The previous
parts of this series can be seen here:
I was interested
to see
this blog post by evangelical atheist
Larry Moran where he refers to a post on the IDist web site Uncommon Descent by a Gordon E. Mullings
(aka “Kariosfocus”). In the referenced post Mullings publishes a quote from an
IDist who bemoans the fact that the academic establishment simply hasn’t been
moved by what
to him is the clear and
convincing case for his version of intelligent design. As often happens with the members of a somewhat beleaguered
and marginalized subculture he just can’t believe that this stone walling is
down to a dispassionate intellectual rebuttal but rather a wilful ulterior-motive
laden rejection of what to him is oh so obvious. So, all too typically we find
that Mullings’ quotation puts it down to a “heart problem” rather than a “head
problem”. The intended hint here is that those who continue in an informed
rejection of Mullings’ version of ID probably do so with bad consciences if not black
hearts. This tendency to believe in the depravity of one’s detractors, as I
have pointed out on my blogs, is a background attitude which provides fertile ground for conspiracy theorism, should it take root. But to be fair,
Mullings and his friends have often been unpleasantly abused, although frankly
I don’t think that some of Mullings’ somewhat paranoid denunciations have
helped calm things down.
For my own part I find it
difficult to take sides here: Polarization has killed off dispassionate debate. Many atheists are probably thoroughly annoyed by the
North American IDist’s claim that they have scientific authority to push their
case for God via Dembski’s explanatory filter (*1). But conversely atheists
also attempt to use scientific authority to rule theism out of court (See here). In any case Mullings often fails
to do justice to himself with his paranoid behavior and I doubt there is much respect
for all his technical efforts – these are just brushed away by evangelical
atheists without thoughtful engagement as just so much window dressing and laughable
sophistry. But there is in my opinion a deep flaw in the kind of IDist thinking
Mullings stands for: Viz: He talks about the computational resources of the
cosmos being incapable of locating life using a “blind search”, but he appears
not to consider the obvious solution that the cosmos may have sufficient ongoing immanent divine resourcing to presume it to be a blind search; In fact the Wiki entry that comments on Dembski’s “Universal Probability Bound”, (an idea
enthusiastically promoted by Mullings) spots the way out:
Dembski appeals to cryptographic practice in support of the concept
of the universal probability bound, noting that cryptographers have sometimes
compared the security of encryption algorithms against brute force attacks by
the likelihood of success of an adversary utilizing computational resources
bounded by very large physical constraints. An example of such a constraint
might be obtained for example, by assuming that every atom in the known
universe is a computer of a certain type and these computers are running
through and testing every possible key. However, universal measures of security
are used much less frequently than asymptotic ones.[6] The fact that a keyspace is very large is useless if the cryptographic
algorithm used has vulnerabilities which make it susceptible to other kinds of
attacks.
For a theist like myself the weakness in Mullings' argument is that divine intelligence is, presumably, well able to express
itself in a much better than “blind” search. Like many IDists of his persuasion Mullings gives
every impression of being against the idea that the cosmos has the wherewithal
to “naturally” generate life. This is, I believe, an outcome of the polarised
state of the debate where respective sides have tacitly taken onboard a “God vs Nature” dichotomy along with the
implicit conclusion that it’s an exclusive choice between “natural forces” and
God. This dichotomy is reinforced by Dembski’s explanatory filter
which necessarily imposes a sharp distinction between “natural causes” and “intelligent
agency”.
It is ironic that my own
position is probably nearer that of the atheists Viz: That the cosmos has
generated life …. although I propose that the cosmos has generated life because it is providentially resourced to do so. Where I differ from these
atheists is that I see the generation of life as a remarkable non-trivial
property of the cosmos. In fact Mullings and myself probably have common ground
in agreeing that any “law and disorder” description of the
cosmos always leaves us with irreducibly startling features; we can never
trivialize those features away with law and disorder explanations. The ontology
of law and disorder posited by the physical sciences is, in the final
analysis, complete when full description is reached; attempts to push it any
further leads to a regression of nested explanatory contexts and this is
mathematically akin to attempts to compress an already compressed data set;
further attempts at compression gain no further reduction in the data string.
