Posted on 02/19/2002 2:59:38 PM PST by Cameron
Perhaps you just don't get it, but proving the validity does not require giving you an example, only proof of all the pertinent concepts. For example, you could state that it is possible to travel at Mach 10 (which it is in a handful of vehicles), and using your reasoning demand that the only proof of human Mach 10 travel is a video of you personally going Mach 10. It would be stupid and ridiculous for me to deny the fact that it is a trivial engineering exercise to travel at Mach 10 despite the fact that you can't do it personally. I'm using "trivial" to mean mundane in an technical sense (i.e. no special or yet undiscovered magic); I am not using it to imply "cheap and easily accessible".
I have no problem with scientific results. How do we verify a designer of Life? We look in the lab. Have we physically observed an intelligent designer creating a new variety of Life? Yes, for instance in the case of genetically-modified pig organs for human transplants. What process was used? DNA programming. What physical mechanisms for speciation were used? Gene-splicing.
Is this an actual example of Intelligent Design creating Life, rather than new life self-Evolving? Yes. Can Evolutionary Theory predict it or explain it? No.
Does this mean that Intelligent Design is possible, and therefor Evolution is no longer the "only game in town"? Yes.
While I don't like to repeat myself, Prigogine actually agrees with everything I've written. I've actually read his papers and you clearly misunderstand what he wrote. I can't sugar coat the fact that you are just plain wrong on this matter.
Folklore is that a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards for a million years will produce the collected works of Shakespeare.
That wasn't folklore, it was a clever pedestrian description of the theorem. Obviously none of those numbers are literally real nor are monkeys typing a particularly good source of randomness.
That's what you're trying to say when you claim that useful software programs can just form on their own in a computer if you leave it on long enough.
Yes, that is what I'm trying to say. Except that "long enough" means tomorrow or next week or your lifetime or something like that to you. Unfortunately, the universe doesn't run on your schedule and many things take a hell of a lot longer than your or my attention span. I can deal with that fact as long as I can prove mathematically that everything works out eventually in a finite amount of time. Note that for any specific case, it is actually quite possible to calculate approximately how long it would take. The result is never "infinity", though in some cases it might as well be for our purposes as human beings (though as history has proven, some "intractable" problems become tractable far quicker than imagined).
"Perhaps you just don't get it, but proving the validity does not require giving you an example, only proof of all the pertinent concepts." - tortoise
"The jury is not "out" and this is trivially demonstrable. ALL programs of finite length can be produced in a finite amount of time by stupid automata.
47 posted on 2/28/02 11:16 PM Pacific by tortoiseIt is trivial to demonstrate a set of biases that will work, and given the thermodynamic chaos of the universe it is rather obvious that those biases must be occurring regularly.
57 posted on 2/28/02 11:37 PM Pacific by tortoise
"Just show me an example of random noise producing a useful program..." - Southack
Did you have an example? - VaBThang
"It would be trivial to demonstrate, though it would likely take longer than I am willing to donate CPU cycles on my machines to generate a long enough noise stream (it depends on the size of the program that has to be generated to prove it)."
92 posted on 3/2/02 10:45 AM Pacific by tortoise
Face up to science, tortoise. You aren't capable of producing an example, demonstration, or even showing the math for your wild-eyed claims.
You'll have to find some lame excuse to flee this thread without producing said support, even though you claim that such exercises are "trivial".
The math does NOT work out in a finite amount of time. Maximum potential order has the maximum potential improbability possible in a chaotic system, per Prigogine.
I never said that evolution was the only game in town. Both are valid hypotheses (which I've stated over, and over, and over...). However, the usual ID hypothesis does not use a human designer as a premise. You won't get any traction from this fact unless you are positing that speciation was designed by man (and I am pretty sure that is not what you are saying). Just because we've verified that human designers can cause speciation in no way verifies the existence of non-human designers.
No, it's folklore. There was actually a demonstration performed about a dozen years ago in which a thousand or so networked computers each simulated a thousand monkeys banging randomingly on keyboards for a thousand years (I don't think that they had the computing power to go to 1MM in time for print back then), and what they were able to show was that pure English words with correct spelling would occassionally be found in the output, but that the words were never in a grammatically correct sentence structure together for anything over 5 words.
They extrapolated from that demonstration that going for the full one million years the monkeys could never produce even one short detective novel, much less a single work by Shakespeare.
