Digital forensic versus ID's design inference
On UcD, the lack of scientific research seems to have gotten to Dembski who seems to be attempting to include much of anything as being relevant to ID’s ‘design inference’
Dembski wrote:
Need it be added that digital forensics consists in drawing design inferences.
Need it be added that this would constitute a common problem of conflation. While the terms may sound similar, an ID ‘design inference’ is very different from how one commonly uses the term.
From the article we learn that Digital Forensics is a news science which attempts to detect manipulations in an image, audio or video.
It’s a new field. It didn’t exist five years ago. We look at digital media — images, audio and video — and we try to ascertain whether or not they’ve been manipulated. We use mathematical and computational techniques to detect alterations in them.
Why is this different from ID’s ‘design inference’? Simple, from the article we learn for instance that:
I think like a forger. I spend a lot of time in Photoshop making digital forgeries to learn the tools and techniques a forger uses. We’ll make a composite photograph of two people and ask, “How do you manipulate this photograph to make it compelling?” By working backwards, we learn the forger’s techniques and how to detect them.
or how regularities are used to detect design
o we’ve developed a way of measuring whether the lighting is consistent within various parts of the image. Lately, I’ve become obsessed with eyes. In a person’s eyes, one sees a slight reflection of the light in the room. So I’ve developed a technique that can take that little image of the reflection of light and tell us where the light was while you were being photographed. Does that match what we see in the image?
Compare this to ID which refuses to address such “pathetic” questions of motive, means and opportunity
Remember when Dembski was asked for details about the ‘designer’?
As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.”
You have been warned, ID’s use of language is 1984’ish in nature. You decide is this by design or can it be explained by regularity and chance processes?
Science does know that we humans are very sensitive to ‘design detections’ and often see ‘design’ where there is none, so there could be a real simple physical explanation here.