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."
What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Objects that are designed by people (and, presumably, other intelligences) tend to be simpler than those created by nature. For example, compare the straight lines of a road with the wavy shape of a river.
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Is "more orderly" the same as "simpler"? Is higher entropy less simple than lower entropy? I would answer "no" to both questions.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
The math would agree with you.
The article fuzzily jumps between concepts like "simple" and "complex" and low-entropy, high-entropy.
An intuitive way of thinking about entropy is considering how likely a particular arrangement is to give you the overall appearance you observe. Take a forest seen from the air and imagine cutting little bits of it out with Photoshop and moving them around. You can do that quite a bit and the result isn't all that terribly different from the original appearance. Now imagine doing it with the Nazca lines, or a pattern of roads. Big difference. The cases where you see a big difference are low entropy states -- they're special and random fiddling destroys them. The forest is a higher entropy state. Randomness doesn't have as much effect.
Now consider a plain blue sky. Do the same Photoshopping. No effect at all. The sky is an even higher entropy state than the forest.
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)
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.
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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
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I gave the hand wavy explanation. Entropy is very firmly anchored in math, and that mathematical definition seems to be a very basic feature of the universe. I see someone else has already given an excellent reply, but I'll just add the standard book example:
Imagine tearing the binding off a book so you just have a bunch of loose, numbered pages. Initially the pages are in numerical order. Now, throw them up in the air and collect them together. It is overwhelmingly probable that the pages will NOT be
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Would they? Certainly a tree dwelling civilization created by us would try. My point is that low entropy and high entropy may just be a matter of perspective. We have a perspective that is coloured by our circumstances, i.e., an agricultural society on a small planet. What would a completely different society see as low vs. high entropy? How about an advanced society of hunter gatherers? How about a society made up
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"How about an advanced society of hunter gatherers?"
How about you describe what you might see an 'advanced' hunter/gatherer society looking like? It's a somewhat oxymoronic statement.
"How about a society made up of intelligent stars?"
You might want to drop that one if you want to be taken seriously. Straining the limits of credulity to support your argument (actually just a series of further questions, getting more radical) hu
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Intelligent life would change its surroundings to better suit its needs (survival first and foremost). It is of course possible that it could be different, that is, if this life was fundamentally different from ours in that it did not arise from a process of natural selection, if it lacked the means to change anything about its surroundings (in which case intelligence would be of no selective value whatsoever and must have arisen spontaneously, randomly), or if its surroundings as formed by natural forces are utterly perfect for its needs (in which case, again, I would argue that intelligence isn't likely to arise).
These options sounds exceedingly unlikely to me. No, we're not bound to catch an intelligence like that, any more than we are to catch intelligent rocks on our own planet. Such an exercise is best reserved for the likes of Deepak Chopra; science on the other hand is based on extrapolation of what we (think to) know.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
A hypothetical tree dwelling civilisation would try to reign in the forces around it. A tree village would look differently from a forest, and I daresay, the scramble test would most likely show that as well.
The problem is that humans are horrible at detecting patterns which fall outside of the ones we prefer or are familiar with.
For example what would you say if you drew the following playing cards from a deck?
* 2 4 6 8 10 Q
* A 4 9 3 Q 10
You'd probably conclude that the first is definitely ordered and the second is near-random.
In fact, both are ordered in a very precise way. They are the elements of the sequences f(x) = (2*x) mod 13 and g(x) = (x^2) mod 13, respectively, x in [14,19].
There are an insane amount of "ordered" sequences (c.f. http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/index.html), each one no more "random" than any other, given the appropriate context. Just because humans like x*2, and can pick it out easily, that doesn't mean that an alien species wouldn't find x^2 "more aesthetic" (or the Fibonacci sequence, or the digits of pi base 23 ...)
Another concrete example. An RSA encrypted message sure looks like random noise, and to any third party swapping bytes around it doesn't *look* like it significantly changes the file. However, if you do have the key, the shuffling turns a well ordered and precise message into gobbledy-gook.
