In a message dated 9/29/2000 9:24:24 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
pnelson2@ix.netcom.com writes:
> FMAJ1019 wrote:
>
> > An interesting assertion but if I understand Richard and
> > Wesley correctly, they are looking for an actual example
> > with numbers. Furthermore they are looking for examples
> > in nature of CSI.
>
> The magnetic patterns on your hard drive exist in nature.
> They're as real as your hands resting on the keyboard.
>
Cool, so we now have examples of magnetic patterns. Are these pattersn CSI?
Are these patterns natural?
> > One cannot merely assert that CSI
> > exists, one has to show that it does.
>
> Hmm. "Show your work," right, like on
> a math quiz?
>
If the CSI hypothesis wants to be taken seriously then that's indeed what
needs to be done.
> OK. There are 27 characters in the
> English alphabet (26 letters, and a space)...
>
> Nah. Too tedious. Your msgs are CSI.
> Mine are CSI. Do the calculations
> yourself, I'm too busy.
>
As I said, interesting assertions. I could call our messages "email" and that
would show what? A mere assertion does not make for much of a hypothesis.
> > An interesting "riddle" was also given by Wesley with
> > his "algorithm room".
> > http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/ae/dembski_wa.html
>
> Right. Wesley and I have talked about this in
> private correspondence. Ask Wesley if he knows
> of any evolutionary algorithm whose causal
> history (as lines of code) does not implicate at
> least one intelligent agent. Put another way,
> evolutionary algorithms are proxy agents.
> If you pursue the causal story, you'll find the
> action of a designer somewhere down the road.
>
Not necessarily: Natural selection is a good example of an evolutionary
algorithm
"Dembski's article, "Explaining Specified Complexity", critiques a specific
evolutionary algorithm. Dembski does not dispute that the solution
represents CSI, but categorizes the result as apparent CSI because the
specific algorithm critiqued must necessarily produce it. Dembski then claims
that this same critique applies to all evolutionary algorithms, and Dembski
includes natural selection within that category. "
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/ae/dembski_wa/sc_resp_wre.html
But Wesley already answered your question
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/ae/dembski_wa/19990913_csi_and_ec.html
"And that is the objection that I answered in my draft article. In other
words, CSI arises, but can be traced to infusion by an intelligent agent. In
my
draft article, I utilize the same test case as I proffered to Dembski in
1997: Where does the "infusion" of information occur in the operation of a
genetic algorithm that solves a 100-city tour of the "Traveling Salesman
Problem"? At the time, and in my draft report, I considered and eliminated
each potential source of "infusion". "
> Think about it this way. If you wrote a program
> to write your e-mail msgs for you, and I detected
> the program, sooner or later I'd track you down
> too. CSI requires an intelligent cause, whether
> immediately or remotely.
>
Again based on a presumption that evolutionary algorithms require a designer.
That computational algorithms can have a designer involved is no evidence
that they NEED to have a designer involved. I am glad to hear though that you
seem to have abandoned apparant CSI from actual CSI. Am I correct in assuming
this?
Also am I correct in assuming that the evidence of CSI (in nature) will be
shown using the arguments put forth by Dembski? Of course if one cannot
distinguish apparant CSI from actual CSI, what is the use of CSI ?
"If Dembski's analytical techniques cannot resolve the issue of possible
cheating in the "Algorithm Room", how does he hope to
resolve the issue of whether certain features of biology are necessarily the
work of an intelligent agent or agents? If
Dembski has no solution to this dilemma, the Design Inference is dead."
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=532248147
If Dembski concluded that
"How does the scientific community explain specified complexity? Usually via
an evolutionary algorithm. By an evolutionary algorithm I mean any
algorithm that generates contingency via some chance process and then sifts
the so-generated contingency via some law-like process. The
Darwinian mutation-selection mechanism, neural nets, and genetic algorithms
all fall within this broad definition of evolutionary algorithms." "
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/ae/dembski_wa/19990913_csi_and_ec.html
then how can it be presumed that any known instance of evolutionary algorithm
has a designer down the road?
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