The highly unrepresentative configurations of life are startling and
remarkable, but attempts to explain them with law and disorder scenarios leads
to logical conditions that are no less startling and remarkable. As Sir Patrick
Moore once said: Our science is strong on
detail but weak on fundamentals. We have to seek a very special kind of
explanatory narrative if we are to stop this regress: An extraordinary universe
requires an extraordinary explanation. But that’s another story I won’t talk of
here; let’s leave theology out of it for the moment and just stick to physical
science.
The bald fact is that Mullings
and his colleagues have failed to get their message across; I put that down in
part to their framing of the question of life with what appears to be a dualist “God did it vs Nature did it” dichotomy.
This dualism is a gift to evangelical atheists who understandably are prompted to
attack the weakness in this dualist IDism; namely, that there is little
evidence for a "God-of-the-gaps-did-it" view: For it is clear that whether Mullings likes it or not, intended it or not, at least one atheist sees Mullings' case as a "God of the gaps" model. As Larry Moran says in his post:
There is no evidence for the existence of a creator who meddles in
the affairs of living organisms.
(This statement, by the way,
betrays a misunderstanding of how evidence is actually used; see here for details). If this “interfering”
deity is what Mullings and his colleagues are really promoting – and they give
every impression of doing so – then it is no wonder that the academic
establishment, Christian and atheist alike, takes such a dim view of their
efforts: While I personally don’t rule out the anomalous and the miraculous the
fact is such things are few and far between by their very definition and amount
to positing an erratic ontology that makes it impossible to provide high
standards of evidence for; scientific epistemology has great difficulty with an
ontology of erratics. So, if as the North American IDists appear to claim life
was generated by the one-off interferences of an eminent intelligence, an
intelligence which could well be little green or gray men inside the cosmos, then that is going
to generate a very soft science, a kind of super-attenuated archeology in fact.
In order to back up his case for
a “meddling” deity Mullings posts this graphic panel:
This graphic by Gordon E Mullings perpetuates the North American "Wow!" signal argument for an interfering Intelligence eminent to the processes
of nature. (Click to enlarge)
Living structures if described
in terms of their self-maintaining activities can be relatively simply defined
without, as Mullings rightly says, specifying all the coordinates of their configuration.
Moreover, compared to all the imaginable
possible atomic arrangements it is clear that this class of self-maintaining
structures, even the simplest of them, is negligibly small and so on a purely chance selection no member
of this set would likely be found even given 10150 trials! But the trouble
with the argument here is that Mullings doesn’t define what he means be “all relevant possibilities” and this
vague reference hides a big issue.
To see this let’s take for example
a construction set like Lego. Clearly the total possible ways of arranging the
bricks in a big Lego set is a huge number and utterly dwarfs the set of
constructions that do “something useful”.
But there is a big difference between the total number of conceivable
arrangements of Lego bricks and the number of arrangements that come to light
should we start moving around the Lego bricks according to some constraining
developmental regime, perhaps with aim of searching for “something useful”.
These two sorts of “relevant possibilities”, namely the total conceivable
possibilities and the possibilities that come to light as a result of constrained change, are very different
in character. Ostensibly it might seem that any configuration of atoms is
possible and violates no physical law, but - and this is the big “but” - physical law is also about change and given
the regime of change in our cosmos it is clear than not all configurations pop
up in a given time; so in the developmental
sense the “relevant possibilities” are very different from the conceivable “relevant possibilities”.
If Mullings had taken this
distinction onboard I suspect his panel would be very different in content. In
fact I have yet to see any serious considerations by his IDist subculture of
how physical constraints enhance the search for organic forms; when they have
considered this topic they usually think terms of the “dynamic fallacy” whereby
they believe the problem is to counter suggestions that the organic biopolymers
are somehow coded directly into the physical regime. Better perhaps is their
concept of Irreducible Complexity, but even that they have managed to screw up on. But if rightly defined irreducible
complexity would, however, be a big evolution stopper, and Mullings and co
would then have the last laugh. However, there is one other big issue I have
with Mullings which may make all this irrelevant. This issue is Mullings
promotion of Dembski’s probability bound; namely,
that the cosmos has an upper limit of only being able to locate at best a 1 in
10 150 instance.
