Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not.

What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological. But in both cases that purpose is something extrinsic to themselves. They have an extrinsic rather than an intrinsic teleology.

How might this extrinsic teleology relate to the intrinsic? That is, how does the specification in SC relate to the common sense intuition that organisms act for their own sake? If this specification doesn't arrive from the organism itself then is it imposed on it miraculously? If so, then isn't Dembski treating the organism as if it is not different from a machine or from the lines on a page that form a word? Isn't he leaving out a lot -- including the most important part -- of the evidence of the divine?

Wouldn't it be more helpful to look at the intrinsic teleology of organisms? That is, look at organisms as naturally signifying something greater? Or is that a topic more suited to philosophy than science? Maybe that's the proper venue for this whole discussion... but then every chiropractor is all too ready to diagnose problems as having to do with the back...

continuing the discussion with Tim in a new post

Hi Tim, I am posting my reply here, because the great blogmeister won't let me put it all in a comment. Me thinks I get your point: is it that we can name and chimps can't, so therefore we are of greater value than chimps? Naming is something above and beyond what a chimp can do, right? In other words, you are illustrating the point I am making (if I catch your drift). My argument is only a sketch, but I think adding the ability to name names, as it were, is still not enough to make the argument seem cogent. For one can still ask why we prefer being able to name over other skills had by animals but not by humans. The objector would demand a more convincing reason. The answer I have in mind is, to put it briefly, that there is something infinite about human beings in comparison with the subhuman. That "something" has to do with our ability to think of the meaning of the cosmos. Whereas one might say"He's got the whole world in His han

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others. But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and may eventually go out of existence. The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual. The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being. In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here.&qu

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