What was that again?

I recently received this rather terse e-mail from a James E Grambrell.

The term "quantum physics" should be avoided. The preferred term currently is "quantum mechanics. This will continue until it is recognized that Physics and Quantics are separate but overlapping disciplines. James E Gambrell.

Was it in response to my passing reference to “quantum physics” in my last post? I hadn’t heard of quantics until this e-mail and so I did a little web work. Top of the Google search list for quantics was a consultancy who specialize in pharmaceutical, health and ecotoxicology statistics. It can’t be that. An online dictionary defined a quantic to be a homogeneous polynomial having two or more variables. It can’t be that. However I eventually found a web pages claiming that quantic physics was a new philosophy, and this is what I read:

Quantic physics says that everything that we see isn’t the images that we really see with your eyes. But it’s an image that is being created from our mind.

My best guess is that that is trying to tell us that reality isn’t “out there” but “in here”.

But if it's all "in here" then there is no "out there". But if there is no "out there" then there can be no "in here" because it can only be "in here" by virtue of its relation to "out there".

William Dembski: Curiouser and Curiouser

Characters of the Wild Web: Academic fugitive Billy the DembskID is proving difficult to nail.

William Dembski has given a brief reply (here) in response to reactions to his latest paper. Here is the bulk of Dembski’s reply:

One criticism is that it at best is consistent with theistic evolution but does not support ID. I think this is a mistake. I’ve said for over a decade now that ID is consistent with the most far-flung evolutionary change. The key contention of ID is that design in nature, and in biology in particular, is detectable. Evolutionary informatics, by looking at the information requirements of evolutionary processes, points to information sources beyond evolution and thus, indirectly, to a designer. Theistic evolution, by contrast, accepts the Darwinian view that Darwinian processes generate the information required for biological complexity internally, without any outside source of information. The results by Marks and me are showing that this cannot be the case. The paper just published is only the first installment. It essentially lays out our accounting procedure for measuring the information in evolutionary search. We have two forthcoming papers that flesh out our larger project (available at www.evoinfo.org/publications), showing that attempts to account for the information internally, without an external information source, all founder.

I’m confused to say the least.

As my previous blog post suggests, even atheists like Mark Chu-Carrol and Joe Felsenstein on Panda’s thumb would accept that evolution only works if resourced by the right physical regime. In the sense that this physical regime seems to just one possibility singled out from a huge space of apparent possibilities it thus appears as a precondition of very remote probability. Hence, using Dembski’s measure of information (-log[p]) evolution requires, accordingly, a very high a-priori information content, Without getting into quibbles over Dembski’s use of the term “information” one might wonder just what distinguishes Dembski’s position from these atheists; both accept that (very) special conditions are required to resource evolution. Of course, the real difference is just where the respective parties go from there: The atheists believe that the apparent fortuitousness of the right physics is no argument for God/Intelligence. (I personally don’t think it is right to start accusing atheists of the unforgivable sin if at this point in the argument they want to say “Hold on a minute, this doesn’t necessarily follow”)

However, while the atheists stop and think about that one let me run with William Dembski.

Firstly, another quibble: Is the notion of probability applicable to the “brute” givens of the physical regime? In physical theory such as quantum physics, probability is a quantity defined within the confines of a given system that generates frequency profiles. In contrast the brute givens of the physical regime are meta-features that don’t find context within a system of frequency profiles and so this raises questions about the applicability of probability to the physical regime itself.

But however we settle that quibble, I for one will accept that there is no getting away from it: The apparent logically unwarranted nature of the cosmic set up seems a remarkable brute fact and for theists like myself and William Dembski, this is seen as evidence of providence, so in this sense I can run with William Dembski’s design views. As a tentative evolutionist this makes me, presumably, a theistic evolutionist.

But Dembski pins theistic evolutionists to a straw man: “Theistic evolution, by contrast, accepts the Darwinian view that Darwinian processes generate the information required for biological complexity internally, without any outside source of information.” I just can’t buy that. Even atheists, as we have seen, accept that evolutionary theory doesn’t explain everything, (especially the conditions that resource it) and that it leaves a sort of “informational” loose end, although of course atheists wouldn’t accept that this loose end should be tied up theistically.

Now Prof William, I can’t speak for other Theistic Evolutionists but correct me if I am wrong; I thought that Theistic Evolution was precisely the belief that God creates and sustains the required preconditions that considerably enhance the chances of evolution working. If Christian theistic evolutionists really believe, as you suggest, that evolution is tantamount to an ex-nihilo creative agency and therefore does not require any outside agency why, oh why are they Christian theists rather than Yin Yan or Gnostic dualists?

OK there may be quibbles about your concept of information but my understanding is that Theistic Evolutionists would broadly agree that evolution is providentially supplied with the right resources to work; that is, evolution is no logical necessity and as such needs some far deeper necessity to create and sustain the conditions it requires. If that’s what you mean by Darwinian evolution not creating information I can run with that.

So just where do you stand William? You say “I’ve said for over a decade now that ID is consistent with the most far-flung evolutionary change”. So given that we accept the necessity of “active information” to resource evolution does this mean that you can affirm that evolution is not necessarily inconsistent with ID? Does this mean that one can be an evolutionist AND an ID theorist? Do you have any ID evolutionist friends? And what are your views on YEC theory?

Darwin Bicentenary part 26: ID theorist and Atheists Agree (!)

An agreement shot through with holes.

Another vicious gun fight has broken out between ID theorists and atheist evolutionists. This time the contention is over Dembski’s latest paper on measuring search algorithm information. Anti-evilution references have, according to reviewers, been kept under wraps by Dembski, but needless to say there is an implicit connection with ID theory. Consequently, that the paper has been peered reviewed and published is too easily construed as a vote in favour of ID and this thoroughly annoys the atheists.

In the ensuing fight a lot of time is spent by people saying what they think about one another. (“liars”, “pompous”, “bragging”, “stupid”, that kind of thing) Also, there is much criticism of Dembski for apparently repeatedly misrepresenting Dawkins’ simple “ME THINKS” program. (BTW, I got my view of this program from Dembski). PZ Myers, presumably because this is not his field, links to Mark Chu-Carrol’s blog who comments on Dembski’s latest paper. Uncommon Descent accuses PZ Myers of evading the issue, hinting that it may all be rather over PZ’s head; the subtext here is that PZ is no match for UD’s gallant champion of the ID cause.

Chu-Carrol is a pretty abrasive character and doesn’t mince his words when it comes to expressing what he thinks of people, especially ID theorists. But this is really by the by. Abrasiveness apart Chu-Carrol’s mathematical content is, as far as I can tell, certainly better than passable; but then so is Dembski’s. So, leaving aside personalities and the silly distraction over the trivial “ME THINKS” program what are we left with? I think you will find that Dembski and Chu-Carrol actually agree. In a blog comment about a very similar paper by Dembski, Chu-Carrol comments:

Back at the beginning of the paper, I said that Dembski actually manages to basically refute his own argument - that he shows how evolution can actually work. By now, you should see how that happens: this whole argument comes down to asking what it means to drop the "over all possible landscapes" part of NFL. If you do that, then you end up with a search algorithm that can perform very well on some set of landscapes. Which is exactly what us lousy evolutionists have been saying all along.

What I think Chu-Carrol is telling us here (and I agree) is that evolution is a search algorithm that performs well given the particular fitness landscape of the right physical regime. Translating that to Dembski’s terms it means that for evolution to work a good dollop of active information must be present from day one. Chu-Carrol quibbles about Dembski’s concept of information (quibbles which I actually share), but the underlying lesson agreed by both parties seems clear: Evolution must be hosted by the right physical regime before it has a chance of working. This post on Panda’s thumb sums it up: “….Dembski and Marks’s argument ends up leaving us to argue about where the laws of physics ultimately come from, and most evolutionary biologists will not feel too worried”.

So what is the argument really all about?

