Dawkins' Necker Cube, Physical Determinism, Cosmic Design, and Human Intelligence

[Mudhammam]

In just about every Richard Dawkins' book I have read, he uses the image of a necker cube (this: http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9G...8eJJKEErHw) to illustrate our ability to conceive of "two alternative models of reality," both compatible with the given facts, but viewed from different perspectives to give a more complete picture of reality (he originally used this example to illustrate the value of analyzing natural selection from the "gene's angle" versus the individual). Philosophers often make a similar point in distinguishing between our "manifest image" of the world, our everyday conceptual scheme of things, and a "scientific image," which often reveals just how different nature actually is at the different levels of description.

I wonder if perhaps the age-old debate of "design" vs. "blind force" is also more like the necker cube or the manifest/scientific image distinction, that is, merely two ways of talking about the facts in which both descriptions could be correct from different perspectives. I think the correlation is more clearly visible if we talk about intelligence and design as it relates to individual persons. We typically think of our ideas as "coherent," "intelligent," "thoughtful," "purposeful," "designed," etc., as opposed to their negation, which is "blind," "dumb," "mechanistic," "efficacious," etc. Yet on one level of description, if physical determinism is true, this would appear to be the case. All we're "really" talking about from the "scientific image" of "me" writing this post are natural processes occurring at the level of brain cells which, to quote from William James' paper "The Experience of Activity," "excite each other from next to next (by contiguous transmission of katabolic alternation, let us say), and to have been doing so long before this present strength of lecturing-activity on my part began. If any one cell-group stops its activity, the lecturing will cease or show disorder of form. Cessante causa, cessat et effectus--does not this look as if the short-span brain activities were the more real activities, and the lecturing activities on my part only their effects? ...What practical difference ought it to make if, instead of saying naively that 'I' am active now in delivering this address... or that certain nerve-cells are active, in producing the result? ...Are the forces that really act in the world more foreseeing or more blind? As between 'our' activities as 'we' experience them, and those of our ideas, or our brain-cells, the issue is well defined."

I bring up the issue of Cosmic Design because although design in a universal sense seems hardly of any consequence (what does 'design' in this case even mean?), it also seems that the same issue can, as evidenced in James' quotes, be to some extent reduced to the level of brain activity, and from a purely psychological point of view the practical differences might actually be great. According to physical determinism, on the "scientific image," we are not actively (and as it would appear, intelligently) "choosing" our actions but rather experiencing them from the "manifest image," which we categorize as "intelligent" or "unintelligent" (though again, all is supposed to be reducible to stupid mechanisms). Couldn't we also, if a practical difference is to be had, view the entire Cosmos as we view our brain activity, the necker cube serving to illustrate that there are really two different ways of describing the same phenomena, and both are correct, though conceptually tenuous? I realize this seems to be only to be a semantical issue though it does cut through the middle of most basic philosophical disagreements.

Thoughts?