Elsevier publishes Granville Sewell’s latest on the Second Law

_{William Dembski

February 19, 2011

Intelligent Design}

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Elsevier has just published Granville Sewell’s “A Second Look at the Second Law” (Applied Mathematics Letters, June 2011):

ABSTRACT: It is commonly argued that the spectacular increase in order which has occurred on Earth does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the Earth is an open system, and anything can happen in an open system as long as the entropy increases outside the system compensate the entropy decreases inside the system. However, if we define ‘‘X-entropy’’ to be the entropy associated with any diffusing component X (for example, X might be heat), and, since entropy measures disorder, ‘‘X-order’’ to be the negative of X-entropy, a closer look at the equations for entropy change shows that they not only say that the X-order cannot increase in a closed system, but that they also say that in an open system the X-order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary. Thus the equations for entropy change do not support the illogical ‘‘compensation’’ idea; instead, they illustrate the tautology that ‘‘if an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable’’. Thus, unless we are willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of spaceships, computers and the Internet not extremely improbable, we have to conclude that the second law has in fact been violated here.

Comments

Ulrich Mohrhoff has an interesting discussion of Sewell's earlier paper in: Sewell on Darwinism and the Second Law ANTIMATTERS 1 (2) 2007 pp 61-70.DLH_{March 3, 2011
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OT kf; I just watched this video and found it interesting and thought provoking. Perhaps you will find it as such as well. Evidence For Heaven (Pt 1) NDE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR_a8ByUuBcbornagain77_{February 26, 2011
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Onlookers: Came back by. I see the proposition of a red herring autocatalytic reaction set in a place where the observed life forms do not base replication of a cell on autocatalysis. That sort of irrelevant distractor is enough to tell us what is going on here. To get tot he observed system we need ot account for the origin of codes, that code informaiton on the working molecules of life, machines to give effect to those codes,a nd the algorithms and programs to do that. Just picking a few typical proteins of length 300 or so AA's will rapidly show that the configuration spaces implied by such are well beyond the credible reach of our observed cosmos acting as a search engine, without intelligent direction. Life forms are well north of 100's of proteins. GEM of TKI GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{February 26, 2011
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The excitement over the article's publication may be short lived. There is a report that Applied Mathematics Letters will be removing the paper and rescinding the acceptance.Muramasa_{February 25, 2011
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kairosfocus, It is evidently very hard for you to admit that you do not know the phase space of self-replicating systems. You can define no probability measure, and therefore you can get nowhere with any permutation of FIASCO. Mathematical analysis and simulations indicate that an autocatalytic set may be much simpler than the RNA-based system constructed by Lincoln and Joyce (2010). A sensational result of the study by Lincoln and Joyce was that recombinant replicators emerged spontaneously, and came to dominate the population. That is, there was a qualitative change in the system that no one would have predicted. The process of reproduction became more complex, in the plain-language sense of the term. I defy you to show how recombination was front-loaded into the study.Noesis_{February 22, 2011
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F/N: maybe I should underscore: the functional specificity of digital code is amply shown by the amount of time and effort given over to debugging to get code right. For language more generally, spell checks and grammar checks are eloquent testimony.kairosfocus_{February 22, 2011
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Noesis: The self replication is based on code, uses algorithmic processing, and is coupled to the replication of a metabolising entity that has a replicating facility. Information requited to fulfill the functionality is well beyond 100 k bits storage. Can you show me a case of observed FSCI where the source is known and is chance plus necessity rather than intelligence? What is the empirically known source of algorithms, code and programs? Chance and necessity or intelligence? Going beyond, can you show me that the functional configs are not on deeply isolated islands in a wider space where the overwhelming majority are non-functional? So, what6 is the predictable result of a random walk search on the gamut of our observed cosmos? In short, YOU, PRECISELY, ARE NOT GIVEN AN INITIAL REPLICATING ENTITY. Nor is it ex post facto painting targets around wherever one happens to hit. We do observe function, and we do observe that it is digitally coded. We do observe that digitally coded prescriptive info is sensitive to changes, i.e. has the sort of pattern we have described as islands of function. Those become facts to be explained cogently. Similarly, given the usual pre-biotic scenarios, you have to move from some version or other of Darwin's warm little electrified pond, or a hot sea vent, or a comet or whatever, and plausibly -- on empirically verified evidence -- get to the sort of self-replicating metabolic entity described for cell based life. The problem, plainly, is, you have no credible bridge from that pond to those metabolising vNSR cells. And, you have no credible explanation for FSCI other than intelligence. GEM of TKI PS: Cf here, for some more details on the vNSR.kairosfocus_{February 22, 2011
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"not to mention" not "no to mention"Collin_{February 22, 2011
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Noesis, Evolution yes, but darwinism no. You are being equivocal with the word evolution. The main question remains "where does the information come from?" (no to mention, where does the mechanism the registers the information come from?)Collin_{February 22, 2011
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kairosfocus:
To plausibly find such an island of function in such a space is of course well beyond observability on the gamut of our cosmos, on chance plus necessity without intelligent direction.
Framing the function and the space a posteriori is invalid. As I wrote in my first post of the thread,
But given an initial self-replicator and a complex environment, the space of self-replicators that might arise in the course of evolution is unknowable. Thus there is no way to associate probabilities with forms of self-replicators that might arise in the future. It is bogus, then, to claim after the fact that the end-results of an evolutionary trajectory are improbable.
The fact is that you cannot begin to talk about probability without specifying -- yes, that is you doing the specification -- a discrete component of something you have already observed.Noesis_{February 22, 2011
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bornagain, I do not know how life originated on Earth. But I do know that it is logically fallacious to claim that the form of life we exemplify is the only form of life there can be. Even if life on earth is the work of a designer, that does not imply that design is required for life. There is no reason to believe that the RNA-based autocatalytic set constructed by Lincoln and Joyce (2010) is the simplest possible. It is a matter of logic that from variety, heredity, and fecundity comes evolution. The variegation of life is a matter of registering information, not creating it.Noesis_{February 22, 2011
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Kairosfocus, Thanks for answering my question. Also thanks for the Paley quote. I think that self-replication does not save the Darwinist because it only adds to the complexity and "poly constrained complexity" (as BA would put it) to the system. There are merely more ways for the system to completely break down.Collin_{February 22, 2011
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BA: Re your excerpt:
two rRNAs with a total size of at least 1000 nucleotides – ~10 primitive adaptors of ~30 nucleotides each, in total, ~300 nucleotides – at least one RNA encoding a replicase, ~500 nucleotides (low bound) is required . . .
800 nucleotides at 4 states each implies 4^800 ~ 4.45 *10^481 configs in the implied space. To plausibly find such an island of function in such a space is of course well beyond observability on the gamut of our cosmos, on chance plus necessity without intelligent direction. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{February 22, 2011
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PS: I also need to underscore that the point about the vNSR based self-replication is ADDITIONALITY, as emphasised by the much despised Paley in Ch 2 of his book (the chapter and extension of the watch discussion that somehow seems to be almost always silently passed over in typical dismissive discussions): ________________ >> Suppose, in the next place, that the person who found the watch should after some time discover that, in addition to all the properties which he had hitherto observed in it, it possessed the unexpected property of producing in the course of its movement another watch like itself -- the thing is conceivable; that it contained within it a mechanism, a system of parts -- a mold, for instance, or a complex adjustment of lathes, baffles, and other tools -- evidently and separately calculated for this purpose . . . . The first effect would be to increase his admiration of the contrivance, and his conviction of the consummate skill of the contriver. Whether he regarded the object of the contrivance, the distinct apparatus, the intricate, yet in many parts intelligible mechanism by which it was carried on, he would perceive in this new observation nothing but an additional reason for doing what he had already done -- for referring the construction of the watch to design and to supreme art . . . . He would reflect, that though the watch before him were, in some sense, the maker of the watch, which, was fabricated in the course of its movements, yet it was in a very different sense from that in which a carpenter, for instance, is the maker of a chair -- the author of its contrivance, the cause of the relation of its parts to their use. >> ________________ What we have here through the vNSR facility is that we have a system that does its own thing, AND is able to by having a coded representation, replicate itself. Autocatalytic chemical reaction sets and computer cellular automata simply do not exhibit that key distinction. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{February 22, 2011
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Noesis: Autocatalytic reaction sets, set up by chemists under highly specialised conditions, are utterly irrelevant to the observed metabolising, and code based self-replicating automata that we SEE in the living cell. To put the one forth as the root of the other without a very solid empirically -- observationally -- based explanation of how the one becomes the other, is to put forth a red herring led away to a strawman. Or, to use a metaphor tinged with the insightful analogies that are so often dismissed when it is convenient for materialist advocates to do so: a live donkey kicking the carcass of a dead lion. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{February 22, 2011
