All of Scott_Jackisch's Comments + Replies

No. As I understand Dembski - at least when he was saying this kind of thing - he admitted that the environment could be complex and hence that NS could instill complexity in evolved organisms. "But", he then suggested, "where did the complexity of the environment come from, if not from a Designer who crafted an environment capable of directing the evolution of man (in His own image, etc.)" Dembski, these days, admits to being a YEC, but the reason he is a YEC is based on a kind of appeal to Occam. "If we believe in God anyways, for reasons of Theistic Evolution", he seems to argue, "Why not take God at His word and believe in 6 days and the whole schtick?"

You will be right about it being genuine recursive self-modification when genetics advances sufficiently that a scientist discovers a gene therapy that confers a significant intelligence advantage, and she takes it herself so that she can more effectively discover even more powerful gene therapies. We're not there yet, not even remotely close, and we're even further away when it comes to epigenetics. Your football example is not recursive self-modification, but the genetics examples would be if they actually come to pass. You're right that if it happened, it would happen without a proof of correctness. The point is not that it's not possible without a proof of correctness, but that it's irresponsibly dangerous. If a single individual recursively self-improved his intelligence to the point that he was then easily able to thoroughly dominate the entire world economy, how much more dangerous would it be for a radically different kind of intelligence to reach that level at a rate of increase that is orders of magnitude greater? It depends on the kind of intelligence, in particular, unless we want to just "hope for the best" and see what happens, it depends on what we can prove about the particular kind of intelligence. Wanting a proof is just a way of saying that we want to really know how it will turn out rather than just hope and pray or rely on vague gap-filled arguments that may or may not turn out to be correct. That's the point.

Those are first-order self-modification, not recursive. Learning better ways to modify yourself, or better things to modify yourself towards doing, would be second-order self-modification. ISTM that it would be very difficult to do anything more than a third-order self-modification on our current wetware. Although our current platform for self-modification is extremely flexible, and almost anything stored in it can be changed/deleted, we can't make modifications to the platform itself.... which is where the "recursive" bit would really come into play. (That having been said, most people have barely scratched the surface of their options for 2nd and 3rd order self-modification, recursive modification be damned.)

Your examples are all missing either the 'self' aspect or the 'recursive' aspect. See Intelligence Explosion for an actual example of recursive self-modification, or for a longer explanation of recursive self-improvement, this post.