experiment, model building and simulation are.

I will simply note that the EIL team has never supported these claims. There is nothing in the MESA users guide about running it on Windows ME, a flawed Pentium chip, and lump of uranium, during a tornado, an earthquake, and a stock market crash, to obtain the correct results.

PS: BB, again, GA’s exhibit FSCI and are KNOWN (per direct observation) to be designed; aptly illustrating one example of the empirical base for empirically anchored inductive inference to best explanation from observed FSCI to intelligent design. We have no empirically warranted grounds for inferring that the FSCI in GA’s or other cases may arise without active information coming from intelligent agents. YOU ARE HEREBY CHALLENGED TO PROVIDE A CASE IN POINT, i.e. here is a point of so far successfully met empirical test — this is not at all a strawman. (NB: I have found across years, from experience, that I must often add emphases because it seems that otherwise the key words will be overlooked by objectors to ID. Cf above on the statement by Orgel 1973.)

Nakashima-San:

It would be easy enough to spew random bits across the PC, and see what happens. Given the well-known vulnerabilities provided by malware, the point I made stands.

GEM of TKI

Also:

Constrained randomness is a known feature of designed, complex systems. (Cf how dice are often tossed to play a board game, e.g Monopoly.)

Such systems however neither originate in randomness and blind mechanical forces nor do they allow unconstrained randomness — such randomness would soon cumulate to the point where the functionality would be compromised. Indeed, the living cell has subsystems that maintain the integrity of DNA information.

And that word integrity tells us what easily enough happens when randomness gets out of hand — as does the danger of radiation damage.

And, that is very well known.

GEM of TKI

Correcting a strawman: GA’s exhibit FSCI, and are known to be desinged by intelligent agents.

Please do me the courtesy of actually reading my comments. GA’s are designed, that is what I said. The strawman was your attempt to confuse a model with the system used to implement the model. I’ll repeat myself just for clarity:

The GA does not arise by chance variation of random bit strings, and the operating system on which it sits, likewise. Nor do we permit random variation of the whole program and the operating system when we use a GA.

Biologists do not claim that DNA copying errors change the laws of physics. This is the same error that Gill keeps making about simulations.

As the onlookers will note, I was addressing this confusion over how computers are used as tools for modelling, not the issue over who designs GA’s. Your obfuscatory attempt to distract has failed.

It seems from your 3 that you are claiming that if ANY attempt to model natural processes generates FCSI then the designer of the model must be inputting active information, and that therefore invalidates anything the model produces.

I notice you have avoided answering my question about whether a deity included the active information required for our evolution with creation of the universe.

Also this:

…how much FCSI does a GA contain?

Can you supply some numbers please.
and then we can start to answer this:

…can it generate more FCSI than it contains?

We have no empirically warranted grounds for inferring that the FSCI in GA’s or other cases may arise without active information coming from intelligent agents. YOU ARE HEREBY CHALLENGED TO PROVIDE A CASE IN POINT

No need to shout. You are persisting with strawmen. As I have already repeated, I have never claimed that Genetic Algorithms are not the product of human design. You challenged me to prove that they do not rely on humans to design them – why should I! it’s not something I claim!

I see nothing more self referential or incoherent about the idea of a naturally occurring intelligence than in the idea of an un-caused cause such as a deity.

KF-san,

It would be easy enough to spew random bits across the PC, and see what happens. Given the well-known vulnerabilities provided by malware, the point I made stands.

Mr Dodgen knew better than to hold to this position after its absurdity was pointed out, why do you persist?

And spewing bits acheives what, exactly? If I ran a GA on such a bit spewing PC, would you accept that it generated FSCI not sourced in the programmer?

PS I think you mean exploited, not provided, minor point.

A more philosophical question:
Do lengthy comments that are completely ignored outside of the small UD cosmos contain any FCSI? A quick Google search proves that FCSI is not effective as an argument.

