Detecting design or intent in nature

[Chas]

Rasetsu made the same points as others did.

She's an order of magnitude brighter than the rest of you.

Which has no bearing on the correctness of the arguments, it's just another insult.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think there is a fatal problem with premise 3. The spider sim is an example of a Heywood system that requires intellect for its genesis but does not require intellect for its operation.

Doesn't require an intellect for it's genesis either...because all of the things you've described as the characteristics of the heywood system are characteristics of the precedural gen-which does not require an intellect for it's genesis or operation-...not the pretty pictures (which actually might - and have thoroughly convinced you that you have purchase where you do not.....), - and it will and does do work on "seeds" not requiring any intellect for their genesis either -all the damned time-.

That's what makes them useful, and what makes them different from other systems - it is, in fact, true by definition. If you want to talk about things requiring intellect for their "genesis" or their operation you simply won't be talking about procedural gens...though you very well may be talking about pretty pictures that procedural gens are manipulating.

I just can't help but drive this home for comedy, you're arguing for the existence of some intellect as a requirement for this whole fucking universe on the basis of a powerful experience you had on the other end of a machine which handles the scenery in minecraft.....jesus fucking christ man!.....your "argument" can't take a single breath of oxygen without invoking something that is A: ridiculous on it's very face, and B: wrong by definition.

You will continue to be entirely, irrevocably, and demonstrably wrong until you let go of that sim...but when you do...what will be left?

[Angrboda]

1b. Where the operation of Heywood systems is unlike the operation of biological evolution, the genesis of biological evolution is probably unlike the genesis of Heywood systems;

3. The operation of Heywood systems is unlike that of the operation of biological evolution in that Heywood systems require intellect, whereas biological evolution

I think there is a fatal problem with premise 3. The spider sim is an example of a Heywood system that requires intellect for its genesis but does not require intellect for its operation. Set up a computer powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator to run the sim and it would continue to run it just fine for quite a long time even if all the intellects were sterilized.

You'll have to refresh my memory on what the spider sim is. However, if it's like most simulations based on genetic algorithms, I'd argue that it does require the involvement of intellect in its operation. I don't know whether you're old enough to remember text based adventure games, but they were very popular at one time. "Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as "get key" or "go east", which are interpreted by a text parser."(Wikipedia) In the game you would visit different locations described in text, such as, "You are in a clearing. Paths lead east and west." The point to all this is that the person playing the game had to "imagine" what the locations would be like if they were real. The same thing occurs in computer games. A two-dimensional display splashes a bunch of colors on the screen such that our brain and visual systems interpret them as 3D objects and motion. In a simple chess game, you have to interpret the display as a virtual chessboard. In the spider sim, if it's the one I'm thinking of, you have to interpret the image as a moving robot; else it's just numbers and colors. So all computer simulations require involvement of intellect to imagine them as if they were real.

Furthermore, since genetic algorithm programs are intentionally made to copy biological evolution, there is a mundane reason why they resemble it and are analogous to it, rather than other Heywood systems. The features of the operation of genetic algorithm programs aren't accidental features, and their likeness to biological evolution is readily explained by the intention of the designers. It seems inappropriate to count them as they are designed to be like biological evolution.

Regardless, I'd like to introduce another Heywood system. Many first-person video games share the traits of replication, heritability, change, and selection. The player character in the game is replicated each time it "dies" in the game, giving the player another chance to evolve new strategies. The heritable traits are stored in the game player whose game play evolves and develops with each iteration of the player character. There is change, both in the player's strategy, as well as random elements in the game. And there is selection in that those strategies which do not meet the demands of a game level are pruned off.

The reason I introduce them as a Heywood system is because my argument as stated is based on probabilities (see premises 1a and 1b). The more Heywood systems whose operation involves intellect, the more probable that any Heywood system chosen will require intellect in both halves. And there are probably several thousand times as many instances of computer game Heywood systems as genetic algorithm systems. This restores the combined validity of 1b and 3 because there are many times more Heywood systems whose operation involves intellect than systems whose operation does not.

