Bad Theology: ID's search for intelligence might have gone off into the wild black yonder; but perhaps it was right under their noses all along.
In
a post on Panda’s Thumb Joe Felsenstein continues the same debate with IDists
which I looked at in the following posts:
(Also relevant to the material I present below is this link:
The above series of posts are an analysis of Joe Felsenstein and Tom
English’s reaction to the work of IDists William Dembski, Winston Ewert
and Robert Marks (DEM for short). Below I publish quotes from Felsenstein’s latest post and as usual interleave them with my own comments. At the start of his post Felsenstein makes it clear that…
FELSENSTEIN: The issue is not the
correctness of their [DEM’s] theorems, but given that they are correct, what
flows from them. Dembski, Ewert, and Marks (DEM) may object that they did not
say anything about that in their paper….
We don’t think that it is a
stretch to say that DEM want their audience to conclude that Design is needed.
Let’s look at what conclusions
Dembski, Ewert, and Marks draw from their theorems. There is little or no
discussion of this in their paper. Are they trying to persuade us that a
Designer has “frontloaded” the Universe with instructions to make our present
forms of life?
My Comment: I think I largely concur with that: As I
constantly say on this blog, de facto ID is essentially God-of-the-Gaps (although
they will deny it), or perhaps in this instance “God-of-the-frontload”. If as
Felsenstein says DEM don’t discuss in their paper the origin of the information required to
generate life that may be because DEM believe the major part of
their epistemic task complete. The epistemic procedure of de facto ID’s
“explanatory filter” prompts a default to “intelligent design” if no “natural
causes” can be found. To this end DEM’s paper has the role of locating an
explanatory gap which they know all too well will be filled in by their followers;
as Felsenstein says: “Are they trying to
persuade us that a Designer has “frontloaded” the Universe with instructions to
make our present forms of life?” But
the explanatory filter epistemic as formulated by Dembski and used by his ID
community has its limitations, especially in theology.
FELSENSTEIN 1. Their space of “searches”
includes all sorts of crazy searches that do not prefer to go to genotypes of
higher fitness – most of them may prefer genotypes of lower fitness or just
ignore fitness when searching. Once you require that there be genotypes that
have different fitnesses, so that fitness affects survival and reproduction,
you have narrowed down their “searches” to ones that have a much higher
probability of finding genotypes that have higher fitness.
2. In addition, the laws of
physics will mandate that small changes in genotype will usually not cause huge
changes in fitness. This is true because the weakness of action at a distance
means that many genes will not interact strongly with each other. So the
fitness surface is smoother than a random assignment of fitnesses to genotypes.
That makes it much more possible to find genotypes that have higher fitness.
In short, with their theorems,
Design is not needed to explain why a reproducing organism whose genotypes have
fitnesses might be able to improve its fitnesses substantially. Just having
reproducing organisms, and having the laws of physics, gets an evolving system
much farther than a random one of DEM’s “search
My Comment: Firstly, there is a good reason why DEM must
consider the whole domain of possible searches. The point of their whole
exercise is to show that whatever be the “search” (or better “process”) behind
the generation of life in our cosmos, then within the full set of possible
Dembskian searches it must be a very special case; that is, it is highly
a-typical. The conclusion, then, is that given the principle of equal-a-priori-probabilities
the cosmic search must be a highly improbable case and therefore of high information. So, I myself can see the point
of this enumeration of the entire domain of possible searches. And yet as I have discussed in the previous
parts of this series Felsenstein is also right; Viz: if one posits a) a
differential in the fitness of possible configurations and b) our particular
laws of physics which smooth out the fitness surface, then it follows that the
cosmic physical regime goes a long way to providing the front loaded
information needed for the generation of life.