PS. Therefore I introduce EFCSI (effective functional complex specific information)

PPS. Although it seems impossible to calculate FCSI (to my best knowledge there’s no positive example of FCSI) it is well possible to make a rough etimate of EFCSI of KF’s comments.

PPPS: SInce only Jerry and a few UD commenters I don’t remember adopted FCSI the EFCSI content of KF’s comments is close to zero.

PPPPS. It may increase if FCSI were supported by Dr. Dembski.

Onlookers:

First, observe that to date, the objectors to the observation that FSCI is a reliable sign of intelligence are unable to provide a single clear empirical counter-example, in the face of literally millions of examples all over the Internet.

That should tell us the real balance on the merits.

Second, had one or two of the objectors above troubled to consult the Derek Smith Model as already linked, they would have seen why GA’s are not credible as artificial intelligences. Namely, the locus of the creative, volitional and imaginative supervision of the algorithmic loop is EXTERNAL to the system. (That is, GA’s contain active information that is exogenous to the GA. A real AI will instead be credibly able to creatively project and decide its own path, then successfully implement it, fixing problems along the way.)

BOTTOMLINE: This thread has now plainly passed the point of diminishing returns and it is plain enough where the true balance on the merits lies. FSCI is a reliable sign of intelligence, and we have excellent reason to conclude that this holds in the context of the information systems in life, from first life on.

G’day

GEM of TKI

PS: FYI BB, using block caps to draw attention to what is there as opposed to what you expect to see is NOT “shouting.”

PPS: Nakashima-san: dismissal does not undercut the material force of the point. Namely, unconstrained random changes of significant size imposed on functioning systems are more likely to perturb them away from functionality than to improve such functionality. (This is one of the reasons why we see a topology of islands of function in a sea of non-function.)

PPPS: Sparc, you are simply whistling in the dark as you walk by the graveyard. You have seen at least three metrics relevant to FSCI [at least one of which has published a table to 35 values int eh peer-reviewed literature, apart form "good enough to make the relevant pint" examples above], and you have seen a context that shows why the term is useful and holds warrant dating back to Orgel in 1973. Again, FSCI is that subset of specified, complex information that has the specification through observed function. As a start, any string of contextually responsive ASCII text in English of at least 143 characters would exhaust the probabilistic resources of the observed cosmos to try to explain it on undirected chance + necessity. But, intelligence routinely produces such.

how much FCSI does a GA contain?

I take it that you are declining to answer this?

using block caps to draw attention to what is there as opposed to what you expect to see is NOT “shouting.”

Perhaps not but using block-caps to issue challenges on discussion forums was something I understood to be analogous to shouting:

YOU ARE HEREBY CHALLENGED TO PROVIDE A CASE IN POINT

I have consulted Derek Smith’s model. There is no mention of genetic algorithms but he does present a model system for creating intelligent robotics that involves adding higher level planning and prediction.

This is what he says:

a higher order controller (far left) replaces the external manual source of command information. This means that there is no longer any high-side system boundary, making the new layout self-controlling. That is to say, it is now capable of willed behaviour, or “praxis”

No mention of this ‘will’ coming from an immaterial source, it is all a product of the mechanisms that make up the machine.

Earlier you said this:

You will see that the upper level controller is imaginative, creative and volitional, rather than merely mechanical — acting by step by step instructions and procedures triggered by necessity and/or blind chance.

The upper level controller is part of the mechanism, it is mechanical in that sense and does not draw on immaterial things to operate. The detail of the mechanism isn’t explained but I would guess that a neural network might be a good candidate, and they work quite well with GA’s.

Mr kairosfocus,

Nakashima-san: dismissal does not undercut the material force of the point. Namely, unconstrained random changes of significant size imposed on functioning systems are more likely to perturb them away from functionality than to improve such functionality. (This is one of the reasons why we see a topology of islands of function in a sea of non-function.)

