Re: The Aphenomenon of Abiogenesis

From: brian harper (harper.10@osu.edu)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 17:11:42 EDT

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    At 01:59 PM 7/31/2003 -0700, D. F. Siemens, Jr. wrote:
    >Richard wrote in small part:
    >
    >To which Glen replied:
    >
    > > Tell me exactly what you think would constitute a measure of
    >intelligent
    > > design? What are the units intelligent design is measured in? How
    >many
    > > bubnogs constitute intelligent design?
    >
    >
    >The first candidate seems to be Bits, the Units of Information Theory.
    >And
    >again, I must request that you reign in your disrepectful language.
    >
    >Sorry, Richard, this won't do. This involves Shannon's theory where a
    >page of random numbers contains more information than a page from a
    >textbook. The proof of this is that the text can be compressed, and the
    >random sequence can't be. Since there is no theoretical measure of the
    >content of standard text, "bubnogs" is as relevant a measure as any
    >other.
    >Dave

    If specified complexity correlates with intelligent design, as proposed,
    then bits is the expected unit. The hard part (for me) to remember is
    that there are two separate parts, specification and complexity. But
    either of these can be considered as a message and can be measured
    in bits. Richard later mentions algorithmic information theory, whose
    units would also typically be bits or bytes.

    Richard's immediate intuition on units seems to me to be fine. I cannot
    see the point of the condescending inflammatory approach some are
    taking here.

    What seems to me to be problematic is the idea of specification and
    its relation to complexity. I raised a question related to this in another
    thread. Here let's look at another problem, namely Dembski's example
    of specification in the context of information theory. Dembski gave the
    example of the sequence of prime numbers as being a specification.
    Since there is only one such sequence of any given length, its information
    content is zero. So this is obviously problematic.

    Brian Harper



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