Signalled Diffusion Book V: Complex Drift-Diffusion Signalling

Book V of my "Signalled Diffusion" project can be picked up here. All the other books can be picked up from this post. Below I reproduce the introduction to Book V. 

Introduction

This book rehashes and enhances some of the mathematics that can be found in Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity and Gravity from Quantum Non-Linearity. In particular it redoes the mathematics leading to the complex non-linear equation numbered in the text as 15.1. It also probes a bit further into the nature of the sub-microscopic signalling regime that gives rise to this equation. As I have said on several occasions this is a highly speculative personal project that in all likelihood amounts to little more than a walk down an obscure track in the woods to nowhere special. But one takes a walk not because it necessarily is going to end up somewhere significant but instead one enjoys the walk for its own sake. It is our duty and yet also our pleasure to enjoy the highways and byways of creation and creativity.

Contradictions, The Academic Establishment and Matt Ridley.

Complete freedom entails freedom to undermine freedom. 

The content behind the word "Libertarian" is problematic. At one time the far left claimed this content: Libertarianism's implicit anti-government and anarchist connotations were comfortable concepts with the far left: In Marxist eschatology a centrally managed state run socialism was supposed to eventually give way to a decentralised stateless communism; in Marxist theory the state really only serves the function of protecting the interests of the ruling class; therefore once this class was done away with no state would be required - so they thought*.  It is huge irony, then, that today the "libertarian" sentiments have been taken over by the far right whose lack of influence (up till now!) makes them naturally suspicious of central government intentions. They also affect to believe that decentralised market choices and the entrepreneurial spirit are the best expression of democracy; maybe the only valid expression of democracy (See this wiki page for more on the subject of Libertarianism)

But "Libertarianism" with  its connotation of freedom, freedom of choice, freedom to exercise responsibility to build a successful life, freedom of speech and above all a fancied freedom from government has inherent contradictions  For in a world full of zero sum games we have more often than not this constraint:

 My freedoms + your freedoms  = constant

That is, too much freedom for me may subtract from your freedoms. Freedom then is about balance & community, and good community means taking into account the freedoms of others.  This is just as true of so-called "free speech" as it is for access to material resources: A vociferous campaign of free speech against another party can curtail their freedoms. Language can be used as an instrument of coercion; that becomes especially clear when we remember that social connection & status are among humanities strongest motivations and speech is the first port of call to be used to assert pecking order. Absolute "free speech" is a contradiction if we are to respect community.

The anti-government stance of extreme "libertarian" leftists and rightists is an affectation: When they claim to be anti-government what they really mean, of course, is that they are anti status quo and anti-establishment; they are in effect anti those institutions of state over which they have little influence. If the revolutions which they aspire to ever took place you can rest assured that these extremists would soon install the strongest forms of government in order to coerce and maintain their vision of society i.e a dictatorship:  As I said in my last blog post:

Looking at the mix of potential plutocrats, domineering characters and the well armed quasi-militias (in America) who make claim to the name "libertarian" it is easy to imagine a would-be-dictator arising from their ranks. And it wouldn't be the first time that "liberty" and "hegemony" have walked hand in hand; let's recall the outcomes of the English civil war of 1642, the French revolution of 1789, the October revolution and Mao's China. Idealism and hegemony are closely linked.

It is likely that Ayn Rand's vision of a sociopathic "libertarian" idealism, if implemented, would very quickly lead in this direction. I've got more than a sneaky feeling that the putative libertarianism of left and right is motivated by a mix of misguided idealism and sour grapes: i.e. those who want power or want more power want the status quo to move over...or else.

So with this background in mind I thought I'd have a little walk over to Matt Ridley's website to see what he's saying about covid-19.  After all Ridley styles himself (unwisely in my opinion) as a  "libertarian" whatever that abused term actually means in his case. Moreover, covid-19 has rather curtailed the freedoms of many and some extremists on the right are quite sure this is a well orchestrated deep government plot (or conspiracy) to suppress people rather than being just another black swan afflicting humanity.

So was Ridley going to join the Trump supporting conspiracy theorists? Well no, he's far too clever for that I'm glad say. In fact in reading his blog I found a lot of good and intelligent stuff there that I wouldn't want to take issue with and could recommend. But there remains the question of which tribe, if any, does he identify with? There are to my mind indicators to be found in his writings that he identifies with the tribal right-wing. Here are three examples where Ridley betrays his right-wing tribal sympathies:

Example 1
Take this blog post here where Ridley discusses the apparent slow down in technological advance in various industries, an example being aircraft: I had long noted this one myself: My father's life time saw progress from the first rickety bi-planes right through to space travel. But in my life time jet aircraft, although more refined and complex, seemed to have plateaued in their performance envelop. Manned space travel has also plateaued in my time. The same is probably also true of automotive technology. I put this down to the limitations within the platonic world of technological configuration space which is constrained and controlled by a physical regime over which we have no power to change. Delving into  this space is a bit like mining for gold; there comes a point of diminishing returns where more and more effort is needed to get out less and less out. Consider for example computerisation; Moore's law applies for a while and fast progress can be maintained initially, but not indefinitely. For we know that there are physical limits on what can be stored and processed using the current physical paradigm. If we are to do better, new (and often unforeseen) technological breakthroughs are required. There could be another revolution in computerisation if breakthroughs in quantum computing take place. Likewise we would see huge market changes if there are ever breakthroughs in portable fusion energy, zero point energy or anti-gravity; in fact such changes would likely require new and revolutionary understandings in theoretical physics to be made first.

I'd be the first to admit that market catalysed innovation and wealth can be suppressed and/or discouraged by cultural and political factors. But for a right wing trouble-shooting political animal like Ridley politics is his first of port call: In Ridley's mind, not to mention the minds among his class affiliation, bad government regulation is the usual suspect suppressing progress. That the platonic world of configuration space has an important bearing on progress hasn't come into his consideration here. Ridley's "libertarianism" sets him up for a default which means that government regulation of business must come under first critical scrutiny. But if Ridley and his tribe, as they make a grab for wealth, think they can leave the poor as a trickle-down-after-thought then they are encouraging alienation & disaffection, and handing society on a plate to the revolutionaries.

Example 2
Let's now look at a blog post by Ridley on covid-19. The post is largely filled with sensible and informative observations - it's worth reading. But Ridley may well betray his tribal affiliation when he gets to this:

,…. This idea could be wrong, of course: as I keep saying, we just don’t know enough. But if it is right, it drives a coach and horses through the assumptions of the Imperial College model, on which policy decisions were hung. The famous ‘R’ (R0 at the start), or reproductive rate of the virus, could have been very high in hospitals and care homes, and much lower in the community. It makes no sense to talk of a single number for the whole of society. The simplistic Imperial College model, which spread around the world like a virus, should be buried. It is data, not modelling, that we need now.

