Complex Specified Information

[Robin]

This may have been done to death before, but I would be interested in some views on Dembski's complex specified information. I would be particularly interested in hearing from people who think that there may be some substance to the concept, ie ID proponents.

I am not putting it in either the science or the religion forums because I don't want to prejudge.

I would be interested in hearing any rigorous definitions of these concepts (complexity for example).

And I don't need to remind you of forum rules - no insults.

 

[Zombified]

Disclaimer: I am an opponent of intelligent design "theory" and creationism in general.

As I understand it, Dembski's notion of complex specified information would infer design when he encounters something which is complicated (i.e. unlikely to occur by chance) and which fits a specification (is not meaningless).

For example, flipping a coin 100 times, you get a particular sequence of heads or tails. That sequence has a probability of 1/2^100, a very, very small number. But it probably does not fit a specification. However, if you got heads and tails exactly alternating, that does fit a specification, so you would suspect the coin toss is not really random.

According to critics of ID (which, as I warned, includes me) Dembski's idea is not really testible, because he hasn't provided a clear definition of what constitutes a specification, nor a proper procedure for calculating probabilities. Although Dembski asserts that CSI does not produce false positives, a number of counterexamples have been found. Of course, these counterexamples can be argued against, precisely because CSI is not, in fact, rigorously defined.

Considerable information on intelligent design, from the point of view of expert critics, can be found at http://www.talkorigins.org.

 

[Zombified]

One more complaint: CSI is essentially an appeal to ignorance. Basically, it's a fancy way of saying "this couldn't have happened at random, therefore, it must have been intentional". But that ignores the possibility of a non-random (or not entirely random) mechanism. The argument is one creationists have tried since Darwin's time, Dembski has merely dressed it up in more florid mathematical language. But the argument, and its lack of effectiveness, is the same.

 

[BillHoyt]

One more complaint: CSI is essentially an appeal to ignorance. Basically, it's a fancy way of saying "this couldn't have happened at random, therefore, it must have been intentional". But that ignores the possibility of a non-random (or not entirely random) mechanism. The argument is one creationists have tried since Darwin's time, Dembski has merely dressed it up in more florid mathematical language. But the argument, and its lack of effectiveness, is the same.

Dembski errs in the way you outlined and in many other respects as well:

o He confounds differing definitions of complexity in constructing his arguments

o He has many of his basic biological facts just flat-out wrong, particularly when it comes to variant forms of organs and organelles (which, despite his claims, do exist).

 

[Dancing David]

People who work in abiogenesis claim the real problem is creating the RNA molecule, because it is so efficient at what it does, they start with the self catalyzing arggregate of chemical which makes life more likely but RNA is a problem.

To the original poster: What is the argument for this specified information?

 

[pupdog]

Another problem with Dembski's work is his highly self-touted "design inference," which he claims is a useful procedure for determining if something is the result of design. However, the procedure doesn't really have any criteria that indicate design; rather, first one eliminates one type of explanation (chance), then another type of explanation, and if both types of explanation can be eliminated, it must be design. So the conclusion that it must be design really depends on being able to recognize all possible chance hypotheses, and, in essence, collapses to an argument from ignorance.

 

[Robin]

From Dancing David:

To the original poster: What is the argument for this specified information?

This is what I hoped someone might jump in and tell us. It has been suggested that this is a sort of back slapping society (although some of the threads seem to contradict this) - I hoped I might try to attract some ID viewpoints.

Nevertheless I find the posts here highly interesting. My summary so far is that there is a problem with the definition of complexity (and I would add that by most definitions complexity is undecidable anyway), and that the idea of specification is vague.

 

[Zombified]

The talk.origins website does have links to creationist and intelligent design websites, if you want to see it presented from that point of view.

It would be interesting if an ID proponent dropped in, especially if he was a half-decent debater and didn't run from a crowd. Place oughtta have one of everything...

 

[Batman Jr.]

Just saying that "it's too unlikely to have happened by chance" is a tenuous argument. Our universe is such a vast place with so many different permutations of events capable of occuring simultaneously; just about anything is bound to have taken place somewhere. On top of that, ostensible complexity doesn't even necessarily imply actual complexity.

 

[Tez]

To be fair there has already been much work done on algorithmic information theory (Kolmogorov complexity etc) which makes precise some notions similar to ones that ID'ers seem to be grasping at. It is well worth reading around these topics before debating them.

