RE: Disproving Odin - An Experiment in arguing with a theist with Theist logic
March 10, 2018 at 2:03 pm
What really fucks up theists like Stevill is that our understanding of life and intelligence is practically useful precisely because of its explanatory power. This is because explanations allow us to not only understand a process but use it too.
What theists think have explanatory power (god-did-it) actually does not, and as a result can't be used practically.
The classic example is evolution. They think that intelligent design has greater explanatory power, yet none of them can explain how I can create a program on my computer to intelligently design something, say an electronic circuit. Yet it is far simpler for me to create a genetic algorithm to do this. The end result will be something very complex which would take a long time to understand but the evolutionary process behind it is actually very simple.
Because the theory of evolution has explanatory power I have been able to use that theory for over 20 years to evolve things.
The same applies to intelligence. Because it can be explained in terms of self organisation and consequently the laws of thermodynamics, I can use this to create very simple models of strong intelligence on my computer. Algorithms that adapt to unknown environments, that can relearn in real-time and which can be re-applied to different tasks. This allows me to obtain reproducible results that I can then write up as a paper and publish, allowing other scientists to do the same.
For a theist to then say that evolution is implausible and that intelligent design makes more sense is something I can recognise as incorrect because it does not provide any explanatory power. How can I write a program to intelligently design something? I am not saying that it can't be done, I have often tried to figure out how to do it myself, but the fact of the matter is that it is actually far harder to achieve than using an evolutionary algorithm.
For a theist to try to convince me that naturally occurring intelligence need not obey the laws of thermodynamics but without explaining how is equally useless. Such a statement has no explanatory power.
What theists think have explanatory power (god-did-it) actually does not, and as a result can't be used practically.
The classic example is evolution. They think that intelligent design has greater explanatory power, yet none of them can explain how I can create a program on my computer to intelligently design something, say an electronic circuit. Yet it is far simpler for me to create a genetic algorithm to do this. The end result will be something very complex which would take a long time to understand but the evolutionary process behind it is actually very simple.
Because the theory of evolution has explanatory power I have been able to use that theory for over 20 years to evolve things.
The same applies to intelligence. Because it can be explained in terms of self organisation and consequently the laws of thermodynamics, I can use this to create very simple models of strong intelligence on my computer. Algorithms that adapt to unknown environments, that can relearn in real-time and which can be re-applied to different tasks. This allows me to obtain reproducible results that I can then write up as a paper and publish, allowing other scientists to do the same.
For a theist to then say that evolution is implausible and that intelligent design makes more sense is something I can recognise as incorrect because it does not provide any explanatory power. How can I write a program to intelligently design something? I am not saying that it can't be done, I have often tried to figure out how to do it myself, but the fact of the matter is that it is actually far harder to achieve than using an evolutionary algorithm.
For a theist to try to convince me that naturally occurring intelligence need not obey the laws of thermodynamics but without explaining how is equally useless. Such a statement has no explanatory power.
