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Author
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Topic: Information creation and transcendence
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gedanken
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Member # 594
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posted 19. January 2003 03:13
Irving,
You asked about the definition of “natural”, and I think we need to consider the two different meanings of natural -- as opposed to being of synthetic origin, and as opposed to supernatural. To differentiate these, I’ll use the terms (supernatural / non-supernatural) and (synthetic / non-synthetic). (Here by “non-supernatural” I mean “natural” as people normally take that dichotomy, and I don’t mean some arbitrary set of all possible meanings that are not “supernatural.”) We could have cross-product categories of supernatural-synthetic, supernatural-non-synthetic, non-supernatural-synthetic, and non-supernatural-non-synthetic. And of course if one believes that all “supernatural” is a product of an intelligence, then one might consider supernatural-non-synthetic to be an empty class descriptor. Products of this world created by humans might be described as non-supernatural-synthetic in this scheme, for example.
Then we add an additional term “origin”, for example supernatural-synthetic origin. The reason for this is that if a natural process replicates something that was originally of “supernatural-synthetic”, we must have a term for the replicated subject, and thus we can use the term “origin”, since the replication by natural means makes the replicant “natural” in one respect, yet having that lineage from the supernatural in other respects. Similarly for the aspect of “synthetic”, and for cross product terms.
So I assume you mean that a computer program is non-supernatural-synthetic origin.
You consider that such a computer program can produce CSI, which means that systems of non-supernatural-synthetic origin can create CSI. (Or at least that only a system of synthetic origin can create CSI.)
Is there a “conservation of information” principle? In other words, can the computer program create new information that is not inherently part of the original program, that is not embodied in that program? If so, then as Mark Elkington suggests, there is some sort of threshold, and after that threshold the system can start generating new CSI.
Is there some further category, that we might call “creative” in some limited fashion, which describes whether a synthetic system can have this property of being able to create CSI. (Now when I am saying that a system must be in the “creative” category in order to create CSI, I don’t mean that a non-creative system cannot ever create CSI, rather that the probability is incredibly low, as Dembski suggests, and would not be expected to happen over the lifetime of the universe or at least of this world.) So the computer program is “creative”. I assume that we cannot have “creative” system that is not of synthetic origin.
Now is there a limitation on how much or qualities of the CSI that can in principle be generated by a “creative” system? Because if there is no limit in principle once a system can be “creative”, then there is no “conservation of information” principle -- there is only a concept of some sort of switch property, a system either has it or doesn’t have it. And if the system has “creativity” it can generate CSI and if it does not it can’t. In that case it is not a “conservation of information” property, rather it is a “conservation of creativity switch” property. Once again, for a system to have the “creativity” property (switch), then it must be of synthetic origin -- is this correct?
But now we have the old problem of regress (which is where all these definitional problems and inconsistencies keep arising). Since we are considering the concept of “origin”, that is essentially a concept of regress.
The problems really come about in that we are considering some property that is carried forward through generations, that allows the system to be “creative” using the terminology we have developed. Let’s look at what are logical requirements if we are to stick to how we have defined terms. Because of regress, we must have an original source of the “creative” property from a synthetic system. But we observe that no non-supernatural-non-synthetic system can ever have that property, and we furthermore may be assuming that the universe or this world started out without any element of that property. So the “creativity” can never develop.
It can only develop if we have a “supernatural” event! Once we have the supernatural event, we can have our initial system that is “supernatural-synthetic” and also “creative”. It can reproduce, and all the reproductions or descendents can thereafter have the property of “creative”, and furthermore they are all of supernatural-synthetic origin!
So now we finally get down to the difficulty with this scenario:
I have no difficulty with any of the above -- as it all follows directly from definitions and pure logic based on definitions chosen.
The problem is how do we identify whether a system in this physical world has the property of being “creative” -- and also therefore of supernatural-synthetic origin? The whole point is that calling something “not a ‘natural process’” (which in this terminology means a “creative” system of synthetic origin) does not provide any new information about analyzing systems of the real world. This is simply because all these definitions have not told us anything about how to identify such a system -- except by observation of whether the system actually does “create”.
In other threads, I think we may have discussed whether Dembski is consistent in the meaning of the use of the NFL theorems in his chapter 10 of No Free Lunch, for example. Dembski in his response to Orr and other locations has pointed out that the meaning of chapter 10 of NFL is that the NFL theorems only point to “displacement” of the source of the CSI. This is precisely what we are analyzing here! And the upshot is simply that the NFL theorems do not make any restriction on the ability of natural systems to be “creative” for example (because the fitness functions of real nature are not of the quality of the ensemble of all possible fitness functions over which one must average in order to make the NFL theorem apply). So the entire chapter 10 of NFL has said nothing more than what I said in this post -- that by definition a system must carry this property of “creativity” in some regress to its origin to which the “displacement” concept displaces the source of the CSI. In other words, chapter 10 of NFL provides us with no way to analyze whether the entire world and environment doesn’t already have the property of being “creative”. It tells us nothing new in answering that question not already presented in this post.
Dembski has discussions of “conservation of information”, but whether the aspect of “information” can be quantified, or whether the aspect is simply a switched on or off property that is carried along -- the entirety of “conservation of information” is nothing more than the set of rules as discussed in this message.
Suppose that you decide that you want to observe characteristics of systems to determine if they have this property of being “creative”, and thus of supernatural-synthetic origin by regress to some originating state. Even if you find a way to tell if a system has this property, then you need to determine what limits that characteristic being passed on to other systems.
