[extropy-chat] Intelligent Design -- take *this*...

[Robert Bradbury]

On 12/20/05, Hughes, James J. <james.hughes at trincoll.edu> wrote:
>
>
> (1) ID could be by "natural" causation, i.e. superintelligence
> (2) ID does not require irreducible complexity, only statistically
> unlikely complexity
> (3) A successful defense does not necessarily determine the strength of
> competing hypotheses
> (4) Indeed, proving the central proposition of statistically unlikely
> complexity in the peer-reviewed arena is what is important


Actually, the "statistically unlikely" argument is open to significant
debate.

The evolution of stars produces a *lot* of carbon which seems to be a good
substrate for structures required for life.  Supernovas and other
astrophysical processes seem to produce a lost of "organic" base materials
(I'm sure Amara could provide a long list of organic molecules found in both
life processes and interstellar dust.)  This is in part the entire area of
exploration of the field of astrobiology (which has a large and growing
"scientific" community).  Lineweaver's arguments point out that a
significant majority of the Earth's in existing galaxies are much older than
ours.  "Probability One" points out there are likely to be a *lot* of them.
Minsky pointed out to Dyson 40+ years ago that the most advanced
civilizations will radiate heat near the cosmic microwave background
temperature (where it is very difficult for us to "see" them).  The
experimental evidence for "missing mass" in the universe is significant and
the theoretical physicists are having to bend over backwards to try an
explain it.

There is a significant case to be made, if you understand biology and
astrophysics sufficiently, that there may be a *lot* of superintelligences
in the universe and *we* may currently be the "statistically unlikely" state
in the evolution of complexity.  "Life" may have a relatively hard time
getting from ground zero to our level of complexity -- but once the
singularity kicks in it goes rapidly from our state to the limits that
physics will allow.  Humans (be they creationists or scientists) seem not to
have fully grasped that yet.

Indeed, the complexity of evolutionary processes may make it impossible to
"compute" the likelyhood or unlikelyhood of various paths of development.
To get the statistics for #4 (above) may in fact *require* that one run
large numbers of actual experiments such as our solar system to get the hard
data.

People unfortunately have a difficult time making the leap from where we are
now to the stage where planetary dismantlement (and reassembly) is simply
one of the things intelligent entities can do (in spite of the fact that we
have been doing just that (to a limited extent) since 1959 [e.g. Lunas 1,2 &
3 and Pioneer 4].

Robert
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