Foil wrote:Drakona, you had to make this one difficult for me by the use of that little word... "rigorously".
I can safely infer that the use of the word "rigorously" was intentional, because I happen to know Drakona has been studying Dembski's attempt to define a rigorous method for making design inferences. Personally, I think design can't be rigorously detected, because detecting design implies detecting purpose, and as we've all seen from the way people misread the purpose of others' posts, detecting purpose is inexact at best. But we can all detect design intuitively within fields where we have adequate experience, and I think we can do so with a high degree of accuracy.
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I'm going to try my hand at all the examples presented so far:
after the loss of the fairy princess. Rodrigo worked hard to
1102 5564 9873 6048 9873 5468 8138 7315 5049 8738
find her, but the trail was cold. He grew up haunted by the knowledge
Even if the text appears right at a page break, it's not likely the book has 11.02 hajillion pages. The text serves no discernable purpose, and in fact detracts from the purpose served by the surrounding text. I infer that the author of the surrounding text did not intend for the number sequence to be there. It's too complex to be a simple typo, though. It may have been inserted in a number of ways, from a printer malfunction to a malicious/disgruntled employee, but I have insufficient evidence to determine the specifics.
opened the message he had taken off the spy's body. It contained
a string of numbers which didn't mean anything to him, but which could
be some sort of code:
1102 5564 9873 6048 9873 5468 8138 7315 5049 8738
Killory stowed the note and and headed back to base.
In this case, the string of numbers is referenced elsewhere in the sentence. It serves an obvious purpose -- it's a description of the message taken off the spy's body. Obviously, the author intended for the text to be present in the novel.
What's less clear is whether the specific numbers have actual meaning, or whether the author simply banged on the keyboard. Perhaps the rest of the novel will shed some light on that -- if the message is eventually decoded, then the specific number sequence was clearly designed; if not, we can't really say.
During the 1940's, Soviet spies transmitted messages in blocks of numbers, using theoretically unbreakable One Time Pad encryption. This resulted in the transmission of messages such as the following: 1102 5564 9873 6048 9873 5468 8138 7315 5049 8738. Despite the theoretically secure nature of the code, a flaw in their execution allowed some of the messages to be decoded. Others, like the example given here, are theoretically impossible to solve.
As before, the string of numbers serves an obvious purpose -- it's an example of the sort of messages being spoken about. Based on the description in the last sentence, I infer the string of numbers has an actual meaning, since the author says the specific example is theoretically impossible to break. What we don't know is whether the message is a real Soviet message or one the author created.
A simple code you can try is to put 1 for A, 2 for B, and so on. What does this say? 2 1 14 1 14 1. Try it!
While the pattern is not at all complex, it has an obvious purpose: it's meant to be decoded using the method described.
Overall, when looking for design in text, the key thing to look for is purpose or meaning. If the text serves some purpose (however obscure it might be) or conveys some information, then it's designed by some intelligent (or semi-intelligent) being. On the other hand, the sort of text that shows up in spam (like "Of take be emporium dune evil tidings", which just came into my inbox) contains no discernable meaning. It is at least being created by an algorithm that uses whole words and attempts to form something resembling sentences, but the text itself is undesigned.
A) You walk into a large auditorium and see a bunch of chairs arranged in clusters. When you count them, you find that each group consists of an odd number of chairs.
If it's less than about ten clusters and this is the only pattern (that is, it's not the stronger pattern "all 5's" or "all 5's and 7's"), the pattern isn't strong enough for me to try to conclude anything. I've walked into enough auditoriums in my life that it shouldn't be surprising to occasionally find 5 or 6 clusters of odd numbers of chairs just because the groups using the auditorium happened to break up that way on accident. But if it's 10 clusters, I'll at least be suspicious that maybe whoever was running the show asked people to make groups with an odd number. If it's 20 clusters, I'll be fairly certain it was intentional. And, of course, if it's 6 clusters of exactly 7 chairs, or 4 clusters of 5 and 4 clusters of 7, the pattern is more impressive and therefore I'm more likely to infer design.
B) You walk into the same auditorium. When you take a look at the chairs, you notice that their arrangement spells out the word "Hello!"
C) Same auditorium. This time, the chairs' arrangement spells out a passage from the soliloquy of Hamlet, Act III, Scene i.
It takes enough chairs to spell out "hello" that I infer design. The longer passage makes me more certain, but even the word "hello" should be enough to override any reasonable skepticism. Anyone claiming the word "hello" was acciental will be ridiculed heavily.
[pattern of dots...]
(A) Raisins on top of a salad.
We already know there's an intelligence involved in making the salad, because salads don't make themselves. I infer that the aforementioned intelligence arranged the raisins in a decorative manner.
(B) Fallen leaves on a driveway.
Definitely weird. The pattern, while somewhat imprecise, is too "cool" to happen just from leaves falling on to the driveway randomly. I infer the presence of an intelligence somewhere along the line, but not necessarily in the actual placement of the leaves.
Just as an example, one alternative explanation is that someone placed a sticky substance on the driveway in that particular pattern (perhaps they were painting a large sculpture or something) and the leaves stuck at a later time. The intelligence was involved in creating the sticky conditions, and the leaves just happened to get caught in them.
(C) Cows in a pasture.
How long has the pattern been there? Were the cows all walking around and they just happened, for one brief moment, to be spaced like that? Have they been spaced like that for hours? (You could ask the same question about the leaves being blown around above.) If the pattern is persistant, there's an intelligence at play -- creating low spots in the field in that arrangement, or tying the cows in certain spots, or something. If it's a transient pattern, I file it under "really weird things I've seen that I don't understand."
(D) Red cars in a full parking-lot, as seen from overhead.
There are a lot of parking lots in the world, and they tend to impose a pattern on the cars parked therein (people usually attempt to park between the lines, with marginal success.) Wouldn't surprise me to see a pattern like this happen completely randomly as people drive in and out of a parking lot.
(E) Craters on the moon.
Craters all of approximately the same size and shape laid out in this pattern? Sixfold symmetry doesn't happen on that scale at random. If the craters are small, I'd guess they were left by a single ship that had several landing points. If the craters are large, I'd guess maybe several probes (or rocks) were aimed at those spots in order to test... something. Don't know what though.
(F) Stars in the night sky.
How large is this pattern? Are the stars all equal brightness? Are there other, dimmer stars interspersed within this constellation / asterism?
This
Hubble Deep Field picture shows about 1500 different galaxies. There are a LOT of stars there. It wouldn't surprise me if a pattern like thiat showed up somewhere in this picture (zoomed way, way in).
But, if this particular pattern was visible with the naked eye from earth, without any other significant stars in between, I'd have to wonder pretty seriously where it came from, and I'd guess it was either God or some very powerful aliens trying to make a cool pattern for some reason.
Very complicated ant colony.
Ants.
They have limited intelligence and limited ability to design, even communally, but both come into play somewhat. They're intelligent enough to dig in such a way that the colony doesn't collapse in on itself, and that requires them to make design decisions like "don't dig right next to where you've already dug".
A: You see a round shaped area in the grass where the grass is shorter than the rest of the grass.
Not enough information to say much... I've seen areas of grass like that due to basketballs being left in the grass, dogs being tied up where they can only dig up/tread on circular area, and so on.
B: You notice that the grass type in the shorter area is different from the grass surrounding it.
Could be planted, or could just be an invading grass type that has only been around long enough to spread a small distance.
C: You notice that there are several areas devoid of grass, consisting of sand in the longer grass, surrounding the shorter grass.
Doesn't change anything. Areas devoid of grass and filled with sand aren't terribly uncommon.
D: You notice a square pattern in the shorter grass.
Grass doesn't grow in square patterns by itself. Up until this point, you could have been describing a wilderness area that had different types of grass and patches of sand, but now it's clear design is in play.
E: You see a small, perfectly cylindrical hole in the shorter grass, with a flag sticking out of the hole.
Now we know what the purpose of the design was.
In an otherwise empty room, you see a lone typewriter in the center of the room with a single sheet inserted, only the single letter "A" typed on it.
We know (from history and common sense) that the room, typewriter, and sheet of paper were designed. The single character "A", though, could have been created by any number of forces -- a piece of tile falling from the ceiling, a janitor bumping the typewriter while dusting, someone attempting to send a secret message ("if I ever type a single 'a' on the typewriter, it means I'm in trouble!"), and so on. The pattern is simply too small to draw inferences from.
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Overall, through answering these questions, I think I've identified four things to look at when trying to discover design:
- the complexity of the pattern (especially in comparison to the size of the data from which the pattern was drawn -- the characters I LOVE YOU, alone on a page, imply design, but if they appear once within a billion pages of text, they're not so impressive.)
- the presence or absence of laws or mechanisms that tend to create similar patterns
- the presence or absence of an apparent purpose for the pattern. (I include information transfer and information storage here.)
- candidate intelligences for the creation of the pattern
Can anybody think of others?
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My scenario:
You read the text "harm no one"
(A) as part of an e-mail that reads "donkey make profound on harm no one cheese. Teacup be of cheerful. She"
(B) as part of a forum post that reads "I harm no one by smoking weed, so it should be legal."
(C) handwritten in the middle of an otherwise blank piece of paper left on your desk
(D) written on a tiny fragment of parchment a thousand years old (in a language appropriate for the time)
(E) as part of a larger piece of parchment a thousand years old, which reads "...should be restricted by past decrees of kings and prophets. But I say to you, harm no one, but do as you will."
Can you detect intelligence? What about purpose or original thought? What are other things you can or can't say about the text in different scenarios?
). If it isn't a printer error, then I'd have to say that someone of unknown origin is trying to send the intended reader a very cryptic message.
