Re: Analog vs Digital

RobertMaas_at_YahooGroups.Com
Date: 06/15/04 

Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 18:31:08 +0000 (UTC)

> From: john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins)
> The mistake is to infer from our use of intentional metaphors that
> anything we can describe in that way must be intentional (which is what
> we have when we infer from the intentionality of a Shannon-designed
> system to any other natural system that any Shannonesque system must be
> intentional also). It is simply projection.

Intention in the sense of a conscious entity deliberately wishing it
and contriving it to be the way wished, is not observable, so the
presense or absense of that kind of intention is metaphysical,
unscientific, not worth discussing here. It doesn't make any difference
whether some design is planned by a conscious entity, or merely
survived best among alternatives because it works best in practice for
assuring the fecundity and survival of the design (or meta-design, the
program/genome that causes the actual design). The key thing is whether
there's a working design that arranges to communicate information
effectively, then to analyze whether that design uses analog or digital
engineering practices. If it is close to a linear amplifier, with
meaningful data values across most of the range of near-linear
performance, where the difference between two different data values is
significant rougly proportional to the amount of difference, then it's
analog. If it's nonlinear to the point of forcing data to reside in a
fixed number of potential wells (attractors), and all values within any
such well are treated essentially as the same, while values in
different wells are treated as different, then it's digital. The DNA
system for carrying genetic information through the generations, and
for transcribing that information to proteins etc., is clearly digital
in design, although some modifications of it such as balance in two
reading frames of single gene, and many other regulatory mechanisms,
seem to be analog in design.

> "Noise" in one formalisation can be a "signal" in another - consider
> using a different frequency of a TV signal to carry, say, the stock
> reports. The picture may be degraded by that interference, and be noise
> relative to the TV signal. What is noise depends on the uses made by
> humans, or on descriptions of processes made by humans.

No, what is noise vs. signal depends on the design of the actual system
being used, not on how humans interpret it. Even before humans knew DNA
existed, the DNA system was already digital in design, and damage to
DNA was noise in that system. As for your multiple TV messages: Two
different signal systems are running in parallel, both designed the way
they are, one analog and one digital in old systems with stock ticker
coded during vertical refresh, both digital in new digital-TV systems.
If you don't happen to be looking at the other signal, it doesn't mean
it's inherently noise, although it may be noise to your purpose if
there's noticeable cross-talk. (But in the new digital systems, there's
zero cross-talk between different signals within a single "channel".)

As for your remarks about goal-directed processes in biology: A design
(arrived at by natural selection) may quite deliberately seek a goal,
without any metaphysical consciousness or intelligence or whatever we
might imagine. It's simply a goal-directed process, nothing more. It
doesn't plan to seek the goal, it just does what it does, which is to
do specific things designed (selected for) to best go toward that goal.
The goal of one mechanism in a cell, for example, is to replicate DNA,
and it accomplishes that goal quite nicely most of the time, often
enough to assure survival of that genome nearly as-is.

> By being able to refer to the state-maintaining processes as
> teleomatic, and where necessary as teleonomic, without implications
> of agency or purpose, allows us to make clear distinctions between
> different kinds functional systems without anthropomorphic confusion
> such as trailed the publication of Dawkins' 1977."

Are we in agreement? Such a process is seeking a goal, not with any
kind of consciousness such as awareness of the goal in some sort of
thought process, merely as an adaptive way to seek that goal, merely as
survival of any program that seeks that goal and non-survival of
alternative programs that don't seek that goal, if the particular goal
benefits longterm survival of the program in the genome? So we can say
such-and-such creature is seeking such-and-such goal, with the
understanding or agreement we're not talking about conscious
intelligent planning?

> The use of the term "design" is yet another metaphor. Evolution
> doesn't design things - it makes things look to systems that do
> recognise design - us - as if they were designed. Dawkins calls this
> designoids, I call it "quasidesign" (where "qua si" means "as if" in
> Latin). Selection doesn't design - it quasidesigns.

The Darwin method of design is mutation to make new designs at random
plus raw fecundity greater than one to make enough copies to exhaust
available resources plus natural selection to weed out the poor designs
leaving only the best of the lot. It's one method of design. Lots of
humans use somewhat the same method, even if the mutations are less
random. For example a business will produce several new products and
see which ones sell the most, and eliminate the ones that don't sell
much, and keep the ones that do. If you want to call the process, the
verb, "quasidesign" instead of "design", that's fine with me. But the
result of the process, or of more engineering-style design, is the
noun, a design, and the noun is properly a design in both cases. If you
don't like the noun "a design" to mean a blueprint or other algorithm
for making something or performing a task toward a goal, perhaps we can
call it "a method" or "a program" or "an algorithm" etc. which is
totally neutral as to the way the blueprint was arrived at (truly
designed or merely selected among alternatives)?

