OK, I see where I misread what you wrote. I thought that you were citing
Tipler to support the claim that Godel showed there were things we KNOW to
be true but can't prove to be true, which I was disagreeing with
(disagreeing specifically just with the part about it being a consequence of
Godel). To Glenn and everybody on the list - I apologize if I seemed to
imply incorrectly that Glenn was a fan of Tipler.
>Secondly, I would use the citation from Yockey, to back up my contention that
>given a digital signal, it is "fundamentally impossible" to mathematically
>determine whether that signal was made by a random process or by a highly
>organized process. Yockey has not gone off to la-la land. (I cite this
>again, Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology, Cambridge
>University Press, 1992, p. 82)
I agree with that contention (as I think I have said in both my posts on
this thread). All I was saying was that Godel did not enter into it.
>Finally, you have a bad habit of using ad hominem's in your argumentation.
>You try to put my argument in the same category as YEC's mis-using the 2nd Law
>argument, and now you are trying to use Velikovsky. Why don't you cease that
>type of argumentation and simply address the issue. About 25% of my work
>involves information theory. Am I expert? No, but I am familiar with it.
>Can I be wrong here? Sure. But I fail to see how your references to
>Velikovsky and the mis-use of the 2nd law has anything to do with detecting a
>message or design is a system like DNA ( to which Yockey's statement directly
>applies). The second law and Velikovsky are irrelevant to this issue!
I regret that you seem to have taken some of this personally. I really did
agree with you in both posts about the mathematical impossibility of
rigorously "proving" design in DNA and similar scientific propositions.
Maybe an analogy would be somebody posting about how a human's behavior will
change if the person knows he is being watched. Like your main claim, this
is a true statement. However, suppose the poster attributed this to
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (in its commonly misused form: "You can't
observe a system without changing it.") That would be incorrect reasoning
(in defense of a correct conclusion), and one would not be out of line in
pointing that out. That's all I was trying to do - say that in my opinion
(which so far 2 of 2 mathematicians agree with) Godel was irrelevant or at
best an analogy. And I mentioned that, like the 2nd Law, Godel's theorem is
one of those things that is used (or misused) more often than it is
understood. Which does not relate to your point but I think is relevant to
mention on the asa list.
Well, I don't think I'm going to make any more contributions to this thread.
Mathematician Ken Smith's recent post seems to sum things up pretty well.
And I'm discouraged that my attempt to agree with something while tightening
up the reasoning has resulted in public accusation of ad hominem attacks.
That sort of thing is a danger of electronic communication. At this point,
we all probably need to step back and take a deep breath and pray a little.
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| Dr. Allan H. Harvey | aharvey@boulder.nist.gov |
| Thermophysics Division | Phone: (303)497-3555 |
| National Institute of Standards & Technology | Fax: (303)497-5224 |
| 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80303 | |
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| "Don't blame the government for what I say, or vice versa." |
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