Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Saturday, March 09, 2013, 11:36 (4056 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW (quoting Tony): "God most likely developed an emergent design, where a relatively small number of rules and constants allow for a near infinite variety, and then built layers of information into that." I find the wording of this quite difficult to follow. By "developed an emergent design", do you mean he kept tinkering with the design as things went along? And does "then built layers of information into that" mean further tinkering?
 
TONY: Emergent design means that you start with a very basic set of guiding principals that form the framework for your entire creation. For example, we have the underlying laws of Quantum Physics and physics that guide all other actions/reactions in the physical universe. They are partially deterministic in nature, ascribing what may and may not happen when certain events come to pass. They do not, in and of themselves, put any events into motion, but only form the guiding principals that guide the outcome of those events once triggered.
 
I shan't reproduce the rest of your post, which deals largely with game design, because interesting though it is, I can't see that it favours one hypothesis over another. We know that materials have combined to form functioning systems (our solar system, living organisms). The theist hypothesis is that an inexplicable, self-aware "first cause" deliberately did the combining; the materialist hypothesis is that the combinations came about by chance; my inbetween hypothesis ascribes them to "first cause" unselfconscious "intelligent" energy within the materials it formed. None of these hypotheses can be swallowed without a large dose of faith. You have quite rightly questioned mine, and now I'm questioning yours.
 
My problem with the passage quoted at the start of this post is your use of "developed..." and "then...", which suggests tinkering around. That is why I've tried to pin down the process implied by your God hypothesis: "Do you believe that God pre-programmed the very first cells to pass the blueprint for sex/liver/brain down through countless generations of individual organisms and different species, or that every innovation was the result of his stepping in and fiddling with the genes?" I do hope you will find time to answer, as this is the question I'm really concerned with.