A while ago I discussed the relevance of motive in determining whether or not something may have been designed. A good example of how this can be turned into a scientific concept is given in a paper submitted to Arxiv called “Message in the Sky”:
“It’s a crazy assumption that there’s a supreme being that wants to send us a message,” said Steve Hsu, an associate professor at the University of Oregon, admitting that believing in a message involves a leap of faith. “But, if you could create a universe in your laboratory, wouldn’t you want to leave a message inside?”
Remarkably (or perhaps not) this ‘tongue in cheek’ paper has attracted Dembski’s attention. Remember that Dembski is still struggling with how an Intelligent Designer could inject information into our universe with zero energy:
Dembski Wrote:What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. Certainly quantum mechanics is much more hospitable to an information processing view of the universe than the older mechanical models. All that’s needed, however, is a universe whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to deterministic natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus have the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the backdrop of randomness).
For those who are more familiar with information theory, it is clear that an infinite wavelength signal would have zero bandwidth. In other words, it will take infinite amount of time to even send one bit of information, showing once again that when philosophers venture into unfamiliar areas they may end up making some interesting mistakes.
Okay, back to the paper. In an almost tongue in cheek manner, the authors seem to mimic ID’s attempt to deny a supernatural designer. And what better way than refer to science fiction:
How would they send us a message? That the universe was started by superior Beings is not only the province of religious thoughts from the earliest days of the human race, but has also been a staple of science fiction. In one of our favorite scenarios, our universe is a school-assigned science experiment [1, 2] carried out by a high school student in a meta-universe. Perhaps he or she or it even started an assortment of universes like ant farms and stashed them away somewhere in the basement, out of his or her or its parent’s way. Perhaps by now he has lost interest and forgotten about the universes, leaving some to expand, others to collapse, in complete futility and silence. But, perhaps not without leaving a message for the occupants…
So what motivates the authors to explore this concept? Well:
If one of the present authors had gotten the universe going and if he had wanted to announce this fact, he would clearly want all the advanced civilizations, not just in our galaxy, but in the entire universe, to know.
Since ID insists that it cannot address motives, it thus remains scientifically vacuous. The authors also consider what the message would be and conclude,
The next question is what might the message be. We thought of various possibilities and decided that the best choice would be the following. We now know, and we suppose that any civilization advanced enough to detect Cl in the comic microwave background would also know, that three of the four fundamental interactions are governed by gauge theories, based on the Lie algebras (formula omitted) Thus, we suggest that the coded message would simply be an announcement along the line “Hey guys, the universe is governed by gauge theories, and the relevant algebras are such and such.”
As to other possible messages, the authors mention:
[5] For example, another suggestion might be the sequence of prime numbers, but this strikes us as not informative enough. (One may even conceive of civilizations for which the prime numbers may not hold as much fascination as for our own.)
Oh, the irony must have been totally lost on some…
But in the message Dembski sent us, another interesting acknowledgement is being made, namely:
All that’s needed, however, is a universe whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to deterministic natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus have the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the backdrop of randomness).
Random events and the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified complexity… Wow, quite an admission and quite a problem for those who thus believe that the complement of regularity requires an intelligent designer to produce specified complexity.
PS: The authors are not the first one to think of the message opportunity:
You might take this all as a joke,” he said, “but perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may be the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird. On the evidence, our universe was created not by a divine being, but by a physicist hacker.”
Linde’s theory gives scientific muscle to the notion of a universe created by an intelligent being. It might be congenial to Gnostics, who believe that the material world was fashioned not by a benevolent supreme being but by an evil demiurge. More orthodox believers, on the other hand, will seek refuge in the question, “But who created the physicist hacker?” Let’s hope it’s not hackers all the way up.
A followup paper title, “The real message in the sky”, exends the findings of Hsu et al.:
A recent paper by Hsu & Zee (physics/0510102) suggests that if a Creator wanted to leave a message for us, and she wanted it to be decipherable to all sentient beings, then she would place it on the most cosmic of all billboards, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) sky. Here we point out that the spherical harmonic coefficients of the observed CMB anisotropies (or their squared amplitudes at each multipole) depend on the location of the observer, in both space and time. The amount of observer-independent information available in the CMB is a small fraction of the total that any observer can measure. Hence a lengthy message on the CMB sky is fundamentally no less observer-specific than a communication hidden in this morning’s tea-leaves. Nevertheless, the CMB sky does encode a wealth of information about the structure of the cosmos and possibly about the nature of physics at the highest energy levels. The Universe has left us a message all on its own.
As ID relevant research go, these papers should be an inspiration to any aspiring IDer.
Mssage -> Message
No, “Massage”.
No ‘comming of the lord’ jokes, please.
When I was a kid, I had an ant farm. It was a fascinating little world, but I never felt the need to try to communicate with the ants.
Doesn’t it seem like a being smart and powerful enough to create an entire universe would probably have very precious little to talk to us about. Even today, much less 3000 years ago.
God: “I dabbled with an entirely new method of superstring formation in a distant galaxy today, what did you do?”
Man: “I disemboweled a goat, and splashed its blood on a fire to please you. Then I foretold the future by looking at its intestines.”
God: “What?”
Man: “And then we went to the afternoon crucifixions. Good double matinee today, heathens and masturbators.” God: “Right. Well, I’ve got to go create some new worlds now…”
Man: “OK, we’ll just be here circumcising ourselves till you get back!”
So the idea is that we look for signals from a creator, under the assumption that we can decode the mind of said creator, who we don’t know is there, and then look for said information that requires advanced knowledge for us to even find it, under the assumption that the supreme being, who wants to leave the message, also wants to hide it.
I say go with the Hitchhikers Gude to the Galaxy Method. *I* want giant flaming letters reading “We Apologize for the Inconvenience.”
Re “In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all.”
Um. He does realize that imparting even a bit of information would involve changing the location or state of at least a subatomic particle? Last time I checked, moving even one electron takes nonzero energy.
Henry
From the “Message in the Sky” paper:
If the CMB encodes “Hey guys” I will assume that Douglas Adams really is the Creator of the Universe.
Really? I, on the other hand, have never had an ant farm, but I have known several fish tanks and other glass-encased pets and I have always tried to communicate - mostly tying to get them to acknowledge my presence. I.e. I tapped the glass in an effort to make them look at me. That counts as communication, though. Mind you, I would *not* do that in a science project, since that would be tampering with it.
Just be happy that there is a chance that out universe does not exist because HEX needed somewhere to output the thaumatic energy of thaum fission. Wizards prodding our universe looking for chelonium and for target practice is something my imagination would rather not contemplate outside of Discworld.
Oh, he realises that all right. The whole point is that he was trying to explain how Go… the Intelligent Designer had inserted the mutations into the genome of the first living form (which is more than electron big), to direct is evolution. The fact that he would’ve taken an infinite time is the bit that D*mbski overlooked.
Hope that helps,
Grey Wolf
D_mbski wrote; In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all.
WD, why do you still insist on seeking the fifth leg to the cat? Do not complicate your life when you already know (and have asserted so) that everything came to be because, POOF, GODDIT
Stevaroni, I am rolling on the floor after reading your post. That is hilarious.
Dembski seems to be confusing the fact that so-called “specified complexity” stands out against the backdrop of randomness, with the ability of such a universe to produce this “specified complexity”. It’s a non-sequitur, and another in a long list of bad thinking.
It seems that he’s trying to suggest, too, that any stand-out in such a universe is due to “specified design”. Naturally this would cast a net wide enough to catch, well, just about anything that we see. But it is likely that Dembski is just following his creationist impulses here, since the real point is that the Word made everything (the gospel of John, with which Dembski equates ID), and “without him not anything was made that was made.” The Privileged Planet also gave the game away, when it essentially took all of the features of our world to have been specifically made to support humans and their investigations.
Glen D http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
So the idea is that we look for signals from a creator, under the assumption that we can decode the mind of said creator, who we don’t know is there, and then look for said information that requires advanced knowledge for us to even find it, under the assumption that the supreme being, who wants to leave the message, also wants to hide it.
Yup. And all of this without even trying to discuss or speculate on the nature of this creat – oops, I mean designer. ‘Cause that would be religion, see, and ID is NOT ABOUT RELIGION, nosireebob, you better get that straight…
Do you really want to sleep that long?
The odd thing about Dembski is that he seems to want to come up with a new model (ok, this requires believing his statements, which can only be done provisionally) by the very processes that he purports to find inadequate, random searching.
He’s just going to throw out ideas until he stumps enough people. The ideas that others can’t shoot down, he will baptize as “truth”. Unfortunately for him, such random searches are almost never effective, especially not against those who design their searches according to the evidence.
It amazes me that someone can be wrong so many times, yet remains a generator of nearly as poor ideas as the previous ones.
Glen D http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
I have fixed the title, and in an irrational fit of type-editing I put punctuation in Pim’s post, since he was obviously in a hurry…
(Commas, Pim, commas! And the occasional colon!)
Re “Stevaroni, I am rolling on the floor after reading your post. That is hilarious.”
The goat disagrees. ;)
Good. I don’t like to read PvM posts. Something about the language makes them a bit hard to read. Not as bad as K.E.’s, though.
One thing that is striking about the idea of Hsu, et al, with regard to ID/creationism, is that by no means would they be looking for “specified complexity” as such. They’d be looking for specificity, all right, but it is the kind of specificity that, amazingly enough, is specified in advance by researchers, not “identified” by probability measures afterward.
This is the thing: we know that, under some (many, actually)circumstances, the specification of the fundamental interactions governed by gauge theories, or sequences of prime numbers, would not appear in the data under “natural conditions”. Hence we might at least suspect that certain kinds of data appearing where we would not expect it to be, at least could be the result of intelligence. True, it might be due to something else, but certain data that could be specified by ourselves as well as by the “creator of the universe”, and which would not be expected otherwise, might give us reason to hypothesize such an unknown intelligence.
By contrast, finding the information in complex DNA sequences is not going to tell us much. DNA strands are unavoidably contain information, and we cannot specify through principles what kind of information they will contain. Evolution, design, or sheer randomness might be responsible for the information contained in DNA. Without a specific designer, whose specifications become our specifications for identifying that designer, it is very unlikely that we could pin down the existence of this designer.
Perhaps if DNA contained information about gauge theory or prime number sequences, we might again suspect that some kind of intelligence was responsible–whether or not we could be sure. These sorts of scenarios seem to be about the only plausible way of giving evidence for an unknown designer through DNA.
So this particular analogy may tell us something, which is that ID has no characteristics to indicate a designer of “natural” DNA. Whether or not Hsu, et al, have an idea that is at all worthwhile on its own, at least it shows that anyone looking for specified information to indicate an unknown designer is not going to follow the ID scenario. The EF is ignored in even mildly serious hypothetical situations, while the usual method of matching up information that can be specified by intelligences independently is still the preferred method of determining intelligence in a situation involving the unknown.
Glen D http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
The goats always disagree. The biblical era… not such a good time for the goats.
Ahhh, but information is carried on a non-infinite wavelength carrier wave.
Have you not seen the elegant sine wave signature of His Noodly Appendage!!!