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Noesis, In your imagination it seems you have this whole origin of life thing worked out, at least to the point that you feel the huge problems for acquiring even a single functional protein are no big deal. If you can just get that 'sure hunch' you have worked out in your imagination into a 'real world' solution, there is a One Million dollar prize awaiting you; The Origin Of Life Prize Excerpt: "The Origin-of-Life Prize" ® (hereafter called "the Prize") will be awarded for proposing a highly plausible natural-process mechanism for the spontaneous rise of genetic instructions in nature sufficient to give rise to life. The explanation must be consistent with empirical biochemical, kinetic, and thermodynamic concepts as further delineated herein, and be published in a well-respected, peer-reviewed science journal(s). http://www.us.net/life/index.htm Noesis, I also noticed that you 'took it for granted' that once you had self-replication of some sort then, ba da boom, ba da bing, darwinian evolution would be a snap for you,,, It seems you have not been informed of the fact that Darwinists have not even demonstrated a increase in functional information over and above what was already present in life; The GS (genetic selection) Principle – David L. Abel – 2009 Excerpt: Stunningly, information has been shown not to increase in the coding regions of DNA with evolution. Mutations do not produce increased information. Mira et al (65) showed that the amount of coding in DNA actually decreases with evolution of bacterial genomes, not increases. This paper parallels Petrov’s papers starting with (66) showing a net DNA loss with Drosophila evolution (67). Konopka (68) found strong evidence against the contention of Subba Rao et al (69, 70) that information increases with mutations. The information content of the coding regions in DNA does not tend to increase with evolution as hypothesized. Konopka also found Shannon complexity not to be a suitable indicator of evolutionary progress over a wide range of evolving genes. Konopka’s work applies Shannon theory to known functional text. Kok et al. (71) also found that information does not increase in DNA with evolution. As with Konopka, this finding is in the context of the change in mere Shannon uncertainty. The latter is a far more forgiving definition of information than that required for prescriptive information (PI) (21, 22, 33, 72). It is all the more significant that mutations do not program increased PI. Prescriptive information either instructs or directly produces formal function. No increase in Shannon or Prescriptive information occurs in duplication. What the above papers show is that not even variation of the duplication produces new information, not even Shannon “information.” http://www.scitopics.com/The_GS_Principle_The_Genetic_Selection_Principle.html The Law of Physicodynamic Insufficiency - Dr David L. Abel - November 2010 Excerpt: “If decision-node programming selections are made randomly or by law rather than with purposeful intent, no non-trivial (sophisticated) function will spontaneously arise.”,,, After ten years of continual republication of the null hypothesis with appeals for falsification, no falsification has been provided. The time has come to extend this null hypothesis into a formal scientific prediction: “No non trivial algorithmic/computational utility will ever arise from chance and/or necessity alone.” http://www.scitopics.com/The_Law_of_Physicodynamic_Insufficiency.html The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity: David L. Abel - Null Hypothesis For Information Generation - 2009 To focus the scientific community’s attention on its own tendencies toward overzealous metaphysical imagination bordering on “wish-fulfillment,” we propose the following readily falsifiable null hypothesis, and invite rigorous experimental attempts to falsify it: "Physicodynamics cannot spontaneously traverse The Cybernetic Cut: physicodynamics alone cannot organize itself into formally functional systems requiring algorithmic optimization, computational halting, and circuit integration." A single exception of non trivial, unaided spontaneous optimization of formal function by truly natural process would falsify this null hypothesis. http://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/10/1/247/pdf Can We Falsify Any Of The Following Null Hypothesis (For Information Generation) 1) Mathematical Logic 2) Algorithmic Optimization 3) Cybernetic Programming 4) Computational Halting 5) Integrated Circuits 6) Organization (e.g. homeostatic optimization far from equilibrium) 7) Material Symbol Systems (e.g. genetics) 8) Any Goal Oriented bona fide system 9) Language 10) Formal function of any kind 11) Utilitarian work http://mdpi.com/1422-0067/10/1/247/ag ,, And yet Noesis, though no one has ever witnessed material, or Darwinian, processes generate any non-trivial functional information whatsoever, though the simplest life ever found on earth easily outclasses what our best computer programmers have wrought;,,,, Three Subsets of Sequence Complexity and Their Relevance to Biopolymeric Information - David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors - Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling, Vol. 2, 11 August 2005, page 8 "No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organism with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms' genomes programmed?" http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1742-4682-2-29.pdf ,,, you yourself, in your few short posts you have submitted thus far, have submitted more information than can reasonably be expected to be generated by the entire universe over the entire history of the universe,,, multiplied by Planck time for good measure!!!! Thus you yourself are presenting concrete evidence of a unique presently acting cause