55 thoughts on “Which of these things is not like the other?”

  3. To Tell of the Logos one needs teleology: perfect and final speech. Nice work if you can get it, Prof. Hedin, and you can get it if you lie.

    1. For any low brows like me having trouble with “teleology”, I found it means study of evidence of design or purpose in nature.

      1. If you have ever watched a Star Trek episode where some species undergoes an “evolutionary jump” to a higher level of being (they mostly do), thats Teleology for you. The idea that anything in nature is actually Goal-oriented. It doesnt even have to be intelligent design or god.

  5. Okay, this only gets weirder. If you were to promote yourself as an unbiased scientist and that you wanted to show people that you were not promoting religious ideas, then why include teleology on you main page? How many other physicists have teleology on their school page? Liberty University, for example, doesn’t have a physics or astronomy department (that should tell you something right there) so finding a comparable school or professorship may be tough. So I looked at the nuttiest school I could think of…Bob Jones.

    It should be noted that even at Bob Jones University the physics professors I found don’t tout teleology on their pages. See Dr. Bob Hill at http://www.bju.edu/academics/faculty/facultymember.php?id=bhill As an aside, it is surprising that Bob jones has so many professors with degrees in biology.

    Chris

    1. Probably you put it if you university thinks that’s cool otherwise you’d feel you should keep it to yourself.

    3. As an aside, it is surprising that Bob jones has so many professors with degrees in biology.

      May be an unfortunate comment on the job market.

  6. Something tells me the information theory he’s interested in wouldn’t be too familiar to Claude Shannon, either. On the other hand, maybe he actually knows what “specified complexity” actually is?

    2. I like this definition: Complex Specified Information – an extra-reality based type of information found only in creationist literature.

          1. Aren’t your required to dramatically remove your sunglasses (that you were inexplicably wearing indoors) when you say that?

  7. How does a physicist even do research on teleology?

    I see he’s only an assistant professor. Does that mean he doesn’t have tenure?

    1. All that is required is a comfortable chair and a contemplative state of mind. Beats actual observation and testing any day. Those methods often don’t yield desirable results.

        1. I think that is pretty much it in a nutshell. Some desire existence to be a certain way. That way being a prescribed world view derived largely from, and or delivered by, their religion or some other source beyond question. And which it is not necessary to understand, and they are happy to accept that they are supposed to be incapable of understanding, beyond a simple declarative “this is the way it is.”

          Then there are those that want to understand the way things are because that seems to be the only sane way to figure out how best to navigate existence. And they are not happy accepting that the level of understanding they seek is supposed to be beyond human ability, or something they are supposed to accept when there is no good reason to suppose it is accurate (evidence). Accuracy matters so they like to see things well tested before deciding whether or not to put any stock in them.

          1. (Pretend those are either all caps or all lower case. Dunno how I managed that.)

    2. He’s been an assistant professor for several years. Perhaps on a year-to-year contract?

      1. Not likely – at most universities, there is a ‘probationary period’ of usually something like 7-10 years during which you are an assistant prof. If it has been more than that, there could be something going on, but even then, not necessarily. We have people who have been associate professors (the rank above assistant and below full professor) for 2 decades, but not because they are sub-standard.

  8. Cosmology, nanotech, information and teleology. And he is actually trained in all of them and does actually conduct research in all of them?

    Is that how it is done these days if you want to be taken seriously as a scientist? Perhaps I should also have our institute website changed to indicate that my research interests are “systematic botany, politics, Elizabethan drama and skepticism” or something like that. After all, I am reading stuff about the last three of these and have totally important opinions on them…

    1. Does “research interests” mean that is what he researches or the topics he’ll supervise PhD candidates in?

  9. If you look at “Publications” on his home page, you can see, under “D) Education” the results of an “informal survey” of his students. Amongst other things, only 15% of his students (non-science majors) believe science can explain everything.

    1. Interesting….being an improvement person, I was looking for how he would move these numbers but not surprisingly didn’t see anything. It would be way more interesting if these baselines were taken and then used in a way to persuade students then see if you were successful at the end by re-asking those questions.

  10. Well 70 years ago that list wouldn’t have looked too bonkers.

    In 1943-47, when Norbert Wiener and others were developing what later became known as cybernetics, they described what they were studying as teleology, as it involved the study of mechanical, electronic and biological systems that had apparently goal-directed behaviour.