The bottom line: What if the universe and this world and its environment is simply of supernatural-synthetic origin? Then the rules of this analysis would say that the world and it environment can produce new CSI -- this is nothing more than biologists have been claiming of the process of evolution, and no conflict has been found.
[ 19. January 2003, 03:42: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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gedanken
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posted 19. January 2003 12:26
There is a structural implication in the original assumptions of this thread (and indeed of all ID “information” arguments) that is being overlooked. And that is that the “creativity” property is identified with a particular system boundary, and the possibility of communication of information by multiple pathways between subsystems within that larger system boundary is somewhat overlooked.
An example of what people overlooked shows in this area of Mark Elkington’s initial post:
quote:
2.2 Humans are partially transcendent
Here the quality of “transcendence” is being applied to subsystems of the larger system of Earth+Life or “E + L”. But only one system boundary was chosen, only one case was given, namely that of the human as the system boundary in applying this property. Thus Mark only identified “humans” in the flow chart as he calls it.
But what of the “GAIA” hypothesis -- that the entire Earth and its environment is itself transcendent?
We might need to refine the flow chart, breaking 2.2 into:
2.2.1 Humans are partially transcendent
2.2.2 Entire system of Earth + Life environment is partially transcendent. (With that transcendence applying beyond a limitation of transcendence of the lifeforms as individuals or even a limitation to the lifeforms at all).
This might be expanded further for various subsystem boundaries. I’m not sure this is exactly the correct way to lay out this case in the “flow chart,” I’m just trying to get across the idea of other levels of subsystem doing the “creating” of the new information being considered, rather than just the humans.
(I’m not advocating for the GAIA understanding, I’m just indicating that it was a possibility left out of the flow chart.)
Likewise the various other cases must all consider various system boundaries for the issue of containing and “creating” new “information,” however that “information” is defined including taking “information” as CSI, etc.
Let’s take a particular case:
A man and woman have an unintended child. (“Unintended” so that we don’t have a case of ID in which they “intended” to “create” the child and we have issues of “purpose” within the original ID sources.) So we assume natural process for reproduction, as in initial post. Did the man and woman “create” information? Clearly the new child embodies “information” in the view of many. Yet they did not perform an intelligent “design” act in the creation of the child, this was strictly natural processes as postulated in the opening post.
What I’m getting at in this case is that the rules for this transmission of information must allow for this. Either there is no new information, or there is. If there is no new information, then the information apparent in the new child must have already been embodied in the system of the two parents (and any surrounding environment that is active), and our reason for not considering there to be any “new” information is based on an information containment concept. The parents and environment already contained the information, so information was not expanded.
What is key is the principle of containment of that information in the boundaries of multiple systems prior to the generation of the next generation. Why is this so significant? The answer is that we don’t necessarily from the outside have a way to know how that information is contained in those systems. Natural processes of the entire system simply causes the expression of that information that was contained in the multiple subsystems boundary initially. Since information was apparently communicated from the assembly of systems that were responsible for the child, the principle of containment is that there is no “new” information, and the information was already contained in that boundary by definition, and furthermore we don’t necessarily know the mechanism of containment of that information in the larger system boundary.
The next key principle is that the systems are interacting, so the principle of containment cannot be restricted in a strict way to particular subsystems. We already know that the information of the child was not held in either single parent alone, rather it must be a combination of the information from each parent. But now, for example, how do we have any way to know that the “information” of the child was strictly held within the pair of parents, and not the sum of the parents and the environment? We have no way to know this. We can only observe mechanisms that we do understand, and comment on those components of the “information”, but we cannot limit that possibility because the systems are interacting and communicating “information”.
A third very important principle is the regress principle that the information still existed, was contained in as many layers of subsystem and amount of past time as can have occurred in the communication pathways of the interacting environment of the subsystems in question. The “regress” principle of containment is that there is no limit on how far one can regress the source of the “information,” there has to be a reason for considering information to be “new” rather than already contained in the regressed sources. (We see this principle regularly applied in part by ID claims that there is no “new information” as generations reproduce, and as more generations reproduce over time this does not change, so there is no limit to the degree of regression being considered.) Additionally the regression is not just fixed to a simplistic pathway, but can include all pathways of communication of information from interacting subsystems -- and this is the important point that is missed in most arguments of regression.
Containment principle unpacked? According to Mark Elkington’s concept of “unpacking”, we must ask if “transcendence” is a necessary principle? (And there might be a way to lay out a flow chart for this.) The alternative is that rather than the information being “created” (and thus “new information” being created in “significant quantity” by purely natural processes), we have a possibility of “containment” in which the information (as defined) is already contained in some initial systems. The issue of regress comes into play because systems interact and thus can communicate this initial “information” -- which happens without any new information being “created” according to the concept.
Micah Sparacio:
Specifically for your point, what I am addressing above has an effect. The problem in your formulation is that you also are not considering the interacting and communicating of information between subsystems.
quote:
How do we know that we're not just a complex algorithm in which all the information that comes out has been programmed in?
I assure you that if a human was limited to no interaction with an outside environment (an environment outside the boundary of the human form), that human would quickly desist from producing any new CSI (if he ever did). So your view of a one-way information path leaves something out of the picture.
What if humans create new CSI by transforming CSI that already exists in the environment, but which didn’t come from strictly within the human? The fact that you (or I) can’t readily identify and understand the form of that CSI existing in the environment outside of the human is simply a failure of our ability of observation of extremely complex signals which exist in a state of communication in a larger and even more complex system of the entire environment.
