Here is one of the more essays I wrote based on discussions I’ve had hereon and on other sites like Pandas Thumb. I think this is one of the more appropriate essays for discussions here and it also happens to be one I feel is fully finished at this point. Well…I’m happy with it, but clearly I may edit it a bit given constructive criticism… 🙂
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I haven’t seen much press on this lately, but back in the late 1980s, Creationists – a slice of Christians who hold that the creation of the universe, Earth, and all living things on Earth were created by God exactly as described in the Christian Bible and that the Earth is roughly 10,000 years old…tops – tried an end around to the 1987 Supreme Court decision (Edwards v. Aguillard) barring the teaching of Creation Science in public schools. The attempted end-around was called Intelligent Design (ID).
ID, boiled down, is essentially a dressed up version of William Paley’s The Watch and The Watchmaker argument for the existence of God, or rather, a slightly gussied up Teleological Argument for the Existence of God. Paley’s argument goes like this: if you stumble upon a rock in the woods, you could reasonably surmise that it had been there, in that state, forever (keep in mind that Paley wrote his analogy in 1802 and was not familiar with what we now know about geology and in particular plate tectonics and erosion and similar forces. So, he can be forgiven for thinking that some items of the universe (like planets and stars) and the Earth (like soil, rocks, mountains, rivers, land masses, and so forth) exist unchanged forever) as a simple object of nature. By contrast, if you stumble upon a watch, you would not think that this item had been there forever, but rather you’d likely think that this item reflected the intent of a creator and, in particular given its complex parts working in intricate harmony, functions specifically for a purpose the creator designed it for. Given this, by analogy one can reasonably look at the universe and, seeing its complex interactions working in intricate harmony, infer it too must be designed and conclude, therefore, there is an ultimate Designer.
All Teleological Arguments rely on the same basic argument: certain features and functions of the world exhibit complexity that appears far too harmonious and intricate to have occurred by accident and thus must have been intelligently designed. Ergo…God.
It’s helpful to understand a bit about the history and use of the concept to better understand the application of teleology in theology, but it’s not absolutely necessary. That said, here are a definition and a brief summary:
Teleology comes from the Greek telos, meaning end (as in goal or purpose), and logos, meaning reason. So, teleology is about understanding the purpose of things. In its most basic form, teleology is the study of the purpose that phenomena serve rather than the cause by which they arise in order to provide an explanation for the phenomena. In other words, teleologists hold that the purpose for the sky being blue is more useful in understanding aspects of the world than studying and understanding optics and the Rayleigh Diffusion Effect. I admit, I’ve had no luck digging up a teleological explanation for the sky being blue, but apparently there used to be some popular ones back before modern science’s explanations. The point is, teleology attempts to address ‘why’ things occur, as opposed to scientific approaches that attempt to answer ‘how’ things occur. It’s also worth understanding that teleology, particularly as popularized by Aristotle and Plato in their day, was a reflection by analogy of the fact that nearly all human endeavors are goal-oriented and purpose driven. Thus by analogy, Aristotle saw the universe as rational and purposeful – analogous to human rational and purposeful behavior – and thus felt that all phenomena can only fully be understood when one considers and appreciates the purpose of the various phenomena.
There are a number of issues I have with teleological arguments and perspectives, but I’m going to focus on four main issues here.
First and foremost, technically there is no actual argument in the teleological approach to the existence of God as it’s simply a tautology and thus question begging. If your philosophy’s premise assumes that all things have purpose and goals, using that philosophy to argue for a goal-oriented and purpose-creating designer is simply restating your premise’s assumptions. It’s just arguing in a circle. Intelligent Design tries to dress the argument up a bit by focusing on complexity vs purpose and goals, but the issue remains the same. In ID, the argument is changed slightly to certain biological and informational features of living things are too complex to be the result of natural selection (or natural processes) and therefore must be the result of intentional and rational (intelligent) design requiring an intelligent designer. This, of course, suffers from the same tautological issue noted above: the first premise of ID is that living things are too complex to be the product of natural processes, but if the premise is that living things can’t come about from natural processes, what’s left? By premising that living things can’t be the product of natural processes, the premise implies something other than natural processes – i.e. design processes. To then conclude a designer is simply restating the premise. Yet again, a tautology.
Next, there’s the fallacy of the General Rule. The fallacy of the General Rule is a logical fallacy wherein someone assumes that something in general is true in all possible cases. A standard example is the claim that “all chairs have four legs”. But clearly rocking chairs have either no legs or two legs, depending on the design, and there are plenty of modern chair designs with three legs, and not a few bar stools that are essentially held up on a single pole. In the case of ID, the assumption is that complexity implies design and since biological objects are complex they must be designed. The thing is though, not all designed things – well, human designed things – are complex. Consider toothpicks, paper clips, floss, and Popsicle sticks as but a few examples. These objects are never used in teleological arguments for obvious reasons. And while it’s certainly possible that a toothpick could come about through natural processes, we know a human-designed toothpick when we see it and not because of the harmonious workings of its complex parts. No, it’s because of two things: man-made toothpicks have tell-tale evidence of being manufactured and they exist in greater collected numbers than nature could reasonably produce.
Another issue with ID that is related to the fallacy of the General Rule noted above is that it relies upon a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy wherein someone argues that some condition has only two alternatives when in fact there are more. An example would be someone who insists that the only alternative to driving a car is walking when clearly bicycles, skateboards, pogo sticks, and air travel all exist. In the case of ID, even if one were to agree that most, if not all, living organisms are too complex to have come about through evolutionary processes, it’s questionable at best whether a designer (and specifically God) is the only alternative. There are abundant natural processes that lead to complex organized structures (think snowflakes, tree rings, and the Giant’s Causeway). And even if we grant a necessitated designer, since there’s no way to assess or know anything about the supposed designer inferred by ID, the designer could very well be invisible pink unicorns or aliens. The bottom line is that it’s a rather large (and unrealistic) stretch to assume the only way to get biological complexity is either evolution or God.
Lastly, as noted above, we don’t infer design from complexity so much as we infer design from indications of manufacturing. This, for me, the primary failure of all forms of teleological arguments for the existence of God and ID in particular. Designs are a very specific form of plan and planning. We make designs (usually written and drawn) to help us visualize how various components and processes will interact and work in a given environment in order to (hopefully) highlight problems and issues before we actually manufacture the object of design. So the truth is that looking at an object tells one very little about the actual activity that went into designing that object. And while looking at an object can indicate something about whether the object was designed, it’s really the indications that the object was manufactured through some tool use process that provides that inference. Manufacturing leaves evidence; design does not.
I’ve never found the ID arguments for the design of biological organisms all that compelling for a number of reasons. The dubious math, the fallacious arguments, the disingenuous bait and switch to Christian apologetics, and so forth. But even beyond that, there was something about the objects in nature – organisms themselves – that just don’t seem designed to me. There is something different about them compared to man-made objects, but I was not able to put my finger on what I felt the difference was. And then it hit me one night: replaceable parts.
All man-made objects – every single one – are either designed specifically to be replaced or have components that are designed specifically to be replaced. Why? Because tool users and manufacturers learn really quick that tools and/or certain parts of tools wear out. So as designers, we anticipate the need for maintenance.
No such anticipation or planning for maintenance can be found in nature. None. If something breaks in an organism, either that organism learns to live without it or it dies. Or, in the case of humans, that part gets replaced by human designed or human configured replacements (as in my case). But even in the later case, humans have to create a work-around, because biological parts actual resist being replaced. You can’t just replace human parts with other human parts willy-nilly. In most cases, the new parts just won’t work, or worse, they’ll be rejected by the body’s immune system. But of particular note, there’s no surplus of replacement parts anywhere; no storage unit somewhere with a bunch of eyes or hearts or toes or hair or kidneys or…anything. Not even bark or leaves or antennae or scales. Nothing.
Of course, this makes perfect sense given evolution and other similar natural processes. It makes no sense if there were an actual designer, particularly an omni-god Designer, behind it all.
Even fundamentalist Christians can be trapped in a materialist outlook when everything must be interpreted as being purely physical events.
The flood story can be interpreted as one big metaphor.
The ark can represent the human form in which all the animal forms are contained. The animal kingdom consists of forms that diverged from the human in one-sided ways. For instance canines and hawks have developed one sense to an extreme degree at the expense of the more balanced evolutionary path of primates in general.
Their has never been a wooden ship built to house every animal that existed. That would have been an impossibility. There is a higher truth behind the story.
We can understand that the origin of the zodiac comes from the same source. The human form has been spread throughout nature. From head to toe, Aries to Pisces in the arc of the heavens.
Well, poof the magic of the gaps.
This is both bad reasoning and a mistaken understanding of what Seth is actually saying. He is perfectly clear that he is saying that his self, or ego, or consciousness (whichever term one prefers) really did cease to exist while under general anesthesia. His phenomenological evidence for this claim lies in his sense of time (what Husserl calls “internal time-consciousness”). He points out that during deep, dreamless sleep, there’s still a persistence of time-consciousness such that when one awakes, one is aware of time having passed. There is no such background temporal continuity during anesthesia, and he takes this to be phenomenological evidence that he himself (qua consciousness, self, ego, etc.) temporarily ceased to exist.
And if all there is to being a self is being a pattern of neuronal activity (which is quite clearly his view), it makes sense: if that pattern is inhibited, then the self disappears. Remove the inhibiting factors (e.g. when the anesthesia wears off) and the self resumes, with no background sense of temporal continuity.
If this were right, then there couldn’t be anything like lucid dreaming, where one is aware of a mental state as non-veridical but nevertheless persists in having that mental state. For that matter, people on hallucinogens are often aware that they are hallucinating but the awareness doesn’t make the hallucination simply disappear. Seth’s point is that one can be aware of the fact that one’s experience of the world is a construction of the brain while also experiencing the world as if it were mind-independent.
This doesn’t follow at all. There is no contradiction here.
One could make this story mean that — or for that matter, one could make this story mean anything you want it to mean. But why bother? Why not just say that it’s a story that belongs to the mythology of a tribe of ancient Near Eastern people, and has no “higher truth” at all?
From a scientific perspective, this is simply false. Primates are just as specialized in their way as canines and raptors: specialized for social life, including the kind of intelligence necessary for navigating social dynamics.
Unfortunately, language evolved more to allow us to describe what people, animals, and other tribes are doing, rather than to describe what is going on inside our bodies.
As a software engineer, I have never had a problem with “error correction” as meaning what my computer does all the time, without any agency being implied.
If you want to suggest a better term, feel free.
I have transcended mere pedestrian triangles. I now worship Pringles. They are the ideal shape.
ETA: And they don’t make your fingers orange.
If you had exerted any effort beyond glancing at Wikipedia for a quick copy-and-paste, you would have noticed that Bedau’s remark comes from a 1997 paper in which he defends the concept of weak emergence, which he distinguishes from strong emergence on the grounds that strong emergence requires downward causation, and weak emergence does not. Weak emergence, of the sort that Bedau defends, is sufficient for my needs. And his work is by no means the final word in the topic — there’s been lots of work on the concept of emergence since 1997 by philosophers far better than myself.
Their point, which you seem to enjoy missing, is that even if dissipative systems are teleological, that kind of teleology tells us nothing about the kind of teleology that is distinctive of life.
I don’t think IDists are irrational for seeing design in nature. I think they are mistaken.
More precisely, I think that what happens in most IDists is that they correctly perceive a good deal of highly complex, organized purposiveness in nature, and then mistakenly use the concept of “design” to describe what they are perceiving.
The mistake is then revealed by pointing out how much organisms are radically different from any artifact that we are at all familiar with it. The fallacious reasoning kicks in at the point where the IDist then says, “well, yes, organisms and artifacts are very different — but if you abstract away from how different they are, then they are identical!” And the irrationality begins at the point where the IDist refuses to acknowledge how trivially true, how vacuous, this response is.
I have no particular problem with the idea that most religious stories can be read metaphorically. I also think that a number of them are simply attributing personal qualities to non-personal, natural events. There are several dozen vengeful/angry spirit/gods disaster flood stories from a number of cultures, most that can be traced to localized events that scared that willies out of good chunk of the population. It’s hardly surprising to me that culture leaders would try to use the events to try to convince the populace that some entity did them because of some issue or “sin” that the leaders frown upon and thus want to get rid of. Several “Christian” leaders blamed homosexual behavior and gay marriage as the cause for “God’s wrath” in sending hurricane Sandy, Chaplain John McTernan and the Westboro Baptist Church in particular. This occurred with hurricane Harvey and the Northridge Earthquake in 1994. That such events killed devout Christians seems lost on such folk, but I digress. The point is, it’s nothing new to tie disasters to bad human behavior and insist on some god’s literal intervening punishment in the form of natural occurrences.
Not particularly what I tend to think of in terms of the metaphor of Noah’s Ark, but I suppose it works just as well. Not that you’ll ever convince any Christian evangelical to buy into it…
Totally agree.
An interesting point. I think there might be some truth to that, though I suspect there’s also a lot of egoism going on their too.
I have another essay I’ve been playing with on the subject of Noah’s Ark and God’s wrath. I for one cannot fathom why any god, let alone and omni-god would try to punish a species – in this case humans – by punishing all other species. I can’t even imagine why a god…any god…would bother punishing humans physically, and certainly not randomly. Any god worth Its salt would have surgical precision punishing capabilities and likely would inflict most punishment mentally, not physically. But that’s just me. Your god’s mileage may vary…
It’s his strongest suit. 🙂
I think you can apply that to any statement in the Bible. It’s not binary, there’s a rainbow choice from complete nonsense, via metaphor and poetic licence to absolute truth (what is truth? 😉 ). Seems to me that is how Christianity has more sects than you can shake a stick at.
I remember reading that the Great Flood myth was fairly common across cultures in the Tigres-Euphrates river valley, since these rivers were prone to flooding fairly often, and memorable when both flooded at the same time. So some Jewish sect of the time basically mangled that common myth by force-fitting it to their religious narrative to emphasize the power of their god (who was in active competition with multiple other gods in the region). It didn’t need to be logical or sensible. As I understand it, the original versions had no divine overtones or any moral purpose – they were just stories of great floods. Great enough to encompass all the world as the tellers of the tales knew it, at a time when very few people ventured more than a dozen miles from their birthplace in their lifetimes.
Gilgamesh.
Again, we see the evolutionary narrative needing to co-opt design language to describe what is seen in nature. “Natural creative process” is oxymoronic. from an evolutionary perspective, any process in nature is due exclusively to chemical interactions. “Creative” doesn’t enter into the picture.
Unless of course you mean that nature possesses unseen design capabilities 😛
Why, I have already conceded that one could call a car emergent, or what ants do. Great, its emergent, and we understand it. Air, and water and cola syrup become coca cola. It emerges! No problem, I don’t think anyone quarrels with that.
BUT, then some folks, want to say, well, if cars and cola and ant colonies can emerge, why can’t intelligence? We can use your logic and just say, “Yea, but cars and intelligence aren’t the same thing”, just as biological life and ocean waves aren’t the same thing. But that’s hardly the point, I don’t see why that matters to the ID argument. Idists see design, but you think the design is somehow entirely different than what humans design? To the extent that it is different (does the difference even matter), well humans aren’t yet as clever as Gods. So? That means we can’t infere design? What a strange leap.
But I don’t need to use your cars and intelligence aren’t the same logic. I would just stick with, if we know what it is that make some things combine to make a new thing, call the new thing emergent. But if we have no idea what it is that makes a group of things suddenly become something new, let’s not call that emergent! Because we don’t even know what it is we are calling emergent. So you might as well call it magic, because that explanation is just as useful as saying emergent.
All this seems very simple frankly, and I don’t need a philosopher, any philosopher, even one quoted in Wikipedia to point out why one is obvious and one is ridiculous.
Your argument has no sound footing to stand on.
Kantian Naturalist,
Kantian Naturalist: The mistake is then revealed by pointing out how much organisms are radically different from any artifact that we are at all familiar with it. The fallacious reasoning kicks in at the point where the IDist then says, “well, yes, organisms and artifacts are very different
Are you sure you’re not just dreaming? Can you point out the “radical” differences between organisms and designed artifacts? Can you quote any significant opinion to the effect “well yes…”?
You’re on a slippery slope with that concession. In fact, let’s not kid ourselves, you’ve been fooled already. Imprecise and meaningless words are the hallmark of atheists. They use them to fool themselves and others. And “emergent” is a prime example.
I am a creationist because of ducks.
I am astounded by the number of highly educated people spending an inordinate amount of time denying the existence of ducks. How does it go?: “My vast scientific experience tells me that you only think its a duck because it looks and acts like a duck. But trust me, it isn’t a duck. Don’t believe your lying eyes!”
Emergence is that giant, red panic button evolutionist are smashing with a sledgehammer.
And you know this because you understand above your intelligence level? Oh, wait… I’ll credit dogs with more smarts. At least they don’t try to second guess their masters.
True statement.
The electric frog come to mind.
Further to your comment Charlie, I don’t believe genes were present at the beginning of life because genes are passive. They don’t control anything. They are acted upon by the architecture that is responsible for transcription and translation. This is why I suspect that architecture came before genes.
So contrary to what Fair Witness is alleging that front-loading doesn’t make sense, we can see that front-loading is entirely possible and probable; compressed information being rolled out through precise organizational structures.
It makes more sense than the evolutionary small step-wise change over time objection, which amount to skipping over the hard-stuff, gliding onto an already established mountain of organized information and declaring victory.
A shrewd, crafty yet ultimately failing effort.
Nonlin.org,
Well frankly I am trying to understand why you would need two terms, strong emergence and weak emergence, if there is no magic involved. It seems pretty obvious that the reason for the term strong emergence can only be to name things we can’t explain. In other words, magic. There simply is no other reason for two separate words other than this.
They have conceded the point with the very name.
Steve,
I concur that there is just way too much symbiosis inherent in both the individual and nature as a whole, to just write it off as refined luck. That would mean there was millennia before that wasn’t refined, that was totally messy and useless, well before the crafting took hold. There is not only no evidence for this, but elementary school logic already makes such a proposal preposterous.
Because something that is arbitrary and that cannot directly hold those responsible for their behavior without collateral damage is not worth my time, attention, or acknowledgement. The former is simply an all-too-powerful cartoon toddler. Certainly not something worthy of worship or the term “God” in my book.
If that’s you’re “god”, it’s no wonder you have difficulty with analogies…
The unconsciousness of deep, dreamless sleep and the unconsciousness brought about by being anaesthetized may come about by different mechanisms but they both result in our inability to consciously experience the passage of time. There are numerous times when I have woken up during the night, looked at the clock and then fell back to sleep. I subsequently woke up thinking a minute or two had passed only to discover that it had been a few hours since I last looked at the clock.
My consciousness and my ego being are not equivalent. Anyone who writes their autobiography will give an account of their lives as they remember it. They will nowhere claim that of course, “over this time there were periods in which I ceased to exist!”, even if there have been occasions when they have been under a general anaesthetic.
Of course he had a sense of temporal continuity. He was able to distinguish the past from the temporal present in which his conscious returned. What he had lost was a sense of the time span and not the sequence of events. But that happens to us all the time. 🙂 Someone who is having a good time might look at their watch and say, “My goodness, is that the time”, while on the other hand someone who is in the midst of an unpleasant experience may feel the minutes dragging. Experiential time is not the same as the regularity of clock time.
Of course there are different levels of awareness and Seth stalls on a level that can be transcended. This is where the maxim “know thyself” and Plato’s reasoning in the divided line is useful to meditate on. To refrain from jumping to hasty conclusions, but instead to let these thoughts occupy my consciousness is, I find, a productive way of dealing with them.
If we are aware that much of how we view reality is illusional, how do we overcome the illusion to reach realty itself? Knowing we have a problem is the first step in getting past that problem. 🙂
There is little I can do if you do not recognize a problem.
CharlieM: There has never been a wooden ship built to house every animal that existed. That would have been an impossibility. There is a higher truth behind the story.
Kantian Naturalist: One could make this story mean that — or for that matter, one could make this story mean anything you want it to mean. But why bother? Why not just say that it’s a story that belongs to the mythology of a tribe of ancient Near Eastern people, and has no “higher truth” at all?
But this myth does not belong to just one tribe. The epic of Gilgamesh makes that clear.
Social dynamics is hardly a speciality, it is a general feature of animal life. Many insects, fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and other mammals apart from primates live in social groups. If animals are evolutionarily successful by relying on instinctive behaviour, very keen eyesight, sense of smell or other such attributes then they have no need nor capacity to develop nervous systems advanced enough to allow for the rational thinking which is necessary for creatures to become conscious creators. By having senses such as sight which takes up a great deal of the nervous system, this leaves less of the system to be put to creative use. The central nervous system of any animal takes more than its fair share of metabolic activity.
Error correction was built in to your computer’s software by the agent who designed it.
How about integral optimization?
You’ve seen the light! But the heavenly, mouth-watering Pringle you are worshipping is but an idol. To find its true origin you will need to look up from the physical object to the thinking minds of its creators. 🙂
Robin,
Worth reading:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2HxAkCG7NWTrrn5R3/three-fallacies-of-teleology
And, at the risk of referencing something that appears to agree with Phoodoo:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence
If information were not a barrier, the myriad number of Miller-Urey type experiments done over the last 70+ years would have succeeded in creating some type of entity that is more that the sum of its constituent parts. The results show that information is missing component required to organize the chemical soup into functional units, which would then be utilized to create a multi-functional whole, which is greater than its constituent parts.
Talking about salt, it is interesting that our bodies need and use salt extracted from the environment for its biological processes. Yet at the same time, there are sensors on our tongue that detect oral salt intake and send that information to our brains for decision making – let the salt in, we could use it, but not too much or it will cause unwanted effects. So clearly salt contains information organisms can detect, analyze and react to.
These sensory mechanisms indicate organisms have the capability to understand simultaneously the constituent parts of salt and the emergent property that is salt, as well as make environmental risk assessments.
How would emergence explain this phenomenon?
The fact that Seth said, “Just over a year ago, for the third time in my life, I ceased to exist”, demonstrates that he did not question that he ceased to exist. As KN correctly remarked, this is supported by his complete lack of sense of time having passed.
You know what really cracks me up? This is phenomenology in action and you, of all people, are writing a veritable avalanche of lame excuses to downplay the importance of Seth’s genuine experience of absence. Me, personally, I dislike speculating about whether anesthesia is like deep dreamless sleep and wish to stay within the observation.
So a person designed the error correction algorithm for computers to keep errors from creeping into the data and software. So what?
Integral Optimization? That is vague and obtuse. Worthy of Deepak Chopra. Try again.
You actually have trouble distinguishing man-made artifacts from living organisms? That must be really awkward.
Fair Witness,
Thank you for those essays! I appreciate Yudkowsky’s point about the problems with teleology — though I think that (a) Aristotle is somewhat more defensible than that and (b) contemporary defenders of teleological explanations have responded to those objections. But I’m not a specialist in Aristotle, so I won’t get into that unless provoked.
With regard to contemporary theoretical biology, I disagree with Yudkowsky (and Mayr) that we should replace teleology with teleonomy — usually understood as the claim that biological functions can be explained sufficiently in terms of effects of past natural selection.
My main reservation is based on a consideration that Denis Walsh extracts from Darwin’s own reasoning and takes further: natural selection is not a causal factor, but rather a higher-level effect. Natural selection is how we describe what happens to populations of organisms over time as a result of organisms doing what they do. So we need to ground evolution in an account of what organisms are doing. And that is where we locate teleology: in an account of what makes something an organism in the first place.
For more on this line of thought, I recommend “Teleology and its constitutive role for biology as the science of organized systems in nature” by Georg Toepfer. I also like the work by Robert Rosen and Tibor Gianti for those interested.
I think I agree with Yudkowsky that emergence is not an explanation — or to use some philosophical jargon, it isn’t the explanans (the explanation) but the explanandum (the phenomenon that needs to be explained). The explanans lies in how to we need to think about causation as a relational property, not an intrinsic property.*
This matters because, unlike Aristotle and Aristotelians, I don’t think that teleology is the right schema of explanation for all phenomena. I’m quite happy to restrict teleological explanations to biology. (No teleological physics, thank you very much!) That’s why it is incumbent upon me to explain how life emerges from inanimate matter and how doing so allows for the emergence of a new kind of explanation, teleological explanation, that we don’t need in physics or chemistry.
* Technically we could think of intrinsic properties as monadic relational properties, I guess — in which case causation would be a polyadic relational property.
So you believe that the first organisms did not have genes? Now I am really curious how you suppose that heritability worked in those days. I assume that cats still birthed cats (or whatever you believe the first organisms to be)? How did that work without heritable information being passed from parents to offspring?
BTW: There are still some comments that appear to have escaped your attention.
So your suggestion is to take the default position that the property of any complex system is magic, until we find out how that property is exactly brought about by its individual parts and then we call it emergent? Hmmm, what an interesting proposition.
By the way, below you see some casts from nests of four different species of ant (Aphaenogaster floridana, Pheidole morrisi, Dorymyrmex bossutus, and Aphaenogaster ashmeadi). Would you be so good to tell the class in exquisite detail how the differences in architecture are brought about by the differences in the respective species behaviour. Remember: if you fail we will be forced to conclude that ant nests arise by magic, which would make your position look a bit silly. Thanks
Figure from here.
You honestly do not believe that amino acids have properties that exceed those of the constituent elements?
And that information is the magic sprinkles that give the soup flavor?
As worded here, this is absurd. And we can easily see that it is absurd.
However, that’s not quite what Steve wrote. I quoted what he wrote, except that I changed “information” to “magical pixie dust”.
We can easily see that it is absurd, because we do not believe that there is any such thing as magical pixie dust. There also isn’t any such thing as information. The word “information” refers to a human abstraction. That is to say, it is a useful fiction. We use it in our talking because it can simplify communication.
Creationists treat “information” is if it referred to something in the natural world. It doesn’t. It refers only to a human abstraction.
Steve goes on to say:
In the second sentence there, Steve uses the word “information”. But the only information is that salt was detected. In the very next sentence, he goes on to talk about “information” as an actual component of the salt. And that’s just nonsense. The information was just that salt was detected. Nothing was extracted from the salt that could be considered to be “information”.
These creationist arguments about “information” are nonsense.
Fair Witness,
I’m fairly sure that Steve believes, as with most contemporary creationists, that information coming from somewhere outside the boundaries of the physical universe was necessary in order to cross the boundary between complex organic chemicals and the simplest forms of early life.
My sense is that the major contribution of “intelligent design” or “design theory” to the discourse has been introducing the concept of information as what the laws of physics cannot create, hence any increase in information requires a non-naturalistic explanation. (This is not quite what Dembski intended, I don’t think, but it’s the main effect of his contributions, in terms of what IDists are trying to argue for.)
There may be some IDists these days who deny speciation, but by and large, for them the Rubicon isn’t boundaries between species but rather what Smith and Szathmary called “major evolutionary transitions”: abiogenesis, the evolution of eukaryotes, multicellular plants and animals, and human cultures. (I’d probably want to add the emergence of unlimited associative learning to that list.)
I believe that should be Maynard Smith and Szathmáry.
I once attended one of his talks. He was already quite famous then, at least in my circle. So I enjoyed the opportunity to see him in person.
ETA:
I had never considered that ID contributed something new; I just figured it was a rehash of the Watchmaker analogy, disguised as a scientific argument and “information” sounded sufficiently science-y. It is true though that some very peculiar ideas are being pushed by its fans.
What? Can you get it any more backwards? This is baffling.
I am saying that if one is going to deny design in nature and INSTEAD call things they can’t exlain, ’emergence” it is THEM that is using the word magic, hidden in the phrase “emergent.” If that is not the case, do tell why there are the terms “weak emergence” and “strong emergence”? What is the difference between the two? Do tell.
Since I don’t use the term emergence to describe anything other than a system, as opposed to its parts*, why would I be the one that needs to explain ant colonies? Its a system of ants building things-I haven’t suggested magic at all (although the materialists still need to explain how the ants know anything- I guess they will resort to the ants “know” by emergence. Because they can’t admit to design, its just too painful for them.)
*Actually, its still a stupid word, because it doesn’t really mean anything, and we already have the word system, but if you must.
Kantian Naturalist,
For those interested, here is the first line of KN’s recommended ideas on biology:
And it goes on. Imagine reading this, and STILL believing, yea, ok, but there is no plan, no design, its just, you know, telelogical!
But, you know, no plan. Just saying. Don’t be so silly to think it is planned. Oh, those whacky IDists thinking their is a design, a plan. Whoa, what nuts!
Teleology! It emerges!
Ah, I hadn’t realized that “Maynard Smith” is the correct last name — thanks!
That’s how I see it, too, though with “information” doing the role that “contrivance” played for Paley. This argument wasn’t even original with Paley — the basic form of it goes back to (at least) the ancient Greek Stoics, who developed the argument as an attempt to refute the Epicurean appeal to chance and necessity. (For the obsessively curious or curiously obsessive, I really enjoyed and learned a lot from Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity.)
Ooh, that UAL stuff is interesting. I need to read up on that.
I occasionally poke the bear over on UD by stating that information does not exist by itself, and only exists as an arrangement of either matter or energy. Many IDists seem to want to reify information as a substance that can stand alone. The response usually includes some reference to quantum teleportation. But even that still requires a physical substrate for the information, as far as I know.
Really good articles FW! Thanks! I’ll read them again and digest some thoughts.
I need a judge’s ruling on this: information is the missing ingredient required to organize the chemical soup into functional units? Do you even have a remotely coherent reference for this…assertion?
This is only…maybe…half correct, but it’s a little jumbled up so I’m being generous. Our bodies require a ridiculously small amount of sodium (half of the NaCl btw) for muscle contraction. Hence the reason folks get cramps if they work out a lot and sweat without replenishment (well…the loss of sodium and potassium, but I digress…) And yeah…it’s a little important when you consider that one of our muscles – the heart – cramping is bad, but you really need to be in other levels of deficiency for that to happen. And yes…our tongues can detect salt, but it isn’t that the salt contains information, but rather that our tongue cells create information in the presence of sodium ions. And this is mostly because up until fairly recently, salt was a tough substance to come by and our bodies are pretty good at giving us cravings for food elements we lack. It’s a pretty good way to incentivize an organism to seek out limited necessary elements.
And yes, too much sodium is bad for the body and can lead to all sorts of issues in terms of edema and hypertension and heart disease and so forth, but you’ll note if you’ve read anything about the US diet (and actually, most diets around the world now), our bodies, and particularly our tongues, are lousy at indicating we’ve had too much salt in our food. Because again, our bodies have not adapted to the now ridiculous abundance of sodium; our bodies just tell us it makes food taste better. But you won’t find any information about it’s usefulness or badness in quantity in the salt itself; that info is created in our bodies.
Not quite. Our tongues can detect NaCl ions, but our tongues and our bodies know virtually nothing about sodium itself. Your tongue cannot tell you if most foods, particularly processed foods, contain more sodium than your kidneys can handle. And yeah…thankfully, that is one of the main functions of the kidney’s – to maintain salinity balance in our overall fluid level in our bodies. But the kidney’s don’t “know” that in any sense. The brain detects overall salinity and releases hormones to make us feel thirsty, so we drink more liquid. As liquid levels rise, more excess minerals and byproducts like calcium, sodium, potassium, magnesium, phosphorous, urea, etc, move from areas of high concentration into the lower concentrated areas of the new liquid and then the kidneys just toss our the excess liquid. Again…no information – not that there is any – in the salt did anything.
I’m not sure anything could explain much of what you put forth because it’s not an accurate description
Possible semantic issue here. I suppose a “design”, as a noun, is just about anything. I personally enjoy the designs frost makes on windows, and the designs wind makes from sand. And in this sense, nobody is going to deny that nature is filled with designs. Some of the patterns people find interesting, some not so much, but all are “designs”.
Now, as a verb, we must presume that any design requires a designer. The combination of water and cold weather co-author the frost designs on windows, and the wind and sand co-author the dunes, etc. And again in this sense, all living organisms are designed, and the primary authors are mutation and selection. Makes sense to me, to say that frost, dunes, and critters have all been designed.
The trick is to figure out the mechanisms. Lacking any understanding of mechanism, the frost and dunes and critters are presumed to be “designed” by some conscious entity using some process unknowable to mere mortals. Not everyone is satisfied by this “explanation”.
Flint,
This is specious, for the reason that you can call things designed or say there is teleology in nature, and you are talking to an audience that is highly invested in the anti-ID movement. The atheist, the self-described skeptic, etc. So to that audience they can try to rationalize all of this sort of the way KN does by saying, well, its just what nature does, and that explanation supposedly satisfies. But these are people who have a vested interest in denying the implications of teleology and design. So they must find a way out.
But if you were to tell this to your average person who is not part of the sketic-denial community, that biology is nothing without teleology. That there is design without a designer, a plan without a planner, these people, the average pesron who has studied biology in school, and who believes that Darwinism is setlled science, if you tell them that, they would say “What now, come again? No way.”
Because this is not how the story is told in school. This is not the story told in popular science media. And the reason it is not told that way, is because a large majority of people aren’t going to fall for the idea that you can have teleology sprouting from chaos. From random unguided processes. That’s not what they were taught. Its too far fetched.
Most people, rightfully so, see life as either being planned or unplanned. They aren’t buying this third way plan without a plan nonsense which requires an awful lot of faith in tremendous, stupendous luck. A plan suddenly emerges spontaneously out of nothing, because nature is just quirky!
Sorry, but this was never how Darwinism was packaged on sold, and for good reason. Its nonsensical and requires just too much faith in atheism to be taken seriously.
I know, no one believes in Darwinism anymore, expect for the majority of the population that believes it.
So do you apparently. And stick with “radical differences”.
We already established that you have very poor judgment. Try to learn something from the dogs. They can teach you a trick or two.
It’s been a while since I felt obliged to mention the rules. Commenters should not question each others cognitive abilities.
If not information, what is missing? The difference between life and non-life is that living organisms detect, transfer, process and utilize information.
If not information, what then is preventing the chemical soup from creating entities/forms with properties different than its constituent parts?
Partially correct. Salt was a tough substance to come by; true enough. However, you derailed your supposed teaching moment when you went off about tongue cells creating information.
That bastion of liberal hubris known as Wikipedia doesn’t suppport your narrative: “The taste receptor cells send information detected by clusters of various receptors and ion channels to the gustatory areas of the brain via the seventh, ninth and tenth cranial nerves” .
Not only Wikipedia but even science.org.au understands it as information gathering: “Once the receptor has detected a particular chemical, this information is conveyed along a series of neural pathways to the brain, where taste is perceived”.
And yet another reference to information. This one from the National Center for Biotechnology Information: This Review discusses the proteins and pathways that taste buds use to detect stimuli, the communication and modulation that occur between their cells, and the nerve fibres that innervate taste buds, as well as the principles of the coding by which information is conveyed from the periphery to neurons in the CNS.
But they don’t reeeeeealllly mean information, do they? They must have mispoken. That’s it. They mispoke.
On the contrary, it is not rocket science. The admittedly simplistic explanation was suffice to convey the key point that our tongue is collecting information. and in this particular case, our taste buds recognize the information contained in salt and transfer that information to our brains for processing.
And what is more fascinating is that our tongues seems to already understand the limits of taste as there are specific receptors for the six known taste types (the last one, the fat taster is yet to be confirmed although a candidate for this taste receptor has been proposed). And if one argues that it cannot be seen as a limit of taste types, it could be construed as the taste types our bodies are most concerned with.
Whatever the case may be, we can say unequivocally that our senses are collecting information, processing it, interpreting it, making conclusions from the information collected and taking action based on those conclusions.
Designed, sealed, and delivered.