However, I must register here my dissatisfaction with the fitness
surface model. In
this post I gave reasons why this model makes implicit assumptions about
the survivability and reproducibility of
the organic structures that respond to the fitness surface. In consequence far more fundamental than the
fitness surface is the mathematical object I call the “spongeam”. This
is a conjectured fully connected but extremely tenuous sponge-like-set in
configuration space. This conjectured abstract structure is defined by the
requirement that it is composed entirely of (organic) forms which are stable and
complex enough to survive and replicate. The point is that these forms need not be very fit, but nevertheless must be fit and complex
enough and sufficiently connected to allow some kind of evolutionary diffusion (by replication) across
the conjectured channels of the spongeam. In fact some regions of the spongeam may
not even have any fitness slopes at all; the fitness could be unchanging across the
spongeam in those regions. In these "flat" regions evolutionary diffusion will be
unbiased although in other regions where fitness changes the
diffusion will be biased. In the latter regions the idea of “sloping fitness
surfaces” will apply. It follows then that “fitness” is not as fundamental as
the spongeam; different levels of fitness may or may not be
superimposed on the spongeam. If Felsenstein is right then it is the spongeam
which is implicitly frontloaded into the cosmos via our physics. The final
twist here, however, is that I don’t think the spongeam exists; therefore neither do
fitness surfaces. (See the post I have already linked to)
Felsenstein quotes Dembski:
DEMBSKI: The term “evolutionary
informatics” was chosen deliberately and was meant to signify that evolution,
conceived as a search, requires information to be successful, in other words,
to locate a target. This need for information can be demonstrated
mathematically in the modeling of evolutionary processes. So, the question then
becomes: Where does the information that enables evolutionary searches to be
successful come from in the first place? We show that Darwinian processes at
best shuffle around existing information, but can’t create it from scratch. [As it turns out this latter statement by Dembski doesn't do justice to the subject as I intend to show in due course - TVR]
I see this work as providing the
theoretically most powerful ID challenge against Darwinian evolution to date.
As for the attention this work has garnered, there has been some, but
Darwinists are largely ignoring it. I’m justified in thinking this is because
our methods leave them no loopholes. We’re not saying that evolution doesn’t
happen. We’re saying that even if it happens, it requires an information source
beyond the reach of conventional evolutionary mechanisms.
My Comment: The first paragraph here basically concurs
with what I have just said: For evolution to successfully generate life there must be some kind of informational “frontloading” (Unless we are to accept interventional
tinkering). Felsenstein is saying that this information is probably implicit in the laws of physics, laws which imply a fitness surface smooth enough for
conventional evolution. Felsenstien might be right (although as I have said I
personally have reservations about this conclusion). Interestingly, Dembski
says We’re not saying that evolution doesn’t
happen and is in effect admiting that evolution could conceivably be tapping into
information from somewhere, perhaps the spongeam. So even if evolution does
occur DEM’s conclusion that a practical and successful search requires a priori information
still applies. And Felsenstein would agree!
You might think, then, that Dembski has got the “materialists” into a “heads I win tails you lose” impasse. But
generally IDists are unwilling to exploit this advantage because lurking in the
background is Western dualism, a dualism embodied in Dembski’s
explanatory filter and which implicitly sets natural forces against divine
intelligent design. It is therefore dangerous for IDists to even admit that
evolution might be sufficiently provisioned with the requisite information (presumably
via the spongeam, perhaps) to do the job; for if they do, then cranking the
handle of the explanatory filter leads to an embarrassing answer. This has the
effect of making “evilution” taboo in the ID community. This
is why in the second paragraph Dembski says:
I see this work as providing the
theoretically most powerful ID challenge against Darwinian evolution to date.
“Yes” and “no” to that Dembski! “Yes” if you are going to depict
“Darwinian evolution” as the straw man caricature of an unguided process, as
do some interlocutors on both sides of the debate. And “No” if one understands,
and certainly Felsenstein understands it, that the “fitness surfaces” which may be implicit in physics, provisions evolution with the requisite directional information.
