Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

ID and the Science of God: Part I

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In response to an earlier post of mine, DaveScot kindly pointed out this website’s definition of ID. The breadth of the definition invites scepticism: ID is defined as the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. But is there really some single concept of ‘intelligence’ that informs designs that are generated by biological, human, and possibly even mechanical means? Why would anyone think such a thing in the first place? Yet, it is precisely this prospect that makes ID intellectually challenging – for both supporters and opponents.

It’s interesting that not everything is claimed to be intelligently designed. This keeps the phrase ‘intelligent design’ from simply collapsing into ‘design’ by implying a distinction between the intelligence and that on which it acts to produce design. So, then, what exactly is this ‘intelligence’ that stands apart from matter? Well, the most obvious answer historically is a deity who exists in at least a semi-transcendent state. But how can you get any scientific mileage from that?

Enter theodicy, which literally means (in Greek) ‘divine justice’. It is now a field much reduced from its late 17th century heyday. Theodicy exists today as a boutique topic in philosophy and theology, where it’s limited to asking how God could allow so much evil and suffering in the world. But originally the question was expressed much more broadly to encompass issues that are nowadays more naturally taken up by economics, engineering and systems science – and the areas of biology influenced by them: How does the deity optimise, given what it’s trying to achieve (i.e. ideas) and what it’s got to work with (i.e. matter)? This broader version moves into ID territory, a point that has not escaped the notice of theologians who nowadays talk about theodicy.

A good case in point is Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation, a comprehensive work written from a theistic evolutionary standpoint. Southgate is uneasy about concepts like ‘irreducible complexity’ for being a little too clear about how God operates in nature. The problem with such clarity, of course, is that the more we think we know the divine modus operandi, the more God’s allowance of suffering and evil looks deliberate, which seems to put divine action at odds with our moral scruples. One way out – which was the way taken by the original theodicists – is to say that to think like God is to see evil and suffering as serving a higher good, as the deity’s primary concern is with the large scale and the long term.

Now, a devout person might complain that this whole way of thinking about God is blasphemous, since it presumes that we can get into the mind of God – and once we do, we find a deity who is not especially loveable, since God seems quite willing to sacrifice his creatures for some higher design principle. Not surprisingly, religious thinkers complained about theodicy from day one. In the book I flagged in my last post, The Best of All Possible Worlds, Steven Nadler portrays the priest Antoine Arnauld as the critical foil of the two duelling theodicists, Nicole Malebranche and Gottfried von Leibiniz. Against them, Arnauld repeatedly pointed out that it’s blasphemous to suppose that God operates in what humans recognise as a ‘rational’ fashion. So how, then, could theodicy have acquired such significance among self-avowed Christians in the first place (Malebranche was also a priest) and, more interestingly, how could its mode of argumentation have such long-lasting secular effects, basically in any field concerned with optimisation?

The answer goes back to the question on everyone’s mind here: What constitutes evidence of design? We tend to presume that any evidence of design is, at best, indirect evidence for a designer. But this is not how the original theodicists thought about the matter. They thought we could have direct (albeit perhaps inconclusive) evidence of the designer, too. Why? Well, because the Bible says so. In particular, it says that we humans are created in the image and likeness of God. At the very least, this means that our own and God’s beings overlap in some sense. (For Christians, this is most vividly illustrated in the person of Jesus.) The interesting question, then, is to figure out how much of our own being is divine overlap and how much is simply the regrettable consequence of God’s having to work through material reality to embody the divine ideas ‘in’ – or, put more controversially, ‘as’ — us. Theodicy in its original full-blooded sense took this question as its starting point.

There was some enthusiasm for this way of thinking in the late 17th century. Here are four reasons:

(1) The sheer spread of literacy, connected both to the rise of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation (and those two events connected to each other, in terms of who operated the presses), meant that the Bible came to treated increasingly as instructions for living, as often happens today. So, the claim that we are created in the image and likeness of God was read as a mode of personal address: I am so created. This, of course, broke down the Catholic mode of Christian domination, whereby clerical authorities had modulated the biblical message for the situation at hand – e.g. by telling the faithful to treat certain aspects of the Bible as merely ‘symbolic’ or ‘metaphorical’. Theistic evolutionists routinely resort to this strategy today.

(2) On theological grounds, to deny that we are literally created in the image and likeness of God is itself to court heresy. It comes close to admitting an even worse offence, namely, anthropomorphism. In other words, if we presume that, even in sacred scripture, references to our relationship to God are mere projections, then why take the Bible seriously at all? 19th century secularisation was propelled by just this line of thought, but anti-theodicists like Arnauld who refused to venture into God’s mind could be read that way as well – scepticism masquerading as piety. (Kant also ran into this problem.) In contrast, theodicists appeared to read the Bible as the literal yet fallible word of God. There is scope within Christianity for this middle position because of known problems in crafting the Bible, whose human authorship is never denied (unlike, say, the Qur’an). One extreme result of this mentality was Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to edit the Gospels of all ‘superstitious’ elements, just as a Neo-Darwinist (say, UK geneticist Steve Jones) might re-write Origin of Species to reinstate Darwin’s fundamental principles in a firmer evidence base. To be sure, there is still plenty of room for blasphemy, but at least not for atheism!

