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Author
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Topic: Specified Complexity, SETI, and a Thought Experiment
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Jules
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Member # 181
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posted 07. May 2002 21:46
I really don't belong here, among all you intellectual giants -- and I mean that sincerely, sort of. But until the ARN discussion forum gets up and running again, you're stuck with me.
Before I begin, let me emphasize that I am an advocate of ID. However, sometimes I wonder if we overstate our case, and that this may be causing some (but certainly not all) of the backlash in the scientific community. As an example, I wanted to think about one of the IDists' favorite examples: SETI. We frequently cite it, because it offers an example of how non-IDists would identify the existence of intelligence without the aid of independent verification (which we can't do with archaelogy, since usually there's independent evidence of hominids around somewhere). And I wanted to think about this in terms of two different scenarios:
Scenario 1: Radio astronomers discover a radio frequency that has exactly what they were hoping for: a signal that repeats the prime numbers from 2 to 101. Further, they are able to locate the transmission to a certain star, and verify that there is at least one planet revolving around that star.
Scenario 2: Radio astronomers discover a radio frequency that has exactly what they were hoping for: a signal that repeats the prime numbers from 2 to 101. However, they are unable to locate the origin of transmission at all. In fact, like background radiation, it seems to be coming from everywhere.
The question I want to pose is this: Would we be more confident that the radio transmission in Scenario 1 is intelligently designed, than we would be in Scenario 2? If we would be, then I think specified complexity alone may not be able to determine the existence of intelligence. For myself, I think I would be more confident that the transmission in Scenario 1 is intelligently designed, than in Scenario 2.
If others find themselves agreeing with me, we should ask ourselves what this means. I suggest, the following: Though specified complexity might be a good indication of intelligence, we need other evidence to confidently conclude intelligence. What form this evidence might take probably depends upon the context. In the context of biology, that evidence might be something like finding pieces of a rocket ship in ancient rock (for directed panspermia), or finding a portion of Genesis 1 coded in the DNA (for theistic ID). This does not mean that ID cannot be a reasonable hypothesis. I think it is a very reasonable hypothesis. But I think it means that without independent evidence of some kind, it may never get beyond the level of hypothesis.
[ 07 May 2002, 21:48: Message edited by: Jules ]
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John Bracht
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Member # 5
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posted 08. May 2002 12:30
Jules,
Thanks for a thought-provoking post. I want to post my initial thoughts. Keep in mind that most of this is off the top of my head and I'm just rambling out loud (or in print...).
Take your second scenario. I think we can say with confidence that the signal is from an intelligent source--there is no doubt about that. The fact that it seems to be broadcast in a way that we are not capable of seems a bit bothersome, but I don't think it really affects the design inference. We humans are incapable of broadcasting a signal diffusely throughout space, and we are used to thinking of radio signals as having a single source. However, I can see no reason why an advanced alien species could not overcome those limitations. In this case, the diffuse signal is a sign of even greater intelligence. Alternatively, we might investigate whether this signal originated with the big bang (which also caused the background radiation) and thus was front-loaded into the system. Del Ratzsch has an example like this, where a bunch of meteors crash on the moon, spelling out a verse from the Bible (I think it was John 1:1 but I can't remember). He claimed it as a defeater of the design inference, but Dembski just pointed out that the arrangement of the meteors travelling through space before the impact must have exhibited specified complexity and thus have been designed. Once we detect an intelligent signal, we may have to trace the "information trail" back a ways to find the source intelligence. If we find an intelligent signal embedded in the background radiation (or having similar characteristics to the background radiation), then it seems that we might investigate the possibility that the signal originated with the universe.
The bottom line? In both cases we are still looking at an intelligent signal. We may just not be familiar with the method of implementation of that design; I don't think that weakens our design inference at all. In fact, Bill Dembski has commented that, if design is real, we shouldn't be surprised to see it pop up in unexpected places. Similarly, we might expect to see design pop up in unexpected ways.
John Bracht
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Jules
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Member # 181
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posted 08. May 2002 22:28
John:
"We humans are incapable of broadcasting a signal diffusely throughout space, and we are used to thinking of radio signals as having a single source. However, I can see no reason why an advanced alien species could not overcome those limitations. In this case, the diffuse signal is a sign of even greater intelligence."
Me: You may be right, there may be no reason why an advanced alien species could not overcome those limitations. On the other hand, there may be reasons that we don't know about. We do know how radio signals can be sent from a single source. So from our point of view, Scenario 1 would provide greater warrant for inferring the presence of intelligence. Our ability to infer intelligence, after all, depends upon the argument from analogy. The more the phenomenon in question resembles phenomena we know are intelligently designed, the more we feel justified in inferring that it also is intelligently designed. I don't want to say that we have no reason to believe that the signal in Scenario 2 is intelligently designed. Just that we have less reason, and therefore more room for doubt. In a world where Scenario 2 occurred, should we discover a means to duplicate such a signal, we would feel more confidence that the original signal was intelligently designed.
