NoName
Posts: 2729
Joined: Mar. 2013
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Yes, sadly Gary doesn't so much double-down as shift downward by Graham's number. The real tragedy is that this has been going on for as long as it has, and to so little effect on this loon.
In early 2009, Gary Gaulin posted this version of the 'Introduction' to his “theory”:
| Quote | Introduction
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause[1] where multicellular intelligence such as ours is emergent from cellular intelligence, which is emergent from molecular intelligence, which is emergent from atomic behavior, which is emergent from subatomic behavior, which is emergent from a source currently unknown to science that must always be present for living things to exist else all molecular motion stops. From matter/energy itself comes increasingly complex behavior that molecularly self-assembles into learned and instinctual memory based intelligence that responds to environment by attempting to control it for its own design dependant needs.
The intelligence mechanism first needs something to control (motors, muscles, metabolic cycle) secondly feedback to gauge failure or success thirdly a memory to store sensory input and action taken then finally a fourth part where a random guess tries a new action. In molecular intelligence are genomes where change in coding is a guess. Either a "good guess" as in conserved domains being used in new combinations. Or a "random guess" as in replication errors that from-scratch would design conserved domains. Successful responses to environment remain in memory in the population (gene pool) to in turn keep going the billions year old cycle of life that through continual reproduction of previous state of genetic memory one replication at a time builds upon a previous design. A cladogram of resultant lineage thus shows a treeslike progression of adapting designs evidenced by the fossil record where never once was there not a predecessor of like design present for the descendant design to have come from.
Behavior of forces (polar force, etc.) that give matter its vitality internally to externally connect us to a progression of intelligent causation where there are two question marks at each end going both into and out of the same physical universe. Living things are hereby shown to be a created by levels of emergent intelligence that begins with nonrandom subatomic behavior then builds upwards to us. |
Since this is much more cleanly written and much more coherent than his more recent efforts, I thought it might be worthwhile going through and pointing out some of the places he goes spectacularly wrong.
It also appears that he has not modified these views in any meaningful or substantive way. He does not appear to have abandoned nor particularly modified any of the claims presented above or discussed here.
If I am wrong about that, I welcome Gary's constructive input as to what changed and what difference the change makes. I submit that if he responds it all, it will be with changes that make no difference whatsoever to the actual claims embodied in his text.
By the end of sentence one we see that Gary is a vitalist and may plausibly be supposed to be a mythicist/supernaturalist. There is no warrant to asserting that ‘molecular motion’ requires some source other than the existence of molecules and the general laws of physics and chemistry.
Brownian motion is the result of thermodynamic forces in aggregates of atoms and/or molecules, notably where there are size differences between the movers and the moved. There is no need to imagine a ‘lower level’ from which the motion is sustained.
But of course without the delusion of this unknown ‘substructure’, Gary has no grounds for asserting intelligence emerging from lower and lower levels, without end. This is the ‘intelligence all the way down’ notion Gary has thrown together from his poorly understood encounters with various sciences.
And as is so typical of Gary’s incoherent approach, he immediately takes it all back in his second sentence. The first portion of his second sentence is lucid and correct — “From matter/energy itself comes increasingly complex behavior that molecularly self-assembles…” It gets a bit clumsy in the last two words, it would be better simply as ‘assembles’, but it is clear here that he is claiming that matter/energy suffice to generate increasingly complex behavior. Standard model science and entirely uncontroversial.
But then he goes badly off the rails by asserting “self-assembles into learned and instinctual memory based intelligence that responds to environment by attempting to control it for its own design dependant needs.” This is an appalling mess of assuming one’s conclusions and asserting a host of facts distinctly not in evidence. It is simply incorrect to claim that molecules as such learn or have ‘instinctual behavior’. As is too often the case, Gary ignores scale and wants to assert that because intelligence is only found in material beings, that is, assemblies of assemblies (of assemblies…) of molecules, that molecules as such are intelligent. Yes, Gary, learning and instinct only occur in beings made up of molecules. This in no way warrants asserting that molecules learn or display instinctual behavior. What learns, what displays behavior of any sort are not the molecules but the structure they make up. We know this not least because the structures persist across a host of changes at the molecular level. The structures display a dynamic identity that is not tied to the specific molecular entities which initially aggregated, through whatever mechanism, into the structure in question. We should also take note, as Gary is unlikely to see this on his own, that this too is a layered organization. The structures at a higher level, where higher means composed out of perhaps only slightly less structured assemblies, are to some varying degree insensitive to the replacement of their sub-assemblies.
Gary wants to simplify all this down and sweep all the problems under the rug by claiming it is all ‘emergent’, as if that explained anything at all. “Emergent” is the description, not the cause and not the explanation.
The problem of emergence is how new behaviors, unknown at and often if not always unpredictable in principle from lower levels, spring into being as lower level entities aggregate into higher level entities. Again, we caution that ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ are merely quasi-measurement of the relative degree of aggregation at the various ‘level’s. From subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to polymers, suspensions, solutions, etc., to cells, to cellular systems, to organs, to biological entities from the single-celled to the multi-cellular and on up to animals, including humans, we have levels of increasing organization where the specifics of the organization switch scales and we focus on the aggregate organization rather than the participatory elements.
