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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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You, , have just used a fallacy, thus defeating your own claim. Fallacies are flaws in logic that may help your side of the argument, but are not used in legitimate arguing. The fallacy you used is the Moving the Goal Posts fallacy. Here is the basic idea of the fallacy: You have said a statement, and when disproved from that statement, you have said that "Well, maybe if you show me a (impossible thing to show you) then I'll believe you." You say that to prove something, you have to see proof that is impossible to show you at this time. That was a little confusing, so here's a video that will help explain.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeswYJgf5mM
One more thing, yes you are begging the question.
That's only an assertion, while i have explained in detail what my case is...i am expecting a reasonable rebuttal and not empty assertions
I thought I reasonably explained why you were begging the question. I defined begging the question and gave examples of how you were doing it. Real examples from things you really said in the context you really said them. That is not an empty assertion. Which brings me to another point: you say, "that's only an assertion." What exactly do you think an assertion is? I think it is a declaration; saying the natural world must have been intelligently designed is also an assertion. What's wrong with assertions?
Did i simply say that the natural world must have been intelligently designed and leave it at that.
I have given my reasons for that claim. What you and every sane person accept and practice in your daily life...the assumption that specified complexity can only arise from an intelligent cause... if i showed you a watch and said a 4 year old made it would you believe? No, because you attribute a higher level of intelligence to that level of complexity. It is this same logic that I apply to come to my deduction of intelligence...but note that I am not saying that that intelligence has to be God.... If i had, then you could say that I am making an assertion...but the conclusion of intelligence is based on simple logic, which you and everyone makes use of in their everyday life.
Well thank you for seeing that I am more logical.
So for this logic thing to work properly, you still need to give a definition of complexity. "Specified" needs another term to go with it for it to have any meaning. Specified as what? Specified for what? Specified by whom? Specified with what? There are a great many possibilities. And don't ask me a question and then answer it for me. You may say "if no, then it could be because...", otherwise you are only in an argument with yourself. Sadly, I'm not sure who would win that argument.
Good arguments cmallen…
Actually I have been discussing this topic with so many people on so many threads… that I am not sure if I had explained everything to you…but I think in one of my posts in this thread to nyarlathotep I had mentioned it.
I am repeating it here, so you get the full picture: specified complexity is the arrangement of primitive parts in a particular arrangement to perform a function, “which would not be possible if the arrangement is changed.”
Please don’t think I am inventing new definitions for wiggle room. This is something I had already mentioned, but as I have repeating definitions over and again, I left it out in the last post.
If you actually think, that’s why it’s called specific. Only a particular arrangement.
Therefore, if dfkljdlskjfdljldk is the only possible arrangement for your specifities (ASCII or bits of info etc)… then yes, it can be accepted as information. But not otherwise. Hope the picture is clear.
Yes, that is quite clear. I think I have a solid idea of what you mean by specified. This works for my purposes as an academic, philosophical talking point; but I do have to agree with Nyarl that this is an insufficient definition for mathematical purposes. Mathematics (for which we have much to thank early Muslims for) is like another language and there are some things that just don't translate.
I do not agree with your argument that observing an object, phenomena or process in nature that appears to fulfill a function perfectly necessarily means that that it was designed to be that way. That also does not mean that it occurred through some directionless happenstance. Though mutation is random (within the parameters of possibility demanded by DNA, of course), the success of each mutation and it's subsequent chances of of being passed to the next incarnation or generation is dictated by how well suited it is to one's environment.
I just got this image of water settling into a pothole. The water appears flat on the surface due to gravity and tension, but underneath it conforms to the shape of the interior of the pothole. If it were to freeze, one may take out the ice chunk and put it back in as if it were made to perfectly fit the hole, the purpose of which could be to provide a solid, flat surface to plug up the pothole. That is a really simple example and I'm sure it's been said better by someone smarter somewhere; but I'm actually kind of proud I thought that up.
First of all thank you for appreciating my idea of specified.