Once again the Ridley is found rubbishing the establishment, this time the (undoubtedly left leaning) academic establishment. Ridley's response here is very reminiscent of the right-wingers I mention in this blog post  where we find these right-wingers expressing suspicion of "modelling" and even going as far as to suggest that modeling isn't science; rather they want something "empirical"! The right-wingers I mention in that post are so stupid as to be unable to see that modelling is all about modelling empirical reality and therefore in science modelling and data go together like coach and horses.

But the problem Ridley and his tribe have is that "modelling" usually comes out of university theoretical departments. The right-wing tribe, as a rule, don't like university departments because they don't have too many allies in that sub-culture, a sub-culture which is not particularly motivated by profiteering and market choices, but whose income is pretty much tied to taxation; i.e. universities are a department of government! Therefore they must be bad!

Of course we never know enough and we always need more data but that doesn't stop the building of models which attempt to join the data dots we do have in order to understand that data. That's what science is about: i.e. building and testing models: No model, no testing and therefore no science.

Seldom, if ever, are models anything other than approximations and simplifications of a more complex reality.  But what's the point of accumulating more data if one then doesn't use that data to update, enhance and sophisticate one's models? As Hume showed data samples in and of themselves are meaningless and useless; what makes that data cohere are the underlying ideas we have about that data (i.e. models). Only models can give us a chance of making predictions; an inventory of disconnected data can't do that because as soon as one makes predictions using that data  one has necessarily moved over into the realm of interpretation and models.

A few minutes of mathematical jiggery-pokery is all that is required to come up with our first crude covid model: The exponential growth in time G(t) of a breeding organism is given by:

G(t) = Exp[a_i log(R_i) t]

1.0

...where R_i is the R-value for a the ith demographic and a_i is a constant which typifies the time between "multiplications" and t represents time.  Crude simplification though it is, equation 1.0 nevertheless is very instructive and points in the direction of where to go for refinements. It tells us that the R-value for a demographic is uselessness without a_i. The R-value for a demographic will not likely be the same for each transmission but like a_i, R_i  is merely a typical value, a value averaged over some presumably normal distribution.  The model that equation 1.0 represents can be made more sophisticated by adding more "i" terms as data comes in about those demographics.

The above equation is the result of a few minutes mathematical deliberation by a non-expert; so if I can do this in a few minutes you can be sure that the bright sparks at Imperial College have got the time, space and aptitude to do a lot, lot better. Of course there is always room for criticising and enhancing the most sophisticated of models - but the modellers at Imperial will be well aware of that too!  In any case the R-value averaged over a variety of demographics does give us some indication of the realities although if substituted into a single demographic equation like 1.0 it wouldn't return very accurate predictions. Even better than simplifying analytical equations is to carry out as near as possible a very literal simulation inside a super-computer.

Unless wholly misconceived models should not be buried in favour of meaningless lists of data, especially if the model is at the very least a first approximation. Approximate models are the starting point and foundations on which more sophisticated models can be built and their subsequent predictive value is a measure of how close they are to converging on a depiction of reality. To my mind it's a good thing Imperial College's model has spread across the world - the more hands-on-deck critical analysis (and subsequent enhancements) it gets the better.

Now I'm sure a guy as bright as Ridley really understands all this, so what's his little game? My guess is that Ridley, as might be expected of the tribe he has thrown his lot in with, just doesn't like left leaning universities and the stuff which comes out of their tax funded departments. So Ridley has to make the kind of noises needed for his tribe and so scepticism of academia's models is something they like to hear about. All this is of a piece with Ridley's scepticism of the academic establishment's climate change models.

Example 3
Ridley's right-wing tribal affiliations and credentials were confirmed when I spotted this blog post where we hear about Ridley's audio appearance on the show of conspiracy theorist and Mormon Glen Beck. Beck isn't quite in the same league as batshitcrazy Alex Jones although not that far from it. According to Wiki:

During Barack Obama's presidency, Beck promoted numerous falsehoods and conspiracy theories about Obama, his administration, George Soros, and others.

Writer Joanna Brooks contends that Beck developed his "amalgamation of anti-communism" and "connect-the-dots conspiracy theorizing" only after his entry into the "deeply insular world of Mormon thought and culture".

But I'm glad to say the conversation Beck had with Ridley was worthy of Ridley's intelligence and didn't plumb the depths of Beck's aptitude for daftness: In their conversation there was no hint that covid-19 is anything other than a natural disaster that we need to cope with as best we can. In contrast, however, there are numerous references to conspiracy theorism throughout Beck's Wiki page and this conspiracy theorism seems to be what Beck is really all about. So what was Ridely doing on this show? There's only one answer to that question that I can think of; namely, Ridley's right-wing tribal affiliations mean that his social connections make the Glen Beck show a natural stage for performance because he's not likely to get polled for authoritative comment by "leftist" institutions (like the BBC?!) So where else does he go?

ADDENDUM 1 June 2020

As this post is about the contradictions found in right-wing tribalism I must make note of the paradox of Ridley's promotion of economic Darwinism; I'm not going to read it, but I'm fairly confident that this Darwinist slant is the world view out of which Ridley's book "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves" emerges. Moreover, I'm sure Ridley's thesis chimes well with Ayn Rand's sociopathic philosophy. Needless to say a Darwinist line of thought would not go down well with the Christian right-wing who either support young earthism or de facto Intelligent Design. And yet economically and politically this is who Ridley is in bed with.

Footnote
* They also thought that since a communist society was supposedly "classless"and a place where everyone's interests were supposed to harmonise & coincide there would be no more social strife (!). Tell that to the marines!

Intelligence, Oracles, Magic and Politics

The de facto ID concept of intelligence.

As I have remarked many times on this blog the de facto Intelligent Design movement affects to leave the internal details of the "intelligence" they believe to have stepped in and directly created life as a mystery. There is some justification in this policy: When handling great mysteries (e.g. Divinity) caution is sometimes the better part of valour and so it may be best to proceed apophatically; that is, to define the mystery in terms of what it isn't. An apophatic approach to intelligence seems to be stock in trade of the de facto ID community in North America. In fact as far as I can tell the mainstream IDists believe that the intelligent agent which created life is neither explicable in terms of so-called "natural forces" or even for that matter any process which has the potential to be expressed algorithmically no matter how complex that algorithm may be. I find their views a little ironic: As many of them make claim to a Christian faith one might think that those so-called "natural forces" which we as Christians believe to be God's sublime Creation may hold one or two surprises for us as to what these "forces" (under Sovereign management) can do; after all, Quantum Mechanics alone has left enlightenment humankind thoroughly perplexed as to what it all means (For a start it is no longer meaningful to talk of matter as having identity of substance; identity comes via configuration). But no, in the de-facto IDist world  the "profane natural forces" vs "sacred intelligent agency" dichotomy is their habitual thesis and anti-thesis. In their view "matter" is too debased and inferior to be a secondary source of the dignified sublimity of  mind.

