NAID pundit William Dembski on AI

Is AI taking off!

I notice that North American Intelligent Design guru William Dembski has been recently writing about Artificial Intelligence on his blog - see these links:

ChatGPT Is Becoming Increasingly Impressive in Real Time – Bill Dembski

 Inferring the Best Explanation via Artificial Intelligence – Bill Dembski

ChatGPT on Intelligent Design and the Origin of Life – Bill Dembski

One of these articles also appeared on the NAID website "Evolution News"; see here.  From a quick perusal of his articles, it seems that Dembski is impressed by ChatGPT and now has a high view of AI possibilities. Like myself he would probably maintain that AI is only a simulation and has no consciousness*, but I'd be interested to know if like myself he would be prepared to accept that human intelligence can be simulated algorithmically. If so that would set him apart from NAID guru Eric Hedin who appears to poo poo any thought that AI can be anything other than a glorified "printer" that churns out and at best rearranges information that has been generated by the "real" intelligence of human beings. 

I think I'll be having a closer look at Dembski's posts.

* To generate consciousness we would have to use matter in the way the biological brain uses matter - see here for my guesses on this subject

Climate Change Discussion: Climate Alarmism vs. Climate Complacency

 

Me standing on a granite tor on Bodmin Moor in 2006. The climate

has weathered these fantastic forms over millions of years. 

I recently had an email discussion on the subject of climate change with James Knight over a period of a few weeks. James published an edited copy of the contents of this discussion on his blog and then added further comments of his own.  This means that the email discussion went through five iterations, with James' edited and supplemented copy on his blog being the fifth iteration. Of course, should I take up the challenge and respond to his blog post with its extra content then that would be the sixth iteration. 

I thought I'd better make available the full original discussion (i.e. up to the 4th iteration) which can be accessed here.  At some stage I might get back to James in reply to his fifth iteration. However, I have to confess my interest in the subject began to wane as I find physics and mathematics far more exciting and, if truth be known, much easier to handle. Climatology by itself is an interesting subject as it's all about systems theory, but it is the theory of very complex systems. Climatologists are respected scientists but no doubt the sheer complexity of the system they are dealing with makes it difficult to arrive at firm conclusions. But that's nothing compared to the chaos of politico-economic thought which deals with how humanity should react to climatology. It is here that huge vested interests and valued judgments make themselves felt as left and right extremists exploit a climatological scare story to agitate for social unrest with the aim of realizing their particular socio-political vision. 

James often uses the term "climate alarmism", an emotive term used by those skeptical of the predictions about dangerous levels of climate change. Climate alarmism as an emotive term is unlikely to be a monopole, and so in order to express its opposite pole I have coined the equally emotive term climate complacency.  A less emotive term is climate concern. But from the perspective of the politically polarized extremes climate concern looks to be either a form of climate alarmism or climate complacency depending on which polarity floats your boat. 

At one point in the discussion James said I had constructed a strawman of his position. I'm very glad he saw it like that because that means he didn't take ownership of these strawmen.

Nevertheless, it was a fruitful discussion and, many thanks to James, got me out of my intellectual comfort zone for a while: I publish the introduction to Iteration No 4 below. It remains unfinished business as far as I'm concerned and iteration 6 calls. But things are moving so fast with the atmosphere that I have a feeling the climate itself will have the last word! 

INTRODUCTION

The eruption of Santorini circa 1200 BC probably help bring the otherwise rich Minoan civilisation on Crete to its knees. That they were quantitatively rich was no help in this one off disaster. What they needed was to be the right kind of rich: that is, to be rich in the kind of technology that would help proof them against the tsunami caused by the Minion eruption. Likewise a blind libertarian market may find itself helpless in the face of one-off environmental challenges because with a sample of zero a blinkered market learns nothing and simply isn’t ready with the right technology. Efficiency in current technological needs will be an irrelevance.

In my opinion a realistic portion of the capital generated by the market must be invested in blues skies research which looks for possible threats to civilisation (e.g. Rogue asteroids, super volcanoes, tsunamis etc.) and investigates how to respond to them. Hence, the quantitative riches generated by free trade must be supplemented by qualitative  technological riches which facilitate proactive environmental control. Proactive environmental control entails extending the human environmental bubble rather than sitting passively in the bubble we already control thinking that as long as we have stacks of cash to defend that bubble we are OK. But in actual fact the history of human civilisation is one of proactively extending the environmental bubble humanity controls; this started with the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture.

I have little optimism in a wait-and-see policy which hopes that the unforetold riches of the future will make civilisation environment proof in the face of threatening one-off environmental challenges.  The libertarian blinkers must come off and a passive market must become a proactive one; that is, one that is aware of the technological changes needed for the next stage in the extension of civilisation’s environmental bubble. Therefore the market must have a qualitative vision toward the end of proactively extending environmental control and not just a quantitative vision of being rich in the abstract.

A major worry I have about capitalism is its proneness to the social cancers of Marxism & Fascism, products of the social discontent it seems to generate. We must view the market as a tool of humanity and not an unaccountable process that humanity must submit to at all costs: Therein lies the problem, however: Humanity doesn’t readily submit to a blinkered market and the result is social disaffection and discontent. It may therefore be necessary to cool the market down to help freeze out the inequalities, resentments and alienation that are fertile ground for the growth of Marxism and Fascism. It’s all but useless to attempt to convince the discontented, the disaffected and the alienated that the capitalism of the past has made them as rich as they are currently: Yes, in times past they might have worn rags, suffered from cold and gone hungry, but moderns who can only get a cut out of societal wealth by going down to the foodbank and get help to pay bills don’t feel rich; instead they may feel humiliated by the one way dependency – let’s remember here that once the base of Maslow’s hierarchy is secured the feeling of being rich is a sense of well-being  conveyed by one’s position  relative to the rest of society. In short feeling rich is about social status;  that is how one  measures up against the people of society as a whole.  Therefore, it is also futile to tell the poor that free-for-all capitalism will make their children’s children stinking rich.

Of course this doesn’t mean we should dispose of capitalism and the market but it does mean that political & social solutions are needed in order to stabilise an otherwise socially rickety system which could find itself teetering on the edge of the Marxist and/or fascist revolutionary abyss.

Humanity has a tense relationship with its systems of government; probably because government is at best hard put to it to promote justice and wealth among its citizens, and at worst is the seat of despotic power. It is no surprise therefore that both Marxists and libertarians seek to replace government with a folksy idyll where the trappings of state and government are minimised. But the Marxist and libertarian way, after the overthrow of the status quo are liable to leave a power vacuum that would attract autocratic rule. Marxism and libertarianism may start out by going in the opposite directions of collectivism vs individualism but they end up arriving at the same place – the dictatorship of the few.

The question of the role of market and government in the face of threatening environmental changes seems just as murky as when I started considering it. Yes there are lots uncertainties and hand waving associated with those climate models, but the uncertainties and hand waving are even greater for those who are trying to work out the implications of the climate projections for the notoriously difficult world of politico-socio-economic policy adoption, whether those policies be to impose emission targets or to adopt live-and-let-live libertarianism or, which seems most likely, something in between.

Relevant links:

Minoan eruption - Wikipedia

Welcoming the End of Our World - John Templeton Foundation

North American Intelligent Design's response to my 27 June & 2 July posts. Part 2

The default thinking of the North American ID community leaves us feeling that it's a choice between Intelligent design and Evolution. But that science's accounts are effectively succinct descriptions which exploit cosmic organization means that the question is not a choice of opposites as the NAID community and some atheists make out. In one sense there is no such thing as "natural forces".

 

In this post I'm going to comment on the following post on "Evolution News" by Eric Hedin:

Physics, Information Loss, and Intelligent Design

This is a continuation of my last post. which followed up the posts here & here. It addresses in particular Eric Hedin's claim to what he believes to be a generalized version of the second law of thermodynamics based on quantum decoherence. 

ERIC HEDIN In an earlier article, I showed that information ratchets do not exist in nature. The most that any mechanistic system can do is to reproduce the information already available within the system. Printing presses reproduce the typeset information placed in the mechanism by human operators. ChatGPT simply accesses and rearranges information originated by humans and uploaded on the Internet. No new information is produced in either case.

In a recent article, I introduced the physical concept of the generalized second law of thermodynamics, as a governing principle consistent with the Law of Conservation of Information, which William Dembski formulated with the claim that natural causes cannot increase complex specified information in a closed system over time. Here, I’ll seek to provide an explanation of the physics behind the generalized second law — a rationale for why natural processes destroy information.

MY COMMENT: As we saw in my last post Hedin did not succeed in showing that information ratchets do not exist in the created order; part of his problem was that he didn't tell us what he meant by "information". However, in the above it looks as though he's thinking of the so-called principle of the "conservation of information". Accordingly, he's of the opinion that unless the mysteries of intelligent agency are invoked God's creation can't create information (although Hedin believes information can be destroyed). Heuristically speaking this rule of thumb often works, but it is not always true; that is, as a catch-all fundamental principle the conservation of information is false as we shall see.

The mechanistic systems we are familiar with do in fact create information in the compelling common sense meaning of the term. A variety of natural systems create complex chaotic patterns whose elements are new to the cosmos and what would by any common sense meaning of the term be new information to human beings. Systems that generate random sequences are by the Shannon definition of the term creating information all the time (See part 1).

It is misleading to claim that computer systems merely rearrange information: They can in a very compelling sense do far more than that: Starting with the relatively simple pattern of an algorithm and given enough time and space very complex patterns can be generated. As far as the cosmos is concerned these patterns may well be entirely new forms: that is, new information. Trivially it could be claimed that for deterministic algorithms the information eventually generated is implicit in the starting conditions: But because any given pattern has at least one simple algorithm which will generate it given enough time and space, then on that basis it would trivially follow that no finite pattern (including finite stretches of disordered patterns) would classify as new information! What we have then is a situation where, whilst it is true that something isn't coming from nothing, nevertheless a lot of something is coming out of relatively little. Ergo, mechanical and so-called "natural forces" create information. 

My conclusion is that it is a misrepresentation to claim that neither nature nor computers are simply "printing" information they already have and at best are tweaking its arrangement a little. But if we allow nature and computers to tweak information, then we can ask ourselves what would be the result of billions of tweaks? The result would in fact be completely new configurations reified from the platonic realm: That is new information, especially so if we are starting from bland and simple initial conditions and relatively small algorithms.

In deterministic generating systems, natural and computational, the information generated can be regarded as implicit from the beginning in the sense that it exists in unreified form in the platonic realm. Hence this implicit information needs to be reified before it can be claimed to be part the real world, and in that sense the information is being created. Natural systems and computer systems are a means doing this. But nothing comes from nothing and these information creating sources have their origins and continued sustenance in God and/or human intelligence. 

As I said in this post and proved here, in parallel computation information is created according to:

Ic = Smin + log (Tmin)

Where Ic is the configurational information content, Smin is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration with a minimum number of execution steps of Tmin. As I have said before it is the slow generation of information with time (The "log" term above) which has given rise to the opinion that information cannot be generated by natural and mechanical means. But the above relation only applies to parallel processing; if the generating system employs a system of expanding parallelism (e.g. a quantum computer) such exponential systems make short work of the log term, a term which then becomes a term linear in time. 

I will be examining Hedin's so-called generalised second law of thermodynamics below. This proves to be nothing but hand-waving. 

ERIC HEDIN: What about the less physical concept of information? How can we physically explain the relentless loss of information by natural processes? Information seems to be a nonphysical concept, but in our universe, it is stored in specific arrangements of physical states of matter. An intelligent mind can recognize specific arrangements of matter (such as molecules of ink that form letters on a page) that convey a meaningful message. In a different context, biochemists can recognize particular sequences of nucleotide bases in a genome that code for a functional protein.

MY COMMENT:  Firstly, as we saw in part 1, we need not talk vaguely about arrangements of matter which an intelligent mind can recognize as meaningful; Hedin is hand-waving here. The configurations of matter we are thinking of have a very practical meaning: Viz: they are ordered systems which are capable of self-maintenance and self-multiplication; in that sense the functionality we are thinking of is a clear concept. However, one thing we can agree on is this: Such configurations are at once both complex and highly organised;  which means that as a class those self-perpetuating organic structures have a very low statistical weight and therefore a very low unconditional probability. If our cosmos is only a parallel processor, then such configurations would never come about in the life-time of the cosmos if naked chance ruled. To enhance the probability of such configurations to a practical level would require the contingency of the right kind of physical regime to raise the conditional probability of life to a practical level. Where parallel processing is the norm the conservation of information does approximately hold. 

