Let's calculate some CSI

In a comment on the post the Case for Materialism Oleg laid down this challenge to Kairosfocus:

Let me illustrate that with an example. Here is a sequence of 60 bits:
1100100100 0011111101 1010101000 1000100001 0110100011 0000100011. Can you tell me whether this information is complex and specified?

I think this is great and would like to one step further and invite anyone to submit a sample so that an ID expert can calculate the CSI. What better way to clarify exactly what CSI means and establish to what extent it is objective?

I will add another example to the one posed by Oleg. I recognise that its really difficult to calculate CSI for biological entities so let's take something extremely straightforward and much used in the literature. What is the CSI of a hand of 13 cards which is all the spades in single deal of Contract Bridge? I am assuming that we are using the definition of CSI in this paper which WAD recently confirmed was the definitive account.

The full formula is on page 21: –log2[M·N· ϕS(T)·P(TH)].

However I would be content to see the calculation of just the specification component on page: 18.

σ = –log2[ ϕS(T)·P(TH)].

Or even just ϕS(T) which is defined on page 17 as:

the number of patterns for which S’s semiotic description of them is at least as simple as S’s semiotic description of T.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to give it a go.

Welcome to Wales

This post picks up on the previous one on Making the Case for Materialism. Please see Kairofocus's comments, particularly the one which finishes



So, please, start from Welcome to Wales. I will be happy to wait on you; though I find the artificiality of the length constraint here somewhat less than helpful.


As this post is focussed on KF I am not going to ask for a specific constraint on the length of comments but just make a general plea for conciseness.

---

Now for my response

I admit I misunderstood this example (not intentionally I assure you).


If I knew that these rocks had fallen into this pattern accidentally then I would not believe the apparent message. This turns on whether the pattern of rocks means anything. Grice famously differentiated between natural and nonnatural meaning. In this case I cannot see a natural meaning of "Welcome to Wales" in the way that for example a rock slide might mean delays ahead. Nonnatural meaning requires someone to have an intention and we are assuming that the rocks were not arranged this way intentionally. The only sense in which they have a meaning is that they happen to fall into a pattern which, when used intentionally, may have a nonnatural meaning.


So in summary - I would not believe them because they don't mean anything.

Obviously I don't find this a problem. So I will be interested to see how you develop your case.

As an irrelevant aside - if I saw the rocks being arranged this way intentionally in North Wales I would still not believe them. The North Welsh notoriously dislike the English.