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Author
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Topic: Define "Design"
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Janitor@MIT
Member
Member # 125
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posted 13. October 2002 14:17
Apart from whatever intelligent design theory has to offer to notions of biological origins, I’ve rather pointedly and repeatedly stated that much of the discussion, however well-informed scientifically, philosophically, and even theologically it is (some things about which I’m really no judge), it appears to be little informed by design science, theory and practice! At least as I understand it.
I noticed in one of the topics that a participant offered some dictionary definitions of “design.” They were all fine, but in the literature itself (e.g., Journal of Engineering Design, Research in Engineering Design, or Design Studies, and innumerable, and mostly unreadable, academic reports, conference proceedings, and books), one rarely encounters any definition of design as simple and straightforward as those in the dictionary. One of the most often repeated definitions of design that I’ve seen is design as iterative search and exploration in abstract problem spaces, and variations on that theme (function induction, pattern recognition, etc.). I couldn’t find anything like these in any of my dictionaries. But you’ll notice a certain “abstractness” to such definitions. Searching, exploring, inducing, and recognizing, etc., don’t actually design anything. Nonetheless I’m appealing for a more abstract discussion of design. Specifically, I would like to know what the IDers have to contribute to my understanding of design. This is what I’ve read:
Design as cultural/technological evolution: design as partly driven by historical and cultural imperatives (both universal and parochial), being carried along by the tides of history and evanescent social demands and dynamics. Obviously, the anthropologists, ethnologists, social scientists, and even psychologists have informed this theory. Although popular, its suffers from the “latest neologism” syndrome and the overall tendency to see culture as an ant farm, moving en masse, as it were, by instinct and inertia, or as a behavior observed in the restrictive confines of a Skinner box. In this view design doesn’t even emerge naturally from designers, but is in effect imposed upon them by forces large and diffuse, to which they reflexively respond but never actually initiate. (This theory of design seems to have its impetus, if not its origins, not so much in anthropology or sociology, as one might think, but in the revived philosophy of Heidegger. Although its more recent proponents manifest a decidedly more admirable indifference than Heidegger ever did. For a thoughtful alternative perspective and response see Florman, Samuel C. 1976. The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. St. Martin’s Press. NY. This is about as sophisticated my philosophy gets.)
Design as mathematical theory: Obviously this theory has appeal to theorists. LOL Design as axiomatic set theory; mapping functions from an abstract and ideal domain of elements to an image of “real attributes,” etc. There is the appropriately topological version, of structures mentally “manipulated” or vectors evolving over an n-dimensional space. Or is that design as pole placement in complex planes, design as input-state-output, design as dynamics, design as probabilities, design as sigmaalgebra, superalgebra, and mysteryalgebra, or design as “representation-free” mathematical representation? LOL Obviously design is highly mathematical, but never quite mathematical theory. Usually the designer has an ICAD station somewhere nearby to handle the symbol manipulations, number-crunching, and topological twists and turns for him, which has resulted in the development of the related theories of design as computation; design as Markovian process, design as networking, the designer as Turing Machine, and designer as P-system, etc. As an amateurish mathematician and, even though I harbor no anthropocentric bias against computers, I see little here that resembles more than a "theoretical" and mathematically abstract designer.
Design as science: The development and experimental testing of theories of artifacts. Obviously, this theory is somewhat informed by observation. Designers do sometimes appear to be working as if they were natural scientists. Albeit w/o the Pyrex and starched lab-coats. LOL I know that’s a stereotype. But that’s also the point. This theory is as informed as it is ill informed by a philosophy of science based on positivistic a priorism and stereotypical examples. To pursue the stereotype, however, the difference between a scientist and a designer is that a scientist appears to be pursuing knowledge for its own sake, for the purposes of changing his mental image of the world, refining it, making it more accurate, more truly representative of “reality.” Whereas the designer has the same objective, he has one in addition: he pursues knowledge not simply to perfect a mental image of the world, but to materially change that world. Knowing the world is science. Changing it is design. It cannot be emphasized enough that these are actually two very different things. Changing (designing) the world (and ourselves) cannot be science because results of such changes can never be predicted in the same way that a natural scientist can alter the variables of an experiment and predict the results with some (often very high) level of precision. The natural scientist theorizes about the world, and makes some small part of it the object of his experiment. His experiment has no apparent material consequence for the world (indeed, he intentionally seeks to isolate his experiment, in so far as possible, from the rest of the world). It has consequence only for his image of the world. Whereas the designer has no “theory of the world,” while his experiments do have very real material consequences for that world. Natural science is reflective. Design is active. (There is, of course, a powerful feedback involved in the relation between science and design, and both to the world and ourselves. So it’s not as simple, obviously, as I have portrayed.)