The alien civilization may impose order on the world, but it may be order "not as we know it." We have to have quite a bit of hubris to think that our ways of ordering things are the only ways of doing so.
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The math would agree with you. [...] entropy
If we take the radio waves or terrain features we observe to be the outcome of random variables, then we're on soft ground here.
Entropy, in the mathematical sense (and specifically Shannon entropy), is a property of a random variable--that is, of a distribution function. Specifically it's defined as - sum_{all i} of (p_i * log p_i). If we've sampled the variable and observed event i, what does that tell us about p_i? About p_j for j != i?
We might take the n-pixel picture to be a random variable instead o
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They're presumably using the information-theoretic definition of entropy, which is equivalent to but more general than the thermodynamic definition of entropy.
A layman's interpretation of entropy is that it's a measure of how many different rearrangements of the same components would be considered the same result. A forest, at a large scale, has high entropy -- a rearrangement of the trees results in the same thing, a forest. The bricks of a building, on the other hand, can be rearranged in relatively few w
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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 the
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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, bu
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That means a perfectly flat desert is teeming with alien life.
Damn, you've discovered our secret! Quarg, ready the ship to take us back to Alpha Centuri -- yes, we might as well take the secret of making perfect banoffee pie with us!
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 robo
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rebellion of life against universal decay
There's no "fight against entropy" here. No matter how much you can reduce entropy locally, you are FAR more greatly increasing entropy outside of your "local" system.
Re:Ridiculous argument (Score:4, Insightful)
It's actually really simple. ID can never be proved or disproved because we're stuck inside the object in question. To accurately determine if something is the result of design or chance, you have to be able to have a perspective outside the object to compare it with other objects. Since we can't get outside our universe to see if there are other universes (and if so, compare them to ours) we have no way to know for sure. Ours could be intelligently designed from top to bottom to look random to us, and we'd be none the wiser.
So it all boils down to whether or not you want to believe in a "someone" (ie. God) that's always existed, or matter that has always existed. But you will never in this life know for sure whether you're right or wrong.
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And how do you know that? 640k of ram, anyone?
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High entropy, actually. Low entropy means that very few rearrangements will remain unnoticeable, but one piece of flat, empty desert is exactly like any other, so they can be exchanged with each other without anyone noticing anything.
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Straight roads? [dmu.ac.uk] Are you from a country that makes cars that corner like sacks of wet sand, by any chance?
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Straight lines of a road? You've obviously never been to St. Paul.
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Re: What? (Score:2)
Objects that are designed by people (and, presumably, other intelligences) tend to be simpler than those created by nature. For example, compare the straight lines of a road with the wavy shape of a river.
Which is funny, because the IDologists infallibly invoke complexity as evidence of design.
Stupid logic (Score:2)
Hear, hear. So logically, anything that appears complicated does not show evidence of design? God is a simpleton? Eyeballs are complicated, so therefore they were not designed? What the hell does that statement mean?
I know I'm beating up on a bad summary, but this is just too trippy. Pass the bong.
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
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if by "he" you mean the author of the summary, then perhaps yes. but if you're referring to Seth Shostak, the SETI guy, then that isn't what he's arguing at all. here's the excerpt FTA:
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"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." What? I don't understand how something not being simple enough for our limited intelligence to understand constitutes divine creation?
It doesn't - and TFA article goes on to explain and agree, which the flaming summary does not:
That's true, agreed Shostak. But the key is comparison. Against a low-information background, one looks for life in complication; and against a complex background, one searches for simplicity. In either case, it's the degree of unexpected variation that matters. That's where Intelligent Design falls short.
And also from TFA, Shostak of SETI sums up how we might recognize life elsewhere:
"Another answer is that given by Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, in a case on pornography," said Shostak. "It's become a famous answer to all these questions: 'I'll know it when I see it.'"
oops (Score:5, Funny)
They assume intelligent life on other worlds would be trying to reduce chaos. I wonder how they arrive at this conclusion, since the only known intelligent life we've found so far seems to rather enjoy creating it in great quantity.
