(February 8, 2014 at 2:21 pm)Alex K Wrote: I get that idea, I don't think it is so. We know many examples where we control the rules of a "game", and choose them to be extremely simple, and can observe emergent complexity. Think of the game of life with a certain size field. There is complete control over the rules, and they are just two instructions. Would you say that all possible resulting life-like complexity you get out of it if you start with all possible initial conditions (*) is encoded in those two simple algorithmic rules to the extent that these two rules are identical with these complex "worlds" which can result from them? I just don't think it is sensible to equate the two.
(*) I consider the union of all these games, thus eliminating the information content in any specific initial condition from the argument, reminiscent of many worlds QM
As you just demonstrated, atheists occasionally like to bring up John Conway's Game of Life to prove that biological complexity doesn't require an intelligent designer.
But there are two points to this argument that (ironically) turn the tables on themselves:
1. An important question that you should ask yourself is, how were the initial rules for the Game of Life created? Did its creator Conway just blindly make up those rules in a couple of seconds (almost without even thinking), or did he exert a lot of mental effort and experimentation behind the process?
The answer to the above, apparently, is that the creator chose a few simple but very carefully selected rules - after a long period of experimentation - by trying to simplify and incorporate von Neumann's mathematical models of self-replicating systems into a virtual simulation. This shows us that the four simple rules in the Game of Life required intelligent engineering, that the rules behind the simulation (initially at least) required a level of foresight, a plan, or a goal that one had to work under in order to be able to create them. Therefore, it would be counter-intuitive to think that the underlying laws of the universe generating complexity didn't require any foresight or planning behind them, unlike the Game of Life.
2. Even though the Game of Life is a conceivable analogy of a basic aspect in nature (i.e. complexity arising from simpler, fundamental laws), it is hardly useful in explaining the amount of depth and the layers of complexity that exist in the real world, considering that the physical universe is enormously larger and that the laws of physics are considerably more complex than just the four rules implemented in the Game of Life. Therefore, the similarities drawn between the Game of Life and the physical universe are extremely superficial.
Even something like this ...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20...vaRxc7v7O9
is almost nothing compared to living cells.
(February 8, 2014 at 2:21 pm)Alex K Wrote: Ok, I don't know whether they are real (on some days I'm a mathematical Platonist, on other days I'm not) but let's say it is so for the sake of argument.
Why then intelligence? Even with scare quotes, what justifies it?
Because even though there may simpler, fundamental rules that gave rise to complexity in the universe, it still implies an intelligent engineering behind them for reasons that I explained in my comments above. To put it in another way, the rules themselves are like "programs" in a computer that eventually produce complexity, and the rules or programs have to be selected very carefully and not randomly (especially in an extremely fine-tuned universe such as ours) which by abductive reasoning necessitates them to be the rules of an imperceptible foresight and intelligence as opposed to just being something totally arbitrary.
Secondly, according to the patternist philosophy of mind, patterns are foundational to mental information processing: "A mind is thus a collection of patterns that is associated with a persistent dynamical process that achieves highly-patterned goals in highly-patterned environments." The whole universe itself is a complex environment of patterns, i.e. patterns within patterns and so on, which is the characteristic of a mind according to patternist philosophy. Refer to the following post where I posted some sources that explain this idea:
http://atheistforums.org/thread-23665-po...#pid600425
