I have one question concerning the rules that perhaps you can clarify:
...the claim has been advanced that design can be inferred strictly from the inherent qualities of a thing, without reference to historical or other external information, and I do expect you to hold to that in defending the inferences
My question concerns the use of side information. For example, as in post #1176, a knowlege of cryptoanalysis would be crucial to being able to infer design. I don't have any idea what sorts of pictures you have in mind, but I think that general knowledge of probablity theory and mathematics, etc will be necessary to apply the criterion. If it is acceptable to you, and just for fun, I may, depending on the nature of the problem, ask some our friends who have responded to me here such as Right Wing Professor, or Doctor Stochastic, or Physicist, and perhaps a VadeRetro or a Lev, et al for help with calculations or other scientific evaluations. Not only am I terrible as such tasks, but if they are willing, it would tend to remove any suspicion that calculations were biased in my favor:^)
I propose that success of the criterion be defined as being able to detect design where it is present, assuming that you know the causal stories behind the pictures and can verify whether design is actually present or not. Dembski does not claim that the criterion is useful for determining that something is NOT designed, for the reason that intelligent causes can mimic necessity and chance, and so I don't believe that I will be able to entirely avoid the problem of false negatives. If I'm good enough, though, the criterion should enable me to avoid false positives.
If the above is acceptable to you, I'm ready to go!
Cordially,
No apologies necessary - I spent my weekend up to my elbows in wallpaper, finishing the bathroom renovation that I was requested to perform ;)
My question concerns the use of side information. For example, as in post #1176, a knowlege of cryptoanalysis would be crucial to being able to infer design. I don't have any idea what sorts of pictures you have in mind, but I think that general knowledge of probablity theory and mathematics, etc will be necessary to apply the criterion. If it is acceptable to you, and just for fun, I may, depending on the nature of the problem, ask some our friends who have responded to me here such as Right Wing Professor, or Doctor Stochastic, or Physicist, and perhaps a VadeRetro or a Lev, et al for help with calculations or other scientific evaluations.
This is perfectly acceptable to me. By way of clarifying what I meant earlier, it's been said that design can be inferred from the qualities of the object itself. By this, I mean that only knowledge of the object's properties and qualities is necessary to infer design. By way of an example, we know as a matter of historical fact that Mount Rushmore was designed and built by an intelligent agent - most of us, in the back of our minds, remember grainy silent films of Gutzon Borglum swinging around the face of a cliff, dynamite in hand. But that does nothing to advance the design inference - if the design inference holds true, we should be able to infer the design of Mount Rushmore, even if we don't know of its design as a matter of historical fact. IOW, aliens who land here tomorrow and know absolutely nothing about humans or their history should be able to use the design inference to discover that Mount Rushmore was designed by an intelligent agent.
But, as I said, the design inference explicitly says that we don't need that sort of knowledge, so I want to put that to the test by ruling it out of bounds. Any of the properties or qualities, mathematical or otherwise, that you are able to discover about the objects in question are, of course, fair game, so long as we're not relying on historical knowledge about them. So if I show you a picture of a car, for example, turning around and saying "I know this is designed because I've been to auto factories and I know designers of autos" and so forth won't work - that may be true, and that's certainly one way to know that a car was designed, but it doesn't satisfy the design inference, because you're relying on historical knowledge of cars and car designing. If, on the other hand, you have some method of determining design - mathematical or otherwise - that can tell you that a car was designed, then that's fair and fits with the design hypothesis. As long as we don't rely on that historical knowledge of how cars are designed and built, it fits the design inference, and is therefore acceptable to me.
I propose that success of the criterion be defined as being able to detect design where it is present, assuming that you know the causal stories behind the pictures and can verify whether design is actually present or not.
Some of the ones I have in mind should be readily apparent whether they are designed or not - it will be interesting to see whether the design inference can tell us what we already know. Some of them may be a bit more subtle, in which case I'm truly interested in what we can learn. ;)
...and so I don't believe that I will be able to entirely avoid the problem of false negatives. If I'm good enough, though, the criterion should enable me to avoid false positives.
Okay. Obviously, we would all like to see something that could reliably determine design one way or the other, but at least knowing that something was definitely designed is an advance in knowledge.
So, to make a long story short, your conditions are acceptable. Play ball! :^)