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Author
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Topic: The Characterization of Intelligent Causation
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aiguy
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Member # 3736
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posted 25. April 2007 17:35
quote:
Because she can not express a knowledge of these topics in an academic context does not mean the knowledge (and/or intelligence) to solve complex chemistry, biology and physics problems does not exist within her body. Based on observed results, it would appear clear that such knowledge/intelligence does exist.
Based on the observed evidence or observed results, it would appear that all living systems involve very extensive levels of very sophisticated knowledge/intelligence.
LE,
Thanks for the responsive comment.
You could say that people have the "knowledge" to design complex biological organisms (i.e. children), but this is a different usage of the word "knowledge" that is commonly used, or that Daniel has in mind. He thinks knowledge means:
"the awareness and understanding of facts, truths or information gained in the form of experience or learning (a posteriori), or through introspection (a priori)."
Women do not introspect about how to design their babies, nor do they learn how to do it, nor are the aware of how they do it, nor do they understand how they do it. They just do it.
But as you point out, if we just looked at the observable result, and we could not ask the woman about what knowledge she had, we might (if we were "ID Theorists") infer that she did indeed have all of this knowledge.
That is the problem, Daniel: If we were alien ID theorists, and came across a human baby, then by your reasoning, we would infer that whatever designed the baby must be very knowledgable, and have a deep understanding of, and awareness of, all that is required to design one of these things. But we would be wrong, because non-biologists mothers actually aren't aware of, understand, or introspect about anything that is taking place in their uterus.
Do you see now?
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aiguy
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posted 26. April 2007 04:40
nosivad,
quote:
What topic, blind belief in chance? That is all that you or any other Darwinian can ever offer.
I see. You don't actually read what anybody else writes; you just like to see your comments appear on the board. The topic of this thread has nothing to do with Darwinism (and I am not a "Darwinian"), and it has nothing to do with chance or a belief in chance. I was hoping this board was moderated to keep people from spamming with irrelevant wisecracks; apparently it is not.
You are fighting imaginary opponents. Go build your strawmen somewhere else.
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nosivad
Member
Member # 767
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posted 26. April 2007 06:25
aiguy
The topic is the origin and characterization of intelligent causation. I have offered a new hypothesis which deals directly with that question. Don't tell me that I have no business commenting on this subject. It makes you look foolish. If you are not a Darwinian then what sort of scientist are you? Give me and others a brief synopsis of your convictions assuming you even have any.
Thank you very much.
"A past evolutuion is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
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aiguy
Member
Member # 3736
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posted 26. April 2007 06:53
nosivad,
quote:
The topic is the origin and characterization of intelligent causation.
Well, you're close anyway. I didn't mention the origin of intelligent causation, and don't see where that fits in at all.
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I have offered a new hypothesis which deals directly with that question.
Then what hypothesis do you have that has something to do with how we might characterize intelligence?
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Don't tell me that I have no business commenting on this subject.
Then don't suggest the topic is "blind belief in chance", or Darwinism, because neither of those ideas has anything to do with this thread.
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If you are not a Darwinian then what sort of scientist are you?
A computer scientist; I do research in artificial intelligence.
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Give me and others a brief synopsis of your convictions assuming you even have any. Thank you very much.
Sure. I do not defend mainstream evolutionary theory, and I'm not interested in debating it. I believe the central claim of ID is utterly vacuous; it is semantic sleight-of-hand with no scientic meaning at all, and I am interested in debating that.
The topic of the thread, then, is to discuss how we can characterize "intelligence" as something causal, since ID offers it as a causal explanation of biological complexity. I think there is no way to do this, any more than we could use "athleticism" as a causal explanation of physical prowess. If you take a moment to reflect, you should see that saying "biological complexity was caused by intelligence" means nothing more than "biological complexity was caused by what which can cause it".
Now, if you can manage to stick to the topic, and not start pontificating about Darwinism, then I welcome your arguments.
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LifeEngineer
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Member # 3446
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posted 26. April 2007 09:38
Quote: You could say that people have the "knowledge" to design complex biological organisms (i.e. children), but this is a different usage of the word "knowledge" that is commonly used, or that Daniel has in mind. He thinks knowledge means:
This touches on a whole range of issues.
INTELLIGENT CAUSATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND INTELLIGENT AGENCY
People often, or conventionally, make distinctions between problem solving resulting from ‘intelligent reasoning or causation’, problem solving resulting from knowledge, and problem solving caused by some sort of external intelligent agency. However, in terms of formal mathematical/scientific analysis of intelligence or intelligent causation, these three intuitive types of problem solving appear to reduce down to the same type or class of phenomenon.
You are welcome to attempt to propose a formal mathematical/scientific definition of intelligent causation that both 1) differentiates between the three categories and 2) is useful in formulating predictive theories, but I doubt that you can do it.
INTELLIGENT CAUSATION AS A MENTAL OR METAPHYSICAL OR COGNITIVE PHENOMONON
Lots of people would LIKE to see intelligent causation defined in terms of metaphysical or cognitive concepts like intent or consciousness or freewill. Lots of people believe that such definitions are possible. Rather than debate the issue on a general basis, it is more practical to 1) ask those individuals to actually produce a scientifically valid definition based on those concepts and 2) demonstrate that such a definition is useful in formulating predictive theories.
BACK TO BUILDING A BABY
No sane person doubts that babies are built or assembled or grow or develop (the term used does not really matter). As anyone with any real knowledge of science recognizes, humans don’t really know or understand or have a scientific explanation of how babies are assembled. As anyone with any real knowledge of science knows, the ‘assembled based almost entirely on knowledge stored in DNA’ explanation of development is about as scientifically rigorous and logical as the delivery by stork story. (Although obviously a lot more people in the world today believe the DNA fairytale than believe the stork story.)
The two key points are that 1) human scientists don’t actually have a scientific knowledge of how babies develop and 2) the end result produced by the ‘grow a baby process’ qualifies by some objective scientific definitions as a ‘result of intelligent causation’. From a formal scientific perspective, it does not really matter if we attribute ‘growing a baby’ to 1) intelligent processing during the development process, 2) knowledge transmitted to the developmental process, 3) intelligent agency, or 4) some combination of the these factors. No matter what we suggest or propose or speculate as the ‘cause’ of growing babies, we don’t, as scientists, actually have a formal complete scientific explanation of the process. No matter what we suggest or propose or speculate as the ‘cause’ of growing babies, the end result still satisfies some definitions of intelligent result. [And it make not one ounce of difference whether aiguy personally accepts the results based definitions of intelligent causation.]
While it may be obvious in the growing babies example that human knowledge of intelligent causation is incomplete, it is probably not as easy for people to recognize that human scientific knowledge of intelligent causation is also incomplete in the case of the household thermostat. The points here are 1) that human knowledge of intelligent causation will always be incomplete, and 2) the ‘goal’ of scientific analysis of intelligent causation is not complete knowledge, but formulating, at a very early stage of analysis, non-trivial testable predictive theories. Even with a very limited knowledge of the baby growing process, we can develop formal, scientifically rigorous results based definitions of intelligent causation (even if we can’t expect to obtain aiguy’s approval of the definition). We can then use these definitions to formulate non-trivial testable predictive theories of the baby growing process. We can develop these definitions and predictive theories despite the fact that our knowledge of the process is a very long ways from complete.
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nosivad
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posted 26. April 2007 14:33
aiguy
Scientists, and I am one, do not argue, they discover and then publish their findings. Absolute truth is not subject to discussion only to disclosure. And yes, I do believe in absolute truth. That is what science is all about.
"A past evolution it undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
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Daniel Smith
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Member # 3004
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posted 26. April 2007 15:03
aiguy:
quote:
My wife built a very complicated biological system... My wife's ability to design a child...
Your wife (and you) reproduced. The two of you did not design anything - your daughter's genetic makeup is merely a recombination of the two of yours. For somebody who is such a stickler about scientific definitions and accuracy of terms, I'm really surprised that you don't know the difference between building, designing, and reproducing. (I'm really not surprised though - I expected exactly that)
Your obvious prejudice is revealed now. You have erected a "God filter" to protect your fragile atheism from reality. You've created a fortress of "science" - narrowly defined to exclude any possibility of God - in order to keep your indefensible world intact.
You have no explanations for life. Your head is buried in the sand. You've gone so far now as to suggest "reproduction" as the mechanism by which all this biological complexity originated. (You know then that there could not have been a "first" organism - don't you?). You're like the little kid with his fingers in his ears shouting "La La LA LA" to drown out what the adults in the room are trying to tell him. You can look at all the unexplainable biological complexity in the machinery of life and completely ignore it!
Michael Denton, in his excellent book Evolution: A Theory In Crisis likened the inner workings of a cell - if we were able to magnify to a billion times it's size - to a "giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York". Inside this "object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design", we would see that "nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had it's analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and molecular construction. In fact, so deep would be the feeling of deja-vu, so persuasive the analogy, that much of the terminology we would use to describe this fascinating molecular reality would be borrowed from the world of late twentieth-century technology."
You have no workable, conceivable explanation for that do you? So all you're prepared to do is shoot down those that offer serious scientific (though they don't fit your self-imposed narrow paradigm) explanations.
Well good luck to you. You have "shot no holes" in our theories, you have not even made a dent. Your world is safe however. Go about your business, ignore the obvious, continue on with your inadequate theories and your non-explanations. Keep chanting the mantra "We don't know!" - until you've thoroughly convinced yourself the answer is unknowable.
This discussion has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous [and I'm through with it].
Edit 4-27-07: Obviously - since I can't seem to stay away - I've retracted the bracketed part of this last statement.
[ 27. April 2007, 14:11: Message edited by: Daniel Smith ]
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aiguy
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posted 26. April 2007 16:49
Daniel,
quote:
Your wife (and you) reproduced. The two of you did not design anything - your daughter's genetic makeup is merely a recombination of the two of yours. For somebody who is such a stickler about scientific definitions and accuracy of terms, I'm really surprised that you don't know the difference between building, designing, and reproducing. (I'm really not surprised though - I expected exactly that)
LOL. You blithley claim that life forms were designed, but can't tell me what that is supposed to mean. I say my daughter was designed, and you claim I'm not justified in saying that!
Here, I will make it even clearer:
1) You claimed that whatever causes the existence of complex machinery must have detailed engineering knowledge
2) I pointed out that human beings cause complex machinery to exist without any engineering knowledge at all
So you are simply wrong. You can call these causal acts whatever you choose to call them, but the fact remains: The most complex creations of human beings are their children, and we create those without knowing anything at all about what we are doing.
quote:
Your obvious prejudice is revealed now. You have erected a "God filter" to protect your fragile atheism from reality. You've created a fortress of "science" - narrowly defined to exclude any possibility of God - in order to keep your indefensible world intact.
What a sorry strategy this is. You lose the argument, so instead of coming up with a new argument, you attack me for my atheism? You can't show where I have narrowly defined anything to exclude anything a priori, and you know it.
You tried to define intelligent causation and found you couldn't, so you gave up. Then you tried to restate it in terms of knowledge, and I showed that we create complex machinery without knowledge, so there is no justification for assuming knowledge is required to create complex machinery. You have lost the argument, pure and simple. You should leave my beliefs about religion out of it, and in turn I won't denigrate you for your beliefs in fairy tales. Fair enough?
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You have no explanations for life.
That is correct, and neither do you.
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Your head is buried in the sand.
