Barry Arrington is a fellow most of you have probably never heard of, and those of us who have aren’t particularly dazzled by him: he’s an Intelligent Design creationist and moderator of Bill Dembski’s wacky little blog. However, there are some amusing revelations: he made a failed stab at a run for Colorado school board (please keep these wackos’ hands off our schools, OK?), and funniest of all, he’s the treasurer of MichelePAC, Michele Bachmann’s fundraising organization, and just to make it even more appropriate, he’s the guy who misspelled dear Michele’s name on the FEC filings.

Spelling is so complex, don’t you know. It puts that whole bacterial flagellum thingie into perspective.

From John Pavlus:

How to make a Singularity

Step 1: “I wonder if brains are just like computers?”

Step 2: Add peta-thingies/giga-whatzits; say “Moore’s Law!” a lot at conferences

Step 3: ??????

Step 4: SINGULARITY!!!11!one

There are other, perhaps somewhat more serious, rebuttals at Rennie’s Last Nerve and A Fistful of Science.

Now run along, little obsessive Kurzweilians, there are many other blogs out there that regard your hero with derision, demanding your earnestly clueless rebuttals.

Ray Kurzweil has responded to my criticisim of futurist fortune-telling. It really just compounds the problems, though, and gullible people who love Ray will think he’s answered me, while skeptical people who see through his hocus-pocus will be unimpressed. It’s kind of pointless to reply again, but here goes.

His first point is silly.

For starters, I said that we would be able to reverse-engineer the brain sufficiently to understand its basic principles of operation within two decades, not one decade, as Myers reports.

I don’t care.

I didn’t make an issue of his timescale in the first place; in fact, I said it made no difference. The problem is that he has provided no reason to specify a date, other than his vague mantra of “exponential growth”. Why not say 5 years? Why not 50? The heart of the Kurzweil method is to simply pick a date far enough in the future that we cannot predict what technological advances will occur, and also far enough forward that he isn’t likely to be confronted with his failure by people who remember what he said, and all is good. My complaint isn’t that he has set a date by which we’ll understand the brain, but that he has provided no baseline value for his exponential growth claim, and has no way to measure how much we know now, how much we need to know, and how rapidly we will acquire that knowledge. “Really fast” or “exponentially increasing” are not informative.

I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments. It is not a proposed strategy for accomplishing reverse-engineering. It is an argument from information theory, which Myers obviously does not understand.

I think I understand it better than Kurzweil. If we have a seed of information that initiates a process, followed by many activities and interactions that add progressively more information to the process, you can’t use information theory to measure the amount of information in the seed and then announce that you’ve put an upper bound on the amount of complexity in the process.

For instance, you can’t measure the number of transistors in an Intel CPU and then announce, “A-ha! We now understand what a small amount of information is actually required to create all those operating systems and computer games and Microsoft Word, and it is much, much smaller than everyone is assuming.” Put it in those terms, and the Kurzweil fanboys would laugh at him; put it in terms of something they don’t understand at all, like the development and function of the brain, and they’re willing to go along with the pretense that the genome tells us that the whole organism is simpler than they thought.

I presume they understand that if you program a perfect Intel emulator, you don’t suddenly get Halo: Reach for free, as an emergent property of the system. You can buy the code and add it to the system, sure, but in this case, we can’t run down to GameStop and buy a DVD with the human OS in it and install it on our artificial brain. You’re going to have to do the hard work of figuring out how that works and reverse engineering it, as well. And understanding how the processor works is necessary to do that, but not sufficient.

Kurzweil does add another piece to his argument, although it doesn’t help: the modularity and repetitive organization of the human brain.

For example, the cerebellum (which has been modeled, simulated and tested) — the region responsible for part of our skill formation, like catching a fly ball — contains a module of four types of neurons. That module is repeated about ten billion times. The cortex, a region that only mammals have and that is responsible for our ability to think symbolically and in hierarchies of ideas, also has massive redundancy. It has a basic pattern-recognition module that is considerably more complex than the repeated module in the cerebellum, but that cortex module is repeated about a billion times. There is also information in the interconnections, but there is massive redundancy in the connection pattern as well.

This is true — the cortex is a layered structure with similar elements repeated over and over again, in broad arrays. Pyramidal neurons, for instance, are instantly recognizable and and share a whole suite of common morphological elements between each other — but each one is also as unique as a snowflake. Those differences matter, and they are not specified in the genome. (For that matter, you won’t find any blueprint in the genome for the dendrite pattern of pyramidal neurons, either). If you want to recreate a generic human brain, it won’t work if you just make every pyramidal neuron exactly identical; there have to be spatial differences and differences in connectivity. You especially won’t be able to carry out something far more specific, such as emulate Ray Kurzweil’s brain, if you decide to simplify and make his cortex a uniform array of identical modules.

