Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable


"topmind" <topmind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Zachriel wrote:
"topmind" <topmind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Zachriel wrote:
"topmind" <topmind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Horse wash. It predicts that detectable artifacts may be left over from
the engineering.


Detectable? But you keep forgetting to tell us how to detect them. You
have
put forth no specific empirical consequences.

Alas! You had once been specific. You said to test for a conventional
bitmap
of the Mona Lisa. I showed that prior searches would almost certainly
have
discovered any such a pattern. Your contention was found false that no
one
has used search methodology likely to have found such patterns.


If it has, then you would have presented the situation or paper, now
wouldn't you? If X happened, then show evidence that X actually
happened. Your "must have" stance is just playing lame.


Finding Mona is just such a test - done at your own insistence. I published
the results and made the code available for public inspection. It's written
in VBasic so it is easy to understand. There is no conventional image of a
Mona Lisa hidden in the genome examined.

--
Zachriel
But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues.
You can tell by the way she smiles. - Dylan
http://www.zachriel.com/monalisa/


<snip>


acmethinker:

I have an interesting speculation. What if some "intelligent designer"
seeded the Earth with life and left a message inside the genome. From what
many people on this thread have indicated, there are several problems with
this speculation.

1. Where is the "intelligent designer"? If ETI, a civilization that powerful
should have already been detected by other means.
2. Why hasn't standard analysis of the genome detected these messages? As
Zachriel showed, even a simple bitmap would stand out like a sore thumb to
investigators.
3. Genomic research strongly indicates that the content of the genome is due
to natural ad hoc evolutionary processes.
4. Why wouldn't the message be degraded over the eons since the Earth was
seeded? The good news is that if all life sprang from these spores, then any
single species may contain a remnant of the message.

I certainly understand that genomic researchers have very powerful tools of
analysis and would be far more likely to discover any such patterns even if
they did exist. I am not fool enough to believe my limited efforts surpass
experts in the field. So, this is just for fun, of course. Leaving aside
these problems, how would we go about testing such a speculation?

I have also come to understand that there are unlimited encoding schemes,
unlimited detection algorithms, and unlimited possibilities for false
positives. But we could limit ourselves to a few specific patterns. We won't
choose images, because as Zachriel showed, conventional image mapping would
leave a tell-tale statistical signature, and would probably already have
been found; and if not, well, Finding Mona demonstrated that there is no
Mona Lisa in the genome examined.

I would suggest a search for the starting digits for Pi (per Sagan's
speculation) using a simple encoding such as base-4. I'm not too savvy with
computer software, nor statistics obviously. I'm not even sure how to
calculate the chances of a false positive.

Well, that's what I have so far. Like I said, it's just a fun speculation.
(It certainly doesn't constitute a valid scientific hypothesis. Not only is
it still lacking specificity, but it can't reasonably explain the problems
noted above.)

acmethinker


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