These comments do not further your argument, and only make you seem desperate. Try making an argument, and stay away from these ad hominem attacks.
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You've gone so far now as to suggest "reproduction" as the mechanism by which all this biological complexity originated.
No, I have not. Do not misstate what I say here; if you claim I've said something, provide the quote. What I post is recorded on these pages, so there can be no mistaking it. I have pointed out the creation of complex machinery does not require knowledge, but I did not claim that life on Earth was "reproduced".
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(You know then that there could not have been a "first" organism - don't you?)
Neither of us knows how life began; the difference is that I have no trouble admitting it.
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You're like the little kid with his fingers in his ears shouting "La La LA LA" to drown out what the adults in the room are trying to tell him. You can look at all the unexplainable biological complexity in the machinery of life and completely ignore it!
I do not ignore anything; I am at least as versed in the complexity in biology as you are, and likely to be much more aware of the complexity of thought processes than you are. And if you'd like to continue debating here, stop insulting me. You can't win an argument with insults.
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You have no workable, conceivable explanation for that do you?
I think I've repeated this enough times now: I do not know how life began, and neither does anybody else.
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So all you're prepared to do is shoot down those that offer serious scientific (though they don't fit your self-imposed narrow paradigm) explanations.
There is absolutely not one iota of scientific argument in anything you have said this far, much less "serious scientific explanations". If you had a scientific explanation, you could tell me what it was, and explain what your terms meant with respect to what could be empirically evaluated. Instead, you toss around these concepts like "ingenuity" that have no operationalized definitions and are scientifically useless.
quote:
Well good luck to you. You have "shot no holes" in our theories, you have not even made a dent.
I have pointed out that you have no theory whatsoever. You cannot characterize the cause of biological complexity in any way at all, save for incoherent theological speculations. As we scientists say, you are not even wrong.
quote:
Your world is safe however. Go about your business, ignore the obvious, continue on with your inadequate theories and your non-explanations. Keep chanting the mantra "We don't know!" - until you've thoroughly convinced yourself the answer is unknowable. This discussion has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous and I'm through with it.
You have lost the argument, and you are upset. You weren't satisfied with your religious beliefs, and insisted that they be accepted as scientifically supported theories. Well, they're not. You can't portray your beliefs in a Supreme Being as a scientific hypothesis, because you can't say what characteristics this Supreme Being is supposed to have in a way that we have any hope of scientifically verifying.
If you stop trying to claim your religion is science, I won't attack your religious beliefs. I think that is more than fair.
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nosivad
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posted 26. April 2007 18:21
To maintain or even suggest that it is intrinsic in matter to self assemble even once into a living evolving system is an arrogant assumption which flies in the face of everything we have learned about life during the century and a half since Darwin presented his conviction that natural selection could be involved in such transformations. The simple truth is that the origin and subsequent evolution of life remains a complete mystery. It is a monumental waste of time to even speculate on the primary causes of both ontogeny and phylogeny. What we can say with absolute certainty is that there was never a role for chance in either process and there still isn't. Those who think that there is or ever was are on a fool's errand. They deny a goal when everything points to exactly that with rational man the final product of a process that can no longer even be observed because, as far as can be directly determined, it is finished. Leo Berg put it very simply, referring to ontogeny and phylogeny -
"Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance."
Nomogenesis, page 134
Pierre Grasse said the same thing.
"Any system that purports to to account for evolution must invoke a mechanism not mutational and aleatory."
Evolution of Living Organisms, page 145
So did Otto Schindewolf.
"...the main features of the evolutionary trend were laid out right from the start with the abrupt, discontinuous production of the type, and with evolutionary potential being restricted right from the start to certain paths."
Basic Questions in Paleontology, page 360, the entire statement in italics for emphasis.
