Commentary: SETI and Intelligent Design
Jason Spaceman
-------------------------------------------------------------
By Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
posted: 01 December 2005
06:37 am ET
If you’re an inveterate tube-o-phile, you may remember the episode of
"Cheers" in which Cliff, the postman who’s stayed by neither snow, nor
rain, nor gloom of night from his appointed rounds of beer, exclaims
to Norm that he’s found a potato that looks like Richard Nixon’s head.
This could be an astonishing attempt by taters to express their
political views, but Norm is unimpressed. Finding evidence of
complexity (the Nixon physiognomy) in a natural setting (the spud),
and inferring some deliberate, magical mechanism behind it all, would
be a leap from the doubtful to the divine, and in this case, Norm
feels, unwarranted.
Cliff, however, would have some sympathizers among the proponents of
Intelligent Design (ID), whose efforts to influence school science
curricula continue to swill large quantities of newspaper ink. As just
about everyone is aware, these folks use similar logic to infer a
"designer" behind such biological constructions as DNA or the human
eye. The apparent complexity of the product is offered as proof of
deliberate blueprinting by an unknown creator—conscious action,
presumably from outside the universe itself.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Read it at
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_intelligentdesign_051201.html
J. Spaceman
Glend
> From the article:
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> By Seth Shostak
> SETI Institute
> posted: 01 December 2005
> 06:37 am ET
>
> If you're an inveterate tube-o-phile, you may remember the episode of
> "Cheers" in which Cliff, the postman who's stayed by neither snow, nor
> rain, nor gloom of night from his appointed rounds of beer, exclaims
> to Norm that he's found a potato that looks like Richard Nixon's head.
>
> This could be an astonishing attempt by taters to express their
> political views, but Norm is unimpressed. Finding evidence of
> complexity (the Nixon physiognomy) in a natural setting (the spud),
> and inferring some deliberate, magical mechanism behind it all, would
> be a leap from the doubtful to the divine, and in this case, Norm
> feels, unwarranted.
>
> Cliff, however, would have some sympathizers among the proponents of
> Intelligent Design (ID), whose efforts to influence school science
> curricula continue to swill large quantities of newspaper ink. As just
> about everyone is aware, these folks use similar logic to infer a
> "designer" behind such biological constructions as DNA or the human
> eye. The apparent complexity of the product is offered as proof of
> presumably from outside the universe itself.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Read it at
> http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_intelligentdesign_051201.html
>
by aliens would be rather complex, and in a sense, "specified" (all
sorts of problems arise from the word "specified", but I'll grant
specification in this case so long as I point out that "specification"
is a question, not the end of the discussion).
What sort of amazes me is that IDists think that language and speech
are designed. Language above all is rather more evolved than it is
"designed" (which presumably is why it is complex), and hardly counts
as the finding of anything "designed" in SETI signals. Speech may be
somewhat more "designed", indeed, particularly very deliberate speech,
but even most of what comprises speech is far less design than it is a
sort of "animal process". The famous, "how do I know what I think
before I say it?" kind of thing. While I'm not denying all design in
speech, or even in language itself, it's absurd to take evolved
communication patterns as "Design" in some Platonic, Stoic, or
Theological sense.
This is the stupidity of ID. They have no idea what "design is", and
in fact when we do our best to define it with more subtlety and
sophistication, we also find ourselves having problems with saying
where evolved patterns and forms leave off from the processes that we
reductively name "design". Languages, literary forms, and even
scientific terms and speech, all evolve and produce both complexity
marks of derivation within themselves. Design per se is less certain
to diagnose in the process than is derivation both from past speech and
from observation/empiricism, and from the knowledge and personality of
the speaker. In fact we are not likely to concern ourselves at all
with "design" when we're really considering speech production (or
signal production of any kind in humans) with some sophistication,
because often the best speech hardly amounts to something "designed" in
any deliberate sense. And even where deliberate design occurs in
speech and writing, we're really interested in what produces such
"design", since we don't really take "design" to be a fundamental
aspect of our world.
The fact of the matter is that we're really only looking for animal
signaling in SETI searches, which is why we have some notion of what to
look for. Those in SETI research rarely make the mistake of talking
about picking up signs of design in an overall sense (some designs
might be noticeable in SETI communications, but much of the rest would
not be design in any meaningful sense), since this seriously confuses
the issue of what occurs during animal signaling, including
sophisticated versions of it. If we were looking for Design without
constraints, such as would be expected of the inscrutable God, we would
not know what to look for, since God is not constrained by physics and
evolution into predictable aspects of communication. The IDists make a
muck of things, as usual, because they have no notion of what gives us
complex speech patterns (it is emphatically not design), plus they have
no notion of why we think we likely know something about humanoid
aliens might signal us. The latter is due to the fact that we know
that aliens would be signaling in some manner that had evolved among
animals, and far from "design" explaining this, it is rather due to
empiricism, physics, and evolution of "intelligence".