Venter's Mycoplasma Laboratorium is another example of a Heywood system which required intellect for its genesis, but its subsequent evolution does not require intellect.

The nucleotide sequence is based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium which the team pared down to the bare essentials needed to support life, removing a fifth of its genetic make-up.

Mycoplasma laboratorium, the first synthetic organism

M. laboratorium is a biological organism altered and replicated by artificial means. It is a part of biological evolution, not of Heywood systems. They wouldn't have been able to do it without the design from nature.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's a procedural generation Ras. Explicitly chosen to remove intellect as a requirement so as to model the researchers view of how evolution occurs. Starting with any seed, provided by any means, it does work which mimics the effect of unguided biological evolution (or at least the researchers position on the mater) and produces results recognizable -as such-...provided you share the researchers views of evolutionary processes. You don't have to keep feeding it inputs or making selections. Procedure stands in for/as input.

It's all the rage in video games at present, particularly for handling massive scenery, big worlds...or for providing variation, which would otherwise be too time consuming or costly, (both in cash and machine resources). These worlds are also, in Heywoods estimation, evidence that evolution requires intellect, somehow.

(your objections by reference to evolutionary biology, btw, not acceptable, as you didn't observe the implementation of that evolutionary system so you can't say that it doesn't require intellect or that any part of it is evidence that such systems don;t require intellect- again, so sayeth Heywood)

[Angrboda]

Here's an interesting example that somewhat aligns with Rhythm's claims. The starting "seed" is random.

6.6 Counterexample: Checkers-Playing Neural Nets

My first counterexample to the LCI [Law of Conservation of Information] is one which Dembski bravely introduces, namely the evolving checkers-playing neural nets of Chellapilla and Fogel (pp. 221-223).37 I'll start with a brief description of the evolutionary algorithm. Neural nets were defined by a set of parameters (the details are unimportant) which determined their strategy for playing checkers. At the start of the program run, a population of 15 neural nets was created with random parameters. They had no special structures corresponding to any principles of checkers strategy. They were given just the location, number and types of pieces--the same basic information that a novice player would have on his/her first game. In each generation, the current population of 15 neural nets spawned 15 offspring, with random variations on their parameters. The resulting 30 neural nets then played a tournament, with each neural net playing 5 games as red (moving first) against randomly selected opponents. The neural nets were awarded +1 point for a win, 0 for a draw and -2 for a loss. Then the 15 neural nets with the highest total scores went through to the next generation. I'll refer to the (+1, 0, -2) triplet as the scoring regime, and to the survival of the 15 neural nets with the highest total score as the survival criterion.

The neural nets produced by this algorithm were very good checkers players, and Dembski assumes that they exhibited specified complexity (CSI [complex specified information]). He gives no justification for this assumption, but it seems reasonable given the uniform-probability interpretation. Presumably the specification here is, broadly speaking, the production of a good checkers player, and the phase space is the space of all possible values of a neural net's parameters. If the parameters were drawn randomly, the probability of obtaining a good checkers player would be extremely low. Since the output of the program exhibited CSI, Dembski needs to show that there was CSI in the input. To his credit, Dembski doesn't take the easy way out and claim that the CSI was in the computer or in the program as a whole. The programming of the neural nets was quite independent of the evolutionary algorithm. Instead Dembski claims that the CSI was "inserted" by Chellapilla and Fogel as a consequence of their decision to keep the "criterion of winning" constant from one generation to the next! But a constant criterion is the simplest option, not a complex one, and the idea that such a straightforward decision could have inserted a lot of information is absurd.

As we saw earlier, the fitness function reflects the problem to be solved. In this case, the problem is to produce neural nets which will play good checkers under the prevailing conditions. Since the conditions under which the evolved neural nets would be playing were (presumably) unknown at the time the algorithm was programmed, it might be argued that the choice of winning criterion was a free one. The programmers could therefore have chosen any criterion they liked. Nevertheless, the natural choice in such a situation is to choose the simplest option. In choosing a constant winning criterion, that is what the programmers did. Since they had no reason to think the neural nets would find themselves in a tournament with variable winning conditions, there was no reason to evolve them under such conditions.

