To: Bertvan@aol.com
Subject: Re: Randomness and complex organization via evolution
At 12:22 PM 07/11/2000, you wrote:
Chris:
>One reason is that randomness *is* complex organization.
Bertvan
Hi Chris,
Science is what we know about the universe. What we know about the history
of life on earth is meager. We know that different organisms have existed at
different times, that they are in some respects similar and perhaps related,
but that the differences are also great enough to avoid explanation. At the
moment any theories of how this came about is speculation, speculation
usually designed to accommodate some particular philosophy, such as theism or
atheism. I haven't included agnosticism because one definition of an agnostic
is the ability to live comfortably with unexplained phenomena. We also
indulge in speculations but I think we are a little less likely to claim them
as "thruth".
You have accommodated your philosophy (no plan, purpose, design or teleology)
with the facts by defining randomness as "complex organization". To me that
is a little like defining up as down , or defining black as white, but I have
no objection.
Chris
No, I have not *defined* randomness as complex organization, though it is
complex organization. Pure randomness is more complex than even the most
complex organism, for the same amount of matter. That is, if you take the
atoms that make up even the most complex organism, if you randomize them,
the result is even *more* complex (by a vast amount, as well, not just a
slight margin). Living organisms are often complex, but not hypercomplex
for the material involved. The complexity of living organisms is merely a
small "sampling," as it were, of the complexity of the forces acting on
life. What makes living things simpler than random groupings of the same
atoms is that there is a vast amount of regularity and repetition of both
small structures (molecules) and much larger structures (blood cells, the
DNA in cells, etc), and much larger structures still (in the kidneys, for
example). Consider the fact that we can, to large degree, understand how
our bodies work, but we could not achieve such a degree of understanding of
the various internal details of a random structure of the same atoms as are
in a human body without *vastly* more research, because we'd have to study
each small area in detail. We could not generalize from a sampling of blood
cells to billions of others like them. In information terms, the random
structure would not usually be significantly compressible in terms of
expressing its structure, whereas a human being made from the same atoms
would be similarly definable in a vastly smaller amount of space, because
so much of the information about certain substructures could be simply
referenced where needed. For example, we could completely specify one red
blood cell and then use that information and a small addition for each
other red blood cell.
Further, I frequently worry about the term "random," because it is so
diffuse without strong contextual restriction. In a literal, metaphysical
sense, I don't believe in randomness *at all*. But the alternative is not
intelligence. The alternative is lawfulness, order determined by the nature
of the various things that exist. Round things can roll smoothly, square
things cannot (on smooth terrain). If something intrudes on the genome of
an organism during DNA replication, it does so according to the laws of
physics (whatever they may be), not in any absolutely or metaphysically
random way. However, because we are generally several orders of magnitude
away from having sufficiently detailed measurements or understanding of
what's going on in any particular case, it appears random to us, and it
*is* true that there is no known *systematic* relationship between a genome
during DNA replication and the intrusion of a cosmic ray that happens to
hit a certain atom in the DNA at a crucial moment. Even if we *could* get
the details, we could not make any nice "laws" that would say that such
cosmic rays would uniformly intrude at that point in the process and hit
the corresponding atom in other cases. Each individual instance is a case
unto itself.
I would define *true* randomness in terms of indeterminism. But for
ordinary purposes, a *mathematical* characterization is better. Such a
definition says that there should be no overall repetitive patterns, there
should not be a major preponderance of some values over others (assuming
that the randomness is supposed to be "flat" rather than gaussian, etc.),
and so on. Even this has problems, because patterns that are clearly not
random in one sense may appear to be random according to such tests. For
example, the digits of pi seem to be random according to such tests, but we
know that they are strictly determined.
(Worse, pi is immensely compressible, at least for many uses, by specifying
how it is defined or how further successive digits may be computed. This is
infinite compression, just as the laws of physics represent infinite
compressibility in that they apply to a potentially infinite number of
cases within certain parameters. And yet, randomness is commonly thought of
as non-compressible in information theory terms.)
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