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

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Does that make random chance intelligent?

Yes.

You claim a priori the results of evolution are indistinguishable from the products of intentional design by an intelligent consciousness. I can claim that the results of evolution are indistinguishable from the products of an unintentional design by environmental and genetic factors.

I agree with both of these claims, because the results are irrelevant of intent. Put another way, the definition of intent depends on the definition of intelligence, and I'm defining intelligence as "that which appears to be intelligent".

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

Can submarines swim?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Can a nation turn its lonely eyes to Joe DiMaggio?

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

No.

[lordjulius.livejournal.com]

I still don't understand what your criteria are for defining the appearance of intelligence.

I thought the Turing test defined the appearance of intelligence. Evolution cannot pass a Turing test.

If you define 'intelligence' as "the appearance of intelligence", then it's just a tautology. In my opinion. (I think I understand what you are trying to say, however.)

Doesn't Godel, Escher, Bach have something to say about this? Do you remember the part where they are analyzing an ant colony (or some such) which appears to have the attributes of intelligence, but is actually composed of many unintelligent bits?

[novalis.livejournal.com]

I think dougo is saying that generating some being which can pass the Turing Test is a valid way of passing the Turing Test. This implies that cp passes the Turing Test, if any program can pass. I think Turing's original definition is more narrow than this; and that narrowness prevents the test from contradiction our intuition.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

That isn't what I was saying, although that's an interesting tangent. I think what I was saying was that there is a different intelligence test that's analogous to the Turing Test but doesn't require a dialogue. Call it the Scopes Monkey Test, or something. But I don't have a good definition of how something passes this test, other than "the ID people think this looks like it was designed by an intelligence". Which is somewhat of a tautology. But it's hard to avoid tautologies when discussing unfalsifiable claims. (And natural selection is sort of a tautology itself: things that are better at surviving survive.)

[novalis.livejournal.com]

CA500

[dougo.livejournal.com]

CA500

I did say "sort of". Maybe I should have said "has the illusion of being".

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Also, I'm not sure copying counts as "generating". Sexual reproduction by intelligent beings isn't intelligence. Generations of reproduction and mutation from non-intelligent beings into intelligent beings is an intelligent process, but this doesn't require producing intelligent beings—producing an eye from a non-eye is similar.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I only have Metamagical Themas. My copy of GEB was stolen from the UCB CSUA before I got through all the Achilles & Tortoise dialogs. Looks like Google Print has them both though. (Haven't figured out how to link to a specific page yet.)