Contrary to Dembski's assertion that the choice of a constant criterion "is without a natural analogue", the natural analogue of the constant winning criterion is the constancy of the laws of physics and logic.

• Also, their choice is without a natural analogue. Chellapilla and Fogel kept constant their criterion for "tournament victory." For biological systems, the criterion for "tournament victory" will vary considerably depending on who is playing in the tournament. [p. 223]

It's not clear what Dembski means by "the criterion for tournament victory". However, the fact that a biological system's success depends on who is "playing in the tournament" certainly does have an analogue in Chellapilla and Fogel's algorithm. The success of a neural net was dependent on which other neural nets were playing in the tournament.

Before considering some further objections to Dembski's claim, I need to decide what he means by "criterion of winning". Does he mean just the scoring regime? Or does he mean the entire set of tournament rules: the selection of opponents, the scoring regime and the survival criterion? For brevity, I will consider only the scoring regime, but similar arguments can be made in respect of the other elements of the tournament rules.

Dembski insists that the SI "inserted" by Chellapilla and Fogel's choice is determined with respect to "the space of all possible combinations of local fitness functions from which they chose their coordinated set of local fitness functions". It's not clear what Dembski means by fitness functions here. As we've seen, in a situation where the success of an individual depends on its interactions with other individuals in the population (in this case the population of neural nets), the fitness function varies as the population varies, since the fitness of an individual is relative to its environment, which includes the rest of the population. Dembski seems to recognize this, since he writes:

• There is not even a fitness function defined over the entire space of checker-playing neural nets. Instead, each collection of 30 neural nets gets its own local fitness function that assigns fitness depending on how a neural net fares in a tournament with other neural nets... [p. 222]

When Dembski refers to a "local fitness function" here, he apparently means the fitness function of one particular generation.38 But, contrary to Dembski's claim, the sequence of fitness functions was not "coordinated" by Chellapilla and Fogel. It was dependent on the evolution of the population of neural nets. So it makes no sense to talk about Chellapilla and Fogel selecting from "the space of all possible combinations of local fitness functions". It would make some sense, however, to talk about them selecting from the phase space of all possible time-dependent scoring regimes (one triplet per generation), and I will assume that this is what Dembski means.

For the reasons already given, it is hardly reasonable to consider the scoring regime to have been selected from such a phase space. Nevertheless, even if we do so, the amount of SI inserted by Chellapilla and Fogel's choice was minimal. This is because the SI must be based on a rejection region consisting of all the possible time-dependent scoring regimes which would have performed as well as Chellapilla and Fogel's or better. Suppose that, instead of using a constant scoring regime, the program randomly generated a new scoring triplet (W, D, L) for each generation, subject only to the constraint that W > D > L. This constraint is not an artificial imposition; it is a characteristic of the problem to be solved. If the problem was to find good players for suicide checkers (where the object of the game is to "lose"), the constraint would be L > D > W. Since SI is based on a uniform probability distribution, the values of W, D and L would be drawn from a uniform probability distribution over some continuous range, say [+2, -2]. We are only concerned with the relative values of W, D and L, so the choice of range is arbitrary and could itself be made randomly at the start of each run. The question then is how often such a program would perform as well as the original, i.e. would produce as good players in the same amount of time. If, for the sake of example, the revised program performs as well as the original on 1/8 of occasions (out of a sufficiently large sample), this means that 1 in 8 time-dependent regimes performs as well as Chellapilla and Fogel's. The SI of Chellapilla and Fogel's regime would then be only -log2(1/8) = 3 bits. For Dembski to maintain his claim that this choice inserted CSI, the onus is on him to show that the proportion of regimes performing as well as Chellapilla and Fogel's is less than 1 in 10150, and that seems very unlikely to be the case.