At this point I have to confess that Dembski’s position rather puzzles me. He is trying to quantify the kind of resource that everyone agrees evolution needs before it stands a chance of working. But in the ID community this is somehow construed as an anti-evolution argument; perhaps because ID supporters feel that if intelligence is going to resource evolution in order to create life, it may as well create life more directly. But why doesn’t Dembski just come out with it: His mathematics, in the final analysis, is neutral about whether evolution has happened on not.

Then again perhaps Dembski’s position isn’t so puzzling. Frankly, I think it is too late for Dembski to take a stance of more studied detachment. As I think I have said before, the human aspects in this battle are intrusive and dominating. Dembski is the ID clan’s “David” in a “David and Goliath” battle with the academic establishment. Dembski’s friends and mates are looking to him to score points. Many of those loyal and admiring friends may even be YEC’s. The personal aspects have taken over Dembski’s life. He does not have the heart to crush the hopes and expectations of his friends. They alone have given him kudos and status and in return he must act well on their behalf in order to fulfill their expectations. He cannot be a turncoat or traitor; he is too nice a guy for that.

Characters of the Wild Web 17: Mark Chu-Carrol: Good guy, bad guy. We know what Uncommon Dissenters think.

Ken is not Amused

A rather nonathletic PZ Myers may have found this exhibit easier to ride.

There are certainly a lot of blog miles to be had in the “atheists do the creation museum” farce. A youTube video of PZ Myers having a ride on Ken Ham’s toy triceratops can be seen here. PZ has difficulty getting on and off the exhibit and looks about as lumbering as a dinosaur himself. Being an expert in natural history and all that, one might expect that mounting a dinosaur would be second nature to PZ. However in this post PZ suggests an explanation for his brontosaurian maneuverability; using AiG age scales he claims he is only 36 minutes old but unfortunately for him he was created with the appearance of (great) age. What a shock for his mother.

Ken Ham, being the butt of the jokes, is not really well placed to see the funny side of all this and he gives his stern and censorious reaction on his blog. One peculiar aspect of Ham’s post is that he displays a set of photos of bumper stickers collected by his staff from the museum's car park on the day of the atheist visit. Ken suggests these stickers are a clear sign of the devil's work. So what do we find on these atheist bumper stickers? “Support the anti Christ”? “Enjoy Sexual lust”, “Live eviL”, “I Hate God”? Not at all; instead stickers expressing self defined ethics, support for evolution, gay marriage defined by love, and a desire to do good. Just the sort of thing one would expect from a group of genuine people looking for moral and spiritual anchorage in a post death of God culture. One can hardly expect to find stickers proclaiming repentance, forgiveness of sins and free salvation. For these people there is no divine underwriter for such things, and frankly, Ham’s group, with its holy idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, is easily construed as further evidence of an absence of God.

But of course for Ham these stickers are the deceitful veneer of unspeakable evil. It is not at all surprising that amongst Ham’s atheist bumper sticker collection is one that simply offers support for Obama. Obama is a believer, but for heresy hunters an apostate faith is, if anything, a worse sin than atheism, for it is regarded as the gloss of a bad conscience that hypocritically courts Satan. Willful deceit and duplicity are round every corner for strict sectarians like Ken Ham.

Atheists might poke fun at Ham and co, but what Ham throws back is far more serious; namely accusations of evil and threats of damnation. And Ham doesn’t reserve this for atheists only but for all who don’t see eye to eye with his view of creation, and even those who simply support president Obama. Holding a different point of view is for them a likely sign of a willful rejection of the truth, thus providing Ham and friends with a pretext to dig deep into their supply of spiritual invective.

Strict sectarians like Ham cannot (yet) be accused of propagating an authoritarian cult regime. Instead they tend to be a decentralized self organizing group that flock in the manner of a boids simulation. What keeps them together is a mutual suspicion of the “outside” world, a world from which they have been well and truly spiritually alienated. Moreover, anyone in the group who might moot a revision of concepts receives a barrage of askance looks; nobody dare move for fear of setting a bad precedent and shaking the foundations of the subculture. Any breaking of ranks might be the road to hell.

I wouldn’t want to accuse Ham of being at the head of a cult, but the step from strict sectarian to the narrow paranoiac conspiracy theory touting cult member is not a big step. Strict sectarians are usually a small tightly knit remnant, an embattled group of people thoroughly disaffected with the anonymity and excesses of a greater society with which they fail to identify. However, there is a danger that as the strict sectarians increase in numbers the transition to a cult is subtly made; this may be forced upon them because the decentralized flocking dynamic may not be sufficient to keep together a large number of people.

Stephen Wolfram and Cellular Automata Part 2

At the constructive suggestion of a Paul Abbots who commented on my first post on Wolfram’s cellular automata I have pushed the boat out a little further by doing some reading of Wolfram’s NKS online, viz the sections on universality and computational equivalence. Paul was responding to this comment in my post:

On the subject of computational equivalence Wolfram is less compelling. Simple processes can produce the high complexity of disorder, but simple processes, which are relatively small in number, merely sample a very small part of the huge class of complex and disordered configurations. The only way of reaching this huge class is to start with complexity. Accordingly I am not sure I know what Wolfram means when he talks about a “maxing out” of complexity. Complexity of process seems to have no upper limit. Perhaps I do not understand Wolfram aright but it seems to me that there is a huge platonic realm out there of highly complex algorithms, whose rules are beyond our ken, algorithms whose computational resources are too great to be humanly manageable.

So how does the above compare with Wolfram’s notion of Computational Equivalence?

Having read bits of NKS online I think I now have a much clearer idea of Wolfram’s notion of computational equivalence. This is how I currently see it: According to Wolfram there is a class of computations based on simple rules that generate complex “baroque” patterns; see for example those simple cellular automata that generate complex patterns like the one illustrated. The members of this class, Wolfram conjectures, are by and large computationally equivalent in that at some point in the sequence of patterns generated by these computations each and every possible computation is carried out. That is, provided you wait long enough for one of these simple rule systems to do its work, it will generate the conditions that in conjunction with further operations of the rule system will then proceed to carry out any identified computation. If Wolfram’s conjecture is correct then there is an obvious sense in which any selected baroque computation can’t do better than any other; for all of these baroque computations (it is conjectured) eventually create the conditions which when worked on by further application of the rules will effectively be carrying out any identified computation. Hence I now see what Wolfram means by a “maxing out” of complexity. Each and every baroque computation potentially embodies all computations and therefore can’t do any better.

The sting in the tail here is that Wolfram’s conjecture may never be proved for the simple reason that the computation needed to prove it may be too long. However, thinking about it, computational equivalence does have some support in intuition. Chaotic computations, like say random number generators that are “baroque” enough not to contain periodicities, will forever generate novelty of pattern. In effect they are (unsystematically) ringing the changes and thus working their way through the entire space of possibilities and thus one expects that given enough time they will visit all computations that are possible. The same even seems to be true of a simple counting procedure; given time it will generate a string that, appropriately decoded, will represent some computation. Put like this, though, Wolfram’s equivalence conjecture seems almost trivial. However, according to Wolfram computational equivalence is always a little bit bigger and profounder than our articulations of it: “Computational equivalence is truer than any proof of it or illustration of it”.

According to Wiki’s NKS page some critics have suggested that Wolfram’s conjecture is equivalent to the Church-Turing thesis. This I don’t see; the Church-Turing thesis affirms the universality of certain models of computation; that is, it affirms that certain models of computation can carry out any computation if appropriately programmed. But Wolfram seems to be saying something that at first sight is surprising; namely that a particular computation (and not a particular computational model), provided it is baroque enough, is potentially universal. That surprising result appears not to follow from the Church-Turing thesis, a thesis which concerns the universality of computational models and not the universality of particular computations.

Now we come to my own comment quoted above. The intended content of this comment, which I can now see doesn’t challenge Wolfram’s thesis of computational equivalence, I explain below. The following really represents my own informal grasp of the kind of work that is being carried out formally by people like Gregory Chaitin. (Caution: my understanding here is still at the hand waving stage)

A computation is product of two resources: the starting program string (which encodes data and the rules of operation) and time (which equates to computational steps). Hence, a given computational result can be expressed as the product of two resources, program and time, thus:

Program + Time = Result.