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Isn't life just the an efficient way to increase entropy (otherwise the chemicals would not have formed in the first amoeba)?
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Where?
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Surely she means the mice. Dolphins aren't all that, they just think they are.
Entropy favors simplicity (Score:2)
If you create a sand castle it'll become a flat surface. If you have a clear blue sky and start up a coal plant it'll initially become patchy and black and then hazy gray. The evenness of our blue sky is an example of entropy in action.
Given nothing but erosional forces eventually the earth would be a flat sphere.
Disrupting patterns is the signal of counter-entropy entities such as life. We look for disruptions in the background 'blue sky' of the radio spectrum for something 'different'.
Different is the
Re:Entropy favors simplicity (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point. Efficiency is a better way to put it.
And one huge source of efficiency is to not unnecessarily modify the environment around you. Sustaining a highway takes an enormous amount of work. Doubly so in a mountain pass. It can be much much more efficient to build a mountain road that's mostly under ground to avoid fighting the constant battle with the elements. It also makes it largely invisible.
Why terraform a planet when you can just change the settlers to easily survive on it.
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A civilization with practically unlimited access to energy would not optimize energy usage. Basically life as we know it uses up all available resources and maximizes effect instead of minimizing consumption. There might be a situation where a civilization only uses the most easily available resources because spreading to find more easily exploitable resources is more efficient than exploiting less accessible resources without traveling. But then the overall output would still be more than our output and sh
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Why not, if you have the right tech to do that?
Would you rather risk a planet (that isn't habitable anyway), or experiment on living beings?
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Yeah...except not (Score:5, Insightful)
The "inky blackness of space" is only simple if interpreted by a spectrally-limited human eye seeing only a tiny part of it from a distance. Space is crammed with a chaotic mess of strange crap on the macroscale and a lot more weird junk on the micro. Quasars, dark matter, nebulae, dark energy, black holes, virtual particles, gluon soup, quarks....
I will, as they say on the Internets, fix that for you:
If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is in no way evidence of design.
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Space is only chaotic if you don't yet know the math. In time, regardless if there is a God or not, the cosmos will be much like a simple clock.
People from times past seen comets and meteor shows as chaotic because they didn't understand the math and the mechanism. We have that today as well but as
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In time, regardless if there is a God or not, the cosmos will be much like a simple clock.
Just like the atom? We are so lucky that the foundations of physical world lack uncertainty [wikipedia.org]. Waaaait a second...
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> waves into sound, we would be listening to a chaotic mess.
It is just my own opinion, but I think that it'd rather be a progressive rock masterpiece.
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If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is in no way evidence of design.
If there can be no evidence against the existence of the designer, there can be no evidence in support of the designer either.
Let the existence of the designer and making an observation be random variables. We say that x is evidence for y if p[y|x] > p[y]; that is, observing x makes y more likely than y is a priori. It's seen that if x is evidence for y, then x is evidence against (meaning s/>/</) the complement of y.
Let o1..on be the possible outcomes of the observation (all happening with posit
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Slashdot desperately needs a LaTeX formatting option.
Re:Yeah...except not (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank God we have someone like you who, through only reading a Slashdot summary, can point out all the holes in his logic.
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He was talking about intellegent design.
Article in summary... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sometimes stuff that looks artificial can actually be natural. Telling the difference can be hard sometimes.
Throw in references to intelligent design to get a bunch of people in a tizzy and drive page hits.
Re: Article in summary... (Score:2)
Sometimes stuff that looks artificial can actually be natural. Telling the difference can be hard sometimes.
Ultimately, SETI and ID would like to have the same thing: a rule or formula that can be applied to an observation to determine rigorously whether it is the byproduct of an intelligent agency.
However, SETI knows that no such rule exists, and though they have software that flags 'interesting' stuff for their attention, they are still left with ordinary scientific procedures for determining what the cause of the observation actually is. (And in one case we got pulsars rather than 'aliensdidit'.)
