Intelligent Design

[dougo]

A few months ago I had a mini-epiphany about this whole issue of Intelligent Design. It's not actually very useful in the political debate, but I found it interesting in an abstract philosophical way.

I believe in Strong AI. (Well, "believe in" is a loaded term. Let's say "subscribe to the notion of".) Strong AI says, roughly, that any entity or system that behaves like an intelligent consciousness (i.e., that can pass a Turing test) is, in fact, an intelligent consciousness. Another way of looking at it is that there is no distinction between "mind" and "brain"; consciousness isn't something metaphysical apart from the physical brain, it's simply an emergent property of a system, whether it be a functioning human brain or a computer running sufficiently complex AI software. (I guess the bumper sticker would be "Cylons are people too!")

So what does this have to do with Intelligent Design? Simple: the results of the process of evolution over many millennia are indistinguishable from the products of intentional design by an intelligent consciousness; therefore, the process of evolution is an intelligent consciousness. Well, perhaps it's a little weird to ascribe "consciousness" to a process that just performs one specific task (creating new forms of life) and couldn't actually participate in a Turing test. But my point is that it is intelligent, because it produces things that can only be produced by intelligence, and there's no need to posit something metaphysical apart from the physical biosphere of Earth in order to explain humans and finches and platypuses and Venus flytraps.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

sorry, that was me.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Hey, nobody's perfect. :)

Actually, I think that's a pretty difficult design project, to make human skulls big enough to hold a brain but small enough to fit through a vagina. There's something about this in How the Mind Works. (Whoa, Google Print rules!)

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

nonsense. just have a zipper going down the front of the stumach. we have all this empty space between our ribs and pelvis where we could give birth without damaging ourselves, but evolutionary needs have created a specimum where the eggs and sperm are excreted at the excretion end of the digestive tract. this is clearly an inefficiency caused by our evolutionary pathway, but there's no way in hell we're going to randomly mutate to give birth elsewhere in our bodies.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I suspect there are good reasons why that wouldn't work. But in general, I think it's clear that given enough time, anything that is physically possible (and better for survival) will eventually be "designed" by evolution. But I'm guessing that some (many?) Intelligent Design proponents wouldn't like the idea that the design process is not "finished" yet.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

That only applies if you assume that evolution is hyperintelligent and can make huge leaps. I think the conclusion here is that evolution is a hacker and only makes incremental improvements.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

It's also sloppy and lazy: it doesn't bother to clean up vestigial organs because it's more trouble than it's worth.

Oddly, most of the top hits in a Google search for "vestigial" are "Darwinism refuted" sites. Augh.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

A stupid search algorithm can look intelligent if 1) the space it's searching is sufficiently complex and 2) it has a ridiculously huge amount of time and processing power.