that is alone sufficient to explain the effect in question,, i.e. where did the information come from? Stephen C. Meyer - The Scientific Basis For the Intelligent Design Inference - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4104651 Further notes; Even the low end 'hypothetical' probability estimate given by evolutionist, for life spontaneously arising, is fantastically impossible: General and Special Evidence for Intelligent Design in Biology: - The requirements for the emergence of a primitive, coupled replication-translation system, which is considered a candidate for the breakthrough stage in this paper, are much greater. At a minimum, spontaneous formation of: - two rRNAs with a total size of at least 1000 nucleotides - ~10 primitive adaptors of ~30 nucleotides each, in total, ~300 nucleotides - at least one RNA encoding a replicase, ~500 nucleotides (low bound) is required. In the above notation, n = 1800, resulting in E <10-1018. That is, the chance of life occurring by natural processes is 1 in 10 followed by 1018 zeros. (Koonin's intent was to show that short of postulating a multiverse of an infinite number of universes (Many Worlds), the chance of life occurring on earth is vanishingly small.) http://www.conservapedia.com/General_and_Special_Evidence_for_Intelligent_Design_in_Biology Evolutionist Koonin's estimate of 1 in 10 followed by 1018 zeros, for the probability of the simplest self-replicating molecule 'randomly occurring', is a fantastically large number. The number, 10^1018, if written out in its entirety, would be a 1 with one-thousand-eighteen zeros following to the right! The universe itself is estimated to have only 1 with 80 zeros following to the right particles in it. This is clearly well beyond the 10^150 universal probability bound set by William Dembski and is thus clearly a irreducibly complex condition. Koonin, when faced by by the sheer magnitude of his own numbers, makes a 'desperate', though very imaginative, appeal to the never before witnessed quantum mechanism of Many Worlds. Basically Koonin, in appealing to never before observed quantum mechanisms, clearly illustrates that the materialistic argument essentially appears to be like this: Premise One: No materialistic cause of specified complex information is known. Conclusion: Therefore, it must arise from some unknown materialistic cause. On the other hand, Stephen Meyer describes the intelligent design argument as follows: “Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information. “Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information. “Conclusion: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell.” There remains one and only one type of cause that has shown itself able to create functional information like we find in cells, books and software programs -- intelligent design. We know this from our uniform experience and from the design filter -- a mathematically rigorous method of detecting design. Both yield the same answer. (William Dembski and Jonathan Witt, Intelligent Design Uncensored: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the Controversy, p. 90 (InterVarsity Press, 2010).) The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds - Douglas Axe - 2010 Excerpt Pg. 11: "Based on analysis of the genomes of 447 bacterial species, the projected number of different domain structures per species averages 991. Comparing this to the number of pathways by which metabolic processes are carried out, which is around 263 for E. coli, provides a rough figure of three or four new domain folds being needed, on average, for every new metabolic pathway. In order to accomplish this successfully, an evolutionary search would need to be capable of locating sequences that amount to anything from one in 10^159 to one in 10^308 possibilities, something the neo-Darwinian model falls short of by a very wide margin." http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2010.1bornagain77_{February 21, 2011
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kairosfocus, John von Neumann never heard of an autocatalytic set. Nature feels no compunction about realizing self-replicating systems more simple than he imagined.Noesis_{February 21, 2011
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F/N: In short, we can do planned, constructive work. But, at a price of energy degradation of the cosmos. What is being forbidden up to fluctuations [Brownian motion is such a fluctuation], is the spontaneous emergence of order, by overwhelming improbability. That is why thermodynamicians first discussed the infinite monkeys theorem.kairosfocus_{February 21, 2011
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Dr Bot Nope. Intelligence allows us to arrange things in ways they would not spontaneously credibly do; due to the balance of statistical weights of clusters of micro-states. (That is the root of my remarks on the likely outcomes of random walks from arbitrary initial points in config spaces with isolated islands of function. E.g. If you have a tray of 1,000 coins, the utterly overwhelming cluster of outcomes will be very near to 50-50 hesds and tails in no simply describable order. That is, to describe the outcomes, you would have to list them coin by coin, basically. HTHT . . . 1,000 times over or the like would be simply describable,a s would be say a Twitter-like message in ASCII code.) The thermodynamic price is paid elsewhere, as an energy converter has to generate waste heat etc. In thermodynamics, you cannot win, you can only break even under one condition, and you cannot get out of the house to get that one condition. Energy is conserved, entropy net rises [or under ideal conditions is constant],and the perfect condition for that is a heat sink at 0 K; which cannot be attained by a finite number of refrigeration cycles. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{February 21, 2011