I think this is a fair, if utterly un-nuanced and certainly far from comprehensive review of the theories of design that I am aware of. I have no decided preference for any of these theories, believing that they all capture some essential aspect of design. Academic ambition, as usual, far exceeds its (mental) grasp.
However, to lead hopefully the discussion in the direction I envision, noticeable by its absence in all these is any theory of design as what cannot be directly observed, modeled, or studied either by scientists, engineers or ethnologists, etc.: Design as imagination and creativity. Design as inspiration and artistry. Etc. Now, the IDers appear to have a broader and, dare I say, more “metaphysical” perspective on design than I am possessed of. I suspect, however, that they can nonetheless contribute to my understanding, at the very least, to my understanding of their understanding of design.
[I hesitate to initiate a topic, as I have no “maternal” instincts whatsoever, and am not prepared to “mother” it along. I think however this topic has been somewhat neglected here, strangely enough, at the home of ISCIDesign. I appreciate your feedback.]
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Frances
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Member # 169
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posted 13. October 2002 16:21
In Dembski's filter Intelligent Design is infered through the elimination of all chance hypotheses where chance includes for some reason regularity (law like) hypotheses. Dembski also has made it clear that ID should not be expected to be held to the same requirements as science in that one should not expect detailed pathways, mechanisms that will help us describe and understand ID. As such this seems to be a major departure from NFL in which Dembski proposed a scientific research program based on ID.Science rather than treating the claims of CSI as unsolvable or doomed to be never understood, have proposed various mechanisms through which CSI can arise. What has ID done in this area?
ID as defined by the filter seems hardly similar to ID as used by many of its proponents.
If ID is merely that for which we have yet to find mechanistic/scientific explanations then how can it contribute to a scientific research curriculum in a positive manner? Dembski suggested a scientific positive research program in which the third application was the causal history of the design and if that was incomplete, reverse engineering the history (similar to Dembski's just-so stories of Darwinism). If Dembski is correct that ID should not be held to standards of historical pathways then what happens to ID as a positive scientific research program?
Design so far has been defined to be privileged entity in that it does not require any hypotheses other than elimination of rival hypotheses. But how can we be sure that what remains, the ID hypotheses are in fact probabilistically better than what has been rejected? Just because we have rejected some chance hypotheses does not make ID more likely unless we can determine the historical pathways of ID. I can give several examples in which absence of presence of historical pathways can lead to or away from a design inference for instance. Or instances in which the absence of our knowledge may have led to a design inference.
An example that comes to mind is IC. IC is proposed to be a problem for Darwinian evolution. But does this mean that IC is a reliable indicator of ID? Not really first of all how do we know that Darwinian evolution is the only possible pathway to be considered and secondly how do we know that the ID pathway is more or less probable than Darwinian pathways. Dembski asks for detailed pathways so that probabilities can be calculated but how do we compare the results with ID? Why should ID be infered if we happen to calculate some of the identified pathways to be very unlikely? What logic makes ID a likely candidate under such circumstances?
To give an example of the dual standard used here I quote from Dembski quote:
As for indirect Darwinian pathways, the causal adequacy of intelligence to produce such complex systems (which is simply a fact of engineering) as well as the total absence of causally specific proposals for how they might work in practice eliminates them.
Yet the same argument can be used for ID and yet we are not to eliminate ID for its failures?
quote:
At this point there is simply no evidence for such indirect Darwinian evolutionary pathways to account for biological systems that display irreducible and minimal complexity.
There is similarly simply no evidence for ID pathways to account for biological systems that display ICness. Perhaps we should, rather than jump to design, admit our ignorance in these matters?