Before I proceed with the next quotation I need to make the following disclaimer. I don’t accept the habitual
assumption of the de facto ID community that natural processes “can’t create information” and that information
only emerges from the mysterious black box of the so-called “intelligent
agent”. This de-facto ID error is bound up with what is likely to be a
misconception about the nature of probability. In fact my latest work (which I
hope to post in due course) suggests that the creation of information is
exactly the intended role of those so-called “natural processes”.....watch this
space. In an earlier post here I
explore some of the complexities of the information concept which impact this
matter.
Felsenstein also quotes Robert Marks
MARKS: By looking to information
theory, a well-established branch of the engineering and mathematical sciences,
evolutionary informatics shows that patterns we ordinarily ascribe to
intelligence, when arising from an evolutionary process, must be referred to
sources of information external to that process. Such sources of information
may then themselves be the result of other, deeper evolutionary processes. But
what enables these evolutionary processes in turn to produce such sources of
information? Evolutionary informatics demonstrates a regress of information
sources. At no place along the way need there be a violation of ordinary
physical causality. And yet, the regress implies a fundamental incompleteness
in physical causality’s ability to produce the required information.
Evolutionary informatics, while falling squarely within the information
sciences, thus points to the need for an ultimate
information source qua intelligent designer.
My Comment: Firstly let me say that the average
reasonably intelligent, yet non-technical Christian will be completely amazed
and fazed by the likes of gurus like Dembski, Ewart and Marks and unable to ferret
out the weaknesses in their position. It all looks oh-so-technically-expert and this in itself is heart-warming and reassuring to the average guru follower
who can connect with the dualist idea that only black-box-intelligence
creates information. And yet there is a deep issue with what Marks says above. Given
Marks’ habituated mode of thought it doesn’t enter his head that in any
practical sense of the word so called “natural processes” can create information. Instead he sees conversation of information working much like energy
conservation. From the perspective of Marks’
dualistic habits of mind it is taken for granted that physical causality is
wholly different from the “intelligent designer”. To him and others in the de
facto ID community the designer is the mysterious and analytically indivisible
entity sourcing information at the end of his information regress. It never
occurs to him to make the connection that perhaps physical causality may be that intelligence at work.
At one point Felsenstein quotes a question by ID supporter Casey Luskin.
LUSKIN: What is Active
Information, and why does it point to the need for Intelligent Design to solve
a problem, rather than an unguided evolutionary process? ……..Well, we appreciate the work that you [Marks]
are doing and the papers that you’re publishing analyzing many of these
evolutionary algorithms and asking whether they support a Darwinian view of
life or an Intelligent Design view of life. (My emphasis)
My Comment: If the spongeam and the fitness surfaces
which ride on its back exist, as Felsenstein thinks they do, then "Darwinism" is certainly not unguided! DEM’s work
in fact shows that conventional evolution cannot be unguided. It is ironic that
the B-teams on both sides of the debate err on this notion of unguided
evolution - see here
for example.
Felsenstein quotes Ewart:
EWART: While some processes are
biased towards birds, many others are biased towards other configurations of
matter. In fact, a configuration biased towards producing birds is at least as
improbable as birds themselves, possibly more so.
Having postulated Darwinian
evolution, the improbability of birds hasn’t gone away; we’ve merely switched
focus to the improbability of the process that produced birds. Instead of
having to explain the configuration of a bird, we have to explain the
configuration of a bird-making process.
My Comment: This is certainly true and this is what DEM
have successfully shown. And yet there is a deep implicit issue embedded in
Ewart’s statements as to the significance of his claims. It is on that significance
which the de facto ID movement is going astray.
The ulterior motive behind the above, a motive which is clear to
Felsenstein and myself, is that Ewart thinks he is paving the way for the explanatory
filter to default us to the “intelligent agent”, whatever he means by that. The
big problem, as I will be proposing in my latest work, is that intelligence too classifies as a highly
improbable configuration and this fact points to a major loophole in the
work of the ID gurus.
How does Felsenstein react to Ewart’s statements?....
