With all respect, you are using a strategy which is unfair and unacceptable. Because it generates only confusion in a discussion which is already confused enough. And not, I believe, because of me.
In brief, I asked for any possible counter-example to my statement that there exists no object, non biological and non designed, which exhibits high FI (more than 500 bits). I firmly stick to this statement. It is true, beyond any doubt.
So, you readily offer not one, but four counter-examples. Very good.
Now, I am not joking here. I mean what I say. And I am not here ot waste time, or make strategies. One counter-example will falsify my position. This point is very important. to me and to the discussion here.
So I take your examples very seriously. And I start from the first (the olthers are nor essentially different. And I point to the reasons why it is not a counter-example. Indeed, it is rather obvious for me that it is not a counter-example at all, so much so that I really wonder why you are offering it.
At this point, you justify your choice using an old trick, that I know very well, and that indeed I had cautioned you against just before you used it: you use the bits to build an ad hoc function.
This is not new. I remember that many years ago, in a similar discussion (yes, I am not at all new at these confrontations and at these objections, whatever you seem to believe), Mark Frank, a very serious and intelligent friend from the other side, when challenged to offer one counter-example, did exactly the same thing: he used the bits to build an ad hoc function. And believe me, he was in perfect good faith.
IMO, this seems to show two things: how intelligent people can say and believe obviously wrong things whem they have a desperate need to deny some important truth that is not comforting for their worldview, and how the same intelligent people (in this case MF and you) cannot obviously find a better argument, if they have to recur to this very indirect, and completely wrong, argument.
However, when I pointed that you were using the wrong trick of using the bits to build an ad hoc function, you change again your position: instead of simply saying if you agree or disagree with my point, you “justify” it saying that I did the same, and broke my rules in the same way.
Which is absolutely not true. So, when I point to the simple fact that I have never, never used the bits to define a function, which can be checked by anybody just by looking at everything that I have written in more than ten years, you “justify” your behaviour by saying that my methodology to estimate FI is based on micorstates. Which is not true, either, but requires a more detailed answer, that I hope to give later.
So, when I point to the simple fact that one thing is the definition of the function, another thing the procedure to estimate FI, and that the discussion was about the first thing, not the second, you still do nothing to acknoledge my point abd clarify your position.
I have appreciated your behaviour up to now. Very much. But I don’t like this. Not at all. This discussion is very serious for me, and for obvious reasons difficult to manage here. Tricks and strategies and unnecessary confusion are very bad.
So, I ask again.
Do you insist that the starry sky exhibits more than 500 bits of FI? Under my definition of FI?
Do you insist that I have broken my own rules in the definition of a function? Where?
Thank you.
(I will discuss the tornado separately with Art, at least for a last attempt)