Thursday, December 20, 2012

Paul Nelson, Computer Simulations and .... Gravity.

Evolutionists and Anti-Evolutionists continue to slug it out.

This video featuring a presentation by Homunculus IDer Paul Nelson has stirred up a response from the evolutionary establishment. The relevant links are:

Paul Nelson is not just a Homunculus IDer; he is also a Young Earth Creationist. But there are YECs and YECs; As far as I can tell  Nelson is not one of the hardened “heretic burning” religionists exemplified by the likes of Ken Ham and his ex-business partner John MacKay (In fact MacKay is probably lunatic fringe). Nelson, like most of those in the Humunculus ID community (or “HIDs”), seems to be a reasonable and intelligent man; somebody, in fact, that any other reasonable person could do business with even in the face of mutual disagreement; Nelson probably has a YEC background, but he is nevertheless prepared to work with non-YEC Christians.

The argument that Nelson has triggered seems be about the relative importance of natural selection over and against other mechanisms that may drive evolution natural history. I’m not going to comment on this matter because firstly I'm not a biologist and secondly it’s one of those grey areas about degree: Viz: Just how important does the evolutionary establishment claim natural selection to be as an agent of change? Have they overestimated it or underestimated it? Contrariwise just how unimportant is Nelson claiming natural selection to be?  Is he overestimating or underestimating its unimportance? The outcome of this kind of dispute is that it has a tendency to degenerate into a “he said, you said” farce.

Although Nelson is the kind of guy I can respect and moreover I think the evolutionary establishment needs the well-motivated and intelligent criticism (albeit largely negative and destructive) we get from people like Nelson, I still feel that there is something highly unsatisfactory about the underlying motivations and concepts behind Nelson’s attack on evolution. My sense of unease is bound up with the pervasive "God Intelligence did it vs. Natural Causes did it"  paradigm with which Nelson frames the issue. This framing is evidenced by the implicit reference Nelson makes to William Dembski’s explanatory filter.

The explanatory filter is an epistemic method whereby one works in sequence through the possible explanations of an observed configuration starting with "natural causes" founded in law and disorder. (i.e. what the HID community inappropriately refer to as “chance and necessity”). If law and disorder fail to explain the configuration this leaves us with, by default, intelligent causes. Certainly, within the confines of the cosmos the ideas behind the filter are robust:  Law, disorder and intelligence (perhaps even alien intelligence) cover all possible agents of change that we can conceive. But though this may be the case, in a theistic context the filter proves to be problematical. To see this let’s imagine for the sake of argument that establishment evolutionists “prove” their case beyond reasonable doubt. Using the explanatory filter it would then appear that the game is up for theism:  The explanation that “Intelligence (=God) did it” has been displaced in favour of “Natural causes did it”. To salvage their position, however, the HIDs will then tell us that our universe is fine tuned to favour the generation of living configurations and that this fine tuning has the effect of triggering the explanatory filter's default explanation of intelligent agency. But the trouble is that the explanatory filter cuts both ways: It now suggests that if one can find a law and disorder explanation for the fine tuning of the universe, then there is no need to posit divine intelligent “first causes”. But it turns out that law and disorder explanations have their own problems: To cut a long story short we find that attempts to arrive at a complete law and disorder explanation has the potential to lead to a classic turtles all the way down regress: Law and disorder explanations always leave a residue of brute facts that either have to be simply accepted as axiomatic, or as a trigger for another level of explanation accounting for why these particular givens have been specially selected for and not others. The inevitable problem here is acknowledged by Max Tegmark who gets round the conundrum of special selection with his mathematical universe, a weird and disturbing place where every conceivable mathematical object has been equally reified.