The verb "to (quasi)design" has three main versions (and lots of gray
between the three):
- Figure out in your head how to do something, try it, when it fails
figure out what went wrong and fix just the specific thing that you can
see went wrong with the failure mode strongly affecting your re-design,
repeat until you can see no further obvious way to make it work better.
- Figure out in your head how to do something, try it, when it fails
start from scratch, perhaps with a new design team, or with some
alternate idea that was dismissed at first, repeat trials until you
happen upon something that works well enough.
- Try totally random variations of some earlier idea, testing to see
which work best, eliminating the ones that don't work well at all,
replicating and further varying any that work best, never stop
experimenting so long as surplus resources area available.

The first version is clearly entitled to be called "to design", maybe.
The third version is how natural selection works, "to quasidesign".
The second version is how humans do it much of the time, and I'm not
sure whether it qualifies as "to design" or not.

> And the recognition of that design lies totally in our pattern
> recognition capacities.

Ah, I see the fallacy in your logic: You've suddenly switched the word
"design" from a verb to a noun from the previous sentence to that. The
phrase "that design" is not grammatically correct if "design" is a
verb, only if it's a noun. The verb, the method by which that was
obtained, may be the act of quasidesigning, but the result of that
method, the thing which was obtained, was a design, for example a wing
design, or a metabolism design, or a DNA-replication design, etc.
(replace "design" by "method" or "algorithm" if you wish).

> And *we* evolved to both design and recognise design.

Now you're *really* confusing word usage" The first "design" in that
sentence, in the phrase "to ... design", is clearly a verb. But the
second is unclear. Is "design" an adjective, a quality, there? We
recognize the quality of something being design(y), we recognize the
"design" in something? But is it the process, or the result, that we
recognize as design(y)? Is it a designy process or a designy result we
recognize? Do recognize the result as having good design, or do we
recognize the process to reach it as having undergone the engineering
discipline of design? When we observe biological design, we can't
directly see the process by which it was obtained, but we can clearly
see the result, nicely functional bird wings, highly accurate DNA
replication, etc. I think it's clear that that second use of "design"
must be a noun to be true to fact, what we actually recognize in
nature. Some people, mostly IDers (proponents of Intelligent Design),
upon seeing a good design, a well-functioning device, will jump to the
conclusion that the process to obtain it must have been true designing
in the engineering sense, rather than NS doing its "quasidesigning"
process.

If you insist we can recognize design as a verb, I say you are grossly
mistaken. Most people can be easily fooled, upon seeing a good design
(noun), a nicely working device, into mistakenly believing that it must
have been (consciously) (intelligently) designed (verb), and have
difficulty accepting that it (noun) was merely the survivor (noun) of a
huge experiment (verb) where any design (noun) that didn't work was
flushed (verb) and only the best accidental design (noun) survived
(verb). (Note the actual parts of speech above don't match
grammatically, but instead are written to match the usage of
(quasi/intelligent)design-process (verb) and design-result (noun) I'm
distinguishing. If you wish, replace "(verb)" by "(process)" and
"(noun)" by "(result)" throughout that paragraph.

> I have larger ambitions than that. I think that intentional language
> ought to be restricted to systems that are actually capable of having
> intentions. So I was to drop "function" as well as "goal", "purpose" and
> "design" from descriptions of the natural world, and realise that these
> intentional aspects of things actually reflect the nature of our models
> rather than the nature of the modeled things (unless we are dealing with
> intentional systems, like us).

I have a counter ambition. We cannot be sure *any* system whatsoever,
even our own brains, truly have volition. If we drop such language from
natural systems, in honesty we must drop all those words from our
language totally. I would prefer we accept that volition is
metaphysical, and simply define the words in a functional rather than
metaphysical way, like the way behaviourist psychologists describe what
they observe. Johnny has a tendancy to seek attention by acting out.
(We can't say what his internal thought process might be which results
in that behaviour.) A cell has a tendancy to replicate its DNA, and
consume resources to get energy to run internal chemistry, etc. Johnny
gets rewarded for acting out, so the beahviour is reinforced. Cells get
rewarded (by increased numbers in the future) by repliating their DNA
etc., so that behaviour is reinforced. We don't have any good idea how
Johnny's behaviour is reinforce, whether it's by natural selection of
neural connections or what, but we have a really good idea how DNA
replication is reinforced, Darwin's theory, Natural Selection. Johnny's
goal seems to be to get attention, for emotional satisfaction which is
the payoff. The function of acting out is to get attention to get that
payoff. Johnny's brain-design/program is such that acting out is the
joseki (standard recipe/method) for getting attention and thus
emotional satisfaction. The goal or purpose of DNA replication is to
make more copies of the DNA, with the payoff being longterm survival.
The goal or purpose of birds' wings is to fly to compete better in
escaping preditors and catching prey and colonizing new islands, again
with payoff being longterm survival. If we use the language to describe
Johnny's brain structure and consequent behaviour, I see no reason to
reject it in describing a cell's or a bird's structure or consequent
behaviour. We just need to clarify our usage of language so the IDers
don't misunderstand us and believe we are supporting their wild claims.
(There is no evidence to support intelligent design, and a large body
of evidence that makes intelligent design either totally wrong or
totally weird and unreasonable and hence in need of humungous amounts
of evidence before anyone reasonable would even consider it as a
theory.)

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