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From Italy, Mathematics and the origin-of-life problem

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I recently posted on Irreducible Complexity in Mathematics, Physics and Biology. That thread generated interest in a well-written article by ID proponents in Italy. The article touches on the work of Turing, Chaitin, von Neumann and relates it to ID-sympathetic literature by Dembski, Behe, Voie, Trevors and Abel. The article was so well written and informative, that I felt it deserved its own thread. Our readers can learn much about ID through this article!

Mathematics and the origin-of-life problem

Here are some excerpts:

The works of Gödel, Turing, Chaitin and Von Neumann even from different points of view, show basic limits of the reasoning power. Someone said that these results got the fall of the platonistic conceptions about mathematics. This conclusion is fully wrong. The truth is exactly the inverse of that. Plato never said the total truth could be derived from few axioms. Instead what was fallen on 1931 is the positivistic utopia that reason may get more from less! In nuce reason cannot get Infinity from finite. In short that is the moral we can learn from the theorems about information irreducibility. These are particular cases only of a more general ascertainment: total truth cannot be axiomatizable. We cannot close the Unlimited into a limited system. The Total Possibility, i.e. the Infinite, is not reducible to a system. In all fields one can find the effects of this universal truth. Gödel found them in metamathematics, Turing found them in informatics, Chaitin found them in AIT. In the following we will show as also the fundamental problem of biology – the origin of life – is unsolvable without an intelligent source indeed due to the same reasons.

To say it in few words, Gödel’s works in metamathematics, Turing’s ideas in computability theory, Chaintin’s results in algorithmic information theory (AIT) and Von Neumann’s researches in informatics are friend to ID because all are different expressions of a unique universal truth: “more” doesn’t come from “less”; a lower thing cannot cause a higher thing; causes are more than effects; intelligence stays above and its results below.
….
Chaitin saw relations between the Gödel’s results and Turing’s ones. Gödel’s incompleteness and Turing’s incomputability are two aspects of the same problem.

Moreover the information incompressibility of [Chatin’s Algorithmic Information Theory] AIT is related to the “irreducible complexity” concept (IC).
….

Those are just some excerpts. The readers are encouraged to read the whole article as it is so well written. It is inspiring to see there are ID proponents doing good work in other countries!

Let me add this quote by Godel himself (from End of Materialist Science):

Godel

“The formation within geological time of a human body,” Kurt Godel remarked to the logician Hao Wang, “by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”

(Hat Tip: Dr. Albert Voie and others who alerted me to this article)