In this case the point had no material force. No scientist, working in any field, has the lack of separation of simulation, model, and experiment built into their methodology. If there is an earthquake in SF (God forbid), will my Second Life avatar feel anything shaking?

Perturbation moves you away from functionality? Now you are making the assumption that you have accused others of making – that the population members are close to high functioning areas already. Here’s a question – if I take a step in a random direction, have I moved closer to the top of Mt Fuji or away from it?

This a resaon our intuition about function and non-function can deceive us. In abiogenesis, there is no fitness function, there are only reaction rates and products. The ‘fitness’ of a molecule depends entirely on its enviroment, which is why a GA like the IPD scenario I proposed is closer to that reality than silly Weasel style functions.

Mr Kairosfocus,

No-one, to my view, is talking about AI. This is rhetorical misdirection on your part.

How do you calculate FSCI? How do you prove its source? Those are the issues under discussion. You have made claims that you are being asked to support.

Having three metrics is almost worse than having none. Which of the three is correct?

kairosfocus:

YOU ARE HEREBY CHALLENGED TO PROVIDE A CASE IN POINT

Okay, I’ll take the bait. I’m a sucker for all-caps.

1) The behavior of random processes in nature, such as radioactive decay, can be encoded as bit sequences of arbitrary length, so exceeding the 1000-bit threshold is no problem. Any given random sequence is useful for a variety of purposes, including testing and encryption, so it’s functional, and therefore FSCI.

2) Ocean tides serve important functions, including nutrient mixing and the creation of intertidal ecologies. How many bits does it take to store tidal behavior? Even if we discretize time and depth very coarsely, we can easily exceed the 1000-bit threshold if we record the information long enough, so we have FSCI.

3) Or we could note that the principle cause of tides is the moon, which remains in close proximity to the earth as the earth rotates and moves through space. How many bits does it take to store the trajectory of the moon? Again, even discretizing time and location very coarsely, we can easily exceed the 1000-bit limit. The same goes for the earth’s trajectory, which has the function of producing seasons.

It’s not hard to see what objections can be raised to the above cases. The question is whether you’ll notice that the problems stem from your definitions, and that the objections also apply to your own examples.

Rob:

When you use RA or Zener noise of sky noise etc to make codes,t he algorithm is where the coding comes from.

The random element is a controlled input that gives an assignment for say a 1-time message pad. the randomne4ss has no ma=eqanintg or function in itself. And of course the algorithm and its instantiation are where the intelligent inputs come in.

In short, the “example” is a strawman.

GEM of TKI

Nakashima-San:

You already have adequate examples on FSCI and related concepts, and on the quantifications thereof.

GEM of TKI

BB:

Now, implement the relevant controller for us, so we can see how a GA is a credible example of a real intelligence, rather than simply a mechanism that implements actions step by step per the design of an external intelligent agent.

And, BTW, I have said nothing about whether or no a designer “must be” immaterial.

(I happen to believe that designers will be informationally based, and am open to the possibility of both materially based and immaterially based designers, just as information is not locked down to any one material expression. [It is materialists who are a priori committed to the idea that all must reduce to matter-energy and space-time, acting through chance + necessity. As I have linked, that runs such into serious difficulties, often expressed today as "the hard problem of consciousness." It is hard because it is trying to resolve a self referential absurdity, implicitly.] )

GEM of TKI

Footnote on Rob’s examples:

Explaining how the strawman comes up:

1] Rob, 222: random processes in nature, such as radioactive decay, can be encoded as bit sequences of arbitrary length, so exceeding the 1000-bit threshold is no problem.

Of course, the process is known random, so is irrelevant to the question of intelligent design — a 1,000+ bit string of known random numbers would not even be in question.

Complex, but not specific in itself. (Cf Orgel on Granite or look at a complex organic tar in the OOL context.)

And, to move from RA decay to “encoded” string*, we have brought in: algorithms, codes, processing and storage, etc; all of which are the work of intelligent designers.

__________

*I use the string as the primitive of data structures because more complex structures can be expressed as suitably related groups of strings.

2] Any given random sequence is useful for a variety of purposes, including testing and encryption, so it’s functional, and therefore FSCI.

The onward process of intelligently using the sequence, however generated, is what would give it specificity and function.

AFTER that process has been completed,t he originally random sequences have now become specific, complex and functional. [To see that, think about what happens if we then onward allow significant random perturbation: the code assignments suddenly break down. A one-time message pad -- by design -- has no further use once used up.]

3] Ocean tides serve important functions, including nutrient mixing and the creation of intertidal ecologies. How many bits does it take to store tidal behavior?

Let’s see, how many bits does it take to code and store the analysis of tidal motion under gravitational forces? How many to store the reports on ecological function of tides? [In short, the INFORMAIONAL aspects come from outside the tidal system and processes.]

The tides, of course are a product of known mechanical forces, and exhibit as well some random elements. They are not INFORMATIONALLY functional in themselves. (Even the sand bugs that live in the intertidal zones on beaches are sensing and responding to the tidal circumstances, i.e. contain their own processing and programs of response. That’s why we used to catch them for bait by slapping down a dead fish on a string as the waves back washed: the bugs would pop up to investigate what they felt and smelled or tasted. We in turn would spot them and scoop them up. Smart bugs knew how to slip away when we tried that.)

4] we can easily exceed the 1000-bit threshold if we record the information long enough, so we have FSCI.

In short, as the highlighted exhibits, the FSCI is created by a process of measuring, encoding, recording and compiling in a relevant data structure.

Again, the information and its specified complexity and functionality are not the product of the tides as such but of the process that an intelligent agent applies.

5] How many bits does it take to store the trajectory of the moon?

Again, an intelligent agent’s action is creating the FSCI, per observation, analysis, encoding, data structure and storage operations.

6] the problems stem from your definitions, and that the objections also apply to your own examples.

Quite the opposite.

The problems come from Rob’s consistent failure to see the — quite obvious actually — role of the intelligent agents in getting to functional, specific, coded, complex information.

That sort of blindness to what is otherwise obvious, tells us a lot about how the evolutionary materialist view and imposition impoverishes early C21 science, imposing blinders that block quite intelligent and articulate contributors from seeing what SHOULD be obvious.

So, we should take warning, and understand that something is rotten in the state of early C21 science.
___________

GEM of TKI

R0b:
Interestingly some designers of electronic products will fill the spare memory of a micro-controller with junk code and data, just lots of random bytes, in order to confuse any attempts at back engineering. This presumably has FCSI because it serves a purpose.

Unfortunately I think we are flogging a dead horse here as KF seems to enjoy his portable goalposts a little too much

So, I’m left wondering how much FCSI a machine that turns random noise into its numerical representation can contain?

the algorithm and its instantiation are where the intelligent inputs come in.

Do things like this qualify as ‘algorithms’?

Ocean tides serve important functions

Now, implement the relevant controller for us

It’s Derek Smith’s controller, why should I do his work for him?

Also, I haven’t ever claimed that GA’s are intelligent, the debate is about whether they can generate FCSI. You are claiming that only an intelligence can generate FCSI so I suppose from your standpoint if a GA can generate it then it must be intelligent because you have defined FCSI as requiring an intelligence to generate. I would offer up the decades of research into GA’s but I know that you will reject them out of hand by claiming that the FCSI is smuggled in when the GA is created.

…how much FCSI does a GA contain?

Can you supply some numbers please. and then we can start to answer this:

…can it generate more FCSI than it contains?

How are the calculations coming along?

And, BTW, I have said nothing about whether or no a designer “must be” immaterial.

So you accept that life on earth can have a material cause then? Presumably this means that FCSI can be the product of purely material forces (i.e. the laws of nature), you just believe that it requires a certain class of natural system (an ‘intelligence’) to generate this FCSI.

