Excluding Intelligent Design Principles From the Search For Alien Life 308
KIdPanda writes "Prompted by pictures of man-made structures in the Utah desert, a SETI astronomer explains the sometimes-ambiguous difference between seeing the hand of God, alien intelligence, or nature. 'In my photographs, Shostak's SETI-trained eye — standing in for a pattern-crunching computer program — searched for an unexpected increase in visual order (or, in thermodynamic terms, a decrease in entropy caused by the rebellion of life against universal decay). A road or a tended field is mathematically simpler than a mountainous jumble or naturally varied vegetation. ... But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design."
Re:Entropy favors simplicity (Score:1, Interesting)
an advanced civilization who does not consume nearly as much energy as we do
I seriously doubt that such a civilization exists. Unless space travel is absolutely impossible, advanced civilizations can expand to overcome all energy and resource shortages. The mark of civilization is efficiency, not frugality.
Re:oops (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't life just the an efficient way to increase entropy (otherwise the chemicals would not have formed in the first amoeba)?
Re:I mod this down. (Score:5, Interesting)
Lol.. Tell us what you really thinks. And let all the anger out this time.
I don't know what christian pissed in your Wheaties and passed them off as coco puffs, but your letting your emotional anger cloud the conceptual message from the story. It isn't that intelligent design is real, it's that the logic behind it is real and the principles are being loosely used to determine the existance of life. At the basic level, they are saying based on the complexity of this, it couldn't be a natural occurance. An example of this might be a radio signal transmitting shakespear comming from inside the sun. There are other objective reasoning at issue too where we plant crops and build roads in generally straight lines, and so on. Nature doesn't do that quite often, take a river for instance, there are some that are straight but most of them have quite a bit of curves. Take a erosion line in a field that looks like a road or a fence line from a far distance. When water evacuated an area, it follows the path of least resistance and we know in nature that large amounts of earth (mars or whatever planet) are rarely uniform enough to create a straight line in the erosion on a scale large enough to be seen from space.
In other words, we are looking for things that wouldn't naturally occur by either stating the premise of nature isn't as prone to certain things or certain things or just too complex for it to happen naturally. In this story's context, the idea of intelligent design only refers to the context that some newly discovered thing is interpreted through or not. In other words, does this happen naturally or does it take some sort of intelligence to get it going. The principles that will convince you of it being a sign of alien life or a natural occurring will be the same that convinces a christian of ID. The article also looks at the impacts of that in how we bash on group (as you illustrated in your post) for using the very same techniques and basic thought processes that another uses. It is like telling a teen he can't get his drivers license because he will drink and drive or smoke while your holding a beer in one hand, the steering wheel in the other and have a cigarette hanging from your mouth.
Simple rules lead to complex patterns (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at fractals. If you found a Madelbrot set sitting somwhere in space, had a bias toward ID, and didn't realize the pattern behind it wsa simple, you'd be tempted to conclude it was intelligently designed.
Just as you can look at life and argue ID, when in fact some molecules, simple rules and a lot of time can in fact be responsible for the variety we see.
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say the real problem here is that identifying design is an incredibly difficult task. The Intelligent Design scammers would have us believe there's some sort of algorithm that could reliably pick intelligently-produced artifacts from natural ones. Of course, they have no such thing, and those sciences that have to deal in trying to figure out what was designed as opposed to what was made by non-intelligent beings is incredibly difficult.
SETI is making a basic assumption. It seems a reasonable one, but still, it is not the same as the claim the ID formulators like Dembski make that you can mathematically determine design on an object or phenomona. SETI's assumption is basically that a technologically advanced civilization out there in the cosmos will, in basic ways, use the same sorts of technologies we do. In short, we're applying the basic rule we always do to trying to determine design in other branches of science; is this artifact what I would make?
