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orthonormal comments on Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It) - Less Wrong
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Comments (432)
Excellent analysis. In fairness to Pascal, I think his available evidence at the time should have lead him to attribute more than a 1% chance to the Christian Bible being true.
Indeed. Before Darwin, design was a respectable-to-overwhelming hypothesis for the order of the natural world.
ETA: On second thought, that's too strong of a claim. See replies below.
Is that true? If we went back in time to before Darwin and gave a not-already-religious person (if we could find one) a thorough rationality lesson — enough to skillfully weigh the probabilities of competing hypotheses (including enough about cognitive science to know why intelligence and intentionality are not black boxes, must carry serious complexity penalties, and need to make specific advance predictions instead of just being invoked as "God wills it" retroactively about only the things that do happen), but not quite enough that they'd end up just inventing the theory of evolution themselves — wouldn't they conclude, even in the absence of any specific alternatives, that design was a non-explanation, a mysterious answer to a mysterious question? And even imagining that we managed to come up with a technical model of an intelligent designer, specifying in advance the structure of its mind and its goal system, could it actually compress the pre-Darwin knowledge about the natural world more than slightly?
Dawkins actually brings this up in The Blind Watchmaker (page 6 in my copy). Hume is given as the example of someone who said "I don't have an answer" before Darwin, and Dawkins describes it as such:
Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion are definitely worth a read. And I think that Dawkins has it right: Hume really wanted a naturalistic explanation of apparent design in nature, and expected that such an explanation might be possible (even to the point of offering some tentative speculations), but he was honest enough to admit that he didn't have an explanation at hand.
As pointed out below, Hume is a good counterexample to my thesis above.
On the other hand, there wasn't a whole lot of honest, systematic searching for other hypotheses before Darwin either.
I didn't really mean because of Darwin. Design is not a competitor to the theory of evolution. Evolution explains how complexity can increase. Design [ADDED: as an alternative to evolution] does not; it requires a designer that is assumed to be more complicated than the things it designs. Design explains nothing.
Designers can well design things more complicated than they are. (If even evolution without a mind can do so, designers do that easily.)
Agree. One way to look at it is that a designer can take a large source of complexity (whatever its brain is running on) and reshape and concentrate it into an area that is important to it. The complexity of the designer itself isn't important. Evolution does much the same thing.
I thought that the advance of scientific knowledge is an evolutionary process?
It is, literally. Although the usage of the term 'evolution' in this context has itself evolved such that has different, far narrower meaning here.
The term "evolution" usually means what it says in the textbooks on the subject.
They essentially talk about changes in the genetic make up of a population over time.
Science evolves in precisely that sense - e.g. see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory
I stand by my statement, leaving it unchanged.
Don't see how this remark is relevant, but here's a reply:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l6/no_evolutions_for_corporations_or_nanodevices/
The main point of that post is clearly correct, but I think the example of corporations is seriously flawed. It fails to appreciate the extent to which successful business practices consists of informal, non-systematic practical wisdom accumulated through long tradition and selected by success and failure in the market, not conscious a priori planning. The transfer of these practices is clearly very different from DNA-based biological inheritance, but it still operates in such ways that a quasi-Darwinian process can take place.
Applying similar analysis to modern science would be a fascinating project. In my opinion, a lot of the present problems with the proliferation of junk science stem not from intentional malice and fraud, but from a similar quasi-Darwinian process fueled by the fact that practices that best contribute to one's career success overlap only partly with those that produce valid science. (And as in the case of corporations, the transfer of these practices is very different from biological inheritance, but still permits quasi-Darwinian selection for effective practices.)
The post is a denial of cultural evolution. For the correct perspective, see: Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd.
I'd like to inquire about the difference between evolution and design regarding the creation of novelty. I don't see how any intelligence can come up with something novel that would allow it to increase complexity if not by the process of evolution.
Noise is complexity. Complexity is easy to increase. Evolutionary designs are interesting not because of their complexity.
If your definition of complexity says noise is complexity, then you need a new definition of complexity.