I'll do a Google search and see if I can find that old demonstration. It was rather insightful, and aligned very well with Prigogine's new (at that time) points.
I'm not making any claims as to the composition of the Intelligent Designer(s). I'm merely showing that the theory is valid and has supporting evidence for it.
If the proof of Intelligent Design means that God exists, so be it, but that's a bit beyond this pedestrian discussion. If the proof of Intelligent Design means that Man did it, then so be it, but again, that's beyond this discussion.
What I will say is that Intelligent Design has been scientifically demonstrated both in the lab and in the wild. Intelligent Design aligns with the current known fossil evidence and explains some species such as the duck-billed platipus for which other theories seem to be missing evidenciary support at the present.
What other theory explains both modern genetic engineering as well as ancient fossil evidence?
Why support a theory that is inferior to that?!
"Yes, that is what I'm trying to say." - tortoise
Please click on the link in Post #310 to see why that claim is folklore.
Another way of contemplating the vast impossibility of complex structures forming randomly is to look at a puny 640*480 VGA black and white computer monitor. That screen, with only 307,200 pixels, is capable of displaying EVERY human face on this planet, one at a time. Now imagine running a random program to fill in bits on the screen. Ever think that you'll see the image of a person?!
So here is my final attempt. Read Chapter 4 "Algorithmic Probability" in the following text:
An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications
By: Li and Vitanyi
Publisher: Springer-Verlag
This text is the de-facto reference standard for the large body of mathematics loosely associated with the Kolmogorov information theory, but is moderately accessible to someone with a solid grounding in basic mathematics. It is by far the most widely referenced text in academic papers on this topic. This area of mathematics is deeply fundamental to computational processes and software theory of all types.
I have just given you the relevant chapter of THE reference standard for the topic we are discussing, which due to its being a de-facto standard is widely available as such things go (a university library probably has it). If you can show me where my understanding of the mathematics contradicts the text, I will very publicly apologize and admit that you are correct. It is certainly possible that I am wrong, but since I'm extraordinarily competent at that area of mathematics and have used it for years to successfully design very sophisticated systems, I find it improbable.
I believe this is reasonable. Why waste our time arguing about it when we can go straight to the source. Unless, of course, you doubt the validity of that branch of mathematics despite its widespread practical application.
No problem. Please click on the link in post #310 to see your mathematics for a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards for a millions producing Shakespeare (as well as computer programs self-forming) - totally debunked, with sources, charts, and verifiable calculations included in the link.
"That wasn't folklore, it was a clever pedestrian description of the theorem." - tortoise
That's what you're trying to say when you claim that useful software programs can just form on their own in a computer if you leave it on long enough. - Southack
"Yes, that is what I'm trying to say. - tortoise
Except that the MATH in the link on Post #310 conclusively disproves what you are trying to say...
You have a pretty limited imagination. Impractical and difficult isn't the same thing as impossible. Just like "finite but very large" isn't even qualitatively the same as "infinite". As I pointed out earlier, while the Million Monkey example isn't practical in any standard context, it is actually quite possibly to speculate unverifiable but non-false means by which such a computation could be accomplished on a relatively small system using known science. Certainly many very bright and famous scientists have written papers on how such extreme computation might be accomplished within the normal constraints of our universe. I don't know what the point would be though. (And of course, once you remove the constraint of the universe, all bets are off by default. Not that it matters.)
So no, you can't get Hamlet out of randomness, much less the entire collected works of Shakespeare, and certainly not a sophisticated computer program.
It's in the math.
Read the link in Post #310. The MATH debunks your claims, and that's why you can never produce the examples that you naively called "trivial".
That's why you will flee this debate with lame excuses rather than attempt to post the math that you said was likewise "trivial".
You have confused folklore with science, and now you've been busted.
You know, I really can't believe that this has digressed to the point of us talking about mathematics that you should have learned in high school (at the latest). One divided by any finite number is NOT zero. The state of the universe is actually irrelevant to the mathematics by the way. Even if the universe had the lifespan of a fruitfly and the diameter of an orange, the mathematics would still be true.
Big hint: The universe does not define mathematics, but mathematics does apply to the universe. In other words, mathematics is not constrained by the universe we live in. And no I'm not going to prove the first assertion, as that gets real esoteric almost from the get go.
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