If not chance then what? I say that all these common views, coming as they did independently from three of the finest minds of the evolutionary literature, demand the complete abandonment of any mechanism that excludes one or more intelligences far beyond our capacity to comprehend or even imagine. Of course we cannot define such forces and shouldn't even try. It is sufficient to recogize that they most certainly once existed. That is all that is required. First causes always escape understanding but they do not escape the reality that they must have existed.
I add Robert Broom to those that provide support for the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis as the only viable alternative to Godless Darwinism, the most failed hypothesis in the history of science.
"Those that consider all the strange course of evolution is the result of an accident or a series of accidents, are quite at liberty to think so. I believe there is a Plan and though in the slow course of evolution there have been ups and downs, and what look like mistakes, the plan has gone on; and we may feel sure that it cannot fail to reach its goal."
Finding the Missing Link, page 101
I would only suggest that the goal was reached around 100,000 years ago with the last mammalian species to appear, Homo sapiens.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
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aiguy
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posted 26. April 2007 22:46
quote:
To maintain or even suggest that it is intrinsic in matter to self assemble even once into a living evolving system is an arrogant assumption which flies in the face of everything we have learned about life during the century and a half since Darwin presented his conviction that natural selection could be involved in such transformations.
What is truly arrogant is to assume that we currently comprehend any significant portion of what is intrinsic to matter.
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The simple truth is that the origin and subsequent evolution of life remains a complete mystery.
I won't argue that; it is clearly true regarding origins.
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It is a monumental waste of time to even speculate on the primary causes of both ontogeny and phylogeny. What we can say with absolute certainty is that there was never a role for chance in either process and there still isn't. Those who think that there is or ever was are on a fool's errand. They deny a goal when everything points to exactly that with rational man the final product of a process that can no longer even be observed because, as far as can be directly determined, it is finished.
So, you still have nothing to contribute with regard to the topic of the thread, I see.
quote:
If not chance then what? I say that all these common views, coming as they did independently from three of the finest minds of the evolutionary literature, demand the complete abandonment of any mechanism that excludes one or more intelligences far beyond our capacity to comprehend or even imagine. Of course we cannot define such forces and shouldn't even try. It is sufficient to recogize that they most certainly once existed. That is all that is required. First causes always escape understanding but they do not escape the reality that they must have existed.
I fear you really are incapable of understanding the question at hand, nosivad. You haven't even touched on the topic.
quote:
I add Robert Broom to those that provide support for the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis as the only viable alternative to Godless Darwinism, the most failed hypothesis in the history of science.
You can only talk about your pet theories regarding evolution, which have nothing to do with characterizing intelligence.
Is there anybody who might be willing and able to read the questions in the original post of this thread, and try to address them?
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Daniel Smith
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posted 27. April 2007 06:01
aiguy:
quote:
I pointed out that human beings cause complex machinery to exist without any engineering knowledge at all
You make no sense. I have no idea what you mean by these terms.
Define: I
Define: pointed
Define: out
Define: that
Define: human
Define: beings
Define: cause
Define: complex
Define: machinery
Define: to
Define: exist
Define: without
Define: any
Define: engineering
Define: knowledge
Define: at
Define: all
How can you make that statement when you don't even know what the terms mean? You can't even define them. You have no theory. You're not being scientific. Science needs clearly defined terms. You lost the argument. Blah, blah, blah...
See I can do it too.
Does this mean I win?
[ 27. April 2007, 06:05: Message edited by: Daniel Smith ]
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miosim
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posted 27. April 2007 06:05
aiguy: quote:
“I'm interested in REVIEWING INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY from the perspective of our current understanding of intelligence…
Because you are not proponent of ID theory, the word REVIEWING and your “emotional” responses set the stage for a ideological rather that a scientific discussion.
Ideology, like any other belief cannot be overcomed by arguments and this discussion just conforms that this is unhelpful and destructive business.
There are two major reasons why people come together: to create through cooperation or to fight. If we change our intention and choose to create instead of fight, the diversity of views is not an obstacle, but a very crucial ingredient for an answer to be found.
Can we go back to your original statement about positively characterization of intelligence causation, but without reference to any Ideology?
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nosivad
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posted 27. April 2007 06:51
I thank aiguy, whoever that is, for repeating my comments. I need all the exposure I can muster.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
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Zarathustra
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Member # 3407
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posted 27. April 2007 08:43
quote:
Smith: You make no sense. I have no idea what you mean by these terms.
If this is true, then you have disqualified yourself from any further discussion, and force us to disregard your earlier posts as being invalid. Strange, because you seem to have been keeping up until now. If, on the other hand, your statement is false, then you are engaging in intellectual dishonesty. There is no place for that in a rational discussion such as this; I suggest you take such arguments to a religious forum, where they belong.
quote:
Miosim: Because you are not proponent of ID theory, the word REVIEWING and your “emotional” responses set the stage for a ideological rather that a scientific discussion.
If you take the trouble to read through this topic from the beginning, Miosim, you will see that Aiguy has remained scrupulously neutral with respect to his original question. How many times has he had to drag people back on-topic, only to have the discussion polluted by irrelevancies a short while later? Your slurs might be better reserved those who deserve them, Miosim.
The teleological aspect of intelligence deserves further investigation. True, water can cleverly find the optimal path from mountaintop to sea, and can rightly be said to have a purpose. We do not ascribe "intelligence" to such phenomena, however, because we understand the underlying mechanisms sufficiently well for them to be unsurprising.
Daniel Smith repeatedly claims that we can "see" that a phenomenon is not naturally-occurring, and usually cites some kind of purposeful "function" as his grounds. Put more simply than Smith is able, this reduces to a phenomenon's being "surprisingly purposeful". Let's look at this more closely. Consider:
A) All surprisingly purposeful phenomena imply an intelligent designer.
B) Intelligence is a surprisingly purposeful phenomenon,
therefore
C) Intelligence implies an intelligent designer.
Following through, we see:
D) An intelligent designer has intelligence (truism)
E) That intelligence is surprisingly purposeful
so
F) The intelligent designer's intelligence implies another intelligent designer.
This leads to an infinite number of different intelligent designers, each having been designed by its precursor. The only way to avoid this regression is to deny either A) or B). Which of them is incorrect?
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LifeEngineer
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posted 27. April 2007 09:31
The development of the human child provides an excellent opportunity to evaluate concepts and definitions of intelligent causation. Essentially everyone involved in the discussion here recognizes or believes that mature humans exhibit or manifest intelligent causation. Essentially everyone involved in the discussion also recognizes that from a mature human in one generation to a mature human in another generation there is a complex transformation process involving egg and sperm cells and a complex developmental process.
In order to evaluate the various scientific definitions and scientific definitions we should ask “How does the proposed scientific definition of intelligent causation address these transformations?” Does the proposed concept and scientific definition suggest that intelligent causation is reinvented every generation? Does the proposed concept suggest that ‘intelligent causation’ or ‘the knowledge or information required to create intelligent causation’ is transmitted between generations in some type material like DNA?
If the issue of transformation of intelligent causation between generations is not addressed, and people like aiguy can not and will not address the issue, then there is no scientific definition of intelligent causation. As has been stated on numerous occasions, those groups and individuals who are unable or unwilling to produce scientific definitions of intelligent causation are in no position to judge the definitions proposed by others.
If the scientific definition of intelligent causation presented by some individual or group does address the between generation transformation issue, then the proposed transformation process or mechanism should be subject to formal scientific testing and evaluation.
I go back to the topic of one of the earliest posts in this thread. Before you can start discussing definitions of intelligent causation, you need to define the criteria to be satisfied by the definition and you need to define who is qualified to evaluate whether those criteria are satisfied. Put up logical requirements like ‘explain or address between generation transformations’ and you quickly eliminate most potential definitions and most potential evaluators.
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