Quantum Non-Linearity: 2001 Space IDyssey

Thursday, December 10, 2015

2001 Space IDyssey

The de facto IDists I've come across believe the configurations of life have been patched in as might an artifact against a backdrop "natural landscape" and therefore life is regarded as entirely anomalous against the background physics of the Cosmos.

The following post has recently appeared on Panda's Thumb. It's a comment by Nick Matzke on the debate between Panda's Thumb posters Joe Felsenstein and Tom English (FE) and IDists William Dembski, Winston Ewart and Robert Marks (DEM).

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Game over for antievolutionary No Free Lunch argument

By Nick Matzke on December 4, 2015 10:58 PM | 121 Comments

This has been obvious from the start, but as far as I know it has taken 10 years for the ID guys to finally admit it. Winston Ewert writes at the Discovery Institute blog:

However, Felsenstein and English note that a more realistic model of evolution wouldn’t have a random fitness landscape. Felsenstein, in particular, argues that “the ordinary laws of physics, with their weakness of long-range interactions, lead to fitness surfaces much smoother than white-noise fitness surfaces.” I agree that weak long-range interactions should produce a fitness landscape somewhat smoother than random chance and this fitness landscape would thus be a source of some active information.

GAME OVER, MAN. GAME OVER! The whole point of Dembski et al. invoking “No Free Lunch” theorems was to argue that, if evolutionary searches worked, it meant the fitness function must be designed, because (logical jump herein) the No Free Lunch theorems showed that evolutionary searches worked no better than chance, when averaged over all possible fitness landscapes.

Emergency backup arguments to avoid admitting complete bankruptcy below the fold, just so I’m not accused of leaving out the context

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We disagree in that I do not think that is going to be a sufficient source of active information to account for biology. I do not have a proof of this. But neither does Felsenstein have a demonstration that it will produce sufficient active information. What I do have is the observation of existing models of evolution. The smoothness present in those models does not derive from some notion of weak long-range physics, but rather from telelogy as explored in my various papers on them.

As always, the ID objections to evolution, when stripped of pseudo-technical camouflage, boil down to “I just don’t buy it because (gut feeling).”

See also: recent PT posts and Jason Rosenhouse at EvolutionBlog.

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FE did a good job of demonstrating the plausibility (but admittedly not "proof" as Ewart points out) of the idea that by means of fitness surfaces physics provides the information needed for evolution to occur. Although like Ewart I have reservations about fitness surfaces (doubts which I express here) I don't have an in-principle objection to the notion that physics (even if has to be modified) is implicated as the agency of biological information. This is where I differ from the view of the average IDist. They are likely to have an in-principle objection to any idea that physics could be the providential means by which evolution has been directed (And for standard evolution to work it must be channeled). But for the IDists I have featured in this blog the default view appears to be that the information for life has been patched-in ad hoc by God (and let's make no bones about just what de facto ID really means by "intelligence"). This divine ad hoc activity is not dissimilar to the way the intelligence behind the 2001 Space Odyssey monolith patched-in an artifact on the otherwise "natural" lunar landscape. The 2001 Space Odyssey ID paradigm treats biological structures as bolt on extras in the cosmic scene, extras that can only be explained by the activity of an auxiliary intelligence, much like alien artifacts. This view is at least in part driven by the explanatory filter epistemic. This epistemic leads to a very suspect theology where God works on the natural order rather than in the natural order.

There's not enough information in the above quotes to know whether Ewart's take on teleology leads him away from this god-of-the-gaps ad hocery or not. However, I suspect that behind his rejection of FE's work lies de facto ID's standard false dichotomy of God vs. Natural forces. God works the way he works: If God works through the physics of fitness surfaces (leaving aside my doubts) then that's the way he works and we have to get used to it; I see no point in apposing biologists simply for the sake of it.

Relevant links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/intelligent-designs-2001-space-odyssey.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

Thursday, December 10, 2015

2001 Space IDyssey

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION