Turns out Random is Better (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, February 20, 2010, 19:50 (5388 days ago) @ dhw

If you assert that life was designed, your overall problem to solve is to demonstrate that randomness simply doesn't exist in the internal process; you have to prove that life *always* goes in the *intelligent* direction. But there's many complexities to this, and I will try to illuminate what I think are the valid points. -1. You have to prove that the underlying system has a distinct goal in mind.-2. You have to prove that their is a large number of possible actions (degrees of freedom) to reach the goal. -This last one bears some explanation. A good test of intelligence would be one where you have many choices to reach a particular goal. If we're going to be objective we have to show that out of hundreds of possibilities, the system we're studying always chooses a path that completes its task, and if we study two similar systems (or specimens) that they display differences in the choice of task. (Intelligence to me means creativity.) If there is only 3 choices, there isn't a great a case for creativity because there isn't enough degrees of freedom to allow an intelligence to be displayed. -3. You have to prove that at NO POINT in the system, can randomness influence the next step of the system. There's a big reason for this.-The degrees of freedom. If you go out to run in the morning, and you have 4 pairs of shoes, you multiply 4 x the number of ways to tie your shoe (2) x the number of shoes per pair (2) times the number of ways to leave your apartment (1). IN this simple example the total degrees of freedom are 4 x 2 x 2 x 1 = 16. In terms of dealing with the system, we can throw out going through the door, because if there's only one way to do something, it doesn't impact anything at all on the system. Now as the situation stands, randomly picking between 4 pairs of shoes is an isolated incident--if you have four pairs of running shoes there's going to be no impact on your run. But if your pool of shoes includes Snow shoes, hiking shoes, running shoes, and lady's heels, there's going to be a huge impact on the rest of your run, especially how far you'll get and how much time it will take. But if you really don't care and will simply use whatever, by rolling a four-sided die, then intelligence essentially leaves the system and the end results will be directly impacted by the random chance taken at step 1--and you will not be able to exclude it from consideration. -But then there's the caveat of creativity. What if you decide to fashion shoes out of layering duct tape around your feet? (OUCH!) This is clearly intelligence of a human kind, would seem entirely random, and would clearly impact everything else in the system. If you can't exclude randomness, you can't rule that a system is acting intelligently.-
Once we've done this we identify the two kinds of intelligence that we observe in the natural world: Perceptual and abstract (human) reasoning. These are the only two kinds of intelligence we're aware of, and in order to decide if life requires intelligence, we need to discuss the types of intelligence we know and compare them to decisions we see made in life's processes. If we can determine an analogical intelligence type to life's processes we should be able to put a boundary on how much intelligence is needed.-[EDIT]-A good question to ask ID advocates is how they feel they can detect intelligence when it is quite possibly the most difficult thing that man has ever tried to do?

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"