Paul Nelson wrote:
> 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.
>
> > One cannot merely assert that CSI
> > exists, one has to show that it does.
>
> Hmm. "Show your work," right, like on
> a math quiz?
Well, yes.
Bill Dembski proposes to deduce design by showing that all possible
chance hypotheses -- chance here means non-design -- are effectively
impossible. His explanatory filter, which he includes in all his
books, is a way of explaining his approach. The "C" in CSI stands
for "complex" and complex in his case means extremely improbable,
i.e., effectively impossible.
I agree that the best explanation of the source of the disk drive on
the computer that I am using is man. But Dembski does not propose
to confirm this by visiting a disk drive factory run by employees
of Seagate. He explicitly says that he is not considering
this kind of hypothesis. (See his "The Design Inference" page 68.)
Rather, he advocates showing that all alternative (natural)
explanations are extremely improbable. He uses an "eliminative"
argument. (See
http://www.calvin.edu/archive/evolution/199909/0383.html.)
So, go ahead. Show CSI.
If you prefer, you can show that something written in English is not
due to "natural" causes.
"All" can be a big word.
> 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.
>
> > 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.
So what. Are you proposing that all processes modeled by evolutionary
algorithms are caused by intelligent agents? This is fine with me
though I have trouble imagining how you will collect evidence
confirming your hypothesis once you go beyond man-made (and some
primitive, animal-made) objects. But this is not what Dembski is
hoping to do when he writes about CSI.
> 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.
Ivar Ylvisaker
Engineer
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