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Noesis: Dr Sewell's analysis is prior to a metabolising, self-replicating system. He is answering the question of whether an open system explains origin of functionally specific organised, information rich complexity. The answer, on thermodynamics, is no. Next, can you address how a von Neumann self replicating system such as is described here [one that also has a separate functional unit] spontaneously self-organises, creating a digital code, algorithms, storage, specific codes for a correct set of functional proteins and execution machines and all? An irreducibly complex system prior to cell based life and as a condition for self replication thus the chance variation and natural selection usually credited for evolution? And BTW, can you kindly give us an example of your self replicating molecules observed forming on conditions that are plausible for a real world prebiotic environment? Then, can you explain the following cluster of excerpts on OOL from leading researchers: ______________ >> In Dawkins' own words: What Science has now achieved is an emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator... It was a supreme achievement of the human intellect to realize there is a better explanation ... that these things can come about by purely natural causes ... we understand essentially how life came into being.20 (from the Dawkins-Lennox debate) "We understand essentially how life came into being"?! – Who understands? Who is "we"? Is it Dr. Stuart Kauffman? "Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started ... is a fool or a knave." 21 Is it Dr. Robert Shapiro? "The weakest point is our lack of understanding of the origin of life. No evidence remains that we know of to explain the steps that started life here, billions of years ago." 22 Is it Dr. George Whitesides? "Most chemists believe as I do that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of chemicals in the prebiotic earth. How? I have no idea... On the basis of all chemistry I know, it seems astonishingly improbable." Is it Dr. G. Cairns-Smith? "Is it any wonder that [many scientists] find the origin of life to be utterly perplexing?" 23 Is it Dr. Paul Davies? "Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit they are baffled ... the problem of how and where life began is one of the great out-standing mysteries of science." Is it Dr. Richard Dawkins? Here is how Dawkins responded to questions about the Origin of Life during an interview with Ben Stein in the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed: Stein: How did it start? Dawkins: Nobody knows how it started, we know the kind of event that it must have been, we know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life. Stein: What was that? Dawkins: It was the origin of the first self replicating molecule. Stein: How did that happen? Dawkins: I told you I don't know. Stein: So you have no idea how it started? Dawkins: No, No, NOR DOES ANYONE ELSE. 24 “Nobody understands the origin of life, if they say they do, they are probably trying to fool you.” (Dr. Ken Nealson, microbiologist and co-chairman of the Committee on the Origin and Evolution of Life for the National Academy of Sciences) Nobody, including Professor Dawkins, has any idea "how life came into being!" >> ______________ Thanks GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{February 21, 2011
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Perhaps I'm misundertanding this but is the argument basically that, because we have intelligence (the ability to design and create objects with FCSI) we are able to violate the second law? If this is the case then it begs an important question - Are there any other laws of physics that we can be free of by virtue of our intelligence or is the SLOT a special case?DrBot_{February 21, 2011
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Prof. Sewell ignores entirely the physics and, more importantly, the logic of self-replicating systems. There are good reasons to believe that autocatalytic sets arise fairly often in environments that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Argue that point, if you like. But given an initial self-replicator and a complex environment, the space of self-replicators that might arise in the course of evolution is unknowable. Thus there is no way to associate probabilities with forms of self-replicators that might arise in the future. It is bogus, then, to claim after the fact that the end-results of an evolutionary trajectory are improbable. Even if one had magical knowledge of a space of evolutionary trajectories (defined somehow or another) and a probability distribution on that space, the probability of any particular trajectory would be exceedingly small. This goes to the fundamental error in arguments from improbability. When all trajectories of a dynamical system are highly improbable, then it is invalid to declare some trajectories "effectively impossible."Noesis_{February 21, 2011
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Joseph, I also replied to Maya's attempted dismissal of the concept of specified complexity, by pointing here to no 4 in the ID founds series. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{February 21, 2011
