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Yes, this notion of the detachability is inseparable from the intellect that recognizes the "target". If it weren't detachable, no intellect would be required, if that makes sense.
Some words of Smith on "detachability":
One needs therefore to distinguish (as I have intimated previously) between two kinds of temporal process or horizontal causation: the kind that derives from natural causes alone, and the kind that springs from intelligent agency. It is the violinist, acting as an intelligent agent, who first apprehends the music - Dembski's "detachable pattern" - on the plane of intellect, and then, by an act of his free will, conveys that pattern to the world of sense by way of a temporal process, an action of horizontal causality.
Whoa, check this out - Smith even directly addresses 's point about the program generating bit strings bigger than itself:
Given the crucial role of CSI in both physics and biology, it behooves us now to reflect further upon that notion, beginning with the mathematical concept of information as such. The danger, when it comes to the latter, is that we are prone to read more into the technical term than it is meant to signify: the word had after all been in use for a very long time before Shannon bestowed upon it a technical sense. That sense is in fact rather bare: it boils down to the actualization of an event represented by a subset of E in a mathematical space with probability measure P. If I flip a coin n times I have produced information - n bits worth, to be exact. And even now, as I am striking the keys of my keyboard, I am producing Shannon information. I am also, however, generating semantic information, which is something else entirely: something, in fact, which no mathematical theory can ever encompass for the obvious reason that semantic information does not reduce to quantity, to mere sets and relations. There is an ontological discrepancy between semantic and Shannon information, not unlike the ontologic hiatus separating the corporeal and the physical domains. And just as a corporeal object X determines an associated physical object SX, so also does every item of semantic information determine a corresponding item of Shannon information which serves, so to speak, as its material base: the latter is simply what remains when all that is non-quantitative has been cast out or "bracketed". One thus arrives, once again, at Rene Guenon's crucial point that "quantity itself, to which they [the moderns] strive to reduce everything, when considered from their own special point of view, is no more than the 'residue' of an existence emptied of everything that constitutes its essence."
Having distinguished between semantic and Shannon information, it should be noted that the semantic component constitutes a specification in Dembski's sense, and in fact defines a detachable target. To be sure, the example of semantic information is highly special, which is to say that specification can arise in a thousand other ways. Think of a bit string in which 1's and 0's alternate, or in which they represent a sequence of prime numbers in binary notation; or again, think of a bit string of length n which is "algorithmically compressible" in the sense that it can be generated by a computer algorithm of "length" less than n (a notion which can indeed be defined): all these are examples of specification. It appears, however, that despite its highly special nature semantic specification enjoys a certain primacy in the natural domain: if indeed God "spoke" the world into being as Scripture declares, such CSI or "design" as it carries must derive ultimately from a divine Idea or logos, which may by analogy be termed a word. And I would add that nowhere in the natural world is the linguistic character of specification more clearly in evidence than in the genetic code of an organism, which as I have noted before, constitutes a text recorded in a four-letter alphabet. The genetic code is thus written text imprinted on DNA. Yet one may conjecture on theological ground that this written text derives from a spoken word: the kind to which Christ alludes when He testifies that "the words I speak to you are spirit and life". No other scientific finding, I believe, is as profoundly reflective of theological truth as is the discovery of what may be termed the informational basis of life.
So Smith acknowledges the program-writing program as itself constituting a kind of specification; and he likewise acknowledges this linguistic character of specification, what you, Chiro, have recently termed the linguistic "logic", wherein the meaning or specification is found.
Onward:
Let us suppose that someone shoots arrows at a wall. To conclude that a given strike cannot be attributed to chance - in other words, to effect a design inference - one evidently needs to prescribe a target or bull's-eye that sufficiently reduces the likelihood of an accidental hit. What is essential is that the target can be specified without reference to the actual shot; it would not do, for example, to shoot the arrow and then paint a bull's-eye centered upon the point where the arrow struck. What stands at issue, however, has nothing to do with a temporal sequence of events: it does not in fact matter whether the target is given before or after the arrow is shot. What counts, as I have said, is that the target can be specified without reference to the shot in question. In Dembski's terminology, the target must be "detachable" in an appropriate sense.
Consider a scenario in which the keys of a typewriter are struck in succession. If the resultant sequence of characters spells out, let us say, a series of grammatical and coherent English sentences, we conclude that this event cannot be ascribed to chance. An exceedingly "small" and indeed "detachable" target has been struck, which however was, in this case, specified after the event. In general, the specification of a target requires both knowledge and intelligence; one might mention the example of cryptanalysis, in which specification is achieved through the discovery of a code. What at first appeared to be a random sequence of characters proves thus to be the result of intelligent agency. The fact is that it takes intelligence to detect intelligent design.
I would like to emphasize that it is impossible to rule out the hypothesis of chance simply on the basis of low probability. If a sequence of 1's and 0's is generated by tossing a fair coin a billion times, the possibility that the resultant bit string will contain not a single 0, say, can indeed be validly ruled out. Yet, if one does actually toss a coin a billion times, one produces a bit string having exactly the same probability as the first: one half to the power one billion, to be precise. Why, then, can the first sequence (the one containing no 0's) be ruled out, whereas the second can not? The reason is that the first conforms to a pattern or rule which can be defined independently; it is a question, once again, of a "detachable" target which itself has low probability.
We've all read these passages before, but revisiting them, after we have meditated on them, and discussed them, and discussed points and subjects related to them, certainly improves understanding.