So, in the light of all this I was not in the least bit surprised to find a post on the de facto Intelligent Design website Uncommon Descent with links to ID material  giving the clearest evidence I've yet seen that de facto ID prefers to think about true "Intelligence" as a property tantamount to a magical power, setting it apart from anything else we encounter in this world^*1. The UD post in question alerts us to one of de facto ID's gurus who is attempting to identify human intelligence as having the ability to act as a "partial halting oracle". That is, it is assumed that human intelligence is an oracle which can in some (but not all) cases solve the halting problem. According to Wiki. the concept of an "Oracle" as used in computational theory is defined as follows:

An oracle machine can be conceived as a Turing machine connected to an oracle. The oracle, in this context, is an entity capable of solving some problem, which for example may be a decision problem or a function problem. The problem does not have to be computable; the oracle is not assumed to be a Turing machine or computer program. The oracle is simply a "black box"  that is able to produce a solution for any instance of a given computational problem:

A "black box" capable of doing the right thing sums up those inscrutable oracular powers. This manoeuvre by an IDist guru well and truly places the essence of intelligence all but beyond analytical probing ^*2. As I have said many times before the de facto IDist's preference for an esoteric notion of intelligence traces back to their use of their "explanatory filter" which once it has been used to settle on intelligent agency as the cause of a pattern doesn't really allow one to proceed much further. This of course contrasts with my own approach to intelligence which doesn't resort to super-analytical processes; well nearly: In my Thinknet project I see intelligence as a teleologically driven search process by a "Thinknet" like system. Thinknet systems are potentially chaotic which means that they can amplify those quantum ambiguities up to the macroscopic level, ambiguities which if they remained un-collapsed would give us people who could be in two places at once. Well, we can't have that at the macroscopic level so if the mind is constantly collapsing those wave-function, then, I tender, it is this process of constant collapse which generates consciousness.  But if the mind amplifies those apparent random collapses  up to macroscopic level there is therefore the potential for it to manifest that great incomputable - absolute randomness; so in that sense mind has an incomputable aspect to it. Nevertheless, what I'm proposing is no blackbox concept of intelligence: I'm working on a notion of intelligence that is much more resolvable than ID's magical oracular black box and this is why I have to sophisticate the explanatory filter.

Turning to my subjective perspective on my own thought life I must say that it certainly doesn't feel like some magical oracle able to coolly solve a problem just like that! In contrast problem solving requires the hard graft of mental searching as one attempts to make connections which lead to solutions. To me my thought life feels much more like the seek, reject and select trial & error grind of a Thinknet search than it does ID's magical oracle where genius solutions just pop into the head. I see the hard work associated with thinking as a consequence of the overheard incurred by using a very general-purpose thinking system with a general purpose connectionist language to solve the generic problem; as this system is a jack-of-all trades-problem-solver it can be slow at solving specialised problems as it has to first translate the problem into its connecionist terms.

I don't have a strong claim to having clinched the essence of intelligence anymore than do the defacto IDists. But like myself they have just as much right to investigate an avenue of possibility in their search for what intelligence is about. In fact I believe their presence is a good thing; the more people investigating different avenues the better. For all I know the IDists might be right! Also, like the IDists I believe that intelligence of some sort underpins the nature of the cosmos.  So under any other circumstances I would applaud the IDists efforts at tentatively trying to move forward with something new; after all that's science for you.  But I'm afraid in this case I can't applaud. Why is that?

***

Well, the answer to that is politics especially the politics in North America. It's the catalyst that has precipitated and hardened a "natural forces" vs "intelligent agency" polarisation. The IDists are persona non grata among the academic establishment and so it is no surprise that these IDists have been tempted to put all their eggs into the "intelligence-is-magic" basket in order to batter academia's evolutionary and algorithmic rendering of the processes of life, processes the academics believe to have generated human intelligence. Some times I wonder if the de facto ID people aren't really being serious with their proposals and simply come up with their stuff just to rile the academic establishment!

But the politics doesn't stop there. IDism is all part of a greater right vs left wing tribal conflict which means that the right wing sharply disagree with the government tenured academics over one or more of a set of well contended issues (as mentioned in my last blog post): e.g. vaccinations, climate change, gay rights, deep government conspiracy theories, the regulatory role of government, the covid-19 lock down, hyper-market libertarianism, gun rights etc. The common underlying theme running through all this is the diffidence right-wingers have toward central government interventions; no!, make that the status quo interventions:  When it comes down to it the right-wing is just as capable of supplying individuals of totalitarian inclination as any other human sub-culture, if not more so. Do you think those characters one finds in America's quasi-militias would have the slightest respect for the argumentative cut and thrust of an authentic parliament? Unlikely: More to their taste would be for one of their plutocrats to do a Cromwell and clear parliament using AR-15 armed thugs.

Crackpot daftness can be found on the extremes of both left and right, but my argument here is with the right-wingery of the de facto ID community. Right wing sentiments ultimately drive their all but exclusive commitment to an Oracular paradigm of intelligence. They've backed  themselves into the cramped corner of this paradigm because they are suspicious of those government tenured academics who for the most part will get rubbed up the wrong way by de facto ID's support of oracular intelligence.

The republican language coming out of England's 1642 civil war fed into the American war of independence (from tax) and now the North American right-wing endlessly recapitulate the sentiments of this language Viz: interference coming from a tax funded government is at best regarded with suspicion and at worse as evidence of a deep government conspiracy.  For example, on Uncommon Descent one can find references to "climate change alarmism" and also "covid-19 lock down alarmism". The emotive term "alarmism" is the keyword expressing right-wing apprehensions about projects largely emanating from government sponsored tax funded bodies. In my view coordinating the social responses to the black swans of climate change and covid-19 requires centralised information and control; such a response is well beyond the powers of the sluggish market with its distributed blind-watch-maker decisions. But such government involvement is the right-winger's worst nightmare come true; especially if government should muff it (which they often do!)

