Replies

Sorry to be so late to the party – I had a number of priorities that interfered.

betty boop, your posts - in particular at 589 and 215 - are absolutely wonderful. I aver your summary and restatement of the article is superior to the article itself in that it not only simplifies the points the author raised but also underscores those points with particulars, esp. the calculation of algorithmic complexity at various levels.

And as you know, dearest sister in Christ, I strongly affirm your position on the relevance of information to molecular biology, including the theory of evolution.

Lurkers: information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver (or molecular machine) in going from a before state to an after state. Information is the action of successful (or unsuccessful in the case of noise) communication. It is not the message, e.g. DNA or RNA. The message survives death of the living organism.

I was very pleased with Alex Williams’ approach to the issue. My chief complaint over the previous argument of “irreducible complexity” was that it was backwards looking much like evolution theory itself and therefore baited various counter arguments, e.g. cellular automata and self-organizing complexity.

Instead, I preferred a forward looking approach like the simple statement that order does not rise out of chaos in an unguided physical system. Period. There are always guides to the system. Even the atheist must accept that space, time, physical causation and physical laws are guides in nature. Cellular automata and self-organizing complexity both require guides to the system.

Alex Williams overcomes my complaint with the “irreducible structure” argument though I wish he had used a different word than “irreducible” because the reader would most likely presume it is also backwards looking when it clearly is not.

To me, the bottom line is that for each level to arise from the prior level there must be additional outside guides to the system. And of course the naturalists’ deal breaker is information itself.

[[that it not only simplifies the points the author raised but also underscores those points with particulars, esp. the calculation of algorithmic complexity at various levels.]]

I agree fully, and it also makes more clear the mathematical impossibilities which face Macreovlution which is something I think is a VERY important concideration concerning TOE.

[[My chief complaint over the previous argument of “irreducible complexity” was that it was backwards looking much like evolution theory itself and therefore baited various counter arguments, e.g. cellular automata and self-organizing complexity.]]

Excellent point- I fulyl agree- and even brought up a possible coutner argument- but wasn’t sure if it was a feasible argument- I suspect strongly that it wasn’t, but it seems that TOE supporters might possibly be able to posit that amino acids were formed from chemicals, and therefore, it showed that a ‘higher form’ was created from a ‘lower form’- of course this doesn’t take into account that we’re only up to level (ii) at htis point, and that there is nothign to suggest level (ii) could evovle into level (iii) via a natural process, because the metainfo wouldn’t be available to the level (ii) creation in order to facilitate further evolving, but again, the TOE supporter ;might’ be able to mount a remotely possible argument that a great many mutations at level (ii) kept adding their own contributions of ‘info’ by altering the level (ii) info to hte point where it ‘might possibly’ accumulate to a point of a bit higher ‘metainfo’

But again- there probably are soem holes in this acenario/argument that I’m not seeing, and I find it highly unlikely this could happen- but htne again, I think we need to know a bit more about hte whole 5 point system and how it all intertwines first- I think the paper, and Betty Boop’s posts go a logn way toward proposing a very plausible theory, and might perhaps be much more important than Behe’s examples of single ID IF ID really does exist at all levels and throughout everything- this paper, if furthered more thoroughly, might just be the next important theory in support of ID.

I, too, was very pleased with Williams’ general approach to the elucidation of irreducible complexity (“IC”) in autopoeitic (i.e., living) systems (“AP”). [Thank you so much, GGG!]

You point to an interesting problem, that IC can be understood as either “backward-looking” or “forward-looking.” The “linear arrow of time” is the context, which provides a “past” and a “future,” relative to the observer’s “present.” In a sense, it seems that the “backward-looking view” states that irreducible complexity is somehow the product of a build-up of past biological events being “selected for” by Nature.

And yet a model like that would have no way to deal with the idea of information (or intelligence), nor could it explain purposeful, goal-directed behavior — something that is universally observed in animal life.

So I think the “backward-looking” approach will not do. So what does the “forward-looking” approach look like?

To boil it down, in a certain sense it would mean being “pulled” from the future. [But we won’t go into eschatological considerations here.] I gather this is what Williams was trying to get at with his term “inverse causality,” which pops up at level (v) of the AP hierarchy. But if you lay out “inverse-causality” on the “arrow of time,” past–present–future, it doesn’t make any intuitive sense.

Actually, I think Williams gets the problem right if we understand that it’s the “top” of the hierarchy — level (v) — that “pulls” the rest. In the “top-down” direction, none of the five levels is “reducible” to the next level “down,” not singly, nor in any combination of lower levels. Which suggests that each of the five levels possesses information not completely derivable from any or all of the lower levels.

In short, the AP model is "irreducibly complex" in two ways: (1) in terms of the totality of the hierarchical, five-leveled model itself; and (2) in terms of the recognition that no "explanation" of any given level of the hierarchy can be given by any lower level, singly or in any combination (in the range (v) "high" and (i) "low").

To draw an analogy from mathematics, given the origin point 0 (i.e., the "observer"), the “backward looking” view of IC is such that the “arrow of time” represents the “real” line of the complex plane, the x-axis, which deals with the distribution of real numbers. With respect to 0, “past” would be defined on the real line in terms of negative numbers….

So along the real axis, 0 defines the point in time where “future” (i.e, expressed as positive reals) and past (i.e., expressed as negative reals) each “begins”; i.e., are “split apart” into two distinct temporal entities. In order for a future cause to be found, 0 must translate (i.e., "move") along the real line in the positive direction. But the paradox seems to be that, when 0 “finds it,” it must be expressed as a negative real.

The “forward-looking” view, on the other hand, seems to go along the “imaginary” line of the complex plane, the y-axis, which deals with complex numbers. And they really are complex, because a complex number consists of a “real” and an “imaginary part.” There’s a “boost” to complexity over the real numbers right there. Not only that, but the two parts are separable; and each has its own proper form of arithmetic operation: the real part is multiplicative; the imaginary part, additive. So, here we have yet another instance of the complexity boost of complex numbers as compared to the reals. Plus almost unimaginable “flexibility” of the ways in which these concepts can function in “real” contexts.

All of which is simply to indicate that, on my view, the “forward-looking” view would appear to be the more “informed” view, which is what we’re looking for at level (v) of the IC/AP hierarchy: For level (v) “pulls from the top” — and may itself be “pulled” from a source lying outside conventional spacetime….

And this leads me back to “the Platonic world of mathematical forms,” as Penrose puts it. Which still manages to "pull" me forward, in space and time....

Then again, maybe I just have too much time on my hands these days, to be investing it and energy in such problems (which I happen to find delightful)....

Thank you so very much for writing, dearest sister in Christ — and for your very kind words of support. I’ve missed you lately. I hope you’re feeling better!