Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by William Dembski, adapted from his Substack. This is the 14th post. Find the full series so far here, “My Personal History with Information.”
To return to my 2005 unpublished paper about searching large spaces, it was after I posted it on my blog that Bob Marks and I started collaborating and subsequently that Winston Ewert and George Montañez came on board as graduate students of Bob’s. The idea in the searching large spaces paper was to substitute for searches probability measures that calculated the probability of successfully finding targets. The idea of displacement then took the form of searching for a search. The original search was thus displaced to searching for a search that with higher probability would conduct the original search. Thus, in place of finding a treasure on an island, a displaced search would be finding a map that helps you find the treasure. The point of conservation of information was then to show that the search for the search did not improve the probability of finding the original target.
Two Key Papers
Bob and I ended up reframing this search for the search idea and calculating information costs associated with it in terms of an information-theoretic apparatus that compared endogenous information, exogenous information, and active information. The two key papers we wrote in this regard were as follows (available here):
- William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans, Vol.5, No.5, September 2009, pp.1051–1061
- William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol.14, No.5, 2010, pp. 475–486.
The latter paper, in an appendix, provided the key proof from my 2005 searching large spaces paper, showing that the search for a search only exacerbates the information problem of lower-level search. The result here was formulated against a uniform probability baseline. In the paper immediately below, the result was generalized for arbitrary probabilistic baselines that do at least as well as uniform random search (it always being possible to do at least as well as uniform random search):
- William A. Dembski, Winston Ewert, Robert J. Marks II, “A General Theory of Information Cost Incurred by Successful Search,” in R.J. Marks II, M.J. Behe, W.A. Dembski, B.L. Gordon, J.C. Sanford, eds, Biological Information: New Perspectives (Singapore: World Scientific, 2013).
About-Face from Springer, Acceptance by World Scientific
The latter paper was ready in 2011 and should have been published in 2012, except that Springer, which had agreed to publish Biological Information: New Perspectives, withdrew the book from publication a few weeks before it was scheduled to be published and made available for sale on Amazon. I mention this not because it is directly pertinent to the unfolding of my understanding of information, but to indicate the sort of opposition that intelligent design, even when focused on scientific issues such as information, engendered.
As it is, I had negotiated with a Heidelberg editor of Springer to have the proceedings of a 2011 Cornell University conference on information (organized by Cornell professor John Sanford) published through Springer. My Dad had done his PhD in biology at the University of Erlangen (a German university) and I had an uncle who had been on the faculty of the Technical University of Berlin. I also had lived in Germany for several years and was fluent in the language. So this Springer editor and I, because of my German background, hit it off and we agreed to have coffee or lunch if I should ever be his way.
Everything Was Set to Go
The book had been typeset. Amazon announced it for preorder. And then, with less than six weeks to publication, anti-ID forces sprang into action and got Springer to pull the book. I’ve kept the high-res book cover as well as the Amazon screenshot of the book as it was set to be published by Springer (volume 38 in their series Intelligent Systems Reference Library). To this day, my colleagues and I in the ID community, when we are poised to get some major work published, whether with a secular book publisher or a peer-reviewed journal, are careful not to publicize the work until it is already in print (and sometimes not even after that if we are looking to publish a sequel).
As a result of Springer pulling these proceedings, it took an extra 14 months to get the book published. Fortunately, Bob Marks was able to persuade World Scientific in Singapore to publish the proceedings. They did a good job with the printing and, through some sort of subvention, the book was made available to download for free, at least for a time, which may have gotten it into more people’s hands than with Springer. So it all worked out in the end. Here’s the cover of the book as it finally did appear in print.
Next, “My 2014 Talk at the University of Chicago.”