While listening to what Wittgenstein has to say about necessity as it pertains to mathematics, I noted that he is not denying that we encounter constraint or necessity when doing mathematics: he is denying that this constraint comes from something outside the game. Rather, it is from the game itself. But what if mathematics is a game we can play with rational beings very different from ourselves? Can we intuit that all would be constrained as we are? Even if they are incredibly smarter? And what about God? Is math a game we play with God rather than being a kind of activity the we aim at God (or at God's Mind) as a kind of ideal object?
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...
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