[ 19. January 2003, 13:00: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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warren_bergerson
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posted 19. January 2003 12:35
Rex,
Quote: However, that doesn't mean that there is a vast disparity between the information in a genome and the computational power of a planetwide evolutionary algorithm running for 3e9 years.
But I am saying there is a vast disparity. Darwin characterizes biological information processing as 1 cycle per lifetime. If you take a moderately complex multi-cellular organisms the raw estimate of information processing per life time would be in excess of 10e1000 or 10^1000 cycles per lifetime. This is based on the number of adaptive changes per life times the average complexity of each adaptive change.
This is not to say that a life form actually uses raw processing algorithms involving random variation and cycles. There are some very sophisticated front loading mechanisms that dramatically reduce the number of operations needed to perform complex information processing.
To illustrate the volume of raw processing involved, consider an organism with 1) 30,000 genes, 2)with each gene having an active and an inactive state, 3) 10e15 cells, and 4) one adaptive change of state per cell per second for a average life time of 30 years. The raw volume of information processing cycles in such an organism per lifetime is (10^10,000)*(10^13)*(10^8).
As should be recognized, the above estimate significantly underestimates the complexity of the adaptive changes because it assumes the cell/point in time adaptive states are independent when in fact survival depends on both complex sequences of states and coordination among the states of different cells.
Life it should be noted is not defined by the information in a set of proteins or amino acids, but by the information in the proteins and amino acids combined with the information on when and how to construct and utilize those proteins.
Contrary to your suggestion, the difference between the complexity of information and information processing in biological systems, and the level of complexity currently recognized by analysis in the biological sciences is vast. The failure of the biological sciences to realistically address the mathematics of biological information processing is a very serious problem.
The 1 bit of information in 55 lives was mentioned in one of the thread here at ISCID. I don’t know the source.
Irving,
Quote: I tend to agree with you here. Would you consider much of the problem is with Shannon's use of the term entropy to describe the average informtation content of a message stream?
IMO, Shannon’s use of the concept of information is a symptom rather than a cause of the problem. The failure of the biological sciences to properly recognize the magnitude of biological information processing is not just a lack of understanding of the principles involved, but an active process of ignoring and discrediting mathematical knowledge that is well established. IMO, in order to explain the phenomena, you have to look at the evolution/devolution of scientific behavior in order to understand the phenomena.
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Irving
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posted 19. January 2003 17:35
Gedanken
quote:
The bottom line: What if the universe and this world and its environment is simply of supernatural-synthetic origin? Then the rules of this analysis would say that the world and it environment can produce new CSI -- this is nothing more than biologists have been claiming of the process of evolution, and no conflict has been found.
I figured this was what you were getting at...which is why I needed to get some clarification on the term "Natural." However in following your logic (if I've been able to do so...) some biologists are indeed claiming something which has yet to be shown. IF the universe is of supernatural-synthetic origin, then Evolution is a sub-set of that universe. Just because the super-set might be able to produce CSI, doesn't mean the sub-set can. It may be possible to show that a particular sub-set can't. Right now, I leave open the possibility that a computer system might be able to be developed that could create CSI; however, I know of many computer systems that can't. There are constraints on their principles of operation that preclude them from producing CSI. Is Evolution so constrained? Some say no, others say yes.
IMHO some evolutionists have deified RM & NS to the point that it is omni-potent and omni-present. I've seen Behe's mousetrap example attacked as if it was blasphemy to suggest that anything conceivable in the mind of man was beyond the power of RM & NS to produce. Look maybe Behe picked a poor example in the mousetrap, but it was only being used as an illustration. The attack on the "illustration" IMO had all the marks of zealotry. Attack his biology all you want, but to go after the mousetrap (even if your correct) with such vigor looks like the idolization of RM & NS. It was just an attempt to explain the concept of IC to people who might be having a hard time understanding it for Pete's sake.
Now I'm a religously tolerant kind of guy, and so it doesn't particularly bother me if people wish to worship RM & NS. Yet, I try and keep religion seperate from my engineering work. If RM & NS can do everything, does it tell us anything? While these existential, tree falling in the forest discussions are entertaining, I'd like to see what ID can offer towards real-world advancement.
No matter how we want to play with words, it is pretty clear to me that reasonable people can look at Stonehendge and say that it's synthetic (or designed or whatever). Clearly Stonehendge has attributes (CSI) that significantly differentiate it from the natural (there's that word again) environment. Attributes significant enough that reasonable people can tell the difference. Rather than endlessly argue over the minutia of possible potentials, engineers (in the end) have to make the call (take the probabilities) and actually build something.
Now, in my work, I'm currently investigating theories and ideas that might relate to network defense, and I believe that ID might have some potential there. In trying to build better intrusion detection and network monitoring systems, we need to better isolate designed attacks from system errors. The global communications grid has become so vast and complex that the entirety cannot be described in a meaningful way--so people default into referring to it as "cyberspace." Consider it my working universe if you will.
The sheer volume and speed with which information hits our network is such that it is increasingly difficult to differentiate a real attack from the number of seemingly random packet-drops, fragmentations, and other assorted network related issues that frequently signal a false alarm of an attack.
So we need to develop a system (call it an AI system if you want), that can differentiate the early stages of a complex, specified, information attack that has been designed to breach our security. Especially since the attack is purposely trying to hide in the "noise" of the information volume hitting our network. In other words, how can we detect an Intelligently Designed attack from the routine and random message flow across the network.
Now some have claimed that ID has nothing to offer; though I believe it might and is well worth pursuing. Maybe in the end it won't offer biology anything...but this is a Brainstorm, isn't it?
[ 19. January 2003, 17:39: Message edited by: Irving ]
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gedanken
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posted 19. January 2003 23:34
Irving,
I agree completely that a subset of systems will lack the capacity to generate a reasonably well defined “information”, where the larger system will be capable of doing so. Indeed the amount of nested structure to contain any encoding of “information” decreases as we examine successively smaller systems in isolation, so they must necessarily be reduced in their capacity. Furthermore the whole is almost certainly more than the sum of its parts, in that the whole of complex systems exhibit behaviors that cannot be explained by any of its subparts taken in isolation.
quote:
Clearly Stonehendge has attributes (CSI) that significantly differentiate it from the natural (there's that word again) environment. Attributes significant enough that reasonable people can tell the difference.
I agree completely with this. I see people as being able to clearly recognize the kinds of structures that people can make (and the possibility of people having been present to do so), and this is a very different pattern from the likely outcome of natural processes that would also be expected to be available to that location. So people can make intuitive judgements of this property, as well as possibly refining those judgments to a science of ID that can use mathematical precision to better make such recognitions. (Pattern recognition is getting to be an older science, and can certainly be combined with notions of what we know of behavior of likely intelligent agents to produce pattern recognition techniques for what we might identify as certain types of “intelligent design”.)
In your “network defense” project, I agree that such concepts could be very applicable. Here we see some very important differences between some of the typical ID techniques, and your needs, and these are in my opinion very instructive.
To recognize an attack, you certainly can’t use “Complex Specified Information” as the measure of network traffic as a discriminent. The reason is simple: virtually all the traffic will exhibit CSI, at least a very large portion. Origin in intelligence will not differentiate information intended to attack a system from information intended to support valid uses of the system. What you will find most useful would seem to be discriminants based on a knowledge of the types of activities that constitute an attack, including knowledge of what people have previously used to perform such attacks. And Bayes rule will provide useful information in making judgments for focus, because one can make some reasonable (though still wide ranging) estimates of prior probability of certain types of activity. (Indeed one can measure the fraction of internet traffic that is devoted to attack.)
The thing that differentiates these methods that will most likely work, from the CSI based method, is that these methods are not based on an “argument from ignorance”.
There is a place for use of notions of “ignorance” of the intent or functional relationships of messages on the network as well. The “known” patterns can be discerned from the unknown patterns, not because the unknown is inherently associated with an attack, but rather because the known patterns can be inherently associated with known data transfer requests. In the case of network defense, there is no claim that such unknown patterns were an attack, rather their flagging for investigation is prudent precaution. The unknown pattern will be low in volume, and thus the cost of its investigation will not be so high as to make it more onerous than the risk of the attack. But if the range of normal activity that is “unknown” to the defense program becomes high, then the costs may transition to less reasonable territory.
This is not much related to the subject of this thread, except in the “minimum complexity threshold” concept. For indeed, a certain type of complexity is inherent in an attack, which is not present in the simplicity of the normal data transfer that is composed mostly of data and only lightly on protocol. Once again, the “CSI” is not the measure of importance, rather the specificity of complexity to the known character of attack.
Notions of “transcendence” will be of little use in the analysis of attack. Just like science, this endeavor will be of a practical nature, wishing to know things about the real physical world. It will not be concerned with ultimate philosophical causality -- and thus measures that depend on the metaphysical will have little place. This is exactly the point about scientific investigations of the mechanisms of evolution as well -- as issues that turn out to be ultimate rather than proximate causes of the activity being detected will become increasing in its irrelevance to the “scientific” study of evolution, however important they are to philosophical and religious considerations.
[ 20. January 2003, 02:24: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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Rex Kerr
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posted 20. January 2003 00:15
quote:
To illustrate the volume of raw processing involved, consider an organism with 1) 30,000 genes, 2)with each gene having an active and an inactive state, 3) 10e15 cells, and 4) one adaptive change of state per cell per second for a average life time of 30 years. The raw volume of information processing cycles in such an organism per lifetime is (10^10,000)*(10^13)*(10^8).
What does this have to do with evolution? Genetics specifies the architecture. It is the information in the genetics (and other heritable components) that evolution acts upon to produce an organism that can modulate gene expression in response to environmental conditions.
For example: one of my computers has tens of millions of transistors, so the information that specifies its architecture is no more than 100MB or so. However, this computer has processed on the order of 10 trillion operations. This doesn't strike me as problematic.
(In any case, your calcuation assumes that every gene undergoes a state-change on average once per second, which is highly inconsistent with what we know about the timecourse of transcription.)
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Irving
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posted 20. January 2003 08:52
Gedanken,
Thanks very mush for your reply. I agree I'm beginning to drift off the topic of this thread, so let me give a quick response, then I'll drop the specifics of my particular project.
quote:
To recognize an attack, you certainly can’t use “Complex Specified Information” as the measure of network traffic as a discriminent. The reason is simple: virtually all the traffic will exhibit CSI, at least a very large portion.
I think I disagree here depending on how we define CSI. I've taken my queue from the definition of Specified Complexity: Specified complexity is displayed by any object or event that has an extremely low probability of occurring by chance, and matches a discernable pattern. . As you have stated pattern recognition is critical to the effort. As Warren has mentione, there is some confusion over the use of the term "information" a better investigation of this (in the context of my project) is probably best reserved for a future thread. Yes, the traffic is full of CSI, but you can always symbolically aggregate the traffic based upon attributes to eliminate the content based CSI, and focus upon the "flow" CSI.
quote:
The unknown pattern will be low in volume, and thus the cost of its investigation will not be so high as to make it more onerous than the risk of the attack. But if the range of normal activity that is “unknown” to the defense program becomes high, then the costs may transition to less reasonable territory.
Ah, this is the issue, the unknown patterns are NOT low in volume. The number of false alarms is rising dramatically and the costs of investigation are rising as well. The attack attempts to hide in the "known" patterns, but in almost all cases the incident response investigation shows a purpose driven, Intelligently Designed, seemingly random corruption of the natural traffic flow.
Thanks again for the help, now back to transcendence...
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Mark Elkington
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posted 20. January 2003 21:08
Hi Gedanken,
quote:
The bottom line: What if the universe and this world and its environment is simply of supernatural-synthetic origin? Then the rules of this analysis would say that the world and it environment can produce new CSI -- this is nothing more than biologists have been claiming of the process of evolution, and no conflict has been found.
Are you in effect saying that CSI can create more CSI? (i.e. "2.1.1.2 There is a minimum complexity threshold for naturalistic Id generation"). Is ID is saying 'no' to that option?
Just a brief metaphysical digression: For me, the transcendence question is linked to the Christian doctrine of freewill and moral accounatbility (however limited wrt to God's sovereigenty these may be). It seems that for these to be legitimate, human choices and behaviour must be nondeterministic in some way.
One suggestion is that the transcendent 'soul' interacts with the brain by skewing underlying quantum events. Dembski uses a similar idea to argue for the most subtle category of ongoing intervention by an intelligent designer. However, others have suggested quantum events cannot add up to useable macro-level control.
Wish I had time do justice to the other repsonses here; more later.
Mark
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gedanken
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posted 21. January 2003 01:48
Hi Mark,
quote:
Are you in effect saying that CSI can create more CSI? (i.e. "2.1.1.2 There is a minimum complexity threshold for naturalistic Id generation"). Is ID is saying 'no' to that option?
I think that Irving was answering that CSI can create more CSI, which would be the “threshold” YES answer. However I have not taken a position, rather I think it is a matter of definitions. In my latest couple of posts I was following through in my analysis using Irving’s answer as the main “language” for discussion, but had intended the discussion to allow for different answers to be plugged in to the language. (More to follow in later posts.)
My principle aim was to follow the various options -- essentially following the breakdown (or “flow chart”) and analyze each option. And I’m sorry if you eventually wind up thinking I hijacked your thread to discuss a different issue, namely consistency of the ID positions given any particular answer to the breakdown. But it is my principle position that for most of the branches of the breakdown, that ID presentations have been inconsistent or reach contradictory stands on observable aspects of nature, or on claims that ID makes. And this is most importantly true because this thread’s main topic points to the nature of “regress” of these characterizations through layers of causality. (The questions cannot be answered unless you understand the nature of “regress” implied by “displacement” as applied to the initial questions.)
So I am more interested in finding the “real” ID position (if there is any single position) on the flowchart from the others who may post here -- how the terms are most commonly defined. In that way we can follow that particular pathway and not spend time on the ones that are not commonly accepted.
To be frank, I think that Irving is answering yes, but I think that Dembski is sort of making a claim of “no” due to “conservation of information”. You can’t have information “conserved” if the answer is Yes after a threshold. Yet he may not really be making that claim, as he may be agreeing with your and possibly Irving’s position but without expressly stating where that is in conflict with other of his writings.
My personal position is the following:
I can’t really answer the metaphysical question. I think that the “regress” issue makes this a very valid philosophical question, and as such I am looking for evidence and answers. But I think this is a very old question, not a new question that ID has illuminated. Specifically the issue of whether the human is somehow bound to physical relationships that can be learned by science -- and what does that mean -- is a very difficult question.
Now I think we completely agree “…human choices and behaviour must be nondeterministic in some way.” (Though I’m not sure we would agree on the implications of your larger statement.) Specifically, I don’t believe that Gould’s “Non-overlapping magisteria” principle is entirely accurate. Gould points out that the “magisteria” of science and religion are “interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border.” I think that the border is not a succinct and crisp line. I think that science can inform more on religion that than Gould (or even Pope John Paul) would like. And I also have come to understand that there can be influences of religion (including complete disagreement with) on the studies of scientists.
It is my firm belief in the principle of attempting to root out most philosophical biases of science beyond what we might call a “naďve realism” position, so as to gain the maximum amount of information from direct observation of nature. Science (or what is to be considered science) is for me something that must extend beyond any particular religious view, and that which is accepted as science must be accessible to those with varying religious viewpoints. So when one may take a combination of an initial philosophical/religious position, and combine it effectively with scientific-like observation to derive very powerful philosophical or religious implications (which must then depend on both the evidence from nature and the religious predicates), we must then be careful to not call these “science”. My disagreement with Gould’s NOMA is that I think that Gould and some scientists fail to recognize the extent to which some religious claims can depend on observational techniques as from or related to science and are highly logically developed -- and thus this boundary is not so crisp as was suggested. But let me then emphasize that any “scientific” position must then show itself to be based independently of any such religious assumptions.