Let me finish with a comment based on Dembski's argument that van Till's naturalism is stifling inquiry. I would argue that its the opposite, ID does not propose any pathways or positive evidence and thus stifles any inquiry into chance hypotheses that may explain ICness on the other hand naturalism while admitting its ignorance is compelled to propose hypotheses that may be accepted or rejected through hard work.
When dealing with ID and falsifiability it is important to remember that when it is claimed that ID is falsifiable, all that is falsifiable is the claim that natural processes could not result in a certain system. Does this falsify ID? Of course not... Falsifying that ICness cannot arise through natural mechanisms does not falsify ID since ID never really proposed a positive testable hypothesis but rather a negative one.
On the other hand Darwinian evolution can easily be falsified by simply showing the undeniable presence of human fossils in the pre-cambrian for example.
So what is Intelligent Design if it cannot be falsified. THe falsifiable form of ID is merely a negative statement that system X could not have arisen naturally. When evidence is found that X did arise naturally, is ID falsified or merely the negative hypothesis? ID itself has never placed itself in any danger by proposing this negative hypothesis since it never proposed a falsifiable hypothesis for ID but merely a falsifiable hypothesis wrt natural or chance pathways.
Dembski is quite clear when discussing predictability of ID,:
quote:
To require prediction fundamentally misconstrues design. To require prediction of design is to put design in the same boat as natural laws, locating their explanatory power in an extrapolation from past experience. This is to commit a category mistake. To be sure, designers, like natural laws, can behave predictably (designers often institute policies that end up being rigidly obeyed). Yet unlike natural laws, which are universal and uniform, designers are also innovators. Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews predictability. Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor.
Thus how can ID be falsified if it cannot make any predictions about ID? It seems to me that ID is inherently unfalsifiable. Yet in Dembski's response to Scott Dembski proposes scientific value for ID while at the same time placing ID outside the realm of science.
If ID cannot make 'dangerous' positive predictions about ID that can be falsified then what relevance does ID have to a (positive) research program? Why should we in case of absence of hypotheses not infer ignorance rather than design?
It seems clear to me that design is used in ID to be 'no natural hypotheses exist that can explain system Y'. But that's not helpful in establishing ID, it merely is helpful in eliminating natural hypotheses but that's what science has been doing all the time already.
I propose that ID focuses on positive hypotheses of design allowing us to eliminate the hypothesis of ignorance and place ID hypotheses against chance hypotheses allowing us to determine which hypothesis is the best one. After all showing that chance hypotheses are unlikely does not mean that the ID hypotheses are likely.
[ 13. October 2002, 16:54: Message edited by: Frances ]
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warren_bergerson
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Member # 262
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posted 16. October 2002 09:33
It appears that some of the opponents of ID are attempting to limit the definition of ‘design process’ to ‘design by an external designer’. This approach would seem to preclude discussion of ‘Design the noun’ or ‘Design as observable, measurable functional or teleological complexity’. Limiting the definition of design the process also would seem to preclude discussion of materialistic design processes.
I suggest that any useable definition of design must recognize:
Part 1. Design(the noun) the observable pattern with measurable functional or teleological complexity.
Part 2- Design the known materialistic processes explainable by explicit models and theories. And finally
Part 3- Design the unknown, unexplained processes which might suggest design by an external designer.
If ID or design is ever to be taken seriously as a science, then it must directly address parts 1 and 2 of the above definition. Part 3, in the scientific approach to design must always be a ‘possible interpretation’ of the results.
To suggest that it would be possible to directly evaluate part 3 of the definition is to suggest that ‘God’s actions’ are subject to direct evaluation by human analysis. The possibility of such direct evaluations is rejected not only by main stream science, but also by mainstream theology. God, by mainstream thinking, does subject herself to tests defined by man.
IMO, the interesting part of ID is the scientific analysis. Questions such as "How and where can you identify and measure design (the noun) complexity?" and "What can actually be modeled, simulated, and explained by known design processes?". Start with a sound 3 part definition of design and these questions can be scientifically analyzed. One can reasonably expect interesting results from such analysis.
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Josh
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Member # 405
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posted 17. October 2002 15:05
I think Warren has hit this issue right on the head!!
