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.
I have no doubt that the ubiquity of flood stories from the various cultures around the world were inspired by the extremes of climate around the beginning of the Holocene.
But the symbol of the Ark representing the human being has deeper significance. Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant both represent the human from two aspects. Outwardly the human form is a compendium of the animal kingdom, and hence the Ark houses all animal forms. Solomon’s Temple was built to represent the human form inwardly. St. Paul stressed that the body is a temple. The Ark of the Covenant is situated within the Temple and it houses the Holy of Holies. This Holy of Holies is the ego within the body. It is the inner sanctum which cannot be experienced from the outside. The “I” can only be experienced by its possessor.
People will believe what they want to believe. It’s up to each individual to decide for themselves if they are being truthful with themselves and that their beliefs are logically consistent
There are four representative signs of the Zodiac which align with the four beasts of the Apocalypse and which are linked to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are Aquarius (Man), Taurus (Bull), Leo (Lion) and Scorpio (Eagle). (the Eagle is the higher side of Scorpio)
The bull is the symbol for the human metabolic/limb system which is the most affected by gravity. The lion is a creature of balance and rhythm symbolizing the heart/lung system, and the eagle, least affected by gravity, soars freely symbolizing the head region which is the focal point of our thinking which allows us a certain freedom from earthy forces. The water bearer is the complete human. Water is is our major constituent.
There are reasons why these ancient teachings are as they are. The sphynx which is a compendium of these creatures sets us a riddle about the living world.
These myths weren’t born out of ignorance and fear, but out of a deeper knowledge of reality that we were destined to lose for a time. The evolution of consciousness is such that this knowledge had to be lost to give us the opportunity to work it out for ourselves as free individuals and not from authority.
It is anthropomorphic thinking that imagines some external bearded deity punishing us for our sins. It is we who punish ourselves.
I hope you do share that essay with us.
Claiming an entity like Thanos is “God” is more the sign of poor judgement. But if worshiping dogs is your thing, have at it.
You’re the one insisting there is some supposed “information barrier”, but you can’t seem to identify it or demonstrate it. It’s not up to me to come up with some other “essence” to satisfy your belief in some barrier. Rather, it is up to you to demonstrate that there actually is a barrier. So far, you’ve simply offered an argument from incredulity.
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 doesn’t actually rebut my point. While I’ll certainly concede that the salt must be present for the tongue cells to generate information, none of those descriptions are insisting that the salt contains the information that the cells pass on to the brain. The information generation is a little more system oriented than you suggest.
Further, I haven’t denied that information is part of a great many systems. I’ve simply denied that it is a barrier to anything. Has the information regarding human sodium taste and craving changed anything about how we eat or process foods? No? Then what is this supposed “information barrier” you keep going on about?
I have been expressing myself poorly. Apologies for that. But, correct me if I am wrong, you have acknowledged that the behaviour of an ant colony is a property that emerges from the interaction of the individual ants. So I picked a random property (nest architecture) and now I am asking you to explain how the specific nest architecture for several species emerges from the individual ants behaviour. Can you do it? If not, do you think we should stop using the term “emergence” for how ant nests are constructed? Should we use “magic” instead? Or “Design”? Or nothing at all until we know exactly how ant nest architecture is established?
But my point was that you don’t know how nest architecture emerges from the behaviour of individual ants. Nobody does. You simply assume it arises by “ants building things” and that’s why you are perfectly fine with calling that emergence. But somehow, when it comes to intelligence, you are unwilling to grant that intelligence emerges from, say “neurons doing things”, and you complain that we might as well use the word “magic”. Why is that?
Me? No, I have never mistaken a living organism for a man-made artifact. But you did? Can you tell us about it? Let me guess: you accidentally tried to use your cat as a can-opener. Perhaps you tried to drive to work in a cow once?
Why don’t you just concede that even small children can usually spot the difference between a living being and a man-made mechanical device?
Morton’s Demon living inside Steve’s head,
Will you let my messages through, please? A lot of effort went into making those, you know.
You mean its possible ant colonies are built by something other than ants?
Can’t we watch them? Have you never seen a glass ant farm?
Maybe there is something else happening that we can’t see, like quantum tunnels appearing from other universes you mean?
Hmm, maybe ancient alien technology? You may have a point.
.. or maybe an invisible Designer is guiding the ants?
Can you explain in detail how any specific nest architecture emerges from the behaviour of the individual ants? If not, then why are you free to assume ants is all it takes to build a nest but are we not free to assume that intelligence emerges from the activity of interacting neurons? What is the difference here?
