Quantum Non-Linearity: Intelligent Design’s Big Issue

Friday, October 21, 2011

Intelligent Design’s Big Issue

Interesting is this post on Uncommon Descent quoting Origin Of Life researcher, Jack Szotsk, as saying “ We’re half way there”. At this optimistic outlook I couldn’t help but quip in the comments:

I think I’ve heard about this kind of “half way there” before: Viz: “We want to get to 10^40 Mev. We can currently do 10^20 Mev so we must be half way there”. Exponentials; who’d have them?

After all, in the past I have been rather prey to optimistic visions of the future state of science and technology, so a measure of skepticism about that kind of claim is in order I feel.

But in spite that, as I think I have made sufficiently clear, this blog is sympathetic to the conjecture that cosmic physics is the very rare precondition (i.e. a high information condition) which considerably enhances the chances of life arising via some kind of evolution: Conceivably there exists in platonic space systems of succinct mathematical functions (although presumably an extreme rarity) which limit the possible histories available to physical systems to such an extent that the class of life generating histories has a statistical weight high enough to confer upon life a realistic probability. If this is the case it is certainly wrong to caricature the products of evolution, as Cornelius Hunter has done, (see “Darwin’s God” blogspot, entry dated Oct 19th) as follows:

…Everyone knows biology is full of complicated designs, but evolutionists think it arose spontaneously, as a result of the play of natural laws. In other words it happened to happen. First there was nothing, then there was something, then that something became very complicated. All this just happened to happen.

If evolution has happened, indeed if it is mathematically possible, it is an injustice to describe its efficacy in the language of the fortuitous (as does Hunter), for it is likely that very rare preconditions (in terms of the selected physical laws and boundary conditions) would have to be selected for it to work.

Having said that, however, I have to admit to intuitive doubts about conventional evolution. As an illustration: The rules of chess considerably limit the number of game histories that can occur, but if one were to move the pieces on a chess board at random but within those rules I doubt if the result would be a game worth watching. In this connection Hunter may have something for us worth taking to heart: In this blog post I give Hunter credit for giving us a feel for the exponential problems that evolution has to solve if it is to work. It is certainly not immediately clear that even our very constraining physics eliminates those exponential intractabilities.

So, does standard physics require something extra for life to develop? Is that extra something so called “Intelligent Design”? No, because it seems that ID, the way it is currently defined by William Dembski, is almost unavoidable: As I have so often tried to make clear, the conditions that lead some people to identify the existence of ID are very difficult if not impossible to avoid in the positing of physical models. The rarity of those conditions, such as the selection of those conjectured life generating laws, have the effect of triggering Dembski’s design detection criterion (That is Dembski “Explanatory filter”). I myself long ago reached the point of accepting that the a priori existence of very rare/unique conditions is an unavoidable truism in the physical sciences, whether those conditions be generating functions, boundary conditions or just brute fact configurations. The physical sciences have an inevitable incompleteness about them, an ultimate embedded logical hiatus that cannot be banished. More likely than not people fail to see this, because they conflate conditional probabilities with absolute probabilities; conditional probabilities may be relatively high, but absolute probabilities, if one is to accept the principle of equal a-priori probabilities (Assuming those probabilities are definable and quantifiable) are extremely low. Ergo, the concept of ID which metaphysically hooks on to the pervasive Logical Hiatus and improbability in physical models is less an ancillary extra needed to help the world go round, than it is an ever present substrate in the day to day running of the world.

The difficulty of excluding rarity/uniqueness/improbablity from proposed physical models means that if one were to simply define ID to exist whenever extreme rarity/uniqueness/improbability is encountered ID almost becomes a logical truism. The question then is less whether ID exists, and more a question of how ID expresses itself in terms of just which rare preconditions have been selected for in our cosmos.

Few writers and correspondents on Uncommon Descent would go along with the young Earth buffoonery we see at “Answers in Genesis”. Most UDers (and hope I am right) would at least accept Earth’s story as it is currently told by academia, if not the Darwinian mechanisms that are thought to govern it. Thus evolution in the trivial sense that life on Earth has changed over billions of years, is accepted by most UDers. (It is no surprise, to hear AiG’s buffoon in chief, Ken Ham, claiming that William Dembski is a theistic evolutionist.)

The big question, then, is just what physical regime describes the patterns of natural history. Did the selection agency give us a unique/rare system of law and disorder that generates the right configurations or did that agency simply grant existence to (living) configurations that no elegant system of law and disorder could generate in anything like a realistic time? Is natural history, in the final analysis, a narrative intense pattern of change that simply cannot be described as the execution of short time algorithms?

"What those deistical chumps don't realise is that I not only have to design it, but sustain it as well. And don't give me any of this 'turtles all the way down' stuff"**

** This "turtles all the way down" references alludes to the regress I speak about in the following blog posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/05/middlebrow-atheism-part-5-final-part.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/05/does-intelligent-design-make-testable.html

I notice that in this blog post on Uncommon Descent Barry Arrington has also picked up on this regress

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Friday, October 21, 2011

Intelligent Design’s Big Issue

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION