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Author
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Topic: The Characterization of Intelligent Causation
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miosim
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Member # 4541
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posted 08. May 2007 14:46
Life Engineer
quote:
“…Teleological theories ... are the only type of hard science theory that can address and explain intelligent causation …”.
Within “hard sciences”, the theory is verified hypothesis. What is the verification for ID hypothesis? If you mean a logical explanation, just drop the word “hard” and ID could be in compliance with a definition of theory , at least for now.
[ 08. May 2007, 16:04: Message edited by: miosim ]
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miosim
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posted 08. May 2007 15:01
05/08/07
I am enjoying reading last few exchanges between Daniel Smith and Aiguy – excellent challenging questions and very good responses.
Daniel quote:
So let's get specific:
…How does the Ribosome know what amino acids to put together…?
…How do the 20 or so enzymes that are continually at work proofreading DNA know…?
… How does the RNA polymerase know to transcribe DNA into RNA? Is the RNA polymerase intelligent…?
… Are these things intelligent … Do they suggest "knowledge" was involved in their construction?
I think you are asking right questions, and by the way, I can expend your list of tough questions that need to be answered by science. Doesn't look like, today science has a good answer, but looking back in a history we see how many challenges science was able to overcome and therefore, I remain optimistic that your questions eventually will be answered. And if the answer is GOD, it will be accepted, because a TRUE SCIENCE is not driven by agenda, and would eventually accept realty, whatever it is. This is how TRUE SCIENCE distinguish them self from a dogmatic teaching.
If you belief that IDT is a real science you should consider any plausible explanation for the questions you asked Aiguy.“Intelligence causation”, for example, should not be limited to an EXTERNAL to material system factor only, but INTERNAL (distributed in the system) intelligence could cause the same effect. For example, an intelligence property of Human Being is “intelligence causation” for the collective intelligence of human civilization.
If you consider you self a scientist and not just an advocate for dogmatic teaching, you may want to hear my arguments in favor to INTERNAL causes, but if the purpose of this thread is just an ideological debate I do not want waste your or my time.
Let me know.
[ 09. May 2007, 05:35: Message edited by: miosim ]
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Ebb_Dimskill
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Member # 5197
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posted 08. May 2007 22:00
Well nobody has posted to this thread for a while, so I can't be hijacking it.
AIGuy: How might we characterize intelligence such that we could scientifically demonstrate the same thing is responsible for both human cognition and the origin of life
The question is, do you AIGuy recognize something going on in human society that could be accurately characterized as "intelligent design". I sincerely trust that you will answer 'yes' to this question. So, the question is, when we look at what is going in in the process of intelligent design in human society, is it the same thing that goes on in the emergence of complex living things, and if the answer to that question is 'yes' (which I'm sure will be apparent it is) then we must say that life was intelligently designed as well. I'm sure you know where this primrose path is going.
(I didn't originate the following - although you probably know who did. Hopefully its not Carl Sagan, although I guess it might be.)
Complex artifacts emerge in human society as a result of innumerable individuals working completely independently on different technologies. Whenever some new technology X emerges, it is unavoidable that it will ultimately form an integral part of some new technology Y, that the originator of X had not the slightest conception of of when he invented X. Furthermore, The inventor of Y may very conceivably not have the slightest idea of how X works, but is instead just using it as a black box. So Y in its totality has not emerged via the conscious awareness of any one individual. If you go back to the foundation of civilization lets say you have some very primitive technologies A, B, C, D, E that were developed by seperate individuals. Then in the next generation, you have F developed which is comprised of ACDCEEEE, technology G = CCCFB, and so on. We could imagine F and G being comprised algorithmically of A-E, so you could have loops or conditionals referencing A-E.
But you can continue this process down through history. As things progress, technologies are preserved, not because anyone understands them necessarily, but because of their usefulness and the fact that they are part of other technologies. Technologies emerge continuously completely independently of the conscious awareness of anyone. Someone modifies some existing technology and the result is something new which no one envisioned, and the modifier didn't understand more than a fraction of the precursor technologies of the item he modified.
Furthermore, existing technologies are incrementally optimized until the presence of their original component parts are completely obscured. We no longer have a causal history indicating how the device originated. To use an example, If you build some program out of preexisting reusable components, it will inevitably be suboptimal in terms of speed or space, the reason being the components you're reusing are general purpose. If you start optimizing your program for a particular task, you will be jettisoning the parts of the components which you don't need, so these components are no longer comparable to the form they were in originally.
But anyway, you have ennumerable brains in society, signaling each other in a big network, but no brain is consciously aware of more than a miniscule portion of everything. This is not unlike an individual brain which is comprised of neurons, each neuron signalling each other in a big network, but no neuron is conscious of anything more than the extremely minsicule.
So, this is intelligent design, literally. Isn't this what goes on in the emergence of complex life? So might not this indicate that the cosmos is intelligent, quite literally as well, and that we were intelligently designed?
[ 09. May 2007, 02:30: Message edited by: Ebb_Dimskill ]
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IF
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Member # 1904
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posted 08. May 2007 22:51
quote:
no neuron is conscious of anything more than the extremely minsicule.
Are single cell neurons conscious?
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Ebb_Dimskill
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posted 08. May 2007 23:21
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Are single cell neurons conscious?
I don't even think a human is conscious - I don't think the term has any meaning.
If a computer is getting sensory input from something in the external world, it can act on it or respond to it in some way.
If a human being is getting sensory input from something in the external world, it can act on it or respond to it in some way.
Either both computers and humans are conscious, or neither are.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it (for now).
Just to clarify though, however you define the term 'consciousness', no human has conscious awareness of more than an incredibly miniscule fraction of existing technology, or just anything in general (obviously).
[ 08. May 2007, 23:34: Message edited by: Ebb_Dimskill ]
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LifeEngineer
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Member # 3446
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posted 09. May 2007 08:25
Miosim,
Quote: Within “hard sciences”, the theory is verified hypothesis. What is the verification for ID hypothesis? If you mean a logical explanation, just drop the word “hard” and ID could be in compliance with a definition of theory , at least for now.
You are making the common mistake of confusing academic soft science with real science or hard science. Academic soft science involves people presenting informal beliefs as hypothesis and then if over time the peer review ‘priests’ don’t reject the hypothesis/belief it gets given the title of theory. Despite the terminology used, the academic process of reviewing ‘beliefs’ is a ‘review by subjective authority’ and is no different and no more effective than other non-scientific and pre-scientific review by authority processes.
Hard science means well defined theories involving defined and quantified variables evaluated and refined by ‘one failure falsifies’ testing. There are lots of ID theories or teleological theories that fit the hard science requirements.
If ID science is presented as an academic soft science then as Daniel is demonstrating it will always come up a looser against the more established soft science anti-ID authorities. If ID science is presented as hard science with testable predictive theories, it can and will defeat the anti-ID soft sciences, but it will also loose most of the metaphysical and religious beliefs of most current ID supporters.
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LifeEngineer
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posted 09. May 2007 08:37
Quote: Are single cell neurons conscious?
There is absolutely no evidence of consciousness in individual neurons, but there is plenty of evidence of intelligent causation in neurons. If you actually model and analyze information processing at the level of the individual neuron, you will find that 1) the processing logic or processing algorithms are highly dynamic with changes in processing algorithms occurring in the millisecond time frame, and 2) despite the rapidly changing processing algorithms, the neuron almost never fails to produce goal compatible output.
It is not possible to explain or fit the information processing behavior of a neuron to a non-trivial non-teleological predictive theory, but the behavior is readily explained by and fit to predictive testable teleological theories or IDTs.
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LifeEngineer
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posted 09. May 2007 09:24
Quote: If you belief that IDT is a real science you should consider any plausible explanation for the questions you asked Aiguy.“Intelligence causation”, for example, should not be limited to an EXTERNAL to material system factor only, but INTERNAL (distributed in the system) intelligence could cause the same effect.
A major part of the confusion regarding ID science arises from a failure to understand the nature of scientific explanations. Non-scientists and soft science advocates continue to incorrectly believe that scientific explanations are in the form of how or why.
Scientific explanations, or more specifically hard science explanations, are in the form of testable predictive theories. Testable predictive theories have a specific format that is compatible with the human behavior of formal hypothesis testing. Most of the informal belief and descriptions that get labeled ‘scientific theories’ in academic science don’t even come close to qualifying as real scientific theories.
To understand hard science ID you need to understand that teleological theories or IDTs fit the formal requirements for testable predictive theories, and you have to understand that academic soft science ‘theories’ and explanations don’t meet the requirements for scientific theories.
Intelligent causation represents a relatively complex form of causal relationship. The challenge that has stumped scientists for a very long time has been trying to formulate predictive theories compatible with intelligent causation. The solution to this problem turns out to be teleological theories. The existence of teleological theories has been known for a very long time. What has not been understood, and what is still not generally recognized or accepted, is that teleological theories provide valid scientific explanations for intelligent causation.
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Daniel Smith
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posted 09. May 2007 14:47
miosim:
quote:
If you belief that IDT is a real science you should consider any plausible explanation for the questions you asked Aiguy.“Intelligence causation”, for example, should not be limited to an EXTERNAL to material system factor only, but INTERNAL (distributed in the system) intelligence could cause the same effect. For example, an intelligence property of Human Being is “intelligence causation” for the collective intelligence of human civilization.
If you consider you self a scientist and not just an advocate for dogmatic teaching, you may want to hear my arguments in favor to INTERNAL causes, but if the purpose of this thread is just an ideological debate I do not want waste your or my time.
Let me know.
I am open to any reasonable discussion about intelligent causation.
You bring up the concept of "Internal Intelligence" and use the collective intelligence of human civilization as an example. This analogy applies to a point in regard to biological systems, but what seems to be lacking in human society - and seems abundantly present in biological organisms - is a "master plan".
Human societies function on the edge of chaos. We seem to barely get along most of the time, and - due to such things as language and cultural differences - we are often completely at odds with each other.
Biological systems, on the other hand, seem to generally function seamlessly from top to bottom. Every element involved in the system is "on the same page" so to speak.
So I would argue that there is a unifying factor involved in biological systems that is largely non-existent in human society.
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Daniel Smith
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posted 09. May 2007 14:51
LifeEngineer:
quote:
Hard science means well defined theories involving defined and quantified variables evaluated and refined by ‘one failure falsifies’ testing. There are lots of ID theories or teleological theories that fit the hard science requirements.
I'm interested in learning more about these hard science ID and teleological theories. Could you provide some references please?
Thanks.
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nosivad
Member
Member # 767
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posted 09. May 2007 15:51
Daniel Smith
Good luck with your request from Life Engineer. I predict you will get nothing.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
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LifeEngineer
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posted 09. May 2007 16:37
Daniel,
Way back when, there were lots of introductory text books in science and philosophy of science courses that discussed different types of hard science predictive theories including the simple deterministic theories used in physics, probabilistic or stochastic theories and teleological theories. If these topics are no longer taught in undergraduate courses or if you did not bother to study the subjects, then you probably lack the technical qualifications to participate in any meaningful way in a discussion of the scientific analysis of intelligent causation.
If you understand the structure of standard physics type predictive theories, then all you need to get to teleological theories is to include a goal variable in the set of causal variables.
It is rather interesting how many people treat 'science' as a literature review subject that is no different from history or literature or theology. This rather strange misconception of science seems to be encouraged by academia.
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aiguy
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Member # 3736
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posted 09. May 2007 20:40
Daniel,
quote:
When you say "god-of-the-gaps", you make it sound as if I'm appealing to magic, or fairy dust. In reality, what I'm appealing to is a universally accepted explanation for technology - Intelligent Design.
First, when I say "god-of-the-gaps", I am referring to no explanation at all; rather, I am saying that your criterion for deciding when your "explanation" is supposed to hold is simply when we can't explain something any other way. Second, "intelligent design" is not accepted as an explanation for anything, at least from a scientific standpoint, since nobody can say what it is supposed to mean. And please don't go trotting out forensics (which seeks to find clues about human activity), or archeology (which does exactly the same), or SETI (which is not a theory intended to explain anything).
quote:
It's interesting that all I had to do was mention an undefined "mechanical widget" for you to immediately reject "natural causation" and assume design in our theoretical Martian world. Why was that?
Because I thought you meant by "widget" the sorts of things human beings build. If you meant something like a flagellum, then nobody would think it was designed by some life form similar to a human being.
quote:
Why is it, when you know it's "safe" and involves "no deity", you can readily see design - even in a theoretical, undefined object - yet in some of the most extensively defined technological marvels ever discovered, you act as if you can't even envision design? Why is that?
Imagine archeologists investigating a dig, and they found a spear, a pot, and a tree. Now, the most complex of these is the tree, but the archeologists would not attempt to investigate the origin of the tree. Why? Because archeologists are looking for things that human beings built, and humans don't build things like trees.
If archeologists really investigated the activity of "intelligent agents", as IDers pretend, then they would want to investigate the tree as well. They could find fossils of all sorts of plants and animals, but no archeologist would spend a moment trying to decide if they were archeological artifiacts, because they don't look like things that people build at all.
quote:
And what exactly are these "gaps" of which you speak?
A "gap" is anything that we observe and can't explain. You would like to offer intelligent agency/God as an explanation for anything we don't understand. That is why you don't try to offer God as an explanation of the generation of lightning in a cloud, because now we understand that. If you lived three hundred years ago, you would surely have said that God aimed lightning bolts. But you would have been wrong, because the fact that you could not explain it is not a justification for saying "God did it".
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The scientific community for centuries held to a teleological view: The world looked designed, no one had come up with a better explanation, therefore Design was the predominant theory. Darwinism changed all that.
Just like with tides, and wind, and planetary motion, and thunder and lightning. Before we learned how to do science, everybody imagined all these things were operated by gods. One by one, the gaps went away, and the gods were dispelled. And along the way, we learned that whatever remaining gaps there are can't really be explained by gods either; it is simply that we don't know all the answers.
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In short, science - since pinning it's hopes on unguided natural causation - has explained nothing:
The "gaps" of which you speak are the complete inability of science to account for the origin of even one organ (much less one organism).
Most scientists believe we know a tremendous amount about the origin of species. I won't debate that with you, however, and it is irrelevant here whether or not that is true. If all of evolutionary was wrong (and it's not), that still would not somehow be a justification for any other theory, much less a "theory" like ID that cannot define it's sole explanatory concept.
quote:
So, contrary to your imaginary scenario where "the more we learn, the less likely design becomes"
I never said this, and it is a ridiculous thing to say. This goes to the heart of your confusion. The question of whether "design" is a scientific explanation at all, and if so, whether it is true, is unrelated to the truth of other theories!
IDers somehow got it in their heads that if they can demonstrate evolutionary theory is wrong, then that is the same thing as demonstrating this idea of "design" has somehow gained support. But that is absurd. If there is no coherent meaning to ID's explanation (and there is not), and there is no empirical, positive evidence for some conscious cosmic mind (and there is not), then even if you manage to absolutely prove that everything we know about evolutionary biology is false, that doesn't even make ID a contender.
[ 09. May 2007, 21:43: Message edited by: aiguy ]
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LifeEngineer
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posted 10. May 2007 07:42
Daniel,
Quote: IDers somehow got it in their heads that if they can demonstrate evolutionary theory is wrong, then that is the same thing as demonstrating this idea of "design" has somehow gained support.
Here is where you would find it useful to understand teleological theories. When IDers formally falsify modern anti-teleology theories of evolution they have only completed half the task. However, when they have falsified an anti-teleology theory and successfully replaced it with a teleological theory or IDT they have not only discredited as scientifically unsound a portion of MET, but they have also provided positive support for design by intelligence.
From a formal scientific perspective it is not sufficient to demonstrate that aiguy is unable to produce either a definition of intelligent causation or a valid scientific theory addressing behaviors associated with intelligent causation. From a formal scientific perspective it is not sufficient to demonstrate that METs do not stand up to formal testing. [Although aiguy’s implication that his inability to define intelligence supports his metaphysical views on the subject is also scientifically invalid. The implied argument that METs are scientifically valid even if falsified is also illogical.]
From a formal scientific perspective, support for the design concept requires formal definitions of intelligent causation, which has been provided and valid testable predictive theories. Teleological theories are the only scientific theories that support design concepts. Aiguy apparently selected you as a dance partner because he recognizes that you don’t have a working knowledge of teleological theories.
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nosivad
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posted 10. May 2007 07:46
A long past Intelligent Designer(s) is obvious in every aspect of both the animate and inanimate worlds. To deny it is just as idiotic as it is to present it as a mere "inference" as the ID crowd continues to do. I regard ID as the necessary starting point without which nothing else in either ontogeny or phylogeny will ever make sense. It is a given and most certainly not a subject for debate.
"Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance."
Leo Berg, Nomogenesis, page 134.
Ergo - The Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
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