Intelligence itself is highly non-arbitrary and rule-governed
I disagree. Intelligence makes its own rules once it is there; but the human brain is one of the most arbitrary and hard-to-understand pieces of equipment that we know about. There have been a lot of very smart people trying to build AI for a very long time; if the creation of intelligence were highly non-arbitrary and followed well-known rules, we would have working AI by now.
So, yes; I think that intelligence can arise from arbitrary randomness. I'd go further, and claim that if it can't arise from arbitrary randomness then it can't exist at all; either intelligence arose in the form of God who then created an orderly universe (the theist hypothesis), or an arbitrary universe came into existence with random (and suspiciously orderly) laws that then led to intelligence in the form of humanity (the atheist hypothesis).
So in this particular case, no, I don't think you can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent, just like I can't respond to your original point by assuming that if the universe exists, then it is orderly.
Fair enough. Then let me put it this way; if God is not sufficiently intelligent, then God would be unable to create the ordered universe that we see; in this case, an ordered universe would be no more likely than it would be without God. An ordered universe is therefore evidence in favour of the claim that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent to create an ordered universe.
I disagree. Intelligence makes its own rules once it is there; but the human brain is one of the most arbitrary and hard-to-understand pieces of equipment that we know about.
It's not arbitrary in the sense of random. It's arbitrary in the sense of not following obvious apriori principles. It may impose its own higher-order rules, but that is something that happens in a system that already combines order and chaos in a very subtle and hard to duplicate way. Simple, comprehensible order of the kind you detect and admire in the physical unverse at large is easier to do than designing a brain. No one can build an AGI, but physicists build models of physical systems all the time.
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A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post. Finally, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.