Yes, many useful definitions, like entropy measures or Kolmogorov complexity, say noise is complexity. But people studying complexity recognize that this is a problem. They are aware that the phenomenon they're trying to get at when they say "complexity" is something different.
And that concept of "complexity" is probably too complex to be captured by a fundamental notions such as K-complexity.
Well, I'm just trying to figure out what you tried to say when you replied to PhilGoetz:
Yes, but not without evolution. All that design adds to evolution is guidance. That is, if you took away evolution (this includes science and Bayesian methods) a designer could never design things more complicated (as in novel, as in better) than itself.
N designers, each of complexity K, can collectively design something of maximum complexity NK, simply by dividing up the work.
Co-evolution, which may be thought of as a pair of designers interacting through their joint design product, and with an unlimited random stream as supplementary input, can result in very complex designs as well as in the designers themselves becoming more complex through information acquired in the course of the interaction.
It is amusing to look at the Roman Catholic theology of the Trinity, with this kind of consideration in mind. As I remember it, the Deity was "originally" a unipartite, simple God, who then became more complex by contemplating Himself and then further contemplating that Contemplation.
For this reason, I have never been all that impressed by the "refutation" of the first cause argument; the refutation being that it supposedly requires a complex "first cause" God, Who is Himself in need of explanation. God could conceivably have been simple (as simple as a Big Bang, anyways) and then developed (some people would prefer to say "evolved") under His own internal dynamics into something much more complex. Just as we atheists claim happened to the physical universe.
A wrong reply - for the correct answer, see:
Hull, D. L. 1988. Science as a Process. An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 586 pp.
There are no correct answers in a dispute about definitions, only aesthetic judgments and sometimes considerations of the danger of hidden implicit inferences. You can't use authority in such an argument, unless of course you appeal to common usage.
However, referring to a book without giving an annotation for why it's relevant is definitely an incorrect way to argue (even if a convincing argument is contained therein).
Disputes about the definition of "evolution"? I don't think there are too many of those. Mark Ridley is the main one that springs to mind, but his definition is pretty crazy, IMHO.
Why the book is relevant appears to be already being made pretty explicit in the subtitle: "An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science".
Agreed. Also, there is a continuum from pure evolution (with no foresight at all) to evaluation of potential designs with varying degrees of sophistication before fabricating them. (I know that I'm recalling this from a post somewhere on this site - please excuse the absence of proper credit assignment.) An example of a dumb process which is marginally smarter than evolution is to take mutation plus recombination and then do a simple gradient search to the nearest local optimum before evaluating the design.
I'll add that evolution with DNA and sexual reproduction already in place fits on a different part of this continuum from evolution of the simplest replicators.
Designers can guide evolution but it is still evolution that creates novelty.
Intelligence is a process facilitated by evolution. Even an AGI making perfect use of some of our most novel algorithms wouldn't come up with something novel without evolution. See Bayesian Methods and Universal Darwinism.
No; you are invoking the theory of evolution to give that credibility. Even post-Darwin, most people don't believe this is true. (Remember the Star Trek episode where Spock deduced something about a chess-playing computer, because "the computer could not play chess better than its programmer"?)
The religious advocates of Design explicitly denied this possibility; thus, their design story can't invoke it.
Incidentally, theory of evolution is true.
I believe his point to be that an argument, to be effective, must be convincing to people who are not already convinced. Your argument offered the fact that evolution can design things more complicated than itself as an example with which to counter an anti-evolutionist argument. It therefore succeeds in convincing no one who was not already convinced.
It would, however, lead them to disagree for slightly different reasons.
I don't understand your point.
It is not useless to demonstrate that you do not accept a premise rather than (as assumed) being unable see the obvious logical consequences of said premise. It would lead them to disagree for slightly different reasons. If any part of such conversation is about sharing understanding and seeking to communicate information then Vladmir's comment is, in fact, rather useful.
(No, it will not convince anyone who wasn't already convinced. But that is because people are just not convinced about religion by argument ever.)
Also missing from the world pre-1800: any understanding of complexity, entropy, etc.