Is that not because you have a competing hypothesis for one but not the other?
Steve,
It has become the standard view in neuroscience to talk about the brains as processing information. This goes together with the idea that the brain is an electrochemical computer and that psychological processes can be understood as neural computations.
But the standard view is not that “information” somehow exists independently of brains and that sensory organs just detect it — the view rather is that the firing of sensory receptors in retina, cochlea, and other sensory organs initiates the transmission of information along neural pathways to the cortical and subcortical structures — where the information will be “processed”.
If information existed outside of the brain-body system, it would need to be physically realized somewhere — information without a storage medium is simply incoherent, according to what we know from information theory. This might imply a kind of “pancomputationalism” but I doubt it’s what you had in mind.
In any event, the ubiquity of information processing in computational neuroscience is totally irrelevant to what we had been discussing, which is the ID thesis that information needed to be added from a non-natural source in order to cross the gap between complex organic molecules and simple cells, and that every major evolutionary transition has also required non-natural information — information coming from a Mind that exists outside of the physical universe — in order to generate novel phenotypes.
This central thesis of ID has absolutely nothing to do with computational neuroscience.
I can’t explain how an automatic transmission works. But I am fairly sure its not a drum full of elfs creating secret pixel dust that causes gear ratios to vary. But perhaps you can correct me on that. In absense of your showing me that cars transmissions are unknown, or the burrowing of insects is something that only happens when the lights are out and no one can see, in sort of a Shrodinger’s Cat kind of way, I will continue to assume that the way I have seen ants build colonies is the way they build them.
Though I have said that HOW the ants know what to do, IS a mystery, and thus not a good candidate for a “well emergence explains it” escape attempt.
Exactly! Same here. That was my point; We sometimes accept that novel system properties can arise because of interactions of its constituent parts, even if we do not have a detailed description of this process (yet). I agree that this can be a somewhat unsatisfactory situation, but that doesn’t mean that “emergence” is a vacuous term. Better yet, I suspect that for ant nests, you are entirely satisfied with this explanation.
So, my question is: why, in the case of intelligence, you suddenly declare “emergence” a non-explanation?
Insects do not have a very complicated behavioural repertoire and in fact we do know quite a bit about how certain behaviours are genetically coordinated in insects. An important pioneer in this field was Seymour Benzer, who screened for behavioural mutants in Drosophila.
No, you completely don’t get it. People know how transmissions work. There is no mystery. People know how ants build things. I know how ants build things, I have watched them. There is a baby in Somalia that doesn’t know how to turn on a tv set. That doesn’t mean people don’t know how to turn on TV sets and so its just an emergent property.
No one knows how intelligence comes into being. No one. So saying it is emergent is the same as saying, “We don’t know, but magic happens naturally.” Its like telling a child in Somalia, Tv’s just do it, its emergent.
Your argument is the entire opposite of what I have said.
I suspect that the idea of emergence isn’t shared here very well. Someone had a good definition of emergence (wasn’t it you?) describing how a complete system can be and do things completely different from the individual natures of each of the component parts. And this is both common and not that hard to grasp.
Now, you seem to be arguing that if people don’t understand in sufficient detail the nature of every part, and cannot accurately model their sometimes enormously complex interactions, that the RESULT of this activity doesn’t count somehow. So we can more or less observe billions upon billions of neurons firing in various patterns, and we can observe that when this happens, something unpredictable occurs – we get a constellation of results we vaguely label as “consciousness” or “intelligence”. I don’t see any reason to deny our observation simply because we don’t fully understand what we’re observing.
I’d say you are correct that nobody knows how thinking happens, but we DO know that you think nonetheless. I doubt your ability to think rests on any magical phenomena. I believe your ability to think rests on those billions of firing neurons.
As I mentioned previously, “Life is designed” is the axiom. It is based on the observation that the information in organisms is not only like the information we use to create things but is evidently more advanced since we are currently only able to create machines because we don’t possess the information that is contained in living organisms. The information barrier is in fact real.
However, this observation is falsifiable. Show that life can arise naturally without need for a pre-existing set of instructions. Show that chemical processes can create their own information. Solve the abio-genesis problem.
Until that is done, the axiom stands.
Flint,
Well, then make a few neurons, make them “fire” and see if you can then have a conversation with those neurons you made. Seems to work with transmissions and tvs and ants.
Radical differences. You overpromissed radical, not just differences. And now you can’t deliver. Would it hurt your pride so much to admit defeat? At least kn realized he made a big mistake and went silent. That’s an admission.
I’m still waiting. And of course, your target is to demonstrate that life is so radicaly different from artifacts that it could not possibly have been designed. Can you? No way.
The sad thing is that there’s nothing there to question. Thanos??? Omg!
I hadn’t noticed your post with this link to Gilgamesh when I mentioned him here.
Noah, Manu and Gilgamesh are all mentioned by Christopher Charles Doyle in a couple of fascinating talks he gives here and here
Many cultures around the ancient world had their own versions of the standard stories and myths without any signs of one copying from another.
Both the Hindus and the Druids spoke about an inverted tree as the tree of life. As the Ark is a symbol for the human being so too is this tree. We take in nourishment through our mouths while trees take it in through the roots. Our sexual organs are situated at the lower end of our trunks while trees produce fruit at the tips of their branches. Both us and trees have a vertical stance while the vertebral columns of animals are generally closer to the horizontal.
What I like about the forementioned videos is that Doyle is not promoting an agenda, he is just providing us with facts that should get us thinking.
There were very sophisticated cultures in existence in ancient times.
Oh…riiight…you already mentioned it, so I guess this is all settled then…🙄
I get that you believe that there is some “information barrier” and that you believe that the information in organisms is in some way similar to the information required to create our man-made machines and for our man-made machines to operate. But your belief and/or opinion about such isn’t exactly credible, reliable, or useful. Unless and until you can actually show how to identify the information in organisms, show how to quantify said information, and then demonstrate that the required information is, in fact, a barrier to organisms arising without design, your axiom doesn’t mean much.
Well…aside from the burden of proof fallacy, no one in science needs to even consider observations on their own. Unless and until the observation can be shown to have some actual impact on entailments of phenomena or some impact on explanation of phenomena that leads to some practical understanding, such observations are going to be ignored.
And just so we’re clear, thus far you haven’t actually demonstrated this supposed “information barrier”.
You’ve lost me. Are you saying that you don’t think, or that you think by means of pure magic, or that you think because of divine intervention, or what? I seem to be having a conversation with neurons you grew yourself. Did you grow them by magic, etc?
“Life is designed” is your hypothesis, not an axiom.
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ax·i·om
/ˈaksēəm/
noun
a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true.
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Flint,
I am saying if there is no magic involved, and intelligence is just the simple by products of neurons firing, well, well we can get a bunch of neurons and figure out what chemicals are in them, right? Then let’s just make some new ones, start “firing” them, and we should get intelligence, right?
I mean, since there is no magic involved, why is it any different than just building a transmission? We can do that, right? And you claim emergent isn’t saying magic is involved, so let’s do it!
Yes, I like that example. The face of the frog reminds me of watching the process of the development of a photograph emerging in the solution.
I believe there is a fundamental polarity in the emergence of life both in individual development and in the evolution of life. The physical matter grows out from a point but the form originates from the periphery. Neither point nor periphery is more fundamental than the other.
Robert Laughlin implies this when he says that as far as we know the universe is pervaded by something very much like a superconductor and he agrees that things that exist on a composite level are just as fundamental as the component parts. Although Laughlin is uncomfortable with this binary nature of what we consider fundamental.
I think the problem lies in the fact that physics is so reliant on everything being amenable to measurement and vectorization. This is ideally suited to pointwise forces, but it is impossible with regard to peripheral forces as they pervade all directions of space.
We could think of DNA as emerging from condensation in a way analogous to crystals emerging out of solution.
Whether or not humans can manufacture new neurons from scratch, get them to chemically “fire” and thus develop a neural network, and from that generate intelligence really doesn’t say anything about whether intelligence is an emergent property.
“Emergence”, in this context, is simply a label for a particular phenomenon wherein two or more parts in a system generate new characteristics/properties that are not present in the constituent parts. It’s not an explanation for the phenomenon, but it is a recognition that the phenomenon occurs. I don’t understand why this is still up for debate.
We can’t make two new elements like Na and Cl from scratch and combine them to form something analogous to table salt either, but that doesn’t mean that the characteristics of table salt are not emergent properties of combining Na and Cl.
I didn’t respond to you for three reasons:
(1) I have a full-time job and my time at TSZ is limited.
(2) I already presented my views about the radical differences between organisms and artifacts here, here, and here, among others.
(3) I know from past experience that there are some contributors at TSZ that are simply not worth my time to engage with. I’m responding to you here and now is to correct your mistaken impression that I realized I’d made a mistake and that my refusal to engage with you was an admission. I’m not engaging with you because of any mistakes that I’d made in my thinking — I’m not engaging with you because I now from past experience that doing so is a waste of my very limited time.
However, humans have been building increasingly sophisticated neural networks. There is some indication that if people can figure out how to build complex quantum-computing systems with adequate error correction, the computational capability will increase by orders of magnitude over the best 9nm circuitry available with traditional methods.
If this should happen, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if, given enough inputs and variety of inputs, this system might “wake up” someday with what could only be considered a conscious self-awareness. And we could have intelligent conversations with it.
People who are in dreamless sleep and people who are under anaesthetic are having the same experience. Neither of them observes anything.
Do you think that a murderer who was anaethetized between committing the crime and standing trial could plead in his or her defense, “I am not responsible, the person who did it no longer exists”?
Flint,
Maybe. I don’t know. I’m more inclined toward skepticism about neural networks — yes, we can make them much faster and computationally more powerful than they are now, but I’m skeptical that mere computational power is all that stands between existing neural networks and general AI, synthetic sapience.
I really liked this overview and criticism of AI, written by an AI researcher named Melanie Mitchell.
That’s exactly what Seth explicitly denies — his point is that dreamless sleep is still an experience, since we can recognize when we wake up that time has passed. That shows — he thinks — that a background temporal awareness was present all along. Whereas anesthesia isn’t any kind of experience, since the background temporal awareness just isn’t there. The self ceases to exist, and then resumes.
For Seth, this makes perfect sense because all there is being a self is being a pattern of neural activity. Inhibit that activity, and the self ceases to be. Remove the inhibiting factor, and the self resumes existence.
No, you don’t know “how ants build things”. You just observed ants randomly scurrying around with sand grains in their jaws. But you can’t tell me how they decide which chambers are for food storage and which for broods. And you can’t tell me why different species have different nest architecture. You just assume somebody has figured that out, which proves my point: you accept emergence as an explanation most of the time. You just get upset when someone suggests it applies to intelligence as well. Why is that?
Sure I can: humans are capable of manufacturing man-made artifacts (by definition) but they cannot manufacture living organisms. That is a pretty radical difference. Wouldn’t you agree?
What humans can or cannot do is a function of those humans, not of some other entity. And of course they (atheists) wouldn’t try to manufacture life, as they do, if they actually believed that to be impossible. You’re in a contradiction mess. Wouldn’t you agree?
But enough with the inexistent “radical differences”. I am sure you can name a whole list of radical similarities discovered from way before Paley and from the very recent past. So what exactly could you cite as argument against life being designed? Nothing. That’s what.
Meanwhile, kn is as funny as ever. Busy with his full time job commenting on tsz perhaps judging by his presence here. And uttering nonsense like this:
“For me, organisms don’t appear to be designed because they are heterogeneous: no two individuals of any species are exactly alike. Whereas manufactured things are overwhelmingly homogeneous — and they become more homogeneous as manufacturing processes become more controlled over time”
… that denotes no understanding of manufacturing, design, and technology in general. Will he ever admit he has no background in and understanding of technology? I wonder.
It is interesting that you believe that the ego cannot return when it ceases to be. KN has now explained twice already why such resurrection is perfectly compatible with (and even logically follows from) Seth’s convictions.
What interests me most is that you bluntly refuse to accept bona fide phenomenological evidence. I have never been under anaesthetic myself, but I had a similar experience from fainting once after getting up from the dentist’s chair too rapidly. In my experience, I regained consciousness immediately, but I learned from my wife that I had been out for a minute or so. I have never encountered a remotely similar experience waking up after deep sleep or “having a good time” (boy, you were really reaching there). Will you please acknowledge that you were just looking for excuses to dismiss an unwelcome observation? Thanks.
So walking around is not a radically different activity from flying around propelled by a rainbow coloured jet stream spurted from the buttocks? That is just “a function of humans”?
Oh Nonlin, I missed your nonsense so much.
So you believe that humans can create life if only they try and that there is not – just tossing out a random thought here – currently an information barrier that prevents this?
ETA: rephrased my question to (hopefully) clarify. I am pretty sure I have at times heard the claim that humans are incapable, even in principle, to ever match the skill level of the Designer.
Yes, I have been skeptical of neural networks since forever. And I have always been skeptical of the computationist ideas about intelligence. I have never thought that AI would work as people expected.