Intelligence set (Score:3, Interesting)
There exists (in imagination land) a set of all things we (supposedly intelligent beings) would consider `intelligent'. This set does not (and cannot) include everything. In fact, it will not include -all- `intelligent' things that could exist---just ones we would consider intelligent.
We cannot escape this bias. It's not enough to spot intelligence... we also have to recognize it as intelligence.
(ie: is our planet intelligent? is jupiter intelligent? how about our sun? how about our solar system? is an electron intelligent?; consider that the universe may be playing out all the synapses of a brain on a much grander scale)
Right now, when we look for intelligent life, we are looking for signs of our intelligence set. Problem is, we do not know what this set is---which is why this question came up. Easiest way to answer it right now: If it looks intelligent (stuff looks like ``roads'' and ``cities''; no other reasonable explanation) then it is intelligence.
Very likely (I hope), one day, AI field may lead us to a definition of what this intelligence set is for us.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
I tend to agree with you in that a scrambled roadmap is very different from an unscrambled roadmap and a scrambled forest is the same as an unscrambled forest. But then we've probably been raised in similar circumstances.
Would a monkey or a hypothetical tree dwelling civilization find the scrambled forest the same as the unscrambled? Probably not because to these people each tree is unique. I would say that your distinction between low entropy and high entropy is very anthrocentric. From what I have observed, much of the natural world (or universe) has low entropy, we just discount the orderlinesss as unimportant because we didn't create it ourselves and we have no use for it.
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I mod this down. (Score:5, Interesting)
...The Anthropic principle isn't that far from god, that's why scientists aren't very happy to just accept that ....
Why is it, that accepting God should make scientists unhappy? Just by studying the universe doesn't tell you much more about God than studying a building tells you about its architect. All of science works just fine, whether God enters the equations or not. Creationists believe that the Bible tells us a record of how this God did it. That is NOT intelligent design, which merely asserts that there is evidence that God may be behind the universe, but doesn't tell anything about how He did it or how long it took him to do or anything else.
There are scientists who believe that there is evidence of intelligence in nature, but in no way believe that this God, if you will, is the one we read of in any particular book. Creationism and intelligent design are not the same.
Ridiculous argument (Score:3, Interesting)
You're wrong :
The point is that intelligence-made structures have high entropy, while nature-made structure have low entropy.
Now let's look at your examples :
-> a perfectly flat desert : LOW entropy. Perhaps a bit higher than a not-quite-flat-but-looking-flat desert, but defineately LOW entropy.
Therefore it is not made by an intelligence. (according to this measure)
-> The surface of most gas planets : LOW entropy (obviously). Compare it to earth's ocean floor. It is mostly very, very flat. When a robot is standing on the ocean floor, he will see kilometers of perfectly flat dark terrain. The only real features, like volcanoes or sunken ships, come from external activity with high entropy (though not necessarily intelligence) That terrain does not have instabilities. It has very, very LOW entropy.
Therefore you can conclude it not to be man-made. You'd conclude the ships to be intelligently-made, which is correct, but you'd also call the volcanoes intelligently-made which is not correct. Unless the zulus are right and we better start throwing women into volcanoes to placate the volcano god, that is.
Now let's take another example. A road network. This is not a stable structure (without maintenance it will dissappear). It is something of very high contrasts, which will release lots of energy during it's decomposition, parts of it can collapse violently at any time (e.g. bridges), and over time it would be buried, made to look exactly like it's surroundings.
Therefore it has high entropy (certainly higher than it's environment) and would therefore be man-made.
Of course there are non-intelligent very very high entropy structures, like the magnetic field or the corona of the sun. Especially the magnetic fields are high entropy, and presumably not the result of intelligent design. (which are somehow capable of heating earth by at least a few dozen degrees with little warning. Currently they are heating the earth quite a bit, and we don't understand them at all).