My affirmation that the conservation of probability is a good approximation in a parallel processing context doesn't necessarily come to the rescue of the NAIDs. The irony here is that the possibility of an omniscient omnipotent Creator/Designer leaves them with an unknown. For we couldn't put it past an all-powerful all-knowing Deity to not have provisioned the cosmos with enough information to generate life with a high probability. As NAID William Dembski himself has shown, the conservation of information doesn't of itself rule out standard evolutionary gradualism. We would be very presumptuous to be absolutely certain that the cosmos hasn't been divinely provisioned with the prerequisite information to generate life. But because the NAID community affect to keep up the gloss of being a scientific society and not a theological society their crypto-theism makes them uneasy in admitting the implications of Christian theism which posits at the outset, a priori, the existence of an all-powerful all-knowing Deity: The implications are that some kind of evolution may well have been reified from the platonic world into our cosmos.

*** 

 In my first post of this two-part series, I wrote:

Consider this writer [Eric Hedin] on the NAID website "Evolution News"; he dreams of a principle (in fact he thinks it's been found!) which he refers to as the generalized version of the second law......

In Hedin's first post he doesn't explain this generalized version of the second law but in the post we are considering here he does attempt to explain it as follows:

ERIC HEDIN: According to the traditional second law, under the influence of natural processes, the surrounding environment brings about a transfer of heat from hot to cold, or a mixing of constituents, such as the mixing of molecules of perfume throughout the air of the room. Natural processes will also cause a mixing of information-bearing physical objects with the environment. In quantum computing research, this loss of information to the surrounding environment results in what is known as decoherence, meaning that “information has leaked into the environment in an uncontrollable fashion.”

Linking Information and Observer: All the information that can be known by an observer about a system of any kind is contained within the quantum mechanical wavefunction of the system. My apologies for bringing up quantum mechanics, but its relevance here is that it serves as the link between the information of a system (anything from a single atom to a complex biomolecule to a macroscopic object) and an observer. Unless the wave function of the system is completely isolated from any environmental influence, it will suffer decoherence (loss of information) with the passage of time. In one sense, the wavefunction spreads out into the environment, meaning that the observer will have greater and greater uncertainty as to the state of the system as time goes on. The physical interaction of atoms or photons uncompromisingly causes this effect, with its resulting loss of information.

 MY COMMENT: Undisturbed quantum systems settle to an eigenstate. An eigenstate is a kind of equilibrium or quasi-static wavefunction with a precise energy; it's analogous to a volume containing a gas which eventually settles to a uniform & precise density and pressure. But when a quantum system in an eigenstate is disturbed (or "perturbed" as it is usually expressed) by interaction with a thermodynamic environment the "coherent" eigenstate becomes mixed with other possible eigenstates: The wavefunction then loses it stasis and becomes a mix of wavefunctions and is no longer stable; to use the standard terminology the original static wavefunction "decoheres".  This decoherence is a particular problem in quantum computing which depends on the stasis of "qubit" eigenstates. 

There is an analogy here with a classical system of two ideal non-thermodynamic bodies orbiting one another in a perfect vacuum under the influence of classical gravity: For an ideal classical system with no thermodynamic randomness such a system will continue in the same state forever. But in the real world any ideal classical system is likely to be coupled to the "imperfect" world of thermodynamics and this linkage would mean the "ideal" system would then undergo perturbations and would randomly walk into another state, if only slowly; from a human point of view the error bars of the unknown then start to widen. These error bars of human knowledge will continue to expand in the absence of information updates that pull us back into the know and keep the Gaussian error envelopes in the vicinity of the actual state of the system. 

The thing to note here is that we have assumed thermodynamics from the outset: Likewise the behaviour of  quantum systems when in contact with a thermodynamic reality tells us no more than we already know; namely, that the world is thermodynamic and that if you want to preserve the integrity and of an array of  binary eigenstates (= qubits) and stop the array  becoming a mix of other eigenstates  by keeping it isolated, you've got your work cut out: Like all real systems a qubit system loses  its ideal state when in contact with the thermodynamic reality around it. 

But decoherence doesn't stop crystals forming or stop the reproductive systems of life working or stop the self-perpetuating systems of life from doing their job. The reason why is because these systems have the physical analogue of information updates that keep these systems within the requisite orbits of self-sustenance: The physical analogue of those information updates are the potential wells or interactional hooks/forces which have a strong tendency to keep ordered systems in place. 

In the above quote Hedin has talked about how a quantum system's interaction with a thermodynamic environment will entail a slow degradation of an observer's knowledge of that system. This is a misrepresentation. In fact, if the observer knows the form of the interactional perturbation, he can then infer how the new mixed wavefunction develops. So, as a consequence of a known perturbation the wavefunction has passed from one known form that is a single eigenstate to another known form that is a mix of a large number of eigenstates. 

All waves states, whether mixed or eigenstates, obey the uncertainty relation:

The square of a momentum value returns an energy value; if this energy value has the precise value pertaining to a single eigenstate then it implies that the magnitude of the corresponding momentum also has a precise value; that is the uncertainty in momentum magnitude is minimized. Therefore, from the uncertainty relation above it follows that under conditions of precise energy the uncertainty in position is maximized. So, when an isolated quantum system interacts with a thermodynamic system its momentum becomes more uncertain, but its position is more localized: In short, increasing certainty in position is traded for greater momentum/energy uncertainty. The lesson is that as a result of an interaction with a thermodynamic system loss of information about the exact energy of the quantum system is compensated by a gain in the information about position. In Hedin's quote above we see that to suite his polemic he has only talked about "loss of information" in energy/momentum but not balanced it with the corresponding and complementary gain in information about position. 

Pure quantum systems are reversible and don't provide Hedin with a fundamental generalized version of the second law: That is, they cannot provide us with that well-know thermodynamic arrow of time where total entropy always increases. It is only the giveness of thermodynamic laws which provide the arrow of time. Moreover, as I've already remarked, in his reference to the loss of information from quantum systems Hedin has neglected to tell us that this is accompanied by a corresponding increase in information. Hedin is simply telling us something we already know about; namely, the effect of thermodynamic systems on quantum systems, systems that are constrained by the complementary uncertainty relation which trades information about one variable for information about another. 

So, there is really nothing at all startling with what Hedin has to tell us. It changes nothing and certainly doesn't provide us with a more fundamental second law than the one we already have. A clue as to the real polemical motive behind Hedin's argument is here:  "My apologies for bringing up quantum mechanics": In bringing up quantum mechanics Hedin has muddied the waters. In that sense it's reminiscent of fundamentalist Jason Lisle's ASC model of cosmology by which he side-steps the age of the universe and like Hedin's reference to quantum mechanics it will confound their benighted followers in their respective communities, especially those who depend on the community's gurus for instruction; it's technical bafflegab which will wow the uninitiated NAID rank and file.