Somewhere in your chain of reasoning there has to be an immaterial cause of FCSI or intelligence, otherwise you are accepting that FCSI and intelligence can arise from natural (material) processes.

4] we can easily exceed the 1000-bit threshold if we record the information long enough, so we have FSCI

Congratulations, you are so close to finally understanding. GA’s and biological organisms acquire this from the environment through a cumulative process.

In short, as the highlighted exhibits, the FSCI is created by a process of measuring, encoding, recording and compiling in a relevant data structure.

Now you are in trouble again because you seem to be requiring an intelligent observer for FCSI to exist. If naturally occurring processes don’t comntain FCSI until they are recorded and encoded then how can we tell if biological organisms contain FCSI when, by definition, studying them turns everything we look at into FCSI.

… an intelligent agent’s action is creating the FSCI, per observation, analysis, encoding, data structure and storage operations.

You need to present a method of differentiating between FCSI that is created when we study something and any FCSI that already exists, otherwise you are just placing FCSI in the eye of the beholder.

KF-san,

Nakashima-San:

You already have adequate examples on FSCI and related concepts, and on the quantifications thereof.

Well, though I am a poor student, I guess you agree with how I’ve calculated the FSCI above, with regard to a screenshot of the Mona Lisa and static. It seems that your metric always returns either 0 or the number of raw bits.

If you can’t detect the difference between a picture of Mt Rushmore taken in 1925 and one take in 1941, you have accomplished nothing, and labored mightily to do so.

Onlookers:

The past few days have sufficed to demonstrate the actual balance on the merits.

In every case of FSCI — which is observable, and measurable — where we know the source independently, we see that its source is in intelligence. We also know on search space grounds, that such cases are not likely to emerge on chance + necessity only.

Thus, FSCI is a reliable sign of intelligence, and int he case of OOL — the actual main focus dor this thread — it means that OOL is best explained by reference to intelligent action.

GEM of TKI

PS: BB, all we need is to know the underlying causal force that best explains FSCI. That turns out to be intelligence. We can then explore circumstances to see whodunit all we wish. That tweredun comes first.

PPS: BB, in fact the issue is that the observed universe necessitates a cause, per its credible origin and contingent character, typically estimated at 13.7 BYA. Given its evident complex finetuning for cell based life, that is on best explanation, intelligent, and powerful and of course not made up from the matter we observe. [Matter does not create itself out of noting . . . ] Going further, by isolating that intelligences are observed and have characteristic fingerprints, then we are in a position to let empirical evidence speak — without imposing a priori materialism — on the subject of whether or not immaterial intelligences exist or have left traces in our cosmos — and the decisive issue on that hinges not on OOL but cosmological fine tuning and inference to its best explanation; FSCI in lifge simply speaks to intelligence as its cause, but life on earth could in principle be a design by a creator within the cosmos (as TMLO, the foundational design theory technical work, discussed from 1984). The Lewontinian imposition of materialism on science censors the evidence.

Nakshima-san:

Do you not see that first the Mona Lisa or Rushmore have in them particular functions and specification?

Do you not see that a digitised map, drawing or picture of these will then have in IT FSCI? And that such would be most evidently designed?

As to the simple metric: > 1 kbits — yes, functional as a map or picture according to some coding scheme and associated algorithms, yes. Vulnerable to sufficient random perturbation; plainly, yes.

So, FSCI, and the bit measure of functionally specific bits will give a bit value if beyond 1,000 bits, specific and functional. And such digital maps or pictures will in every observed case of known origin be DESIGNED.

What is so hard to see or accept about that?

GEM of TKI

PS: Contrast a screen-full of white noise “snow”: complex yes, specific — no. Vulnerable to random perturbation — no. So, the specific variable would set it to zero on the simple FS Bits metric. (Cf here granite vs DNA on Orgel’s remarks.)