About the maths of specificity, Nyarl was fussing over it because he thought I was asking him to measure degrees of complexity between two objects. Which is why math was important. But that’s not what I want… all I am asking is to show from our world an example of specified complexity (as I explained) that arises without the agency of intelligence. Let me call specified complexity SC for brevity.
Coming to your next argument about the “appearance of design” in nature. The ice and pothole was a good example. And there are plenty of such examples in nature…but does it fit the bill of SC? Are there many parts getting arranged there to fulfill a function? I don’t see it. That’s why you can rule out intelligent agent there.
I don't think one can rule out an intelligent agent if one subscribes to the notion that SC is subjective to design.
The way I see it, SC is a matter of perspective. As example, [CBGB and OMFUG] offers no practical information when its complexity is not specified for a purpose, as appears so to many people with this particular arrangement of letters in the English language, and so is not the result of intelligent design. If you where to switch to my perspective, [CBGB and OMFUG] would suddenly become the name of a place where you used to perform as a musician and would invoke a host of memories and connections. This arrangement of letters would cease to meet this specified purpose for me if they were arranged differently.
Design is subjective to perspective.
Good argument Camallen
As this thread is getting too narrow... i am posting the reply for this at the end....please check it out
Kata, I'm glad you're here. And if that is in direct defiance to god then so be it. Keep on keepin' on.
As its weekend here and I am away...I will reply to u guys by sunday
It was richard dawkins who said that “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
What do you think your God, Mr Dawkins meant by design there? That's precisely what I mean by specific complexity.
Valiya - "What do you think your God, Mr Dawkins..."
A new low for you Valiya...
Thank you for stating that Dr. Dawkins is God. Though I'm sure he would blush at the assertion.
Dawking states "appearance of having been designed..." You never said anything about appearances, you made a forthright assertion as fact that complexity = design.
I was replying to some comments on this thread I am using ill defined terms (not in so many words though)... and my only purpose in quoting dawkins here was to show that words like design have been used meaningfully by evolutionists which shows that people understand these terms... yes, dawkins meant appearance of design, which means there is something called 'design' and everybody understand it.
Not one single person in this thread has questioned your use of the word design. You have not only leapfrogged here, you have made an intercontinental flight.
Also, I call BS on your use of the Dawkins quote. You thought it bolstered your view of intelligent design, which it does not.
Valiya - "the addition of 300 base pairs"
you mean 3000?
----------------
Valiya - "the bacteria lost an ability"
bait and switch!
Now you are substituting ability for information, which you previously switched for complexity. You are making it up as you go along.
--------------
Valiya - "and if you want to insist that the addition of 300 base pairs should be accepted as new information"
strawman alert!
bait and switch!
I never said it was new information. You seem to be doing the old switch-a-roo again, information switched for "new information".
-------------
Valiya - "it's like saying that when a child randomly adds letters to a poem, and the result of it is that some meaning from it was lost...and you want to call it information addition"
In every metric I have ever seen or worked with in mathematics and physics, the addition of letters to a message increases the information contained. You could argue that this added information isn't very useful, you could argue that it damages the beauty of the poem; but it still increases the number of basic operations required to construct the message/poem, which is the information it contains. In other words it increases the amount of work required to create a copy of the message. If we had your definition, we could examine it to see if this addition of letters increased the information in your definition. Of course: YOU STILL HAVEN'T GIVEN IT, so we can't do that. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to define information in a consistent manner that has the properties you claim, but I could be wrong! GIVE US THE DEFINITION AND WE WILL SEE!
Man... i can't believe it... in one of your posts you said: "....I said gives 6*10^9 bits of information in a human being..." What did you mean by information there.... and now you are asking for its definition.
According to your argument, you would take the following as information: dfjkdfkdfdjkfdjkerieioqbdjf... wouldn't you? if that's how you see information, and based on that you think mutation adds information...go ahead. You are free to believe what you want.
dfjkdfkdfdjkfdjkerieioqbdjf is comapritively a lot of information. 27 7-bit characters isn't exactly nothing.
there you have just proven it.... you accept gibberish as information...and that tells me why you are able to accept ecoli experiment as an example of informational increase through mutation....