In the case of the first sequence, the prescription "no 0's" in itself defines a target of that kind: the subset, namely, containing the given bit string and no other. But this is precisely what can not be done in the case of the second bit string (the one produced by tossing a coin a billion times): it is virtually certain, in that case, that no detachable target of low probability has been hit. It is possible, of course, to produce a target from the empirical sequence itself; but that description or pattern (if such it may be called) would turn out not to be detachable. It would be comparable to a bull's-eye painted around to spot on the wall where the arrow has struck: such a description, of course, proves nothing. The discovery of a detachable pattern of sufficiently low probability, on the other hand, proves a great deal: it may prove, in fact, that the event in question cannot be attributed to chance. Thus, what rules out chance is not low probability alone, but low probability in conjunction with a detachable target: this winning combination is what Dembski terms the complex specification criterion.
Yes, those passages have a different meaning for me now, especially now that I am able to relate them to seeing in 'my own terms', with the idea of the underlying logical syntactical structure. What we're really talking about here, it seems to me now, is the notion of higher order, the same as we do in logic.
This is really, really important, so I am going to try to say this carefully. The precise change that occurs with a hop into second order logic is the ability to form relations, that is, something which can logically exist by way of how a first order concept interacts with another first order concept. For example, we'd say that 'love' is a second order relation. I want to connect this to the idea of specification and detachability.
First, in order to do that we need to think of reference. What is it to refer? This is a mysterious phenomenon, which when done properly, constitutes an intentional act. That is, to use a word to stand in for some thing, is what we do when we refer. But as you and I have both been studying Borella recently, he discusses the idea of intellect and, taking great pains, shows that the striving of intellect is always a struggle against difference, ultimately attempting (never perfectly) to identify with what it is that we wish to know by the intellective act. The Word, as it were, is the closest that we can come, and metaphysics itself is the intellect at its most naked. Metaphysics is the intellective act of relating to thingness at its most stripped away reference.
Now, consider what is required for a system to be able to refer, which is to say, that it possess not just language, but the capacity for the intellective act of using this language to refer outside itself. It must transcend itself. The information in the system must be able to hop to a higher order, so to speak, in order to point to its relation to something outside of itself. This is always what language does.
If we are scanning the random sequence of chimpanzee-derived bits, and we happen across the sequence that encodes the human script you set out before, what we have found has not so much to do with the transformability of the 1's and 0's into the human letter groups, as it does with the fact that the 1's and 0's are referring outside of themselves, via a logical syntax, to something else in the world.
The detachable target is just the pointing outside of oneself, demonstrating the intellective act (or if encountered as a sign, then the remnants of the intellective act, as writing for example).
Smith says that the target must be detachable with respect to the fact it can be specified without reference to the broader target. If we take the target to be a bullseye, the important fact is the bullseye can be specified without reference to the overall cork board where the dart can strike at all.
In the case of the program, the detachable target is the presence of a higher order logical form that refers outside of itself.
Now that we've come this far, I really, really want to connect this to the concept I was discussing the other day: symmetry.
In a bit string of length, n, a low probability configuration would be all 1's. This would, along with the outcome of all 0's, represent the highest symmetry states for an n-length string. These also correspond to the lowest Shannon-information states, because they contain the least amount of surprise, therefore the least information. It is just because they are symmetrical that they are low in information. I've written privately (not on Voat or Poal) about a different definition of information content, viewed as a vector quantity. I'd rather say that the configuration of all 1's is high in positive information (which would correspond with low Shannon info). High Shannon information is high negative information, as in high in surprise, therefore we must supply information to resolve it. High positive information, on the other hand, would correspond with symmetry, which is self-resolved for us, and which we receive as a message!
The probability of getting the all 1's configuration is incredibly low in a situation where we'd think there is some surprise, just because such a case would tell us there was, in fact, very little surprise at all (the probability of the all 1's config is only 1/2n). Whereas the probability of any other sequence not showing this level of symmetry would be (n-2)/2n.
We find this wherever we find symmetry in nature. If we were to find a perfect circle in nature, this would be analogous to finding the kind of symmetry in a string of all 1's in a fair coin flip. It would immediately communicate intelligence to us because it resolved the negative Shannon information. Instead, symmetry organizes the system 'for us', i.e. there is higher positive information. Set against the chaos of nature, to find a perfect circle in the wild would constitute something like a message, which is precisely how we would take it, that some preternatural cause has "said something" to us.
Further, I want to say that language itself (and its logical syntactical structures) are a special case of symmetry, which obtains as a way of referring to something in an environment and organizing it so as to minimize the Shannon information content - in other words, we increase the positive information of a system by referring to it with language, bringing a kind of order (Logos) to it.
Any production and use of language is an intellective act in which one refers to something. Therefore, to find logical syntax in nature is to find intelligence, because only intelligence can recognize logic. What logic is, is a form of symmetry-making, which happens by reference.
To find an oblong globe shape in nature may still be low probability, but it would lack the symmetry to comprise a 'message', so to speak. A perfect circle, instead, would speak volumes. Likewise, to find a subset of the chimpanzee sequence which encodes human language that is 'meaningful' - that is, it is specified in the sense of having logical syntactical structure combined with semantics - is to find symmetry of a higher order, i.e. that which points outside of itself to symmetrize nature. When I find the perfect circle in nature, I know that I recognize intelligence by the fact that it points outside of itself, to perfect what is not itself perfect, so becoming the specified target - and it shows to me The Good. It communicates a symmetrizing act, the same as meaningful language indicates a symmetrizing act.
Good Lord that was probably a mess. But boy are we getting places, in my opinion. This whole thing had for me a breakthrough sensation. Even if I am not articulating it properly (which I'm almost sure that I'm not), I feel as though I am connecting a few different concepts in ways I haven't before - detachability and CSI to the notion of symmetry, information, intelligence and The Good.
(post is archived)