>
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> J. Spaceman
CreateThis
> From the article:
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> By Seth Shostak
> SETI Institute
> posted: 01 December 2005
> 06:37 am ET
[snip article intro]
"[SETI] seek[s] artificiality [...] found out of context. This is
clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the
work of a supernatural biochemist."
So not only is design characterized by simplicity and thrift, not
complexity and waste, we also need to be able to contrast it with
non-design in order to detect it. ID asserts that all of nature is
designed - so what's the non-design that contrasts with ID's designed
nature? The only thing we have to contrast with nature is whatever
purposeful design we're aware of. ID proposes to detect design by its
*dissimilarity* to everything we know is designed.
CT
Bobby D. Bryant
> Jason Spaceman wrote:
>
>> From the article:
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>> By Seth Shostak
>> SETI Institute
>> posted: 01 December 2005
>> 06:37 am ET
>
> [snip article intro]
>
>> Read it at
>> http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_intelligentdesign_051201.html
>
> "[SETI] seek[s] artificiality [...] found out of context. This is
> clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the
> work of a supernatural biochemist."
>
> So not only is design characterized by simplicity and thrift, not
> complexity and waste,
Unless of course the designer wants to use complexity and waste.
That's why it's nonsense to discuss 'design' without considering intent.
> we also need to be able to contrast it with non-design in order to
> detect it. ID asserts that all of nature is designed - so what's
> the non-design that contrasts with ID's designed nature? The only
> thing we have to contrast with nature is whatever purposeful design
> we're aware of. ID proposes to detect design by its *dissimilarity*
> to everything we know is designed.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
Andrew Arensburger
> What sort of amazes me is that IDists think that language and speech
> are designed. Language above all is rather more evolved than it is
> "designed" (which presumably is why it is complex), and hardly counts
> as the finding of anything "designed" in SETI signals.
Interesting comment. In this context, I note that in our rare
attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials (the flip side of
SETI), we haven't used natural languages.
Sure, the gold record includes recordings of human speech, but
AFAIK no one expects the aliens to understand the meaning of the
words; they're just included to give them an idea of what we sound
like.
The "decoding instructions" in both the Arecibo message and
the gold record are given in an artificial language, one that's much
simpler than any human natural language (and also tailored to a
specific task: that of making the message make sense). The artificial
language used is as simple as it could be made, and the instructions
are designed to be (we hope) unambiguous. This undermines ID's
argument from complexity.
--
Andrew Arensburger, Systems guy University of Maryland
arensb.no-...@umd.edu Office of Information Technology
Who messed with my anti-paranoia shot?
Richard Clayton
When ID proponents start talking about ID's similarity to SETI, I like
to point out that the most exciting "designed" signal we ever found
turned to have completely unintelligent causes-- a rotating neutron star.
--
[The address listed is a spam trap. To reply, take off every zig.]
Richard Clayton
"During wars laws are silent." -- Cicero
Glend
> Glend <interelect...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > What sort of amazes me is that IDists think that language and speech
> > are designed. Language above all is rather more evolved than it is
> > "designed" (which presumably is why it is complex), and hardly counts
> > as the finding of anything "designed" in SETI signals.
>
> Interesting comment. In this context, I note that in our rare
> attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials (the flip side of
> SETI), we haven't used natural languages.
Right, I think that the complexity is a serious problem. Nevertheless,
I wrote about natural languages because presumably SETI searches could
detect powerful broadcasts of natural language, and would at least have
some idea that they were due to "intelligence". I believe that the
article was referring to the "artificial languages" in their
simplicity, yet I did think that IDists at least get credit for the
fact that SETI should in principle be capable of recognizing
intelligence in natural languages as well as from artificial ones.
> Sure, the gold record includes recordings of human speech, but
> AFAIK no one expects the aliens to understand the meaning of the
> words; they're just included to give them an idea of what we sound
> like.
These recordings should be capable of showing that intelligence is
behind the words, as I'm sure you'd agree. The simpler languages, and
"instructions" for decoding, are used because simply knowing that
"intelligence produced something" is not very satisfying, even where
this bare fact is demonstrable. Unfortunately, IDists want us to be
satisfied with only this, and even more unfortunately, they want us to
be satisfied with this belief without the proper evidence for
intelligence being behind life.
> The "decoding instructions" in both the Arecibo message and
> the gold record are given in an artificial language, one that's much
> simpler than any human natural language (and also tailored to a
> specific task: that of making the message make sense). The artificial
> language used is as simple as it could be made, and the instructions
> are designed to be (we hope) unambiguous. This undermines ID's
> argument from complexity.