I didn't say I place any value on the information, merely that it is information. And why do you say I am an ecoli experiment? I mean, maybe as an organism I am comparatively similar to one, but what is that to do with accepting information?
Sorry Cmallen... as I am discussing with more than 3 people simultaneously on this thread... i just lost continuity... i thought i was answering Nyarlthotep, with whom i once had a discussion on ecoli.... that's why the confusion.
Secondly... if you think any gibberish can be information, i doubt if it has any backing of experts... I am not sure, please enlighten me otherwise...
This is the reason i have been stressing on specified complexity from the beginning... dfkdjfeirekjd this is only complex because it has many letters, but not specified. But consider the sentence "how are you doing?" this is complex and specified because the letters are arranged to generate meaning.
Therefore only specified complexity is information.
dfkdjfeirekjd is no more or less "specified" than any other complexity. I will specify them now as thirteen ASCII characters, or 91 bits of information, or six billion possible arrangement combinations. If you mean that the complexity is there for a specified purpose, well... I know it may seem that way, but just because something can be used a certain way or winds up meeting a certain function, doesn't mean it was designed that way. If we use your own method of taking human designed tools as analogy: a sword is more complex than a stick, a sword may have been designed to chop an infidel's head off, but if a post-apocalyptic society uses it solely to open cans of Spam it has just lost it's original "specitivity" and suddenly has a completely different one.
Cmallen
I accidentally posted this reply at another place in the thread... so here it is once again for you
Good arguments cmallen…
Actually I have been discussing this topic with so many people on so many threads… that I am not sure if I had explained everything to you…but I think in one of my posts in this thread to nyarlathotep I had mentioned it.
I am repeating it here, so you get the full picture: specified complexity is the arrangement of primitive parts in a particular arrangement to perform a function, “which would not be possible if the arrangement is changed.”
Please don’t think I am inventing new definitions for wiggle room. This is something I had already mentioned, but as I have repeating definitions over and again, I left it out in the last post.
If you actually think, that’s why it’s called specific. Only a particular arrangement.
Therefore, if dfkljdlskjfdljldk is the only possible arrangement for your specifities (ASCII or bits of info etc)… then yes, it can be accepted as information. But not otherwise. Hope the picture is clear.
Please see my reply to your other identical post. I wouldn't worry too much about posting in the right places, most of us are able to follow the tendrils of a thread like this, even when many of the conversations overlap and intertwine.
I will use this space here to make a small confession: I have been having a bit of an experiment at your expense. In a few of my recent posts I have made comments that deliberately misconstrue your words in a way similar to how I see you do it. Except for the one that was obviously a joke, you haven't called me out on any of them (you even apologized to me for one of them). This tells me you are probably not intentionally doing any of these things. So I have to wonder, why do you continually over-read things into what others say, or leave things out that are important parts of what they said? It's hard to hold a conversation that way.
I don't know what you are talking about. May be if you give an example, i can explain.
Valiya - "Man... i can't believe it... in one of your posts you said: "....I said gives 6*10^9 bits of information in a human being..." What did you mean by information there.... and now you are asking for its definition."
strawman alert!
Yes, that 6*10^9 is an estimate of the amount of information contained in the average humans DNA. You already asserted months ago that this is not YOUR definition of information. I'm asking for YOUR definition of information (and complexity). I have been asking for YOUR definition of information and complexity over and over again on these forums, to the point where I'm sure some users feel these requests are spam (I'd like to apologize to those people; I'm sorry, but I think this is an important point that needs to be driven home).
Are you now suggesting that in all of these requests you never realized I was asking for YOUR definition?
Ah, yes I remember... a cancerous mutation is also information addition for you....what a great example to prove the theory of evolution...CANCER...
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