From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 15:28:07 EDT
Josh wrote:
>
>Your endless diatribe is quite intolerable at this point to me.
Then I would suggest deleting messages with my name on them. You will feel
better. But I am very disappointed that you won't show me how ID works.
Which of the sequences
woxianzhegetuyiyang
xianwotuyiyangzhege
amhuinnsuidhe
dallenbaloch
thaancumorachthaancatbeag
ciamarathasibh
is designed? For pete's sake Or even peat's sake, ID claims to have a means
of detecting design, but NO ONE will try my test. I have offered this test
for years with absolutely no ID person or anyone for that matter taking it.
After years of trying this, I suspect I am being bamboozled when ID folks
say they have a means of detecting design. C'mon Josh, show me. Prove ID is
more than bananas.
Josh then cites a long passage from Dembski. My suspicion is that this is
probably from the ID list, formed when the IDers left the old evolution list
at calvin, and which only allows those who agree onto the list, thus there
isn't really any critical scrutiny as occurs in real science.
>R
>William A. Dembski
> Member
>Member # 7
>
>posted 29. August 2002 21:26
>
>What Sort of Property is Specified Complexity?
>By William A. Dembski
[snip]
>Specified complexity is a property that things can possess or fail to
>possess. Yet in what sense is specified complexity a property? Properties
>come in different varieties. There are objective properties that obtain
>irrespective of who attributes them. Water is such a property.
Water is not a property; it is matter. a molecule (darn I just noticed that
David Siemens beat me to this one). Color is a property, mass is a
property, information is a property. The above statements seem to
illustrate the nonesense that Dembski puts out. (sorry to be diatribish
here).
There are
>also subjective properties that depend crucially on who attributes them.
>Beauty is such a property. To be sure, beauty may not be entirely
>in the eye
>of the beholder (there may be objective aspects to it). But beauty cannot
>make do without the eye of some beholder.
Beauty is a philosophical property, not a scientific property. Exactly what
units measure beauty? I would suggest an alternative scale of uglies. If
you have few uglies, you are beautiful. but what are the observable units of
uglies? Is it length squared * mass? or what? This shows why the above is
mere bananas.
[snip]
Descartes's distinction of primary and secondary qualities has
>required some updating in light of modern physics. Color, for instance, is
>nowadays treated as the wave length of electromagnetic radiation and
>regarded as a primary quality (though the subjective experience of
>color is
>still regarded as a secondary quality). Even so, the idea that some
>properties are primary or objective and others are secondary or subjective
>remains with us, especially in the sciences.
>
I disagree. Science has advanced by removing the subjective from it. One
doesn't talk about phlogiston or the life-forces of the old vitalist school
because they are not objectively determinable. ID is in some sense a return
to vitalism.
>The worry, then, is that specified complexity may be entirely a subjective
>property, with no way of grasping nature at its ontological joints
>and thus
>no way of providing science with a valid tool for inquiry. This worry,
>though misplaced, needs to be addressed. The first thing we need to see is
>that the objective-subjective distinction is not as neat and
>dichotomous as
>we might at first think. Consider the following three properties: X is
>water, X is married, and X is beautiful (the "X" here denotes a
>place-holder
>to which the properties apply). X is water, as already noted, is
>objective.
An entirely different linguistic use from that above.
>Anybody around the world can take a sample of some item in
>question, subject
>it to a chemical test, and determine whether its composition is that of
>water (i.e., H2O). On the other hand, X is beautiful seems thoroughly
>subjective. Even if objective standards of beauty reside in the
>mind of God
>or in a Platonic heaven, in practice people differ drastically in their
>assessments of beauty. Indeed, no single object is universally admired as
>beautiful. If specified complexity is subjective in the same way
>that beauty
>is, then specified complexity cannot be a useful property for science.
>
>But what about X is married? It certainly is an objective fact about the
>world whether you or I are married. And yet there is an irreducibly
>subjective element to this property as well: Unlike water, which is simply
>part of nature and does not depend for its existence on human subjects,
>marriage is a social institution that depends intimately for its existence
>on human subjects. Whereas water is purely objective and beauty purely
>subjective, marriage is at once objective and subjective.
Here Dembski pulls sleight of hand by equivocating concepts. There is no
objective experiement to determine marriage. What are you going to demand as
proof? A marriage certificate? Shoot, the Ono Indians of Tierra del Fuego
didn't have marriage certifcates. Slaves in the old South jumped over the
broomstick. How could I know that two people who claimed to jump over the
broomstick 5 years ago actually did? Thus, marriage is not part of science
either. It is not objectively provable.
This
>confluence of
>objectivity and subjectivity for social realities like money,
>marriage, and
>mortgages is the topic of John Searle's The Construction of Social
>Reality.
>Social realities are objective in the sense that they command
>intersubjective agreement and express facts (rather than mere opinions)
>about the social world we inhabit. But they exist within a social matrix,
>which in turn presupposes subjects and therefore entails subjectivity.
