Intelligent design

[pgrmdave]

Originally Posted by TRoutMac

What, now "legitimate science" to you must include fortune-telling?

Scientific theories make predictions, that is how they are testable. Any theory which is untestable, is disregarded by science.

Originally Posted by TRoutMac

I.D. could be disproven, or at least "non-supported", if no similarities could be found between the things that humans with intelligence produce and the systems which are found in living organisms.

I have a two main problems with this idea.

1) Similar solutions will arise to fit similar problems.

Bats have wings to fly. Birds have wings to fly. Insects have wings to fly. However, this does not mean that they are related, but that the solution to the problem of flight is similar. Likewise, evolution suggests that some degree of order would be best for an organism and a population, which means that order would arise to the degree to which it provides an inheritable advantage. A human will design a system as orderly as it will produce an advantage.

2) Things other than life are complex.

Stars, planets without life, atomic structure, galaxies. All these things have a lot of complexity, and they exist through natural forces. Unless you are going to concede that all things must have been intelligently designed, thus leading to a force outside of the physical universe, then there is a logical problem there.


TRoutMAc, try reading Metamagical Themus, by Douglas Hofstader, in much of it he describes self-referential looping, such as the brain (a system of many unintelligent neurons which, in total, 'understands' its existance, and changes itself based on itself) and anthills (a system of many unintelligent ants which, in total, 'understands' its surroundings, and is able to functions on a much higher level than the individual). These ideas are much like that of evolution. Evolution seems intelligent in the same way that an anthill, when fully studied, seems intelligent.

[TRoutMac]

Damocles, you can be assured of one thing: If I want logic, I will most certainly not be looking for it in any of your posts. They contain nothing even vaguely related to logic.

You defy your own so-called "logic" every time you sit down at the computer and type a message to this board. If you actually believed that self-organization were possible, you wouldn't need to apply what is, I'm sure, your considerable intellect toward organizing your replies to me. They would just "happen".

You know instinctively that self-organization is a contradiction in terms, and you reveal that whenever you clean your kitchen or type a message to this forum, or even when all you do is THINK. Organization, the sort of which I am speaking, only happens when intelligence acts. That is demonstrable every second of every day.

[pgrmdave]

Then how do you explain the presence of the solar system? Unless you attribute it to intelligence, you claim that it couldn't be organized.

[damocles]

Originally Posted by TRoutMac

Damocles, you can be assured of one thing: If I want logic, I will most certainly not be looking for it in any of your posts. They contain nothing even vaguely related to logic.

Are you getting personal?

If so then you've lost the argument.

You defy your own so-called "logic" every time you sit down at the computer and type a message to this board. If you actually believed that self-organization were possible, you wouldn't need to apply what is, I'm sure, your considerable intellect toward organizing your replies to me. They would just "happen".

Nonsense. I am one statistical result of 12-18 billion years of a massive self-organizing system. Denials to the contrary wirthout evidence are unproven. Present evidence instead of self-organizing rhetoric.

You know instinctively that self-organization is a contradiction in terms, and you reveal that whenever you clean your kitchen or type a message to this forum, or even when all you do is THINK. Organization, the sort of which I am speaking, only happens when intelligence acts. That is demonstrable every second of every day.

Bull.
Ants.
Spiders.
Bees.
Termites.
Beavers.

See if you can make the connection.

I'm done with you here, too.

[TRoutMac]

Originally Posted by pgrmdave

Then how do you explain the presence of the solar system? Unless you attribute it to intelligence, you claim that it [i]couldn't[\i] be organized.

I attribute its organization to an intelligence, absolutely. Nothing inconsistent about my position.

[TRoutMac]

Originally Posted by damocles

Are you getting personal?

Don't get self-righteous on me now… You've expressed that my logic is in error a number of times. Your thinking turns logic on its head, and that's my whole problem with Darwinism. It flies in the face of everyday common sense and logic.

Originally Posted by damocles

Nonsense. I am one statistical result of 12-18 billion years of a massive self-organizing system. Denials to the contrary wirthout evidence are unproven. Present evidence instead of self-organizing rhetoric.

Restating your hypothesis is not proof, or even evidence of your hypothesis. If you want me to believe in self-organization, then you show me an office that organizes itself. The burden is on you… the evidence AGAINST self-organization is everywhere. You accept purely on the basis of faith, and against all of that evidence, that you are a statistical result of billions of years of self-organization. You cannot prove that is true, you've just decided that you'd rather believe that than anything else. And hey… you're free to do that. It's no skin off my nose.

But let's not play games here… both sides believe in the eternality of something and in each case, that belief is ultimately based on faith. You believe that matter and energy are eternal, I believe an Intelligent Designer is eternal. Same thing. Question is, which concept is supported by the evidence?

[damocles]

Originally Posted by TRoutMac

Don't get self-righteous on me now… You've expressed that my logic is in error a number of times. Your thinking turns logic on its head, and that's my whole problem with Darwinism. It flies in the face of everyday common sense and logic.

Restating your hypothesis is not proof, or even evidence of your hypothesis. If you want me to believe in self-organization, then you show me an office that organizes itself. The burden is on you… the evidence AGAINST self-organization is everywhere. You accept purely on the basis of faith, and against all of that evidence, that you are a statistical result of billions of years of self-organization. You cannot prove that is true, you've just decided that you'd rather believe that than anything else. And hey… you're free to do that. It's no skin off my nose.

But let's not play games here… both sides believe in the eternality of something and in each case, that belief is ultimately based on faith. You believe that matter and energy are eternal, I believe an Intelligent Designer is eternal. Same thing. Question is, which concept is supported by the evidence?

1. Quit using the word eternality. It presupposes an an assumptive identity not proven.
2. I've been careful to third person until now since to address error by name introduces personal bias.
3. Evidence has been supplied with every example I wrote.
4. Refusal to refute or engage the counter-evidence supplied point by specific point(something which I have done in those rare cases when the instances of repetitive false analogy was the evidence presented) is the hallmark of a position taken that is untenable. Instead there is usually the appeal to a statement of truth followed by another false analogy introducing more spurious argument instead of addressing the central question.

Latest specific case is "office".

Ridiculous.
Do you understand the concept of "division of labor" or "swarm intelligence"?

Try this;

Swarm Intelligence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

Swarm intelligence (SI) is an artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behaviour in decentralised, self-organised, systems. The expression "swarm intelligence" was introduced by Beni & Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems (see also cellular automata).

SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment. Although there is normally no centralised control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local interactions between such agents often lead to the emergence of global behaviour. Examples of systems like this can be found in nature, including ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacteria molding and fish schooling.

Two of the most successful swarm intelligence techniques currently in existence are Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). ACO is a metaheuristic that can be used to find approximate solutions to difficult combinatorial optimization problems. In ACO artificial ants build solutions by moving on the problem graph and they, mimicking real ants, deposit artificial pheromone on the graph in such a way that future artificial ants can build better solutions. ACO has been successfully applied to an impressive number of optimization problems. PSO is a global minimisation technique for dealing with problems in which a best solution can be represented as a point or surface in an n-dimensional space. Hypotheses are plotted in this space and seeded with an initial velocity, as well as a communication channel between the particles. Particles then move through the solution space, and are evaluated according to some fitness criterion after each timestep. Over time, particles are accelerated towards those particles within their communication grouping which have better fitness values. The main advantage of such an approach over other global minimisation strategies such as simulated annealing is that the large number of members that make up the particle swarm make the technique impressively resilient to the problem of local minima.

Here is a hint; about six thousand years ago, an animal started exhibiting the symptoms of that kind of intelligence. Prior to that it was more or less like its cousins, the other greatr apes.

Now then.....

Bull.
Ants.
Spiders.
Bees.
Termites.
Beavers.

Except for the first animal(which was a patent reference to the logic that the opposition was marshalling) all of these animals are exhibiters of the above evidence to the specific case that they use their own body excretions as glue to build their habitats(hives and colonies.) as they exhibit the symptoms of swarm intelligence.

Do beavers file office papers? No. But they do organize and plan logistically; that is by INSTINCT they estimate how many trees to gnaw to make their dams. They don't waste. Is that intelligence? No. Is that planning? No. Is that instinct? Yes.

A human animal does the same when he/she uses the hardwired abilities in himself/herself to guess about the new and the unknown. Success and that old human hivemind kicks in when the survivor of the lucky guess passes on the "found" solution. That is "cultural" evolution-and is comparable to instinctual hive mind evolution-only on a vaster "human" scale.

[TRoutMac]

Originally Posted by damocles

1. Quit using the word eternality. It presupposes an assumptive identity not proven.

I'll continue to use the word that's appropriate regardless of what you tell me to do. You believe, apparently, that matter and energy always have been, and that you shouldn't need to explain how matter and energy came to be in the first place. To you, they're a given. That's eternality. You can call it something else if you like, but a rose by any other name is still a rose.

Again, we're dancing around the "flavor" of science that enjoys heavy favor here… methodological naturalism.

MN either presupposes that there can be no Intelligent Designer, or simply chooses to pretend as much and then ignores or reinterprets any evidence which would point toward an intelligent designer.

This means that under the weight of methodological naturalism, science is not concerned with actually finding truth about anything. Instead, it becomes concerned with defending its own presuppositions, regardless of what the truth is.

The philosophy of methodological naturalism insists that there are only natural explanations for natural phenomena, but acknowledges that it has not found all of the explanations yet. This raises a rather obvious question that needs to be answered:

If science hasn't found all the explanations yet, then how does science know that there are only natural explanations?

Not surprisingly, (at least not to me) I.D. looks more and more like REAL science, and MN looks more and more like a bunch of panicked scientists trying desperately to avoid admitting how dreadfully wrong they are.

[Theophilus]

Originally Posted by damocles

I have wondered about Intelligent Design.
How could a rational man possibly argue such a position?
That position can be argued if you approach it properly.
But you would have to junk all pre-conceived notions and abandon any idea that there has to be an ntelligent designer required to produce a self-organizing system.

Instead you must set the parameters for what is possible.
Let us turn to a little logic and see if we can find a circumstance in which the intelligent designer could fit our current understanding of the way reality works.

First, can an intelligent designer exist undetected?
This is possible if the intelligent designer and the intelligent design are one and the same. Exactly one and the same. If there is any deviation in the two sets; then there is information transfer between the two sets and the boundary or the merge between the sets will be seen by an observer.

Second, can an intelligent designer hide in plain sight?
Possible if the intelligent designer built the universe and then moved off leaving it to self-organize, based on a set of pre-set instructions. However he leaves behind two boundary conditions, that an observer would detect eventually in the structure of the creation; even if the observer was on the inside of the creation looking out. On top of that, the very nature of the two boundary conditions would rapidly reveal the exact size and composition of the intelligent designer bringing up the question of what created it?

Third, can an intelligent designer act in plain sight and be undetected.
Not possible. If an intelligent designer changes local created conditions and the observer is present; the observer will notice local condition violations immediately and conclude that there is something screwy occuring.

Fourth, can one even argue that an observer trapped inside a creation can seek for an intelligent designer and prove or disprove the proposition? If you read this, then you obviously know the answer to that question.

Fifth, could an observer detect an intelligent designer if it was an A=A congruence with its creation?(Based on the first condition.) Yes. But the requirement is that the creation and the intelligent designer have an edge or a boundary and be finite. This is so that a reflexive symmetry can be tested and refuted.
Tests
-Violations of any standard universal local condition.(Not seen to date.)
-Discovery of a codified language built into structure that is not explained by chaos theory, principles of self-organized systems, or simple statistical variance.(None of those limiters has been exceeded to date.)
-Discovery of another universe that provides clear data of preset organizational principles.(This is enormously difficult as it requires more than one intelligent designer!)

Based on the above conditions, if that intelligent designer is oiut there, then it must be;
-congruous to creation.(A=A.)
-totally inactive as to present modification of the preset conditions it imposes on its creation.(Call this the blooming flower postulate.)
-not violating local universal conditions.(No miracles folks.)
-be a finite being limited to the existence parameters of its creation.(Remember the intelligent designer has to be exactly congruent to its creation in order to escape easy detection.A=A.).

Given all of the above, is it any wonder that the Occam's Razor crowd looks upon intelligent design with skepticism?

All of your questions and answers are based on a foundational assumption that the natural order is not created; that your intellect is both sufficient to apprehend the nature of experience and that it is legislative for what is possible. This at the same time that you hold to a purely contingent system of brute factuality which makes predication impossible.

Occam's razor has nothing to do with the truth of a proposition. It is frequently used on the mistaken notion that if someone can propose an explanation of the natural order apart from the creator, such explanation must be preferred because it is "simpler." This is a complete misrepresentation of Occam's meaning.

BTW, I am not a supporter of ID or Scientific Creationism. I'm just a Christian, i.e., I accept creation on the authority of God's word. Whether ID is a legitimate topic for scientific investigation, it, like all theistic "proofs" does not lead to the God of scripture.

[Theophilus]

Originally Posted by damocles

Here is a hint; about six thousand years ago, an animal started exhibiting the symptoms of that kind of intelligence. Prior to that it was more or less like its cousins, the other greatr apes.

Is this a scientific statement? What observations have you made and what experiments have you conducted to arrive at such?

Six thousand years puts it out of the range of observation and, as far as I'm aware, there are no written records. Unless, ..."Dear descendants 6000 years from now; we just wanted you to know that, prior to this time, we acted like our cousins the great apes, but now, we don't. Your's truly, Alley Oop."