Naturally enough the HIDs want to stop this regression process from the outset by unequivocally showing that law and disorder are incapable of explaining living configurations; for if the situation is allowed to get into a multiverse regress it becomes too abstruse for a decisive victory to be claimed by either side. The consequence is that the HIDs have put down a very high stake in favour of intelligence in the “God Intelligence did it vs. evolution did it dichotomy, a dichotomy of thought encouraged by Dembki’s explanatory filter. Nelson and many other HIDs therefore have a great vested interest in discrediting evolutionary theory. They follow a negative approach which by a process of destructive elimination is intended to leave us with the default of God intelligence as the “cause” of life.  In the video I have linked to Nelson refers disparagingly to the wall surrounding law and disorder explanations, a wall which implicitly excludes thoughts of intelligent “causes”. Therefore for Nelson it’s a stark choice between naturalism and supernaturalism intelligence. William Lane Craig’s support of the Kalam cosmological argument comes out of the same stable: He is adverse to multiverse scenarios because they ostensibly attack his “divine first cause” argument by muddying the waters with a potential "natural causes" regress. Craig, like Nelson, thinks in terms of causes rather than patterns amenable to mathematial description. This causation concept of explanation readily leads to a way of thinking that views God’s involvement as the diametrically opposed alternative explanation to natural causes. (See endnote 3)

Nelson and Craig have categories of thinking which inclines them to put “natural causes” and “divine causes” on the same logical level thus pathing the way for God and nature to be seen as competing agents of explanation. This fails to do justice to the nature of intelligence, especially divine intelligence. I can best express this with a computing metaphor: It is possible to simulate a computer within a higher level host computer. In fact a simulated computer could be just one of many agents that act within the simulacrum of a virtual world rendered by the host computer. In such a simulacrum the simulated computer would stand alongside and have the same logical level as other categories of causation in the simulacrum. But in this scenario computation is actually the outer embracing context and therefore it is of higher logical level than the particular law and disorder regime rendered within the simulacrum.  Intelligence and computation are closely related; both have a dynamic that involves searching, rejecting and selecting, along with the interim production of partial results. So, if intelligence is anything like computation it too is likely to have an abstract, general all-embracing superset definition. It is conceivable, therefore, that our universe is running on (or "in") an intelligence/sentience rather than a "nuts and bolts" computer.  If a host intelligence is the embracing substrate on which our world is being rendered this means that the schism between intelligence and naturalism prompted by Dembki’s explanatory filter is very inappropriate; this schism is a result of placing law & disorder on the same logical level as intelligence. 
 
Like other HIDs Nelson defines evolution as a dumb process (See here where we find Richard Johns doing a similar thing). But even if the mechanisms of evolution are as the academic establishment would have it, then it is very wrong to call evolution dumb: If evolution is to work its efficacy is likely to be very dependent on the selection of the right physical regime. If evolution works then the aim at a distant functional target (As Nelson puts it) has taken place in the selection of the right physical regime. Intelligence has already been built into the process of evolution and evolution is, in fact, intelligence at work.

But having said that this is not to say that evolutionary theory is sown up.  I’m the first to concede that we may be far from understanding the full set of mechanisms driving evolution. Evolution is a present tense continuous process, but unlike the objects of spring extending and test tube precipitating science the changes it generates are smeared over very large tracts of time. We are like ants crawling over the surface of a huge evolutionary tree (or bush!) trying to reconstruct a highly complex shape.  Our attempts at reconstruction should be admixtured with a certain amount of epistemic humility. But in the polarized and passionate North American political and religious environment the sad fact is that a shift toward epistemic humility is not going to happen.

***
Other relevant links
Nick Bostrom’s computer simulation theory is relevant to this post. A flurry of links have appeared on the subject of a simulated universe. See:

I touched on the subject of a simulated cosmos here (with tongue in cheek!):

David Deutsch is good on the subject of Physics and Computation: He is developing a theory of physics that only makes recourse to the constraints on computation, an indication of the superset generality of computation. See here:
Endnotes
1) A computer needs to be instantiated by some kind of law and disorder regime, but because computation is a concept that is independent of the exact computing model instantiating it, then the precise nature of the instantiating regime of the host computer is not easily accessible to the inner simulacrum. This is because the computer model reifying the host computer is one amongst many possible models and the formal structure of the simulacrum is insensitive to that model. If, like computation, intelligence is a general abstraction this will mean that the nature of the medium reifying the host intelligence is likely to be all but unrecoverable from the inner simulacrum.

