The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Belacqua]

I'm a science student not a law student. We falsify things in science not prove them beyond a reasonable doubt.

Based on your nonsense posted in these fora that's a barefaced lie.  You know as much about science as I do the Urdu language.

تمہاری ماں کتوں کو بھاڑ میں لیتی ہے۔

[John 6IX Breezy]

So I think we could make certain things more or less credible, more or less easy to believe given the laws of nature, but I don't see yet how we can falsify designability.

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).

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.

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?

[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.

[John 6IX Breezy]

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.

To briefly add to this, there is overlap between perception and imagery. One experiment by C.W. Perky in 1910 had participants stare at a blank screen and imagine a banana. And he would slowly project an image of a banana. Participants were not only unaware of the projection, they mistook it as their own, describing it when asked what they were imagining. 

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.... 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... Actually designing a cat that could live and move around and walk on your computer keyboard would be far beyond a person's ability. 

I agree; but I think such a wholistic approach might not be necessary. I say this because designs are models; and models can be partial representations. Many of our own projects are too big for a single person, but get successfully broken up by teams working together on individual parts. God himself according to Christianity broke up creation into parts by days and types. So I think designs can be investigated by aspects, without detracting from the whole.

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.... As I said, we could find things unlikely, but not definitively ruled out.

I agree this is a problem; and it might not be one I can easily solve. I do think that "not designable" is still a valid proposition; it applies to all minds including God's. So the question is, what happens if we find something non-designable? My initial answer is that it still falsifies intelligent design because of how we've defined and constrained the theory. It was formulated as a human-centered idea from the start and it must fall as a human-centered idea.

I think that as long as we can recognize something as intelligence or design, that the recognition itself suffices the criteria. (My own limits to design a Ferrari, do not inhibit my recognition that someone else has.) I think your critique becomes valid, however, when we can no longer recognize intelligence or design in something. For example, some people suggest that slime mold behaves as though it possesses intelligence; others say that photodiodes posses consciousness. These ideas push the limits of what we can recognize as consciousness or intelligence.

In conclusion: If we cannot design, or even recognized something as designable, then the entire theory is falsified. Other explanation might be necessary, but Intelligent Design would no longer be one of them.

[Angrboda]

This reminds me of Drich's perennial complaint that God may have accomplished something through natural means, that doesn't mean God is not responsible. True enough, but if nature is all that is required, then God becomes superfluous and that thing ceases to be evidence for God. You want to shore up the idea that things are designed while doing jack shit in terms of providing evidence that things were designed, knock yourself out. Just as a side question, what would something that is not designable look like? If you can't specify an observation that would show the hypothesis false, then you don't have a falsifiable proposition, but just a vague idea. That's not how falsification works. Additionally, even if designability is one way to falsify design, it's likely not the only way, so even if you can show that designability has withstood falsification you haven't shown that the design hypothesis in general resists falsification.

Anyway, the long and short of it, to my mind, is that design lies in the designer, not the designed. If we had no information about human behavior, we'd have no clue about the origin of Clovis points.

Anyway, I'm too lazy to actually make a substantive argument in that vein, so just consider it food for thought.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Just as a side question, what would something that is not designable look like?  If you can't specify an observation that would show the hypothesis false, then you don't have a falsifiable proposition, but just a vague idea. 

Yeah, that's something I've been discussing with Belacqua. And I've made it analogous to things like "dark" or "off." These are things described as the absence of something else (Dark means not light, off means not on). Likewise the absence of designability is as valid of a proposition as the absence of graspability.

Even if we don't know what it would look like, we still know what it means at a rudimentary level. For example, we can take the perspective of a beaver and say "this dam is designable by a beaver" and "this car is not designable by a beaver." So our question could be formulated as "Is there something not designable by an intelligence?"

[Mister Agenda]

This is precisely the type of thinking that makes religious ideas so dangerous. it excuses any amount of evil perpetrated in life because the dead people 'may have a better life now'.

Seriously, if child cancer is NOT an evil in your mind, then you need to re-evaluate your whole morality. ANYTHING said as an excuse for it only undermines your moral system and shows it to be vacuous.

I am pointing out that we simply don't have complete information, and thus cannot assert stuff like "a deity who allowed this is incompetent".

And also can't reasonably assert competence on the part of a being who arranged things the way they are.

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So it's worth noting that Christianity views emptiness as intentional. God doesn't just fill the Earth to the brim, he makes a garden and places two people in it. The rest of the planet, and perhaps the Solar System, is our canvass to paint, our ground to till, our problem to solve.

There used to be a quote going around among the anti-religion people, about how the earth couldn't be designed because so much of it is ocean. The argument, I guess, is that because people can't live on water then the ocean is wasted space. 

When was this and what was the source of the quote?

[Angrboda]

Just as a side question, what would something that is not designable look like?  If you can't specify an observation that would show the hypothesis false, then you don't have a falsifiable proposition, but just a vague idea. 

Yeah, that's something I've been discussing with Belacqua. And I've made it analogous to things like "dark" or "off." These are things described as the absence of something else (Dark means not light, off means not on). Likewise the absence of designability is as valid of a proposition as the absence of graspability.

Even if we don't know what it would look like, we still know what it means at a rudimentary level. For example, we can take the perspective of a beaver and say "this dam is designable by a beaver" and "this car is not designable by a beaver." So our question could be formulated as "Is there something not designable by an intelligence?"

If you don't know what it would look like then in what way have you presented an observation which would be falsifying?

Vague ideas and knowing what you mean don't feed the bulldog. Btw, as a springboard, Heidegger explored these same issues in Being And Time, if you're looking for ideas.

[Mister Agenda]

Shifting the burden of proof. This is a fifteen yard penalty and a loss of down.

I'm a science student not a law student. We falsify things in science not prove them beyond a reasonable doubt.

For falsifying something to have any scientific relevance, it must be falsifiable, at least in principle. There is no property a thing could have that would render it 'undesignable' in principle. It's not valid to make up a quality of 'undesignability' just to be able to make a coherent sentence that something with that quality would falsify design.

[John 6IX Breezy]

It's not valid to make up a quality of 'undesignability' just to be able to make a coherent sentence that something with that quality would falsify design.

I disagree; science is the art of carving nature at her joints. We not only make up qualities all the time (e.g. Gender, Episodic Memory, Consciousness) as an attempt to describe something about the universe, we also come up with operational definitions to make abstract qualities measurable (e.g. Fear means heart rate above 130 bpm).

I've borrowed the "something-ability" concept from a popular theory in psychology about affordances and direct perception. And I've exemplified why "not designable" is a valid proposition, namely, because we frame things as "not-something-else" all the time. There is nothing in what I've said that is in anyway incoherent, uncommon, or unfalsifiable.