Quantum Non-Linearity: Algorithms, Searches, Dualism and (Possibly) Declarative Computation. Part I

Saturday, May 09, 2015

Algorithms, Searches, Dualism and (Possibly) Declarative Computation. Part I

Western Dualism just doesn't make sense..

In this post on Panda’s Thumb Joe Felsenstein and Tom English continue the work of challenging the de facto Intelligent Design movement. This latest series of mine is going to be all but a rerun of my previous posts on Felsenstein and Dembski which can be read here and here. However, in this latest post on Panda’s thumb Felsenstein and English (FE for short) address a more recent paper by Intelligent Design theorists William Dembski, Winston Ewert, and Robert J. Marks II (DEM for short). FE have done a lot of hard work in not only understanding and explaining DEM's results but also helping their readers appreciate the status of their work and its limits. I trust FE’s expertise enough to proceed without reading DEM. This saves me a lot of time and brain strain, so many thanks to FE for their very competent efforts.

Let me say this to start with: As I have said before I have great respect for someone like William Dembski who seems to be one of the leaders of the de facto ID community. He is a moderate evangelical Christian who by no means stands in the tradition of the nasty heretic hunting fundamentalists that so often grab center stage in the evolution/creation debate and discredit not only themselves but Christians in general. Nevertheless, the polarization that afflicts this subject means that even evangelical moderates like Dembski are positioned very much on the opposite side to the likes of FE. But even though I’m a Christian myself I have to say that I’m not at all sure I could side with the dualistic God of the Gaps philosophy which seems to be the habitual mode of thought behind the de facto ID community; in fact, my observations suggest that this community are bound to interpret DEM in terms of God of the Gaps ID. In contrast FE are atheists but nevertheless as Westerners they will inevitably share a Western dualist conception of God. That is, they will conceive 'God' and 'natural forces' as two very distinct categories. Of course, FE as atheists have done away with the uneasy and tense relationship between God and 'natural forces' by denying that there is any such thing as 'God'. Consequently they obviate the problem of two classical categories that don’t sit well together. This is not to say, of course, that their atheistic monism harmonizes with our deepest religious impulses.

Although I would ultimately take issue with the philosophy underlying the de facto ID movement, I nevertheless believe that not only are DEM’s results mathematically sound, but that they also present an enigma. Viz: Why should the world behave in such an ordered fashion as to have the capability of generating life in so short a time? DEM's work suggests that unconstrained/unbiased/random 'searches' simply can't get the required results quick enough. So, the debate really revolves round the question of the enigmatic organization of a cosmos that must, it seems, be very evolution friendly (I’m using the word 'evolution' here in the very general sense of life generating). But on this question I probably have more in common with FE’s monism than the de facto ID community's residual Western dualism; for like FE I find myself committed to the scientific endeavor of finding out just what it is about 'matter' which gives it that providential fruitfulness referred to by Sir John Polkinghorne, a fruitfulness which means that the cosmos has generated the complex organized structures we call life. In effect I reject the 'explanatory filter' epistemic of the defacto ID movement when it is used theologically; for this epistemic superimposes on the debate a sharp distinction between sentience and matter, thereby bringing about a false dichotomy between God and 'natural forces'. This binary category has the effect of curtailing investigations into the proactive fruitfulness of God’s world of matter by attributing living structures to the inscrutable “interventions” of an unknown intelligence, unknown in power, motive and method. The upshot is that de facto ID is not unlike the science of archeology; a science which assesses material artifacts and tries to guess the motives and methods of human ancestors. But as archeologist Francis Pryor has said, archaeology is not an exact science. And so it is with de facto ID, except that ID is likely to be an even softer science than archeology; for the sentience envisaged to “intervene” in the natural world is far more alien than human!

…to be continued.

Relevant links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/misplaced-concreteness-theology-of.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/does-intelligent-design-make-testable.html

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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

Saturday, May 09, 2015

Algorithms, Searches, Dualism and (Possibly) Declarative Computation. Part I

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION