NoName
Posts: 2729
Joined: Mar. 2013
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A few of Gary's core problems and misunderstandings:
Gary appears to make the all-too-common (especially in ID) mistake of conceiving selection as a positive process. That is, in Gary's world, selection is always selection for.
This is strictly false. Selection is strictly negative. It removes those things that fail in a given environment. It is always selection against. Were this not so, the concept of 'neutral drift' would be impossible.
If only Gary, and the rest of the varied and various 'ID' folks, would genuinely come to grips with this. It clears out so much of the underbrush and tangles that confuse their every approach.
Gary insists that intelligence requires motor control. The world generally recognizes both the composition of a melody and the recognition of a melody, especially transposed and in a different tempo and perhaps also different rhythm, are acts of intelligence. This refutes one of Gary's foundational quasi-axioms.
He must either show that these are not acts of intelligence, or specify how motor control is involved. Neither seems a productive effort, as in 'both are doomed to fail'.
Gary tries to sweep the problem of control under the rug by recourse to assertions of 'emergence' and a vague hand-waving in the direction of different "levels" of intelligence. But that approach is doomed to fail because at the level of atoms and individual molecules, there are no motor control systems. Nor can the concept of 'control' be applied at those levels. There are only the laws of chemistry and physics. Gary becomes especially incoherent, or, more often, absent from the discussion, when he is pressed on this problem.
Gary tries to work around the problem above by insisting that the emergent levels are 'self similar'. As N.Wells originally pointed out, this is a massive conceptual confusion. Things that are emergent from other things are not self-similar to that from which they emerge. Things that are self-similar do not display relationships of emergence, least of all at the same time and in the same respect.
Gary is vociferous in his rejection of 'generalizations', despite the simple fact that explanations, hypotheses, and theories are all generalizations. Worse, 'intelligence' is a highly general term, and it is a wild leap into the dark to act as if the term were univocal and had a 'one size fits all' explanation. It seems quite likely to me that 'intelligence' is much more of a 'catch-all' term for a wide class of phenomena than a univocal singular phenomenon as Gary requires it to be.
But regardless, Gary has not shown that it is a univocal term and that is one of the many foundational pre-requisistes he simply must accomplish before any of his subsequent effluent can be taken seriously. As it stands, one could replace the word 'intelligence' in any of Gary's work with a meaningless pseudo-word and remove not one tinge of sense from the whole.
Finally, Gary smuggles the acts and concept of intelligence into his "model" by recourse to the generalization "guess". The ability to "guess" and to "gauge the success/failure" of the guess are claimed to be foundational for intelligence.
The rest of the world, including his beloved, but maligned by his asserted association, Cognitive Science, knows better. Guessing is itself an act of intelligence. Molecules don't guess. Rocks don't guess. Stars don't guess.
Gauging success/failure is also an act of intelligence. Atoms don't judge success/failure. Nor do rocks or stars or any of the vast number of things and events and process not generally taken to be intelligent.
So Gary assumes the very thing he seeks to explain in his purported explanation, rendering the entire effort vacuous at best, self-contradictory on average, and tediously insane at worst.
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