[extropy-chat] Re: Intelligent Design and Irriducible Complexity

[devon fowler]

 question here.
 

Many philosphers like Camus, Sartre, and Kierkegard seemed to meditate on the inherent meaninglessness of life assuming there is 'no God.'  They seemed to think that without a creator or power greater than the sum of all humanity than the notion of any meaning in life becomes a cosmic joke.  Contemporary existentialists like Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman certainly use this brand of nihilistic atheistic philosophy as a key focus for many of their films.  The idea of nihilism certainly frustrates me on a gut level; the fact that people 'freak out' at the notion that if there is no God than all of humanities aspirations, ambitions, creations, and individual and collective thoughts maybe completely transitory and therefore become pointless/meaningless.  
 
In  Annie Hall the young Woody Allen character seemed to find life meaningless at just the thought of the eventual collapse of the universe.  That anthro-biased word 'meaning' that philosphers and laypeople babble on about seems so often to be the key deciding factor for whether people see the glass half full or empty in life.  It seems to me that many, if not most people, who are not very religious seem to use distraction through simple pleasure/novelty seeking as a way to shield them from the threat of atheism and  therefore nihilism.  Most people in the middle therefore have a don't think to hard or else become depressed kind of attitude...this also frustrates me.
 
Now I know that part of existenialist, humanist, and transhumanist thinking is that humans can and do create 'meaning' through our actions and our ability to reason etc. And >humanists seem to believe that our ability to make decisions will one day be augmented and advanced through bio-engineering and nano-technology and so on.  They seem to hint at the notion that we can overcome the threat of nihilism through creating a world of amazing complexity through AI, the Singularity and cyborgian super advanced humans, and people like Kurzweil take it even further.  
 
 The notion of superintelligence itself promises to break the cold barriers of hard determinism and potentially create true free will.  I could speculate on both sides of the issue and babble on about free-will vs. detereminsim and whether >humanist level thinking can produce greater free will etc.  But I was curious to hear some of your opinions on creating more meaning, true free will, and whether or not other 'old hash' philosophical ideas like nihilism, existentialism, and human level meaning have any validity when dealing with hard materialist science?  Is nihilism just a stupid loaded term or does it have any truth to it?  
 
 
David <deimtee at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> Kurt Schoedel wrote:
> 
> 
>>The creationists argue that biological systems so complex, irriducibly 
>>complex that they simply cannot have evolved through natural processes. 
>>So they say, biology had to have been designed. The problem, of course, 
>>is that the designer itself is an example of an irriducibly complex 
>>system that the designer itself had to have been designed by another 
>>designer, and so on. this is an example of an infinite recursion. When 
>>you point this out to creationists, they tend to go bananas on you. 
> 
> 
> In your dreams. When I have pointed this out to Christians, they
> have just stared at me incomprehendingly as if I had just said
> something entirely nonsensical. God is the Creator, the Source of
> all, who just IS. A question about the origin of God is MEANINGLESS.
> This is entirely OBVIOUS.
> 
> Considering that even (by US standards) enlightened Christians fail
> to grasp the problem there, I don't think this will make the least
> impression on whacko creationists.
> 


I think a useful strategy against ID would be to emphasize the
"alien creator" aspects of their argument. If they are trying
to remove God from their arguments, then portray them as arguing
that mankind was created by little green men.
This is very easy to make fun of, and the only way they can
counter it is to bring God back, which makes their argument
religious, not scientific.




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Devon Fowler
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