"There is similarly simply no evidence for ID pathways to account for biological systems that display ICness. Perhaps we should, rather than jump to design, admit our ignorance in these matters?"
How often do you find darwinian evolutionists making these admissions? In the Ohio debate I saw one evolutionist quote that evolution is as real as gravity! Put these admissions into textbooks and accept reasonable skepticism from critics of darwinian evolution, and you'll go a long way to defusing the debate. And by the way, what kind of evidence are you looking for exactly? If Van Till's ideas are correct and God created the world by means of evolution, then every last detail of scientific knowledge about the pathways of development for biological systems are completely correct and they have been originated by the intentional design of a Creator God. How would you ever discern if such a Creator God actually was responsible for this except by establishing that biology displays design features matching criteria part 1 from Warren's list? The fact is that both chance and design become a roll of the dice possibility under definition part 3 in my mind. It's possible using an old analogy to have a hurricane run through a shipyard full of junk parts assemble a 747 jet by chance alone, but is this our best inference? Was biology really as hard as the analogy suggests? The only way to tell is to apply explanatory filters and the like to put a rigourous mathematical limit and discern inferences to best possible explanations.
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Janitor@MIT
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Member # 125
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posted 23. October 2002 12:34
Sorry, didn’t mean to neglect you guys.
Frances appears to be continuing an argument with Dr. Dembski and I don’t think has addressed anything I wrote. But Frances could probably clarify or explain. Josh appears to be continuing an argument he’s having with Charles Darwin. LOL Darwin has been disinterred and retried more times than some medieval popes! I wish I could say that he bores me, but even muted by six feet of earth he still dominates the conversation. I can’t say that I fully understand why, but I believe it has little to do with the content of modern science.
Warren_bergerson, I’m attempting to get at the IDers conception of design as process. (Assuming they have such ideas.) Natural theology may be fairly criticized as supposing “God is an Englishman,” but I don’t know if there is much choice there. I’ve criticized it as Paley’s “sculpture garden.” But I suppose that saying the universe is rationally comprehensible to us is little different than saying that we can rethink the thoughts of God (which I understand is elemental to Christian theology). But I don’t think theology, natural or revealed, is going to be of much help to me here. But maybe that’s what I need to learn. As a mountain climber I’ve learned that a good toehold somewhere near the base of the mountain is only way you can start to reach the top. A toehold is all I’m asking for.
So far the IDers haven’t found this a very interesting topic.
As my adumbration and critique above would indicate, design science (foregoing my usual abuse of the term and using it properly for a change) is pre-paradigmatic. No one is really satisfied with any of these ideas, and some (e.g., Philip Sargeant) are vehemently opposed to the very premise that they all share: design is something that can be studied scientifically--even the perfectly mundane brand of design which is all I’m familiar with.
Maybe Dembski is correct—what is required is a rethinking of what science is. I dare say he would find a more receptive audience in the design sciences than in the natural sciences, where a strong positivistic hangover lingers on to this day.
Anyway, I gave it a shot. I appreciate your feedback.
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Stephen Wright
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Member # 195
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posted 18. December 2002 10:19
DESIGN AS AN INFORMATION EVENT
Janitor@MIT,
Here is a brief sketch attempting to conceptualize design as the structuring aspect in ideas of purposeful adaptation. The viewpoint I would propose is congruent with ID proponents, in viewing information as substantially real and with a role in the causal forces of nature. Unlike the ID theories of Dr. Dembski and Dr. Sewell, Informational Realism, a philosophical worldview where ideas are substantial and naturally connected to real events, would not see the second law of thermodynamics being challenged by the build up of complexity over time.
Design can be defined as a resultant product of an information event. Two or more ideas or information units, existing as prior facts of reality, are bound together by being observed or perceived in a manner that connects their properties. The catalyst initiating the binding phenomenon is inward observation with intent focused on solving a challenge. This challenge, to respond or to adapt, is generated from interaction with surrounding circumstances. The engagement linking the units of information can be visualized as a model analogous to molecular or subatomic energetic bonds. The virtual photon is deemed by Werner Loewenstein, in Touchstone of Life (see below), to be the carrier of information bits from a radiant energy state to one usable by organisms. Quantum physics presents empirical examples of changed results when a focus of mental attention attends to the state of particles. The intersection between mental experiences and information may be like quantum fields that exchange virtual particles to achieve new states and structures.