Of course, this has application to biological organisms. Should we ever be able to bioengineer living organisms, our confidence that they were originally intelligently designed would also increase. Unless I'm mistaken, such a situation is a long way off. Presently, we live in a world where we are just beginning to unravel the mysteries of living organisms. More circumspect claims regarding their supposed intelligent origins might be received with less hostility.
[ 08 May 2002, 22:29: Message edited by: Jules ]
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Mike Gene
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Member # 149
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posted 13. May 2002 00:28
Jules sets up an interesting thought experiment which helps us to see two different ways to infer ID.
In Scenario 1, we have two lines of evidence that point to ID. The first line is based on analogy (which is essentially what ID inferences in archaeology and forensics rely on). Here, a mathematical message, carried by a radio signal, from a distinct planet is detected. The analogy to human activity is clear. Secondly, there is the evidence from CSI, where this message can neither be attributed to chance or law. Together, they merge to make such a powerful case that skeptics of the ID inference would be flirting with irrationality.
Jules can correct me if I am mistaken, but I think he is arguing that in Scenario 2, we lose the line of evidence from analogy and instead must rely entirely on CSI. Thus, it would seem, merely as a consequence of losing one line of support, the inference would be weaker. However, with this particular example, the pattern is clearly detachable - a mathematical series that clearly reflects abstract thought. So John still thinks the ID inference is sufficiently strong in this scenario and I would tend to agree.
An interesting sideline to this exercise is how it helps us understand science-as-we-know-it (SAWKI). With scenario 1, I am confident that SAWKI would agree with the ID inference and the whole scientific community would be excited by the discovery of ETI. But in scenario 2, I do not think SAWKI would infer ID. This is because SAWKI depends on analogy to infer ID and the type of intelligence one must invoke to explain the mathematical series that permeates the entire universe would be so vastly superior to ours that it would appear divine. I think the rules of SAWKI would kick in and many would argue that science needs to uncover the non-teleological forces behind the generation of this apparent design. It would be claimed that anyone jumping to the conclusion that this number series came from an intelligent being would be giving up on science.
Finally, Jules writes, "More circumspect claims regarding their supposed intelligent origins might be received with less hostility." I think it would be very hard for anyone to be much more circumspect as I have been. One can then judge for themselves how much of a "hostility-damper" this has been.
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Jules
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posted 13. May 2002 03:45
Mike,
Thanks for the reply. I was beginning to think this topic was dead in the water, here. I even started the same topic at Infidels, just to get some reaction. Quite a lively crowd over there. And some interesting reactions. Some ID critics there still think that Scenario 2 would be good enough to conclude intelligent design. Others don't think it would be strong enough, but that the evidence would justify an intelligent design hypothesis. Others are thinking it over.
I'm kind of with the crowd that think it justifies the intelligent design hypothesis. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps if I understood CSI (and how it differs from SC), I would know that Scenario 2 still leaves us no other choice than intelligent design.
But I think Mike is right about SAWKI. I'd bet that half the scientists would think it was intelligently designed and look for an answer to how or who. The other half would think it wasn't and look for some law-like explanation. I can even imagine a new race of Pythogoreans, starting communities with radio telescopes, listening for signals of pi, and teaching their members not to eat beans (I wonder if that was because they lived so close to each other).
And I can't really fault SAWKI. Whatever its shortcomings, modern science seems to be at bottom an empirical being. It gets rather suspicious of conclusions that aren't grounded in the testable and observable. But isn't CSI (SC?) grounded in the empirical? After all, any time we know the cause of CSI, it's intelligence. Shouldn't an inductive inference lead us to intelligence in Scenario 2? Yeah, but those are all cases of human design (we think). Anyway, minds are messy and hard to get at. Didn't Behaviorism even want to dispense with talking about them?
And maybe this helps to make clear another cause of the hostility toward ID: A reliance upon minds for causal explanations. How unpredictable. So even if IDists wannabe like Mike (and it took me nearly half a year to figure out that Mike wasn't trying to prove ID, but merely assuming it, and using it as a research tool), they'll still encounter lots of hostility. We peace activists have our work cut out for us.