I would propose that potentially
the cosmos has a much, much greater power of searching out rare cases than
Dembki’s probability bound suggests and this follows from certain quantum
mechanical considerations. We can begin
to appreciate this by first looking at the classical analogy of quantum mechanics
– namely, elementary diffusion. One dimensional diffusion can be simulated
using a system of nodes laid out on the x-coordinate.
If the diffusion distribution is represented by Y(x) then the system of nodes can simulate the diffusion simply by
signaling one another with wY(x) where x is the position of a node and w
is the analogue of the step probability in random walk. The result is a
simulation of the elementary diffusion equation:
Equation 1
Where e is the distance between nodes and v is the velocity of the signal. (More detail about this topic can
be read in my private publication “Gravity
and Quantum Non-Linearity”)
The number of nodes working in
parallel to simulate this equation is potentially proportional to L/e where L is the length of
the x coordinate. But this is just for one dimension. If we
have N particles then the diffusion
distribution is represented by Y(x1,…xj…xN), a quantity defined over a space of N dimensions. The appropriate diffusion
equation is then:
Equation 2
…where for simplicity I have
assumed that e, w, and v are independent of
coordinate, although in general this is not the case.
If for the sake of argument we
assume that each coordinate has length L
then the total number of nodes will be (L/e)N. These nodes effectively
act as our processors and so potentially the simulation could utilize the power
of (L/e)N nodes. If N ~ number of particles in the observable cosmos we
can see straight away that the number of processors is so huge that potentially
it will return a processing power far in excess of the strictures of Dembski’s
probability bound; this bound only raises 10 to the power of a 3 digit number,
whereas in (L/e)N, the power N, assuming a figure similar to the
number of elementary particles in the observable universe, is far in excess of
3 digits.
However our simulation isn't
doing anything useful. In order to make it build things we need to add a potential
term, V, thus:
Equation 3
Here I have taken the quantity e inside the summation and made it a variable
that depends on coordinate, but this will not substantially change the enormous
number of processors involved. The significance of this change will become
clearer shortly.
The potential terms V(x1….xN)Y is way of “pumping in”
signal in some regions but extracting it in other regions in order to conserve
the distribution for correct normalization. This term, as we know, can be
arranged so that there is a tendency for particles to stick together, thereby
acting much like the attachments of some kind of construction set. If so, then
this will mean that the distribution has tendency to accumulate around certain
coordinates values representing the case where particles coagulate. To be sure
however, this accumulation of the distribution would be very small if the space
is very large and the size of the particles in terms of their surrounding
potentials are small; this is because under these conditions there is a very
small chance that the particles will find such configurations. But here’s the
crucial point: These configurations will effectively be flagged and marked by a
raised distribution at those points.
We can considerably enhance this
simulation in favour of organized configurations by turning equation 3 into its
quantum mechanical equivalent (See again Gravity
and Quantum Non-Linearity). This is easily done by simply replacing the
real signal wY of ordinary diffusion with
a complex number signaling of form iwY thus giving us
the multidimensional Schrodinger equation: (*2)
Equation 4
…where w, v and ei are adjustable constants that
can be set to give us the usual quantum mechanical factors of Planck’s constant and
mass: Notice, however, that the factor ei which I placed inside the summation
can now be seen as a way of simulating different particle masses.
The reason why this equation is
a huge improvement over ordinary real diffusion is that the wave nature of the
resulting solutions has the effect of cancelling out (when normalized) huge
fields of bland randomness, thereby enhancing the relative presence of those peaks
of coherent and organized structures. In short quantum signaling is way of
insuring that organization and coherence become disproportionality represented.
This is just the sort of constraint we need to help enhance the search for life.