The relationship between a physical manifestation and the specific information associated with it may be poorly represented as: real to abstract, the common paradigm, but better by a concept that correctly understands mutual partners, each with a sphere of influence. Natural transformations include exchanges between energy and matter, also between states of energy and information. We understand structure in matter and structured energetic processes, but not actual structures of information. Design occurs during a moment of choice, caused by an observer selecting specific possibilities and transforming them into a pattern. Designs are understood to be these arrangements of information.
The new design emerging from this event is, necessarily, a functional whole in terms of its complexity. Each experience or occurrence merges a perception of the observable environment with intentional problem solving. It is a manipulation of the substantial potential inherent in information. An observer or perceiver is needed, who by apprehending the diverse bits, brings them into a single gestalt. This process consumes energy and is creative in the local enhancement of order. Each design event is a cause and an effect. The motivated observer of the circumstantial solution, or said another way; the design creator expends effort during the mental work. Energy is also spent to maintain its status as an entity. These outflows of energy balance the account for the proper amount of complexity gained by the new information structure. Therefore, each event is neutral in terms of total entropy in the fields affected by the occurrence.
The energy spent on the design results in a changed relationship between the entity and its environment. The creative entity gains complexity anytime it holds the design in mind with intent to use it as a response. The environment shares something of its nature as information, which becomes part of the design. The new response, when implemented, can leverage material constructions incorporating this complexity in a synergistic fashion. There exists shared information between the planned response and the field of its enactment as it contains factual components derived from observation of the specific surroundings for enactment. A successful design is characterized by a solution structured and adapted to potentials within the local circumstances. Any contributing components, with some related part of their information contained in the executed design, have changed in complexity due to their additional interconnectedness with the creative observer. The information in the new design should be measurable in bits of coded instructions that are specified relations between the creative entity and the associated components in its field of experience. A greater level of interconnectivity has occurred, during the process, as the information is transferred and reformulated.
A physical realization of applied design has a new, higher level of information content and order. In this manner information converts from an unobserved potential state and enters a state of higher potentiality because there is an initiative to reorder circumstances. Additionally, with another expenditure of effort, this plan can be embodied, physically or energetically. The intermediate step where a design has been created intellectually but not embodied, either as a symbolic representation or as a functioning materiality, is normatively seen as abstract and not substantial. However, energy has been used in its creation and therefore should be a real repository of increased order or negative entropy. The normal understanding of information is contradicted by following the step-by-step exchange of energy for increased order.
Viewing information as substantial in a different domain than matter enables a straightforward and comprehensive concept placing design as a part of material thermodynamic processes, but also retains its understood nature as appearing abstract to physical or energetic detection. Information should be fully interconnected with complexity in matter, bound together in correlative structures. There can be device measurement of the energy expended by the designer during the process. This is not true for measurements of the complexity increase, as it would not necessarily be kinetically or physically apparent. However, gain in order is subject to measurement, which can be expressed in a symbolic way and be quantified mathematically in bits. It would also be true that there is a new gain in the potential for future physical events to occur in a more ordered fashion whenever guided by the design. If information exists in a potential state, the actualization of the design’s reality therefore reduces the total unknown but probable information in the universe. New information, now a novel design, is higher in probability for embodiment in the domains of matter and energy, than prior to observation with intent. The design event could make a permanent contribution to the history of useful information. The sum of each and every design event becomes the total knowledge available for interaction with observers and their environments.
Responses, made by living beings to challenges they face, have two likely formats for obtaining results: plans to act out behavior and plans to modify their environment. Complex designs would include phases of both. All designs are appropriate to the environmental circumstances they address. If not, the mental concept will generally fail to be productive. Plans for behavior can be ready instantaneously through bodily actions or the plan can be stored for appropriate timing. Embodying the working components in a design brings the design’s information to a state ready for interaction and that may require a construction phase. This implies that the design’s new structure manifests first as a mental concept, leaving the use for potential actualization to occur subsequently. In either case, as a conceptual model whose forecast of results aids the transfer to actual practical use or as physical action manifest in present time, the capability of a design would be relative to the ideas or parameters that make it functional.
