stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote | Science versus ID: Message in the sky
PvM posted Entry 2344 on June 6, 2006 10:42 AM.
Trackback URL: http://degas.fdisk.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2339
Remarkably (or perhaps not) this ‘tongue in cheek’ paper has attracted Dembski’s attention. Remember that Dembski is still struggling with how an Intelligent Designer could inject information into our universe with zero energy:
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Dembski wrote:
What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. Certainly quantum mechanics is much more hospitable to an information processing view of the universe than the older mechanical models. All that’s needed, however, is a universe whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to deterministic natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus have the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the backdrop of randomness).
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Dumbass DonaldM shows up to defend his liege:
| Quote | Comment #104217
Posted by Donald M on June 7, 2006 11:08 AM (e) | kill
Pim writes (quoting Dembski):
| Quote | | In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. |
Pim here misquotes. There needs to be an ellipsis between the first and second sentence because Pim left out,oh,only about 11 paragraphs of further explanation between those two sentences. And all this time we’ve been told that it is only the “creationists” that quote mine!! Guess that myth is now finally laid to rest!! Pim, thanks for finally making clear the double standard that exists regarding the charge of “quote mining”.
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presumably this is based on Dembski's response:
| Quote | June 7, 2006
Casting pearls before swine — okay, I’ll do it
In still another post at PT (go here), I’m charged with committing a basic physics error in my book No Free Lunch, much to the delight of the gallery that comments there (based, by the way, on a deliberate misquote — see below). Too bad that Freeman Dyson agrees with me and not with them. Here, then, is the pearl: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt. Go trample on it. And having trampled on it, go email Freeman and get him to distance himself from my views even though the section of NFL cited merely expands on his and Frank Tipler’s ideas. | Quote | | The light from the distant galaxies will be strongly red-shifted. But the sky will never become empty and dark, if we can tune our eyes to longer and longer wavelengths as time goes on. –Freeman Dyson |
In addition, the author of the PT post deliberately misquotes me, juxtaposing two passages from my work without any indication that several pages of text intervene between the passages. Here is the passage attributed to me at PT exactly as it appeared there (at the very least, there should have been an ellipsis before “Certainly quantum mechanics …” as well as an indication that his actually is not the start of a sentence): | Quote | | What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. Certainly quantum mechanics is much more hospitable to an information processing view of the universe than the older mechanical models. All that’s needed, however, is a universe whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to deterministic natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus have the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the backdrop of randomness). |
And now here is the full text with the two passages marked in bold. Note that the PT post simply kludges those passages together (you’ll have to scroll down quite a ways to see the connection). By the way, I’ve saved the page at PT just so that they don’t insert ellipses and say there never was a problem: | Quote | How much energy is required to impart information? We have sensors that can detect quantum events and amplify them to the macroscopic level. What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all.
Limits, however, are tricky things. To be sure, an embodied designer could impart information by employing arbitrarily small amounts of energy. But an arbitrarily small amount of energy is still a positive amount of energy, and any designer employing positive amounts of energy to impart information is still, in Paul Davies’s phrase, “moving the particles.” [[In contrast to the PT post, the possibility of infinite wavelength, zero energy, and zero bandwidth therefore never arises. –WmAD]]. The question remains how can an unembodied designer influence the natural world without imparting any energy whatsoever. It is here that an indeterministic universe comes to the rescue. Although we can thank quantum mechanics for the widespread recognition that the universe is indeterministic, indeterminism has a long philosophical history, and appears in such diverse places as the atomism of Lucretius and the pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James. (more…)
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Filed under: Intelligent Design — William Dembski @ 12:44 am
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Oh no! PvM, what do you have to say for yourself. Could this be true? Of course not, it's Dembski, of course it's a lie. PvM lowers the boom:
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Comment #104220
Posted by PvM on June 7, 2006 11:23 AM (e) | kill
DonaldM wrote:
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Pim here misquotes. There needs to be an ellipsis between the first and second sentence because Pim left out,oh,only about 11 paragraphs of further explanation between those two sentences. |
DonaldM should be able to back up his assertions that I left out 11 paragraphs of further explanations when I quoted Dembdksi
| Quote | | In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. |
See the original source
Is Donald now so desperate that he has to accuse people of quote mining for providing an extensive quote?
Last time Donald showed up he ran after I explained how he had inappropriately turned my statement of scientifically vacuous into “not science”. This time he makes other accusations, which on closer scrutiny are as vacuous as the claims of ID itself.
I guess we shall not see much of Donald for yet another week while he is licking his wounds :-)
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| Quote | Comment #104222
Posted by PvM on June 7, 2006 11:30 AM (e) | kill
On UncommonDescent Dembski complains that I misquoted him
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In addition, the author of the PT post deliberately misquotes me, juxtaposing two passages from my work without any indication that several pages of text intervene between the passages. Here is the passage attributed to me at PT exactly as it appeared there (at the very least, there should have been an ellipsis before “Certainly quantum mechanics …” as well as an indication that his actually is not the start of a sentence):
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If Dembski had done the minimal research of cut and pasting the quote into Google he would have found the following link
So not only is he wrong that I misquoted Dembski but he certainly is wrong about ‘deliberately’.
Will Bill apologize for yet another one of his mistakes? Time shall tell. I have saved a copy of his page for reference.
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| Quote | Comment #104229
Posted by Andrea Bottaro on June 7, 2006 11:43 AM (e) | kill
This misquotation thing is just hilarious. Here’s another version of “Intelligent Design coming clean” (IDCC) by Bill Dembski, in which the paragraph is exactly as quoted by Pim (this version is on ID-friendly ARN, so it’s quite unlikely that they purposefully mangled Dembski’s piece).
I am not sure about the timeline, but IDCC came before No Free Lunch (NFL), from which I think Dembski’s lengthy quote is taken (the origin is unclear from his post). However, I wouldn’t be surprised if ID critics commented on the physical impossibility of infinite-wavelength, zero-energy information transfer as soon as IDCC appeared. Therefore, it is at least plausible that Dembski added the “clarifying” passage in NFL at least in part to counter the criticism that his original statement made no sense. If that were the case, for him to now accuse Pim of misquotation by citing the revised NFL passage instead of the original in IDCC would be amazingly dishonest. Perhaps Dembski can clarify this.
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UPDATE: LOL! it just gets better. DougMoron has to weigh in right before somebody tells it like it is:
| Quote | #3
This is sickening. How can one expect a meaningful scientific debate (or even a reasonable dialog) when the other side is so blatently dishonest? Obviously we cannot - and so we should not have such lofty expectations of our adversaries as for them to be honest. But nevertheless we need to stay focused on the facts, take the high ground, and let them drown themselves in their own tidal wave of lies and deceit.
Comment by dougmoran — June 7, 2006 @ 12:31 pm
#4
I hope that everyone is reading the PT blog as well. You will see that the passage exists exactly as quoted on the ARN web site http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_idcomingclean.htm.
Comment by Mark Frank — June 7, 2006 @ 12:46 pm |
AHAHAHAHAHAHA what a bag of tards. our tidal wave of lies and deceit....hahahahahaha
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