CSI and Design

Even this far into the topic I'm going to ask - What is CSI?It would be nice if you went back to message 1 and also edited this information in. Maybe then an ignorant admin type can edit it into the topic title.Adminnemooseus

quote:

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You may feel better with chocolate sprinkles, but is a comfortable lie better than an uncomfortable truth?

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your words, not mine. and i don't so how belief in god is wrong. even as a former militant athiest. and belief in something outside of that is wrong? no i didn't, you're reading the wrong connotation there. i meant wrong as in incorrect.you may be interested to know that i attended a combinatorics lecture one time, on a conjecture involving a theoretical number space, and in this case, 2 + 2 did actually equal 5. it was quite entertaining, actually. ok, who caused the monks to be freed from their laundry prison?

complex specified information.who knows what it really means. it's an attempt to quanitify and/or qualify complexity....and yes, we are GLORIOUSLY off topic.This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 06-16-2004 01:48 AM

Arachnophilia responds to me....Well, no...he doesn't. Everything was a non sequitur.Could you try again?

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

CSI is "Complex Specified Information"In practice when it refers to Dembski's version (as it usually does when given as an acronym and certainlt does when "recognising" design is the subject) the meaning can be understood as follows."Complex Information" refers to probability with regard to non-design explanations. The probablity of ANY non-design explanation producing the observed result must be less than a probability bound - and unless another probability bound is stated and justified it means Dembski's "Universal Probability Bound" of 10^-150. Of course actually trying to do this is often very difficult so this step is often fudged or ignored despite being necessary (but not sufficient)."Specification" in effect means that the observed result can be described in a way that is meaningful other than as a simple statement of what that result is. This is necessary because Dembski (unlike some anti-evolutionists) recognises that improbable events do happen and that it is trivially easy to produce a vastly improbable observation by pure chance. Specification is Dembski's method of identifying "special" results with the hope that this will "narrow the field" enough that we really can say that these results are special enough to reject chance as a viable explanation.
(Personally I think that Dembski needs to do more work here - Dembski needs to quantify the proportion of results that qualify as "specified" for his argument to be shown to be valid - but so far he has not done so. Probably it isn't practical - "specification" is still too subjective.

now that was a brilliant response.

Arachnophilia:It means I literally do not understand the point of what you were trying to say. Could you try to rephrase?

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

I find Definitional Complexity to be a good description of Dembski's definitions.

and I thought it was {Certified Sense Inversion} ..

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}