Gary dearly loves collapsing all this in lieu of solving the problematic it exposes. And no wonder -- it's a hard problem, a very hard problem. Gary is simply not up to and so must rely on desperate pretense and hand-waving.
Terence Deacon, especially in Incomplete Nature is a good counter to this particular absurdism.
But we must not overlook the additional sleight-of-hand move Gary makes here. Specifically, his allusion to “respond[ing] to environment by attempting to control it for its own design dependant needs.” Molecules have no needs and no capability of responding in terms of control. These are emergent phenomena that do not obtain at the level of atoms and individual molecules. They emerge at quite high levels far removed from the simple physics and chemistry that rule at the molecular level. Gary here smuggles purpose, intent, and responsiveness to an environment into his “theory” with full intent to make use of those concepts regardless of where along the chain of complexity he happens to be wibbling. Gary is not good at attention to detail, nor is he sensitive to, if even aware of, scale effects.
Gary loses it entirely in the first portion of his third sentence, the start of his second paragraph. No more need be said to disqualify the entirety of his efforts than this:
“The intelligence mechanism first needs something to control (motors, muscles, metabolic cycle) “. This rules out a host of phenomena widely if not universally taken to be signs of intelligence, acts of intelligence. His “theory” can be judged a failed attempt at the moment he ties intelligence to motor control.
Gary's entire '4 level' or '4 element' schematic for intelligence fails in every way when considering intelligence as expressed in the form of the recognition of a missing note from a melody transposed to a different key and played a different tempo than that learned by the person who can nonetheless identify that there is a note missing.
Each of his spurious requirements explodes into irrelevance and falsehood under the assault of this one example.
It is as if having heard of intelligence, and AI, and computer programs, and robotics, he decided that robotics was the answer to the problems of emergence and intelligence.
No serious researcher could possibly entertain such notions for long except perhaps with psychoactive chemical assistance. Counter-examples abound, and Gary has fled from even considering them each time they have been raised.
Gary compounds his errors and laughable absurdities by embedding the process of guessing as an undifferentiated primitive with alleged explanatory power for change in time and/or circumstances by the process of intelligence. He goes so far as to assert that molecules guess when/where/how to bind, that species guess when/where/how to mutate, and yet that ‘guess’ is primitive, not to be further explicated nor elaborated on.
Utter nonsense, and sufficient to render his alleged explanation nonsense by virtue of circularity — guessing is a function of intelligence, not a sub-element within the process of ‘intelligence’ despite Gary’s assertions to the contrary. As always, Gary is either smuggling his answers into this premises, sweeping the genuine problems under the rug of his logorrhea, or simply contradicting himself and/or the facts known to obtain in the real world.
The generous, especially those not yet exposed to the entirety of Gary’s blunderful world of gibbering nonsense, may be tempted so suspect that I’ve been engaging in hyperbole, that surely Gary could not be so risibly inept as to be proposing what I claim he is proposing.
The final paragraph quoted above puts paid to any such notion. Gary quite explicitly asserts “Living things are hereby shown to be a created by levels of emergent intelligence that begins with nonrandom subatomic behavior then builds upwards to us.”
It is critical to his assemblage of verbiage miscast as a ‘theory’ that intelligence pervade reality from the lowest most fundamental and least “structured” layer to the highest reaches of assemblies of assemblies of …(of assemblies…). Yet intelligence, taken as cause of these layers and the emergence of such things as intelligence is inherent or it couldn’t emerge. Yes, Gary truly is that insane. Intelligence is omnipresent, always and everywhere 'just there'. At the same time, intelligence emerges. Emerges from what? Gary neither knows nor cares, it just emerges from what was always already there, which includes that which emerges. (Later, after mis-learning a tiny bit more science, he will abuse the term 'fractal' and the term 'self-similar' to further obfuscate his claims in service of explaining them. Of course, this compounds his errors, for emergence and self-similarity are contraries when applied to the same thing at the same time.)
Looking at his “theory” after 5+ years of polish and modification improves matters not at all. If anything, Gary’s ability to be fairly clear and coherent has been suppressed in his ongoing attempt to maintain his original claims at all cost while perverting the text so as to make any clear assessment of what he is, in fact, asserting or claiming increasingly difficult.
Worse, he will never, ever, under any circumstances, engage with the substance of any challenge raised against his assertions, claims, counterfactuals, violations of logic or meaning.
Gary, as is his habit, is likely to once again raise the challenge "Oh, yeah, where's the competing theory?" as if his rubbish doesn't fall on its own (lack of) merit.
But to hand him an answer -- the competing theory is in the work of Terence W. Deacon, referenced above. Incomplete Nature is the title and it is readily available, both for purchase and from well-stocked library systems.
Until and unless he can provide at least this level of critique of Deacon's work, there's the "competing theory". Not only does Gary's effluent fail, other work is available to do what it attempts and more, without the reek of failure embedded in his nonsense.
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