Dembski: The Concept of Specified Complexity and Its Applications

We continue our day with Dembski with these paragraphs to explain the concept of specific complexity and its applications: ------------------------------ The most important moment in the film Contact In this film, scientists searching for extraterrestrial intelligence discover signals that convince them that they have communicated with intelligent aliens. At the most important moment in the film, when capturing the signal, one researcher turns to others and says, “This can’t be confusing as it has a specific arrangement.” What was that signal? Although the true extraterrestrial intelligence seekers didn’t discover any convincing signal from outer space as the result of an alien’s intelligence, they did find that signal in the film: 111111111111111111111111101111111111111111111111101111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111101111101111111111111111111111111111111111011111111111111111111101111111111111111101111111111111011111111111111111111111111111111111111101111111111110111111111111111111110111111111111111111111111111111101111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111011111111 The signal detected by SETI researchers in a continuum film is composed of a long sequence of binary numbers. SETI researchers received the signal as a sequence of 1186 pulses and separators, and the signal on the speaker amplified, symbolizing the pulse with 1 and the separator with 0. This sequence represents the prime numbers trapped between 2 and 101 – prime numbers are the numbers that are divisible by themselves and only by one. The prime number in this example is represented by the number of pulses corresponding to (1) and the prime numbers are separated by 0. Many scientists today harness the idea of specific complexity as a sign of intelligence, especially in forensics, cipher science, random number generation, archaeology, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Theorists of the idea of intelligent design take this sign on intelligence and apply it to natural systems.[2] Applying this idea, they claim that many complex, irreducible molecular machines exhibit specific complexity, and are therefore products of an intelligent organism. The Real Project of Extraterrestrial Intelligence Seth Shostak is an aerospace scientist and director of SETI and one of the strong advocates of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Search Project. SETI describes its mission as “exploring, understanding and interpreting the origin, nature and spread of life in the universe.” With this phrase, SETI’s natural relationship with intelligent design and the possibility of setting a single goal in the search for design in the universe are shown. Why? Because intelligent design looks for complexity in living things to reach design, while SETI looks for very simple signals – radio signals that express a specific messaging package – to reveal the design. In particular, the real SETI project does not look for complex long sequences of numbers as in the film Contact by Carl Sagan. Shostak explicitly claims that the real SETI project is not looking for specific complexity when trying to detect radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligent beings, but he is wrong. The fact is that SETI and Shostak are looking for specific complexity, which is the specific narrow messaging package. According to the definition, a radio signal shows specific complexity if it is easy to describe and difficult to happen by accident. This is the case here. Specific narrow messaging packages are easy to describe because humans, who designed them, use them to transmit information and communicate with each other, and they are also difficult to happen by accident because no physical process produces them without external guidance. That is, these signals combine ease of description with complexity – in a probabilistic sense – and that is the specific complexity and key sign of design discovery. Despite Shostak’s objection, SETI scientists are looking for a narrow, specific messaging package to detect intelligence in outer space because such signals exhibit specific complexity. Any signal that humans choose to search for intelligence in outer space seems bound to show definite complexity. Take, for example, the massive, dimensional stone l 4 9 that was transported to Earth by aliens in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 film A Space Odyssey. Someone discovers the design in this object because it shows a specific complexity, it is geometrically easy to describe and is difficult to happen with an unguided random mechanism, due to the rigidity of its components and its rectangular homogeneity. More: https://braheen.com/publications/التصميم-الذكي-ومفهوم-التعقيد-المحدد — Source: Published on Facebook's "Braheen Center" page