>
>Searle therefore supplements the objective-subjective distinction with an
>ontological-epistemic distinction. Accordingly, water is ontologically
>objective -- it depends on the ontological state of nature and is
>irrespective of humans or other subjects. Alternatively, beauty is
>epistemically subjective -- it depends on the epistemic state of humans or
>other subjects, and its assessment is free to vary from subject to
>subject.
>Properties reflecting social realities like money, marriage, and
>mortgages,
>on the other hand, are ontologically subjective but epistemically
>objective.
>Thus marriage is ontologically subjective in that it depends on the social
>conventions of human subjects. At the same time, marriage is epistemically
>objective -- any dispute about somebody being married can be objectively
>settled on the basis of those social conventions.
But that isn't science. Social conventions are subjective. If I give a
green hat to a lady in China, she will be offended. It is not objectively
clear as to why. There is no experiment I can run to determine why she is
mad about getting a green hat (lu mao).
>
>How do Searle's categories apply to specified complexity? They
>apply in two
>parts, corresponding to the two parts that make up specified complexity.
>Specified complexity involves a specification, which is a pattern that is
>conditionally independent of some observed outcome. Specified complexity
>also involves a measure of complexity, which calculates the
>improbability of
>the event associated with that pattern. Think of an arrow landing in a
>target. The target is an independently given pattern and therefore a
>specification. But the target also represents an event, namely, the arrow
>landing in the target, and that event has a certain probability.
Bull. (sorry to be diatribish). If I drop a set of 96 rocks on the ground
from a moving car, the event and pattern generated by those 96 rocks has a
probability of 10^-150. But there is in this case, you will say, no
independently given target. That is true. But where is the independently
given target for DNA? Who is the 'giver' of this target? ID will
illogically claim that the designer is the giver of the target. But they
can't say when the target was specified, they can't say where it was
specified, they can't tell us what book the pre-defined target was written
in. In other words, I can claim subjectively, that the rocks I dropped
perfectly fit a pre-determined target privately given to me by Oogaboogah
(old timers here will remember Oogaboogah). WHO can dispute me? Similarly,
what the ID folks do is perform an inadequate calculation of the odds of
probability and then claim that God hit the target. Since life formed 3.5
billion years ago, where was the pre=specification which Dembski's method
claims to have. Where was it written down 4 billion years ago before the
advent of life.
[snip]
>
> This quantum mechanical experiment therefore models the
>flipping of
>a fair coin (heads = photon passes through the filter; tails = photon
>doesn't pass through the filter), though without the possibility of any
>underlying determinism undermining the randomness (assuming quantum
>mechanics delivers true randomness).
>
>Suppose now that we represent a photon passing through the filter
>with a "1"
>and a photon not passing through the filter with a "0." Consider the
>specification 11011101111101111111..., namely, the sequence of
>prime numbers
>in unary notation (successive 1s separated by a 0 represent each number in
>sequence). For definiteness let's consider the prime numbers between 2 and
>101.
My banana detector went off here.
It is interesting the conflation of false physics, lack of the application
of statistical rules etc that Dembski engages here. First, in order to get
the sequence 11011101111101111111 from a quantum system you would know
immediately that it wasn't a quantum system. A quantum system is random. The
sequence isn't random because there are too many 1's in the sequence. Now,
we can engage in bananas(play science) by pretending in a thought experiment
that has no chance of occurring, that Krypton and Vaderite will kill
superman when mixed together, but the reality is, this example says nothing
about the real world. Bananas bananas bananas.
I know where Brian is going with the Fibonacci series so some ID individual
needs to answer that question. Is the Fibonacci series specified?
>This representation of prime numbers is ontologically
>subjective in the
>sense that it depend on human subjects who know about arithmetic (and
>specifically about prime numbers and unary notation).
Prime numbers are objectively definable and are not subjective. Prime number
structure is found in nature and thus might not require little green men to
find.
"Recent studies by mathematicians and physicists have
identified a close association between the distribution of prime
numbers and quantum mechanical laws governing the
subatomic dynamics of quantum systems such as the electron
or the photon. It is now recognised that Cantorian fractal
space-time fluctuations characterise dynamical systems of all
space-time scales ranging from the microscopic subatomic
dynamics to macro-scale turbulent fluid flows such as
atmospheric flows. The spacing intervals of adjacent prime
numbers also exhibit fractal (irregular) fluctuations generic to
dynamical systems in nature. The apparently irregular
(chaotic) fractal fluctuations of dynamical systems, however,
exhibit self-similar geometrical pattern and are associated with
inverse power-law form for the power spectrum. Self-similar
fluctuations imply long-range space-time correlations
identified as self-organized criticality. A cell dynamical
system model for atmospheric flows developed by the author
gives the following important results..." A. M. Selvam, "Quantum-like Chaos
in Prime Number distribution and Turbulent flows,"
http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V08NO3PDF/V08N3SEL.PDF
Josh, are you going to take the test? Prove to the world you can detect
design in the sequences I presented at the start of this note.
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