The fourth part of my Thinknet Project can be downloaded from here. Below I reproduce section 11, a section which is about Intelligent Design a subject which is very relevant to this blog as I have posted so much on this contentious question.
The other parts to this series can be picked up here:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/12/thinknet-project-articles.html
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11. A note on Intelligent Design, specified complexity and information creation.
As we saw in the last section Thinknet is way of seeking and selecting
the improbable, given certain input specifications, specifications realized as
consciously stimulated patterns. As with
an internet search a Thinknet search has the potential for returning rare cases
and this equates to improbable cases; that is, cases of high information
The de facto Intelligent Design community often talk about specified complexity and the
impossibility of “natural processes” (sic) creating
information, thereby implying that such are only available to an
intelligent process. It is not always clear just what the de facto IDists mean
by an intelligent process and by specified complexity. Also, it is not
clear why “natural processes” (which for the Christian are processes created,
sustained and managed by a “supernatural” God, so they are hardly “natural”)
can’t create information; after all human brains presumably classify as “natural
processes” and yet they seem to be able to create information.
As we have seen in my Melancholia I
project so-called “natural processes” can
create information, especially if they have an exponentially expanding
parallelism. The reason why macroscopic “natural processes” appear not to be
capable of creating information is because:
a) They don’t often have this expanding parallelism and therefore generate information only slowly with the logarithm of time.
b) They don’t often have a teleological selection structure which clears away generated non-targeted outcomes. Therefore “natural processes” appear not leave the high information targets conspicuously selected.
a) They don’t often have this expanding parallelism and therefore generate information only slowly with the logarithm of time.
b) They don’t often have a teleological selection structure which clears away generated non-targeted outcomes. Therefore “natural processes” appear not leave the high information targets conspicuously selected.
Thinknet on the other hand, has both of these features. Viz:
a) An exponentially expanding parallelism is required to search the complex network of associations.
b) Thinknet has a built-in teleology which leads to the clearing away of outcomes which do not meet the target criteria.
If Thinknet is an indication of the fundamentals of human cognition then
it follows that the human mind is a natural
process which conspicuously creates information and targets it. This is not
say that what we classify as non-intelligent processes don’t create information;
as I have said above, they do, but not conspicuously because in many
non-intelligent processes information is only generated in slow logarithmic
time and also without selection. The latter in particular may explain why atheist world views tend to have
a preference for information symmetry; the many
worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics does entail exponentially expanding parallelism
but it lacks asymmetrical selection of information, a trait which smacks of a
teleologically interested intelligent process; the latter would of course be
unacceptable to many atheists.
The Thinknet simulation does, however, throw some light on de-facto ID’s
so called “specified complexity”. In my
simple Thinknet simulations two stimulated input patterns A and B are used to specify a sought for outcome in a
similar way to an internet search. As we have seen, symbolically this can be
expressed as:
[AB] => C
21.0
Input patterns such as A and B have zero information as they are from
the outset known objects; that is, they have no Shannon “surprisal” value
expressed by an improbability. But from the outset C is an unknown and in fact may be a member of very small class of
objects which fulfill the conditional
specifications A & B. Thus, C may have a high improbability implying that it is a high information
object. The computational complexity of the outcome C is implicit in the symbols “[ ] =>
”. These symbols represent the
search needed to arrive at C. Since a
Thinknet network presents a search problem whose computational complexity is an
exponential function of the network penetration depth, then the operation
symbolized by [ ]=> may
embody a high computational complexity. If this high computational complexity
is actually the case then we can say that C
has a high specified complexity with
respect to the specifications A &
B.
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