The potential to serve a useful application inheres in the purpose chosen by the mind of the observer, although in fact, the design could serve many useful functions unintended at its first creation, only to be discovered later. The initial information units or properties comprising the design’s new configuration, may stay separated and work alternately or they may be secondary to an emergent property produced by their combination. Emergent properties are what give the designer’s results power when they can be fit to leverage specific functional paths. The use, or failure in use, in actual application would be part and parcel of its wholeness and is what makes a design different from just an observation.
I think an informational domain correlates very well with the natural processes and “actual occasions” described by mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead. In a brief paper by Henry Stapp – Whiteheadian Process and Quantum Theory, the following conclusion is drawn after a number of math formalisms in quantum physics are expressed.
quote:
“Once one becomes open to the notion that maybe our conscious thoughts have a reality in their own right, and are more than just some aspect of the physical brain, fully reducible to the physical brain as far causal connections among brain actions are concerned, it becomes apparent that there is a natural causally efficacious place for them in quantum mind-brain dynamics. The point is that, according to the basic quantum precepts, the occurrence of a conscious thought associated with a quantum system is supposed to cause a reduction of the state of that system to the reduced state that incorporates the increment in knowledge that constitutes that conscious knowing.”
http://www-physicslbl.gov/~stapp/wh3.txt
Design as science is expressed well in your post. Design is an indispensable tool, being an early step in fundamental scientific practice, a D.O.E. (Design of Experiment). It is also in the implied relationship of science to culture, that being the reality where the causal connections of principles, deduced from experiments, become the applications of engineering and technology. This is similar to design as cultural heritage. The sense I got from what you wrote, not being familiar with the S. Florman citation, suggests the concept of memes used in evolutionary psychology. I find it very interesting how well memes fit the bill to explain cultural design created by natural practices. They seem perfectly suited, as conceived by Dawkins and Dennett, to explain evolving behavior. However, memes are cast by their proponents, in this veil of abstractness and are doubted as scientific although they appear to have cogent explanatory ability. Locally purposeful, designs solve or enforce behavioral adaptation efforts. Memes and design are adaptive responses shaped to the environment, as detected, needed to implement a useful strategy. Memes appear to fit well with design as a structuring of information.
Informational Realism, the philosophy I am trying to support with this definition of design, should be pragmatic and empirical enough to avoid a full-blown metaphysical label. Modestly out of the box, it concentrates on the creation and then translation of a concept to practical use. In this way - a woman’s unspoken plans, intracellular communication sequences, Einstein’s cosmological constant, the instinct of animals and M. C. Escher’s work can all equally be design, if not also beauty and art. Each one, a driven observation made by cobbling together bits into bytes. Design, as an information event - maps well to quantum physics, concepts in cognitive literature such as memes and works within the second law, fully. I hope you place it intellectually as hovering just above solid ground but not flying-off into the comic reaches. (lol)
The following is contained in The Touchstone of Life, subtitled Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundation of Life, Oxford University Press 1999. Addressing the virtual photon, page 21, Loewenstein explains:
quote:
“a real photon coming in from the environment is absorbed when it strikes an atom and its energy is used up in switching an electron to a farther orbit. This transit from real to virtual photon, we shall see, is the bridge between the nonbiological and biological organizations in the universe; it is the window through which living beings let the cosmic information in.”
PS: Janitor, by the way, I think your sentences, “Knowing the world is science. Changing it is design.” makes the perfect slogan for ISCIDesign and the ID bandwagon. You should get them to use it and charge a license fee.
[ 19. December 2002, 08:47: Message edited by: Stephen Wright ]
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Irving
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posted 16. January 2003 20:16
quote:
Searching, exploring, inducing, and recognizing, etc., don’t actually design anything...I would like to know what the IDers have to contribute to my understanding of design.
In my years of systems, network, and software engineering, design has always meant--The allocation of requirements.
The technique or process one uses to allocate said requirements is the design methodology. Don't know if this helps...
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Janitor@MIT
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posted 17. January 2003 12:08
I appreciate everyone's feedback, and I'm not ignoring you--I'm thinking. LOL
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gedanken
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posted 17. January 2003 14:33
Mark Elkington, Rex Kerr, and myself have asked what I consider to be important and essential questions that relate to the topic of this thread, in the ISCID thread Information creation and transcendence. It is my personal view that the entire foundational concepts of ID are in crisis, because no one is willing to tackle these definitional problems.
For example, the question of “defining design” must depend significantly on the definition of “information” itself. If the processes and concepts used in ID of how design occurs and transfers from place to place in the universe is defined in inconsistent and contradictory ways, how can definitions of “design” escape these difficulties? Those who are interested in these problems might look in.
[ 17. January 2003, 14:34: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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Stephen Wright
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posted 17. February 2003 23:16
quote:
from Flight to Arras- by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
The mathematical formalisms of quantum physics have lead to an understanding delineated by the term complementarity. A comprehensive view of radiant energy must unite wave and particle duality. Often in the process of ordering concepts on which logic can be grounded, we must address issues that appear paradoxical in nature. The act of laying these fundamental building blocks, where solid definitions are needed to structure and support analytical principles, can push us into wording that includes opposing parameters.
I have reached a kind of peace with this phenomenon by seeing it as a marker, which indicates the product of a process derived from a higher level interaction. Design fits this bill. I am of the view that the “hard problem”, regarding whether mind is derivative from just physical events, calls for perceiving living functionality in a new way. The trick to me is seeing the complementarity of observation and response, and likewise their mutual source.
quote:
from Healing Our Worldview, page 49 - by John Hitchcock, PhD
An excellent general definition of complementarity has been given by Edward Teller:
“The idea of complementarity is that in order to describe a situation you have to use (at least on certain occasions) two mutually exclusive approaches. If you omit either, the description is incomplete. Both must be used. Because they are mutually exclusive, it is necessary to adjust the two approaches in a manner that is by no means obvious.” Footnote to Great Men of Physics, edited by Marvin Chachere
Actually, the mild expression "by no means obvious" turns out to mean that there is no rational solution to the problem of how to adjust the two approaches, and thus that we, the observers, are called upon to enter the situation with choice and intuition. That is how the universe draws us into its own being as participants.
Previously, we said that the electron or photon can show both aspects (both wave and particle behavior), but that needs to be qualified. At any single instant, one of these entities can exhibit only one aspect or the other. That is, in the realm of our perceptions, it is either wave or particle, but not both at the same time. This means that the wholeness of the electron or of the photon is a pre-perceptual unity. Wave and particle are the observable forms of the electron or photon, the only modes in which we can perceive them at all.
Like light, life’s fundamental nature has two aspects that are really one. We are inclined to separate information and intent into dissimilar categories because they produce products that proceed in separate directions. However, as a team they are foundational and are generated from a highest level of interaction.
The observation/response tandem is a very solid indicator of a living thing. We can have non-living processes, which can retain images or impressions that can be said to observe an event. We see reactions from physical events as determined effects from specific causes. However, when we see something that detects an event and exhibits an actual emotional reaction, we know it is alive. Coordinated observation and response, considered as a single function, describes living behavior. This is true at a micro scale in the action of RNA and protein; through all the levels of organizational coherence exhibited by a cell, a tissue type, an organ, an organism and beyond to a macro scale by groups of living things as colonies or nations.
This is because observation and response correspond to the higher level interaction between life’s physicality and information/intent. I suggest a paradigm where the phenomena we quantify as “information”, in the terms and expressions of communication theory, mandates a complement of intent to be inferred. Every mind that detects information also wills. They are inseparable. Like a graphic of the Tao, information swirls with potential intent each time it is observed by a mind. Analogously, in life, consciousness operates as a unified principle utilizing the process functionality of: observe and respond. Design is just a creative product of this functionality. It is the sublime observed response to a problem, whether physical, emotional or intellectual. Designing is done naturally, from the evolutionary changes of the simplest single cell organism to the combined efforts of a scientific community working on quantum gravity.
[ 19. February 2003, 09:33: Message edited by: Stephen Wright ]
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