FELSENSTEIN: This example leaves
it unclear what the “process” is. The reader may be tempted to conclude that it
is the process that models an evolving population. And then the reader may
think that if this evolutionary process succeeds in improving fitness, that
some outside force is needed to set up the process so that it succeeds. But for
their theorem to apply, the processes considered must include processes that
make no sense as models of evolution. Processes that wander around among
genotypes randomly, without being more likely to come up with higher fitnesses.
Even processes that prefer to find genotypes with lower fitnesses. All of those
are among the processes that must be eliminated before we get to processes in
which genotypes have fitnesses, and those fitnesses affect the outcome of evolution.
My Comment: As I have already said DEM have rightly included all
the possible searches in their enumeration and that includes all the highly
disordered searches which practically speaking are fruitless. Disorder, by
definition, has an overwhelming statistical weight and therefore a successful evolutionary
search is a very rare case when set against the class of disordered
searches. Using the principle of equal a
priori probabilities it follows, then, that a practical evolutionary process is
a highly improbable search and this by definition implies a high information
object. But then Felsenstein is also right; he presents a good prima facia case
that physics implies different levels of fitness and a smooth fitness surface, which
is where the information required by DEM lies according to Felsenstein. (Although
I must once again register my reservations about the existence of the spongeam
on which the existence of the fitness surface depends,)
Felsenstein further comments on Ewart:
FELSENSTEIN: In his reply, Ewert
invokes the smoothness of the fitness landscape, and considers the smoothness
to result from “laws or self-organization”
(EWART): *Quote* It is not
sufficient to invoke the three-fold incantation of selection, replication, and
mutation. You must also assume a suitable fitness landscape. You have to appeal
to something beyond Darwinism, such as laws or self-organization, to account
for a useful fitness landscape. *Unquote*
He does not seem to realize that
those “laws” might simply be the laws of physics, and that the
“self-organization” can simply be self-reproduction, something that all
organisms do.
My Comment: Although DEM are right in asserting that any
working conventional evolutionary process must have, a priori, a high information content, it is notable that Ewert
doesn’t acknowledge that conceivably this information could, as Joe Felsenstein
plausibly maintains, reside in the rarity of our familiar physical regime. One might
think that by admitting this as a possibility at least, the IDists could have
their cake and eat it; they could even claim that Felsenstein is admitting the
existence of “active information”! But
no, the de facto ID movement has painted itself into a corner here: For if something
along the lines Felsenstein is suggesting could be satisfactorily demonstrated
then not only would that bugbear of ID, the explanatory filter, stab IDists in
the back, but the whole thrust of IDism, which has been unequivocally against
any hint of “Darwinism”, would make it
look as though they have been defeated. The IDists have fostered the fearsome
dualist spectre that if those loathed “natural forces” are doing the creation
job all along then ID is worsted. Notice Ewert’s reference to so-called “self-organization”,
a vague concept which has yet to produce any substantive input into the evolution
debate. And yet if Felsenstein is right,
the solution could be staring the IDists in the face; namely, that if the requisite fitness
surfaces are implicit in physics then in effect common-or-garden physics is doing the job of “self-organisation”.
(Assuming the existence of the spongeam I must add). Even though this outcome
to the debate would still be consistent with the work of DEM, such an outcome
would cloud the tribal-clarity of the IDists shrill anti-Darwinist rallying
call, a call which appeals to the dualist thinking of every Christian sect
between here and the Watchtower’s Brooklyn HQ.
FELSENSTEIN: It is clear from
these examples that Dembski and Ewert mean their theorems to be read as
evidence for an Intelligent Designer either frontloading the evolutionary
process, or for an Intelligent Designer intervening in it. But Tom English and
I have shown that their Active Information can come about without that. It can
come about simply by having a reproducing organism which has different
genotypes, which have different phenotypes, and these have different fitnesses.
And further Active Information can also come about by the predisposition of the
laws of physics to bring about fitness surfaces smoother than “white noise”
fitness surfaces.
