A coincidence of various stimuli got me thinking once again about Darwinism and Intelligent Design. One such was discovering the Journal of Scientific Exploration, thus a pointer to science as practiced close to the borderzone; I’ve made notes on that earlier here. Another was seeing Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, courtesy of Netflix. The film makes a very calmly reasoned case for transcendentalism by, among sources, mining the insights of the ID community. I’ve written some notes on the ideological aspects of ID on Ghulf Genes here under the title of “Battle of Clerics.” In that I focused principally on the unfortunate aspects of a debate where philosophical positions clash and cannot be resolved. The actual scientific work that people like biochemist Michael Behe pursue I’ve always admired. That sort of work, seems to me, is genuine science—open-minded, in other words—much like the material presented by JSE. Third on my list of stimuli is my use of the word devolution in the political context on LaMarotte—and remembering, later, that the New Yorker had used that word to lambast Michael Behe in an article published in 2005. The article’s subtitle was “Why intelligent design isn’t.”
But let’s examine that dismissive phrase. The new biology, as I might call it, is quite excellent natural philosophy; it is reasoning about nature based on observation. What the ID movement sees is the marks of intelligence in living beings. It’s obviously there, as I pointed out on Ghulf Genes. Long before the ID movement had its birth, I spent some month studying biology in depth, but as a grown man and already an expert on technology. What I saw in living things, and this time in detail, was just that, technology—indeed exactly the same kind of technology I’d been studying for years already in human society; the big difference between the two was that the biological variety was much, much more sophisticated—and the agencies behind it invisible. And therefore, being also a science fiction author, I hit on the notion of a “chemical civilization” to explain it. In other words, I do agree with the ID proponents, and did so before they came to be known. Obvious intelligence underlies life. No doubt about it.
Now what is not intelligent is to assert that matter can, by sheer chance, produce intelligence—with nothing else added or present. Matter shows no sign whatever of having the potential to manifest life, never mind intelligence. The two concepts on which the whole of Darwinism (neo- or otherwise) rests are natural selection and survival. Natural selection for what? Survival. But what or who is this Mysterious Survivor? Well, it is a chance convergence of chemicals, per Alexander Ivanovich Oparin (1894-1980)—who pushed evolution back to the level of chemicals. By chance they converged, by chance they accidentally formed some more chemical combinations within themselves, the DNA, which by chance coded for proteins that formed, first of all, the walls that they had earlier accidentally formed without the help of DNA and also, by good luck, the enzymes (also proteins) that actually read the DNA later and, reading it by forming RNA, aligned themselves accidentally in such a manner as to form a machine that could, reading RNA this time, form other proteins as well. And presto we have the self-reproducing cell. And having shown that this could be, and all just by accident, the rest is history, a history that, by accident, formed Alexander Ivanovich Oparin, who, by the accidents of birth and education could finally explain it all to the accidentally formed Soviet citizenry.
Considering the mind-boggling improbability of all this, the little child who cries that the emperor is naked might be viewed as intelligent. And that, ultimately, is what the new biologists are actually doing. They point to a gap in the logic that leads from a handful of elements—but by no means all—to self-moving creatures that exhibit purposive arrangements internally, like that handy DNA code. Is it their unforgivable sin that some of the more philosophically minded among them, looking to fill the gap, point to God rather than, like their opponents, to the equally mysterious divine Complexity. The sin, it seems to me, lies in the meanings associated with these two concepts. God is assumed to be intelligent, a source of law, suggesting a relationship between creator and creature—whereas Complexity demands nothing at all while giving us whatever we want in the way of explanation. And where power to explain is sought, Complexity is certainly omnipotent.
Showing posts with label Complexity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Complexity. Show all posts
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Can Mind Emerge from Matter?
The question is equivalent to asking whether or not anything useful can appear by accident. On the surface it might appear so. If a steady drop hollows the stone, as the German proverb has it, nature might form a nice-enough spoon by hammering one end of a narrow stone with droplets long enough. But the object wouldn’t be a spoon until some mind recognized the utility of that shape and at one stroke transformed that hollowed stone into a tool. Yet this transformation wouldn’t actually change the stone physically. It is the mind that does this transformation, this re-purposing as modern usage has it.
Implicit in the very concept of utility produced by chance is that some agency must recognize the utility of an object. Until that happens, the object is simply a fact of nature without meaning. Chance hasn’t produced anything useful yet. The object is thus in an order of indifference. When a utility is discovered in it, it comes to coexist, as well, in an order of purposes and meanings.
The difference between a consciously produced object (A) and one formed by accident (B) is that, in the case of A, A’s future useful function guides its very production. In the case of B a function is discovered after an unconscious process that had no intention whatsoever.
In the evolutionary scheme of origins, mind must be material by definition. It must be a function of the brain. The brain is a chemical machine the parts of which—and the convergence and proper linkage of the parts—had to come about by random events of a chemical nature. In this scheme utility is defined by advantages accruing to the individual in whom the changes take place. That individual is more likely to reproduce than another unluckier creature that lacks those advantages.
In this scheme useful innovation takes place entirely without any other agency than the fact that changes produce advantages in reproduction; by this means they aid the survival of the species.
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, it mixes things up a little bit. The picture presented is actually the same as the picture of the drop-hollowed stone. Concepts such as “advantage” and “survival” are not actually present in the naturalistic description of our origins. We’ve introduced those from the outside. Such ideas properly belong in the order of purpose and meaning. If the life process is an extension of the chemical behavior of matter, we cannot really speak about advantages or of survival; we can only talk about outcomes. It is only from our perspective that survival is a value. It is a judgment, a hierarchical ordering of outcomes entirely missing in nature.
What we are facing here is the improbability of deriving from one order (Y) the emergence of another order (Z). If Y does not already contain or possess Z, it cannot produce it. We want the material and specifically the chemical order to produce the order of purpose and of meaning. But in the material we only ever encounter necessity and chance. Here, of course, I’m leaving the whole subject of life as such entirely unexplored. I’m merely pointing out that you cannot derive perception, thought, will, and imagination from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on.
Attempts to do so ultimately rely on the invocation of complexity. It is the modern way of naming the order of meaning and of purpose. Complexity, however, is ultimately only the very intricate arrangement of the same old components. Complexity theory therefore, logically speaking, demands our acceptance of a magical element that simply “emerges” when enough of the same old chemicals are rearranged intricately enough. No explanation of this emergence is ever provided. Thus no one is ready to say why and how the last element linked to the whole would cause it suddenly to burst into consciousness. We are asked to take it on faith. It’s an empirical observation. Really? Before we take that leap of faith, however, another earlier one is required. We must first accept that only the material is actually real.
Implicit in the very concept of utility produced by chance is that some agency must recognize the utility of an object. Until that happens, the object is simply a fact of nature without meaning. Chance hasn’t produced anything useful yet. The object is thus in an order of indifference. When a utility is discovered in it, it comes to coexist, as well, in an order of purposes and meanings.
The difference between a consciously produced object (A) and one formed by accident (B) is that, in the case of A, A’s future useful function guides its very production. In the case of B a function is discovered after an unconscious process that had no intention whatsoever.
In the evolutionary scheme of origins, mind must be material by definition. It must be a function of the brain. The brain is a chemical machine the parts of which—and the convergence and proper linkage of the parts—had to come about by random events of a chemical nature. In this scheme utility is defined by advantages accruing to the individual in whom the changes take place. That individual is more likely to reproduce than another unluckier creature that lacks those advantages.
In this scheme useful innovation takes place entirely without any other agency than the fact that changes produce advantages in reproduction; by this means they aid the survival of the species.
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, it mixes things up a little bit. The picture presented is actually the same as the picture of the drop-hollowed stone. Concepts such as “advantage” and “survival” are not actually present in the naturalistic description of our origins. We’ve introduced those from the outside. Such ideas properly belong in the order of purpose and meaning. If the life process is an extension of the chemical behavior of matter, we cannot really speak about advantages or of survival; we can only talk about outcomes. It is only from our perspective that survival is a value. It is a judgment, a hierarchical ordering of outcomes entirely missing in nature.
What we are facing here is the improbability of deriving from one order (Y) the emergence of another order (Z). If Y does not already contain or possess Z, it cannot produce it. We want the material and specifically the chemical order to produce the order of purpose and of meaning. But in the material we only ever encounter necessity and chance. Here, of course, I’m leaving the whole subject of life as such entirely unexplored. I’m merely pointing out that you cannot derive perception, thought, will, and imagination from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on.
Attempts to do so ultimately rely on the invocation of complexity. It is the modern way of naming the order of meaning and of purpose. Complexity, however, is ultimately only the very intricate arrangement of the same old components. Complexity theory therefore, logically speaking, demands our acceptance of a magical element that simply “emerges” when enough of the same old chemicals are rearranged intricately enough. No explanation of this emergence is ever provided. Thus no one is ready to say why and how the last element linked to the whole would cause it suddenly to burst into consciousness. We are asked to take it on faith. It’s an empirical observation. Really? Before we take that leap of faith, however, another earlier one is required. We must first accept that only the material is actually real.
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