The pretext supporting the "libertarian" polemic about covid-19 and climate change is, however, entirely plausible if not sound: The world's wealth generating markets could be so affected by central government policies that it causes huge economic hardship or perhaps even an apocalyptic economic collapse. But this line of argument cuts both ways. Covid-19 and climate change, if left to run their courses, could conceivably also cause economic collapse. Moreover, the right wing's emotive language can be used against them: One might accuse them of promulgating "economic hardship alarmism", or "totalitarian new world order alarmism". Both sides are faced by the same dilemma: The  fix may be worse than the problem!

Whilst I strongly reject the border-line Marxism and anti-theism found among some academics, neither can I support the right-wing affectation for so-called libertarianism. Libertarianism is to the free market as fundamentalism is to Christianity; they are the kiss of death for the things they purport to uphold. Sociopathic libertarianism is a source of social disaffection thus helping to serve up a discontented society on a platter to either Marxist or right-wing dictators. For example, allowing covid-19 to take its course is likely to strike harder among the poor than the rich and therefore this solution to our problems is readily perceived as the solution in favour of the rich. Moreover, self-branded "libertarianism" with its connotation of "liberty" comes under the heading of "self-praise is no recommendation": Looking at the mix of potential plutocrats, domineering characters and the well armed quasi-militias (in America) who make claim to the name "libertarian" it is easy to imagine a would be dictator arising from their ranks. And it wouldn't be the first time that "liberty" and "hegemony" have walked hand in hand; let's recall the outcomes of the English civil war of 1642, the French revolution of 1789, the October revolution and Mao's China. Idealism and hegemony are closely linked.

The many wildcards of socio-economics don't stop some people thinking they are clever predictors and planners. The open-endedness of socio-economic systems is a bottomless pit of new data that can be cherry-picked and tailored to support the favoured planning polemic. In a chaotic world human beings are necessarily complex adaptive systems and therefore by definition much better opportunists than they are planners. They make their decisions and take their opportunities on the hoof. Like other biological organisms society is a mix of central as well as distributed control and this mix no doubt better suits a chaotic world where black swans create new problems and at the same time deliver otherwise unforeseen opportunities. But the time honoured overriding concern of human beings is that of hanging on to the immediacies of survival at all costs and that's probably why many people favour social distancing rather than the long shot of saving an abstract economic system that more likely favours lining the rich man's pockets in his ivory tower before it gets to line your pockets (if you've survived covid-19!). While there's life there is hope, hope that the new opportunities open up into vistas of  fruitful originality and prosperity.  We can only plant and water; it is God that gives growth.

POSTSCRIPT 

27/4/20

In a post on Uncommon Descent that I wouldn't necessarily want to take issue with we find an interesting comment from a character called "Polistra". Viz:

Polistra April 26, 2020 at 2:48 pm

This is silly and illogical. It wasn’t the virus that stopped the world.

The virus just wandered around and found tissues to infect, and the humans who own the tissues killed the virus using standard weapons and tactics. A very few humans were unable to maintain the war, and they lost.

The world was stopped by GOVERNMENTS. The virus was just the latest fake “reason” for stopping the world.

This commentator doesn't like the fact that the UD post suggests 900 bytes of covid-19 DNA is the reason why the world has shut down. Polistra clearly wants a much clearer statement that the culpability lies with GOVERNMENTS.  Polistra doesn't tell us why governments want to shut the world down with what he calls a "fake" reason any more than flat earthers will tell us why the UN wants us to believe in a spherical earth instead of their flat earth. Although I don't think most UDers would go along with this kind of conspiracy theorism it's probably significant that they don't challenge him: He's one of them, he's part of their anti-government tribe!  The irony is, as I have already said, that it's so easy to see dictators readily emerging from the ranks of the domineering fanatical right wingers if they should ever get power.


Footnotes

*1 I'm not quite sure how this works out with human beings, objects which from a third person perspective are observed to be entirely a product of  complex organisations of  God's atoms.

*2 Turing's halting theorem and Godel's incompleteness theorem are closely related in that both use  the "runaway self-referencing" reasoning found in the diagonalisation procedure. Roger Penrose proposed that the human ability to understand Godel's argument proved that human thinking was an incomputable process. Hence Penrises ideas are also favoured by IDists. Whilst it is wrong to dismiss Penrose outright I have submitted my reasons why I don't follow him down this particular avenue..

Anti-Science or Anti Academic Establishment?

They'll love Mars then!

Since the 1960s Western Christianity, especially among the liberal academic and intellectual elite, has become increasingly marginalised. Although this drift undoubtedly predated the 1960s, the cultural marginalisation of Christianity by intellectual trend setters has, to people on the ground like myself, become noticeably more pronounced since the 1960s. The Christian reaction among those with fundamentalist tendencies was and is to counter this cultural shift with a loud proclamation of contrariness; although this contrariness is probably less caused by fundamentalism than it is the definition of fundamentalism; feel marginalised? Just shout louder! This contrariness expresses itself through one or more of a motley collection of shibboleth issues such as anti-vaccination theories, anti-climate change theories, anti-gay rights, young earthism, flat earthism, a huge variety of conspiracy theories usually involving "deep government", fear of government, anti covid-19 lock down, extreme market libertarianism, promotion of gun rights and above all a general identification with the tribe of right-wing of politics: I would not want to call all these people "conservative" because some of them advocate quite extreme un-conservative, anti-science ideas. (e.g. flat earth and other conspiracy theories)*

Although there are some overtly anti-rational Christians who openly embrace fideism many of the aforementioned right-wingers like to make claim to scientific legitimacy to give some kudos to their case.  But because scientific epistemology is so often unhelpful to their theories the only way forward for them is to portray a distorted view of science before they can enlist it in support of their views. A common corruption of science which I have commented on many times is the false view that there is a distinction between observational science and so called historical science which is supposed to have no observational support. This concept falls over because no scientifically proposed object is really ever directly observable: What makes the crucial difference is not some bogus distinction between empirical science and non-empirical science but the fact that objects of scientific study have varying epistemic distances; this means that those objects have varying amenability to their structures being populated with observational protocols.

But rather than accepting that there is a sliding scale of epistemic amenability on scientific objects many right-wingers like to promote the notion that there is a sharp distinction between  true science which is supposed to be thoroughly empirical and science they don't like which they claim isn't (very?) empirical. This distorted concept of science is then mobilised in an attempt to de-legitimatise science that is inconvenient to the right-wing world view. As I have recorded before on this blog this polemical technique is very often employed by fundamentalist theme park manager Ken Ham. In fact Ham's tame astronomer Danny Faulkner has spent so many years as an apologist for Ham's theme park that it seems to have addled his thinking about scientific epistemology; see for example this post of mine where I charge Faulkner with having a debased and caricatured view of scientific epistemology. Faulkner thinks that science is about what can be detected with the five senses. Well yes, science is about the five senses but very little in fact can be detected directly with these senses. The senses simply provide a limited sampling window on the complex but otherwise rational objects of our cosmos, objects which are for the most part well beyond our senses. The only reason why our sensorial "key-hole-view" works is (in my opinion) because God has created a thoroughly rational,  ordered world and therefore readable world. Reading this world is like reading the sentences of a rational person**. Formal science works and works well. Praise be to God Almighty!