ERIC HEDIN: Some might argue that “luck” could result in an opposite outcome, with interactions causing an increase in information (in biochemistry, this would correlate with increased functional complexity). Why couldn’t this happen? Simply because there are always more ways to go wrong than to go right, when considering whether interactions will result in chaos or increased complex specified information.

MY COMMENT: Yes I think we can go along with that; But let's remember again: The cosmos is no ordinary  "natural" object: It's unwarranted and seemingly out of place contingency is the creation of an a priori transcendent intelligence of unimaginable power and Asiety; who can guess what those so-called "natural forces", created, managed & sustained by such an intelligence might achieve in terms of their ability bring forth organisation?

ERIC HEDIN: An increase in information requires not just one right choice (or lucky draw), but a long sequence of correct choices. Luck might happen once, but any gambler knows that if “lucky outcomes” keep happening against the odds, then the game is rigged. A “rigged game” in nature corresponds to a law of physics — in this case, a law causing information to increase over time by natural causes. Such a law cannot really exist, however, since we already have a law of nature that says the opposite. As I mentioned in a recent article, “Theistic Cosmology and Theistic Evolution — Understanding the Difference”:In our study of science, we have found that the laws of nature do not contradict one another. We don’t have laws of nature that only apply piecemeal.

 MY COMMENT: By any common sense standard and by the Shannon definition of the term both "natural" processes and human designed computation machines increase information  as we have seen. I agree with the above paragraph up until and including A “rigged game” in nature corresponds to a law of physics — in this case, a law causing information to increase over time ........   But because of the poverty of his community's conception of nature Hedin starts going astray as soon as he talks about so-called natural causes. As we have seen he hasn't discovered any "natural law" that contradicts evolution least of all a generalized second law of thermodynamics based on decoherence. His efforts here amount some hand-waving around the idea of an observer becoming less and less certain of a system that as a result of its contact with its thermodynamic surroundings is subject to random walk. He then conflates an observer's information with the objective uncertainties of quantum mechanics, when in fact there is a distinction between the state of an observer's knowledge of a system and the objective state of a physical system itself which according to quantum theory has its own uncertainties; but these uncertainties are not to be confused with observer uncertainties. 

Hedin's argument is no advance on the standard second law of thermodynamics, a law which only bars overall entropy decreases in isolated systems without putting a fundamental bar on local increases in the order of subsystems within the overall system.  This doesn't mean to imply that evolution as conventionally understood has actually happened, but it's clear that Hedin and his colleagues continue to fail to find a fundamental law prohibiting evolution. The spongeam may yet exist and Hedin and his community have failed to see the difficultly of the problem that faces them if they wish to bar evolution on the basis of fundamental physics.

Nature is not natural: Its highly contingent laws, patterns and statistics have and are and will continue to be reified out of the platonic realm by the Divine Will. Yes, it is just possible that God is patching organic configurations  directly into nature ad-hoc style but the nested cladistics of life look to me as if some sort of divinely provisioned process is at work that at least looks vaguely like conventional evolution; perhaps via the conditional information of the spongeam or perhaps something more exotic in the realm of expanding parallelism and teleological laws - the latter would essentially entail  that the cosmos is a declarative system of computation. But Hedin and colleagues have in no way proved their case about those divinely provisioned "natural forces" being blind & ineffectual. Hedin has waved hands around and then simply asserts without proof the old NAID canard:

Such a law cannot really exist, however, since we already have a law of nature that says the opposite.

Hedin must try harder. 

ERIC HEDIN: Imagination and Freedom: Only by the action of non-physical intelligence can the natural process of decoherence and information loss be overcome. Information is meaningless apart from a rational mind, meaning the creation of new information requires more than knowledge. Increased information requires imagination and the freedom to creatively design complex outcomes that convey meaning or exhibit function. (See, “Intelligence Is Unnatural, and Why That Matters.”)

The non-physical aspect of our intelligent minds can succeed in producing information because an intelligent mind can imagine a meaningful outcome and act to separate the components of a complex system from their natural mixed state into specific arrangements that actualize that outcome.  This takes work, meaning it requires energy, but not energy alone, since without the guidance of a non-physical mind, energy cannot succeed in increasing information in a closed system.

MY COMMENT: Philosophically speaking I disagree with the typical dualist dichotomy of the physical vs the non-physical. Firstly God created one world (Colossians 1:15ff) and the only substantive dualism I would propose is God vs. everything else. But in any case what gives the so called physial world meaning is that its laws so perfectly organise experience and thinking that a rational solid world presents itself to perception: That is, the physical world is an unintelligible and incoherent idea without the a priori assumption of the presence of a conscious intelligence somewhere. So, yes, information is meaningless without positing a rational perceiving conscious mind. This idealistic philosophy sees the physical world is an aspect of mind and a world created by the Mind of God at that. So, we should not be surprised if that world displays "unnatural" and miraculous properties; science is less a way of "explaining" those properties than it is a way of describing those properties. It is mathematically inevitable that those properties will be highly particular and contingent. 

Clearly the so-called physical world is manifestly & intrinsically miraculous: Decoherence doesn't stop crystal formation and it doesn't stop organisms self-perpetuating and multiplying. These systems work because nature is carefully crafted by God everywhere and everywhen. Whether God has patched living configurations directly into nature over billions of years or has provisioned it with enough information in its laws and fine-tuning to evolve life, or has used an exotic declarative system with expanding parallelism and teleological constraints is the question that has yet to be unequivocally answered; it certainly has not been properly addressed by the NAID community. In fact, if they persist with their "intelligence vs blind natural forces" dualism they will continue to think there is nothing to address. 

Hedin's notion of natural and mechanical systems as printer-like-devices which simply passively pass on information is rubbish.  Mechanical systems and natural systems (which includes human beings) are constantly creating new forms; that is, new information. In spite of the constancy of reproductive templates each human individual is a unique creation where new information has entered the cosmos. That the mechanisms of the cosmos constantly bring forth new information out of the platonic realm should be no surprise to anyone who believes in a sovereign Christian God. But this is something those who affect to present themselves as a purely scientific community with a degenerate view of "natural forces" are loathe to admit. 

ERIC HEDIN: Intelligent design remains the only explanation consistent with the laws of physics for the increasing information content of living systems throughout life’s history on Earth.