In short, here’s Kurzweil’s claim: the brain is simpler than we think, and thanks to the accelerating rate of technological change, we will understand it’s basic principles of operation completely within a few decades. My counterargument, which he hasn’t addressed at all, is that 1) his argument for that simplicity is deeply flawed and irrelevant, 2) he has made no quantifiable argument about how much we know about the brain right now, and I argue that we’ve only scratched the surface in the last several decades of research, 3) “exponential” is not a magic word that solves all problems (if I put a penny in the bank today, it does not mean I will have a million dollars in my retirement fund in 20 years), and 4) Kurzweil has provided no explanation for how we’ll be ‘reverse engineering’ the human brain. He’s now at least clearly stating that decoding the genome does not generate the necessary information — it’s just an argument that the brain isn’t as complex as we thought, which I’ve already said is bogus — but left dangling is the question of methodology. I suggest that we need to have a combined strategy of digging into the brain from the perspectives of physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and development, and in all of those fields I see a long hard slog ahead. I also don’t see that noisemakers like Kurzweil, who know nothing of those fields, will be making any contribution at all.

So what exactly is the basis of Kurzweil’s expected magic great leap forward? And no, the miracle of exponential growth is not an answer. If all a futurist has to do is wave his hands and say things will change more rapidly than we expect, then futurists like Kurzweil are nothing but techno-gimmicky Criswells. Utterly useless.

Franklin Graham has said something stupid again. He has some peculiar ideas about inheritance.

I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name. Now it’s obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That’s what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn’t. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said.

So now religion is heritable factor, with a strange pattern of assortment where Islam is male and Judaism is female? That’s got me wondering about a cross between a Muslim man and a Jewish woman — what would the child be? Or how about a Muslim woman and a Jewish man — is that how we breed atheists? Crazy stuff.

You might be wondering how Christianity is inherited. That’s an exception: you become Christian by conscious choice, not by birth…

Well, you know, you can be born a Muslim, you can be born a Jew, but you can’t be born a Christian. The only way you can become a Christian is by confessing your sins to God, asking his forgiveness, and by receiving Jesus Christ by faith into your heart, that Christ died for your sins, shed his blood on Calvary’s Cross, and that God raised him to life. If you’re willing to accept that and believe that, and let Jesus Christ be the lord of your life, God will forgive your sins, he will heal your heart, and that’s the only way you can become a Christian. And so if the President has done that, then I would say he’s a Christian, if that’s what he has done.

…says Franklin, son of Billy, the well-known evangelical preacher.

Think, though, about Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Muhammad Ali — I guess they acquired their Muslim faith, not by conscious decision, but by the seed passed on to them by their Christian fathers.

Oops.

I don’t think Graham meant much by it, he just didn’t think. What we see bubbling behind those blank eyes is simply mindless racism — he probably just sees Islam as the default religion for brown people, unless they’ve been instructed appropriately by good ol’ pale-skinned missionaries.

Many people don’t read the comments here, but you might try in this case: Barney Zwartz himself is replying repeatedly to my criticisms. It’s a wonderful demonstration of the First Rule of Holes.

Greg Abell wrote to me, requesting answers to his questions, which he doesn’t ask, and since he caught me in a cranky moment, I felt like answering.

Hello,

I wanted to ask a professional scientist how something can come from nothing?

No, you didn’t. You wrote as an excuse to preach at me, and are not asking any sincere questions. You’re a phony.

If there is no God, you have to prove how this is possible.

Matter had to come from somewhere. Space had to have a beginning. Time also has to originate right?

Ask a physicist. I’m a biologist. It says so right over there under my picture to the left, where you got my email address. So why are you pestering me with questions way outside my expertise? I wish these loonies would write to me asking about biological events within the last half-billion years, where I might be able to give a pretty good answer. Big Bang stuff, ask an astronomer/physicist; origin of life stuff, ask a biochemist; rock stuff, ask a geologist.

Why aren’t you harrassing Vic Stenger or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Lawrence Krauss or Sean Carroll about these subjects, instead of me? You’ve already pissed me off with your inappropriate, clueless questions — and I can already tell you’re an insincere, pretentious twit who won’t pay any attention to any answers I might give, anyway.

You got your assertions wrong. Matter had to come from nowhere: we aren’t talking about Private God digging a hole in one place for dirt to fill a hole in another. We are talking about the creation of matter, space, and time out of nothing. Inventing a god who did it doesn’t solve the problem: it just postulates that there was no nothing, but instead an anthropomorphic superman with magic powers, which is the kind of hypothesis a five year old might make. And not a smart five year old, either.

If you landed on an alien planet and discovered something that looked like plastic, had buttons and a screen. You would say it looked like a computer. You would also have to deduce that some kind of intelligence made this.

Yes, by analogy with similar devices on Earth, I’d make a reasonable hypothesis about how it was manufactured.

If I saw a herd of small purple alien creature with tentacles and three eyes scuttling about organically and gnawing on the fragrant hoobatchie trees, though, I’d suggest that they got there by procreation and that there were mommy and daddy hoobatchie nibblers around, and that they come from a long line of autonomous biological replicators. No intelligence on the part of the organisms is required. You, on the other hand, would postulate that a robed and bearded humanoid strolled across the planet, snapping his fingers and conjuring the plants and animals into existence…because that scenario requires very little intelligence and zero evidence on your part.