Another example of a right-winger who somehow thinks that true science should be "empirical" can be witnessed in this blog post of mine where Brian Cox clashes with Australia senator and conspiracy theorist Malcolm Roberts.  Roberts is unwilling to accept computer climate modeling and Cox has to labour the scientific point that modelling is the only way to anticipate the future of the Earth's climate. Roberts' claim that the models don't work empirically (which is debatable) is not backed up by way of alternative, better models, tested against his pretensions to empiricism. It seems that Roberts simply doesn't accept esoteric modelling as part of the valid scientific method.  I don't know what he thinks he's going to do with all this empirical data he makes claim to if it isn't used to help build and test a model. In any case let's beware of the "alternative facts" of those who have swallowed conspiracy theorism as a world view.

Finally another example of an anti-science right-winger has come to light in a post by PZ Myers where Myers quotes a Tweet from Republican John Carnyn who is even clearer in his denial of modelling as valid science: 

After #COVIDー19 crisis passes, could we have a good faith discussion about the uses and abuses of "modeling" to predict the future? Everything from public health, to economic to climate predictions. It isn't the scientific method, folks. https://t.co/OYBm3CIUxX

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) April 10, 2020

Anti-science Tweet

The Tweet reads:

After #COVIDー19 crisis passes, could we have a good faith discussion about the uses and abuses of "modeling" to predict the future?  Everything from public health, to economic to climate predictions.  It isn't the scientific method, folks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

Cornyn obviously hasn't read his own Wiki reference and he consequently gets the mauling he deserves from Myers and his following. Their criticisms are along the lines you'd expect from professional science people: You just can't move in science without creating a model of some sort and testing it formally against experimental results: No model? Then nothing to test and therefore no science.  Every department of science, and in fact even much of our day to day living, involves the tense and sometime contentious dialogue between our concept of how the world works (i.e. our mental on-board models) and our experience. We all use an informal version of science: That is we all have some kind of anticipation about how the world works (i.e. a "model", which maybe constructed from the sampling of previous experience) and then bring that anticipation into dialogue with experience. This, I propose, is even true of religions although let's just say that sometimes theology tends to be more creative, metaphorical, seat-of-the-pants and free format than the science of the relatively simple very regular objects of spring extending and test tube precipitating science; no surprise, then, that sometimes the gaps and ambiguities in the theological account are filled in with authoritarian fulminations of the raving fundamentalist.

My own guess as to what really drives the right-wing anti-science agenda is a paranoid counter cultural malaise which smarts under the realisation that they have little influence and credibility among the academic establishment elite. What's worrying, however, is that in America some of these right-wingers are armed to the teeth and may start shooting if they don't get their way. 

Bang!, bang! bang! bang! You'd better dance to the tune of the AR-15!

Fortunately I think we are dealing with a fanatical minority here -  at least I hope so. 

Relevant links.

See also

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/03/new-ager-capitalizes-on-spiritual-and.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/03/christian-world-views-part-2-christian.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-anti-establishmentarian-malaise-and.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-trump-victory-part-2-anti.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/06/cloistered-academics-vs-punks.html

See also the link below to the de facto ID website Uncommon Descent where we find a video that is ignorant of the status of the second law of thermodynamics:
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/when-scientists-ignore-science-by-mark-champney


Footnotes

* Some "New Agers" seem to be going down a similar road to Christian Fundamentalists especially regarding conspiracy theorism, and anti-vaxing. They have a similar attitude to academia as do fundamentalists.

** This assumption of a rational regular world appears to break down in paranormal connections. In paranormal circumstances the world, locally at least, slips into an almost dream state (cf "The Oz effect"). These experiences form muddled erratic patterns that are the anti-thesis of a testable regular reality. The paranormal is a breakdown of rationality, a kind of storm of delirium in the usually regular fabric of reality. Hence the great difficulty of attempts to get an epistemic handle on the paranormal. Paranormal experiences do, however, seem to have some kind of loose associative/connotative/Freudian meaning not unlike dreams

A Case Study in Technological Capitalism: Part II. Under the Doctors.

                            

These bespoke machines were killer products in 1984

This is Part II of a 3 part series on a company I once worked for called "Xenotron"; this name was chosen by the start-up owner because it means in Latin "Strange Machine", and let's face it, the history of the world since the industrial revolution has been dominated by the advent of strange machines in large numbers; steam engines, telephones, production lines, cars, aircraft, tanks, bombs, television, computers etc. At the introduction of each have been innovators, entrepreneurs and speculators; all people who helped make the world what it is today.

The PDF's of Part I and Part II can be found here and here respectively. Below I reproduce the first section of the introduction to Part II.  My first blog post introducing this series can be found here. This story in part explains why I always say "I'm in favour of the Free Market, but with a 'But'....."

The story so far

In Part 1 of this history we saw how innovative technology company Xenotron had come to the fore in the printing industry as a result of it marketing a killer product: Viz: A unique combination of electronic hardware and software facilitating page and ad make up WYSIWYG style on a computer screen.; this device was called the Xenotron Video Composer or XVC. In 1976 when this proprietary product first appeared on the market nothing like it had been seen before. In Part I  I suggested that the introduction of Xenotron’s XVC  was comparable with the printing press revolution of 15^th century; well,  I like to think so as I had a small part the play in it! (No, make that a “tiny part”!). But at the very least the product was revolutionary and original enough to ensure Xenotron’s initial fast growth. However, by the mid-1980s the technological goal posts were on the move again: Xenotron’s growth meant that its organisational overheads were starting to balloon and the market had changed and slowed. In particular, on the horizon loomed the need to adopt standard platforms and become a systems integrator for printing companies who were now looking for single vendor solutions to system wide problems; this contrasted with Xenotron’s initial “one-trick-pony” XVC act (Although to be fair Xenotron did increase its repertoire of tricks).  Xenotron’s initial big profits were plummeting and just breaking-even became a challenge.  To meet this challenge a new trouble shooting CEO was called in, Danny Chapchal, who had a CV of nursing back to health ailing companies. One of his first acts was to sell Xenotron to the German printing company, Dr. –Ing. Rudolf Hell of Keil.

In this second part of the Xenotron adventure I will be looking at Xenotron’s progress under its two “doctors”:  namely, Danny Chapchal whose initials were appropriately “D R” and who was billed in Lithoprinter as a “Company Doctor” (See pages 7 & 8), and of course its buyer Dr. Hell.  Could these doctors rescue Xenotron from the bottomless pit of free market oblivion?  Well, it’s no spoiler to reveal that the answer to that question was, in the end, “No”. But spoiler or no spoiler I’m going to tell the story anyway because that story is less about the final outcome than the “how” and the “why” of that outcome. In particular, this story gives a perspective on what it’s like to be inside the ravages of a typically capitalist scenario of changing technology and changing markets. Here the demands of the market, demands sourced in human acquisitional motivations, often find themselves ill at ease with other human values rooted in human social needs. More comments on that subject can be found below.

Breaking Through the Information Barrier in Natural History Part 4

In this latest post on the subject of Algorithmic Specified Complexity (ASC) I had intended to comment on Joe Felsenstein's post here where he critiques the definition of ASC as defined by Intelligent Design gurus Nematti and Holloway along with their claim that ASC is conserved. But before I look into Felsenstein's post (which I will now do in my next post) I need to look at another issue with ASC which has turned up and so I will briefly deal with this instead.

Features of ASC
As we saw in part 3 of my examination of Nematti and Holloway's (N&H)  notion of ASC, ASC is only conserved under a subset of conditions. But as we also saw in part 3 it can be used to detect the mid range complexity of organised structures such as life. This becomes clear if we pick up equation 7.0 in the last part. Viz:

ASC(L, C) = I(L)  − K(L)  + K(C)

1.0

This equation quantifies the ASC of a configuration L given the "context" of  a "library" of data and algorithms represented C and where I(L) is the Shannon information value of L. I(L) is the information calculated on the basis of the chance production of L. The functions K(L) and K(C) are the smallest algorithms that will define configurations L and C respectively. I have assumed that C has been reduced to the minimum data and algorithms needed to generate L. The configuration L could be a living configuration. As we saw in part 3, for life K(L) and K(C) will have similar values and approximately cancel in equation 1.0. Therefore because I(L) must be high for living structures then the ASC  associated with life is high. In contrast, as we also saw in part 3, for a randomly generated L ASC is very probably at a low value close to zero. For cases like crystals and polymers where we have highly ordered structures the functions K(L) and K(C) will return low values, but I(L) will also be low because the probability of crystallisation is relatively high and hence a low value of ASC is returned by this kind of high order.  (But there is an issue here as we shall shortly see).

ASC really doesn't tell us much about the exact nature of L; it could be some intermediate expression of ordered complexity where we keep information in the library C  so that:

K(L) ~ K(C)

2.0

In other words ASC isn't a way of particularly distinguishing living configurations; it is just away of registering an intermediate complexity, which in many cases does result of direct intelligent action.

I must concede that my analysis above depends on what may be a violation of one of the big assumptions of the de facto ID community: Viz: I have assumed that C, the context where it is assumed an intelligent source of input is to be found, can be expressed in terms of data and algorithms; that is, I am assuming that C and therefore the intelligent agent that is part of C is computable: As IDists appear to be fond of the idea that somehow intelligence must remain sacrosanct and beyond analysis this has drawn some of them toward the notion that intelligence displays incomputable properties and therefore would not return a definable K(C). See for example IDist  Robert Marks whom I quote here:

I am starting to believe creation of information requires a nonalgorithmic process, hence intelligent design.

To my mind this is counter-intuitive: Why do we use computers to solve problems and return information about things we don't know? Wouldn't it be sensible to develop and use a concept of information which expresses this intuition? No, not for the IDists because they work with a preconceived notion that information remains static and therefore they look for a definition of information that fulfills their expectations of stasis.

Another Issue with ASC

In the foregoing I have glossed over an important point. The functions K(L) and K(C) have fairly clear definitions, but how do we define the Shannon information term I(L)? Is it calculated from conditional or absolute probabilities? If I(L) is measured absolutely then even the monotonous periodicity of a crystal returns a high value of ASC: This is because the absolute probability of high order is extremely low and therefore its Shannon information is high. But high order like this has a low K(L)  and a low K(C).  Therefore 1.0 returns a high value for crystals. I don't think this is the result that N&H would want.

So, we conclude that I(L) in the expression for ASC must be measured conditionally if it is to give us the kind of ASC value N&H would look for in crystals. But what is crystal formation conditioned on? Presumably the laws of physics: If the laws of physics didn't exist to constrain physical behaviour crystal structures as an ordered class of configurations would have a very tiny probability and therefore a high Shannon information leading to a high ASC for crystals, as we have already seen. We don't want crystals to return a high ASC because we know that there is an apparent non-intelligent agent, namely inter-atomic forces, which can explain crystal formation without having to resort to intelligent  agency.

At this point we must now use  the Shannon information relationship I used in part 1 where we had : 

I(q) + I(r) = I(p)

3.0

....where p is the unconditional probability of life and where q is the conditional probability of life given a physical regime whose probability is r. 

Which information value,  I(q) or I(p), do we use to calculate the ASC of living configurations?  If we are supposed to use the absolute probability of life and use I(p), then using the same practice for crystals it follows, as we have seen, that crystals have a high value of  ASC because I(p) for crystals is huge. But if we use the conditional probability of crystal formation then that suggests we must also use the conditional probability of living configurations and therefore use I(q) for life. But if we are to use I(q) for life, we are faced with an unknown; that is, what is the conditional probability of life? Who knows the probability of life given our physical regime?

Well,..... although I say "unknown" opposite sides of the debate think they know the answer here. Ardent evolutionists are likely to be drawn toward supporting the idea that the laws of physics provide sufficient constraint for standard evolution to have a realistic probability of generating life (implying that the spongeam must exist). After all, as they might argue, empirical evidence suggests that standard evolution has actually taken place as observed in the fossil record of natural history. On this account the conclusion would be that I(q) for life has a relatively low value and therefore has a relatively low ASC value.

On the other hand IDists are likely to deny this because for them those secular and profane "natural forces" are not sacred enough to generate life: Their effective denial that a high conditional probability for life is implicit in known physics means that life could only be generated by "natural forces" via a chance event of very small probability; that means that I(q) has a very high value therefore implying a high value of ASC for life. For them only intelligent agency can generate life and as we have seen intelligent agency for people like Robert Marks is so mysterious that it is not reducible to algorithmically expressible processes.

So ASC turns out to be a pretty useless measure: Its value doesn't provide any sufficient reason to judge between these two points of view for the simple reason that its value is dependent on one's a priori world view.