But if "anything with high entropy is designed by an intelligent being" is your assumption then, yes, you'd presume God to be real (not allah, not krishna, not buddha, since those ideologies are in direct conflict with scientific theory. They both claim that scientific experiments have no validity, and convey no truth. Therefore using an experiment to validate them is beyond stupid. The bible, otoh, even describes a few experiments and accepts their outcomes as "obviously true". Since for example muslims claim allah decides "intelligently" the outcome of every single experiment every time it's carried out, the result of any experiment would change over time. Therefore any experiment, no matter what it's about, doesn't represent any truth to any muslim. Otherwise you'd directly arrive at the claim that the quran must correctly follow mathematics, which is a claim the quran fails (e.g. fractions of the same quantity in the quran don't add up to 1 : islamic inheritance laws are mathematically flawed in a way any 3-year old learns in school : if you cut a pie, the pieces always add up to a whole pie, never to more, never to less). The bible does seem to follow mathematics by contrast, at least you might say it tries, and even acknowledges that better study can yield better results. E.g. the bible claims salomon measured pi to be "a bit more" than 3, and claims a few centuries later it was measured to be 22/7, which is quite accurate).
The problem with equating high entropy with intelligent design is simple. The universe as a whole most certainly (currently) has a very (very) high entropy. The further back in time we go (and so presumably the closer to the creator) the higher entropy we see. So if entropy is higher for intelligently designed things, then most certainly the universe is designed, since the entropy at the start was infinite (according to big bang theory). (insert remark about correlation-causation not being equal*)
Of course that's discounting the fact that high-entropy events
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
No. This has a very strong mathematical and physical basis. In Statistical Mechanics [wikipedia.org] one can start with looking at the number of possible combinations there are of objects in a physical system and then derive the likelihood that any change will maintain the properties or is a significant departure. A road is small set within the phase space of possible states of the system, random changes will usually end up in a set of objects that no longer define the concept of "road". This leads on directly to the concept and measurement of entropy. So the road / forest comparison is quite reasonable. The blue sky, well how many microstates are there in blue sky: one. So no matter how you permute it it will always be a blue sky.
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
They're presumably using the information-theoretic definition of entropy, which is equivalent to but more general than the thermodynamic definition of entropy.
If the definitions are equivalent then either definition should give exactly the same result - for domains in which they both apply.
So, are you suggesting that a thermodynamic definition of entropy doesn't apply to an actual forest? Or, are you suggesting that you have a fairly simple information-theoretic method that can accurately calculate the thermodynamic entropy of an entire forest?
More to the point though, I think you, or anyone, would be hard pressed to apply either an information-theoretic or a thermodynamic definition of entropy to an actual forest.
On the other hand, there are certain information-theoretic definitions of entropy that could, rather easily, be applied to something abstract (non-chemical) such as a digital image of a forest.
Maybe that's what you're suggesting: that comparing the entropy of an actual forest to the entropy of actual roads is pretty much impossible - but that, using certain information-theoretic definitions (that may, or may not, have anything to do with thermodynamic entropy), comparing the entropy of a digital image of a forest to a digital image of roads is relatively easy.
Re:Where are their hyptheses? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's an interesting intellectual question, and it has been touched on in many areas of science, most notably pattern recognition, as the summary states. It interests me that no mainstream creationist has pursued this line of thinking. There are good arguments for being open minded when it comes to our beliefs about the universe - not the least of which is that our senses, and so the data we collect using them, are not provable to be trustworthy.
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is an outright falsity of your visual cortex though. Your visual cortex says a sky is "blue" but it's actually a huge variety of hues, saturations and values.
I dare you to take a wideish angle photo of even a blue sky and try reorganizing it. It'll look senseless.
Even a blue sky has a pretty vast dynamic range from the horizon upward.
Photoshoping a sky is harder than photoshoping a forest because your mistakes get covered up in the forest very easily due to so much detail. That's the reason a forest is easy to scramble. Errors are difficult to spot due to the frequency of the data. Low frequency data such as a blue sky is obnoxiously difficult patch up because errors are so easy to spot.