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Jules
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posted 18. May 2002 00:42
I haven't been able to login at ARN, so you guys are still stuck with me. Someone started a thread there (Mona Lisa...) that is similar in argument to mine here. Mike Gene summarizes it and offers his answer:
Zygote - "I disagree. I recognize the Mona Lisa is designed because it is consistent with what I know about paintings; humans assemble paintings via a specific, reasonable mechanism."
Mike: "Sure. Basically, you infer design through analogy (as I would), as analogical reasoning is the most commonly used method. But is such reasoning necessary to the ID inference? That is, one could indeed use Dembski's method to successfully infer ID, suggesting another way to infer ID."
Since I can't respond to Mike there, I thought I would do it here. I had been thinking over Mike's response to me here for a while, and formulating a better answer, but his shorter answer to Zygote has helped me formulate it better. The reply is that Dembski's method is analogical reasoning. We observe intelligent agents design specified complexity; we observe specified complexity (our background radio signal with prime numbers 2 to 101); we infer (by analogy) that it was intelligently designed. It is like other things intelligently designed. We can strengthen our argument by making it an inductive one: Every time we know the cause of specified complexity, it is an intelligent cause. This is an example of specified complexity, therefore it is probably intelligently caused. Of course, we are assuming that we know that other human beings are intelligent agents. And we know this only by analogy -- they are like me, therefore they have minds and are intelligent. So ultimately, the argument from specified complexity is another example of analogical thinking. Unless we want to abandon our belief in other minds, we can't reject it.
But the important difference between Scenario 1 and Scenario 2, is that in 1, we have a specific explanation of how the radio signal came about: a radio transmitter, probably located on a planet of a specific star system. In Scenario 2, we have no such specific explanation. I imagine this is where science would have dissatisfaction with the simple statement: "The radio signal in Scenario 2 was intelligently designed." Science would want to know how. My sense of things is that ID is in a Scenario 2 situation. We claim that life or parts of it were intelligently designed. Science wants to know how, especially in light of the fact that many IDists think design events have occurred over billions of years.
Not being able to answer the How question has some sort of effect on our epistemological claims. Not being able to explain the radio signal in Scenario 2 leads some people to question whether we really know that it was intelligently designed. Likewise, not being able to answer how life or its parts were designed likewise leads to doubting an intelligent cause. One can question whether such doubt is legitimate. I tend to think it is legitimate. Since we are arguing analogically to intelligence -- whether in Scenario 1 or 2 -- when that analogy breaks down, there can be a resulting break down in the inference.
I don't want to push this argument too far. I think hypothesizing an intelligent cause in Scenario 2 is the most reasonable thing to do. Likewise, I think an ID hypothesis is also the most reasonable. However, I can understand why people would doubt such an hypothesis in either case.
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Mike Gene
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Member # 149
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posted 18. May 2002 23:41
Jules,
Perhaps specified complexity is a special or more rigorous example of analogical reasoning. Imagine an alien intelligence visiting this planet long after humans existed, and finding the Mona Lisa. They probably would not know what to make of it until they discovered photographs of humans, or even skeletons. At this point, it would be come clear that the painting contained a detachable pattern - a pattern that existed independently of the painting. Understanding the chemistry of paint would help them to rule out this as a causal explanation for the pattern on the canvas. And it would also be clear that chance was neither a good explanation for this pattern.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with analogical reasoning as part of an investigation. I think it is at the root of all design inferences. It fuels SETI, forensics, and archaeology. It even plays a large role in the study of biology. Analogy is simply the attempt to use what is known as a guide into the realm of the unknown.
As for understanding how others can doubt the ID inference, I understand this fully. However, there is a difference between expecting others to share in your ID inference and holding your ID inference captive to another's doubt. One simply does not need to convince the skeptic of ID in order to carry out an investigation using ID. What matters is whether ID can be used to explore the biotic world in an illuminating fashion. On my web page, I also make a distinction between ontological evidence and epistemological evidence that would seem to apply here.
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Jules
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Member # 181
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posted 20. May 2002 20:46
Yes, I'm beginning to think that Specified Complexity is just a more rigorous form of analogical thinking. I believe that there is someone with a mind, who goes by the name of Mike Gene, who is posting messages on this topic, because the coincidence of a message being posted here that displays such relevance to this topic is too improbable for another explanation.
But then I understand the mechanism that would be used by that other mind to post here. If we don't understand the mechanism, is it still legitimate to insist that we "know" that there is another mind involved? And is this knowledge of the kind that could be called scientific knowledge? Frankly, I don't know much about what science is supposed to be. I get the impression that it tries to root itself in experience. So that, the further we drift from experience, the less trustworthy science views our reasoning or speculation. Thus in a Scenario 2 situation, science would eye our claim of knowing it was intelligently designed with a great deal of suspicion. I think if we could get science to grudgingly grant that we have a reasonable hypothesis, we are doing well.