***

I find myself in between the devil and the deep blue sea here: The devil is the Trump voting, gun toting, gay persecuting, anti-vaxxers, and also on occasion the fundamentalist & conspiracy theorist leaning right wingers. (If they think this assessment unfair they had better do something about their PR). The deep blue sea is the atheist nihilist abyss.

As I have so often said, on the one hand I don't think current physics supports a spongeam and therefore standard evolution is not implicit in known physics (see once again here; physics provides a "construction set" of parts with their fixings but not a dynamic sufficient to generate life), but on the other hand I would at least question the IDualist's contention that intelligence has a special, inscrutable and vital "information creating" mystique, a mystique beyond human intelligence's own capacity for self-understanding; or if I may express it the other way round, I would at least question those who are unable to attribute a special mystique to matter, matter which is the Divinely created miraculous stuff making up brains and where brains are the third person's perspective on conscious cognition's first person perspective. Moreover, as we have seen and will continue to see algorithms do create information by any sensible and intuitively agreeable definition of the term "information": Viz: We use computers to solve declarative problems and/or to generate unanticipated complexes of configurations; that is, to create information extracted from the platonic realm that is otherwise unknown to us. In contrast IDualists persist in the search for the authoritarian straight-jacket of a one-size-fits-all formal definition of information which supports their ill defined and preconceived contention that information is conserved. What they haven't bargained for is that so far their success has been marginal and in any case it is very likely that one can define an agreeable formal concept of information which expresses our everyday experience that information can be created.

Where I think both the atheist evolutionists and IDualists fall down, however, is that they are both missing the role that teleology plays in computation and human intelligence.  Teleology is the key to the whole affair: Teleology declares and specifies, whereas procedural computation is a mill for creating configurations which declaration and specification then rejects or selects in order to secure a searched for end result. The outcome is information creation.

No Progress on Young Earthism's Biggest Problem: Starlight. Part 3

This is the third part of a series where I have been following young earthist attempts at solving their star light problem. Part 3 is well over due: I  published part 1 in July 2017 and part 2 in July 2018. I have to confess that I feel that refuting these clowns clever people wastes so much time and therefore my motivation is not high given that I could be doing stuff that's more interesting and constructive.

I've been using the Answers in Genesis Star Light page to follow their (lack of) progress. See the following link  for  the AiG  Star Light page.

https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/

I had intended in this part to look at John Hartnett's star light "solution" which tries to build on Jason Lisle's sequential creation model of ever decreasing concentric creation circles with the Earth at the centre of this concentric sequence*. However, I've recently come across an AiG article by Danny Faulkner, Ken Ham's very tame astronomer. This article charts the (lack of) progress by young earthists on the star light question and lists the very disparate salient "solutions" to date....so I thought I had better take a look at this stock taking exercise. From Faulkner's list of "solutions" it appears that his own proposal is still among the latest and AiG favoured answers (see part 2) and it has picked up the name "Dasha".  See here: 

https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/what-about-distant-starlight-models/

Faulkner tries to put the best possible complexion on the catalogue of disparate and desperate failed endeavours: Viz: Young earthists have lots of irons in the fire with more to come so perhaps one day someone will come up trumps. In his own words Faulkner concludes:

When all is said and done, this alleged problem of distant starlight does not seem as problematic for the biblical creationist. Researchers have several options that can solve this problem, so it is not a problem for a young universe. Furthermore, we want to encourage researchers currently working on these projects.

But from a big-picture standpoint, no one outside of God completely understands all the aspects of light (or time for that matter). It acts as a particle and in other instances acts as a wave, but we simply cannot test both at the same time. This dual behavior is still an underlying mystery in science that is simply accepted in practice. The more light is studied, the more questions we have, rather than answers.

Such things are similar in the theological world with the deity of Christ (fully man and fully God). Even the Trinity is a unique yet accepted mystery (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; one God but three persons). And in science, there is the “triple point” of water, where at one temperature and pressure, water is solid, liquid, and gas at the same time.

Light is truly unique in its makeup and properties, and with further study perhaps we can be “enlightened” to understand this issue in more detail. Regarding the distant starlight issue, there are plenty of models that have some promising elements to solve this alleged problem, and we would leave open future models that have not been developed yet (and we would also leave open the miraculous).

But as we consider the light-travel-time problem, we frequently overlook the immensity of the creation itself. The sudden appearance of space, time, matter, and energy is a remarkable and truly miraculous event. This is something that we humans cannot comprehend at all. Compared to creation, the light-travel-time problem is not very big at all.

This is basically the kind of distracting bafflegab which seems to be effective on Faulkner's science challenged audience, an audience who are by and large so dependent on AiG's gurus. In essence Faulkner's conclusion amounts to this: We don't understand God and the Trinity and we don't understand light and light is so mysterious anyway. But never mind your young earthist science gurus have the matter in hand and have got plenty of promising (but mutually contradictory!) irons in the fire and there may be many more irons to come. And in the last resort we can scrub all that and fall back on the miraculous. Star light is not really a very big problem at all. So just keep hanging on in there! As I have remarked in part 2 I have not been very impressed by Faulkner's work. See part 2 for my reasons. His best work seems to be that of disproving flat earth theory.**

Faulkner, like other young earthists, uses the technique of distraction to redirect attention away from these failed models by claiming that young earthism's star light problem is on a par with Big Bang's horizon problem: 

The Secularists Have the Same Sort of Problem. The opposition rarely realizes that they have a starlight problem, too. In the big-bang model, there is the “Horizon Problem,” a variant of the light-travel-time problem.4 This is based on the exchange of starlight/electromagnetic radiation to make the universe a constant temperature. In the supposed big bang, the light could not have been exchanged and the universe was expected to have many variations of temperature, but this was not the case when measured. Such problems cause many to struggle with the bigbang model, and rightly so.

But Christian old earthists don't have to subscribe to Big Bang and inflationary theories which attempt to solve the horizon question: Just as an example: It is possible for an old Cosmos Christian creationist to simply postulate that the background microwave uniformity we see in the heavens is simply a consequence of a God ordained boundary condition on creation i.e. an initial dense quasi-uniformity - a consequence if the cosmos is initially randomly but densely distributed. The horizon problem doesn't exist in an old-cosmos-random-boundary-condition model and of course in this old cosmos model star light arrival isn't a problem. But for the young earthist the star light issue remains serious and as I have remarked before it is a very basic problem, one that even a naive naked eye astronomer becomes aware of when (s)he looks up and sees the Andromeda galaxy. Big bang problems apart, the young earthist star light conundrum remains outstanding even for the local universe let alone for more distant parts: How did the light from Andromeda traverse 2 million light years of space? The young earthist star light problem exists for local objects as close as Andromeda where the horizon question isn't an issue. One doesn't have to have any views on the exact nature of the "t ~ 0" creation to understand the young eathist's headache. In drawing attention to the difficulties with inflationary theory Faulkner seems to forget the old adage that two wrongs don't make a right.

