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Reinstating the Explanatory Filter
| December 10, 2008 | Posted by William Dembski under Intelligent Design |
In an off-hand comment in a thread on this blog I remarked that I was dispensing with the Explanatory Filter in favor of just going with straight-up specified complexity. On further reflection, I think the Explanatory Filter ranks among the most brilliant inventions of all time (right up there with sliced bread). I’m herewith reinstating it — it will appear, without reservation or hesitation, in all my future work on design detection.
P.S. Congrats to Denyse O’Leary, whose Post-Darwinist blog tied for third in the science and technology category from the Canadian Blog Awards.
102 Responses to Reinstating the Explanatory Filter
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JT:
Before locking off after doing some major downloads, I decided to come back by UD. Saw your 88.
1] Say someone draws an ordinary snowflake on that paper.
H’mm seems a bit obvious, but we can look back as a case of known origin per gedankenexperiment.
2] take each row of the paper and lay them out end to end so you have a million-bit long string of digits.
this gives us a 1 mb string, bearing a code based on the algorithm, snip at every so many bits, then align. Sort of like what I think was called the Caesar code — wound up on a stick as I recall.
A 1 mb string is complex.
Assuming we can “spot” a pattern, and thence see that there is a specifying algorithm, it will be recognisably specified. (Sort of like SETI.)
Once we see that there is a functional pattern here — picture of a snowflake, that will give us a basis for inferring that we have complex string fulfilling a narrowe target.
Designed.
If we cannot spot the pattern we will infer complex but no evident functional pattern so default to chance. [Though with so simple qa case, there will be strong correlations from row to row so the pattern will be easy enough to spot.)
BTW, this is a simplified version of what is alleged to be going on in a recent twist on codes and ciphers: steganography.
If one fails to spot the pattern, the EF will default to chance, per its deliberate bias, and will make in this case a false negative. 9It is designed to be reliable on a positive ruling [by using so extreme a degree of threshold for ruling complexity], but will cheerfully accept being wrong on the negative ruling.
3] just say that a random snowflake lands on the paper
Maybe this requires either a giant snowflake or a very good CCD display element so that the flake will block light on some pixels but not others.
Then we row by row convert and use the resulting string as a transmitted string.
this is rather like how in C17 – 18, I gather colonial authorities in what would become the US sometimes would use a leaf as a design on paper money so that the counterfeiting would be impossible.
Again, what happens is that the correlations along the bit string will suggest that this is slices of a pic, like a raster scan. (My students in Jamaica loved to hear that term!)
The ruling wlll on that outcome, be: designed, and it would relate to the composition of the string, not the features of the snowflake – i.e. is a digital or old fashioned chemical photograph designed or a mere product of chance and necessity?
GEM of TKI
And for the record, I generally put “mind” in quotes when referring to the ID concept of it and don’t use the term much at all, because of the potential for confusion.
OK KF, why isn’t an ordinary snowflake in nature complex and specified on the same basis. It seems clearly it is. So if its CSI,
all we can conclude from that is its not the result of metaphysical randomness – that’s all that the Design Inference can establish. The design inference cannot determine whether the snowflake was caused by A) laws or B)some completely different ontological category of causation called “Intelligent Design” which some say doesn’t even exist. You have to decide that on your own.
OK I’ll quit monopolizing this thread and see if I can figure out from KF’s post and Jerry’s what FCSI is all about.
JT–Say on a sheet of paper the bit 1 corresponds to black and 0 represents white. Say someone draws an ordinary snowflake on that paper. Now take each row of the paper and lay them out end to end so you have a million-bit long string of digits.
The same thing would be true of a drawing of a rotted log. Are you saying that ID would indicate the log was designed?
Of course, ID would indicate the drawing to be.
I was curious whether Dembski had ever commented on the Snowflake argument. This is all I could find:
Mere Creation
Page 12 of No Free Lunch also has a reference to crystals, but it’s not on google, although snowflake examples are.
“Refutations” by Darwinists seem to typically consist of mangling the concepts to be whatever they want (aka strawmen). For example:
Where’s my “rollseyes” button?
And any digital string encoding the drawing of the log, as well, presuming the encoding method can be found.
Patrick,
What is occurring is an attempt to rationalize away reality.
Agreed. People build their little logical boxes based upon preconceptions and attempt to forcefit/mangle everything into it. I don’t want to “build” such a box and call it reality, I want to know what our box called reality really is.
Many of the recent arguments seem to be along these lines: “I do not like the results so I am going to redefine the variables to get the results I desire.”
Gentlemen
Following up on a few points:
1] Patrick at 95: Links.
Excellent links!
Thanks.
I particularly like the remarks in mere Creation that explored the contrast between crystals and biopolymer based systems, with sidelights on Prigogine’s work. [BTW, Thaxton et al's TMLO has a very good discussion of Prigogine's work in the online chapters 7 - 9.]
