The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Belacqua]

I'm here borrowing from J.J. Gibson's "ecological approach to perception" in which he introduces the concept of affordances. Objects have properties like "graspability," which exist by virtue of there being animals with limbs in an environment with surfaces that allow grasping. (The theory is about how animals perceive these "affordances" but that's less important.)

It's always dangerous to assume one understands after five minutes of Googling, but I think I see what Gibson means. 

If I'm understanding right, it's in line with some fundamental ideas in phenomenology -- that we never perceive the world "raw," as sense data, but always in relation to how we use it. So we don't walk out the door and wonder about the extended flat matte grey hard level surface. We just immediately perceive that it's a place to walk (i.e. a sidewalk) and know what to do. I'm thinking that Gibson would say we perceive its "walkability" first and foremost. 

Sometimes I do a thing with my students where I have them look up and focus on the ceiling, and then I ask them what color are the chairs they're sitting in. Surprisingly often they can't say. When they came into the room they properly perceived the chairs and properly sat down on them -- nobody fell on the floor -- but they only saw the use of the chairs and not the full range of sense qualities. Not the color. So Gibson would say that sit-ability was the quality that interested them and they didn't bother to look beyond that. I'm guessing. Is that basically right? 

Obviously we can be mistaken about these qualities. (Affordances?) I might perceive a gap in the wall as a place to walk through, when in fact it's a large window with clean glass, and I end up bumping my nose. So the ____-ability of something would be falsifiable. 

What I'm claiming here is that objects also have a property of "design-ability."  Which exists by virtue of them being "designable" or "creatable." A pencil, for example,  is something that can be designed. And if there is any doubt, we can easily conduct an experiment and attempt to design and create a pencil.

Again, this is all new for me. My first instinct is to be wary of jumping from a theory about perception to a method of falsifying propositions about the world. 

It's true that we could think of things as design-able or not design-able. But this seems likely to be learned not through sense experience or instinct (like eat-ability or jump-over-ability) but through what we have learned conceptually of what things are intentionally designed and what things are natural. Someone who grew up in a religious household might have been taught that God designed everything, and therefore that person would perceive trees as designable, whereas someone from a different kind of culture would habitually separate the designed from the natural. 

So what we perceive as designable will be predetermined by the metaphysical assumptions we have about the world. There's a danger of begging the question. 

The claim that "everything in the universe is designable" is falsifiable because other claims with the same structure are as well (e.g. "everything in the universe is graspable" is false—the moon isn't graspable). Simulation Theory is important because it allows us to test the design-ability of the universe virtually.

If anything in the universe cannot be designed, then intelligent design is falsified.

This is tricky. If we can show that any one thing cannot be designed, then the idea that everything is design-able is falsified. But that doesn't mean that nothing at all is intelligently designed by God. There could be randomness built in, in which some things are allowed to evolve randomly, while others are made intentionally. 

Or God could design the system and the natural laws, and then put them in motion so they evolve in a pre-determined way. Would that be considered designed or not designed? The idea of God as a constantly hands-on demiurge fashioning each thing like a potter on a wheel would be wrong, but the idea that God made the thing come about as it is could still be possible. As if God designs through the Butterfly Effect -- by making a tiny change a million years ago, he ensures that there is a particular kind of thing today. If God "sees" all time and space simultaneously, that wouldn't be incredible. (The Christian idea of God as that which at each moment holds the universe and its laws in existence makes this different from Deism.) 

I don't know! But I'm much more likely to take "designed" as an analogous term, which has a different meaning when applied to God as when it's applied to people. Just as "love" or "know" is completely different in each case.