So, the points I would like to
leave us with at this stage are:
ONE: The quantum mechanical processing potentially
involves huge numbers of processors
TWO: Bland fields of randomness are
canceled out.
THREE: Organized and highly coherent
structures are flagged with raised distributions.
But there is a little
problem: In the Wiki entry about
Dembski’s probability bound of 10150 we read that Seth Lloyd has
come up with a bound which has a power of similar order of magnitude as that of
Dembski. Lloyd and Dembski aren’t sloppy workers, so how does this square with
the enormous processing power I’m proposing where the power of ten isn't merely
a three digit number but is itself a power of ten?
The answer may be this: The sort
of quantum mechanical vision I've sketched out above entails quantum systems
maintaining the ambiguity of their prospecting signals over huge regions of
space. The trouble is, at the macroscopic level we don’t observe an ambiguous
reality – the apparent discontinuous jumps of the state vector always seem to
contrive an unambiguous macroscopic reality. This “collapsing” of the state
vector has the effect of clearing away the work of huge numbers of nodes (*2). So
in this light I suspect that Lloyd and Dembski are probably right is reducing
the apparent processing power to a
mere three digit power of ten. But the enormous computational potential of QM is nevertheless clear; perhaps
we simply don’t perceive it because human consciousness is only ever handed unambiguous
macro states that have been “collapsed” into a far less ambiguous state; who
knows what goes on in between these discontinuities?
I find I can’t dismiss the
powerful computational potential of quantum mechanics: QM looks to me as if it
is meant to use that potential. In fact, let me speculate a bit: Those
prospective signals look like the means by which possibilities are probed
before a selection decision is made – in short, an important aspect of intelligent
activity; seek, find, reject and select.
So, if my guess is right then in quantum mechanics are we watching intelligence
at work at the low level, much as we
might see the low level neural signaling of human consciousness, if we look
very closely; the trouble with the low level view is that it so easily misses the big
picture.
An extraordinary cosmos requires
an extraordinary explanation: For me the idea of the cosmos being intelligence
in action is commensurately extraordinary with the extraordinariness of the
universe itself. However, people’s intuitions about what is extraordinary are
not necessarily going to concur and may actually conflict. But my excuse is
that I’m in uncharted waters here and I can only present what are my own
personal speculations and intuitions about the nature of the universe. This is
no basis for accusing those who don’t agree with me about God as having bad consciences and perhaps even dark
hearts, or as is the habit of fundamentalists of accusing disbelievers of “suppressing the Truth in unrighteousness”!
This sort of epistemic arrogance leads
to tribalisation and at the extreme end can even be used to legitimize genocide.
...to be continued (This is a work in progress)
Footnotes
*1 This filter is a useful
heuristic within the cosmos, but it
falls over badly in a theological sense when used as an argument for God; with its clear cut "natural forces" vs. "intelligent agency" distinction, God competes with his own creation as an agent of causation.
*2 In linear quantum mechanics
there is symmetry between momentum space and geometric space, but in this node
simulation of QM it is meaningless to talk about momentum space being composed
of a set of mutually signaling nodes. In this simulation picture momentum emerges as a synthetic function of the gradient of the wave function.
Notes
On indistinguishability: The indistinguishability
of fundamental particle makes the idea of the distinguishability of substance
problematical. I suggest that quantum physics doesn't create any “substance”
(whatever “substance” means) but rather creates configurations taken from the
platonic realm. Distinguishability is a result of distinguishability of configuration and therefore identity of
substance is bound up with identity of form.
On Fine Tuning: In the quantum
mechanical equation in this article V
is a given; so how do we know from the outset that a given V will support organic forms? The answer
to this question may be along the lines of the Church-Turing thesis; namely, that there
is such a thing as the universal construction set, a set that will build anything
(or compute anything). Thus construction sets can be judged on whether or not
they are universal construction set
complete. We could define a “fine-tuned” construction set as one of those
construction sets that is universal
construction set complete. My guess is that there is probably an infinite
number of universal construction sets. Conceivably,
the space of all construction sets could itself be explored with a signaling
system.