 MY COMMENT: Notice here that Hedin makes a distinction between Intelligent Design and the laws of physics:Yes, I agree that an a priori  Intelligent Creator (complex enough to have Aseity) is the only way of making sense of the mathematically necessary contingent bias of the cosmos. In the light of this perception I'm not going to rush to conclude that the physical world is some kind of ineffectual demiurge creator only capable of creating chaos: In assuming their position the NAIDs have taken on board the mindset of our times which frames the question of origins as a God vs. impersonal physical forces dichotomy, an exclusive or between God and physics: In this polarised context atheists are anxious to prove the creative efficacy of those "natural forces" and conversely the NAIDs are committed to proving that those natural forces are "blind" agents.

The NAIDs have also committed themselves to the gnostic notion that human intelligence is a ghost in the machine and cannot be simulated by algorithmic means or be a particular application of the God provisioned material package. I think the reason for this aversion to the idea that humans are an application of the material package is this: If human intelligence is an aspect of the clever use of matter (matter which embraces those enigmatic quantum properties) and we accept that human intelligence is able to create information then it would clear the way for us to propose that other applications of matter, whether some kind of evolution or computation can also create information.

But I know of nothing that the NAIDs have said which means one should commit oneself at all costs to their dualist and quasi-gnostic views.  In so publicly opposing evolution on the basis of the gut-feeling that it elevates natural forces to a god-like demiurge status they have effectively swallowed atheistic categories and have dug themselves into a hole from which they seem incapable of escaping.

North American Intelligent Design's response to my last two posts. Part 1

Unfortunately, the NAID view of Intelligent Design invites
this sort of mockery. They've only got themselves to blame. 

I'm going to critique the following two posts on Evolution News. They are relevant to the points I raised in my last two posts (See here and here). 

Physics, Information Loss, & Intelligent Design | Evolution News

But I must start by criticizing this post:

Is Life an Information Ratchet? | Evolution News

...which is referenced in the first link.

The author of these links, Eric Hedin, hasn't defined exactly what he means by "information" but instead assumes we know what he, and presumably his ID tribe, means by it. For Hedin the connotations of the label "information" are proprietary to him and his NAID tribal group and these meanings can be resorted to at any time by NAID protagonists to undermine attempts to bring down a NAID target of unknown whereabouts. 

***

So, starting with the second link, Hedin writes:

HEDIN: An information ratchet would be some mechanism or process that causes the information content of a system to increase with the passage of time and prevents or limits its decrease. Key to understanding any ratchet mechanism is to grasp that its performance is predetermined by its mechanism

MY COMMENT: This statement is telling us what the average NAID is never expecting to find: A "natural" ratchet which entails an increase in "information"; whatever "information" means in this context. Algorithms do exist which increase "information" in the Shannon meaning of the term. Viz: Simple algorithms (such as binary counting) can be developed which, starting from configurational uniformity, systematically work their way through a gamut of configurations and so eventually arrive at random configurations (See here for a definition of randomness). An observer with no knowledge of the background algorithm would then, on the basis of Shannon's definition of information, see these complex random sequences as having maximum information. (See here for the definition of probability).  On these definitions, then, we would have an example of information being created. The predetermination of these systems is neither here nor there: The appropriately uninitiated observer sees information being created (in the Shannon sense)

HEDIN: Do natural ratchets exist in the physical, non-living world? Examples of natural mechanisms that approach the specific functionality of human-designed ratchets seem to be lacking. We might, however, claim that gravity is a sort of natural ratchet seen on Earth, in that it moves objects down and limits them from moving up. However, its target direction is only generally located, so that material may take any circuitous route in moving to a region of lower elevation, and that region could be anywhere on, or even within the planet.

 While acknowledging the ratchet-like effect of gravity to move objects down (to a lower gravitational potential) we must avoid the error of attributing additional abilities to this natural ratchet-like phenomenon. For example, while gravity can cause rocks to slide down a mountain slope, it cannot assemble those rocks into a castle in the valley. Why not? Simply because the mechanism is not designed to accomplish this task.

MY COMMENT: Firstly, we can say that configurational ratchets do exist in nature: For under the right conditions of temperature, pressure and concentration, crystalline configurations capture atoms which then have a low probability of leaving the structure. In this change the high disorder of a solution of molecules (for example of salt) is changing to one of a highly organized crystal. This doesn't violate the second law because the lower energy of the crystal means it loses heat to the environment which in turn implies that the combined system of crystal and heated environment has a higher statistical weight; that is, the overall entropy of the total system, crystal plus environment, has increased. 

When it comes to the creation of fullerenes, we have a "natural process" which can create relatively sophisticated structures: It would be quite a challenge for humans to design and engineer a system that generates Buckminster structures artificially. It goes to show that the question of whether so-called "natural processes" (sic) have been designed to generate configurations poses itself straight away as soon as we look at nature; in fact even before we start pondering the question of organic configurations. Unfortunately, however, the NAID's flawed explanatory filter imposes a "natural forces" vs "Intelligent Design" dichotomy at this point which means that the filter does not naturally pick up on the possibility of design in the very fabric of reality. This seems to be the result of an affectation in NAID culture to retain the gloss of a "scientific" community by not mentioning "God", a being who transcends the fabric of reality (although "God" is, in fact, implicitly recognized in NAID subtext).  In NAID philosophy the unidentified intelligence (which could be little green men) plays the role of a kind of auxiliary agent of physical causation to be invoked when attempts at explaining configurations in terms of so-called "natural forces" fails. The NAIDs are looking for evidence of direct intelligent action involved in the initial creation of organic configurations. In contrast highly organized crystals are clearly generated by known physical conditions and therefore the NAID explanatory filter classifies them as caused by "natural forces" and not intelligent agency; but for a transcendent theist such as myself, this classification is clearly wrong. 

The NAIDs would be very wary of the suggestion that if a transcendent omniscient omnipotent God can create a cosmos which generates crystals then perhaps he's gone a whole lot further and designed a cosmos which generates life. To admit that the "natural" cosmos may be provisioned to generate life would be a betrayal of the NAID paradigm; namely, that those "natural forces" are "blind" and ineffectual as far as the generation of life is concerned and must be contrasted against the mysteries of "intelligence".  This in, my opinion, may be underrating the provisions of God's creation. 

But to explicitly mention God in a cosmic design context is all but an embarrassment in NAID circles because they affect to style themselves as making a purely scientific point. They are then inexorably drawn by the logic of their precepts to the conclusion that intelligence itself, even in human beings who are manifestly part of the material creation, is somehow transcendent of those so-called "natural forces".  