ID pretends t
Where are their hyptheses? (Score:4, Insightful)
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...with an actual science that could predict whether something was created by an intelligence....
How about predicting how a junkyard full of car parts can spontaneously, randomly become a running Ferrari or even only a Toyota automobile.
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Re: Where are their hyptheses? (Score:2)
How about predicting how a junkyard full of car parts can spontaneously, randomly become a running Ferrari or even only a Toyota automobile.
I'm curious who you think makes that prediction.
If you're thinking that's an analogy for biological evolution, you're wrong. Automobiles and their precursors don't reproduce themselves via error-prone self replication.
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...Automobiles and their precursors don't reproduce themselves via error-prone self replication....
We humans think that self-replicating cells arose randomly from the "primordial soup" of the early oceans. Yet, despite science and technology's efforts we have not come even within light years of building any sort of machine that can take bare elements and make a copy of itself, which in turn copies itself etc. How is it that we can intelligently attribute to chance and time what we cannot do ourselves? Maybe
Re: Where are their hyptheses? (Score:4, Insightful)
We humans think that self-replicating cells arose randomly from the "primordial soup" of the early oceans. Yet, despite science and technology's efforts we have not come even within light years of building any sort of machine that can take bare elements and make a copy of itself, which in turn copies itself etc. How is it that we can intelligently attribute to chance and time what we cannot do ourselves?
God, what a stupid post.
1) What are you going to do in a few years when the artificial life people do get their self-replicating metabolizing systems working. (Somehow I doubt that you've seen the literature on the topic.)
2) We can't do lots of other stuff that happens naturally; what's the problem with us not being able to create life in a test tube (yet)?
3) Whence the argument, "we smart guys can't even do it, therefore some intelligent designer must have"?
Don't you creationists ever think?
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As far as something like that randomly happening there is no difference between a Ferrari appearing or "even only a Toyota automobile." Unless of course there are more parts in one or the other.
But that has nothing to do with evolution. Those who make the argument as you have simply have not even the most basic understanding of evolution. We did not spontaneously come together out of a "junkyard" of parts. The incredibly slow process of evolution is all about incremental steps. Did I mention incredibly
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...We did not spontaneously come together out of a "junkyard" of parts....
I was thinking not so much about what happened AFTER a living cell "somehow" appeared, but about the random molecules in "the primordial soup", the junk yard of elements, came to make the first living cell. Darwin did not have the foggiest idea about how complex a single living cell is. We OBSERVE and experience that any moderately organized pile of atoms becomes less organized over time. This a a manifestation of the second law of th
Probability theory versus unfalsifyability (Score:2)
If probability theory is a reasonable model of the existence of the ID and the outcome of observations, you can't have evidence for unless you allow evidence against.
See my proof at http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1045125&cid=25918745 [slashdot.org]
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Predicting whether something was created by an "intelligence" first requires a definition of intelligence, and then (apparently) some way of discriminating between different "levels" of it. Unfortunately, the only "intelligence" we have to base any of this on is our own, so it fails the empirical test. And of course, there's the bias of seeing ourselves -- that is, our human intelligence -- as the best or most refined kind.
Lastly, here's an example of just how innane this line of thinking is: Cars are creat
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It's an interesting intellectual question, and it has been touched on in many areas of science, most notably pattern recognition, as the sum
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Obviously, ID fails to impress us with its (lack of) logical hypotheses. I would like to see the ID crowd come up with an actual science that could predict whether something was created by an intelligence <snip>
That's exactly what their 'intellectual' leaders (Behe, Dembski, Gonzalez, etc.) profess to be doing.
Of course, their claims don't stand up to the most casual scrutiny.
(Though for some reason creationists tend to find them convincing. Wonder why...)
My own theory... (Score:2)
What keeps bothering me, is
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cromar [slashdot.org] wrote:
The ID/Creationism folks can't ever produce such a thing because they don't believe that there are any examples of things that were not intelligently designed! They literally believe that everything that exists was created intentionally by an intelligent being, even apparently random processes that we can contemporaneously observe (as opposed to apparently rand
I think you're overthinking this (Score:2)
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I thought it was prime numbers and a Hitler speech.
