[continued from previous message]   
      
   > put it simply science assumes that "evidence means something", i.e.   
   > empirical observation is an epistemologically valid source of knowledge.   
   > Occasionalism is the position that there are no natural processes;   
   > instead God does everything. Progressive creationism can grade into   
   > occasionalist evolutionism, but God, episodically or steadily, magicking   
   > new species into existence is not occasionalist.   
   >   
   > Philosophical naturalism is the position that nothing is supernatural;   
   > occasionalism is the position that everything is supernatural. Most   
   > religious views lie somewhere between those two extremes.   
      
   Most Christian views require at times irregularity (occasional   
   occasionalism?), however they not antithetical to the pursuit of   
   science. As I've said here before, identifying and demonstrating that   
   boundary would be where science itself points to a creator.   
      
   >>   
   >> The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you   
   >> mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record   
   >> of the historical environment", or something else?   
   >>   
   >> ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find   
   >> intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this   
   >> have yet to land it seems.   
   >>   
   >   
   > My intuition goes the other way. Hardware random number generators   
   > create information out of "nothing".   
      
   But not information that is specified (as in CSI), which is the critical   
   distinction, and why Dembski and others give this so much attention.   
      
   >   
   > If the laws of physics are invariant with respect to time-reversal then   
   > information (in some senses) is conserved. But while T-violation has not   
   > been observed, physicists believe that the laws of physics are CPT-   
   > invariant, and as CP-violation has been observed this implies that T-   
   > violation also occurs. There is also the black-hole information paradox,   
   > wherein black holes appear not to conserve information.   
   >   
   > Creationists have been known to argue that evolution is impossible   
   > because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, ignoring that the law does not   
   > preclude local decreases in entropy. (If the creationist 2LOT was true,   
   > life would also be impossible.) Similarly, even if an analogous law of   
   > information existed it would not preclude evolution (and life); just as   
   > life (and evolution) exports entropy into the environment, they could   
   > import information from the environment. Dembski et al could retreat to   
   > the question of the ultimate source of the information, but that is just   
   > the cosmological argument redux, and not an argument against the   
   > factuality of evolution.   
   >   
   > For an analogy, consider the connectome - the set of connections between   
   > neurons. In the same was as DNA this can been seen as containing   
   > information. In most animals (C. elegans is an exception) this is not   
   > fully defined by the genome. So a proportion of the information in the   
   > connectome must be imported from the environment (whether sensory inputs   
   > or biochemical noise).   
   >   
   > Turning again to the question of conservation of information. AlphaZero,   
   > starting with nothing more than the rules, bootstrapped itself to   
   > superhuman levels of play in, inter alia, Go and chess. Did that process   
   > increase information? In that case where did the information come from?   
      
   As I’ve mentioned on t.o before, in the past I worked as an engineer   
   programming Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). At the time, I read   
   an article which utilised a genetic algorithm to develop an FPGA circuit   
   for a clocked counter of some sort. It turned out to be a very efficient   
   solution, but humanly incomprehensible because it appeared to utilise   
   parasitic capacitances or some other secondary analogue effect. The   
   device used was programmed with a 2kbit configuration file, and so it   
   appeared that 2,000 bits of information (presumably qualifying as   
   complex specific information) had been created de novo by an   
   evolutionary process. I wrote to William Dembski at the time, who   
   responded with an interest in investigating the example further, but   
   offered an initial assessment that information had been “smuggled in” to   
   the system by an intelligent designer (i.e. the creators of the   
   experimental set up).   
      
   My point being (without claiming anything definitive) the information   
   may be from sources such as the intelligent system/algorithm designers,   
   or from a brute force search of the entire soluition space (or enough of   
   it to outperform humans).   
      
   >   
   > (AlphaFold broke the back of the protein folding problem, but in that   
   > case one could appeal to import from environment as the source of the   
   > information in the trained model.)   
   >   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)