ERIC HEDIN: Random outcomes of a rockslide might include one slab-shaped rock leaning against another, resembling a lean-to, but any structure with the complexity of stonework typically seen in a castle could never happen within the spacetime limits of our universe. For most people, this is common sense. As Douglas Axe writes in his book, "Undeniable", our design intuition is correct regarding the improbability of functionally coherent outcomes (such as a castle) occurring by chance. For such complex, functional results, the ratio of “correct” outcomes to “incorrect” outcomes is too small to be obtained by any undirected process in a finite universe such as ours.

MY COMMENT: Although it is clear that God's creation is equipped with some sophisticated configurational ratchets which generate things like galaxies, stars, planets, and crystals this is unlikely to satisfy the NAID's demand for a rachet which increases organic "information". But what does "information" mean in this context? If we use the well-established Shannon definition of information (That is -log [Prob]), it actually comes up with different answers depending on how we apply this definition.

If we are talking about the unconditional probability of configurations like crystals, then it would follow that because crystals as a class have a minute statistical weight then the unconditional probability of a crystal appearing is vanishingly small and correspondingly crystals have a very high information content. That is: 

Prob  = P(crystal class) ~ very small  => high information

Equation 1

Ergo, a big crystal is unlikely to form in the lifetime of universe if the cosmos was a purely random affair.  But in contrast if we are talking about the conditional probability of a crystal; that is given the laws of physics and the right environmental conditions etc (i.e. the physical conditions), this probability is very high and therefore a crystal then has a low information. That is:

Prob  = P(Crystallisation, Right physical conditions) ~  high => low information

Equation 2

 So, as far as the atoms/molecules of the crystal are concerned we have a ratchet here which locks in what would otherwise be a high information configuration. Because Shannon information is based on probabilities and probabilities are observer relative then whether or not a crystal is a high information configuration depends on one's point of view: Coming to a crystal without any knowledge at all we find that it has a very low probability and therefore high information: In this context crystallization has effectively ratcheted in a high information configuration. But once we become aware of the nature of the physical conditions a crystal then assumes high probability and therefore a low information. 

But now consider these two equations:

Prob  = P(organism)  ~ very small=> high information

Equation  3

Prob  = P(Organism, Right physical conditions, i.e the physics of the reproductive system) ~  high

 => low information

Equation 4

Cleary, again, the extremely low statistical weight of the class of organisms means that the unconditional probability of life (Equation 3) is vanishingly small: We don't expect an organism to assemble itself from a purely random physical regime. In that sense organic forms have a high (Shannon) information content (or high "surprisal" values as it is sometimes expressed). However, given the right conditions (i.e. Physics and a reproductive system) a new organism has a high chance of forming. Under these circumstances life has high probability and therefore low information. 

The physical ratchet which creates crystalline structures given some fairly basic physical conditions is one thing, but the physical ratchet which creates an organism from a reproductive system is quite another. A reproductive system is a highly sophisticated configuration which itself has a vanishingly small unconditional probability; that is, it is a high information system. 

It is relationships like equation 4 which has led NAIDs to believe there is such a thing as a conservation of information: That is, in order to create sophisticated configurations of life one must already have in place a sophisticated generation configuration, which because it has a vanishingly small probability will have a correspondingly a high information. So, lowering the information of an otherwise improbable outcome comes at the expense of another high improbability; in this case a sophisticated life generating engine in the form of a reproductive system. At this juncture the conservation of information that Hedin and other NAIDs promote seems plausible. But recycling the words of H G Wells ' Time Traveller at the end of chapter 6 of Wells' The Time Machine: 

"Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough - as most wrong theories are!" 

...as we will eventually see!

ERIC HEDIN: Could a natural information ratchet exist? Since our goal is to understand whether life is an information ratchet, we first need to examine what kind of mechanism might be required to cause a living system to ratchet up its information content over time. To increase information means to select outcomes that correspond to a greater level of functional or meaningful complexity. The only way for this to happen is if the selection mechanism (in other words, the ratchet) is designed to produce the target outcome, and this means that the mechanism must already contain the information specifying the target. A physical mechanism cannot produce any information beyond what it already contains.

MY COMMENT: Here Hedin talks of "functional or meaningful complexity" which I assume is his way of trying to distinguish between the hyper-complexity of randomness and those strange organic configurations which are at once both complex and yet organized. But rather than use vague ideas such as "functional or meaningful complexity" we need something a little more solid. What living configurations are all about is more clearly and less mysteriously expressed as this: The main feature of the molecular configurations of life is that given a particular environmental context they are capable of self-maintenance and self-multiplication in that environment. Therefore, should these configurations come about, repeat, should they come about, then their self-perpetuating properties lock them in: In short, they constitute the "teeth" of the ratchet we are looking for. In fact, as we know from observation of the organic world there are many, many of these self-perpetuating "teeth" occupying configuration space, and these range from single cells to huge communities of cells in symbiotic relationship. But creating self-maintaining and self-multiplying configurations from scratch would challenge the intelligence of any human designer; such configurations are fine examples of complex organization; (that is, they are configurations which occupy at once the world of high organization and at the same time the world of high informational complexity as per randomness). The question Hedin is really trying to ask is this: Has God created a physical world with an information ratchet which favours the emergence of living configurations?  This would mean that the conditional probability of life is well above its absolute unconditional probability; Well, we've got the teeth but what we also need to know is this: Have the teeth been arranged into a ratchet? More technically we can put the question thus: Does the spongeam exist with a sufficient diffusion dynamic to allow diffusion to permeate the structure of the spongeam? 

Self-perpetuating configurations are highly organized. That is as a class they have a very low statistical weight, and this means as a per equation 1 that we can say this of their unconditional probability: 

Prob  = P(class of self perpetuating structures)  ~ very small => high information

Equation 5

...and if our physical regime is to have a realistic chance of generating such structures then in analogy to the conditional probability of equation 2 we require:

Prob  = P(class of self-perpetuating structures, right physical regime) ~ realistically high

=> low information

Equation 6

The big question is however, does the "right physical regime" exist? Since I'm not coy in invoking the agency of a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient God, that such a regime just might have been chosen & created for our cosmos is a possibility that I must take seriously and not dismiss with a wave of the hand as mere "blind natural forces". As I've said before the creation, in all its contingency, is hardly "natural".

ERIC HEDIN:  But natural processes cannot produce unnatural results. Selection based on the ratchet mechanism of increased fitness cannot of itself produce novel complex functionality if each successive small change does not give some increased advantage towards survival and reproduction.