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A flamebait article and a flamebait submission. (Score:2)
I do not dismiss religion in and of itself. That being said, if it makes your day to think that order is a sign of God than feel free to take comfort in that, I have no real problem with it. But at the same time don't think that it's ultimate proof (as in science), there are enough explanations without needing to raise the name of a deity to defend what appears as order to you.
For me? I think things work well in their proper frame. I'd like to
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.
divine mistake? (Score:2)
What if the universe happened by chance or an error and God has no idea how to put it back in the box?
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> to us to pretty much discount any intelligent designing.
IMO, just because you can't see a purpose, doesn't mean that the creator didn't see one. Or the evolution, or both (or maybe they're the same?).
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I believe that things sometimes seem fuxx0red from our perspective because they were intended as a lesson for us, and it's not the things that go wrong but our perception of them. Sometimes I even stop asking myself all the silly questions about the meaning of life, universe and everything, and just try to appreciate the moment, think of everything as being right here and right now solely to make me happier. And I think that this is what actually could bring me close
blue sky (Score:2)
sky is blue because of a star and some leftover accumulations of what mostly became that star. So some order and organizing there, by gravity and the other forces, on both the formation and continuation of sun and earth. We're of the same origin as the blue sky.
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.
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I think you misunderstand. Intelligence - at least meaningful intelligence - can be represented by a few things. One of them is clearly exercising control over the environment or habitat. You mention roads. Well, yes, that is an example of such control. But control extends to shelter, exclusion of things that are harmful (pests, vermin, disease, etc.) as well as many other things. Use of tools is a clear sign of intelligence because that shows control over environment.
Radio transmissions are a seconda
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I think you misunderstand. Intelligence - at least meaningful intelligence - can be represented by a few things. One of them is clearly exercising control over the environment or habitat.
Thank you for listing some -characteristics- of what you think our "intelligence set" is (ie: things that we would likely recognize as intelligent). This is exactly the bias I've mentioned, and it's unavoidable.
Opposite of intelligent design (Score:5, Insightful)
This argument seems to get the Intelligent Design argument backwards. The ID people argue that complexity can't arise from simplicity, and thus complexity is the signature of design. This guy seems to be arguing that simplicity is the signature of design.
Neither one is particulary a good argument. Complex things can arise from simple ones-- a snowflake can arise from water vapor. And simple thing can arise from complex ones: water vapor can arise from a snowflake.
In either case entropy increases, and heat, ultimately, is dissipated into space.
The guy should read more of Greg Bear (Score:3, Insightful)
The Forge of God [wikipedia.org]
It's all there.
Simplicity, Complexity, Hawking and Bohr (Score:2)
> If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design."
Wrong. There exist very rigorous standards for simpilicity and complexity, having to do with how complex the calculations necessary to describe the phenomenon being examined. But in keeping with the tone of TFA, we'll stick with the acceptable generalizations.
As in TFA, the SETI-d00d was standing in for software doing pattern matching. For there to be a pattern, there had to be something less than random presentation of components of t
See also the Canals of Mars. (Score:2)
The words "life" and "intelligence" are a like the word "planet". What seems obvious gets messy and debate-ridden once you have enough data to actually have to formalize the definition of where to draw the line.
Looking for unusual patterns in the entropy will tell you where to look for new things to explain, but it isn't going to magically cancel out all possible explanations short of civilization.
(by the way, could slashdot please, please cut back on the apparent quota of ID references - sure it's driving
vacuum (Score:2)
Humans are Biased (Score:2)
The problem is that humans are hard-wired to see patterns in the world around us, even where there is nothing but chaos. So the whole question of finding intelligence in the patterns around us is moot.
The intelligence is more in the mind of the perceiver than in the design itself. There's no one out there, they're not coming.
Intelligent design, my ass. (Score:4, Funny)
One word: cancer.
The human body is clear proof that God is an idiot.
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For reference that's called the anthropic principle [wikipedia.org]
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.