This equation is not rigorous or literal mathematics but rather a metaphor, a metaphor that illustrates the complimentary relation of program string and time: If we want to shorten the time needed to arrive at a given result we can do so by increasing the length of the program string, effectively giving the computation more information. Conversely if we shorten the program string depleting it of information this has the effect of increasing the time needed to generate the designated result. Together, program string and time must “sum” to the “value” designated as “result” in the above “equation”. (It is assumed here that “memory space” is unlimited). There is a loose analogy here with data compression; the less compressed data is, the less time needed to decompress it, whereas the more compressed the data, the greater the time needed to decompress it. The size of the combined resources of program string and time can be thought of as a measure of the computational complexity of the result.

Of particular interest to human beings are results that are a product of manageable resources; that is, program strings and computation times of humanly convenient length. In this connection it is clear from such things as random number generators and Wolfram’s cellular automata, that configurational complexity need not be particularly computationally complex; that is, configurational complexity can be the output of computational simplicity; simple in terms of manageable programs strings and computation times. Thus, there is a class of configurationally complex structures that can be “compressed” into elementary computing resources.

Given a particular programming model it is clear from combinatorial considerations alone that the number of short programs is very small compared to the enormous size of result space. Thus, if we are to stipulate that short programs are only allowed to map to this space via links that consist of a realistic number of computation steps, then it follows that the very limited supply of short programs reaches a very small sample of results. However, if we put no limit on the number of computation steps by switching our programs into nonstop production mode thus allowing them to generate very long sequences of results, we are then moving into a realm where Wolfram’s computational equivalence may apply. Thus, from computational equivalence we deduce that any result can be reached with most short program strings that have a “baroque” output, but the colossal size of result space will ensure that the majority of results will only be arrived at after a prohibitively long time.

As Gregory Chaitin points out, a theory is a successful means of computing the complexity we see around us, but such theories only have human utility if they use humanly tractable resources; namely relatively short program strings and computation times. This is a form of data compression and a theory’s ability to compress data into simple computing resources is in part the human rationale for theorizing. A good theory is a way of describing the complexity we see around us using minimal computational resources. On the other hand if we apply computational equivalence then trivially any observed configuration could in principle be a product of a simple computation, but it is unlikely to be a computation with a tractable number of steps. In fact if computational equivalence holds then any observed complexity could be the product any of a large class of “baroque” computations that have been given enough time to do their work. Thus, computational equivalence leaves us with an ontological ambiguity in that when we allow long computation times any of a large class of long computations could do the job of describing the cosmos.

On the other hand this ontological ambiguity is not true of low resource computations; (that is, short program strings and computation times) if we succeed in describing the complexity we see around us using a low resource computation it follows that we have found a very rare case indeed; that is, a rare mapping from a low resource computation to the specific configurational complexity found in the cosmic setting. In terms of real descriptive power and succinctness of resource not all computations are equivalent.

…to be continued.

Skullduggery

PZ Myers is still posting material following his visit to the Creation Museum. Just look at following which was taken from one of the Creation Museum presentations:


I'm gobsmacked; all squeezed into the first part of a short 4400 history since the Flood (There seems to be an even greater difficulty over the development of radically different carnivorous phenotypes from herbivores in the space of about a 1500 year period between Fall and Flood). I wonder if Homo Heidelbergensis and the distribution of genetic markers have somehow been synthesized into the above picture by Ham's vaunted PhD's? Looks like I'm going to have to pay AiG a visit sometime.

In 1975 I read "The Genesis Flood" by Whitcomb and Morris. In one of their appendices they stated:

"... it seems Biblically possible, or even probable, that the Flood occurred several millenia before Abraham"*

Since Abraham is dated about 2000 BC Whitcomb and Morris were arguing for an Earth that could be as much as 10,000 years old. This at least made life a little easier for them; they didn't have to place the Flood around 4400 years ago thus having to explain away the apparent conflict with, say, Egyptian history. What has changed since 1961 when "The Genesis Flood" was published?

* See "The Genesis Flood", Page483, 1974 edition.

PZ Myers does the Creation Museum

Characters of the Wild Web Number 17: PZ Myers' Raiders Visit the Creation Museum

PZ Myers, along with some 300 hundred other “raiders”, recently converged on Ken Ham’s creation museum. For Myers’ perspective on the event see here, here here and here. Interesting is Myers' link to this blogging Christian minister. The latter notes the dualism that is the founding philosophy of Ham’s museum – a common philosophy of thought that I have often found in the unselfconscious evangelical and fundamentalist mindset.

Myers account of the visit reveals what is essentially a glitzy and superficial Disneyland style “museum” that will no doubt provide comfort and solace for the converted masses easily persuaded by special effects and science qualifications, but which will cut no ice with those looking for rigorous science and philosophy. (Those who are looking for some rigorous science are likely to find themselves on the receiving end of some spiritual intimidation; such as being accused of looking to inferior human reason rather than obeying sublime revelation – this is what we mean by “dualism”)

Now, it might be validly pointed out that one shouldn’t just go to PZ Myers alone for a view on the museum. However, I have to say that Myers’ account gave me such profound feelings of reminiscence and vivid flashbacks to my own experience of fundamentalist creationism that I suspect that he is close to the mark. This brand of creationism is less about science than it is a PR exercise in securing a following of spiritual rednecks who will then cough up the finance to keep the whole creationist show on the road, thus generating a self perpetuating travesty of science. Summing up, the museum, like so much Christian fundamentalism, appears to tap into yearnings for a Kincadian cozy living room version of reality that promotes feelings of warmth and well being. And to think of the number of prayer meetings that must have offered up prayers in support of the museum, assured that God was on their side and His Spirit guiding them.

I wonder what William Dembski thinks of this museum? Would he dare vocalize his true thoughts? Is he now too much in the pockets of the YEC’s to do that?

Following the raid a fight broke out on Larry Moran’s blog involving PZ Myers and one of Ken Ham’s staff about the culpabilities and facts surrounding the ejection of one of the raiders from the museum. Frankly, the whole incident now seems to have pathologically degenerated and become bound up with the trivial, rather than with the profound mysteries of our cosmic setting. But why is it I can't stop laughing? Schadenfreude?

Characters of the Wild Web Number 16: PZ rides in at the head of his raiders proving once and for all that man coexisted with dinosaurs.

Stop Press 13/8/9
For anyone wanting to know the circumstances surrounding the above surreal picture, then see the account below. The following is part of an incongruously sober report prepared by one of the creation museum staff and marked for Ken Ham’s attention. It appears on Ken Ham’s blog. (Note: SSA = Student Secular Alliance)

But there were still some incidents, but most were minor. For example, despite our clear sign next to the Triceratops model downstairs (which is not in the museum exhibit area), where it stated this was a photo op and that children under 12 could get on (see photo attached), some SSA members hopped on anyway. Our head of security went downstairs to stop that activity when he heard of it. The prof (PZ Myers) got on, too, but insisted that he only saw the children’s sign after he got on! Here is a photo of the sign which is easy to see and read:


Indeed, that much-mocked Triceratops model of ours—with the saddle on it, and which has been mistakenly taken by our opponents as a museum exhibit rather than a photo op area for families with children—was a center of much attention today. The model had just been patched up Thursday (it had taken a lot of beating over the past two years by children climbing on board ) to be back just in time for today. We did not want to be accused of hiding something so “infamous.” It was clearly placed in a non-exhibit part of the museum and marked with a sign that stated that this was for children to get on and for photos to be taken. Of course, we are not embarrassed by our teaching that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, but the atheists have been implying that this photo-op spot in the museum was our “evidence” of dino-human co-existence. To use a photo op area for kids, no different to what one finds at many secular venues, shows how much these opponents clutch at straws and will twist anything to try to mock us.