2) As with computation one might expect sentience to be reified on some kind of law and disorder medium. The question then arises: Which comes first: Law and disorder or intelligence?  Law and disorder regimes are too simple in structure to be self-explaining – they cannot have the property of aseity.  Since complexity has no apparent upper limit aseity may be hidden in the upper reaches of sentient complexity. It may be wrong  to think in terms of law & disorder causing intelligence, or, vice versa, intelligence causing law and disorder. Law & disorder and sentience  may not proceed one out of the other but of necessity go hand in hand: Viz: Sentience will explain itself in law and disorder terms, but for the elementals of law and disorder to have positivist/experimental meaning the a-priori complexities of conscious cognition are required to host these elementals and give them context.

3) Patterns vs. Causes: In the final analysis our scientific epistemology only ever reveals the pattern of things; that is, science provides us with what is essentially a means of describing the cosmic state of affairs. In fact we find that many of the patterns the cosmos presents us with are amenable to description using algorithms (what I refer to as “law”) and statistics (what refer to as “disorder”) - hence my use of the phrase “law and disorder”. The concept of “cause” is really a special case term that is usually applied when a pattern can be described with a “deterministic” algorithm that computes the pattern in relatively short time. (Although one could say that a quantum event has been “caused” by randomness - i.e. a disordered pattern - this usage would probably be considered as rather strained).  “Causation”, in my view, is very much a subset category within more general categories of pattern description. It is with the foregoing in mind that I am uneasy about William Lane Craig’s and the HID community’s stress on the causal role of God in creation. This view of God favours the assignment of God to the wrong logical category; that is, as an ancillary homunculus source of causation rather than as an embracing substrate.

4) How Paul Nelson is viewed at Sandwalkhttp://sandwalk.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/paul-nelson-is-confused.html

Sunday, December 09, 2012

Config Space via Mathematical Impressionism. Part 1

Post 11/03/13 Clarifications added

In my posts on evolution I have often talked about “configuration space”. By “configuration space” I am referring the set of all possible configurations of atoms/particles consistent with our physical regime. In this post I’m going to attempt to give this concept further clarification; further clarification but not complete clarification. This post is an impressionist’s “first parse” based on mathematical intuition rather than mathematical rigor, with the hope that in time a fuzzy picture will eventually give way to something of higher definition. I have doubts, however, that the picture will sharpen up much more because I have feeling that we are dealing with a subject that will not fully reduce to mathematics human beings find tractable; biology, I feel, is destined to remain narrative intense.

***

Given a class of configurations then the mathematical problem can be posed of how to count these configurations. Counting objects requires one to organize these objects into a sequence. In fact many computational problems involve tracking through a set of objects in sequence and this raises the question of how one constructs this sequence. A very natural way of organizing configurations is to juxtapose configurations that are separated by a small increment of change. For example, two binary configurations that only have a one bit difference would be adjacent to one another. This idea of bringing together configurations associated by incremental differences underlines an important fact: The operation of counting imposes a one dimensional sequence on a naturally multidimensional object: Configuration’s separated by small increments of change form a network of objects where each configuration is linked to a large number of near neighbours and not just two neighbours as is imposed by a simple counting operation. It is with this network view of configuration space in mind that I will later be adding a cautionary note when we use my proposed categorization of configurations based on the graph I present and explain below.

***

In the above graph the horizontal axis, S, represents some kind of size dimension of a configuration; for example, for a binary sequence this would simply be the number of cells in the sequence.  The vertical axis, Z, represents the number of physically possible configurations for a given size. Because Z is a number that, generally speaking, is going to be immense I've carried out the common practice of taking the Log of Z. This practice also has the useful side effect of turning products into sums so that the addition of parts to a system is also additive as far as the value of Log Z is concerned.

