NoName
Posts: 2729 Joined: Mar. 2013
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Quote (cryptoguru @ Feb. 20 2015,11:47) | NoName: This statement is fact: pure randomness by itself cannot account for the arrival of complex information ... evolutionists (educated ones) agree with this point |
Citation needed. And just what do you mean by 'pure' randomness? And just what do you mean by 'complex information'? I gave a set of very clear questions which you did not answer. Why? They would clear up a great deal, but instead you fall back and make another run at, let's face it, vague and prejudicial verbiage.
Quote | You are confusing what information is ... information is not simply something that is patterned or useful. A hammer is useful, it is not information. The instructions on how to build a hammer or how to use a hammer to make an object with nails and wood IS information.
Natural occurring patterns and stellar "signatures" are NOT information they have no intended meaning. |
That's a highly prejudicial, and short-sighted, and ultimately wrong, definition of information. A hammer is information -- it tells you a great deal about the kind of creator who created it, the kinds of technologies involved, the intended uses, other possible uses, etc. There is a host of information in everything we encounter. But now you want 'information' to apply only where there is intent. And worse, only when the intent is known beforehand. That's bullshit, because it requires prior knowledge of intent in order to determine anything whatsoever. We did not know the intent behind the construction of the Antikythera mechanism, but we knew a great deal about it regardless. Similarly, we knew a great deal about stellar spectra before we knew what they meant. They have meaning, and you have not addressed that salient fact. You want to fall back to the ridiculous notion that information requires prior intent. In a world filled with information, that amounts to assuming your conclusion. I am rejecting your notion of 'information' as not only not helpful or useful, but wrong. Flat-out wrong.
Quote | The pattern of stripes on a bee's body is not information, the way it moves its body to communicate to other bees where the honey is located IS information. |
How do you know? A very few years ago you could have made a similar argument about the stripes on a zebra. But it turns out the stripes fulfill a purpose with respect to pest attacks. You want to restrict 'information' to 'informative'. That requires knowledge that may or may not exist, which means the same item may be information to one person and not to another. The exact same case as your foolishness with DVD players. Worse, the information content of the dance of the bees did not change when we learned it was meaningful to the bees. That information content was always there, but we only learned it recently. This fact blows your pseudo-definnition out of the water. Our knowledge of a thing does not change the nature of the thing, it only changes what we know. You're simply wrong here, wrong because you are using non-standard, prejudicial, and ultimately useless definitions that are derived not from the facts of the matters at hand but from your prejudices. Quote | DNA is information because it means something to the living cell that is interpreting the data. |
So meaning is use? That's rather odd, because that amounts to saying that oxygen is meaningful to hydrogen because it means something to the water molecule they form when they bind. Gary Gaulin is at the end of that path, and it's wrong. Worse, it is absurd; absurd because it can only be applied selectively and with intent aforethought. Quote | The cell is running an instruction set (DNA) that it understands. The cell can't run ANY instruction set, the instruction set has to mean something to the interpreter, which goes about using that information to build proteins and assemble them into complex structures. |
That is so wildly oversimplified that it is false for the uses you require of it. The DNA and the cell are not independent artificial constructs that are 'brought together' to fill a function. They are part of one whole, and there is zero reason to suppose that any external intent was required for that to happen. Worse, for you, there is absolutely zero evidence not only for the need for an external intent, but absolutely no evidence of any possible external intent that could accomplish this, nor any traces of such intent. The actions and behavior of the separable parts of the whole that is a cell are as explicable, and as natural, as the binding of hydrogen and oxygen to form water or the binding of sodium and chlorine to form salt or the atomic decay of certain isotopes of uranium that generated the natural nuclear reactors at Oklo. One might think, not knowing any better, that something as complex as a nuclear reactor, in a system that is self-damped and that cycles on and off, requires external intent and assembly by external forces. One would be wrong, as Oklo conclusively demonstrates. You're wrong here and we've explained why.
Quote | Randomness cannot create information. |
Why not? Pi is information. The digits of the expansion of pi include the first n digits of the expansion of pi as a subset. There is a table of random numbers that contains a series of integers in numeric order; randomness has no difficulty accomplishing that other than sufficient runs, sufficiently long outputs. You keep asserting that 'randomness cannot do x' without ever proving it or referencing a proof. I've rejected it and I've offered reasons to reject it. Worse, you toss around 'randomness' without ever relating it to natural law, and you toss around 'natural law' without ever relating it to randomness. You objected to my phrase 'constrained randomness' when I used it during your first visit here. Let me elaborate. You seem to be taking an extreme view of what 'random' means, a view that amounts to 'anything at all is possible as the next result in a random series'. That is nonsense. 'Constrained random' is always and only what we get. A series of random numbers does not run '1, 2, e*, eggplant**, supernova**, 57, '57 Chevy'**, the law of non-contradiction**, wind from the NW at 5 knots**, etc.' **where each of these terms is the thing named, not the name of the thing named Random does not mean "anything at all without limits and selected from all possible existent items". The DNA codons are random, but you only ever encounter A,G,C, or T in the natural case. Constrained randomness. And what of natural law and randomness? Clarify what you mean by the two, what their relationship is, how they operate together or in opposition. You appear to have lost on this point. Quote | Evolutionists assert that natural selection on randomness creates information by filtering out noise and leaving information through competition. I would like to see THAT happen without imposing intelligence on the system by telling it what it should be producing. |
If your sense of 'intelligence' is sufficiently broad as to include nature, you can't. If it's not, you're not talking abut the real world. We've seen it, we have no reason to doubt it, and you have no alternative mechanism that is supported by evidence of ever having occurred. You lose on this point.