Comments
Blast! I didn't intend for that to happen. My computer keeps freezing up and when I submitted my comment nothing appeared so I assumed it didn't go through.a5b01zerobone
February 6, 2007
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Sal, I managed to put in a working email address.a5b01zerobone
February 6, 2007
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Okay. I did.a5b01zerobone
February 6, 2007
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Hi Sal, I put in a working e-mail. Hope it works. - A5a5b01zerobone
February 6, 2007
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a5, Yes. Can you change your profile at UD with a working e-mail? I'm not savvy on the details, so I leave it to you to try. Let me know if you succeed. regards, Salscordova
February 5, 2007
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Would it be somehow possible to provide you with a different email?a5b01zerobone
February 5, 2007
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a5, I just tried e-mailing your account. I was not able to get through. Salvadorscordova
February 5, 2007
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Okay Thank You. Best Wishesa5b01zerobone
February 5, 2007
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A5, I'll send it to you if the e-mail that you registered with is correct. Also, ARN is a good place for a public discussion. All of the questions that I field regarding ID should be publicly accessible with the exception of identities of ID proponents and perhaps important work too sensitive to disclose. Even I did not know about Biologic. I would have considered Biologic as too senstive a project. I make it a policy to not be involved in highly confidential matters lest there be a security leak. And frankly what is there to be confidential about regarding the science being discussed? I make it a point not to know too many names of clandestine sympatheizers. Those I meet on the net, I encourage to remain annonymous. All this to say, any questions about ID directed to me I will answer on a public forum like ARN. However, my e-mail address I send to you so you can alert me of a discussion. Thanks for your interest. Salvadorscordova
February 5, 2007
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Hi Sal, Do you have an email address if someone wanted to ask you some questions about ID? Thanks - A5a5b01zerobone
February 5, 2007
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SCheesman, Barrett1, The post strips out LT/GT signs. "Using very simple counting arguments, Hubert Yockey has concluded that an ancient protein such as “cytochrome c” could be expected to arise by chance only once in 10**44 trials." "It is this image that, no doubt, accounted for Francis Crick’s suggestion that life did not originate on earth at all, but was sent here from outer space, a wonderful example of an intellectual operation known generally as fog displacement." Ha, or in honor of today's game, moving the goalpost. Gotta love Berlinski!Michaels7
February 4, 2007
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Some additional news from Italy. A few days ago one of the national broadcast TV's aired a 2 hour program about ID with a long and very informative reportage and interviews with both Italian and American people http://www.la7.it/news/videorubriche/dettaglio.asp?id=861&tipo=13kairos
February 4, 2007
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One final thought. I would like to introduce some pertinent observations of the late Lewis Thomas, best known for his book The Lives of a Cell. In another book, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony , which I recommend, in his essay Humanities and Science, he wrote:
On one occasion, Kelvin made a speech on the overarching importance of numbers. He maintained that no observation of nature was worth paying serious attention to unless it could be stated in precisely quantitative terms. The numbers were the final and only test, not only of truth but about meaning as well. He said, "When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. But when you cannot--your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind." But, as at least one subsequent event showed [the age of the earth and the solar system], Kelvin may have had things exactly the wrong way around. The task of converting observations into numbers is the hardest of all, the last task to be done, and it can be done only when you have learned, beforehand, a great deal about the observations themselves. You can, to be sure, achieve a very deep understanding of nature by quantitative measurement, but you must know what your are talking about before you can begin applying the numbers for making predictions. It is the the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching...Science, especially twentieth-century science, has provided us with a glimpse of something we never really knew before, the revelation of human ignorance. We have been used to the belief, down one century after another, that we more or less comprehend everything bar one or two mysteries like the mental process of our gods. Every age, not just the twentieth century, regarded itself as The Age of Reason, and we have never lacked for explanations of the world and its ways. Now, we are being brought up short, and this has been the work of science. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead, and we will need science for this but not science alone. Science will, in its own time, produce the data and some of the meaning in the data, but never the full meaning. For getting a full grasp, for perceiving real significance when significance is at hand, we shall need minds at work from all sorts of brains outside the fields of science, most of all the brains of poets, of course, but also those of artists, musicians, philosophers, historians, writers in general.
J. Parker
February 3, 2007
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Did Godel ever disclose whether he thought that human beings were the result of guided evolution or something else? Apparetnly he rejected evolution but justified it by saying `You know Stalin didn’t believe in evolution either, and he was a very intelligent man.’ So it’s sort of a wash from our end. For the record Stalin’s official biographer, Emilian Yaroslavsky, credits Darwin with turning Papa Joe to atheism.tribune7
February 3, 2007
