>Abstract: I think this is a fascinating possibility that has the potential
>to reconcile the PC's divine intervention with the TE's natural law. It
>also may bear relevance on the "Philosophy of Science/ID" thread debate
>about whether the complexity of living systems can be reduced to the laws of
>physics.
>
Eddie considers an example from the point of view of statistical thermo
that I'll treat in some detail in my forthcoming post that I mentioned
in my reply to Bill Hamilton. What I would eventually like to convince
people of is that thermodynamics has nothing to do with [directly] the
"complexity" that everyone is arguing about. This will come later,
for the time being I want to just point out the differences in the
two approaches.
[snipped some details]
>
>Now, imagine you flip 10 coins all at once. There are 1024 equally possible
>microstate unequally partitioned among 11 possible macrostates like this:
>
In algorithmic information theory we would consider practically the
same problem except that we would flip the same coin 10 times in
row (rather than 10 coins simultaneously), recording the sequence
of heads and tails as we go. This would be more directly
applicable to say a protein since it is not only the number of
occurances of the various amino acids that is important but the
specific sequence in which they occur. For a protein we could imagine
rolling a die with 20 faces (is this the right number of aas?)
assigning each number on the die to an amino acid and then recording
the sequence of aas as we go along. [BTW, I'll mention in passing
that if the aa sequence in a protein were reducible to the laws of
physics then it would contain no information :).]
Anyway, from this point of view, the result (returning to coin flipping):
HTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHT
even though containing an equal number of heads and tails, would
still be highly ordered and thus highly improbable. The sequence
also contains precious little information since it can be compressed
into a simple "theory" [see my reply to Bill for definition of
"theory"]
"PRINT HT ..."
In fact, any sequence containing a pattern will be highly improbable.
[this statement can be rigorously justified]. In other words, the
answer to the question;
"out of all possible sequences of length N, how many do *not*
contain a pattern?"
is:
"practically all"
more details later ............
[snipped some more]
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Brian Harper |
Associate Professor | "It is not certain that all is uncertain,
Applied Mechanics | to the glory of skepticism" -- Pascal
Ohio State University |
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