YOU don’t give your self enough credit. Your Brain is 100 times better than a computer!!!!!!!Plus you have hands and fingers and senses and you are telling me that this just happened as if I could destroy a watch with a hammer, throw the pieces in a bag and if I were able to shake the bag long enough, eventually I would get a watch??????

I wouldn’t tell you that, because only an idiot would think smashing a watch is a relevant experiment.

PLEASE SMELL WHAT YOU ARE SHOVELING!!!

I thought you were asking questions? You’ve already decided that any answer I might give is ordure.

I hate to be rude but you really need to get over yourself and grab ahold of the only possible way of escaping a place that has no love because God is Love, This Universe is Filled with His Love. If you choose to reject God in this life by not accepting the fact that He sent His Son to be The sacrifice for our unrighteousness, then God will give you what you want and He will remove Himself from you which is what Hell is.

We enjoy love in our lives, We understand the concept. God is Love, Remove God, Remove Love and Compassion and etc…..multiply that by eternity and that’s what Hell will be like and it is a real place.

This universe is filled with vacuum, gas, dust, radiation, and uninhabitable chunks of rock and ice. Imagining a magic man in the sky doesn’t change reality and fill it with candy floss and puppy dogs.

Your Jesus was just another in a long line of holy con artists. Why should I believe him over Mohammed, or Thor, or Krishna, or Buddha? That he did a tawdrier class of magic tricks during his brief life does not impress me, nor does the logic of blood sacrifice by another to atone for the imaginary sins of my many-times-great grandmother. He’s already absent from my life (and from yours too, I will note: that you pretend to have an invisible friend doesn’t make him real), and I’m feeling pretty good: a wonderful wife, three great kids, and a job I enjoy doing. If this is Hell, bring on more.

Your idea of science is fundamentally flawed. Your science starts off by limiting the possible answers. From the word Go, your science does not allow for the Super Natural!

My science begins with doubt and disbelief, which turns out to be a powerful foundation. It means I don’t accept crazy claims from random rubes on the internet, but instead expect verifiable evidence for those claims. It certainly does allow for the supernatural…as long as the supernatural phenomena affect the natural world in some measurable way.

You can go to the Big Bang which I kinda believe in because God “Spoke” the Universe into existence!

The word “Universe” simply means ONE VERSE/ ONE PHRASE

That phrase was “Let there Be”

No, it doesn’t. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin universum, from neuter of universus entire, whole, from uni– + versus turned toward, from past participle of vertere to turn

You’re making stuff up.

A RELATIONSHIP with Jesus is the only way you will be able to be free and escape the never ending agony of being in a place where God’s presence is not there.

I will be praying that the Holy Spirit Convicts you and that Almighty God would allow your heart to accept The Truth!!!

You don’t get it. I’m not in agony. I’m feeling damn good. Your god is a god of misery and promises of relief from horrible, awful pain; your god is a delusion for broken people. If ever I am in a situation where I am suffering (an inevitable state, since I’m not pretending that I’m immortal), I should hope I wouldn’t be so brain-damaged that I believe a retreat into fantasy is the solution. I believe in reality, and hard work, and the redeeming power of knowledge; I don’t believe in magic.

May God Bless you and your family Mr. Meyers

I would really appreciate any feedback you might have and thank you for your time.

OK.

You started by claiming you wanted to ask a scientist a question, and then instead of asking anything, you made a series of ignorant assertions, ranted about your goofy Jesus idol, and closed by misspelling my name. And now you want feedback?

You’re an arrogant ass, Mr Abell. Your faith makes a lot of noise about humility, but I’ve found almost all of its followers to be poisonously full of themselves, and you are no exception. I get letters like yours on a daily basis, and I assure you — all they do is repeatedly emphasize to me that religion breeds stupidity and lazy thinking and unconscionable pomposity. You are an anti-proselytizer. You are a walking, talking, preaching object lesson on why I despise religion. If you want to convert people, a better strategy for you would be to shut up and go hide in a cave where no one might listen to you and be frightened away from your daft pratings, because all you do is affirm my conviction that faith is for fools.

Sometimes, my email is a little disturbing.

I AM
I AM the “goddamned cracker” sir. This is a personal invitation. I am Karl Duane Anderson. I live at REDACTED in Fargo, North Dakota. If you want to desecrate the Body of Christ, please find out just what it is that you are desecrating. Come to my upstairs apartment and do it to me.

What, a cracker is asking me to come to his apartment and nail him? I’m flattered, sir, but this is not Craig’s List, I do not swing that way, and if I did, I would respond better to an invitation to dinner and a movie than to ordering me directly to your place to do you.

However, I am such a nice guy that I will inform Karl that he will have an opportunity to meet plenty of godless folk at the 2010 Red River Valley Freethought Convention, taking place on 18 September at the Radisson near the Fargo Civic Center. Ease in, big fella, let’s just have some pleasant conversation.

(Oh, yes, I still get cracker mail, although it’s now down to about a half-dozen pieces a week, about evenly split between aggressive angry jerks and formal hand-written letters on flowery stationery from little old ladies crying about how much Jesus loves me.)