Gpuccio: The Case of the Starry Sky is Bad Faith

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Frankly, Swamidass’ starry sky was much worse. And not in good faith, IMO.

For reference, let’s pull that example. I said there is more than 1000 bits of Functional Information in the starry sky.

@swamidass

What is the object? The starry sky? You mean our galaxy, or at least the part we can observe from our planet?

What is the function?

I said the information is the positions of visible stars in the sky. The function of this information, for many thousands of years, was navigation (latitude and direction), time-telling (seasons), and storytelling (constellations). Any change that would impact navigation, time-telling, or storytelling, or create a visual difference would impact one or all these things.

There are about 9,000 visible stars in the sky (low estimate). Keeping things like visual acuity in mind (Naked eye - Wikipedia ), we can compute the information. However, even if there are just two possible locations in the sky for every start (absurd) and only half the stars are important (absurd), we are still at 4,500 bits of information in the position of stars in the sky. That does not even tell us the region of sky we are looking at (determined by season and latitude), but we can neglect this for now.

@gpuccio

I wll briefly answer this, and then for the moment I must go.

What makes the current configuration of the stars specific to help navigation, time telling or story telling? If the configuration were a different random configuration, wouldn’t it be equally precious for navigation, time telling and storytelling?

There is no specific functional information in the configuration we observe. Most other copnfigurations generated by cosmic events would satisfy the same functions you have defined.

@swamidass

A new configuration would not be equally precious for telling the stories we have now. We would have different constellations, and therefore different myths about these constellations. My function is to tell this specific (specified!) stories, not any old stories you might want to come up with in place of them. So no, a new configuration would break the storytelling function.

Remember also, that some configurations (e.g. a regular grid or a repeating pattern) are useless for navigation or time-telling. Very quickly, we would get over 500 bits with a careful treatment, well into the thousands if not millions of bits.

@gpuccio

But you are doing exactly what I cautioned about. You are defining the function as a consequence of an already observed configuration.

If the configuration were different, we woukld be telling different stories.

Are you really so confused about the meaning of FI?

The function must be defined independently You can define the function as “telling stories about the stars”. You cannot define the function as “telling storeis about the stars in this specific configuration”.

How can you not understand that this is conceptually wrong?

@swamidass

No, I’m just using a particular definition of function, which parallels yours in biology. If you don’t want me to use my definition, I am not sure you can use yours.

@swamidass

It seems you are defining function by the already observed configuration of proteins in extant biology. This does not take into account the configurations that would produce the same high level functions, but we just don’t see because it is not what happened.

If these are the rules, you are breaking them. Right?

@swamidass

It is subjective how we define function. I chose a definition of function that paralleled yours in biology, so I am not sure how you can object to me “breaking the rule” while breaking yourself with your own definition!

Yes, this highlights the problems with using FI as a way of determining if something is designed or not.

And I will let @gpuccio have last word on this:

@gpuccio

This is bad. Frankly, I would probably not even answer this kind of arguments, if they did not come from you.

I don’t know if you really believe that the stars in the sky exhibit high values of FI, or if you are only provoking (without any good reason, IMO).

If you really believe that, there is proibably no purpose in continuing any discussion about FI.

If you are provoking, it’s not a good sign just the same.

However, here is a brief answer.

The simple rule I have described (and which is rather obvious in any possible serious discussion about FI) is that we cannot use the observed bits to define the function. The function must be defined undependently from the knowledge of the observed bits.

So: “a configuration of stars that favors storytelling” is valid. But probably almost all possible configurations would do that.

While “a confifuraion of stars where the first has these celestial coordinates, the second these other ones”, and so on for all 9000 visible stars, is not valid.