Could that Active Information be
enough to explain the evolution of, say, a bird? Do they have some argument
that further “configuration of a bird-making process” is needed beyond that?
There is actually nothing in their argument that requires that there be further
Intelligent Design
My Comment: Yes, given the work of DEM it does follow that the
generation of life demands frontloading; either that or the ad hoc fiat of
tinkering and intervention. Felsenstein is plausibly maintaining that the mutually
acceptable frontloading is down to physics.
Essentially then DEM and Felsenstein aren’t at odds; for they both see
the need for some kind of frontloading (If not interventional tinkering). But
they disagree over the significance and meaning of this fact. What makes the situation more complex is that
for reasons I’ve already outlined the IDists are unwilling to admit that this frontloading
could be down to common-or-garden physics; they’d much prefer their opponents
to talk of some exotic and speculative “self-organization”, a vague idea which
currently has little real intellectual traction. But for polemical reasons the
IDists are unwilling to entertain the prosaic physics solution; a choice imposed on
them by the dualism implicit in the explanatory filter which excludes any
middle ground in their intelligence versus natural forces dichotomy. The IDists have committed themselves to the
idea that some special ingredient X is needed for life to exist. Felsentstein
says that that ingredient could well be the physics we all know and love. The
IDist is inclined to say “no!” to that because otherwise it would cut across
his anti-darwinist raison d'etre he has fashioned for himself. For the
IDist ingredient X is likely to be thought of as some inaccessible “black box”
intelligence and not mere prosaic physics; to admit the latter would be a terrible
anti-climax to the de facto IDists' 2001 space odyssey message; namely, that they have found an artifact not created by common-or-garden “natural forces”; this is in spite of the fact that even if
Felsenstein is right the IDist still have a case to argue!
The ID community's loathing of "Darwinism", even if it actually doesn't directly cut across DEM's ideas, nevertheless, goes deep enough to cause division within the ID community. See for example this post by Vincent Torley on Uncommon Descent where in the comments section Torley is accused of supporting “Darwinism”. See comment 86 where we read: It almost seems as if VJ Torley is turning Darwinist on us. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong. Regardless of whether it is consistent with conservation of information ideas or not as a rule the average right of centre ID follower hates "Darwinism" and can not abide by it.
The added irony is that Felsenstein himself takes for granted the same
dichotomy of intelligence vs. natural forces. Given his outlook on life it is
likely, of course, that he believes “natural forces”, whatever that means, have
done the job of evolving life. Since he has
shown (plausibly) that physics could be the seat of so-called active information,
then his conclusion, as per the explanatory filter, is that intelligent agency
is not required as an explanation. He, like his IDist antagonists, sees it as a
straight choice between natural forces and God. Felsenstein is a dualist in his conceptual categories when it come to thinking about God. As Felsenstein says above: "
Epilogue
Even if Felsenstien is winning the argument this still leaves us with
the question of Why our particular
physical regime with its miraculous fine tuning? For IDists, of course,
this is the work of the God of the Gaps,
but for Felsentstein it’s probably the work of Physics of the Gaps, perhaps some kind of multiverse. But whatever
way we look at it, finite chains of human logic will always leave an inevitable
grand
logical hiatus unfilled. The irrational arbitrariness of an impenetrable
wall of brute fact contingency faces us at the end of our quest for obliging reason;
positing neither physics nor intelligence will rid us of this super gap (But see appendix). Therefore I suggest
we leave it and get back to the thing we do best and that is to describe the
cosmos we have been provisioned with using the intellectual tools the good Lord has
also provisioned us with.
From where I’m standing the results of Dembski, Ewart and Marks are starting to look like a misinterpreted mathematical trivialism, I hope to
expand on this topic in later posts. What ID is missing is that those much despised so-called “natural processes” are actually provisioned, in any practical sense of the word, to
do exactly what IDists dread and fear in their darkest dreams; namely to create information. But then why should
a Christian be surprised at that? God is immanent in his world.