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Did Godel ever disclose whether he thought that human beings were the result of guided evolution or something else?`You know Stalin didn't believe in evolution either, and he was a very intelligent man.' So it's sort of a wash from our end. For the record Stalin's official biographer, Emilian Yaroslavsky, credits Darwin with turning Papa Joe to atheism.tribune7
February 3, 2007
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Hi Sal, Did Godel ever disclose whether he thought that human beings were the result of guided evolution or something else?a5b01zerobone
February 3, 2007
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What does Godel mean by “the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components”? I believe that is a a figure of speach for saying something is impossible. For the atmosphere to spontaneously separate out it’s components (oxygen, nitrogen, C02, helium, etc.) from its mixed gaseous solution would be statistically impossible. Seems like a 2nd Law reference, and similar to what you were saying. Despite bouncing between both sides fo the chmecial equation in equilibrium, the chance disassociation of all instances of stable atmospheric chemicals into the constituent elements simulataneously is effectivley impossible.JGuy
February 2, 2007
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What is an Evolutionist Painter like ? An evolutionist painter is one who tries every possible combination of brush strokes on his canvases with his eyes CLOSED - and expects he will come up with a Van Gogh when he reaches 70.tomc
February 2, 2007
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[...] Uncommon Descent has a link to a great overview of the intersection of math, information, and intelligent design. Bookmark to: [...]THE SEARCH FOR PURPOSE » Politics, A New Blog, Islam, Love, Romans, $, and Math (2/3/07)
February 2, 2007
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Seeing that there is a Truth as to our existence- we are here and that was achieved via one, and only one, vehicle. So it should fall within the realm of possibility for us to ascertain that reality, ie the Truth.
“A healthy science is a science that seeks the truth.” Paul Nelson, Ph. D., philosophy of biology.
Linus Pauling, winner of 2 Nobel prizes wrote, “Science is the search for the truth.”
“But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding.” Albert Einstein
The truth need not be an absolute truth. Truth in the sense that Drs. Pauling, Einstein & Nelson are speaking is the reality in which we find ourselves. We exist. Science is to help us understand that existence and how it came to be. As I like to say- science is our search for the truth, i.e. the reality, to our existence via our never-ending quest for knowledge.Joseph
February 2, 2007
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OK, Sal. I suspect you might be better at this than me but if you were to somehow mathematically describe every material thing in existence how would you prove what you describe to be true according to Godel’s incompleteness theorm? . . . You cannot. Sorry to dissappoint you Okay, BUT, for the material to be true wouldn't that mean there MUST be something outside the material? And if you should miss this question, hope you had a great weekend! :-)tribune7
February 2, 2007
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Tribune asked: OK, Sal. I suspect you might be better at this than me but if you were to somehow mathematically describe every material thing in existence how would you prove what you describe to be true according to Godel’s incompleteness theorm?
You cannot. Sorry to dissappoint you. :=( You can not experience truth without some degree of faith, but you can falsify things (ala popper). There are truths that are unprovable, so faith is in order somewhere! In fact, I was quite shocked when my math teacher told me that the basis of accepting math was faith! A consequence of Godel is that some of the truest things in reality cannot be proven, but only accessible through faith. Mathematician Douglas Hofstadter said it so eloquently: "truth is greater than provability". So it's not a matter of whether one has faith, but whether the faith one has is in a true thing (more on that at the end of this comment). Thankfully, it is possible to dismiss many false statements. If for example, someone said, "E = not-E" that is a false statement by the rules of logic. Darwinian evolution has many of such illogical square-circle statements. The scientific method and proof by contradiction gives us a technique to help us have a better chance at having a hold of truth.... What can be done via proof methods is occasionally demonstrate there are logical inferences from ones faith assumptions (presuming ones faith assumptions are correct). For example, if our faith assumptions about the reals are correct, then there are infinitely many prime numbers (can be proven using a proof by contradiction). The reason we think our math is good is because it works so well! Is there a chance it's incorrect? Logically speaking perhaps, but via faith we accept that it's right until proven wrong. I recall my math teacher saying one day, "you can prove Zorn's lemma if you assume the axiom of choice...There is the Apostles creed. The axiom of choice is like a creed. It is a mathematician's article of faith." One can formulate falsifiable hypothesis (ala popper) both in math and in science and see if there are inconsistencies or counter-examples to our faith- inspired conjectures. Let me give you a conjecture: "at least it seems that every number that is greater than 2 is the sum of three primes". In fact this conjecture (Godlbach's) has remained unproven for over 250 years and a 1,000,000 prize to solve it. We can use the scientific method and provisionally accept it as a true principle until it is proven or falsified (ala Popper). A disturbing fact is if this hypothesis is undecidable, it cannot be proven even if true!!!! We tend to believe what we can prove, and perhaps one day we'll prove or disprove Goldbach's conjecture. But we are always faced with the possibility that what we believe is true but unprovable. Now, back to the question of how we can possible know if something is ulitmately true, especially if it is unprovable. The physcist reverend John Polkinhorne said it so wisely in his Gifford memorial lecture, "by God's gracious disclosure." That is, unless ultimate Truth is willing to help us along, to give us eyes to see and ears to hear, and minds to reason, and actually tell us the truth and help persuade us its true, we would not have any hope of knowing truth. Such truths then also require faith to be effective. The source of truth can do a lot to persuade, but one is not forced to accept it as true, even in math! One more thing, because we are finite, some degree of child-like faith is needed to receive truth. Even science has this child-like faith that its methods can work, but there is no way to actually prove the scientific method is valid. ID sympathetic Nobel Laraureate Charles Townes said, "I have faith in order that I may know." That's about the most sensible thing I've heard in a long time. See you all next week. Have a great weekend!scordova
