I.D.

Been having a tough time remembering my dreams lately. I know I'm dreaming, because I can keep the dreams in mind for about half a second after a wake up, but by the time I sit up, it's gone. Looks like I'll be here in the fall. That was never really my plan there are some advantages to it. What else is new? The podcast ended up being only one three distinct creative projects in which I am presently engaged. Things are sure to get busy in a few weeks, so I guess I gotta make the most of this time. This summer went by so fast, but I suppose they always do. Seems like I get up everyday and before I know it everyone else is going to bed and then the dawn is approaches and I have to do the same.

Didn't have a way to get to the Pepper concert, that wasn't so cool.

Hard to believe I'll be in Colorado in a few months.

possible future topics include:
anti-intellectualism in popular culture
the scope of political communities
the history and function of RPGs (not the grenade kind)
economic stratification and infotech literacy

But for right now let's talk about the so-called intelligent design theory. Look, I'm pretty sure that even a perfect understanding of our own evolutionary history will not disprove the existence of god. It might hurt the case of the strict interpertationalists of the big religious texts, but most of that damage has already been done with two little words... carbon dating. However...

We need some idea of what we mean by intelligence before we get started. To me, something can only be said to display intelligence if it is relatively feedback intensive, meaning that however badly off it beings, it must start to do better over time at a particular task than a random effort, thoughtless effort to do the same thing would. I gun fired at random by a machine with no means of locating the target, might hit the target some times. A human being or another primate, however bad they start off, can use feedback to learn to hit the target and eventually outshoot our random trigger pulling machine easily. That's intelligence.

The problem is that evolution is not very feedback intensive. The mutations occur randomly and only over tremendously long periods of time does the feedback accumulate in any highly functional way. Yes, the survival of the fittest is a form of feedback, but that feedback does not guide the next set of adaptations, only cement pre-existing adaptation. Evolution is such a slow, inefficient and empirical process that I can't imagine how it can be said to obviously indicate the presence of higher intelligence.

Yes, evolution did CREATE intelligence... eventually. But that isn't the same as saying evolution IS an intelligence process. Evolution created intelligence the same way it created everything else, adaptive or not, by accident. If evolution were such a smart process, it wouldn't constantly require many many maladaptations for every sucessful adaptation it produces.

But, like I said, while the theist crowd will eventually have to give up this ground to the secular thinkers, it isn't going to prove or disprove theism. I'm of the opinion that no scientific proof either way will ever surface (real agnostisism) and that is precisely why I'm an athiest. When presented no evidence for a phenomeon, I assume it does not exist. If I ever come across anything I can interpert to be evidence of a god, I can tell you I'll disregard that assumption immediately.