It’s rich. Imagine the scene. Amidst a rowdy group of laughing, joking and mocking students (who were no doubt delighted to find and abuse this legendary “exhibit"), a well known university professor joins the fun and does a stint on the children’s toy. He then gives the stern head of security the corny story that he didn’t see the sign!

Here We Go Round Again: The Heart/Head Dualism

Look here on Uncommon Descent for a very interesting post by sociologist Steve Fuller. He links to his review of Karen Armstrong’s book “The Case for God”. Below I have paraphrased some comments from Fuller’s review. I have never read Armstrong, so the following will have to serve as an account of her position on religion.

Armstrong according to Fuller
* Armstrong sharply distinguishes the status of religion as either logos and mythos – that is, as an account of how the world really is and how we make sense of our place in the world.
* Armstrong seeks an end to arguments for and against God’s existence, arguments which obscure the divine.
* The divine is beyond words.
* Religion works best when mythos has the upper hand over logos.
* Intelligent Design theory is logos driven
* Science’s quest for certainty is hubris.
* Humanity’s logos mania has led to untold cruelty, misery and harm to other humans and nature.
* ID supporters are the target of Armstrong’s anti enlightenment harangue.
* Core religious experience is silence before the ineffability of being; the apophatic response.
* There has been a decline in modern religious authenticity as it becomes bound up with science.
* Armstrong calls for Stephen Jay Gould’s magisterial segregation of religion and science.
* ID is too enamored with science as opposed to religions ultimate basis in the ineffable.

My Comments
Firstly, I don’t think it does justice to describe the logos vs. mythos dichotomy by portraying it as a distinction between how the world really is and how we make sense of our place in the world. For many an atheist evolution has the character of a structure that makes sense of our place in the world; or at least as far as the materialist can make sense of that place. Moreover, evolution is a hugely complex object tying together a very tiny sample of direct experience and thus evolution is less the world as it really is than what we think it is. So, what Armstrong really means here is that "logos" grounded theories like evolution (and ID!) make little sense of the human predicament in terms of axiomatic human predicates such as value, purpose, meaning, sensibility and feeling.

Therefore my reading of Armstrong (according to Fuller) is that she is in actual fact manifesting yet a another version of the tension found in a very common duality, a duality that I have expressed time and again on my blogs and elsewhere; words versus feelings, analysis versus intuition, knowledge versus gnosis, H. G. Wells’ Morlocks vs. Eloi, etc; in short the head versus heart dualism (See here, here and here). This dualism may actually have a grounding in the left/right physiology of the brain, although I apply this picture tentatively because the scientific account may need modification. However, the left/right brain division at least serves as an excellent metaphor for Armstrong's head vs. heart religious dualism.

Armstrong, needless to say, is a religious liberal and yet in her valuing of mythos over and against logos she has much in common with the skew in EPC Christian culture (EPC = Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic) toward the Holy Spirit; or as many New Agers would contend, a shift from the age of pisces (Icthus, the fish) to the age of aquarius (the water carrier). It is surely an irony that Armstrong’s disaffection toward logos religion closely mirrors the EPC Christian's oft expressed disdain for reasoning, thinking, and language. Unlike Armstrong the EPC Christian may espouse fundamentalist doctrines, but those doctrines have more the character of a hard shell or husk that encases what to the EPC is the heart of the matter; a faith of mythos mush, an intimate and unspeakably sublime connection with the Divine. For how many times have I heard in my unfortunate association with EPC of the 18 inch separation between head and heart? How many times have I been told that faith is not in the head but in the heart? How many times have I heard expressed EPC diffidence toward “enlightenment” thinking? How many times have I had the misfortune to sit under preachers, even strict and particular evangelicals, who deride the products of reason and promulgate a fideist gospel? How many times have I heard that true faith is in the heart and not in the head? How many times have preachers expressed a dislike of science and compared "man’s knowledge" unfavourably with Divine knowledge? Just like Armstrong, EPC yearns for mythos over and against logos.

The following quote taken from a charismatic fundamentalist (whom I have on video) typifies so much that I have heard in EPC:

“If you always process salvation through your mind you will never enter the fuller things in your walk. You must move from a place of cognitive reasoning ability to a place where faith and belief flows through your spirit and not your head … God is beyond your logic.”

Another manifestation of the head vs. heart dualism with a bias toward the former is surely found amongst some emerging church Christians. See, for example, this exchange on Network Norwich where a commentator by the name of Paul expresses diffidence toward James Knight 's highly intellectual and cognitive apologetics and he echoes what is the equivalent of Armstrong's disdain of ID theory. Paul says:

In dissecting the wager as you (James Knight) have done you have put forward the modernist construction that one believes first - it is about thought, will and logic. You've basically said it's about competing truth claims (eg propositions that can be debated, arguments clinched). Surely all that does is narrow and confine the God you are attempting to expose to as "more than" that. In essence then the place to encounter God is in certainty and the mind. Interesting that Kraft said the evangelical church was the child of modernity. Not sure your arguments hold in a postmodern, postchristian, postchristendom and postwhatever society.


Making a guess I identified Paul as a post-evangelical, emerging church Christian and I went on to hazard that he appeared again in this thread on Network Norwich, but without a name, and so I gave him the acronym PAUL which I said stood for "Postmodern Antifoundationalism Undermines Logocentricity", or "Postmodern Ambiguity Undermines Language".

Anyway, here was my reply to Paul:

In the tension between the Institutional and the Celtic, between the analytical and the intuitive, between science and art, between the informational and the heartfelt, between ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’, I’m for a synthesis rather a competitive spiritual hegemony by partisans who place all their eggs in one basket, whether that basket be just the formal or of the intuitive.

It is surely ironic that today’s charismatically oriented mainstream evangelical, who often derides the ‘head’ knowledge of propositional doctrine, thus finds himself on a similar quest to the emerging church and the liberal theologians. In their own ways they are all reacting to the apparent epistemological and ontological hegemony of analytical science by finding spiritual refuge in that last bastion of sacredness and humanity: the mysteries of inner life. I would be the last to deny the important role that sublime experience may play in the spiritual life of some people but it’s gone too far when the ecstatic is set over and against the analytical.

God can, I believe, can be found in the modernist and the abstract (in thought, will and logic) as in any other domain of human experience. But human knowledge is inherently probabilistic and probabilities soften the sharp outlines of binary logic saving the analytical from human hubris.

Pascal is a very significant figure in this connection. In him we see the tension between the analytical and the intuitive worked out, in his case resolved in favour of the mystical and the fideist. But he had also become aware of the probabilistic nature of human knowledge. He appealed to the analytically inclined by suggesting that their knowledge had blurred edges. (The exact space of possibilities in which Pascal offered the choices of his wager were the options the culture of his day thought to be nigh on exhaustive)

Evangelicalism the child of modernity? No! No! No! Evangelicalism has been and continues to be as much the embodiment of tensions between “right and left brain” expressions as many other parts of society.

The escape from science into gnosis or mythos seems to be a very general phenomenon, a phenomenon that goes wider than religious liberals and EPC . At its root is a thirst for mystery that science finds hard to satiate:

Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine – unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made the tender-person’d lamia melt into the shade. (Keats)

Stephen Wolfram and Cellular Automata.

I recently watched this YouTube video featuring Stephen Wolfram expounding his theory of cellular automata. I have tinkered around with cellular automata in the past myself, but it seems that Wolfram is trying to develop the notion into the ultimate killer science. Looking around on the internet, however, it seems that not everybody is impressed with Wolfram’s lack of modesty and unwillingness to give credit. For myself I was surprised that in his lecture Wolfram didn’t at least make some mention of researchers like Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin. But this totalizing kind of theorist often goes together with a large ego. I hear rumor the Benoit Mandelbrot was of a similar type.

