From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Thu Aug 07 2003 - 21:44:09 EDT
Howard wrote:
>However, this business of numerical sequences might also be considered
>irrelevant by an ID advocate. For example, when Dembski argues that the
>bacterial flagellum is specified he uses an entirely different strategy.
>Here is another excerpt from my essay review of No Free Lunch:
I simply disagree with what I understand you to be saying here. Dembski has
over and over used numeric or alphabetic sequences to illustrate intelligent
design. If he uses them, how can it be said that he could consider them
irrelevant? If he considers them irrelevant, it would raise the problem of
why he is using irrelevancies to support his position. I don't think he is
that bad.
>So, is a biotic structure that displays the Fibonacci series
>specified? Hard
>to say. It may depend on whether one uses the numerical sequence
>requirement
>or the biotic function requirement.
The numeric or alphabetic sequences play the role, in Dembski's thought, of
mixing semantic meaning with Shannon information. He seems to think that
semantic meaning is what Shannon information is about. I would use the
following quotation in support of my interpretation. The following
quotation from Dembski shows how he either misunderstands or misrepresents
information:
"This chapter identifies the specified complexity of chapter five with a
powerful extension of Shannon information. Having drawn the connection
between specified complexity and information, this chapter presents a
conservation law governing the origin and flow of information. From this law
it follows that information is not reducible to natural causes and that the
origin of information is best sought in intelligent causes. Intelligent
design thereby becomes a theory for detecting and measuring information,
explaining its origin and tracing its flow." William A. Dembski, Intelligent
Design, (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1999), p. 18
This idea that information is not reducible to natural causes, means that it
is silly to think that a random number generator isn't intelligent. Why?
Because the random number generator is generating information in the
sequences it spits out. That means it must be an intelligent cause. Isn't
that an amazing fact. Your computer is an intelligent cause!
Compare this with Shannon's rejection of semantic meaning as having anything
to do with information theory.
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one
point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.
Frequently the messages have _meaning-, that is they refer to or are
correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual
entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the
engineering problem." C. E. Shannon, " A Mathematical theory of
Communication" The Bell System Technical Journal, 27(1948):3:379-423, p. 379
Warren WEaver, a colleague of Shannon wrote:
"The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must
not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, _information_ must
not be confused with meaning.
"In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the
other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present
viewpoint, as regards information. It is this, undoubtedly, that Shannon
means when he says that 'the semantic aspects of communication are
irrelevant to the engineering aspects.' But this does not mean that the
engineering aspects are necessarily irrelevant to the semantic aspects.
"To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so
much to what you do say, as to what you could say. That is, information is a
measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. If one is
confronted with a very elementary situation where he has to choose one of
two alternative messages, then it is arbitrarily said that the information
associated with this situation, is unity. Note that it is misleading
(although often convenient) to say that one or the other message conveys
unit information. The concept of information applies not to the individual
messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to the situation as a
whole, the unit information indicating that in this situation one has an
amount of freedom of choice, in selecting a message, which it is convenient
to regard as a standard or unit amount." Warren Weaver, "Some Recent
Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication, in Claude E.
Shannon and W. Weaver, _The Mathematical Theory of Communication_ (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 8, 9
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