 

[Dancing David]

FRom a very brief web search it seems DEmbeski's idea is just a silly rehash of the standard arguments against evolution.

It seems to suffer from the inherent fallacy of determinism. In that it is searching for meaning after the fact. Evolution takes advantage of unplanned and random contingency.

 

[hammegk]

Nevertheless I find the posts here highly interesting. My summary so far is that there is a problem with the definition of complexity (and I would add that by most definitions complexity is undecidable anyway), and that the idea of specification is vague.

One could almost say "vague by design".

To be fair there has already been much work done on algorithmic information theory (Kolmogorov complexity etc) which makes precise some notions similar to ones that ID'ers seem to be grasping at. It is well worth reading around these topics before debating them.

I'd be interested, but would you expand the idea in a bit more detail? Just a few more sentences describing what you refer to.

http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/~gch/kolmogorov.html

gives an overview. Are you proposing the RNA/DNA code as a subject for this approach? Or have I completely missed the idea?

 

[Robin]

From Hammegk:

One could almost say "vague by design"

You are probably right there, I was trying not to pre-judge.

Are you proposing the RNA/DNA code as a subject for this approach? Or have I completely missed the idea?

No, you have not, there are some people applying information theory to biology who are not ID proponents.

The problem with Dembski's approach is that he seems to be using his own definitions of 'information' and 'complexity' that have nothing to do with classical information theory or algorithmic information theory.

 

[Tez]

One could almost say "vague by design".


I'd be interested, but would you expand the idea in a bit more detail? Just a few more sentences describing what you refer to.

http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/~gch/kolmogorov.html

gives an overview. Are you proposing the RNA/DNA code as a subject for this approach? Or have I completely missed the idea?

No, I was saying nothing more than we have studied issues somewhat related to those of ID -- for instance, what is different between a random-looking binary string 11010001101010 and the string of all 0's when both are equally likely to appear if I flip a coin? Now the Kolmogorov complexity is non-computable, but it is still a useful concept. Thus one should be careful how one argues against the usefulness of an (uncomputable) ID concept. The difference lies in the preciseness (or lack thereof) of the formulation.

As Robin says, I'm sure people have applied these information theoretic ideas to DNA/RNA etc. I'm equally sure that once an ID advocate with enough brains to understand algorithmic info. theory gets a hold of it, they'll do some invalid twisting and extrapoloation of it into their worldview...

Wikipedia or Mathworld are probably the best places to go to read more about it...

 

[snakefing]

One thing to notice about most ID arguments is that they are basically extensions to Paley's watchmaker analogy. They are all building from the intuition that "something this complicated just couldn't have arisen by chance".

What they are trying to do is to polish up Paley's argument that you can tell by looking at an object whether it had a designer or not - mostly by trying to be more specific about what attributes of an object allow you to infer a designer. For Dembski, this is "complex specified information," and for Behe (Darwin's Black Box) this is "irreducible complexity."

Mostly their attempts fail through a lack of rigor in defining their concepts. This vagueness in their arguments comes from starting from a conclusion that was reached on other than rational grounds, then trying to rationalize it. But at least they are trying to formalize their intuition, rather than completely trying to dodge the issue.

 

[BillHoyt]

One thing to notice about most ID arguments is that they are basically extensions to Paley's watchmaker analogy. They are all building from the intuition that "something this complicated just couldn't have arisen by chance".

What they are trying to do is to polish up Paley's argument that you can tell by looking at an object whether it had a designer or not - mostly by trying to be more specific about what attributes of an object allow you to infer a designer. For Dembski, this is "complex specified information," and for Behe (Darwin's Black Box) this is "irreducible complexity."

Mostly their attempts fail through a lack of rigor in defining their concepts. This vagueness in their arguments comes from starting from a conclusion that was reached on other than rational grounds, then trying to rationalize it. But at least they are trying to formalize their intuition, rather than completely trying to dodge the issue.

I agree: they're mostly trying to dress up Paley. But there's another clear aim here: to divorce themselves from fundamentalist creationism and disguise themselves as alternative science. Its a play into the postmodernist feints. The attempt fails not only because of conceptual rigor, but also by very clear cherry picking of facts. Many of the biological claims, particularly about the lack of certain intermediate evolutionary design decisions, are pure bunk.The failure is fundamental: sophomorically sloppy scholarship.