Nevertheless, the lecture was fascinating stuff. Wolfram believes that in order for our science to make further progress, especially in the area of complexity, new kinds of primitive are required. Needless to say, Wolfram believes that cellular automata are those primitives. He showed us how a variety of objects that cellular automate are capable of generating, from the complexity of high disorder through patterns that looked like particle collisions, to spatial geometries that had the properties of gravitational curvature. Of particular interest to me were Wolfram’s references to touring automata which build up structure by weaving a single thread of time, like a kind of continuous scan line, through reality. But he pointed out a problem with touring automata; the reality they generate may be dependent on the order in which the automata visits various locations. Hence a class of automata is required that is insensitive to the update order and Wolfram referred to these kinds of automata as “causally invariant”. He claimed that causally invariant automata give rise to relativistic like consequences. But what about quantum mechanics and the non-locality of the EPR experiment? How do strictly local automata deal with this? I believe Wolfram has been challenged on this point, but during his lecture he made passing references to extra dimensional links between particles which could cater for this. Wolfram believes that cellular automata provide a very literal digital simulation of reality and this leads him to declare that in his view time and space are very different things, perhaps mirroring the distinction between memory space and computational steps.

On the face of it, it all looks rather impressive, although Wolframs treatment of the EPR experiment does look to me a little contrived. Wolfram expressed the belief that he thought real physics to be digital and it seems that he really does believe that cellular automata capture some kind of reality about the universe. But just what is the nature of this correspondence? It is clear that standard Turing machines can simulate a large class of reality and yet we don’t conclude that the ontology of the cosmos is based on Turing machines. The question, then, is this: Is Wolfram simply propounding just another model of computation, like Turing machines, recursive functions, counter programs etc, or does cosmic ontology closely correspond to cellular automata? Wolfram is in fact facing the same question that I faced when I wrote my book on Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity: Having arrived at some interesting results using the particular model I employed I conceded that: “The work in this book may be little more than a novel way of simulating quantum mechanics and relativity for the price of one”. But then I went on to say: “All theories are, I believe, simulations, but the crucial question is, do those simulations have a life of their own in as much as artifacts of their construction anticipate aspects of reality as yet unknown?” I then tried to show how my proposal did make predictions, and that is precisely what Wolfram must also do: Can he show how cellular automata have an ontological reality that distinguishes them from a mere computation technique? Providing predictions is another point on which Wolfram has been challenged.

Reality aside, Wolfram’s model of computation, perhaps because it is very visual, does seem to bring out some results in the theory of computation very clearly. The work of people like Kolmogorov, Chaitin and others have made us aware of the notion that any given computational task has a lower limit on its computational complexity in terms of the minimum resources (such as memory space, initial program string length and number of computational steps) required to carry it out. Hence, given a particular computational task these resources cannot be indefinitely reduced and thus a task has an irreducible minimum of required resources. This idea is, I think, equivalent to Wolfram’s notion of computational irreducibility, a notion that comes out very clearly in Wolfram’s lecture when he says that a process is computationally irreducible if the only way to find out its result is by running it. Computational irreducibility follows (presumably) when a task’s computational resources are at an absolute minimum, in which case it is not possible to find an analytical solution that arrives at the same result any quicker or easier by using less resources. From this follows Godel’s and Turing’s undecidability theorems: if a process is computationally irreducible and the only way we are going to find out if it stops is by running it, then its halting point may be too far off for it to be humanly possible to make the halting question decidable. Wolfram may not be original here, but I personally found Wolfram’s visualization of Godel and Turing helpful.

On the subject of computational equivalence Wolfram is less compelling. Simple processes can produce the high complexity of disorder, but simple processes, which are relatively small in number, merely sample a very small part of the huge class of complex and disordered configurations. The only way of reaching this huge class is to start with complexity. Accordingly I am not sure I know what Wolfram means when he talks about a “maxing out” of complexity. Complexity of process seems to have no upper limit. Perhaps I do not understand Wolfram aright but it seems to me that there is a huge platonic realm out there of highly complex algorithms, whose rules are beyond our ken, algorithms whose computational resources are too great to be humanly manageable. Let’s just thank God that much of our world, seems readily reducible too simple computations.

Towards the end of the video, during the question time, Wolfram appeared not to directly answer a query about just what light his work throws on the metastable states of life, structures that make extensive use of cybernetics in order to respond to an open ended world of random perturbations. He did at one point show us a picture of a cellular automaton run that generates rare conditions whereby a particular pattern starts to take over the available space. But all this was worked out in Wolfram’s strictly deterministic world. If our world has an open endedness about in that it is perturbed by a complexity that is not reducible to simple algorithms, then it is anybody’s guess what kind of perturbations could arise to undermine the “determinism” of such patterns.

Wolfram’s concepts certainly cover a lot of ground but perhaps not everything. Although Wolfram may have found a useful tool of visualization and understanding, some aspects of our world, if they should exist, may not be naturally amenable to his computational model; for example, non-locality, algorithmic irreducibility, and a cosmos where there is parallelism in time.

Darwin Bicentenary Part 25: Challenging a Spinful View of Evolution

In a relatively obvious sense the universe has direction; the laws of physics, along with the boundary condition imposed on the universe, are such that the cosmos is in thermodynamic disequilibrium. This results in the well known temporal directionality which means that the time line does not look the same in both directions. It is also clear that there is a biological arrow of time; there is a kind of morphological disequilibrium in that an increasing fraction of cosmic matter, on Earth at least, has slowly become locked up in organized (and complex) biological structures. Morphological disequilibrium may, in fact, be an aspect of thermodynamic disequilibrium as I will shortly suggest.

One thing is very clear: In terms of what is absolutely possible the organized complexity of living structures are highly unrepresentative configurations. Something, therefore, has considerably enhanced the chances of living structures coming about, and if this enhancement is not down to the direct action of design by intelligence (as postulated by the ID theorists) then the only other alternative currently on the agenda is that the probability of life has been considerably raised by the appropriate physical package of laws and boundary conditions, a package that must severely restrict the degrees of freedom available to matter.


If we imagine a system where probability was evenly spread over every conceivable possibility, then probability would permeate the space of possibility as an extremely thin “vapor”. Because the class of living structures has such a low statistical weight, then under these conditions there would be no realistic chance of life making an appearance. However, if evolution has occurred then the cosmic physical regime must so constrain what is possible that it forces this very thin vapour to “condense” into a fibrous network of very thin fibrils, fibrils in which are embedded the structures of life. Moreover, these structures must have sufficient near neighbor relations within the strands of the fiber to allow evolutionary diffusion to migrate from structure to structure in a quasi continuous way. It is important to understand that this conjectured fibrous network doesn’t exist in any tangible sense but only in a platonic mathematical sense in as much as it is an abstract structure implicit in the laws of physics. It would classify as a kind of chaotic complexity arising out of mathematically simple laws.

If this fibrous network has a mathematical and real existence it means that evolution is, ironically, an outcome of the second law of thermodynamics. This follows because thermodynamic disequilibrium ensures that matter, gas like, strives to fill the volume of possible states open to it; if that volume includes the states of life as a significantly large fraction of what is possible then diffusing matter will very likely find those states. But, and this is the big but, this dynamic only has a realistic chance of generating the highly unrepresentative structures of life if the physical regime has considerably suppressed the overwhelming number of non-life configurations, leaving an abstract fibril network that severely limits what states matter can visit.

As an aside, here, let me acknowledge that the ID theorists have a right to challenge the mathematical and evidential basis for this conjectured morphological network of fibers. As far as I am concerned the ID community’s challenge may be valid and that is why I’m carefully scrutinizing their work. However, if evolution has occurred in the way currently understood then the morphological platonic fibril structure is a necessary condition of evolution.

However, proceeding under the assumption that evolution has occurred, then it is clear that the morphological network effectively gives evolutionary diffusion direction in as much as there are preferred directions of development, directions weighted by the underlying physical laws. It’s a bit like a hand powered railroad car operated by a drunk unsure in which direction to move, east or west. Although there may be no preference by the drunk driver whether to move east or west, there is clearly a directionality here determined by the railway track. Of all the directions in which movement can proceed the railway restricts motion only to an east-west directionality. In a similar sense evolution certainly has directionality; the laws of physics must provide a limited set of directions in which random change can proceed, otherwise there will be no chance of evolution.