PPS: Nakshima-San: there are many real life situations that give different equally valid metrics for phenomena. At a very simple level, think about how we measure angles. Similarly, think about different digital encodings for images or other analogue phenomena, which is actually a metric process. The issue is fitness for particular purpose in view and being clear on what convention you are using in the particular context.

kairosfocus,

mechanism that implements actions step by step per the design of an external intelligent agent.

I believe what you just described fits the description for an electronic computing device, like what we normally use for information processing.

It is all about information processing, right? I am afraid I don’t quite get your point.

“Do you not see that first the Mona Lisa or Rushmore have in them particular functions and specification?”

kairosfocus, they all see. What they do is sit around and think how they can make up something that will confuse the issue. They are not driven by desire to understand, only confuse people as best they can. That is why the interesting thing is why grown men do this. Many of these are not children or young adults but supposedly mature adults and they actively engage in this behavior.

Have some pity on them. There must be something strange or wrong with them to engage in such behavior. I have relatives who are like them, in their 30’s and 40’s and some older who do not lead serious lives and find amusement in making other people unhappy. I have other relatives who are serious and leading very productive lives with families who would not waste a second on such juvenile behavior.

When the pro ID people here try to be an adult with them, you send them off to find another bit of non relevant trivia that they will hope confuse the issue. They are a rather pathetic lot but they are here so most of the pro ID people feel the need to deal with them. But it just feeds them. It is like the bulk spam servers looking for those who will answer the inane emails sent out. By answering them you are only encouraging them to send out more spam and try to screw up your computer. Think of the anti ID people here as the spammers.

If we charged them .01 cents a word to post a comment here, we would see the last of them

In every case of FSCI — which is observable, and measurable — where we know the source independently, we see that its source is in intelligence.

I’m still waiting for you to show me how to measure the FSCI of a GA. Without knowing how to do something like that I’m not sure how to apply it to anything else, particularly as your definition of FSCI seems to extend to any observation of nature.
—-

Do you not see that first the Mona Lisa or Rushmore have in them particular functions and specification?

If I were to take my stonemasons tools and carefully re-design and re-work Mt Rushmore so that it looks like a mountain would it still contain FSCI. In fact if I designed a whole planet with oceans and mountains specifically so that life would evolve would that planet contain FSCI, and if so how much, and how would you tell the difference between my planet and one that formed naturally, without having prior knowledge that a designer was at work?

… And such digital maps or pictures will in every observed case of known origin be DESIGNED.

What is so hard to see or accept about that?

Speaking for myself: nothing, you are quite right, every digital map or picture that is known to have been designed has been designed. Of course I am using your definition of design that would include pictures generated algorithmically or with GA’s. We know that it is possible to create mechanisms that can create pictures, which I presume will contain FSCI.

BTW, a screen of what looks like white noise could be a representation of a large encryption key, which would be very vulnerable to perturbation. Without knowing the cause of the signal how do you tell if it has FSCI?

I don’t actually have a problem with the idea of an intelligent cause to the universe but I still don’t buy your claims that this FSCI you argue is in living systems can’t be gathered from the environment and must be placed there by an agency.

jerry.

Well done! there’s nothing like a resort to personal attack to help solidify your position in a debate

KF-san,

PS: Contrast a screen-full of white noise “snow”: complex yes, specific — no. Vulnerable to random perturbation — no. So, the specific variable would set it to zero on the simple FS Bits metric. (Cf here granite vs DNA on Orgel’s remarks.)

Well, this is exactly why I asked for your help. Based on your definition, viz.

b] Let specificity [S] be identified as 1/0 through functionality [FS] or by compressibility of description of the information [KS] or similar means.

I set S = 1 due to the low compression ratio. I said so previously and asked for your confirmation that this was appropriate.

Let me ask you about a thought experiment. Let’s take two photos, taken from the same vantage point, the same season, the same time of day, of Mt Rushmore, the first in 1925 (before the sculpture) and the second in 1941 (after the sculpture was completed).

1 – do you agree that ‘design detection’ in the first photo is a false positive?