But as shown in our examination of the functionality of any ratchet mechanism, it cannot produce an outcome beyond what it was designed to achieve. With information as the outcome, the mechanism can only reproduce the level of information it already contains.

MY COMMENT: Three comments here:

1. Playing with Semantics: Those very contingent "natural processes" are in fact very unnatural in not having "natural" aseity but they have been created by a transcendent entity that presumably has Aseity. So on the basis of this semantics we shouldn't be surprised if those "natural processes" produced "unnatural results".  It's also worth noting that the "unnaturalness" of creation isn't merely a past tense event: It is in fact present-tense-continuous: Those descriptive transcendent laws, whether statistical or deterministic have no logical necessity to persist in regulating the cosmos, but the fact is they do persist. The physical regime is as unnatural as "unnatural" can be and I would venture to say that unnatural results are par for the course. 

2. The Ratchet: As for the ratchet mechanism: Well, we've defined an organism as a "ratchet tooth" in that it locks itself in given the right environment. But the big question here is are those ratchet teeth close enough to allow the diffusion process to work its way through configuration space to those highly complex yet highly ordered self-perpetuating organic configurations? IDist William Dembski talks about this subject in terms of the space between islands of functionality. If this question is answered in the negative it would be an evolution stopper - at least evolution as conventionally understood. But if one is prepared to admit that we are dealing with a creative transcendent intelligence of unimaginable power we simply can't dismiss the possibility that God may have provisioned the cosmos with a physical regime that inserts the right physical conditions into equation 6 (i.e. with a spongeam) and would considerably enhance the probability of life being generated. If this is the case, then we could recycle Hedin's last sentence above as: 

In our examination of the functionality of any ratchet mechanism, it cannot produce an outcome beyond what it was designed to achieve; in this case the physical regime has been designed to generate life itself. 

...and as far as the human observer is concerned such a physical regime (if it exists) would appear to generate, that is create, information. 

3. Information conservation: Hedin hasn't defined how he understands "information" an omission which makes his last sentence in the quote above incoherent. But contrary to what he is attempting to incoherently tell us here, we find that by any intuitively compelling standards information can be generated (See Part II).

ERIC HEDIN: Another Process at Work: Given the obvious, that the complexity of organisms on Earth has increased through time from single-cell archaea to functional multicellular creatures, some process other than a supposed evolutionary information ratchet must have been at work. The genomic information content of the prokaryotic cells descriptive of the earliest life on Earth falls far short of the greater information content and complexity of advanced life. An intelligent mind is the only known source for the necessary input of complex specified information throughout biological history. Attributing the vast diversity of life on Earth to intelligent design provides an explanation more in line with reality than the misguided concept of an information ratchet.

MY COMMENT:  I think most of us accept that organisms have increased their organizational complexity through time as Hedin says; at least from single cell organisms to those huge complexes of symbiotic cells. However, I have heard some atheists being rather diffident about measures of complexity which betray an arrow of time pointing in the direction of increasing organized complexity. This is because such a trend is so easily coopted as evidence of a cosmos with a progressive purpose, and this makes some atheists very nervous; strong atheists like to think that there is no selective contingency in the cosmos and that all options are kept on the table with equal probability.   As for the IDists they should be asking themselves; why this developmental pattern in life? And why is there so much evidence for nested cladistics? That to me hints of some kind of "natural" (sic) process at work rather than ad hoc injections of "information" from time to time (see picture at the head of this post). 

Yes, I can accept that we may well come to the conclusion that the only sense we can make of the progressively fruitful organization of the cosmos and above all its clearly biased contingency, is for it to have its origins in a transcendent a priori intelligence. But where the NAID community go wrong is that they fail to take into account the plausible implications of transcendent intelligence. Those very plausible implications are that the very created unnaturalness of the fabric of the cosmos has been provisioned to generate life. Instead, NAIDs use the model of a cosmically in-house intelligence (that is, one that is part of the cosmos) which takes the fabric of the cosmos as a given and then creates configurations from the fabric of creation by tinkering with it as might a human or alien intelligence. Their view of matter is one of it being a passive medium like blind clay in the hands of a potter. But as soon as we admit a transcendent omnipotent omniscient creator of matter then the possibility of a proactive information ratchet appears on my suspect list. 

***

The NAID community have painted themselves into a corner with a paradigm that dichotomizes intelligent design and "natural forces" and expresses itself in their flawed explanatory filter. Their paradigm works if we are dealing with cosmic "in-house" intelligence such as humans or aliens but fails if we are looking for an omnipotent & omniscience transcendent intelligence such as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. But their paradigm is now entrenched in the NAID community. They are therefore committed to downgrading the created processes of reality as mere passive "blind natural forces" rather than those forces being the instrument of transcendent intelligent activity, yesterday, today and forever.  

My ongoing critique of NAID philosophy will continue as I look at Hedin's second article. 

UPDATE: Dualistic ID's Quixotic Quest

As with the development of life the NAID view of

human intelligence is that it transcends the capabilities of 

God created matter.

As if to prove the thesis of my last post about the North American Intelligent Designe (NAIDs) community being unable to think out of the box they've created for themselves up pops an article on Evolution and News from the same author I quoted in that post which plays right into my hands. Viz:

Intelligence Is Unnatural, and Why That Matters | Evolution News

I will concede that it is just possible the Good Creator, over the course of millions of years, has patched in living material configurations ad-hoc style. But I have my doubts about that given my understanding of the way the Creator works and also given the insights of my Melancolia I project.  Therefore, I keep in my mind the competing idea that God has provisioned His creation, perhaps via the spongeam, with a high probability of generating life given cosmic dimensions. It is this possibility, as we saw in my last post, which the NAIDs are committed to denying. They also, apparently, are committed to denying that intelligence "in-house" to the cosmos (such as human intelligence) can be simulated algorithmically and that it is an application of created matter.  And here's the evidence that they put the intelligence of human beings into a category which cannot be reduced to "natural forces"; for at the end of the above article, we find this conclusion (my emphases):

Human expression manifests the unnatural attributes of creating art, literature, and technology — outcomes that would never arise by the influence of natural processes alone. Freedom and creativity complement one another; neither will flourish under controlling forces. If the forces of nature governed our thoughts and actions, would we see the vast panoply of creative human expression displayed throughout the history of civilization? It seems not.

Reading the article it is clear that this conclusion is largely based on the author's gut reactions. But if God is omnipotent and immanent (Acts 17:28) then those "forces of nature" are constantly maintained by the thoughts and actions of God - in particular the rich complex novelty of randomness would require the complex thoughts of an omni-author to maintain it:  "Natural forces" (sic) never act alone. And if I'm right it is that very randomness which gives humanity both its creativity and its consciousness. (See here and here). 

