RE: specified complexity (was: The Aphenomenon of Abiogenesis)

From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Thu Aug 07 2003 - 21:44:09 EDT

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    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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