The line I have labelled  L0 represents the increase in the total number of logically possible configurations as we increase the size of the system. I have shown L0 as a straight line because on taking the Log of Z we usually find that Log Z, as a function of S, is approximately linear (The actual expression is often “S Log S” which is approximately linear). Superimposed on this graph are other straight lines, labeled L1 L2,…Ln whose meaning I will explain below. 

The line L0, as I have said above, is the Log of all the logically possible configurations as a function of configuration size S. In fact it is possible to arrange a 1 to 1 map between each point below the Lline in the Log Z-S plane and each configuration represented by a unique point below L0. Thus our graph above effectively counts and arranges the possible configurations by means of this 1 on 1 map.

The line, L0 enumerates configurations of all types. What we now need to do is to further organise this counting method using the concept of "disorder". In what follows I’m assuming we know what “disorder” means. (I have written a lengthy private paper on this subject, a subject I will not be going into here) . To this end we start by introducing the line L1, such that the points between L1 and the S axis map on a 1 to 1 basis to the configurations that are classed as very highly ordered (that is, of very low disorder). For example, simple periodic configurations would classify as highly ordered; a configuration with a repeating pattern such as 10010010001…. would be included in the enumeration defined by L1.  I have shown L1  as a straight line that increases with S; an indication that the number of highly ordered configurations increases exponentially with S. 

High order isn't something that suddenly cuts out; rather it fades as configurations become more complex in pattern. To represent this we imagine the Log Z-S plane be divided up into bands using lines L2, L3, ….Ln as shown above, where each line is separated from its two neighbours by the same increment in Log Z. The bands bounded by  L2, L3, ….Ln respectively represent regions of configurations of increasing disorder. Using this banding system means that the Log Z axis doubles up to give an indication of disorder as well as numbers of configurations.  Therefore, if we take a particular configuration of a given size it can, by virtue of its level of disorder, be placed somewhere below the L0 line, in one of the regions bounded by the lines L2, L3, ….Ln.

The vertical width between the bands demarked by L1,L2, ….L is a log value of the number of configurations of a given size in the respective band. Because this value is a logarithm of a configuration count, it implies that when  this value is translated to a literal count by taking the inverse log, it increases exponentially as we move through the bands L1,L2, to Ln. This fact brings out an important feature of disorder; namely, that the number of configurations associated with a particular value of disorder increases steeply with increasing disorderAn interesting corollary of the steep increase in configuration count as a function of disorder is that when disorder is at a maximum then as system size increases the number of maximally disordered configurations tends toward the total possible configurations as expressed by  L0
***
Some Quasi-Axioms
I will be using the Log Z-S plane to consider evolution, but I can’t take this consideration much further without some further assumptions. The following assertions are too high level to be called axioms, but as we are dealing with a very high level phenomenon we can get a good head start by making some shrewd high level guesses as per the 4 points below:

Definition

Living structures have powers of self-repair and reproduction; or using a catch-all term powers of “self-perpetuation”.

"Axioms"

1. The level of complexity required for self-perpetuation is going to position living configurations in a band intermediate between high and low order.

2. The set of self-perpetuating structures is going to be of “vanishingly” small size when compared to the set of all configurations

3. The larger a configuration becomes (i.e. increasing S) then the greater the improbability of it forming spontaneously; (that is, of it forming without precursors). This looks to be a consequence of the assumption of equal a-priori probabilities amongst configs. In fact the probability of spontaneous formations is likely to be some decaying exponential term that looks something like  "A exp [-B S]" where A and B are constants

4. If we take a given configuration C1 separated from another configuration C2 by d changes then the probability of C1 morphing spontaneously into C2 is likely to be a decaying exponential of d; that is,      the probability of a “saltation” leap being made from one to the other will have a mathematical form that looks something like the expression "A exp[-B d]" where A and B are constants.  This assumption is closely related to assumption 3.