February 2, 2007
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"But the nucleic acids and the proteins are precisely such strings. We have no idea how they arose; filled with disturbing manic energy, they seem devoid of pattern. They are what they are. Their appearance by means of chance is impossible; their generation from the simple laws of physics ruled out of court simply because the simple laws of physics are indeed simple." I believe this is Berlinski speaking this. It's pure brilliance---and ID in a nutshell.PaV
February 2, 2007
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OK, Sal. I suspect you might be better at this than me but if you were to somehow mathematically describe every material thing in existence how would you prove what you describe to be true according to Godel's incompleteness theorm?tribune7
February 2, 2007
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SCheesman, I'm sure that's the case. If not, I'll have to start visiting another thread for secrets to unlocking the universe.Barrett1
February 2, 2007
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Salvador (quoting Berlinski): "Using very simple counting arguments, Hubert Yockey has concluded that an ancient protein such as “cytochrome c” could be expected to arise by chance only once in 10 trials." I'm sure the 10 must be missing some impressively large exponent...SCheesman
February 2, 2007
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For the reader's benefit, the Godel quote came from Berlinski's article (linked above). Berlinski commented:
A premonitory chill may now be felt sweeping the room. "We cannot see," Richard Feynman wrote in his remarkable lectures on physics, "whether Schrodinger's equation [the fundamental law of quantum mechanics] contains frogs, musical composers, or morality." Cannot see? These are ominous words. Without the seeing, there is no secular or sacred vision, and no inferential staircase. Only a large, damp, unmortgaged claim. And a claim, moreover, that others have regarded as dubious. "The formation within geological time of a human body," Kurt Godel remarked to the logician Hao Wang, "by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components." This is a somewhat enigmatic statement. Let me explain. When Godel spoke of the "field" he meant, no doubt, the quantum field; Schrodinger's equation is in charge. And by invoking a "random distribution of elementary particles," Godel meant to confine the discussion to typical or generic patterns -- what might reasonably be expected. Chance, again. Under the double action of the fundamental laws and chance, Godel was persuaded, no form of complexity could reasonably be expected to arise. This is not an argument, of course; it functions merely as a claim, although one made with the authority of Godel's genius. But it is a claim with a queer prophetic power, anticipating, as it does, a very specific contemporary argument. "The complexity of living bodies," Godel observed, "has to be present either in the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]." In this, Godel was simply echoing Paley. Complexity must come from somewhere; it requires an explanation. And here is the artful, the hidden and subversive point. The laws of physics are simple in that they are short; they function, they can only function, to abbreviate or compress things that display pattern or that are rich in symmetry. They gain no purchase in compressing strings that are at once long and complex -- strings of random numbers, for example, the very record in the universe of chance itself. But the nucleic acids and the proteins are precisely such strings. We have no idea how they arose; filled with disturbing manic energy, they seem devoid of pattern. They are what they are. Their appearance by means of chance is impossible; their generation from the simple laws of physics ruled out of court simply because the simple laws of physics are indeed simple. Godel wrote well before the structure of the genetic code was completely understood, but time has been his faithful friend (in this as in so much else). The utter complexity of the informational macromolecules is now a given. Using very simple counting arguments, Hubert Yockey has concluded that an ancient protein such as "cytochrome c" could be expected to arise by chance only once in 10 trials. The image of an indefatigable but hopelessly muddled universe trying throughout all eternity to create a single biological molecule is very sobering. It is this image that, no doubt, accounted for Francis Crick's suggestion that life did not originate on earth at all, but was sent here from outer space, a wonderful example of an intellectual operation known generally as fog displacement.
scordova
February 2, 2007
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Jehu: Perhaps this is reference to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, as applied to gas diffusion. Once one or more gasses diffuses through a volume, the resultant mix will not spontainiously separate back into it's components.sabre
February 2, 2007
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What does Godel mean by “the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components”? I believe that is a a figure of speach for saying something is impossible. For the atmosphere to spontaneously separate out it's components (oxygen, nitrogen, C02, helium, etc.) from its mixed gaseous solution would be statistically impossible.scordova
February 2, 2007
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What does Godel mean by "the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components"?Jehu
February 2, 2007
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