The foregoing preamble was necessary in order to comment on this post by Larry Moran where he posts a video discussion between Robert Wright and Daniel Dennet on the subject of direction and purpose in evolution. Larry says:

Watch Robert Wright and Daniel Dennet discuss direction and purpose in evolution.

Now imagine what the discussion would look like if they really understood the important role of chance and accident in evolution and, instead of humans, they used lobsters, ginkgo trees, shiitake mushrooms, rotifers, and cyanobacteria as examples of modern evolved species with three billion years worth of ancestors.

Even worse, think about the octopus. Is there any sane person who would point to the existence of those eight-legged slimeballs as evidence that evolution must have a direction and a purpose?

The directionless and purposeless of evolution is one of Larry’s big themes. However, his continual emphasis on the important role of chance and accident in evolution entirely misses the point. Chance and accident only have an effective role in evolution given the sort of highly organized fibril structure I have been talking about. This structure, if it exists, must be implicit in the laws of physics and so limit the degrees of freedom of matter that evolution attains a realistic probability. In and of themselves chance and accident are useless and to over sell the role of chance and accident is to put an entirely wrong spin on evolution. This spin is a distraction from the remarkable fact that if evolution as we know it is to work then a very constrained directionality must be imposed by the physical regime.

At first sight a dithering drunk operating a hand powered rail car may seem to be directionless, but when we become aware of the outer frame which includes the very limited degrees of freedom imposed by the track then it is clear that directionality is the name of the game. For reasons of his own Larry Moran finds it difficult to give cognizance to the outer frame of laws and boundary conditions which impose directionality on the universe. On the question of whether evolution has purpose I will not comment here, neither will I comment on whether or not the complex pathways of a network of “rail tracks” of evolutionary development can be encoded in few lines of physical equations. But one thing is clear; evolution requires matter to have such limited degrees of freedom that directionality effectively exists.

The Mystery of Life's Origin

I am currently reading the online chapters of this book. I hope to do a post on it in due course.

Calling All Epistemological Stalinists

Dr William Feelgood, cognitive psychologist, writes…


Dear Jo,


Mr. Timothy V Reeves has asked me to consider your case as you appear to be poorly adjusted to your world, epistemologically speaking.

As I think Mr. Reeves has made as clear as mud, science is unable to progress on certain questions - in particular if the description of our world won’t yield to simple statistical or mathematical treatment. However, that much of our world is regular and statistical enough to be science friendly is testified by technological advances as you point out. And yet we have no known reason why this “science friendliness” should be so and have no obvious way of turning science on itself on order to scrutinize and throw light on this meta-question. We have no proof that our world has any logical obligation to be amenable to science or that it always will be so. In this sense we are at the mercy of providence.

Historians, of course, have to face “science unfriendliness” all the time, and much of their subject cannot be reduced beyond large swathes of debatable text and dates to remember. String theorists are working hard to reduce even the contingencies of history to a full mathematical theory, but as yet that is barely light at the end of a very, very long tunnel, and in any case their theories hold out little prospect of a logically closed self sufficient cosmos that explains itself.

In the meantime we have to come to terms with the fact that the map of knowledge will forever have blank areas beyond the known world. There are two ways of reacting to this 1. The fearful superstitious reaction of populating the unknown areas with the fanciful monsters and beings of our nightmares Viz: “Here be dragons” (or “little grey aliens” as it is today) 2. The equally fearful reaction of declaring that what is not known or what is not amenable to science simply doesn’t exist.

In order to come to terms with the unknown, I prescribe some simple measures. Firstly say to yourself daily such things as “I don’t know. We don’t know. I may never know. We may never know”. I also advise you to read some of Arthur C Clarke’s books dealing with the mysteries of our world. (Caveat: never get involved with the occult). Also worth reading is Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan”. (Taleb is a paradoxical blend of great intellectual arrogance and preciousness and yet exemplary epistemic humility)

Once a position of epistemic humility is fostered one is then ready to receive with great joy discoveries that fortuitously fall into one’s lap. The realization finally dawns that all knowledge is in fact a providential revelation, and an unwarranted, perhaps even undeserved, gift.

The alternative is a foolish, crass and naive truimphalistic “clockwork” scientism based on an irrational and unselfaware faith that it is our unalienable and logical right to receive knowledge in a in cosmos that owes us an epistemological living. That our world can hatch some nasty surprises for us, along with the many good things that are not in our power to receive at will, is then a well deserved and chastening lesson. However, if we adopt epistemic humility we will find ourselves much better adjusted for the mysteries of reality as they truly are. The way is then set for renewed epistemological attitudes that acknowledge where our epistemological bread is buttered. Then with joy, humble hope and expectation we can say. “I may yet know. We may yet know. One day I may know. One day we may know”.

The Only Way of Knowing? Who Says?

What's that mustached guy think he's doing in that church?

No sooner had I juxtaposed “anti-theist” with “crypto-fascists” than I saw this entry on Larry Moran’s anti-theist blog. As far as Larry is concerned religion is not just non-science, but does in fact conflict with science; anyone who claims there is no conflict is derisively referred to as an “accommodationist”. I suspect there is little point in trying to engage Larry on questions related to aseity, ontological complexity, epistemological tractability, meta science and the question of the excluded middle between law and disorder. However, I would be the first to admit that science is the only epistemology in the public domain with social authority. But I certainly wouldn’t claim that its formal law court type methods are the only way of acquiring knowledge, especially when it comes to the vexed questions of world views and source ontology. With the latter methods are far more informal and proprietary. What I find sinister is that Larry seems to go as far as suggesting that formal science is the only way of knowing, else why would he get so uptight about extra-curricular claims to knowledge? True, science is the only publicly authoritative way of knowing just as the courts are the only authoritative way of settling legal cases. But like other anti-theists Larry tries to draw a line round the whole of rationality rather than drawing a line within it. His theory of necessary conflict thus sets science’s authority on a collision course with private knowledge. This is blatant intellectual hegemony. What makes this doubly sinister is that science’s public domain authority is being used to apply a kind of intellectual duress on people, perhaps not unlike what was once seen in the Soviet Union. In this context science’s authority has the potential to be abused as a tool to transgress human rights.

All this makes my rather tongue in cheek remark about “crypto-fascists” just a little too close to the mark for comfort.

Monsters From The Id

During the writing of the last blog entry and posting it on Network Norwich I indulged in a little mild trolling by bringing the anti-theists into close proximity with the term “crypto-fascists”. Sure enough I got a response on Network Norwich thus:

Crypto fascists? Closed ended epistemology? Closed ended ontology? Above all a closed mind? My dear Timothy V Reeves, where on earth did you get all this nonsense? And if you listen and read "the likes of Dawkins et al" properly, you will certainly come to a rather different conclusion. That is if you open YOUR mind.

This is very reminiscent of my blog post here where I indulged in a little trolling by referring to the anti-theist add campaign as “Probably the worst poster campaign in the world”. This provoked the following emotional riposte:

This is probably the worst blog entry in the world. You seem to be obsessed with the word 'probably' but in your struggle to appear erudite and witty you come across as a muddled-thinker and a bit neurotic, actually.

Unfortunately these gut reactions haven’t so far proved to be the starting point of any constructive discussions of the big issues concerned. The tapping into deep seated emotions gets a response but it is perhaps is a little hazardous.

Anti-theism, Anti-Liberalism and Fascism

Crypto Fascists?

Here is my response triggered by someone who posted a thread entry on Network Norwich and Norfolk here.

Continuing this rather bizarre interleaving of topic threads:

Hi Mike_v_02

Let’s get back to basics Mike and forget God, for the moment; if such is possible for you.

The explanatory objects used by the physical sciences are primarily just two; namely “laws” and “statistics”. These objects are only descriptive in nature; that is their logical type. When using them to describe physical phenomena a certain amount of logical compression of descriptive content takes place, but it is no more profound than that.