Appendix (Added 21 Nov)
Is there any hope that the finite human mind could ever grasp the
concept of Aseity? Two lines of inquiry respectively from the atheist and
theist camps might be as follows:
Atheistic Aseity: This line or argumentation might be based on
some kind of super-copernicanism; that is, the super-multiverse where all
options are somehow realised, an idea having its strongest form in Max Tegmark’s
mathematical universe. Because everything exists in the super-verse then it
follows that everything has an existence probability of unity. The Shannon “suprisal
value”, that is, the information value of the existence of any particular state
of affairs then sinks to zero. Since the human intellectual demand for
explanation comes in large part from our intuitive sense of surprise as to why particular
things are as they are, then it may be argued that super-copernicanism goes
someway to assuaging our sense of surprise at apparent contingencies; for in the super-verse nothing conceivable is
given preferential existential treatment; the only surprise left is why there
is something rather than nothing. But it might be argued that if everything
exists it is no more surprising than everything failing to exist at all!
Regarding the epistemic question as to why human beings can know
anything at all in such an indifferent and dispassionate universe it might be
argued that in a universe of indifference we aren’t going to be specially
targeted for deception; hence errors average out and we can be reasonably sure
that we can acquire knowledge about somethings
if not everything. To claim that we could know nothing in an impersonal universe is tantamount to the inverted conceit of the
conspiracy theorists who believe that they are being specially targeted for deception. One
thing to be said for Copernicanism is that it seems to be an antidote to the narcissism
of fundamentalist paranoia!
However there are problems with this view: Namely, the
simulation argument and why we know as much as we do; we would expect the universe
to be far more random and unknowable if some form of super-copernicanism held sway.
Theistic Aseity: This line of thought is potentially much more
fruitful to my mind. Early on in my intellectual career I was attracted to positivism;
the general idea that everything swings on observer experience to a high
degree; in fact strong positivism suggests that all else besides experience is meaningless.
Strong positivism is counter intuitive when it comes to in-practice and in-principle
realities that cannot be experienced like the planets of distant galaxies or
other minds. But nevertheless positivism has left me with the general feeling
that without the presence of an experiencing sentience to apprehend it in some way
“reality” is a meaningless and incoherent idea. This view is clearly related to Berkeley’s
idealism. So, if reality is meaningless without a sentient apprehender then the organised high complexity of the cosmos immediately follows: The experiencing sentience
has to be sufficiently complex in order to possess the coherence needed to
cognitively apprehend the cosmos, But since coherent human observers are composed of the very stuff of the cosmos, then it follows that the cosmos must be sufficiently organised and complex to support the human sentience that apprehends it. When human's describe the cosmos they are in effect describing themselves. I advance a related idea in the
introduction of my book Gravity and
Quantum Non-Linearity. Viz; that conscious sentience is described in its own
terms, much like a computer language compiler is written in the language it compiles.
The foregoing line of thought is essentially the strong anthropic principle. It attempts to show that sentient observers are logically necessary because a cosmos without them is regarded as an unintelligible notion. These prototype ideas on the aseity of sentience may throw light on the aseity of God.
Atheistic visions of the cosmos which are founded on the elementary elemental such as bits and particles will always face a logical hiatus: Simplicity is simply too simple to self-explain. (I touch on this idea of elementary elementalism being unable to self-explain in the following posts:
The foregoing line of thought is essentially the strong anthropic principle. It attempts to show that sentient observers are logically necessary because a cosmos without them is regarded as an unintelligible notion. These prototype ideas on the aseity of sentience may throw light on the aseity of God.
Atheistic visions of the cosmos which are founded on the elementary elemental such as bits and particles will always face a logical hiatus: Simplicity is simply too simple to self-explain. (I touch on this idea of elementary elementalism being unable to self-explain in the following posts:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/paul-nelson-computer-simulations-and.html)
Appendix II
Without the spongeam conventional evolution is a non-starter