2 – do you agree that ‘design failure’ in the second photo is a false negative?

Now using Photoshop or some similar tool we create a series of morphs between the two photos, let us say 98 intermediates at 1% intervals.

In which of these images is it correct to infer design, and in which of them is it incorrect?

KF-san,

PPS: Nakshima-San: there are many real life situations that give different equally valid metrics for phenomena. At a very simple level, think about how we measure angles.

In these cases, we know how to convert between metrics. We can convert between degrees and radians, as you say. So it would very much help your case to show that these three different metrics are convertible, or explain why they are not.

Billb,

I have been here 4 years and this is my analysis of what passes for discourse here. I have only found one (maybe a second) anti ID person here in that time that did not fit the description I have made. At first there are attempts to be reasonable but after time they all drift into the same behavior pattern.

By the way FSCI is obvious and in order to see where it is in a GA you would have to have the algorithm itself to examine. It exist very clearly in language, computer programing and in DNA. All are clear examples. Bringing up other examples are sometimes problematic. Something may or may not have FSCI but there are probably examples where is not obvious. But it does not exist in nature and that is the point. If one wants to pursue it to other things, go right ahead but it is not relevant to the basic argument. All the other attempts are just extending it to intelligent processes, not natural ones.

Jerry,

By the way FSCI is obvious and in order to see where it is in a GA you would have to have the algorithm itself to examine. It exist very clearly in language, computer programing and in DNA. All are clear examples. Bringing up other examples are sometimes problematic. Something may or may not have FSCI but there are probably examples where is not obvious.

This is the point isn’t it. The reason why I’m arguing here is that FSCI isn’t obvious and with these ambiguities I can’t just take your word for it when you claim:

But it does not exist in nature …

I would help if you can give me a demonstration of this:

in order to see where it is in a GA you would have to have the algorithm itself to examine.

Pick which ever one you want, there are plenty of examples on the web.

Jerry:

y the way FSCI is obvious and in order to see where it is in a GA you would have to have the algorithm itself to examine. It exist very clearly in language, computer programing and in DNA. All are clear examples. Bringing up other examples are sometimes problematic. Something may or may not have FSCI but there are probably examples where is not obvious. But it does not exist in nature and that is the point. If one wants to pursue it to other things, go right ahead but it is not relevant to the basic argument. All the other attempts are just extending it to intelligent processes, not natural ones.

Indeed, every of your comments contains FSCI. Just like KF’s posts the FSCI content of your comments is a constant that equals God.

kairosfocus:

the randomne4ss has no ma=eqanintg or function in itself.

Can you name anything that has function “in itself”? Random sequences are useful in many situations. That you deem them non-functional seems rather arbitrary.

Complex, but not specific in itself.

In your always linked, you say that specificity can be identified through functionality. Random sequences serve several important functions.

And, to move from RA decay to “encoded” string*, we have brought in: algorithms, codes, processing and storage, etc; all of which are the work of intelligent designers.

Ah, so information in AGTCCTGACTTCAGGGCT comes from the intelligent designer who encoded the genetic sequence, not from the actual DNA. And here I was thinking that functional DNA was an example of FSCI.

The onward process of intelligently using the sequence, however generated, is what would give it specificity and function.

AFTER that process has been completed,t he originally random sequences have now become specific, complex and functional.

So random phenomena do have FSCI, but only after they’re used for something. So why do you credit the FSCI to the consumer rather than the producer? Is there any reason other than the fact that the latter would invalidate your claims?

Let’s see, how many bits does it take to code and store the analysis of tidal motion under gravitational forces? How many to store the reports on ecological function of tides? [In short, the INFORMAIONAL aspects come from outside the tidal system and processes.]

That makes no sense. It sounds like you’re saying the there is no information in tidal behavior until we record and report that previously non-existent information. Again, why is this not also true for biological information?

They are not INFORMATIONALLY functional in themselves.

Again, can you name anything that is informationally functional, whatever that means, in itself?