Quote | EXAMPLE (from InterStellar the movie): pour dust on the floor, it makes a pile ... does that pile contain information? No. It's just a pile of dust. |
Shortsighted and incredibly wrong. Dust is made up of stuff. The kinds of stuff that make up the pile of dust is information about who has been in the room, what else has been in the room, how long the room has been left uncleaned to some degree of precision, etc. The size and shape of the pile contain information about how the pile was formed, as does the position of the pile with respect to the larger context (doors, windows, walls, floor, ceiling, etc.) You're picking and choosing what you choose to call 'information' by eliminating all the things that you aren't focused on. Not focusing on it, not being able to see it, doesn't mean it's not information. Consult a forensics team and tell them a pile of dust has no information. Once they get done picking their jaws up off the floor, they'll be laughing hysterically.
Quote | interact with the dust to make it form piles that represent morse code and convey a message. It's information now! | There's different, possibly more, information now, but that's because you're playing fast and loose with what you're prepared to count as information at any given point. And what you choose to consider as information is entirely constrained by what you know now. That's a precarious, at best, meaning of the term 'information'. It again hearkens back to 'informative' rather than 'information'. What if you don't know Morse code? What if Samuel Morse had chosen different patterns for the code? It's the Simpson's episode with Kang and Kodos looking at a skull shaped island and saying "shaped just like our number 4. Really makes you think, doesn't it?"
Quote | What made it information? Has anything changed in the dust itself? No! Did the dust contain the natural properties to create the information itself? No! The information was enforced by an outside intelligence and had meaning to an intended recipient. |
Wrong, across the board. There is nothing that prevents the wind, or the pattern of broom strokes, to create patterns in the dust that can be taken to be Morse Code. Or some analog to Morse code that we don't know. Just as the stellar spectra were information even before we knew what they meant. If natural laws do not lead to information, science is not possible. Quote | I assert that information cannot originate naturalistically, that it must be caused by an intelligence. |
And that's where you define science as impossible. Your assertion is a blatant unsupported and unsupportable assertion. It is not supported by evidence, it is only supported by the rejection of evidence and the acceptance of culturally driven fictions. Quote | That's exactly what SETI does ... the search for ET INTELLIGENCE is to find transmitted information or signs of intelligence. |
Misinterpretation. SETI is looking for patterns such as we know could be produced by intelligence. This does not restrict the field of information to what can be produced by intelligence, yet with that caveat accepted, your argument falls. Stellar spectra are information and they are not assumed to be the product of intent. There is no need to make such an assumption because natural law suffices. We have learned that over time; the information content of starlight has not changed, our ability to extract the informative from it has.
Quote | What are they looking for? Messages or structure that you wouldn't expect to originate randomly. |
Not quite. Structure that are highly unlikely to originate randomly, but not structure that is impossible to randomly occur. The processes we understand, by the information we have extracted from natural laws, place limits on the probabilities. If we knew less, the probabilities we used would be other than they are. When we know more, they will be different. It is an absurdity to tie information to the receiver of it. To think otherwise is to reject the possibility of science and of knowledge. Quote | They expect to be able to differentiate between the radio waves sent from stars and those sent from an intelligence. How? Because intelligence is identifiable by us. We understand that a letter that came through our front door with our name on it was sent by an intelligent sender and intended for us, it didn't happen randomly. |
There's that abuse of 'random' again. As well as the prejudicial ad hoc selection of what counts as information.
Quote | Evolutionists believe that natural selection is able to somehow steer the randomness to create information-rich systems that are functional and diverse. I don't believe that and I'm challenging you to show me that happening on a mathematical, information theory level. |
With a precise operational definition of 'information', 'meaning', and 'random', the answer is 'stellar spectra', 'belousov zhabotinsky reactions', 'DNA patterns between parent/child and between individuals with more distant relationships', ecosystems, the Oklo reactors, etc.
Quote | Nothing you've mentioned is even in a similar problem space to what I'm talking about. |
That's largely because you choose your problem space ad hoc, as you go, redefining terms, excluding data, and setting up contradictory conditions, or conditions that have far more extreme results than you would be willing to accept as you go. Your problem space is imaginary. It is the child insisting that *this* wolf is friendly and will look out for people because of a disney movie he has seen, while that wolf is bad and will hurt people. It is the refusal to accept data, to accept and acknowledge evidence, and the continuous generation of new pseudo-problems in a futile attempt to find a thought experiment that will invalidate 150 years of biology. Lenski alone suffices, and he is not alone. You're simply wrong. You can't accept that, so you keep making up pseudo-problems and rejecting the answers you get because they're not the answers you want. You can't counter the evidence we've provided, so you keep trying to recast the shape of the problem. Stellar spectra are complex information, produced by natural law, without intent. If information relies on the knowledge of the person who encounters it, you are accepting an extreme subjectivism of the worst sort, and rending science and human knowledge impossible. Deal with it.
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