Intelligence (Origins)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Friday, March 08, 2013, 05:40 (4061 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: "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? -
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. -The third layer of information, to the best of our knowledge, is that found in life. DNA, RNA, etc. There are certain guiding principals, rules and organization if you will, that these things must follow or they simply would not work. Again, the underlying rules only serve as a frame work for what will occur when the proper conditions are met, they do not set any events in place. Layer upon layer of information seemlessly integrated and working together to provide infinte variety. -To relate it back to game design, a game that is shipped out to the customer is an inert framework. It does nothing in and of itself. It is only when the game is played in the proper type of machine and receives inputs from the user that anything happens within the game at all. -Developers, when creating games, create tool sets that they can work with. We call them Game Engines. These Engines are very similar to Quantum Physics, Physics, and DNA in that they do not define the possibility space of what we can create, but rather they define what will happen when we mix and match certain elements. If we mix or match them wrong, the entire design is unstable and will crash. Even if we mix and match them right, and develop a stable system, it is still possible for the end user to break that system by doing things that the game was not designed to handle. Not only will this ruin the gaming experience for the user, but it can also have a cascading effect whereby it destroys or corrupts later aspects of the game in ways that no one could anticipate. -A good life example of this was the straightening of the Kissimee River in Florida. The river, by design, formed a natural water filter, biological habitat, and performed a number of other useful functions. The Army corp of engineers decided to 'improve' upon the river by digging a channel that essentially made the river one straight path from north to south Florida. The effect was the poisoning of the water supply and the destruction of the natural habitat because the River, without its bends, was no longer capable of performing its intended function. --
>DHW: I shall have to repeat what I wrote for David on this subject. 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? Do you think he grabbed hold of a pair of primates and reorganized their "internal physiology and psychological behaviors" (your terms) so that one minute they were apes and the next they were humans? Ditto for every single innovation you can think of: a programme dormant for a few thousand million years suddenly produces livers etc.; or God decides one day to put livers (plus all the necessary link-ups) in a collection of his existing creatures?
> -I will try to answer these later, but unfortunately I am out of time at the moment.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.