As to your distinction between ontological and epistemological evidence, it sounds more like the difference between hypothesis and confirmation. Many scientists believed in the Big Bang, but it was predicting and finding the background radiation (I hope I got that right) that confirmed their belief. Likewise, we might believe in ID, but I think we'll need some kind of confirmation of it before it will be considered scientific theory. I doubt it will be something like pieces of a rocket ship in ancient rock, or a passage of Genesis coded in DNA. I suspect your heuristic approach may be the key. If eventually most biologists find themselves viewing life through a teleological filter, ID may just be accepted, regardless of our ignorance of Who or How.
[ 20 May 2002, 20:49: Message edited by: Jules ]
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Danpech
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posted 16. June 2002 17:20
I don't see Scenario 2 as being a weaker case for a design inference.
What if, upon waking up tommorrow, we find millions of space shuttles (merely similar to our own) and its parts in all various places and in all states of disrepair. Some orbiting the earth, some floating in interplanetary space, some strewn across the landscape, some in the earth, and some in the surface waters of the earth. The natural thing would be to assume that the existence of these space ships were the result of deliberate intelligence, even though their presence and distribution in our environment can logically be by chance.
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Jules
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posted 20. June 2002 18:52
Dan,
Good to see ya'! I think there are some key differences between my example and yours. First, we would have some idea how and why the space shuttles were designed. Second, in my example, I'm assuming that in Scenario 2, the radio signal is diffused, but is distinguishable from one where there are many, differently located sources. Thus, we would have no idea how the signal was designed, nor why. I'm reading "No Free Lunch," now. I just read the part where Dembski responds to Korthof's example of Fibonacci sequences in plants (p.12). I started a thread on this topic at ARN. Charlie D has suggested that Fibonacci sequences have been found in non-living natural phenomena. I don't know if that is true. If it is, and if it is complex enough to warrant being called "Specified Complexity," should we assume it is intelligently designed? I tend to think not. Though maybe it's because Fibonacci sequences seem intuitively simpler than a progression of prime numbers.
[ 20 June 2002, 18:53: Message edited by: Jules ]
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Danpech
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posted 22. June 2002 01:18
double post content deleted
[ 22 June 2002, 01:32: Message edited by: Danpech ]
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Danpech
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posted 22. June 2002 01:25
Jules,
That makes sense to me.
Let me try something else, then. Say your number series signal matches perfectly the binary translation of some very well known proverb as it is in English spelling, and someone discovers this fact of the signal. No one can locate a point of origin for this signal, and it seems to be coming from everywhere.
I can see how this can be natural and not ID, because the binary series should be fairly short.
But, what if the signal proceeded to change from one well-known proverb to another, giving four days for each of ten such proverbs, and then repeating them in this process over and over, without any sign of stopping? It seems to me it would be natural to assume that such a signal is ID. The problem is that if the intelligent agent wants to communicate to people no matter their language or culture, this sort of thing would not work for that purpose.
What could work for that purpose, if anything? That is my question to myself. What could work while not being taken by people throughout history and across cultures as natural in origin?
The problem then is, how would we see that it is reasonable to assume that any such message presently exists? If this sort of thing which we are discussing as to its natural or intelligent origins does not interact in any way with us, then, depending on just what is the medium, I might tend to take it as natural in origin and not as a thing injected, as it were, into the natural, mindless order of things.
It seems to me nothing but an unproven assumption that a seemingly non-injected (i.e., "natural") signal that seems to be of intelligent origin is, in fact, not of intelligent origin. That, to me, is the problem of the ID/evo debate.
It seems to me natural enough for humans to assume that something that can itself be ID is, in fact, ID, even though it is in a medium that we consider "natural"---it seems to me that we are attracted to this idea unless we have learned/been conditioned to reject this tendency as something which w ehave come to call 'superstition'. But, whether this assumption, this tendency, is well-founded is not something that I am quite clear about. How can I prove to myself whether it is worth its claim or worthless? I'm not agnostic, but if there is a 'Universal Messanger', I would think that It would want me to know what is really there in the presumed message to be understood, for what it is.
It's about a mutually inclusive faith and reason and, while the SETI program has its sights set much lower than some universal message, I think that it is nontheless a program founded on both faith and reason (where faith is here defined, at least, as a fairly well reasoned hope).
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David J. Sack
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Member # 49
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posted 26. June 2002 00:05
Jules:
Your post seems to be getting at the idea of whether or not nature can produce an intelligent transmission. Your example of the cycling sequence of primes distributed like "background radiation" seems to be an example of specified complexity constructed for the sole purpose of excluding an intelligent source similar in nature to ourselves (from a planet orbiting a sun). Your question then seems to be, do we still hold to an intelligent source explanation or at least do we hold onto it as strongly?