2] Ratzsch example
Event & aspect: tumbleweed tumbles through small hole in fence.
EF look:
3] 97: People build their little logical boxes based upon preconceptions and attempt to forcefit/mangle everything into it. I don’t want to “build” such a box and call it reality, I want to know what our box called reality really is.
Sadly apt.
Science, at its best is an unfettered (but ethically and intellectually responsible) search for the truth about our world, in light of empirical evidence and logical/mathematical analysis.
Too often, today, that is being censored in pursuit of the sort of politically correct materialistic agendas I cited from Lewontin at 86 above. In case some may be tempted to think that Lewontin is unrepresentative, I here excerpt from the US NAS’s latest [2008] version of their pamphlet against “Creationism”:
that sounds fairly innocuous, until you see the immediately preceding context:
Cue: red flashing lights . ..
SOUND Effects: ERRMRR! EERMRR! ERRMRR! . . . SCREECH!
Black-suited, lab – coated jackbooted (actually, penny loafers are more likely . . . ) “Polizei”: “We’re the thought police and we’re here to help you!”
On a more serious note did it ever occur to the NAS . . .
4] JT, 93: why isn’t an ordinary snowflake in nature complex and specified on the same basis. It seems clearly it is.
This has already been answered, more than once.
The issue is that we need specification and complexity in the same aspect of the object, event or process. That is what sets up the large config space and the narrow island of functionality.
In the naturally occurring snowflake [not my suggested Langley mod for steganographic coding purposes]:
5] . . .some completely different ontological category of causation called “Intelligent Design” which some say doesn’t even exist
And thereby fall immediately into self-referential absurdity and selective hyperskepticism, for they themselves are intelligent, are designers and have conscious minds.
So, to then turn around and object to the implications of such empirically established phenomena reflects very sadly indeed on the current state of the intellectual life in our civilisation at the hands of the evolutionary materialists.
As has already been pointed out. Details here.
______________
At this stage, the ball is plainly in JT’s court.
G’day
GEM of TKI
PS: The whole TMLO book by Thaxton et al is available here as a PDF, about 70 MB if memory serves.
kairosfocus
Aplogies if this has been asked before, but do you have a list of objects and the FSCI contained within them? I’d be interested to see how the figures work out.
Do onions have alot of FSCI due to their unusual genonme for example? More then carrots?
Hi Mike
I see your question.
I first note that it is to some extent misdirected. For, we are not interested in whether the onion’s cells [including DNA, enzymes etc] show more evidence of FSCI than the onion’s or the converse. Instead, the material point is that BOTH are well beyond the reasonable threshold for being reached by chance forces on the gamut of the observed universe across any reasonable estimate of its lifespan.
What do I mean by that?
So, we have a reasonable lower bound on reliably inferring to directed rather than undirected contingency being responsible for an observed configuration that functions in some context or other. (This is entirely similar to standard hypothesis testing techniques that work off the principle that predominant clusters mean that small target zones are sufficiently unlikely to show up in reasonably sized samples that if we see these results, we are entitled to infer to intent not happenstance as the most reasonable cause.)
In the case of living systems, the current lower bound on an independent life-form plausible as first life is a geneome of about 300 – 500, 000 G/C/A/T elements (or possibly the RNA equivalent). That is a config space based on 4-state elements, and at the lower end, 4^300,000 ~ 9.94 * 10^180,617.
Both carrots and onions would be well beyond that threshold, and it is reasonable to deduce that the basic genome is explained by intelligence not chance.
If you then want to factor in the elaborations to get to the body-plans and peculiarities of the carrot or the onion, you are simply getting into overkill. On evidence, basic body-plans will require 1′s to 10′s or even 100′s of millions of additional DNA G/C/A/T elements.
Even the difference between a carrot and an onion would be well beyond the 500 – 1,000 bit threshold. We would reasonably infer that that difference is due to directed contingency, by whatever mechanisms such a designer would use.
As to metrics of FSCI that give numerical values as opposed to threshold judgements, we note that FSCI is a sub-set of CSI, so the Dembski models and metrics for CSI would apply. For instance in 2005, he modelled a metric [here using X for chi and p for phi]:
X = –log2[10^120·pS(T)·P(T|H)]
Thus we have a framework for supplying the table of CSI values, but to go beyond the threshold type estimate to that is a far harder exercise, and it would not make any material difference.
For instance post no 100 is an apparent message that is responsive to the context of this thread, and has in it 403 ASCII characters. 128^403 ~1.61 * 10^849, the number of cells in the config space for that length of text. I comfortably infer that this is message not lucky noise, per FSCI, as 1000 bits specifies about 10^301 states.
Are you willing to challenge that design inference?
On what grounds?
GEM of TKI
After reading some responses on other forums, it appears that the anti-IDists
1- do not understand the meaning of INFERENCE concerning science
and
2- do not undrstand that the science of today does not and cannot wait for what the future may or may not reveal.