Patrick Caldon
Posts: 68
Joined: April 2006
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| Quote (GCT @ May 18 2006,09:14) | | Stick around and you will find that these guys are chock full of it. They care not one whit for good debate or science. They only care that what they know to be true (from reading it in some holy scripture) is accepted by all, no matter what the facts, science, and real world say about it. |
I agree they're full of it - but why?
There's some kind of bizzare arrogance to think that you, having thought about a matter for half an hour or so, can work it all out better than someone who's been studying something all of their lives.
My wife just now suggested it's a kind of Romanticism - that by the power of your passion about something you create truth (or Truth). That we can liberate ourselves from the messy and petty facts about biology and by looking at `Information' and `Intelligence', which somehow represents a higher (sublime?) plane of being. You don't need to study to see this - you can, like a romantic, experience it.
I think the reason why ID can't come up with a satisfactory definition of information or intelligence is that they need their information to be apparent --- you, as the Common Man, must be able to look at an object and just see its information, feel its specified complexity - receive it unmediated from the world.
And by this common man standard humans have more information than grasses, more information than apes - no need to stuff about with messy and unobvious ideas like Kolmogorov complexity or non-linear fitness functions with no simply observable global maximum or god forbid wet unpredictable biology itself, where we need an expert or some expertise to mediate between us and the world. This is the allergy to experiment --- if you can perceive the Truth, know it directly --- if you're the philosopher-king, if you already know it all, why do you need to stuff about with experiment? It's just another mediator which will stop you perceiving, not help you perceive.
And it's just a petty fact of biology that they're trying to liberate themselves from - that they (and we) are quite thoroughly a part of nature - i.e. we're critters too.
I guess I find this sort of delusion pathetic.
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