This descriptive role ensures that the road of science has an in principle terminus; science halts if and when finite scientific description ends in a complete description. That this point is implicitly understood amongst physicists is evidenced by the search for a “Final Theory”. If (a big “if”) and when a full and complete description has been reached, then attempts to push the boat out any further leads to a tortoise like regression whereby one effectively describes the descriptions of the descriptions and so on without any real content being added. (Clearly we are using the tortoise scenario metaphorically here and not literally!)

Science only works if there is a threshold level of complexity in the world: This is because its descriptive role depends on and presumes the existence of pattern, and pattern posits a relatedness of one item to another. Thus, scientific explanation is meaningless in an imaginary cosmos consisting of, say, only a few bits of data.

Standard scientific description, then, requires some kind of a-priori complexity to be meaningful. It is also clear that an even greater level of a-priori complexity is required if we are expecting to find some kind of “self explanation” (that is aseity). The two basic explanatory objects of science (law and statistics) are simply not logically complex enough to provide self explanation. Science deals with finite objects, and baring “tortoises all the way down” type explanations, standard physical science terminates in axiomatic brute facts.

In order to circumvent the “tortoises all the way down” effect we have to ask ourselves if self explanation (=aseity), is an intelligible concept, a concept we are not going to find in the merely descriptive world of law and statistics. So what kind of object do you think would have the property of aseity? Can we, in fact, conceive such an object? Again forget gods, china teapots, tortoises, and try and come to this question afresh. Be prepared to face down your demons and avoid a state of nervous denial that may stem from a fear of what might pop out of the ontological woodwork….

The above questions require one to take a meta view of science, a view that actually introduces a level of logical circularity in that one has to use a kind of science to probe the nature of science. One of the few persons who seems to have understood that this meta perspective immediately creates difficult issues that need to be dealt with and who is trying to tackle them from a NON-THEISTIC angle seems to be Paul Davies. One DOES NOT have to be a theist to appreciate the mystery of aseity or see that bog standard “law and disorder” science doesn’t provide ultimate solutions, if indeed there is a meaningful problem here. Positing the aseity of an a-priori complex deity is just one attempt to tackle the problem. Some anti-theists seem to be in state of denial about these meta issues because it seems to make them jittery about what’s coming next. (BTW James Knight has alerted to me to the “anti-theist” category, a category of proactive protagonist who seems to be a very different fish from the plain atheist. Anti-theists seem to have deep subliminal fascination with God; but then so has the devil!)

Given that science attempts to describe the world using the simple objects of law and statistics we can’t expect science to provide any deeper answer to “why” than the description of mechanism. But just as the descriptive explanations of science require a threshold level of complexity to work, deeper “whys” require yet another layer of given complexity to be meaningfully asked. E.G. the standard question “why” is often a loaded term that presumes all the complexity and trappings of a-priori personality and intentionality to be meaningful.

Even if religion is merely some kind of mythologically expressive structure invented by humanity as it attempts to come to terms with its predicament, it is clear that the orbiting teapot makes no serious point here; it trivializes world view analysis and sheds little light on the anthropological role of a religion in the life of a culture as that culture attempts to make sense of its place in the cosmos.

Finally forget the concept of simple “evidence”. Such evidence really only comes into its own for the simple objects of physical science like springs and moving weights, fields and matter; objects that are amenable to the formal procedures of science. Like the law courts formal science puts its evidences and verdicts in the public domain, but its methods only seem to work for a sub class of cases. Some cases (like alien big cats, Jack the Ripper et al) remain enigmatic and scientifically intractable, although that doesn’t stop one having private opinions based on one’s proprietary experience of the world which, of course, doesn’t classify as authoritative public domain knowledge. What deeply worries me about the anti-theist agenda is that in the final analysis it is a fascist agenda that is anti-liberal; it seeks to attempt to mobilize a contrived scientific authority in order to outlaw religious people and proprietary domain knowledge. Shades of the Soviet gulags and KGB persecution of Jehovah’s witnesses etc come alarmingly to my mind when I listen to the likes of Dawkins et al.

When it comes to the far more complex and intractable objects of “world view” ontologies, the epistemological procedures are very seat of the pants, and proprietary. The resultant ontologies are very narrative intense and cannot be expressed using law and statistics only. In this connection it is better to think in terms of huge sense making mental structures that attempt to embed a very wide experience of life into a grand narrative. These structures are created informally and on the hoof. It’s an exciting form of “joining the dots” with all the risks of being wrong that that entails. That’s what humans do, even when the data samples (=dots) are thin on the ground. But remember this; a search engine only needs a few search key words to sift out a few web pages from millions, so in principle a few dots may be enough.

One of my greatest fears is that the anti-theists are in actual fact crypto fascists with a closed ended epistemology, a closed ended ontology and above all a closed mind. They will not stop until they have made their insecurity everybody’s insecurity and brought to an end the exciting project of the world view analysis of an open ended world.

c Timothy V Reeves (NOTE Copyright. Beware plagiarizers)

What is Consciousness?

Somebody once asked the above question and here was my briefest of possible replies:

For me the subject of consciousness generates major category conundrums. In one sense our whole world is consciousness, (or better ‘conscious cognition’): From intimate internal experiences, through perceptions revolving round the senses, to elaborate theoretical artifacts that interpret those perceptions; all these things are part of 'the consciousness experience' and we can only connect with the putative 'world beyond' via the medium of conscious cognition. Conscious cognition is not a thing that takes its place amongst the many observed things of the world; that is, it is not simply another category that exists side by side with things like cars, atoms, and animals, but rather it is a kind of super category that embraces all things: How can we point to consciousness when it is consciousness that’s doing the pointing? How can you define consciousness when it is consciousness that is doing the defining? How can we declare consciousness doesn’t exist when it is consciousness that is declaring it? How can consciousness detect itself when it is consciousness that is doing the detection? How can one observe consciousness when it is consciousness that is doing the observing?

And yet paradoxically consciousness itself delivers the conviction that consciousness is not all that there is; conscious cognition itself suggests that there is a world beyond whose elements, if rightly juxtaposed, succeeds in ensconcing consciousness. So consciousness may see its ‘personal self’ as an assembly of impersonal elements thus producing that familiar philosophical tension between personality and the ‘plain elemental things’ of which conscious cognition seems to consist.

I have never been keen on dualism myself, but it is difficult to get away from consciousness’s partitioning of the world into the ‘us’ of conscious beings and the ‘it’ of the world of elementals beyond sentience. What is primary then? Us or it? In an attempt to resolve the dualist dilemma, the best of a bad bunch of solutions is to think of consciousness like a programming language whose compiler is written in terms of that self same programming language; like a self describing programming language consciousness can be described in terms of its own theoretical artifacts, artifacts that are too simple to classify as having ‘personality’ or consciousness - for example such things as atoms, fields, neurons, computation or whatever. Consciousness describes itself in terms of its consciousness of unconscious elementals. The question of which is primary, ‘us or it’, doesn’t then arise; ‘us and it’ can never be logically separated, since one requires the other.

Now that’s what I call a philosophical dodge – declare the problem of dualism as unintelligible and therefore null and void.

The above expresses my lifelong slant toward a kind of “cognitive” positivism; that is, my opinion that a universe of elemental bits and pieces is unintelligible without the context of a-priori sensing, perceiving and thinking mind(s). If the cosmos consisted only of one bit of data then the descriptive burden of science would be at its lowest and there would be very little to explain. But if only one bit exists there is nothing else to relate that bit to and “explanation” is impossible, because explanation can only happen in relation to and within the context of other preexisting stuff in which the single bit is embedded. In short, the simple “one bit cosmos” is meaningless. Moreover, we will certainly not find aseity in one bit or even in a cosmos that is a collection of elemental bits; elementals are far too simple for that. The foregoing considerations suggest to me that some highly complex context must have an a-priori existence in order to lend meaning to the concept of explanation and in turn to give meaning to that which is elemental.

A Note on Nomenclature

This post by Larry Moran gives a good indication of differences in the way atheist and ID communities insult one another: Atheists tend to use expletives and accusations of feeble mindedness, whereas ID supporters, with all the seriousness of the religious mentality, have the know how and gravitas of purpose to implicate their opponents in unforgivable sins - like the holocaust for example. Expletives add nothing to the atheist argument, although use of the holocaust, if anything, effectively subtracts from the ID argument when we simply remember the word "Inquisition".