>
Yes indeed! Designs tend to be simple, or complex through repetition.
While this isn't necessarily the mark of design--extremely complex and
non-repetitive designs are possible in principle--the sort of
complexity found in evolutionary structures tends to be absent from our
own designs. Designed languages are not as complex or rich as natural
languages, as we see in the partially designed Esperanto (based in
Romance languages), and even more so in artificial languages used for
computers, logic, etc. Which is your point, but I wanted to emphasize
it.
Andrew Arensburger
> Andrew Arensburger wrote:
> > Sure, the gold record includes recordings of human speech, but
> > AFAIK no one expects the aliens to understand the meaning of the
> > words; they're just included to give them an idea of what we sound
> > like.
> These recordings should be capable of showing that intelligence is
> behind the words, as I'm sure you'd agree.
Actually, I'm not convinced.
By the time they hear the recorded words, the aliens will have
learned our symbols for math and engineering, learned where we live,
seen photos of us, and built a gramophone by following the
instructions we've provided. That may be a tip-off that there was
intelligence involved with the sounds.
But let's say that the aliens pick up the Voyager spacecraft
and secretly analyze it. They play the recordings of the various
greetings, musical pieces, and various sounds to J. Random Alien on
the street (or Dr. Alien, professor Informational Linguistics at
Previously Uninvolved Labs). What is it about the speech that would
denote intelligence?
--
Andrew Arensburger, Systems guy University of Maryland
arensb.no-...@umd.edu Office of Information Technology
Define "normal."
Glend
> Glend <interelect...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Andrew Arensburger wrote:
> > > Sure, the gold record includes recordings of human speech, but
> > > AFAIK no one expects the aliens to understand the meaning of the
> > > words; they're just included to give them an idea of what we sound
> > > like.
>
> > These recordings should be capable of showing that intelligence is
> > behind the words, as I'm sure you'd agree.
>
> Actually, I'm not convinced.
(I just found your response now)
You are not convinced by observing repetition along variation and
change? I would think that most methods of determining whether or not
a text is coded or is simply gibberish would give us a pretty good idea
that "natural speech" was produced by some sort of "animal". The
"problem" that IDists would raise is that, broadly considered, one
would find much the same coding in DNA (the absurdity of IDists is that
they don't recognize that both sorts of codes are indeed the results of
evolution, and not of their notions of isolated "design").
To restate: we do identify coding of information by certain marks of
repetition and variation. This holds for "natural language" in the
genome, as well as for natural languages used by humans. We can often
roughly determine whether or not something is, or was, coding by
looking at how much information could be encoded in strings of data
which appear neither completely random, nor simply ordered and
repeated. We probably would not know precisely whether or not a string
of data were actually produced by intelligence until we had some
understanding of the language, but we can tell whether or not such
strings are likely to be languages.
> By the time they hear the recorded words, the aliens will have
> learned our symbols for math and engineering, learned where we live,
> seen photos of us, and built a gramophone by following the
> instructions we've provided.
But that's one specific situation. The issue I concede to the IDists
is that if aliens stumbled upon texts or radio messages without
pictures or other interpretive information, they still could have a
fairly good idea that such data are not "naturally random" (narrow
broadcasting and/or precise textual form should certainly help as
well), nor "naturally ordered". That is, SETI should not have to be
restricted only to detecting messages deliberately sent out to other
life forms, rather it should be capable of determining with good
probability that a "voice broadcast" from ETs came from "intelligent
life forms". Indeed, I am fairly certain that SETI does try to detect
the mixtures of apparent "randomness" plus "order" found in natural
languages.
That may be a tip-off that there was
> intelligence involved with the sounds.
Yes, but there are multiple marks of "intelligence" available to the
investigator.
> But let's say that the aliens pick up the Voyager spacecraft
> and secretly analyze it. They play the recordings of the various
> greetings, musical pieces, and various sounds to J. Random Alien on
> the street (or Dr. Alien, professor Informational Linguistics at
> Previously Uninvolved Labs). What is it about the speech that would
> denote intelligence?
That's a good question. This is one reason why I call speech "animal
communication", because it is absurd to look for the marks of
"intelligent design" when all natural language and speech are is
information transfer which has evolved in a form that is not dissimilar
from DNA information transfer.
Yet I do believe that aliens would have no great difficulty in
determining that extended recordings of speech/writing were likely the
results of "natural organisms" communicating with each other, any more
than they'd be stymied in determining that bacteria are likely
communicating with each other when transferring DNA. The marks of both
communications are order, repetition, and sufficient variation to code
for the specific information to be transferred between organisms. The
IDists want to predetermine that one sort of communication is in fact
categorically different from the other, but we have no reason
whatsoever to suppose that either one shows the coding patterns that
they do for any reason other than physical constraints coupled with the
evolution of information transfer between organisms.