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If you find out, make sure you get him to see a doctor, urine isn't supposed to be dark brown.
Re:I mod this down. (Score:5, Informative)
Yawn.. The creationist use science to explain plastic.
And no, oil doesn't take hundreds of thousands of years to make, it can be made in small quantities from organic matter in labs in less then 6 months. It's not economical viable to mass produce in this way or anything but it can be made.
And no, there is nothing in the creation story making the claim that the world is 4000 years old. That is a number, and incorrect number at that, which was pulled from people outside the bible who were attempting to add the ages of the key players in the bible up and estimating the age of the earth. There are a few problems with it though. Your also confusing the point of a creator who creates things. If someone or something, lets call it a GOD could create the universe, create life, create weather, water, minerals and everything else, Why couldn't he create oil too? I mean seriously, even if is took billions of years for oil to naturally occur, why couldn't the creator just create?
Anyways, your perception of creation is a little off. You see, you don't need to know how plastic is made or what processes are involved to believe in evolution or any other science. In fact, you only need to know about oil and plastic if you are doing something with it that required you to know about it. I mean seriously, how much force is needed to cause a nuclear reaction in a non-controlled environment? Don't bother looking the answer up, it doesn't matter because neither of us are working with nuclear reactions and the answer is a lot more then we have to worry about. So you believing in creation, evolution, paganism, the church of Scientology, the Flying Spaghetti monster or whatever doesn't mean you have to be able to explain someone else' concepts, misconceptions, or general ideology nor would you have to involve yourself with some deep knowledge of science either.
Re:I mod this down. (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean problems apart from literally believing a book that's been through several translations from extinct languages and wasn't written down at all until many generations after the events allegedly happened?
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It's even simpler than that. Once you assume God, it trumps all. See very low levels of Carbon-14 in those fossils? God did that. Drill up what appears to be vegetation processed in the bowels of the earth for eons? God put it there. Infer design from the simplicity of empty space(quite the logical left turn btw)? It's gee-to-tha-oh-to-tha-dee.
It's the whole problem with intelligent design as science: it's not a search for causes, it's looking for an understanding gap(real or imagined) in order to in
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Three cheers for ignorance!
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.
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ID is young earth. They created it and they use it as a tool to get creationism in the classroom. Specifically that the earth was created ~6000 years ago.
While the logical term does not imply bible literalism, that is how it is used, and for all practical purposes that is what it means.
This is becasue zealots are using an incorrect term to push there agenda.
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If SETI can detect patterns in the songs, then the aliens need a more efficient codec.
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However, it's also nearly a tautological statement. It's not deep.
It's just ~B -> ~A therefore A -> B. No shit. It means that the universe exists and works. The same is true of any potion of the universe, including the portions that we have designed. It neither precludes nor supports the theory of an intelligently designed universe.
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Neither did the article.
Summary... (Score:2)
What the OP seems to be saying is that: a) they came up with a theory that they can find life by searching for simplicity in the midst of chaos. b) they then found out they were wrong.
Stunning, huh?
Perhaps what they mean is that they want to search for clear natural patterns. Except that they don't know how to define a clear natural pattern, so they're still as clueless as the rest of us.
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Or sentient life which has transferred its consciousnesses into a networked computer system ala the matrix. Great place for such a farm would be deep under ground in stable bedrock. Then just have little hovering robots fluttering about the surface and exploring the stars. Tele-presence is already vastly more efficient than air travel. It's only a matter of time before we take the leap to being 'digital'.
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Even we simple earthlings did it with our space-faring satellites and the Mars rover. I'm pretty sure nobody in another galaxy will notice any of our spacecraft for a few thousand years though.
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More like the opposite. As far as particle physics and quantum mechanics are concerned, it looks very much like there are just a few different possible charges (for example). The multitude of different particles is a combination of very limited set of properties (electric charge being one of them).
In a designed universe, every particle could have been designed different. In an universe that has developed as dictated by rather simple laws, every particle also follows these laws, and in this case it means tha