Re: Manufacture vs. Artifact?

On Dec 5, 8:59 am, Seanpit <seanpitnos...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Dec 4, 6:24 am, richardalanforr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

< snip >

If he sees a highly symmetrical polished granite cube,
even if he were on an alien planet like Mars, he would quickly assume
the activity of deliberate artifact - as would I and anyone else with
half a brain and some experience with the material of granite.

I would not however conclude that it was an artifact until I had
thoroughly investigated the cube and tested hypotheses of manufacture.

You already know that a highly symmetrical polished granite cube can
be manufactured by a number of different methods. What then would you
"test" in this regard? You already know the answer. Manufacture by
at least human-level intelligence using a large variety of possible
methods is already known to have the potential to produce such a
cube. There simply is no need to "investigate" this possibility
further. That investigation is therefore pointless.

Now, if you want to investigate the cube to make sure it is granite,
that would be helpful indeed. But, once the stone is determined to in
fact be granite, then the conclusion of artifact for such a granite
form is pretty darn obvious given at least some experience with the
material of granite as it interacts with non-deliberate forces of
nature. This second aspect of the "investigation" is also needed -
the more the better. But, for most scientists anyway, this part of
the extensive investigation should already be pretty much complete -
at least to the point where one could reasonably propose an
artifactual origin for such a cube.

If I could find no evidence for how the cube was made, I would do what
any honest scientist does under such circumstances and conclude that
we don't know how the cube was made, and that therefore we don't know
if it is an artifact.

That's absolutely ridiculous. If such a highly symmetrical polished
granite cube were ever found on an alien planet, like Mars for
example, even without any tools or any other evidence of exactly how
it was manufactured, it would still be very clearly artifactual in
nature. It would hit the news worldwide. You would be sittin there
on your thumb with a small group of hold-outs arguing that, "It still
could be the result of some unknown non-deliberate natural process."

This very same argument was used by some when intricate geometric crop
circles started appearing in England for the first time. Before it
was known how they were actually produced, some actually suggested
that some unknown weather pattern was probably responsible. I propose
that even those who suggested alien intelligences were involved were
more logical than those scientists who suggested some sort of odd
weather pattern was responsible. Of course, as it turns out, a couple
of guys with ropes and boards did the job, but what should have been
very clear from the get-go was that whoever did the job, the job was
intelligently and deliberately done.

Indeed, crop circles are a good example. Until people conducted
experiments
to see how such crop circles could be manufactured, it was an open
question as to whether or not the items were manufactured. In short,
we do not detect design, we model manufacture.

Another, more striking example is the phenomenon of objects that
we now know are stone tools, that were long known in Europe. Pressure
flaking technology was dead for such a long time, that Europeans could
not conceive of these objects as being manufactured. They were
hypothesized to be a kind of fulgarite or lightning stone.
It wasn't until Europeans came in contact with people who still
employed
the technology that the mystery of these objects was solved.




Again, the same thing is true of radiosignals from outer space.
Certain types of signals, if discovered actually coming from outer
space, would be hailed as evidence of deliberate artifact - - even
without any knowledge of how, exactly, they were produced. Scientists
might have an idea about how such signals could be produced. But
knowing how something could be made is far different than knowing how
it was actually made. This is true of a highly symmetrical polished
granite cube. There are many ways in which such a cube could be
manufactured. However, knowing which of these ways or some other way
was actually used is simply not necessary before its artifactual
nature can be clearly recognized.

On the contrary. You forget that signals have to have some sort of
encryption pattern. We might not recognize an alien signal, because of
our preconceived notions of what constitutes a "signal". Indeed, the
decryption of such signals is a kind of inverse problem. As every
signal
theorist knows, the solution to such an inverse problem may yield
results that are more representative of the method being used to do
the inversion, than of the thing being inverted for. Again, you forget
that
mathematics and algorithms are manufactured, as well.

Furthermore, even
if investigators did get a WOW signal, if that source were way
stronger than
the signals that we could conceive of generating, or from a large
extended
object, or coming from a location that did not seem hospitible to life
as we
know it, then it is less likely that it would be considered to be a
signal from
aliens, but rather a new natural phenomenon worth studying in their
own right.
This is how pulsars were discovered.




Why do you think in the move '2001, A Space Odyssey", a granite
obelisk, without anything else around or independent evidence of
manufacture, was used as evidence of design? I'm sorry Richard, but
I'm afraid you are the one in the distinct minority position on this
point.

2001 Space Odyssey is a science fiction movie, Sean. The monolith
was contrived to be something that we would expect aliens would create
if they wanted us to recognize the monolith as being manufactured.
Since we have never found, to our knowledge an actual alien artifact,
we don't know necessarily what real ones would look like. It might be
that the earth has been visited continously by aliens, who carve
extensive self portraits everwhere they go, but because the alien face
looks like weathered stone, we don't recognize them.


< snip rest >

Sean Pitmanwww.DetectingDesign.com

.

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