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PS: I forgot, ln is log on e the base of natural logs, 2.718 . . .kairosfocus_{February 21, 2011
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Collin: Cell based life requires functionally specific, digitally coded information and associated implementing nanomachines organised around not a logic of order but a logic of function. So, we have three distinct concepts: randomness, order, organisation. Organised entities are specifiable on function, but to accommodate information, they are more aperiodic than orderly systems, which tend to have various types of symmetry or a simple repeating cellular structure. What Dr Sewell is addressing is an underlying issue. The basic architecture of materal things is based on atoms, molecules and the like at micro level. Associated with that micro-level arrangement of mass and energy [which includes motion], we have a quantity that measures the degree of freedom within a given macroscopic -- our scale - description. That quantity is entropy, and one way to measure it is given by Boltzmann: s = k * ln w Where s is entropy, k is a part measure of the quantity of energy required/used per degree of freedom [k* T, temp above absolute zero, is in energy more or less per molecule], and w is a count of the number of ways things may be arranged. Disorderly things may be arranged any old how, and so have a great many ways. Orderly and organised things may be arranged in only a relatively few ways and are low entropy. Orderly things are very simply describable, and tend to be very regular, so they are not very informational. Organised things are quite specific [e.g. the string of letters in this post are in a very specific though not regularly repeating order], and that specificity, especially if it is functionally constrained, is highly informational. DNA is like that, and so are the proteins coded from DNA. What happens is that he open systems objection to the inference to design is saying that -- thanks to energy and matter flow through -- and since organised arrangements are arrangements, they can plausibly be accounted for without reference to an organiser. That is, forces of chance and or necessity are enough to account for this. Dr Sewell's rebuttal is that in effect relevant islands of function are deeply isolated in the space of possible configurations, so if one envisions moving to configs at random, it is utterly unlikely that one will find functionally specific ones. So, the organization is information rich and is not credibly accounted for on simple flows of energy, without intelligent direction. So, a moon landing space craft is not credibly accounted for on chance configs, and a computer is not accountable for on mere open-ness to energy and/or mass flows either. A Jumbo Jet points to a Boeing company, not a tornado in a junkyard in Seattle. That is why he speaks of how that which is very unlikely in a closed system is no more likely in an opened up one, except something else is happening that makes the thing not unlikely. The degree of unlikely at stake is typically of order 1 in 10 ^150 or more, much more. The atoms of our observed cosmos, across its lifespan, will go through about 10^150 minimum time states. The minimum length in question is about 10^20 times faster than a strong force nuclear interaction. Hope that begins to make clear. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{February 21, 2011
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Kairosfocus, Thanks for answering my question. If you don't mind, I've got a second one. Is Granville saying that in order to have life, you have to have enough order and that there is insufficient order here? Or is he saying that order cannot create information no matter how much of it you have? Or is he even addressing information at all?Collin_{February 21, 2011
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I let him know that you are interesed.Joseph_{February 21, 2011
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PS: Joseph, you are discussing encoding of stereophonic sound, and blending in FM broadcasts, which are in turn different from phase modulation. Just a footnote lest the usual pick a point, strawmannise and attack game is played.kairosfocus_{February 21, 2011
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Joseph Thanks. I hope he takes time to look at my remarks in the ID founds no 2 and in the always linked note App 1 on thermodynamics issues. BTW, this last has in it a discussion on Brillouin's negentropy view of information, and Jaynes' remarks on the informational view of thermodynamics. NE has it wrong way around. Let's see if he can discuss the Clausius case with us, and what happens when (like with a double acting steam engine), the device contains FSCI, directly or through being a complicated irreducibly complex entity. And, do notice my App 3 discussion on things like snowflakes and hurricanes, esp how order and functional organisation are to be distinguished. Why not let's thrash it all out here in this thread, NE? (Can you post here?) GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{February 21, 2011
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kairofocus- your response is up on my blog and I went to his blog and posted a link to your response. I can tell he got it because my bloig is getting hits from his.Joseph_{February 21, 2011
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