(November 5, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: It is possible to recognize the marks of mind or intelligence through the detection of design and purpose itself.
No it is not. This does not tell us if these 'marks' came about through intelligent design or natural selection. All it tells us is that we would require intelligence to deliberately design it.
Conversely, we can look at the marks of natural selection through the detection of redundant features that serve no purpose any more that have not been removed. But like with software engineering, you get old bits of code hanging around that no one wants to remove because they fear breaking it.
(November 5, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: Or one could look at the origin of intelligible information itself. Do we have examples of intelligible information in the form of language or code that can be shown rather than assumed to originate from non-mind or non-intelligence?
Yes. we use can use computers to evolve designs for us. Even to search for new Mathematical proofs. The problem comes though in that there is no free lunch and Mathematicians then have to read, understand and verify the proofs that are generated. The same with evolved designs. It's actually quite simple to evolve something that can take us months of work to understand. Last time i truly understood how my Artificial Intelligence worked was back in 2005 and it took me months to figure out. I now proceed to do research with assumptions about how the AI I evolve happens to function, and more times than not I am wrong.
(November 5, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: What about the applicability of mathematics to the physical world? After all, mathematics wasn’t invented by mankind. Rather it was discovered, as something that already existed, irrespective of our awareness of it.
No Mathematics was invented. And it continues to be invented. There have been arbitrary decisions being made in the past about how Mathematics works. For example why does zero squared by zero equal 1? If you have a problem which is difficult to describe using existing Mathematics then you need to invent a new branch of Maths in order to describe it. A classic example is Einstein's non-euclidean tensors for his work on general relativity.
A perfect circle does not exist in nature so that means Pi cannot exist. Nor are there absolute true and false values, or you can even argue integers. These are useful concepts that describe the world. They are approximations. And sometimes they aren't so useful so we change the rules entirely. For example, fuzzy logic has degrees of true and false.
Many forms of Mathematics and logic are invented which don't prove useful beyond the immediate problem they are used to describe. The useful and generalisable forms of Mathematics propagate and get reapplied to other problems. They can do this because they are abstractions of physical reality. You don't need to consider the Planck length when doing simple arithmetic involved in stacking eggs for example. The power of Mathematics comes from it being a form of generalisable abstraction. An abstraction of reality by definition does not exist in reality.
(November 5, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: Credulity is stretched beyond the breaking point if the answer is actually “Yes!”
So what it comes down to is an argument from credulity.