Anyway I'll leave it at that for moment. In the meantime to make up for the deficiencies in young earthist thinking Ken Ham will no doubt persist with his religious bullying and continue to intimidate, misrepresent and smear all those Christians and people he disagrees with. See here, here, and here, He will also continue to convey a distorted view of  young earthist history. See here.

Postscript

There is one aspect of the young earthist's efforts that I can applaud and this is the whole rationale behind their strenuous attempts to solve their star light problem; that is, most them accept that positing an in-transit-creation of light messages transgresses creative integrity. Danny Faulkner puts it like this:

The reason many do not accept the light in transit idea is that starlight contains a tremendous amount of detailed information about stars. For instance, stars have been known to blow up into supernovas like SN 1987a. Had this merely been starlight in transit, then what we saw would not have represented a star or a supernova, but instead merely light arriving at our eye to appear as a star and then a supernova. In other words, the star that was observed before the supernova could not have come from the actual star. If the light in transit idea is correct, then the light was encoded on the way to earth to make it look like an actual star. In that case, the supernova itself did not really happen but amounted to an illusion, sort of like a movie.

Many have suggested that if this were the case, then most stars are not stars. The implication is that God would be deceptively leading us to believe they were stars, when in fact they are illusions of stars. The idea of light in transit was widely popular among creationists for some time, but now many reject this idea because it seems far too deceptive.

Footnotes:
* Hartnett's work here is somewhat of a departure: Usually young earthists clear the ground and start over again with a new solution that branches out into a completely different direction.
** But see here where Faulkner comes out on the side of establishment science regarding the distribution of quasars and the expanding universe. 

Mind vs Matter IDualists

How to brick yourself into a corner!

This post on the de facto Intelligent Design website Uncommon Descent is further evidence of the IDist's struggle with mind vs. matter dualism.  Their implicit dualism mirrors their natural forces vs intelligent agent dichotomy. For the de facto IDists mind and intelligence are necessarily eminently mysterious;  they prefer to withdraw from the question of the nature of mind and believe their terms of reference only require the identification of the presence of intelligent action and otherwise leave it as an undefined. This approach tends to draw them toward a dualist paradigm of mind and matter.

Mind in the form of our techno-scientific culture has explicated much of the mystery of the cosmos in terms of the relationships within dynamic configurations; but the sentiment I'm seeing with the de facto IDists is that we are treading too sacred a ground if our minds attempt to understand themselves in terms of dynamic configurationalism. For them configurationalism is a non starter paradigm in the understanding of mind; mind is too holy for such a cold intellectual incursion!

Let's consider this quote from the UD post: 

In his continuing discussion with Robert J. Marks, Michael Egnor argues that emergence of the mind from the brain is not possible because no properties of the mind have any overlap with the properties of brain. Thought and matter are not similar in any way. Matter has extension in space and mass; thoughts have no extension in space and no mass.

Michael Egnor: The thing is, with the philosophy of mind, if the mind is an emergent property of the brain, it is ontologically completely different. That is, there are no properties of the mind that have any overlap with the properties of brain. Thought and matter are not similar in any way. Matter has extension in space and mass; thoughts have no extension in space and no mass. Thoughts have emotional states; matter doesn’t have emotional states, just matter. So it’s not clear that you can get an emergent property when there is no connection whatsoever between that property and the thing it supposedly emerges from.

Notice the dichotomy being emphasised here: Viz, the first person perspective of mind versus the configuratonalist paradigm of "matter". But there is an obvious reason for this apparent mind vs configuration distinction; it is a perspective effect: Viz: The third person is bound to observe the first person as a dynamic configuration; for whilst we are dealing with two separate conscious perspectives the third person perspective can't see the first person as anything other than a dynamic configuration; the anti-thesis of this is some kind of "mind-meld" which blends two conscious perspectives into a less fragmented perspective. But in the absence of that the conscious cognition of the first person  doesn't have any overlap with the conscious cognition of the third person. 

But of course the third person also has a first person conscious perspective themselves and the perceived configurational reduction of the first person only exists in the world of that third person's conscious cognition.  That is, the configurational reduction of mind that we identify as "matter" is necessarily the third person's perspective on the first person and therefore is itself bound up with conscious perception. Ergo, it is impossible to dichotomise conscious cognition and the dynamic configurations of matter; it's like trying to separate a centre from its periphery; centre and periphery are logically conjoined - one can't exist without the other.  

So basically my difference with the de facto IDaulists is that:

a) Configurationalism is a meaningless idea unless there are conscious minds capable of  constructing it. The up shot is that  I find my self slanting toward Berkeley's idealism.

b) For the Christian, God is the Creator of matter and therefore it is no surprise if there are ways of using matter which give rise to the miraculous complexities of conscious cognition. After all, as I have said in my Melencolia  I and Thinknet projects our modern concept of matter is looking suspiciously like the stuff of mind seen from a third person perspective.  In contrast IDists still conceive matter (whose configurational behaviour can be rendered computationally) as a reality distinct from mind and hold to the traditional quasi-gnostic view of matter as dead and inferior in contrast to mind's ethereal character. 

Explicating mind in terms of configurationalism is taboo among IDists because it means we are "reducing" mind to a computable object; that is, we could run computer simulations of mind if we had sufficient computing power (which we probably don't have at the moment). This is a "no-no" for many de facto IDists because it smacks of swinging things in favour of that much dreaded "secular" category and IDist's worst  nightmare, "materialism". But if matter is God's creation it's no competitor to his sovereign will. 

Perhaps illustrative of the difference between my own position and that of the IDists who attribute an almost untouchable holiness to mind, may be found in my derivation of equation 7.0 in my last post. This equation quantified the IDist concept of Algorithmic Specified Complexity (ASC) Viz: For a configuration L its ASC can be evaluated with: 

ASC(L, C) = I(L)  − K(L)  + K(C)

Where:
The function  I is the Shannon information associated with L.
The function K is the length of the shortest algorithms needed to define L and C
...and where C consists of the mysterious "contextual resources" from which L derives its meaning; this may include that strange thing we call "intelligence".

However, the IDists are very likely to look askance at the last term on the right-hand side of my equation, namely K(C). My derivation of this equation depended on the assumption that the quantity K(C) is mathematically definable;  but this assumption is only true if one assumes that C can be rendered in dynamical configurational terms. That is, it is a computable configuration in so far as it can be defined in data and algorithmic terms: I doubt the de facto IDists would buy that idea!