    And the other key component of Wiener’s theoretical approach was the development of concepts of information, which was also being worked on in a narrower sense by Claude Shannon (though he never called in ‘information theory’ – his term was ‘communication theory).

    Wiener and his group dropped the ‘teleology’ in the late 1940s – cybernetics sounded sexier and weirder and more novel. Which it was.

    More in my forthcoming book on the history of the genetic code! 😉

    1. though he never called in ‘information theory’ – his term was ‘communication theory

      For good theory, I would suggest.

      “Information” isn’t fundamental in the same way that communication is.

      You can’t store information, for example; you can only communicate in a time-delayed manner. Those magnetic fields on your hard disk are just a very slow relay in the communication loop of your computer.

      b&

      2. Your focus is too narrow. I use Shannon’s law (and Nyquist’s and a few other mathematicians’ theories) all the time to extract information from digital data (images). So the field of information theory is not limited to communications, but rather to extract information from sets. Information theory, or the concepts behind it are vital in DNA/RNA sequencing, geographic modeling, and Hedin’s “focus” astronomy. Simply because the concepts of information are used in electronic communications, does not mean the concepts are limited to that field. If I hope to accurate resolve a particular biological structure, I need to know how the signal will respond, so I need to account for wavelength, polarity, and a host of other factors in order to extract information from the result. That is Information Theory, not just the exchange of binary data.

        1. My point is that what’s going on isn’t that you’re extracting information from the digital images, even though that’s an extremely useful layer of conceptualizing to lay on top of what’s happening.

          But, rather, all that you’re doing is making more efficient the communication from the original scene to you.

          The magnetic domains (or whatever) that represent the binary data that your images are stored on are just part of a very convoluted communication channel.

          And, of course, there is Turing-equivalent computation being performed on and with the communication.

          b&

          1. And you would be wrong. The mathematical sets I work with are not attempts to communicate, (as defined by the transfer of data) they are attempts to represent in numbers (real and imaginary, as in square root of -1) certain biological structures, i.e., the acquisition of data. In order to understand their shape, their orientation, their spatial and temporal coordinates, as well as other interesting aspects, one must rearrange the sets, decide which sets to combine, in what order, and how to interpret that result. Confocal microscopy has absolutely nothing to do with the transfer of data, it is extraction pure and simple. If your argument were true then all geometry (solid and plane) all calculus (single and multivariable) all topology would fall in communications, and that is simply incorrect. Astronomers use the same techniques to determine the same characteristics; they collect reams of data, then apply algorithms to determine physical characteristics of celestial bodies, such as distance, composition, shape, etc..

          2. When you make a photograph, photons reflecting off the subject create electrical charges in the camera’s sensor. Those charges are recorded in the magnetic domains of the camera’s memory and transmitted to the computer. Each step of the way nothing is happening other than communication exactly according to Shannon’s laws, with one and only one caveat: at many steps along the way, including afterwards when you do your processing, a machine logically equivalent to one of Turing’s uses the original communication as input and writes something useful as output.

            That exact same pattern of communication and computation continues all the way to your brain.

            All of the abstractions you mention — all the math and physics and everything else — is, no more and no less, a useful-to-us interpretive high-level perspective on that communication and computation.

            Cheers,

            b&

      1. He’s not an Assistant Prof for nothin’.

        So… how would one describe all the students who gave him rave reviews? Hedinists?

  14. lol.

    I wonder if that’s the legit form of Information Theory or if it’s the Discovery Institute’s version of “Information” contained within the DNA of living things.

    haha

  15. Is it just a coincidence that Hedin and Gonzalez received their Ph.D.s from the same institution, which happens to be in the same city as the Discovery Institute?

  16. Whereas in Britain teleology is the study of popular TV programs. 😉

    Sorry ’bout that…

  17. Huh. An astronomer doing “nanoscience”? That’ll be a first. Maybe he means he does extremely little science rather than science on itty bitty things.

      1. You just gave me a great idea for getting away with doing little work and making it sound important! Awesome! 🙂

  18. Teleology followed to its ends contradicts what we know about the others.

  19. I think the real odd-man-out is “nanoscience” in that (based on his publications) it appears to be the only ‘research interest’ he’s actually conducting research on. The rest appears to be some sort of wish-list of ID-related topics he’d like to get involved in (i.e. more “interest’ than ‘research’).

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