The fear of those so-called "natural forces" runs deep in our culture. The ghosts of deism haunt Western culture even today. The creation is a very unnecessary contingency, everywhere and everywhen; it has no property of Aseity and in that sense it is unnatural as unnatural can be. 

For the Trumpteenth time: Dualistic ID's Quixotic Quest

Casey Luskin is part of the North American ID community. 

Although I would classify myself as an Intelligent Design Creationist I have found the North American Intelligent Design community (NAID) and its followers to have fallen far short of their promise. Spurned and rejected by the liberal academic community they have fallen into the arms of the North America right-wing with its anti-academic-establishment politics. This polarization toward the right means that the NAID community have painted themselves, a priori, into an anti-evolutionary corner, giving them little choice but to embark on the Quixotic quest to find a basis in physical law which blocks all possibility of evolution being behind the emergence of life over many millions of years. They have so far failed in their quest.......

ONE) They have been misled by dualistic notions of a natural forces vs Divine Creation Intelligent Design dichotomy. In order to maintain the affectation of being a scientific community they are unwilling to identify the Designer as God, an entirely different genus of entity from cosmic "in-house" intelligence (e.g. humans, "aliens" etc.). In-house intelligence, by definition, stays within the cosmic constraints of physical law - but introducing the transcendent intelligence of God changes things considerably - See point 2 below. 

The upshot is that the NAIDs appear to have missed the need to address the distinct possibility that those so-called "unguided natural forces" (sic) may well embody divine miraculous provisioning in terms of a suite of physical laws which facilitates the emergence of life over millions of years.

TWO) The error of not distinguishing between in-house intelligence and the transcendent intelligence of God has fed through to their simplistic epistemic filter which doesn't work properly. It also means that NAIDs are pressuring themselves into favouring the idea that even in-house intelligence, such as we see in human beings (and animals like chimps, cats & dogs etc.) has an exotic non-algorithmic basis. Well may be, (although I think probably not, see here and here), but the problem with this is that the NAIDs have started to close down their options and therefore they are going to find difficulty in keeping in their heads two competing hypotheses about the nature of intelligence.  That, I tender, is an outcome of the social polarization in the US, where there is pressure to commit to one side or the other of the sharply defined left vs right battle lines between academics and right-wingers. 

THREE) Their attempts to use the second law of thermodynamics in its untweaked form as an evolution stopper have failed; even a young earthist guru advises that it not be used for this purpose.

***

None of this is to say that evolutionary mechanisms, as conventionally understood, are sufficient to explain the emergence of life over millions of years, particularly abiogenesis, but it is all too obvious to me that the NAID community continue to make heavy weather of their mission: They have become a clique of self-comforting, mutually back-slapping right-wing comrades embattled, persecuted even, by an otherwise hostile academic establishment.  It's no surprise they have aligned themselves with other right-wing causes like anti-anthropogenic-climate-change, anti-vax notions, the gun-lobby and an obsession with polarised concepts of sex and gender. Fortunately, I haven't yet seen any evidence that NAIDs are into conspiracy theorism, but that may yet come!

However, I think NAIDs do at least now understand that the second law of thermodynamics, as it is currently formulated, is no to block evolution; after all, the second law only demands an increase in the overall entropy of an isolated system, a system where local decreases in entropy may yet occur.  But the NAIDs, spurred on by the possibility that there may be a version of the second-law which can be applied at all levels of a physical system, continue to search for a physical law which bars evolution in all subsystems of a system.  Consider this writer on the NAID website "Evolution News"; he dreams of a principle (in fact he thinks it's been found!) which he refers to as the generalized version of the second law...... 

The traditional Second Law of Thermodynamics is viewed as an inviolable arbiter of possible outcomes for all physical processes. In particular, any conceivable proposal for a perpetual motion machine can, without analysis, be rejected based on the Second Law. With regard to the origin and development of life, the generalized Second Law states that any “alleged natural explanation…will be untrue in the same way a patent examiner in Washington, DC, knows an alleged invention for a perpetual motion machine is untrue.”

Well yes, perhaps the Good Creator has patched-in piecemeal-wise constructive miracles over millions of years thus implementing His grand designs in an ad-hoc fashion ...... and yet because He is the Transcendent,  Omniscient, Omnipotent Creator maybe he has miraculously provisioned the physical world with sufficient constraint for the diffusive dynamic in configuration space to settle on those self-perpetuating configurations called life. But NAIDs have barricaded themselves into a corner and have thereby committed themselves to a quest to prove that God's Created world is one of "unguided natural forces" (sic. A phrase used by many NAIDs including the above writer). In their need for mutual moral support in the face of a hostile academic establishment the NAIDs have found solace in a mutual-back-slapping community which blocks any thought of hypothesized evolutionary scenarios, scenarios which even William Dembski has acknowledged are not inconsistent with the core concept of Intelligent Design Creationism.  See also here where Dembski says of one his books: Even though argument in this book is compatible with both intelligent design and theistic evolution, it helps bring clarity to the controversy over design and evolution.”

But the creation, with or without evolution, is clearly not unguided even on the basis of the admission of the NAIDs themselves: After all, they make a lot of cosmic "fine tuning" which (although a necessary condition for evolution it is not a sufficient condition for evolution) constitutes the kind of mathematical constraint that would mean our cosmos cannot be classed as a place of "unguided natural forces"  (sic).  

NOTES

The NAIDS, along with many young earthists, make the claim that "natural forces" cannot create information. This actually very much depends on how one defines information, but if we are talking about configurational information then this NAID belief is manifestly false. As I have said here and proved here, in parallel computation information (or complexity) is created according to

Ic = Smin + log (Tmin)

Where Ic is the configurational information content, Smin is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration with a minimum number of execution steps of Tmin. 

The logarithm of time explains why information is only slowly generated with time and this can give the false impression that those Created "natural forces", when in parallel processing mode, don't create information. However, the NAID thesis manifestly falls over when expanding parallel processing is employed and selection is made with teleological constraints. But this is even true (although less obviously) of today's parallel processing paradigm where useful algorithms generate configurations which are then selected on the basis of teleological search constraints.           

Relevant Links:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicentenary Part 27: The Mystery of Life’s Origin (Chapter 7) (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicententary Part 28: The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Chapter 8 (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicententary Part 30: The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Chapter 9 (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)