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Author
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Topic: Cataloguing Criticisms of Specified Complexity
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Erik
Member
Member # 160
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posted 20. April 2003 19:36
I almost forgot about this:
Imagine that a supporter--let's call him Bob--of Dembski's Explanatory Filter is looking at two 150-digit liquid crystal displays. Bob knows from reliable sources that LCD 1 displays a 150 digit random number, which is either drawn according to a uniform probability distribution or chosen directly by a human. A new number is drawn, by one of the methods, everyday at 12 and displayed on LCD 1 starting one hour later. LCD 2 displays the same number starting 30 minutes after it was drawn, but Bob doesn't know that. Thus, if Bob looks at the two displays as LCD 1 is updated with todays number, he will observe that it is identical to that displayed on LCD 2. He might be tempted to use LCD 2 as a specification for the outcome of LCD 1 and conclude, using the Explanatory Filter, that the number was chosen by a human, even if it was generated randomly. (For a more creative and amusing example, see Sobel's review of "The Design Inference".)
C22 The requirement that the items of knowledge determining the specification and the event to be specified must be statistically independent is either practically impossible to verify or ineffective at ensuring Dembski's claim of no false positives. It is possible to interpret the condition strictly so that it represents a condition that serves it theoretical purpose well. If the condition is interpreted in an objective fashion, so that (e.g.) Bob above (or the reader of Sobel's review) could be faulted if he applied the Explanatory Filter without having made sure that the numbers of LCD 1 and LCD 2 are uncorrelated before using the latter as a specification, then it is difficult verify the validity of specifications in practice. On the other hand, if the independence criterion is interpreted to be less demanding, then it does not ensure that false positives cannot occur (with a non-neglible frequency).
Erik
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Evan
Member
Member # 164
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posted 20. April 2003 21:31
Ah, now at last we are on page 2. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Are there any replies to any of the criticisms?
In general, the problem seems to be that definitions are not precise, empirically feasible and biologically appropriate ways of measuring and calculating are not defined, and various logical inconsistencies are present.
Can these problems be remedied? Or are the critics off the mark? And if so, where and why?
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Pim van Meurs
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Member # 541
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posted 22. April 2003 00:06
Evan asks: Can these problems be remedied? Or are the critics off the mark? And if so, where and why?
I would like to refer to the work of Del Ratzsch "Nature design and science" in which Del evaluates the Design Inference by Dembski.
"I do not wish to play down or denigrate what Dembski has done. There is much of value in the Design Ingerence. But I think that some aspects of even the limited task Dembski set for himsel still remain to be tamed."
Going over Del's comments and revisiting some of Dembski's presentation it became clear to me the source of confusion between Dembski and some of his critics on the topic of false positives. As Del has shown as well, false positives are unavoidable but at the same time Del also points out that the design inference 'as he presents it in final form is straightforwardly valid in standard predicate calculus terms.' Thus in an ideal world the design inference would have no false positives because we have complete knowledge and thus in principle the design inference could be free from false positives. But in reality false positives are a real issue and while Dembski attempts to dismiss the issue by saying that science is tentative, he forgets that the appeal to an eliminative approach depends strongly on the absence of false positives lets it want to run the risk of becoming a 'God of the gaps' argument.
In the end the design inference is nothing more than the set theoretic complement of the disjunction regularity-or-chance.
In one of the earlier presentations Dembski himself seemed to admit that ID had oversold itself but that there were several people working on applying the design inference approaches. Since then a few years seem to have passed and yet not much has reached the level of publication.
I wonder when we may expect some actual applications of Dembski's idea to problems which are beyond the level of strawmen?
It seems that any comments which point out the nature of the design inference are met with some hostility for pointing out that the approach is eliminative. And yet the eliminative nature of the approach has some significant implications for the usefulness of the approach and should be openly discussed.
[ 22. April 2003, 00:08: Message edited by: Pim van Meurs ]
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