I am willing to examine a widely cast set of religious and philosophical positions, including some very interesting Eastern religious thought. It is because of the Eastern influences that I look more widely at the relationship of the physical and metaphysical -- for example considering the “transcendence” of rocks as a possibility, for example. That life, even in its development from non-life, is in some manner “transcendent” of physical limitations, yet an expression of a greater whole.
I think that it is of note that Pope John Paul says in “Theories of Evolution” Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 22, 1996 (as linked from Gould’s article) “that truth cannot contradict truth,” and of the observational evidence:
quote:
Today, nearly half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge leads to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor provoked, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
Returning to Quantum Mechanics and its implications:
Modern physics has concluded that randomness is at the heart of reality, that so far there is no essential identification of “determinism” as one found in the older classical physics. I agree with Mark that an essence of “freewill” can be found in this. And I agree with Dembski that within that randomness, there can be a dimension of the expression of “transcendence”.
Where I disagree is in the following: In Dembski’s writing, he ascribes an “information” change as a possibility falling within the bounds of this randomness, specifically wherein we would be able to measure the information difference coming from this aspect of transcendence, yet the basic probability measurements of Quantum Mechanics would not be violated. My point would be that any repeatably measurable quantity (any possible definition) of information would produce a violation of the statistical laws of QM, and thus would in principle produce a measurable violation, refinement, or variation from the laws of Quantum Mechanics.
Furthermore there would be violations of what Dembski appears to be saying about probabilities in “Darwinian” scenarios, precisely because these would be examples where we can investigate the relationship to “information”. If these probabilities (from QM) are maintained as following over time, then the aggregate (not necessarily the locally individual) events of evolutionary behavior must obey their original statistical relationships, and frequencies of various quantum mechanical options must be maintained within statistical limits. For this to be so, relationships such as descent with modification and increases of information must over time average out to be consistent with statistical theory. So if this is so, then either QM statistics are possibly violated, or the ID proposal is violated -- and thus the notion that is proposed that the “transcendence” is hidden in the QM chance relationships is shown to be false. But this depends on what sort of “transcendence” is being entertained. Is the “transcendence” a connection, or a way to violate the measurable properties of “information” as they might be calculable from QM principles?
This in essence points to a testable theory. As such, those interested in ID studies should propose experimental verification of those principles -- and as such ID may be validated or repudiated as consistent with physical observation of the real world. Or it may be demonstrated that ID makes untestable claims, because the essential claims cannot be tested because the “regress” principle turns all ID statements essentially into philosophical questions. This thread may illuminate this question.
Now there is great significance in what we have discussed in this thread, specifically related to theories of “information” to be created by an “intelligence” (however we define either of these terms). What is significant is that these are not issues of historical science -- rather these are issues that can be placed into laboratory test conditions if they are worded as scientific principles. So if ID is in fact something that can be stated as a scientific principle, it can be tested in this area by laboratory test methods -- and most importantly is not dependent on “historical science” for verification.
That the elements of this thread put ID into the arena of laboratory science rather than historical science that is something that I find most interesting! This is partly interesting due to claims that are being made in the public arena, on behalf of efforts to support teaching of ID in public schools, which suggest that ID is principally an issue of “historical science” in its importance for religious issues, and that there are Legal theories of fairness that imply that ID should be brought to public school teaching because of religious implications of “historical science”. References to this:
Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook
Written Testimony of John H. Calvert, Esq. Before The Education Committee of the Ohio House of Representatives March 12, 2002
Darwinism: Science or Philosophy? Stephen C. Meyer
I find that these issues are just as important in terms of current events, and science that investigates them. The implications to religion are just as great -- so if there is a requirement of fairness for “historical science” it is just as present (or absent) for non-historical sciences. Likewise if there is any threat felt to religious principles from the sciences, they are just as present in the non-historical sciences.
So I have several areas of interest in this thread: philosophical understanding, implications of ID, consistency of ID claims, and legal implications. I don’t think that the “legal implications” are something that will get discussed here, but I think that the structure of the questions is highly relevant to the consistency of ID claims. I am most interested in exploring how the various understandings in the opening post’s breakdown of possible characters of definitions of information are followed through to their conclusions, and in stimulating discussion on how these can be made consistent within ID propositions.
[ 21. January 2003, 03:27: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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warren_bergerson
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posted 21. January 2003 08:30
Rex,
Quote: What does this have to do with evolution? Genetics specifies the architecture. It is the information in the genetics (and other heritable components) that evolution acts upon to produce an organism that can modulate gene expression in response to environmental conditions.
The subject here is biological information and biological information processing. Gedanken suggested that the failure to properly and precisely define biological information processing is a serious problem for ID. I have expanded on the concept to demonstrate that failure to properly define and quantify biological information and biological information processing is a very serious problem for all the life sciences and particularly for evolutionary biology.
As Darwin, I identify the basic unit or element of the biological design process as the teleological ‘variation-selection’ search cycle. Darwin proposed a theory based on the premise there was one such cycle per lifetime. I have demonstrated that Darwin misjudged the decimal place by thousands of positions. Biological design processes in multi-cellular organisms (this includes the biological design processes evolutionary change processes) involve in excess of the equivalent of 10^1000 teleological search cycles per lifetime.
Behe and Dembski and others in the ID movement have demonstrated that there are features in biological systems which are two complex to have arisen from Darwin’s simplistic concept of biological information processing. They have suggested the possibility that this higher than expected level of complexity ‘might’ be attributable to unidentified intelligent design processes and this in turn might be attributable to external forces or to some as yet unexplained force.