The foregoing, then, summarizes the model I use and will be using when discussing the evolutionary question.

Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Fundies, Cultists, Conspiracy Theorists and Right Wing Politics

Below I've posted another of the email shots I receive periodically from  the right-wing magazine, Townhall. I signed up to this magazine  some years ago in order to get an insight into their thinking. This latest email advertised a novel by conspiracy theorist and Mormon Glen Beck. It's another indication of how the conspiracy theorists, the extreme right, the fundamentalists and cult/sectarian Christianity have blended to produce a very toxic mix in American politics. This post is part of my study of conspiracy theory a subject I have touched on in the following posts:


Especially watch that third link of mine above: It's about an email from Townhall that actually dabbled in the fears surrounding the Mayan Calendar inspired end-of-world rumours, rumours that are rapidly coming up to their sell-by-date of 21st December. Some parts of America look as though they are under the influence of cranks and crackpots.  This is  bad news for the West which looks to America for leadership.  I notice that the German magazine Spiegel is also worried. (See: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/divided-states-of-america-notes-on-the-decline-of-a-great-nation-a-865295.html).  The trouble is that China, a possible successor to America, is too ill-prepared for democracy and the open society to be an acceptable world leader.

******



Glenn Beck is Back!

Get Glenn Beck's "Agenda 21" FREE with Townhall Magazine!

Sustainable development. Population control. One-world government. The United Nations' Agenda 21 is very real and a cause for concern to those who worry about the infringement of national sovereignty and liberty. Exposing the worst case scenario of Agenda 21 through a fictional portrayal of a futuristic dystopia is renowned conservative icon Glenn Beck. In his latest book, just released this week, Beck examines a troubling UN program through a lens that only he could pull off successfully.
Great deal! Get "Agenda 21" FREE with 1 year of Townhall Magazine!


Eighteen-year-old Emmeline is a member of the Republic, formerly known as the United States of America. She lives to serve the UN led program, Agenda 21. There is no representation, court system, president, or individual liberty in the Republic. Creating sustainable, clean energy and producing offspring for the continuation of society are the only goals of the suppressed population. People live under tight controls and are constantly being watched by the Gatekeepers, the overlords of their existence. The disappearance of individuals runs rampant and food and water are strictly rationed. What is this world that Emmeline lives in? Is there any hope? In Agenda 21 Emmeline seeks to find some answers when she is finally pushed too far.

Great deal! Get "Agenda 21" FREE with 1 year of Townhall Magazine!


 If you're a fan of Glenn Beck then you need to read his latest masterpiece. If you read "The Overton Window" then you know how much of a page turner Beck produces. As one of the most read and influential authors and media personalities, Glenn Beck knows how to expose very real possibilities in an imaginative way. "Agenda 21" is sure to be another bestseller and the subject of many water cooler conversations in the coming months.Townhall Magazine has acquired a small number of this hot selling book. For a very limited time you can get the hottest book with the best conservative publication in print today, Townhall Magazine! Order now!

Great deal! Get "Agenda 21" FREE with 1 year of Townhall Magazine!


Don't miss out on this great deal! Order Townhall Magazine today!

Fresh. Intelligent. Conservative. -- Townhall Magazine.


**********

Townhall Magazine is exclusively in print and coverage features investigative journalism, in-depth reporting, heavily researched analysis, interviews with the heavy hitters and powerful exposes--all exclusive to the magazine.

No other magazine offers you this brilliant combination of smart, conservative, in-depth reporting and opinion that truly reflects your values.


Townhall Magazine is taking "conservative magazines" to new heights with its investigative reporting and stories, conservative humor, photography, culture, and commentary from your favorites.

Keep up with Townhall Magazine to get the inside scoop on exclusive interviews and more!