Darwin Bicentenary Part 24: Dembski's Recent Paper

Has Dembski bowled out the evolutionists?

Having completed a first read of Dembski’s paper on “Life’s Conservation Law” I think the essential mathematical lesson is sound - although I haven’t been through the paper with a fine tooth comb. Expressing the main lesson of the paper briefly in my own terms: Given the observable cosmos it follows that probability is asymmetrically distributed over the space of possibility. That is, some possibilities have a disproportionately higher probability than others. If evolution has occurred then it is because this asymmetrical distribution holds in order to considerably enhance the chances of self sustaining structures evolving. This conclusion that probabilities are a-priori weighted in favour of life assumes a “small” universe; that is, a universe where cosmic magnitudes and dimensions are far too small to provide a realistic chance of evolution if probabilities were uniformly (i.e. symmetrically) distributed over the space of possibility. This asymmetrical assignment of probability is what, I assume, Dembski means by information input.

OK, so Demsbki’s basic mathematical lesson looks to be sound, and his work brings out the stark fact that evolution or no evolution biological structures have been resourced by an underserved “free lunch” of highly asymmetrical probability distributions. It gives the lie to the erroneous belief that evolution (if it has happened) is without “direction”; directionality is a form of asymmetry, so in a general sense evolution requires skews and biases in order to enhance the chance of evolutionary developments.

Dembki’s conclusions are, in fact, no surprise even if we assume all that happens under the cosmic Sun is ruled by a standard law and order package. Given that standard science is a descriptive activity which attempts to explicate observations in terms law and disorder objects, then it appears that those objects are an extremely rare class of contingent entity plucked out of the huge space of platonic possibility. Thus, expressing this realization as even-odds probability ratios will lead to minute probabilities unless there is a considerable weighting favouring the physical status quo. Even if we resort to some kind of infinite multiverse in attempt to restore symmetrical distributions of probability we are still left with the implicit asymmetry inherent in the philosopher’s paradox expressed by the question: “Why there is something rather than nothing?”.

The bottom line of Dembski paper is about a logical hiatus that humanly speaking is inescapable. But this stark truth need not be the controversial. Although some atheists may fight shy of Dembski’s maths the strange free lunch that is our cosmos is the same mystery that Paul Davies recognizes and is attempting to grapple with without recourse to theism. What is controversial, needless to say, is the conclusion ID theorists draw from Demsbki’s mathematical treatment; namely that from an apparent undeserved free lunch it follows that a-priori Intelligence must be at the bottom of it all. Atheists, particularly militant atheists, intensely dislike the ID community exploiting highfalutin mathematics in this way. Even as an theist myself, I feel I could not claim on the basis of “No Free Lunch” that the atheist game is up and therefore expect them to follow me into theism; theism is just one time honoured attempt to account for with the problem of the apparent cosmic free lunch. Otherwise I think it is very bad idea to try and intellectually coerce atheists on the basis of an explanatory filter that defaults to Intelligent Design by a process of elimination. True, some atheists are refusing to face their much feared demons by ignoring the meta issues Dembski’s work underlines, but there may be other atheists out there who hold their views with a clear conscience and with intellectual integrity.

But looking at Dembki’s paper it seems that the game is not up for the evolutionists either. In fact Dembski seems to be saying that provided we accept that the cosmos has a considerable burden of “active information” (That is, an asymmetrical distribution of probability) then evolution is a possibility. For example, Dembski quotes a rather puzzled Stuart Kaffmaun who is confounded about the perplexing free lunch that evolution seems to require. As Kauffmann says:

Where did these well-wrought fitness landscapes come from, such that evolution manages to produce the fancy stuff around us?

Dembksi then says “According to Kauffman, ‘No one knows’” and then Dembski goes on to say:

Let’s be clear where our argument is headed. We are not here challenging common descent, the claim that all organisms trace their lineage to a universal common ancestor. Nor are we challenging evolutionary gradualism, that organisms have evolved gradually over time. Nor are we even challenging that natural selection may be the principal mechanism by which organisms have evolved. Rather, we are challenging the claim that evolution can create information from scratch where previously it did not exist. The conclusion we are after is that natural selection, even if it is the mechanism by which organisms evolved, achieves its successes by incorporating and using existing information.


Dembski says here: “we are challenging the claim that evolution can create information from scratch where previously it did not exist”. If evolution has occurred that challenge still holds good in as much as the low probabilities of life can only become high probabilities when conditioned on the contingencies of our particular cosmic particulars. Those particulars in turn seem to have been chosen from a vast space of possibility and this choice constitutes the information input that Dembski requires. But surprisingly it is here that we find Dembski agnostic about just how this unwarranted information might be input, for he is not challenging common descent and evolutionary gradualism or even natural selection as the principle mechanism by which organism have evolved. He is simply telling us (and I agree with him) that if evolutionary mechanisms have resulted in life they can only do so with a considerable burden of “active information”. So the evolutionists are still in bat and have yet to be bowled out yet.

Although Dembksi makes the theoretical concession that evolution can work given the right informational preconditions, we might expect him to not support evolution in practice as the means by which life has come to be. But in this connection Dembski says this:


The search algorithms in evolutionary computing give rampant evidence of teleology—from their construction to their execution to the very problems they solve. So too, when we turn to evolutionary biology, we find clear evidence of teleology: despite Dawkins’s denials, biological evolution is locating targets. Indeed, function and viability determine evolution’s targets (recall section 3) and evolution seems to be doing a terrific job finding them. Moreover, given that Darwinian evolution is able to locate such targets, LCI underwrites the conclusion that Darwinian evolution is teleologically programmed with active information.

Let me get this straight: “when we turn to evolution we find clear evidence of teleology …”? Is Dembski saying that evolution, albeit with the right information conditions, has actually happened? Is Dembski, bit by bit, being taken down the evolutionary path? In the post on Uncommon Descent where Dembski introduced his paper I left a comment that seconded a comment left by another commentator named “Mapou”. Here is my comment:

11 Timothy V Reeves
05/02/2009
7:06 am
Thanks very much; this looks very interesting; I’ll give it a good look.
Mapou says at 9:
It seems to me that what this paper is saying is that evolution was designed, and I agree.
…that might be the opinion I’m beginning to form as well.



Immediately after my comment Dembski followed it with this comment:

12 William Dembski
05/02/2009
7:33 am
I urge people to read the paper before commenting......

Well having since read the paper, I think I would not amend my first impression!


Whether or not Dembski is a closet or crypto-evolutionist, there is one issue, and very one important to my mind, which Dembski’s paper does not address but which is touched upon in the following quotes taken from Dembski:

It follows that Dawkins’s characterization of evolution as a mechanism for building up complexity from simplicity fails. For Dawkins, proper scientific explanation is “hierarchically reductionistic,” by which he means that “a complex entity at any particular level in the hierarchy of organization” must be explained “in terms of entities only one level down the hierarchy.” Thus, according to Dawkins, “the one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity.”
…..Conservation of information shows that Dawkins’s primeval simplicity is not as nearly simple as he makes out the success of evolutionary search depends on the front-loading or environmental contribution of active information. Simply put, if a realistic model of evolutionary processes employs less than the full complement of fitness functions, that’s because active information was employed to constrain their permissible range.

As I have related in previous posts in this series, it is not clear to me that simplicity of explanation is ruled out by Dembski’s valid point about presence of active information. For it is far from clear whether or not the relatively simple cosmic law and disorder package of physics is one of those rare objects which encodes complexity via simplicity of expression. The complex “front loaded” fitness function which Dembski talks about may be implicit in a standard physics package which succeeds in encoding a reducibly complex morphospace. In this morphospace we may find smooth transitions of self sustaining structures, thus allowing evolutionary diffusion to do its work in creating them.

I don't suppose the evolution/ID debate will ever be Cricket