GSchultz
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Member # 1953
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posted 09. September 2006 00:01
quote:
2nclass's example is legitimate, by Dembski's definition, and disproves the concept that SC is evidence of an originating intelligent designer.
However, before tossing the whole thing out, there should be some effort to see if any minor modifications would make it give the correct answer. I think the ones mentioned above would do to get it past the pulsar example.
quote:
Take Dembski's definition and try to apply to a Picasso, a Monet, a DaVinnci, Beethoven's complete works,... It doesn't work. Yet the SC of such things is undeniable.
It seems that there are a couple of preliminary consideration to the question of detecting design in art. First, are we talking about the media being used, the portrayal of something, or the actual thing being portrayed (shades of Rene Magritte)? If we're interested in the thing being portrayed, then we should consider it, not a work of art that reflects it. As for the media being used (oil paints and canvas, film, etc.), they should handily register as "designed". After all they are fairly uniform in composition, but unlikely to form spontaneously. A set of oil paints may have a common base, differing only in pigmentation. Film is made of very uniform layers of chemicals, such as cellulose acetate, gelatin, silver halide grains, etc.
So this leaves the question of how to recognize design in the portrayals of things. In the case of a photograph, the live subject forms a very precise prespecification for the photograph, so nature or chance can be ruled out. In the case of a painting, the prespecification resides across the room, or in the mind of the artist, in a different form than the final result, but linked nevertheless.
But there is, it seems, a further consideration here. Once again, we are talking about physical things rather than nice clean 1's and 0's. So I would note that even in a painting of something, the actual arrangement of the paint on the canvas would not reflect design at every possible level. This is because the artist was not attempting to design at every level! The artist did not, for instance, control the orientation of every molecule on the canvas. Nor does every painter attempt to control the paint at the brush-hair level. Just at the brush-stroke level and above (mostly). So if we took an impressionist painting, and attempted to digitize it at 6000 pixels per inch, we would see features that were in fact left to chance by the artist.
This leads me to conclude that with art objects--and any manmade thing, that design will be evident at some level(s) of detail, and randomness or physical law evident at other levels. This poses a problem when trying to apply SC to the real world, but is not necessarily a fatal flaw in the general idea of SC.
Intuitively, it seems that at the level we observe art with our eyes, the information in the art object is generally compressible, and also unlikely to have gotten there by chance. (And combine that with the fact that a lot of art has a prespecification somewhere in the real world.) The trick will be to formalize the choice of the proper level of detail to use. (Or the process of searching for any level of detail that evinces design.)
To support my intuition, consider that what may mislead us here is the fact that digital images do not compress well, particularly if one is using lossless compression. But there's a catch: Even if we only get 20% compression out of a digital image, that is far more than we would expect from a collection of pixels generated completely by chance. Since this is a real-world example, we should not expect the compression ratios to be as good as they are with the textbook bit sequences like Champernowne's.
In checking this idea for counterexamples, one must consider modern/postmodern art, where randomness is sometimes introduced _intentionally_. (Think of the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock.) I.e., where design is intentionally obscured. But here, the artist has clouded design at one level, while unintentionally introducing it at another: Researchers have recently discovered discernible, characteristic, fractal patterns in Pollock's work. They have attempted to use this discovery to root out forgeries. See Mathland and other ref's on the web. (And I won't even touch upon some postmodern art, which doesn't look designed--and probably wasn't. But I digress into personal opinions...)
Perhaps similar lines of reasoning to the above could be applied to other (non-graphical) art forms.
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