In case Dembski has a problem with even the natural constraint that I suggested above, let's consider an alternative which has no prior constraints. Suppose that, at the start of each run, the program draws 6 random numbers from an arbitrary range (as above). Call these numbers W-, W+, D-, D+, L-, L+. For each generation, the program generates a new scoring triplet (W, D, L), selecting these parameters randomly from uniform probability distributions over the ranges [W-, W+], [D-, D+] and [L-, L+] respectively. Many program runs will fail to produce good checkers players at all (though they may produce players who are good at playing suicide checkers or good at forcing a draw). However, on a small proportion of runs (1/720 on average), it will just so happen that W+ > W- > D+ > D- > L+> L-, and on these runs we can expect the program to produce good checkers players.39 So, if we run the program enough times, the output will sometimes exhibit CSI even though there was no SI in the scoring regime. Alternatively, we can say that a successful regime like Chellapilla and Fogel's40 has SI of -log2(1/720) = 9.49 bits, plus a few bits to allow for the fact that not all successful regimes perform as well as this one, as discussed above.

Having seen that very little if any SI was "inserted" through the choice of scoring regime, Dembski might choose to focus on other parameters, such as the population size. The beauty of Chellapilla and Fogel's algorithm, however, is that it has very few parameters and even those few could be varied considerably without adversely affecting the performance of the program. Nothing has been fine-tuned. Just as in the case of the scoring regime, the selection of those other parameters therefore involves little SI.

Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates: A critique of William Dembski's book No Free Lunch by Richard Wein

[The Grand Nudger]

Ah, but Ras...that says that people were involved, therefore there is the requirement of the involvement of intellect! - so sayeth the Heywood System.

[Heywood]

M. laboratorium is a biological organism altered and replicated by artificial means. It is a part of biological evolution, not of Heywood systems. They wouldn't have been able to do it without the design from nature.

I'll take it that you reject Chas's definition that biological evolution requires reproduction? The first Mycoplasma Laboratorium did not come into existence via reproduction but was replicated much like a car is replicated. If you accepted Chas's definition you cannot then claim it is part of the same biological evolutionary system which is responsible for us.

I'll respond to the rest of your post later....short on time these days.

[Chas]

M. laboratorium is a biological organism altered and replicated by artificial means. It is a part of biological evolution, not of Heywood systems. They wouldn't have been able to do it without the design from nature.

I'll take it that you reject Chas's definition that biological evolution requires reproduction? The first Mycoplasma Laboratorium did not come into existence via reproduction but was replicated much like a car is replicated. If you accepted Chas's definition you cannot then claim it is part of the same biological evolutionary system which is responsible for us.

I'll respond to the rest of your post later....short on time these days.

Without reproduction there can be no evolution. If you are concentrating on the inception, then you are arguing abiogenesis vs. creation - not evolution.

[Heywood]

Without reproduction there can be no evolution. If you are concentrating on the inception, then you are arguing abiogenesis vs. creation - not evolution.

If we accept your argument then consider this: The first Mycoplasma Laboratorium was not the product of reproduction and therefore it was not the product of the system of biological evolution which is responsible for you and me. Each subsequent generation of Mycoplasma Laboratorium conforms to your definition of evolution and must then be considered part of a completely different system of evolution then the one which is responsible for you and me. If we accept your definition of evolution, then Rasetsu's premise three is false. It is false because we have a Heywood system which required intellect to implement but that operates exactly like the biological evolutionary system which is responsible for you and me.

[downbeatplumb]

If we accept your argument then consider this: The first Mycoplasma Laboratorium was not the product of reproduction and therefore it was not the product of the system of biological evolution which is responsible for you and me. Each subsequent generation of Mycoplasma Laboratorium conforms to your definition of evolution and must then be considered part of a completely different system of evolution then the one which is responsible for you and me.

If you are insisting that biological evolution is a "system" by your loose term, then evolution of these things follows exactly as a natural Mycoplasma does. It is not using a different "system" because we made it.

It is a copy that is introduced and goes merrily on as before.

I see it like this, a river flows into the sea. Then you walk up and pour a bucket of water into the sea and claim we must treat that water differently because it came from the bucket not the river.