stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
|
When I was posting at OE, several of my posts concerned this guy Mark with his own novel ID theory. He's now got three posts on the topic, so I reproduce them here.
| Quote |
My Design theory
In my intro quote, I said I'm skeptical about using ID to scientifically identify design. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm opposed to ID in principle, and in fact I've done some work on my own theory of intelligent design. I haven't published it before, so I thought I'd share it here.
My theory is based on what I call "cognitive distance" or CD. Don't let the big words fool you, all it really means is "how far away are we from knowing who did it?"
It's not scientifically exact, but it does help us be a little more scientific about how we decide whether or not something is intentionally designed. (I like "intentional design" better than "intelligent design," since "intelligent" can mean different things).
The way my theory works is like this: suppose we have something, and we don't know whether or not it was intentionally designed. Let's say we found an oddly-shaped rock, and we want to know whether its shape had a natural origin, or was deliberately sculpted to have that shape.
What we do is consider each of the possibilities by making four measurements for each possibility. The measurements cover four aspects of design:
* Agency
* Capacity
* Opportunity
* Impetus
By assigning a numeric score in each of these four areas, we can calculate a total score for each possibility. The numbers get bigger the less certain we are about each area, so whichever possibility has the lowest total score, "wins."
I'll say more about each of the four aspects of design in future posts. This is just a high-level overview. |
| Quote |
My Design Theory Part 2
In my last post, I started to describe my personal design theory and how it works by assigning "scores" in each of four areas: agency, capacity, opportunity and impetus.
In this post, I want to describe the scoring system in a little more detail. The basic idea is that we want to assign a score that is smaller the more certain we are about whatever we're measuring. It's a subjective assessment, but it does help put a meaningful number in each category.
Now, some might argue that if it's subjective, then it's not really meaningful. But it does have a meaning: it means "this is how certain we feel about our conclusion." More than that, though, we also have objective guidelines about how each score is to be assigned. I'll say more about that later.
The point I want to make in this post is that my design theory is a discriminatory theory. No, I'm not talking about civil rights or violating anyone's human rights! I'm talking about an approach that compares two theories, and allows us to judge which of the two is better.
In other words, we consider two explanations. For each explanation, we look at the four categories, and determine how each explanation scores in each category. Then we total up the scores for each explanation, and the explanation with the lowest score (the shortest "cognitive distance") is the winner.
In the next post, I'll go over each of the four categories, and what they mean, and after that I'll talk about how each category is scored. Probably one category per post. |
| Quote |
My Design Theory Part 3
The Categories:
Agency
Who or what. I could have put "Designer" here, but I wanted a more neutral term so that we can calculate a Cognitive Distance for non-design processes as well. So, for example, we could list "erosion" as the Agency in an explanation of the Grand Canyon.
Capacity
Capacity refers to the Agency's ability to produce whatever it is we're trying to explain. For example, if we want to suggest the possibility that humans produced the great "heads" on Easter Island, we would consider whether the islanders had sufficient technology to carve the stones and move them, given their enormous size.
Opportunity
This category lets us assign a score to the question of whether or not the agency would have had a chance to produce whatever we're trying to explain. For example, would nature have enough time to produce a (whatever), if it started a couple billion years ago?
Impetus
I wanted to say "motive" here, but again, I need to keep the language more neutral so as not to be guilty of assuming the conclusion that an intelligent designer was involved. Given the ability and opportunity to produce a (whatever), is there some motive or pressure or other process driving the Agency to actually produce the (whatever), as opposed to producing something else, or even nothing at all?
So there you have it. We have four categories describing four ways in which the things we know have different "scores" related to the likelihood of a particular Agency being involved in creating something.
Does anyone have any other categories they think we should consider?
Next post: how to count scores in the Agency category. |
| Quote | My Design Theory Part 4
Agency
Ok, we've had an overview of the theory as a whole, and we've looked at what each of the four categories is. Let's take them one at a time and look at how each would be scored, starting with Agency.
Scoring is based on the idea that the more certain we are about who or what produced the whatever-it-is, the lower the score should be. So, for example, if we watch a painter paint a painting, we would put down a zero as the Agency score for the painter. We watched him produce the painting, so we know he produced it. Zero is the score which means maximum certainty.
Scores in the 1 to 9 range would be for situations where we didn't see the Agency actually produce the painting, but we know who the painter is, and we know he produces paintings like the one in question. So maybe we saw the painter working on something, but we didn't see the painting itself until it showed up in an art gallery somewhere. We might score that at the low end, say a 1, 2 or 3. Or we never saw the painter working on it at all, so all we have to go on is that it seems to be his style. Score that an 8 or a 9.
Next, in the 10-99 scoring range, we have scores for the situation where we may not know as much about the specific painter, but we do know that there were a general group of painters (Impressionists, let's say) who produced similar paintings. This is significantly less certain than when we have direct information about the specific painter, so the scores are an order of magnitude larger.
In the 100 to 999 scoring range, we get even more hypothetical. Perhaps the painting is unlike any known school of painting, and all we know is that there were some people associated with it, who might have tried to paint something.
And finally, we have the 1000 to 9999 range, for cases where we know nothing at all about any painter who might have painted it, and can only guess, based on how reasonable our speculations sound to us.
This last category might have been 1000 to infinity, on the grounds that if we truly know nothing about the painter, then we have no basis for making any kind of score. However, after giving it some thought, I decided to leave it in the 1000 to 9999 range because otherwise any unknowns are going to drive the total CD score up to infinity, regardless of whether or not there are unknowns in more than one category. By keeping the last category limited to the 1000 to 9999 range, we make it possible to compare explanations that may involve one or more unknowns in one or more categories. |
"Ladies and gentlemen, this here is a wookie..."
|