Again, the information and its specified complexity and functionality are not the product of the tides as such but of the process that an intelligent agent applies.

By that logic, you’re creating the information in this comment as you view and mentally process the pixels. Any critiques of this comment should therefore be directed to yourself.

PopSize = 1000
IndSize = 1000
MaxTime = 1000
mutationRate = 0.05
allocate Pop[PopSize, IndSize], Fitness[PopSize]
for i = 1, PopSize
for j = 1, IndSize
Pop[i, j] = rnd(0, 1)
next j
Fitness[i] = evaluate(Pop[i, *])
next i

allocate NewInd[1, IndSize]
for t = 1, MaxTime * PopSize
for j = 1, IndSize
p1 = rnd(1, PopSize)
p2 = rdn(1, PopSize)
if Fitness[p1] > Fitness[p2]
then newBit = Pop[p1, j]
else newBit = Pop[p2, j]
if rnd(0,1) < mutationRate
then newBit = not(newBit)
NewInd[1, j] = newBit
next j
p3 = rnd(1, PopSize)
Pop[ p3, *] = NewInd[1, *]
Fitness[p3] = evaluate(Pop[p3, *])
next t

evaluate( Ind )
{

}

Mr Jerry,

If you want to discuss the FSCI of a GA algorithm, I thought it would help if we had one to reference, so I wrote this pseudocode during lunch. It is a steady state GA with uniform crossover. It is about the smallest GA I could write, but it should still work.

Nakashima,

Ah, excellent, if I’m not mistaken, it’s the microbial GA! I was considering posting the same thing myself.

I was wondering about how the representation of the algorithm will affect the FSCI? Perhaps your psuedocode could be compared to a plain text description and a compiled executable. Should they all contain the same amount?

Mr Nakashima

You wrote:

Let me ask you about a thought experiment. Let’s take two photos, taken from the same vantage point, the same season, the same time of day, of Mt Rushmore, the first in 1925 (before the sculpture) and the second in 1941 (after the sculpture was completed).

FYI: Here is a picture of the Old Man of the Mountain in Vermont, before it was destroyed.

http://www.funnycoke.com/om4.jpg

Here is a photo of George Washington’s face under construction on Mt. Rushmore, in 1932.

http://www.imageenvision.com/m.....shmore.jpg

To calculate the bit content, you could treat each face as a set of equal-sized planes (like the faces of a pyramid, a cube, or an octahedron) and then calculate how many of these planes you’d need to generate a pretty good likeness of each face, with the same amount of detail. Each plane has its own mathematical equation. You could assign one bit of information to each plane.

You then asked about morphing from one to the other.

In which of these images is it correct to infer design, and in which of them is it incorrect?

The number of bits in the Old Man of the Mountain is clearly within the scope of nature to generate. Let’s say (very generously) that a structure of equivalent specified complexity to the Old Man of the Mountain is generated by natural processes, somewhere in the world, once every year. We can use that fact to calculate the probability of obtaining N bits. George Washington’s face has considerably more than N bits. You should be able to calculate the number of bits that natural processes might generate once every 4,536,000,000 years (the age of the Earth). That’s your cutoff point.

Nakashima,

The code you presented when implemented on an appropriate computer is FSCI. It is information that is complex and specifies another entity which has a function.

Sparc,

“Indeed, every of your comments contains FSCI. Just like KF’s posts the FSCI content of your comments is a constant that equals God.”

I did not know that God was writing comments on this site. Did He also write the code that Nakashima gave us.

Mr Vjtorley,

Hi. The idea you describe would be appropriate for estimating the FSCI of a sculpture – the 3D object itself. What KF-san has been discussing is simply a 2D image, whether of Mt Rushmore, Mona Lisa, a block of text or a screenful of static.

Your idea is similar to how objects are often represented in computer graphics/ The surface is approximated by a set of triangles. if you arrived at this yourself I congratulate you.