(3) Within philosophy, theodicists, despite their disagreements, claimed legitimacy from Descartes, whose ‘cogito ergo sum’ proposed an example of human-divine overlap, namely, humanity’s repetition of how the deity establishes its own existence. After all, creation is necessary only because God originally exists apart from matter, and so needs to make its presence felt in the world through matter. (Isn’t that what the creation stories in Genesis are about?) So too with humans, so Descartes seemed to think. The products of our own re-enactment of divine thought patterns are still discussed in philosophy today as ‘a priori knowledge’. The open question is how much of our knowledge falls under this category, since whatever knowledge we acquire from the senses is clearly tied to our animal natures, which God does not share. But of course, the senses do not operate unadorned. Thus, by distinguishing the sensory and non-sensory aspects of our knowledge, we might infer the reliability of our access to the intelligent designer.

(4) There was also what we now call the ‘Scientific Revolution’, whose calling card was the fruitfulness of mechanical models for fathoming the natural world. A striking case in point was Galileo’s re-fashioning of a toy, the telescope, into an instrument of astronomical discovery. This contributed to the sense that our spontaneous displays of invention and ingenuity also reproduced the divine creative process: We make things that open up the world to understanding and control. This mode of thinking would start to kick in the scientific societies formed around the 18th century’s Industrial Revolution. One such influential society in the British Midlands, the ‘Lunar Society’, has been the subject of a recent popular book by Jenny Uglow.

Theodicy gets off the ground against these four background conditions once a specific mental faculty is proposed as triggering the spark of the divine in the human. This faculty was generally known as intellectual intuition – that is, the capacity to anticipate experience in a systematic and rational fashion. (Here’s a definition of intelligence worth defending.) We would now say the capacity to generate virtual realities that happen to correspond to physical reality, the sort of thing computer simulations do all the time, courtesy of their programmers. In the 17th century, people were especially impressed by the prospect of analytic (aka Cartesian) geometry capturing a rational world-order governed by universal laws of mechanical motion. So far, so good. But clearly something went wrong – what?

Tune in for the next instalment…

Comments
Would illerate visual thieves understand how to read between the lines or look at the callendar that doesn`t exist for a date or their watch that didn`t exist for atime that didn`t exist?It must atleast have been daylight,YES?Dr. Time
January 13, 2009
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Dear Eye:Thank you for your letter.Adam and I(Eye)did give birth to twins but unfortunately Cain`s biblelic cord choked Able apparently just before they were born.Our mid wife said that this happens quite often.Able is just the spitting image of his father and we are all healthy.Sending you some extra ink.Love ya all.Dr. Time
January 13, 2009
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Dear Joan(J0hn).It is the Eve(evolution) tomorrow of Adam`s and your celebration of of your first child.You must be so happy.When we last talked you said that if you had twins,you would name them Able for the first and Cain for the second.Running out of ink,write us.Love you all.Dr. Time
January 13, 2009
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kanttoockthahhwokspeedingpelphnope?PDr. Time
January 12, 2009
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CJYman: Moreover, as I have already explained, operating on best explanations, CSI rules out chance and law because it is both highly improbable and specified and not merely described by regularities (algorithmic compressibility). I don't know where you got the idea that algorithmic compressibility does not by itself entail specificity (along with CINDE, TRACT, and DELIM of course). Do you think that something extremely simple but non-functional, like a rectangular monolith, is not specified? You're incorrect in thinking that specificity's role is to rule out law/regularity/necessity. Check out the EF. The mathematics behind Dembski’s formulation of a COnservation of Information Theorem, and the subsequent work on active information seems to back up the hypothesis that neither CSI much less intelligence can be “purchased” without previous intelligence. Needless to say, it doesn't seem that way to me at all, but I don't have any issues to bring up that haven't already been pointed out by Dembski's critics. Simply put, something with the amount of high improbability and functional specificity as intelligence requires at least that same amount of high improbability and specificity to produce said intelligence. You and I can discuss this if you wish, however, please refrain from implying that it is a mere assumption. Where did I imply that? If I were to talk about conservation of CSI I would say that it's simply wrong, not that it's an assumption. For one thing, specificity is relative to a specifying agent and can easily increase via a deterministic function, eg a decrypter. (And yes, I know how Dembski says that the encrypted string is specified in terms of the encrypter and the decrypted string, but that requires that the specifying agent know about the encrypter, so the LCI is not universal. It also requires that the encrypter have zero descriptional complexity in order to conserve specificity.)R0b
January 12, 2009
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"Evolution names Adam`s wife as a deer John.??Dr. Time
January 12, 2009
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Joseph: Is there ANY data which demonstrates chance and law can account for living organisms? No. I don't know whether you're saying that chance and law can't account for the behavior of living organisms or the origin of living organisms. Regardless, data has nothing to do with my question, which was a hypothetical IF. I explicitly said that I wasn't claiming that this was the case. So this all boils down to what you “don’t see”? That is not a scientific stance. Of course it's not a scientific stance. I saying that I can't see how your position is not metaphysical. If you could state your position in scientific terms, then I would see.R0b
January 12, 2009
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Joseph: As I have said many times- nature, operating freely, ie WITHOUT agency involvement. Does anyone else here consider this a scientific definition? If so, could someone please tell me what branch of science I can research to find the definition of "agency"? I think that this kind of vague and equivocal terminology is partly to blame for the poor communication between Joseph, CJYman, and myself. Some statements also confuse me as to whether they refer to the behavior of a system or the origin of the system. CJYman's response to Dembski's point about the redundancy of "law+chance" showed that we're talking right past each other. I don't know how to interpret the terms "law", "chance", "intelligence", "foresight", and "design" in a way that renders this discussion coherent. Maybe answers to a few questions will help me to concretize the terms: (In the following questions, I use the word "computer" to mean the whole package of hardware+software.) 1. If a computer can make predictions, does it have foresight? 2. If a computer can decide from different courses of action based on its predictions, does it have intelligence? 3. If the above computer can also improve its track record over time by forming generalizations from its own experience, does it have intelligence? 4. Can a computer design software? 5. If not, why not? 6. If so, should the resulting software be attributed to law+chance, or design? 7. Is the next state of a human brain determined by its current state plus any inputs from sensory receptors, Penfield's electrode, etc.? 8. If not, is there also an indeterministic factor in the state transition? 9. Are there any factors that are neither deterministic nor indeterministic? 10. How do we determine that humans are designers and not merely conduits of CSI? Thanks in advance.R0b
January 12, 2009
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Want to know something that has to be one of the most kept"INTELLIGENT"secrets of our governments?Space travel.I don`t have an inside visual imagination,but for those who do,imagine what kind of electronics they say they have to measure "ACCURATELY" enough the measurement there in miles,in in calendar time,in fuel capacity,in visual and audio contact,in robotic perfect control and in radar directional homed in on what headed to the "OUTER LIMITS" successfully televised believed and Cellphone use in places in adip won`t work because satelites aren`t developed yet to help the stupids back here on EARTH?!Would that be considered an "INTELLIGENT DESIGN to fool the STUPID NATURAL?" I am glad that that I am a STUPID CRAZY and not considering myself as an INTELLIGENT DESIGN.It`s kind of like sending tax dollars to HELL to put toward distinguishing an eternal fire that evaporates liquid half way there.Wonder if we could trade some metal GARBAGE and GOLDEN TACKS for some of Hell`s fire sit under some donkeys behinds to change their empty brains that an economy needs transportation systems,friendly,safely useable as a "TOP" priority,atleast here in Canada where they should also be GOLDEN.They can travel to the outer limits with their golden jets for very little fuel(ALSO need to generate heatvery cold>and electricity for headlights to see in the dark for their generators)."INTELLIGENT DESIGN"helped the wasteful while the stupid natural could only look on. "INTELLIGENT DESIGN just keeps getting more desireable to defend and be proud of,doesn`t it? ^$$^Dr. Time
January 11, 2009
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It's right next door to the restaurant at the end of the universe. The home of endless endings.dgosse
January 11, 2009
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I kind of wonder what kind of a tool was used by intelligence to tell it self it is indeed intelligent.Is it contagious? I think they make you join MENSA 8^>dgosse
January 11, 2009
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Hi Sal Gal I believe that the philosophy of mind is very important As do I. I am pleased to see that we are approaching common ground. At the risk of sounding silly, philosophies of mind affect how we think about ourselves and our place in the world. Some philosophies have unpleasant consequences. (In fact, consciousness is at the center of my personal philosophy.) In what sense? Do you have a public philosophy? If so, how does one affect the other? Mind, like consciousness, in intrinsically private. There is no empirical observation of the mind. If by empirical you mean we cannot pick it up and weigh it and measure, then yes, "there is no empirical observation of mind" in that sense, however... The fact that you and I can give similar verbal reports (which make for empirical data) on our private (subjective) experiences does not make the experiences themselves empirically (publicly, “objectively”) accessible. I suggest that making a verbal (or written) report does make the experience or observation public. There are indeed certain phenomona associated with the experience that are subjective, such as the personal thrill we feel at a successful experiment, but the logical chain of thought and physical result the experiment are both open to public scrutiny. 1. Reduction of mind to chemistry is nothing but pursuit of a philosophical agenda. And it is quite a muddled pursuit, at that, for if mind reduces to chemistry, then there really is no need for the term mind at all. I couldn't have said it better myself, in fact, I have often said it far less succinctly. 8^> The sad fact is that such reductionist ideas are common currency in what passes for "intellectual" thought today. It leads to some rather bizarre conversations... (You have a mind. Do not. Yes, really, you do. Do not! Do too! Do not!) 2. I contend that all Truth is subjective (intrinsically private), and that the “objective reality” we arrive at by social processes (e.g., science) is merely a body of shared belief. Ar you absolutely sure about that? Is that a True statement? Does the observation that all Truth is subjective assert that the Truth I believe is also purely subjective? If so, then there is at least one truth that is objective and universal. If we can uncover one universal truth then the potential exists that we might uncover more universal truths. ...and that the “objective reality” we arrive at by social processes (e.g., science) is merely a body of shared belief. Please, reconsider this statement. There are implications embedded in this that you cannot (or at least, should not) embrace. Particularly if you are a scientist seeking to uncover truths about the world in which we live or a teacher imparting knowledge to the next generation.dgosse
January 11, 2009
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dgosse (151): I believe that the philosophy of mind is very important. (In fact, consciousness is at the center of my personal philosophy.) But not every subject of interest can be investigated empirically. To devalue mind or consciousness because it is not a scientific entity is to grossly overvalue science. Mind, like consciousness, in intrinsically private. There is no empirical observation of the mind. The fact that you and I can give similar verbal reports (which make for empirical data) on our private (subjective) experiences does not make the experiences themselves empirically (publicly, "objectively") accessible.
However, if mind is reducable to chemistry then we have no foundation of which to suppose that the theories we develop are representative of any objective reality.
1. Reduction of mind to chemistry is nothing but pursuit of a philosophical agenda. And it is quite a muddled pursuit, at that, for if mind reduces to chemistry, then there really is no need for the term mind at all. This is just an underhanded way of asserting philosophical naturalism. In contrast, a methodological naturalist says that mind can be addressed in science only with operational definition in terms of empirically observable phenomena. There is no claim as to what mind "really is," but as to what science really does. 2. I contend that all Truth is subjective (intrinsically private), and that the "objective reality" we arrive at by social processes (e.g., science) is merely a body of shared belief. I have the capacity to recognize truth in another person's account of private experience, and so do you. But the process by which we do so is nothing like empirical science. This perhaps gives a better idea of why I value religion, philosophy, art, music, and literature more highly in my personal life than science. Again, science is a workhorse in blinders.Sal Gal
January 11, 2009
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Hi Sal Gal Nor can you with an autistic savant. A generalization about humans does not necessarily hold true for every individual human. If I write that men are taller than women it is fallacious for you to argue that George is only 4'6'' so men are not taller than women. Care to dehumanize those people? I have not said that persons lacking apparent rational capacities are not human, only that humans, all other things being equal, are the only creatures that appear to exibit the qualities of rational thought (intelligence). And you can’t train a human to do the criminal investigative work dogs do. Humans are not as “intelligent” as dogs in olfactory processing. As someone once said, you train animals and you teach humans. I can't do mathematical calculations as fast as the computer I am using, does that make the computer intelligent? What about my adding machine? If you are not familiar with the elaborate structure of the mounds that blind, individually “dumb” termites produce through “collective intelligence,” you might want to look into it before responding. And I am certain the blueprints they work from are equally astounding. Do humans stand outside nature, or do they not? Isn't that the 64,000 dollar question? The “definition” also makes me think of Yul Brenner in “The King and I”: “Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…” Do you actually believe that this clears things up? What, specifically, do you find objectionable to the definition, other than the irrelevant and apparently emotive memory of "sitting on a hard pew on a Sunday morning, listening to a preacher invoke Saint Webster to pronounce the “real meaning” of a pivotal word in the sermon." Is there some particular objection to the definition? It tells you nothing about what I actually do. I have no doubt that you are extremely intelligent and well educated. No matter how solid your reasoning, false premises will lead to false conclusions, and one of the false premises is that intelligence is quantitative rather than qualitative. "The least error in the beginning is magnified a thousandfold in the end." Aristotle Have you ever read J. Budziwzewski "Escape From Nililism". It can be found on the web. Here he writes of himself; "Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit."dgosse
January 10, 2009
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Hi Sal Gal I can appreciate your reluctance to commit yourself to yet another poorly structured definition of "intelligence" when I consider some of the nonsensical ideas about mind, intelligence, and knowledge that are presently being passed off as "scientific", but the definition I have in mind (if there is such a thing as "mind") is one that has been recognized by both philosophers and lay people for thousands of years. It is not some new attempt to squeeze the human capacity to grasp concepts and abstractions from nature into a self referentially incoherent materialistic framework. AI may someday be feasible, but I remember watching a TV program when it was in its heyday wherein the researchers were beginning to discover the limitations of their constructs. Interestingly, as they tried to mimic human thought and action, they were learning a great deal about human cognition and perception. There were repeated references to the astoundingly complex integration of human cognitive systems. In a word, they had pretty much discovered intelligence is something more than adding more RAM or a bigger hard drive. Unfortuantely, some have responded by downgrading intelligence to the parlor trick of a Turing test. If we can develop a program that mimics intelligence well enough to fool someone in another room, then we can call it intelligence. Do you see the contradiction in that statement? We must know what intelligence is before we can determine if a program can mimic it. Which presupposes that we do know what intelligence is. The "hard problem" of mind and intelligence is that if we admit that it is what it appears to be, then we find it has metaphysical implications that subsantially discredit the materialist framework. Much better if we can reduce it to a parlor trick. We see the same contradiction in some of the theories of mind, wherein the theorist explains that mind is nothing more than a buzz caused by the synaptical chemistry of the brain. However, if mind is reducable to chemistry then we have no foundation of which to suppose that the theories we develop are representative of any objective reality. The same could be said for Dawkins' speculative "meme" which, presumably, is responsible for his claiming that memes exist, however, if his speculation about memes has substance then it abolishes the rational mind. I do not claim that the reductionists are necessarily wrong, only that if they are right then there is no "reason" to believe that their theories have any relation to "reality." Each of them has used their intelligence to construct a theory that denies the existence of the that intelligence. Personally, I have invested too much time in thinking to endorse their view.dgosse
January 10, 2009
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dgosse,
And yet, there exists a qualitative difference between human intelligence and the “intelligence” exibited by the beasts of the field. You cannot sit down with your cat and discuss the fine points of a definition of intelligence.
Nor can you with an autistic savant. Care to dehumanize those people? And you can't train a human to do the criminal investigative work dogs do. Humans are not as "intelligent" as dogs in olfactory processing. It has nothing to do with noses, and everything to do with olfactory bulbs of brains. Humans cannot build structures that are as large, relative to their body size, as African termites do. If you are not familiar with the elaborate structure of the mounds that blind, individually "dumb" termites produce through "collective intelligence," you might want to look into it before responding. How, precisely, did you earn those scare quotes you put around the "intelligence" of non-human species? ID cannot have its "intelligence is natural" cake and eat it too. Do humans stand outside nature, or do they not? Or are you going to slip into the mode of telling me what is "really intelligent"?
intelligence–noun1. capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.
Evidently you ARE trying to tell me what's "really intelligent." Reminds me of sitting on a hard pew on a Sunday morning, listening to a preacher invoke Saint Webster to pronounce the "real meaning" of a pivotal word in the sermon. The "definition" also makes me think of Yul Brenner in "The King and I": "Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera..." Do you actually believe that this clears things up? One of the points in my case against the scientific utility of intelligence is that scientists always have more specific terms to apply to what they are investigating. I have studied learning, not intelligence, in humans, rats, and computers. I have implemented, and had my students implement, various approaches to knowledge representation and reasoning in computers. My earliest work in "machine intelligence" was in natural language processing, and that segued into research in speech recognition and learning. The term "machine intelligence" does no more than identify my research area. It tells you nothing about what I actually do. I've focused on "machine intelligence" here, but I can tell you that psychologists usually identify what they study with a term more specific than intelligence.Sal Gal
January 10, 2009
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dgosse (141): Excellent post, not because I agree, but because your objections are clear and well articulated.
Do you ever find yourselves confronted by an assertion so patently absurd that you find yourself at a loss for words? That is what I feel when I read this discussion on the definition of “intelligence”.
I find patently absurd the notion that every concept we invoke in casual discourse makes for a useful scientific construct. If science addresses everything we experience, then it addresses nothing well. That is why I use the image of a "workhorse in blinders" so often for science. I have seen so many "scientific definitions" of intelligence fly 50 feet, crash, and burn. In fact, it is more or less standard today to teach artificial intelligence students how radically the definition of AI has changed over time. In the 1950s, translators of higher-level programming languages were sometimes referred to as "automatic programming" systems, and were treated as intelligent systems because they did what had previously been done by "intelligent" human programmers. Now no one considers a programming-language translator as an example of an "intelligent system" today. There are scads of similar examples. Someone eventually "defined" artificial intelligence as the attempt to get computers to do what only humans are presently able to do. "Intelligence" is a moving target. "Intelligent systems" don't seem intelligent when we understand how they work. To boil that down, I am saying that intelligence has a long history of resistance to definition. The claim that any scientist who wants to make much of the term carries a heavy definitional burden is not rhetorical contention, but a matter of experience. Most of my graduate training was in so-called artificial intelligence. My advantage over some of my colleagues is not merely that I've watched philosophically half-baked ideas about what would make a computational system "really intelligent" come and go for 25 years, but that I began with a psychologist's rigorous perspective on the concept as a hypothetical construct.Sal Gal
January 10, 2009
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I have used the word bias many times in this thread, and my general point is that discovery and learning require bias. The feeling in the seat of your pants that bias is wrong in science is wrong. The empirical observations you choose to make are a matter of bias, and what you allow them to "say" to you is also a matter of bias. The uninspected bias is not worth applying.Sal Gal
January 10, 2009
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Methinks the laddie doth protest too rudely. My main point, highly relevant to this thread, and the one that cries out to be addressed, is that there is nothing "intelligent" in the signals SETI hopes to detect -- not in the signals themselves. Every physical search process -- and SETI certainly implements one -- operates with limited resources. (The costs of search are definitely not limited to "information costs.") The bias in the SETI search for certain simple signals is quintessentially Bayesian (subjective). SETI researchers exhibit prior belief that the chances are good (think of the speculative Drake equation) that some E.T. civilization has received radio signals from earth and is trying to transmit a radio signal to earth that we will suspect is technological in origin. There is a huge element of "we think that they think that we think that they think..." (i.e., reflection predicated on similarity of us and them). So, as DaveScot points out, SETI does not have the magical ability to explore exhaustively a huge search space. It must somehow bias its search, and that bias comes from "trying to get into the mind of E.T." How would the E.T. civilization help SETI with its search? Well, what alternative is there but to ponder how we would proceed if the table were turned? If E.T. thinks in ways that are utterly alien to us, then the problem of second-guessing him/her/it is insoluble, and selection of a search bias is futile. A carrier wave or an optical burst can be detected with a low-cost trial. So the SETI search is biased in favor of low-cost trials under the assumption that E.T. would make the search cheap for SETI. BTW, it makes sense for SETI to assume that an E.T. civilization is not willing to devote huge resources to contacting us.Sal Gal
January 10, 2009
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IOW, see if a filter based on background noise and an arbitrary collection of laws applied to more background noise and an arbitrary collection of laws can produce CSI, much less intelligence.CJYman
January 10, 2009
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Rob: "I don’t know what you mean by that. If intelligent agency derives strictly from brain activity, which consists of particles acting according to the laws of physics, then it follows that intelligent agency reduces to law and chance. I’m not saying this is the case, but I don’t see how you can assume an alternative without crossing into metaphysics." I've already responded to this, IMO adequately in #138. Even if intelligence is perfectly physical and operates according to law and chance, there is still something extra that needs to be accounted for. The thing that needs to be accounted for is the highly improbable and functionally specified organization necessary for the brain to produce foresight. This type of organization has been mathematically quantified as CSI. Until it is shown that law and chance, absent previous intelligence can account for CSI (much less intelligence itself) we can only invoke intelligence (as I have defined it above) to explain CSI or further intelligence since foresight is routinely used to generated CSI. Moreover, as I have already explained, operating on best explanations, CSI rules out chance and law because it is both highly improbable and specified and not merely described by regularities (algorithmic compressibility). In reality, the only option we have available to us is intelligence which routinely does produce CSI and intelligent systems, because its organization (foundation of CSI) allows for it. Is there another viable option that can be brought forward? According to Dembski's formulation of Conservation of Information and work on active information, there seems to be a no go theorem as to what law and chance can produce absent previous intelligence. Rob: "A demonstration of what? You’re the one making the assumption, not me." A demonstration of law and chance absent previous intelligence generating intelligence or even the smallest amount of CSI. Joseph and my assumption is well founded on Dembski's formulation of COnservation of Information and the on going work with active information. Simply put, something with the amount of high improbability and functional specificity as intelligence requires at least that same amount of high improbability and specificity to produce said intelligence. You and I can discuss this if you wish, however, please refrain from implying that it is a mere assumption. At the very worst it is a mathematically based hypothesis which is falsifiable and so far has not produced any false positive. That much can not even be said of the SETI program, yet it is considered science. Joseph: "However I challenge you to provide a testable hypothesis based on undirected processes." Rob: "I would need to know, in scientific terms, what you mean by “undirected”. As far as I know, hypotheses that entail probability distributions should be testable for any repeatable process." Any combination of chance and law absent the application of previous foresight is seen as undirected for the purposes of the ID Hypothesis.CJYman
January 10, 2009
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Ya see an intelligent agency is a PHYSICAL thing.
I don’t know what you mean by that.
Humans are intelligent agencies, as are beavers, ants, termites, bees, etc. Can we see them? Yes. Can we touch them? Yes. They are physical things.
If intelligent agency derives strictly from brain activity, which consists of particles acting according to the laws of physics, then it follows that intelligent agency reduces to law and chance.
It doesn't follow at all. To be reducible to chance and law means that chance and law can account for it. Is there ANY data which demonstrates chance and law can account for living organisms? No. And just what about those laws? can chance and law account for them? No. I’m not saying this is the case, but I don’t see how you can assume an alternative without crossing into metaphysics. So this all boils down to what you "don't see"? That is not a scientific stance. However I challenge you to provide a testable hypothesis based on undirected processes.
I would need to know, in scientific terms, what you mean by “undirected”.
As I have said many times- nature, operating freely, ie WITHOUT agency involvement.Joseph
January 10, 2009
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Both ID and SETI specify demarcation points. ID's is based on what can be generated by current knowledge of chance and law and -only- then infer design by a process by elimination. SETI's demarcation point is based upon what frequencies can be generated by chance and law and -only- then using this background knowledge to infer design using a subset of specified frequencies that a extraterrestrial civilization would most likely use (again, a process by elimination) "I gave clear evidence from a SETI source that SETI operates by trying to get into the mind of E.T. There are a gazillion signals radio-astronomers can tell you they have not observed, and do not expect to observe, and SETI is not looking for all of them. The project has decided that it would transmit a particular kind of physically anomalous signal in order to get E.T.’s attention, and is assuming that E.T. will think the same way if he/she/it wants to contact us. This fits ever so neatly with what Steve Fuller has written about trying to get into the mind of God." SETI makes assumptions and so does ID. Its a non-starter to apply any tests on biological functions that don't do something human intelligence is not already familiar with (thats not to say that tests cannot be performed via non familiarity). For example, if ID didn't already know something about complex systems and processes but knew about a bacterial flagellum or a ATP synthase ID would not bother making inferences as to its source. But since we already have background knowledge about complex systems that intelligence can and does produce everyday then ID becomes viable and testable since an additional variable (what we know as "intelligence") can and must be added to the equation. Same with SETI, if SETI had no background knowledge on types of signals intelligence can produce then neither the signals could be propagated by SETI nor detected by extraterrestrial civilizations. Some priori knowledge is used in both cases as to what intelligence can presently produce and what chance and law can presently produce. I don't see whats so hard to understand about that.ab
January 10, 2009
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dgosse....thank you.Upright BiPed
January 9, 2009
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Do you ever find yourselves confronted by an assertion so patently absurd that you find yourself at a loss for words? That is what I feel when I read this discussion on the definition of "intelligence". Presumably, the people writing these absurdities consider themselves intelligent, and no doubt they are, but if you reason from incoherent premises you will arrive at incoherent conclusions, no matter how sound your method. Modern intelletual thought is primarily reductionist, quite literally a "can't see the forest for the trees" type of thinking. C. S. Lewis called it "nothing buttery" thinking. So life is "nothing but" complex chemistry which has led to an inability to define what is life. Mind is "nothing but" a emanation of the electo-chemical firing of synapses in the brain, so mind is an illusion. Intelligence is "nothing but" the sum of synaptical in activity, therefore difference in intelligence is quantitatve. Hence the rush to measure the size of the brain case in every new hominid discovery to calculate its relative intelligence. We might call it neo-phrenology. If a worm has a few hundred thousand synapses and responds to stimuli, it is more "intelligent" than an amoeba with a few thousand such synapses and less intelligent than a dog with a few billion. It is entirely quantitative, there is no consideration of quality. And yet, there exists a qualitative difference between human intelligence and the "intelligence" exibited by the beasts of the field. You cannot sit down with your cat and discuss the fine points of a definition of intelligence. We don't find them writing books on the philosophy of life, and there is precious little evidence that they have a capacity for reflective thought. Should you seriously desire a definition of "intelligence" I took a virtual trip to "dictionary.com" and found this... intelligence–noun1. capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. To put this into context, consider the following quote from G. K. Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man" "It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree. For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature."dgosse
January 9, 2009
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Joseph: Ya see an intelligent agency is a PHYSICAL thing. I don't know what you mean by that. If intelligent agency derives strictly from brain activity, which consists of particles acting according to the laws of physics, then it follows that intelligent agency reduces to law and chance. I'm not saying this is the case, but I don't see how you can assume an alternative without crossing into metaphysics. Challenge it all you want but until you can provide a demonstration it is an empty challenge. A demonstration of what? You're the one making the assumption, not me. I'm not saying you're right or wrong, I'm just asking for your justification. However I challenge you to provide a testable hypothesis based on undirected processes. I would need to know, in scientific terms, what you mean by "undirected". As far as I know, hypotheses that entail probability distributions should be testable for any repeatable process.R0b
January 9, 2009
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Rob: "Asking a question like the following would be an example of approaching the subject metaphysically: After chance & law what is left besides intelligent agency?" That question is not metaphysical if you can measure chance as statistical randomness, measure chance and law as chaos with pockets of regularities (algorithmic compressibility), and measure chance, law, and intelligence as CSI. As long as you are clear in your definitions and measurements, you are not dealing in metaphysics.CJYman
January 9, 2009
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Rob: "Dembski’s approach to ID, on the other hand, hinges on the metaphysical nature of intelligence." Maybe intelligence does have a metaphysical nature, maybe it doesn't. That honestly doesn't concern me and according to the definition I use, it makes no difference to the subject of detecting intelligence. Rob: "If intelligence is reducible to law+chance, his filter doesn’t work." Not sure exactly how you are using the term "reducible." If law and chance absent previous intelligence can produce intelligence then yes, the filter does not work. This is why ID Theory is falsifiable. Rob: "If ID depends on the murky idea of libertarian free will, it’s not on very solid scientific footing IMO." I agree, and I see no reason why intelligent design need have anything to do with free will of any sort. The concept of intelligence relies more on foresight, which does exist whether we are free in our foresight or not. Rob: "I’m confused about whether we’re discussing “intelligence (foresight)” vs. “just law+chance” in the operation of a system or in the production of a system." Intelligence operates via law, chance, and CSI (highly improbable, specified organization of law and chance). The system then uses foresight to produce its effects. CJYman: But, what about those patterns which can be described by both high improbability and functional specificity (not mere regularity) thus ruling out both chance and law respectively as described mathematically? Rob: "If chance and law cover the entire entropic spectrum, then there is nothing else by definition. (Technically, chance covers the whole spectrum. As Dembski pointed out in both TDI and NFL, regularity is just a special case of chance, just like real numbers are a special case of complex numbers.)" Sure, technically, pure chance should be able to explain everything, but then we would have no understanding of law, cause and effect, or the intelligence necessary to write an essay. So, it comes down to finding the best explanation. Sure, we could say that our conversation is nothing but chance processes because of the high contingency of our conversation, but high contingency can also point to something else that we both know is necessary, alongside law and chance to produce this conversation -- that is foresight. What point to I wish to get across to you in the future and how do I manipulate matter and energy in order to accomplish that goal? Furthermore, the point I was attempting to get across to you is that high improbability along with specificity should eliminate chance. Furthermore, functional specificity (not mere regularity) eliminates law. So, once these two concepts of complexity and specificity are combined we should be able to eliminate both law and chance, *absent something else.* So far, no one has shown otherwise. So, what is that *something else* which needs to operate alongside chance and law to produce CSI? Rob: "Again, I challenge the assumption that foresight is not reducible to law and chance." And I ask you to provide any evidence that law and chance operating absent previous foresight can produce intelligence. If CSI can't even be created absent intelligence, how is intelligence to be created absent previous intelligence? The mathematics behind Dembski's formulation of a COnservation of Information Theorem, and the subsequent work on active information seems to back up the hypothesis that neither CSI much less intelligence can be "purchased" without previous intelligence.CJYman
January 9, 2009
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The project seeks to detect simple, but anomalous, signals that seem more likely to be of technological origin than some other origin.
They may be "happy" with that but if they detect something more complex are they going to ignore it? By your "logic" they would.Joseph
January 9, 2009
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Asking a question like the following would be an example of approaching the subject metaphysically: After chance & law what is left besides intelligent agency?
Why? Because YOU say so? Is THAT your argument- a declaration- and a bald one at that? Ya see an intelligent agency is a PHYSICAL thing. They exist in the PHYSICAL world. They leave PHYSICAL traces which can be detected via physical processes Or are you claiming that archaeology is a metaphysical venue?
Dembski’s approach to ID, on the other hand, hinges on the metaphysical nature of intelligence.
No, it does NOT. Ya see it is Wm Dembski who qualified the word "intelligence" to differentiate between optimal and apparent design.
But what does it mean to not be reducible to law+chance?
It means EXACTLY what I have been telling you. Let's see law & chance produce an automobile. Or heck, Stonehenge is made up of stones. Let's see chance & law put something like that together. Until then we do have an understanding of what nature, operating freely can and cannot do. And we have experience with what designing agencies can do. So we couple that knowledge to either come to a design inference or not.
Again, I challenge the assumption that foresight is not reducible to law and chance.
Challenge it all you want but until you can provide a demonstration it is an empty challenge. However I challenge you to provide a testable hypothesis based on undirected processes.Joseph
January 9, 2009
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