I am proposing that the intelligent design force responsible for all types of biological designs, from wing on bees to the Mona Lisa, is biological information processing. As I have demonstrated, biological information processing has a power, a force, or an intelligence far in excess of the equivalent of 10^1000 search cycles per lifetime. If you understand the front loading and the mechanics of information processing then it is fairly easy to understand how such high levels of biological intelligence are achieved. [This is from the study of logic machines such as computers. ]
Darwin essentially assumed that evolution was a permanent and universal process like gravity which had remained unchanged since the beginning of time. In my approach, evolutionary change, adaptive change, and or biological design processes are themselves dynamic and teleological processes. Over time these processes change or evolve. One of the key elements of this change has been an in power or intelligence of these processes. Teleological cycles per lifetime provides a useful measure for quantifying the magnitude of this evolved intelligence.
I think in discussing the role of information in ID it is important to distinguish 1)the rigorous mathematical/scientific concepts of information and information processing, 2)the weak ‘hand-waving’ mathematics and science concepts of information used in evolutionary biology and 3)the purely metaphysical concepts of information which have played an important role in the historical development of ID. Gedanken, it appears, is trying to make the point that the effectiveness of ID as a science is limited by its origins in metaphysics. IMO, the development of ID as a science is much more seriously constrained by the fact that so many ID scientists are trained in the mathematics and science of evolutionary biology.
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Rex Kerr
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posted 21. January 2003 09:39
Warren, I'm afraid I'm still confused as to what you're getting at.
An individual organism does not respond to its environment using an evolutionary algorithm. The closest it gets is responding by reading off answers from its genetic code--but those are stored, and no novel information is created by reading off what is already there. So when you say
quote:
Biological design processes in multi-cellular organisms (this includes the biological design processes evolutionary change processes) involve in excess of the equivalent of 10^1000 teleological search cycles per lifetime.
I have to wonder if you are confusing the process of being alive with the process of evolution of populations of living organisms.
quote:
Behe and Dembski and others in the ID movement have demonstrated that there are features in biological systems which are two complex to have arisen from Darwin’s simplistic concept of biological information processing.
This is, of course, a demonstration which has been widely contested. The demonstrations rely on assuming that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence (of indirect functional intermediates), which is highly dubious when one would expect almost all evidence to be absent. (Protein complexes do not fossilize.)
However, I am happy to suppose for the sake of this discussion that they have in fact demonstrated exactly that.
quote:
If you understand the front loading and the mechanics of information processing then it is fairly easy to understand how such high levels of biological intelligence are achieved. [This is from the study of logic machines such as computers.]
Well, I understand information theory and computer architecture and programming reasonably well considering that I am not a specialist in any of these. I'm afraid I don't quite follow your front-loading thread, though. If you only mean that the nature of the world makes it possible for organisms to be selected for or against, then I would have to agree. In that sense, everything is very heavily front-loaded: if silicon had different properties, we would not have computers; if oxygen gas had a different dissociation energy, we would not be alive; if the force of gravity were 10^8 times weaker, the Earth would never have formed, or would distintegrate if somehow assembled.
You could say that a thermometer has a processing capacity of 10^35 operations per second or so--it does, after all, measure the mean kinetic energy of an enormous number of particles undergoing very many changes to the values of their observable properties (e.g. location, velocity)--that's some pretty impressive front-loading!
I get the sense that you are talking about some other kind of front-loading, though. And evolution certainly assumes that the physical world has the properties that it does; the question is, given the physical properties of the world, how did living organisms end up with the wide variety of forms and capabilities they have now, and how do populations change over time when exposed to the (resource-limited, often harsh) environment?
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gedanken
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posted 21. January 2003 10:48
Warren:
RBH partially addresses your concerns in the thread Front Loading and down on that page, and also on previous page 3 of that thread.
I think this might not be an appropriate place for me to bring up any detailed probability arguments of your numerical calculation, rather I think that what is being missed is precisely the interaction and communication of “information” that I spoke of in prior posts, and to recognize the part that regress plays in implications from the definitions that have been expressed.
The “information processing” in evolutionary simulations must include the information and processing capacity of larger system (or subsystems) as a whole, not just the “biological” components. They do not act alone. Evolution does not act alone in a single or limited set of organisms, it is a system wide process. The “information processing” system includes the entire environment in which the organism populations reproduce.
Additionally, the simplicity of a mechanism does not translate to simplicity of the information encoded in that mechanism. Force equals mass times acceleration is a very simple relationship (or mechanism) and yet it gives rise to extremely complex patterns of behavior. (I think Rex has done a good job of questioning on this line.)
Also you said in a prior post “We have scientists suggesting that the change from genetics to the full grown organism is a simple transformation, when we have abundant evidence that such transformations require vast amounts of information processing/information generation.” I take this to be an indication of your view of the amount of CSI existing in a biological form. But remember that genetic material actually does seem to directly code much of the structure of an organism -- so all that aspect of complexity can clearly be compressed into the genetic mechanism. If it can be so compressed, how much information is really present? The genetic material has a “digital” character, in that random changes are in essence discrete, and are limited by the number of genetic structures in the “genetic code” which for most intents and purposes encodes the entire complexity of the organism. Contrast this to the complexity of the interacting organisms of the World and its environment as an “information processing system”. I don’t see the difficulty in understanding how this great deal of “information” can exist in the environment, ready for expression as Darwinian or other natural processes express the information as evolution proceeds.
