The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Belacqua]

I think part of the reason these things seem a bit unsatisfactory and superfluous is because we've ignored a very important design simulator: Our own brain—the intelligence aspect of intelligent design.

Many psychologists explicitly use the word simulation to describe what the brain does. We simulate the future for example. Mirror neurons, which lie at the intersections of sensory and motor systems, run simulations of our body to understand what we see (e.g. someone dancing).

And clearly, it is in the brain where designs are created. We manipulate reality in our heads, bending it toward our will, creating something from it. And our brains are not limited by reality (e.g we can even think about square circles and other impossibilities).

This is about the most amazing subject there is, I think. How the mind works.

So perhaps the problem is this: We already know everything can be designed. And we know it because the mere act of thinking about anything produces a representation of it in our heads (a design). It's odd to think something couldn't possibly be designed.

Aristotle said that when we think of a thing, we have in our minds the form of the thing without the matter. (As you know the thing itself, per hylomorphism, is always form + matter. But that wouldn't fit into our skulls.) 

So you're right that the mind creates, and it creates representations or models. Coleridge, following some German Idealists, wrote particularly well about how creation in the human mind was the same type of thing, on a smaller scale, as the creation done by God. Nobody else here will want to hear about that, of course, but I suspect something like that will turn out to be true, though expressed in different language. Panpsychism, or something nobody's thought of yet. Since nobody currently has any clue about how we experience qualia, much less recombine them into things we haven't experienced, it's clear that the most important part of life is still a mystery. 


I'm concerned though that having a mental image of something may fall well short of what we can consider a design for that thing. So for example I can call up clear mental images of many of the cats I've had over the years. But this is largely limited to their visual appearance. Even if I had a detailed knowledge of cat anatomy, my imaging ability would fall well short of what it would take to make a fully functioning cat. That would require knowledge on a molecular level. Actually designing a cat that could live and move around and walk on your computer keyboard would be far beyond a person's ability. 

We can mentally create or design some small percentage of what it would take to design a natural object. We have some small portion of that, and maybe Coleridge is right and it is a less powerful version of the thing that really did design cats. 

So the question is how does falsification work for something we already know is the case? I'm not sure. As a starting point it's possible that "not designable" is a valid proposition even if we don't know what could possibly falls under that category. That seems logical (albeit abstract) because we conceive of many things as the absence of something else: dark means not bright, off means not on, etc. So is "not designable" alone sufficient to make "designable" falsifiable?

Since we're putting the mental imagination up close with design here, it makes sense to go back again to human limitations. I'm sure there are just things that human minds can't manage. 

Here I'm thinking of a speech I heard from Noam Chomsky. He told about experiments with rats, in which the rats were trained to solve math problems in order to get their food. They could manage some surprisingly complicated equations, but no one could ever get them to understand prime numbers. Like if you have a maze where they had to go through only little doors based on primes (the second door, and then the third, and then the fifth, seventh, eleventh, 13th, etc.) the rats couldn't figure it out. 

Chomsky offered this as evidence that certain kinds of minds are just limited in what they can manage. And he pointed out that since human minds are also mammalian evolved minds, and in modern opinion not sparks of divinity, it is certain that human minds have their own limitations just as rat minds do. 

So it is entirely possible that there are things in the world that are designable by some minds, but not by human minds. Either by the mind of God, if there is such a thing, or aliens who evolved differently.

That means that we can't conclude with certainty that anything is non-designable, since it might just be non-designable by people, but easily designable by something else. (This would exclude, I think, logical impossibilities like four-sided triangles. Those cannot be designed by anybody, by definition.) So on this big, universal scale, where we're looking for definitive falsification like "this could never be designed by a mind," that's not going to be available. As I said, we could find things unlikely, but not definitively ruled out.