DNA communication has evolved (many IDists admit as much for a good
deal of DNA--but not for some artificially designated collections of
coded information), and language communication has evolved. Both are
detectable in their manner, but neither shows the marks of "design" in
any categorically identifiable way (we conveniently designate some
engineered DNA as "designed" as well as some speech being "designed",
yet neither is "unnatural", or specifically identifiable as being
designed via the recognition of some quantity of information per data
string--again, we cannot determine genetic engineering by measuring
quanta of DNA information).
Glend
> Glend <interelect...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Andrew Arensburger wrote:
> > > Sure, the gold record includes recordings of human speech, but
> > > AFAIK no one expects the aliens to understand the meaning of the
> > > words; they're just included to give them an idea of what we sound
> > > like.
>
> > These recordings should be capable of showing that intelligence is
> > behind the words, as I'm sure you'd agree.
>
> Actually, I'm not convinced.
(I just found your response now)
You are not convinced by observing repetition along variation and
change? I would think that most methods of determining whether or not
a text is coded or is simply gibberish would give us a pretty good idea
that "natural speech" was produced by some sort of "animal". The
"problem" that IDists would raise is that, broadly considered, one
would find much the same coding in DNA (the absurdity of IDists is that
they don't recognize that both sorts of codes are indeed the results of
evolution, and not of their notions of isolated "design").
To restate: we do identify coding of information by certain marks of
repetition and variation. This holds for "natural language" in the
genome, as well as for natural languages used by humans. We can often
roughly determine whether or not something is, or was, coded by looking
at how much information could be encoded in strings of data which
appear neither completely random, nor simply ordered and repeated. We
probably would not know precisely whether or not a string of data were
actually produced by intelligence until we had some understanding of
the language, but we can tell whether or not such strings are likely to
be languages.
> By the time they hear the recorded words, the aliens will have
> learned our symbols for math and engineering, learned where we live,
> seen photos of us, and built a gramophone by following the
> instructions we've provided.
But that's one specific situation. The issue I concede to the IDists
is that if aliens stumbled upon texts or radio messages without
pictures or other interpretive information, they still could have a
fairly good idea that such data are not "naturally random" (narrow
broadcasting and/or precise textual form should certainly help as
well), nor "naturally ordered". That is, SETI should not have to be
restricted only to detecting messages deliberately sent out to other
life forms, rather it should be capable of determining with good
probability that a "voice broadcast" from ETs came from "intelligent
life forms". Indeed, I am fairly certain that SETI does try to detect
the mixtures of apparent "randomness" plus "order" found in natural
languages.
That may be a tip-off that there was
> intelligence involved with the sounds.
Yes, but there are multiple marks of "intelligence" available to the
investigator.
> But let's say that the aliens pick up the Voyager spacecraft
> and secretly analyze it. They play the recordings of the various
> greetings, musical pieces, and various sounds to J. Random Alien on
> the street (or Dr. Alien, professor Informational Linguistics at
> Previously Uninvolved Labs). What is it about the speech that would
> denote intelligence?
That's a good question. This is one reason why I call speech "animal
communication", because it is absurd to look for the marks of
"intelligent design" when all natural language and speech are is
information transfer which has evolved in a form that is not dissimilar
from DNA information transfer. And "intelligence" is not a category
per se, instead being merely a convenient designation of certain
biological data processing systems.
Yet I do believe that aliens would have no great difficulty in
determining that extended recordings of speech/writing were likely the
results of "natural organisms" communicating with each other, any more
than they'd be stymied in determining that bacteria are likely
communicating with each other when transferring DNA. The marks of both
communications are order, repetition, and sufficient variation to code
for the specific information to be transferred between organisms. The
IDists want to predetermine that one sort of communication is in fact
categorically different from the other, but we have no reason
whatsoever to suppose that either one shows the coding patterns that
they do for any reason other than physical constraints, coupled with
the evolution of information transfer processes between organisms.
DNA communication has evolved (many IDists admit as much for a good
deal of DNA--but not for some artificially designated collections of
coded information), and language communication has evolved. Both are
detectable in their manner, but neither shows the marks of "design" in
any categorically identifiable way (we conveniently designate some
engineered DNA as "designed", as well as some speech being "designed",
yet neither is "unnatural", or specifically identifiable as being
designed via the recognition of some quantity of information per data
string. Again, we cannot determine genetic engineering by measuring
quanta of encoded DNA information in a given string of data).