- Dear Mr. Last,
I am intrigued by your recent essay in the Huffington Post titled "Are We Observing Extraterrestrial Intelligence Without Realizing It?" The questions you raise are fascinating, and the novel theory you present -- that certain binary star systems may be artifacts of intelligent agency rather than natural artifacts -- is worthy of serious scientific investigation.
On a related matter, on your blog this is what you have said about intelligent design theory:
"... the pseudoscientific concept of Intelligent Design... I instantly realized that Intelligent Design was a pseudoscientific attempt to legitimize creationism. But the point of this article is not to provide another redundant analysis of why Intelligent Design is pseudoscience..."
But in your essay you used William Dembski's explanatory filter. You concluded that physical law did not explain the energy flow in the binary stars, and chance doesn't either, so you inferred design.
Even more remarkable is that you endorse rarified design -- design inferred only by the fingerprints left by intelligent agency, without any knowledge of the putative designer.
You could write a chapter in Dembski's next book on the explanatory filter. If the dynamics of binary stars that are not adequately described by physical laws or chance justifiably raise the question of intelligent agency -- and they do -- why doesn't the dynamics of millions of information-rich sequences of base pairs of nucleotides in DNA raise the question of intelligent agency?
Why is the inference to rarified design in binary stars valid, but the inference to rarified design in the genetic code "pseudoscience?"
Are we observing intracellular intelligence without realizing it?
Sincerely,
Mike Egnor
theadvancedapes, hope you don't mind me posting this. I have made you an "editor" on the post if you'd like to change or modify anything. Did you respond to Mr. Egnor?
I'm really busy today so I can't respond right now... however, I will rebut a few of his comments here on Hubski and send them to him via email since he emailed me this article yesterday asking me to respond. I won't be responding in a blog post as my site does not function to discuss the non-controversy between evolution and pseudoscientific creationism. Furthermore, if my writing starts to attract a wider audience I should suspect that more people in the "Intelligent Design" community will start to draw me into discussion and debate. Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins took/take the stance that they wouldn't/won't debate Young Earth Creationists (YEC) because you give them exactly what they want: credibility (i.e. a scientist is taking our arguments seriously enough to debate me!). I know "I.D." is not the same as YEC but they are equally wrong (even if one is more intellectually untenable than the other). During the first two years of my exposure to science I spent a great majority of my time debating the validity of evolution. I found this to be exhausting and actually subtracted from what I wanted to discuss... which was the science itself... not the validity of science. Historians of Rome don't have to constantly defend whether Rome actually existed. Physicists don't have to constantly defend whether or not atoms exist. Evolutionary scientists shouldn't constantly be burdened with defending evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory is supported by more evidence than perhaps any theory in science (with the only possible exception being Quantum Mechanics). Therefore, my blog has always functioned to discuss the science - not the non-controversy. In short, I take the stance that even acknowledging a debate with pseudoscience gives them the fuel they want to keep the controversy alive. I don't want to give them any fuel.
That's a very reasonable approach. That said, what I found missing in his argument is that you suggested that if physical laws fail to predict the behavior, perhaps intelligence is involved; the phenomenon that he describes (the dynamics of millions of information-rich sequences of base pairs of nucleotides in DNA) can be predicted by physical laws, at least we have yet to find a place where they cannot. It's a false analogy.
I am quite new to Hubski and I didn't know who you were before this post. I have great respect for you Mr. Last. Just keep using your knowledge to further our understanding of the world and don't mind those who try to drag you down with their pseudo-intelligence. I've had "debates" with a fellow coworker who, unfortunately, was indoctrinated since birth and told that evolution is false. I have also told her that evolution has more evidence for it than basically every other scientific theory but all she says is, "no it doesn't". And when I offer to personally show her the evidence she declines.
Dont loose time responding rationally to those guys. As you stated that's exactly what they want. And by email, he will cut and rewrite stuff to make you look stupid and push his agenda. Just say he's totally right: you think some gods created dual-star, and we should worship them by eating fish on Friday and ban sex from our lives for their utmost glory. Starmen. Anyway, pretty nice to be the target of some zealous website. Hopefully you'll get some traffic out of it, and some young Christians will get a kick for science.
My understanding of this as a non-scientist (so I might have some company) is that, when Cadell says Now, I have read Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End where Clark imagines that the manifest destiny of the DNA is to evolve into a Global Brain kind of consciousness. I know that Cadell has not, so he might mean something else altogether. Maybe when he gets time he can clarify this for me.certain binary star systems may be artifacts of intelligent agency
he means that certain binary star systems have evolved over millennia to become an intelligent agency. Is that your understanding of the statement tng?
Well the idea that I discussed in great depth with clemvidal at the Global Brain Institute is that there is a natural system-level pattern for intelligence that follows the Kardashev scale and Barrow scale. If this is accurate then intelligence gradually acquires more and more energy from its star system. This leads to intelligence turning their host planet into an extreme dense supercomputer that can directly control the energy of its parent star. This would result in a "binary star" system whereby the planet's density would be analogous to that of a white dwarf or eventually a neutron star. These would be "super global brains". So within this framework we are heading towards a global brain, but then once we are a global brain we will continue development further by acquiring more and more energy and inventing smaller and more efficient computers until we have completely transformed Earth into a "post-planet" (my term). Eventually we will create such a dense magnetic field that we will directly "feed" off of the Sun (i.e. becoming a starivore) until we have accumulated a massive accretion disc of the Sun's energy around our post planet. This would be a super global brain. It's possible that this is the natural trajectory of high intelligence - but of course we don't know yet - which is why I stated in my article about this that it is philosophy and not science. We need to develop a way to test the idea - and then it would be science.
I guess I like that ... now. At 10? Not so much. And the way Clarke portrays the emotional trauma of the process, coupled with the melancholy of the ending, doesn't leave me with an upbeat, mindmeld is the best meld attitude. But I didn't like Asimov's take on Gaia either -- did you read that? -- so maybe I just subconsciously find the concept unsettling.