(e.g. the ratio of the “information” in the entire environment of evolution to the “information” encoded in the digital genome is huge. Just as an example, a representation of the entire human genome structure can be contained in a single computer disk -- yet that computer disk is a very small part of physical reality and the entire environment of the Earth.)
If what Warren proposes is true, that might be easily tested by observation of the actual physical world. If “Biological design processes in multi-cellular organisms (this includes the biological design processes evolutionary change processes) involve in excess of the equivalent of 10^1000 teleological search cycles per lifetime” then it would appear that there would be implications in reproduction caused by these search cycles. We clearly observe reproduction occurring by naturalistic means and have made tremendous progress in understanding the repeatable current-date observation of reproduction in the laboratory. This is another example of not following the implications of what is proposed to see if they can be verified for consistency with both logic and with observation of nature. I think this one fails both.
Furthermore as I read your way of computing “information”, we have not avoided the regress issue. My main point is that without understanding how “regress” allows the source of what is called “information” to be chosen in different ways, we have not followed through on the implications. So when you say that I have called for more precise definitions I don’t’ see that you have made any progress in the regress issue as the original source of what you assert to measure has not been pinned down any more clearly. As long as a definition of information (and its associated ways of analyzing it) don’t pin down the point in regress of levels of causality in which the information is created, it does not solve the regress problem that I am focusing on. Since it does not address the regress problem, I don’t see it as a clarification, even if the definition can find uses and the underlying assumptions were to be verified -- something I severely question.
[ 21. January 2003, 11:38: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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Irving
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posted 21. January 2003 15:46
quote:
I think that Irving was answering that CSI can create more CSI, which would be the “threshold” YES answer.
I consider CSI to be a created data object, not a mechanism. I am open to the possibility than a supernatural or supernatural-synthetic mechanism can create CSI. However, the fact that it is supernatural or synthetic or whatever isn't by itself enough, it still needs to be demonstrated that the mechanism can indeed create CSI.
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gedanken
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posted 21. January 2003 20:12
Irving,
I was using a sort of shorthand there -- I agree that CSI would not be a “mechanism”. What I really meant was that your proposal appeared to be that a system with the property of CSI could also have the property that I called “creativity” which I was defining as being capable of creating CSI. Then the rule is that any system that is “creative” also has the property of CSI.
Now I don’t think that agrees with Dembski (but as I mentioned this is not clear in Dembksi’s writings). The reason is that some ID writers appear to treat intelligent agents as outside of considerations of nature.
This is the essence that I think is important here, to recognize that property is being assumed in ID writing. It would appear to be a violation of the notion of “conservation of information” as described -- because a system like a human (which we can see reproducing according to natural processes) is capable of producing more CSI than that system can easily be measured as containing (possibly the “threshold” idea). So Irving, I’m still not clear, are you saying that “conservation of information” only applies to some systems, or is it not a characteristic you accept?
Let me clarify my question a little:
Earlier you said that a computer program (which I think we agree is at least of what I was calling non-supernatural synthetic origin in some lineage of causality) can create CSI. As above, I would like to call the property of being able to generate CSI with anything but exceedingly low probability “creativity”, and a program can’t be “creative” unless it is of synthetic origin according to definitions. But what I didn’t get clear is this concept of “conservation of information,” in other words is there no limitation on the total CSI output of such a program -- or can we declare a measure of the CSI embodied in the program itself that the output of the program (though generating CSI) cannot exceed (at least without more input)?
In other words I’m still trying to get a handle on the nature of containment of this property of “creativity” and the measure of information “CSI”. This really hinges on whether the CSI that can be “generated” by a “creative” system can exceed the CSI that was expected to compose the system itslef (given CSI as a measurable quantity, or if necessary change the term to some other form of “information” rather than CSI).
A perfectly fair answer is that we don’t have a handle on the “quantification” of information, and thus can’t define a “conservation of information” argument (thus disagreeing with Dembski), but that we are claiming that there is some sort of property that is passed on (which I wanted to call “creativity”) which is necessary for creating CSI, and which by definition requires one or more systems with the property of CSI in the causal lineage.
Now of course we “demonstrate” that the system can generate CSI by observation that it is outputting “CSI”. I don’t believe that we can demand that we understand how that mechanism works in order to categorize it as “creative” (as defined above) because we don’t completely understand such mechanisms in humans and we don’t make that demand there.
Also just an interesting aside on your point about CSI being a “data object” rather than a “mechanism”. Now we can mathematically define a “data object”, but for it to exist in the real world it must exist as some form of energy (or matter) in a matrix of some sort of system. As such, each “data object” has a mechanism of expression, for example a bit is actually expressed as an analog quantity of voltage in an assembly of transistors in a memory cell for example, or alternately as a magnetization state of a region of the surface of a disk platter. These are “mechanisms” of expression of the “data object”, and information can’t exist in the real physical world without such mechanism as a carrier. I thus consider the “data object” to be a model of what is contained in the mechanism, and think that it is a philosophical and not a physical concept as to whether there is any existence of that “data object” beyond its expression in the data storage mechanism. Likewise biological systems function is a modeled in biological theory as “information” of some sort.
[ 21. January 2003, 22:57: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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Irving
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posted 21. January 2003 22:40
quote:
So Irving, I’m still not clear, are you saying that “conservation of information” only applies to some systems, or is it not a characteristic you accept?
It's not a concept I can accept or reject, since it's pretty meaningless to me without a firm definition of just what information is supposedly being conserved.
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