But then I’m a computer scientist, so what would I know?
Actually, many mathematicians and computer scientists have been skeptical of AI.
Thanks for that reference. But I think she has it wrong, too. However, she does at least see some of the problems with AI.
I’m inclined to see part of the problem in the overrating of logic. And I suppose philosophy gets to share some of the blame for this.
For me, logic has always seemed overrated. Thinking logically came easily to me, though I’ll admit that many people find it difficult. I tended to see logic as just a systematic way of using trial and error methods.
When I think about it, logic really only systematizes the “trial” aspect of trial and error. Deciding what is error is some kind of evaluation. And, as best I can tell, our ability to evaluate is mostly biological, and perhaps even connected with emotions. I suppose scientific measurement can be seen as a way of systematizing evaluation. But our biological abilities at evaluation extend well beyond what we can measure.
Corneel,
How many times do I need to tell you, I agree we DON’T know how ants know to do things, and so I WOULD NEVER call how they know how to do things an emergent property. Gophers, make holes, beavers make dams, rabbits make holes, bees make hives.
Exactly!
Kantian Naturalist,
KN, why do you think we need two terms, one called “weak emergence” and one called “strong emergence”?
Corneel,
Corneel, why are there two terms, “weak emergence” and “strong emergence”?
I think I agree with you here, so maybe I’m fooled by the wrong image. I think sheer computational power is hardly all that stands between current technology and true sapience. What I was trying to communicate here is that given that power and future theoretical advances, there could possibly be what we’ve been calling the emergence of something unexpected and qualitatively different from anything the builders of this system could possibly have planned on. Certainly nothing resembling Spock or Robbie the Robot.
What phenomenon? The phenomenon of a spark plug becoming a car? Is that a phenomenon?
What is the reason for two terms, “weak” and “strong” emergence?
I think it’s more like the phenomenon of the car becoming transportation. Even though not one single component of that car is transportation.
Flint,
So is that weak emergence or strong emergence?
The phenomenon of two or more components in a system that create properties when combined that do not exist in any of the constituent components.
As for the difference between strong and weak emergence, strong emergence tends to be studied and discussed in philosophy while weak emergence tends to be discussed and studied in science.
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199544318.001.0001/acprof-9780199544318-chapter-11
Robin,
Then what is a car, science or philosophy? What are ant colonies, science or philosophy? What is the brain, science or philosophy?
If intelligence is strong emergence does that mean it is not really science?
Robin,
From your paper:
But you don’t really care about this, do you?
I believe we agree on the following things:
1) Ant colonies have properties that individual ants do not possess (architecture of nests, foraging strategies, etc.)
2) These properties cannot be understood as the sum of individual ants doing their thing by themselves.
3) These properties CAN be understood by additionally taking interactions between ants into account: social interactions, pheromone trails, etc.
4) You nor me can give a detailed account of how the colony properties arise from the interactions between ants (though perhaps somebody else can).
If you agree with all of the points above, then you accept emergence as sufficient explanation in some cases. You just resist use of the term.
Now, in the absence of a detailed description of the processes involved, you reject emergence as an explanation for intelligence; Fair enough. HOWEVER, you also maintain that invoking “emergence” is nothing more than a way to disguise complete ignorance and we might as well invoke magic. That is incorrect.
I don’t know; the first time I saw that distinction was here at TSZ 😀
I’d hazard a guess that it is sometimes useful to make a distinction between emergent processes that can be understood in terms of interactions of constituent parts and emergent processes where this does not apply. For example, if every time I place the chocolate sprinkles next to the peanut butter a gnome materializes out of thin air then this regularity is something I need to accept as a bare fact and no further understanding is possible. I am not convinced strong emergence exists, but might be wrong.
Why do you ask?
It means that, unlike in living systems, the source of this feature of computers is extrinsic to the machine.
,blockquote>CharlieM: How about integral optimization?
Fair Witness: Integral Optimization? That is vague and obtuse. Worthy of Deepak Chopra. Try again.
Living organisms have an intrinsic ability to alleviate changes brought about through external influences, thus they are “integral” to the creature. “Optimization” because, even if changes are reversed, a less than exact return to the previous condition ensures variety among the species to better cope with changing environmental conditions.
Everything we’ve discussed so far falls under weak emergence.
No, I care about it, but then strong emergence isn’t really my area of interest. I’m not all that concerned with what emerges when five angels dance on the head of a pin vs eleven.