Your example reminds me of an exchange I had with a skeptic recently. He pointed to quasar bursts and how people were so excited when they first were discovered, wondering if there was an intelligent source. When it was discovered that there was a naturalistic explanation for the repetition encountered in the bursts, the skeptic said to me that he feels that some day someone will find naturalistic explanations for things that Dembski claims have intelligent sources (like DNA). The question I posed to him was "Would you still assume a naturalistic origin to 'quasar pulses' if, instead of blinking out a simple, repetitive, pattern, it blinked out the sequence of primes?" There was silence on the other end and he was a little squeamish. He never did answer the question.
I believe that Dembski has proved mathematically that if something that we thought was a "quasar" blinked out the sequence of prime numbers (from say 2 to 101 in binary), that in fact chance and laws of nature (as we know them) are in principle incapable of being explanations. But I'm not sure that we can conclude that there is a sentient, intelligent source. We could correctly say that the transmission mimics intelligence, but it's always possible that this transmission is a law of nature. Of course then we would look for other such occurences under similar situations, and if the exact same prime sequence played out, then we would start to consider the possibility this sequence under the given conditions is hard-wired into nature and turn it into a bizarre natural law.
Of course denying a sentient intelligence as the source of this transmission and inferring a natural law, should cause us to wonder about the source of this natural law. In fact the collection of natural laws themselves could be construed as an example of specified complexity in its own right. This of course starts to get into the anthropic principle which philosophers have so artfully denied by invoking multiple universes.
To a large extent I think what Dembski has accomplished (when the dust settles) is that he has forced us to view our world differently, that it is insincere and disingenuous, to suppose that known law and chance are solely responsible for the DNA molecule. That leaves the intelligent design hypothesis as a viable alternative, but it's not the only alternative (at least in the way that we think of purposeful intelligence). One can always appeal to unknown natural law. The decision on which alternative to pick is not a mathematical/scientific decision. It is actually a meta-decision, outside the domain in question. And while I think it's absolutely ludicrous to believe that there's not an intelligence behind the DNA molecule, I suppose there will always be people that choose the non-intelligent hypothesis. But let's be clear that they are not doing so on scientific/mathematical grounds. The choice is axiomatic and is almost a relgious choice if not a philosophical one.
Isn't it funny how these things always seem to boil down to faith?
- Dave
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Frances
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posted 26. June 2002 00:29
I am interested in the 'primes' argument. In my recent searchings I have run across several interesting examples of natural occurrences of primes. An often quoted example is the 13 and 17 cycles in Cicadas. While hardly CSI perse it shows how prime numbers could show up in nature.
In fact the model used to explain these cycles can generate any prime number, although not as quick as optimized algorithms. I ran across this example in DNA
quote:
Molecular biology: Yan et al. (1991) suggest that certain amino acid sequences found in genetic material exhibit patterns similar to those of binary representations of prime numbers. There may be deep connections between primes and genetics in the sense that via mutation, recombination and natural selection, genetic material evolves toward some kind of optimal balance of coding efficiency (which one might attempt to relate to the fundamental theorem of arithmetic or the Goldbach conjecture, but this is very speculative) and robustness, i.e. containing enough redundancy to permit a reasonable amount of error correction (see also item 3).
And then of course quantum mechanics and prime numbers
More on DNA and primes
or prime numbers and turbulent flows
Certainly we might not be able to reject the occurrence of CSI in prime numbers as natural without further evidence.
Primes are fascinating and their occurrence in nature may be far deeper than one may expect from the onset.
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Jules
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posted 27. June 2002 21:42
After struggling with this question for the past few months, I think I've figured out my problem with Specified Complexity as a sufficient condition of design. It seems to leave the "telos" out of "teleology." What inspired Aquinas' fifth way was his observation that "natural bodies act for an end...so as to obtain the best result." Whereas Specified Complexity only requires that natural bodies display some detachable pattern, for Aquinas that pattern had to display "telos." Granted, Aquinas' opinion of what patterns would display telos was no doubt much more generous than present day scientists would accept. Yet I imagine even he had some notion of when a pattern exhibits telos, and when it doesn't. Or, if he didn't, he should have had.
So, getting back to Scenario 2, we have a detachable pattern, but it is no longer as clear that this pattern exhibits telos. And I think in that context, the question of whether or not it was intelligently designed would also not be as clear.
[ 27 June 2002, 21:45: Message edited by: Jules ]
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